Burroland

Hey there! If you attended my presentation today at the Nevada Interactive Summit, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know what you thought of it. Thanks!

Oh, and here are links to some of the sites I discussed:

• Google Docs docs.google.com
• Freebase freebase.com
• Geocommons geocommons.com
• FlowingData flowingdata.com
• Many Eyes manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com
• Magic/Replace cleanupdata.com
• Dabble DB dabbledb.com

Update: Click here to get a PDF of the entire presentation, along with my notes. I’ve placed it under a Creative Commons license, so let me know if you’d like it in another format.

Tags: Media, speaking // 1 Comment »

Most news organizations have been slowly shrinking both their budgets and staffs in the face of a vanishing market. Both insiders and outsiders are divining what went wrong and how to adapt to a new world of publishing. There are at least as many different opinions and strategies as there are keyboards. Even in a world composed of ceaseless chatter, journalists are a verbose and opinionated group.

It’s not that anyone’s appetite for news has diminished. It’s just that they didn’t want what traditional media was serving, or maybe how it was being served. It’s easy to focus on the particular details — the foolishness of considering a daily newspaper a breaking news medium decades after television stole that away, the rank arrogance of newspapers after the disappearance of true competition, or the excessive focus on packaging, at the expense of the product. These are just some of the complaints advanced as reasons for the decline, but whether they’re true in whole or part, they don’t explain much. The truth is far more complicated, and has more to do with the new rhythm and pace of the average person’s life than it does with journalists. I’ve mentioned context in another post, and there’s no need to elaborate on it here.

It’s more interesting to visualize the future of news, especially in light of the latest announcement by the Detroit Media Partnership. Many people in the industry have been wondering which major metropolitan daily would first switch to online-only publication. The well-respected (but rarely read) Christian Science Monitor recently made the news when it announced it would stop printing and publish only on the Internet, but they’re a different kind of publication from the daily metropolitan newspaper. It seems that the Detroit JOA is showing that, instead of a radical break with the past, we might see a more gradual move away from print dominance to a more complicated distribution system. They’re still going to print a daily newspaper, but they just won’t deliver it to homes for most of the week.

On its face, it seems a fairly bold step, at least for newspapers — they focus their print efforts on the days where they get most of their print revenue (82 percent is the number I’ve seen). But when you break the daily newspaper habit for home readers, you stand a very good chance of breaking their print habit entirely. After all, once you get used to reading it online for four days out of the week, why not give up the print subscription? In any event, it’s a great move for everyone else, because the results will be extremely illuminating. It’s not a trend yet, but eventually most newspapers will face similar choices. Not all of them, as John Duncan points out in an excellent post.

John has always been good at pointing out the obvious fact that for-profit media organizations are businesses, and should be run as such. It’s a refreshing viewpoint and moves away from the overall hand-wringing mentality that dominates media industry discussions, conducted mostly by folks who yearn for simpler times that they understood. But really the discussion should not be about what New Media is or isn’t, or what the future of Journalism is or isn’t. It should be focused on the simple questions, like “What do our customers really want and how much are they willing to pay?” Or given that newspapers have at least a decade of experience with the Internet, “Are our online operations still worth it for our particular newspaper?” Other newspapers might ask, “Should we lay off 90 percent of our staff and publish only on the web?”

For some newspapers, the right online presence is just a self-serve interface to their customer account, or even just a brochure listing contact information. For others, maybe the right print presence is no presence at all. These basic questions don’t seem to get discussed much by the right people. I do see a lot of newspapers pouring time and money into their online presence with only the conviction that it’s the future for their business. I’m not so sure they’ve really thought about what that particular future looks like.  The only thing I know is that it doesn’t look like their past, with its increasing revenues and comparatively high margins. It looks lean and small, even in good years. For most newspapers, it may be the only future. But it shouldn’t come as a shock.

Privately, I’ve mentioned to friends that the collapse of newspapers may not be such a bad thing in the long run. I’ve compared it to whale falls: When a whale dies and its corpse falls to the ocean floor, its nutrients can support a host of organisms. In a similar way, when a large media organization disappears, it gives smaller, nimbler enterprises room to breathe, in the form of advertising dollars and readers. Alternatively, most newspapers may not close up shop, but just fade and compete with other small news startups, or even passionate amateurs.

One of the reasons I quit the business is that even though I could see what was broken and doesn’t work, I didn’t have a clear idea as to what it would take to fix it. Gannett certainly had a plan, and I was happy to help implement it until it became obvious that it wasn’t going to work either. Kevin Kelly’s recent manifesto “Better Than Free,” clarified things, in the sense that it frames the problem in a clearer way. I’ve been thinking, off and on, about the points Kelly raises, and how they would relate to a news organization. I think this long and rambling post is part of that process. I can see a local news organization (or more) thriving, not just surviving in the future. I don’t see all the details yet, but I see enough that makes me happy.

