Do something.

June 16, 2009

Alex said this in a recent email, and it's worth repeating:

In the end, I think, doing something is what's really important. There can be a lot of wanking over platforms, implementation, topics or whatever. But doing something, and including people, being open in approach, is probably the most important thing to do, I think, and once the ball's rolling, let it roll in they way it wants to.

Remember that when meetings multiply, when platform wars become software crusades, when your computer does things that cause you to swear in Portuguese and Chinese and Italian.

Doing ...

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Twenty years

June 4, 2009

The Beijing I knew in my brief visits is a product of the last two decades, the time since Tiananmen Square, when China traded political freedom for economic liberty. It's a city I remember as thriving, diverse, crowded and still growing. It's the only place in China I ever heard anyone acknowledge what happened twenty years ago today.

I wrote about that memory two years ago, when I was an English teacher in Dalian. The day after getting blank stares from a group of college freshmen when I asked about the date, a graduate student dismissed the movement ...

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Beyond publishing

June 1, 2009

Rebuilding my blog in Django means I can do more than just publish posts.

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The iTunes for News we have

February 11, 2009

Let's talk about what iTunes does.

Back when it first launched, it was a companion to a piece of expensive hardware, the iPod, and a way to sell music that could be played on that piece of hardware. Both are Apple products, and the two work together as seamlessly as as Windows and Internet Explorer. One company, with a well-cultivated following, a lot of marketing and slick design, figured out how to make it easier for music fans to listen to--and pay for--music than downloading MP3s off Napster and its successors.

Did it stop piracy? Not in the least ...

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Imagine...news on your computer

February 9, 2009

It's not as far fetched as you might imagine:

This video has been making the rounds, but I had to post it because--aside from being broadcast the year I was born--it says something about the way news consumption has changed in my lifetime.

I hear some version of the lead in on this piece pretty regularly from members of my parents' generation: "I just can't imagine sitting down with my coffee and a computer screen. I like the feel of the paper." Funny, that's exactly how I read the news, and discuss it, and create it.

A ...

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Tools for News teams up with SND

February 2, 2009

The toolkit for online journalists has moved to a new home with the Society for News Design.

Shortly after I launched Tools for News in late December, Tyson Evans from SND emailed me about teaming up on the project. Matt Mansfield helped convince me to come on board. Chrys Wu has more on the hackathon that got it all migrated.

The toolkit is now part of a growing network of apps and sites under SND's banner. Expect development to pick up and the overall look and feel of the site to improve.

Everyone's login should still work. If ...

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Experts

January 28, 2009

Steve Yelvington talks about being a local expert. This pushes farther a concept Jeff Jarvis advanced a few months back: The building block of journalism is no longer the article. Matt at Newsless describes this as systematic knowledge accumulation (he's talking about within journalism, in this case, but I think it's applicable here).

Let's think about what that might look like a bit. For a given topic or issue, I might want to pull together:

• News articles
• Blog posts
• Forum topics
• Links to other places talking about the issue
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Profiles of people who show up ...

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PBS Newshour Online

January 26, 2009

Funny story: Back in October, I started building a little Django-powered web app that ultimately became Tools for News. I'm up coding one Friday night (my girlfriend was in Guatemala at the time; I'm not THAT much of a nerd) and send out this tweet:

eyeseast: The little journalists' toolkit I mentioned yesterday is coming together. A few good folks are testing it now. Going to try adding comments. Oct 11, 2008 05:37 AM GMT

A few minutes later, this direct message appears in my inbox:

NewsHour Howdy there. We're digging the toolkit for journos ...

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Lessons from Spot.us

January 24, 2009

I'm about to leave the warm embrace of the Bay Area and in doing so, take myself out of the jurisdiction of Spot.us. I was lucky enough to meet David Cohn when the San Jose Mercury News opened its newsroom for CopyCamp last year, and he suggested I pitch something in his alpha phase. At that point it was just a simple wiki, The Point and David's seemingly-infinite energy.

In December, when Spot.us launched officially with its new site and its own mechanisms for handling donations, my story was published and republished and spread farther than ...

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Remembering Deep Throat and the man in the shadows

January 17, 2009

Friends, family and admirers of W. Mark Felt, better known to the public as Deep Throat, remembered the late FBI agent today as a man who lived his fundamental beliefs of "truth, justice and service."

"Action is character," former Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward (now an editor there) said of his late friend and mentor.

This was a memorial for the man known as Deep Throat, the G-man who arranged secret meetings at an underground parking garage with Woodward as the Watergate cover up unfolded, much more than it was for Mark Felt, who died at 95 in his daughter ...

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New tool: TwitBlog for LiveBlogging with Twitter

January 15, 2009

Let's say you want to live-blog something. Let's say you like Twitter. Twitter is great for immediacy, but what if you want to round up all your tweets at the end of the day and put them in a blog post? You'd have to copy each one, reformat it, then put the whole list in chronological order.

Now you don't have to.

...

Production notes:

I put this little app together yesterday after thinking about it a lot longer. It's a simple Django-powered tool that converts a feed from Twitter Search into plain text or ...

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Stuff to learn in 2009

January 7, 2009

Just going to write all this down so I don't forget. Could call it "resolutions" but that whole mindset seems designed to produce regret come December. Let's just make this a to-learn/to-do list:

GeoDjango

With Tools for News up and running and RedFence 2.0 almost there, I feel like I've got a good enough grasp of Django to try out the GIS branch. I've got a subdomain for it set up and a couple project ideas to play with. No promises that anything interesting will happen there, but it's there.

JavaScript

I have ...

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Blueprint CSS. Yes.

December 31, 2008

Why, or why, did it take me so long to discover Blueprint CSS?

Because I wasn't looking, clearly.

I am not a designer. Designers are people with style, and my sister, my girlfriend and my housemate have all made it very clear that I'm lacking in that department. More than that, CSS fits into the large category of things I'd much rather outsource to a competent professional. I'll stick to Python and prose.

Clever readers of yesterday's post announcing the beta launch of Tools for News may have noticed the line about building the core ...

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New tools for new news

December 31, 2008

Journalists need new tools to work online. In the last year, I've used more that I can count, most of them free, to find and tell better stories on the Web.

Back in October, I started building an online database of such tools as a personal project, just a way to keep track of everything I was using. It has since grown into something I think others will find useful, so I'm releasing it into the wild.

Tools for News

The site is in public beta for now. Eventually, I hope to move it to its own domain ...

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