Tags: Media, ideas // Add Comment »

One of the reasons I switched jobs earlier this year is that after a year and a half of media management, I was getting excited about programming again, thanks in no small part to the joy of working with Brandon Mitchell, a smart programmer and all-around decent guy. I jumped at the chance to develop and maintain software in an academic and scientific environment.

One of the decisions I also made at the time was to change my text editor. For a programmer, the choice of editor you use to write code is a personal statement similar to the one made by participants in the Ford vs. Chevy debate, and argued over in terms that approach religious and political debates. It’s not surprising, since it’s where we spend so much of our time. But for the normal folks who spend most of their day in Word or Outlook, it’s a little mystifying. I’ll try to explain.

I decided to give Emacs another chance. I had tried it several times before, but you must realize that Emacs requires a huge time commitment to learn and use proficiently. It has a unique interface and vocabulary all its own. Emacs is not just an editor, but an entire programming environment. This makes it both an extremely powerful tool and a dangerous waste of time, as you spend time creating the “perfect” work environment, at the expense of the work you were brought in to do in the first place.

It’s not a surprise that Emacs is an excellent butt of jokes. XKCD, the finest geek comic on the Internet, delivers the perfect commentary on editor wars in general, and Emacs in particular:

It’s funny, trust me. But I’m burying the lede, so let’s get back on track. Emacs is an old piece of software. It dates back to the mid-70s, when I was just a little boy. It’s been under constant development since then, and not only is it still actively developed, there is a tremendous amount of free code out there that gives Emacs almost any capability you could want. One reason for this lively community is that Emacs itself consists of a large amount of easily mutable code built on a small, fast and more fixed core. It’s designed for tinkering. Of course, so’s Microsoft Word, which doesn’t quite have the same community or amount of free software, even though it has far more users.

In some ways, it’s because Microsoft is more interested in providing opportunities for businesses to make money selling software, which is an admirable goal. But I also think it’s because changing Word’s behavior is less fun and less elegant, and the people who use Word are also much less likely to attempt to learn how to change it, even if they have a strong need to do so.

Emacs itself is largely written in a form of Lisp, an even older technology than Emacs. It dates back to 1958, which makes it the second-oldest programming language in widespread use today, according to Wikipedia. But that doesn’t make it a hugely popular language. Aside from Emacs and the occasional Lisp shop, there isn’t a lot of Lisp development, although there has been more interest in Lisp of late. It’s never gone away, in part because Lisp allows you to program practical solutions while also keeping the theory of computer science right there on your screen. It’s sometimes maligned for its syntax, which is a little different than most languages and also leads to a profusion of parentheses that can be confusing if your editor isn’t designed to display it properly. Once again, XKCD hits the mark:

The Star Wars reference is particularly apt in relation to Emacs customization, which for a programmer is a lot like a Jedi building his own lightsaber.

The problem with Emacs is that in order to get the editor you want, you’ll probably have to write your own code, and integrate a lot of other people’s code as well. It’s what I did, as everyone did before me. Your Emacs will necessarily be different from mine and anyone else’s, sometimes radically so.

If you use more than one computer — say, one at home, and one at work, or a laptop and a desktop — this leaves you with the problem of keeping your Emacs configurations consistent. The obvious solution, since your Emacs configuration is a bunch of files full of code just like all the other software we produce, is to put your home directory under version control. Also called source control or revision control, this is the software most programmers install right after setting up their editor and their programming language of choice. It’s like an unlimited Undo on steroids, or Apple’s Time Machine feature.

My version control software of choice is git, which is a much more recent piece of software, about three years old. It’s quickly become the flavor of the moment and the version control of choice for some very high-profile and important projects. It’s a wonderfully flexible tool.

Using both Emacs and git together made me think about their relative ages, and about how when seen in the history of tools in general they may as well have been developed on the same day. One of the largest uses of the Internet still involves reading text like this blog post. The written word has been in use for thousands of years, and it’s an essential part of our daily life. Even the most sophisticated technological artifacts are designed in large part by using text — text to describe them, discuss them, define them, and finally implement them in a way that a computer can realize in a more physical way.

It’s easy to look at our new computers and think about the changes to daily life, especially if you still remember when the sound of typewriters echoed in the office. I like to think about the cherry-picking of technology we do on a daily basis. I sit at my new workstation and use a cutting-edge version control system to maintain a thirty-year-old editing environment that uses a fifty-year-old computer language rooted in a technology that’s been with us for about 6,000 years. It puts the novelty of the moment into perspective, and it’s humbling to imagine attempting to contribute to that history in some way.

Tags: ideas // 2 Comments »

Via the Fuze Blog:

Tags: Uncategorized // 1 Comment »

Here’s a photo of Ivan and Rachael, taking a nap after the big event. You’ll find more on  Flickr.

Tags: family // Add Comment »

Ivan Joseph Levy was born at home at 12:55 PST today. He weighed in at 9 lbs., 3 oz. Both Rachael and Ivan are doing well. I’ll have pictures up shortly.

Tags: family // 1 Comment »

There’s this idea that lean, successful organizations should focus entirely on their “core,” their primary reason for existence. But of course, even if you are, say, a news organization, you still need to make sure your people get paid, someone installs the desks and the workstations and the software, and all the myriad little details that go into a day’s work. So before long you have finance departments, IT departments, a person who takes care of travel arrangements, etc. These fall into the general category of “support” departments, and when the budget rubber hits the road, they also tend to get the shaft because they are considered cost centers not central to the business at hand. If you can outsource it, so much the better.

This is all fine and well if your core business truly operates independently of your support departments. If you can outsource most of your payroll and finance and save money and time, great. But if your business depends on having smart and well-trained accountants and analysts to do interesting (and legal) things with your cash, then getting into a vendor relationship where you spend part of your day working around their procedures and haggling with them over the terms of the contract is going to cost you more money over the long term. Because you’ll be hiring people to fill in the gaps and glue the two systems together. And this won’t be a fun job, so you’ll be dealing with higher turnover costs.

Software engineering is one of those things that most organizations never gave any thought to. The larger organizations may have had a data processing department stuck somewhere, working on fairly well-defined behind-the-scenes processes. But software didn’t drive your day until we started installing terminals, soon to be replaced by PCs. At that point, software became central to you day. And here’s the thing about software: It’s not a commodity. It’s not something general-purpose like a chair or desk. It doesn’t just become a part of your day: Its capabilities — what it makes easy and what it makes hard — determines what you do during the day and how you do it. Finished software is a business process that’s difficult to change.

Think about that for a minute. If you find that the way something your organization does is terribly inefficient, you can come up with a new way to do it and change it, unless it’s built into the software. Here’s a concrete example: The image below shows you part of the article editing interface in Saxotech Online, a web content management system used by many newspapers to run their web sites:

You’re seeing that right. Saxotech is designed so that every paragraph of every story gets put into its own box. This runs counter to decades of word-processing interfaces, let alone centuries of experience with the written word.

The reason given for this design is that it allows the system to insert content between arbitrary paragraphs, say by putting an ad after paragraph 3. This seems legit until you realize that you can actually handle this task perfectly well inside the software itself, and you don’t have to burden a human by making it part of the interface and thus making their day that much more difficult. Extra keystrokes, mouse clicks and time for each person who uses the system adds up very quickly when you look at it over a year: Never mind the additional performance hit you take by putting every paragraph into its own database row.

Your average blogger has a faster and cleaner content management system available to them than most online newspaper journalists. Do you wonder why blogging grows so quickly in popularity and capabilities? Do you wonder why bloggers can move faster and do more? Is this the kind of system that makes it easy to publish across multiple platforms?

We can’t change this, and the people who can have very little incentive to change it for us. Oh sure, we can bring it up at contract negotiations, but unless the vendor shares both our strategic and tactical concerns down to the very last employee, we’ll always be arguing over details and we’ll never be pleasantly surprised by innovation. You can reward innovation after the fact, but you can’t pay someone beforehand to deliver it to you. You can only hire the best people, encourage them and get out of their way.

That last statement is fairly well-worn. But we have to stop considering software engineers as something exotic, positions only software companies have to worry about filling. If your organization is based on information — meaning it produces or aggregates it in some way — there is no black box or silver bullet you can buy that will eliminate the need for smart people who know how to create or couple together your business processes — your software. You have to have good software engineers to help you shape the information and come up with innovative ways to deliver and present that information.

This is also why open-source software will remain a viable option for some time to come. What you lose in contractual support you gain in freedom of movement and a guaranteed level of innovation. Microsoft, no slouch in developer support itself, has made every effort to push forward its own free or nearly-free solutions. When you add the skills and institutional knowledge of passionate software engineers who have your strategic interests in mind, the results are amazing: Just look at sites like LJWorld, SavannahNow or IndyMoms.

With services like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud you should think long and hard before insisting on managing your own NOC and worrying about SLAs. But note that you’ll still need someone to write the software. Someone to worry about your processes in excruciating detail. Someone to come up with new ways do do old things, and new things to offer your customers, and actually be able to implement those ideas.

I can’t think of anything more central to an organization that produces or distributes information.

Tags: work // 5 Comments »

Contrary to what a very loud proportion of our readers say, we’re actually fairly sophisticated over here in the newsroom information center. Once we kicked the five-drink-minimum policy (and that was just before breakfast, mind you) we had decades of clear thinking to create what we are — a hard-charging yet reflective organization obsessed with metrics.

It’s just that sometimes they’re the wrong ones. Or we don’t measure the ones we really need. Lemme ’splain.

We’ve had a lot of practice lately with audience metrics and narratives. We work hard at knowing who they are, what they do, and what they’re looking for in their media mix. We do that geographically, demographically, and — using the following word is guaranteed to make you sound like a raving lunatic, moron or both — psychographically. Then we try to match the content up to what we think the audience wants. So if you wonder why we run home-made pasta recipes for food-allergy sufferers, you can bet there’s a valued (and valuable) audience somewhere for that sort of thing, and advertisers who want to peddle their wares to them.

There’s something missing in this equation, though, and it’s a remnant of the days when all we did was print newspapers. It’s not just your interests that lead you to a newspaper, magazine, meeting, TV show, blog, chat room, podcast, DVD, book, MMO, video game, or some variant of dancing bear. It’s also the context in which you have time to take part in a conversation about those interests. I’ll use conversation even though your participation may be fairly passive (TV) or extremely active (internet, face-to-face meeting). It’s a weaselly and vague word, but it’s useful in that it takes us back to the original context: Sitting around the fire, belly full, pleasantly tired. And I’m tired of the word “media” — we use it so often and in so many different ways that it doesn’t serve much of a purpose outside of a particular subculture.

OK, fine, so what is context? Let me spit out some examples, starting with the endangered one I’m sad to see go: You sitting at the breakfast table, reading text. There are many reasons this context is disappearing. The morning TV shows are easier to watch or listen to while you’re preparing breakfast, everyone has a car, and we’re all moving further away from our workplace. That private commute time eats into our reading time in a way that public transportation doesn’t — you can read a newspaper while you’re riding on a bus, but not while you’re driving.

Speaking of driving, there’s another one. Even here in Reno your commute time is going to be about 15 minutes one way, which means you have 30 minutes of daily tedium to kill. That time can get filled with talk radio, music, books on tape, or phone conversations. Someday most vehicles will have internet access and download audio content seamlessly, but in the meantime even a podcast works for a growing minority of people with all the cables plugged into the right place.

Then you get to work, and you sit down at your workstation with free internet access provided by your employer. Now you and I are on the same side. My goal is to get you to come to my news site, and your goal is to take a break from work. You have the time and the opportunity to just sit in front of a computer most of the day, and that’s why news sites are busiest during weekday business hours. In your free time, you’d rather run errands, spend time with family or friends, or do any of a zillion other things.

It’s this complicated nexus of a person at a particular time and a particular place that really matters to an organization that specializes in conversations, or to a solo operator (read: blogger or freelancer). We get so hung up on the MEDIUM and the potential for storytelling with the MEDIUM and the unique constraints of the MEDIUM and what the MEDIUM really means that we just jump straight into our own navel while the person on the other end of the conversation says, “Fuck it” and finds someone more interesting. If all you do is write a blog, you’re ditching a vast segment of the population who might find you extremely interesting. If all you do is put video into a custom player and don’t make it easy for the alpha geeks to download it to their iPhone, you’re going to be playing catch-up when everyone watches TV on their cell phone while they’re waiting for someone. Because the context for video may not — and probably isn’t, if our numbers are right — be your workplace. I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want to do is make it known that I’m wasting time at work.

“Multi-media” is not some giant conceptual train wreck created in Flash (can’t spell “shit-flavored” without it) with completely reinvented navigation, lots of black backgrounds and silly noises whenever you move the mouse. It’s all about your ability to carry on a conversation with lots of different people, at different times, in different places, and on many levels. It’s about meeting them where and when they are, and respecting their context — not yours.

Tags: work // 1 Comment »

I’ve been blogging since 1997.

But it’s more accurate to say I haven’t been blogging since ‘97. See, I used to blog before the tools existed, and back then I certainly didn’t have the chops to develop my own. So I just changed the HTML directly and uploaded via FTP. The process is certainly easier now, but it’s never been so difficult that it provided an excuse for the rare and minimal updates found here. It’s hardly blogging. At all.

Oh, I’ve been full of excuses: We moved to Amsterdam. We had kids. I got a master’s degree. These excuses are all lame, because keeping a journal is just something you do so you don’t forget the key points of the dialogue inside your head. There are many great essays I’ve forgotten before committing them to writing, or at least they seem like they’ve been great essays at the time.

Anyway, I’m challenging myself to write at least once week. That’s long enough to let things percolate, but a vast improvement over the limited number of posts in the past 10 years.

I’ve also moved my Blogger-based blog to this new system, and entered all my pre-Blogger posts by hand. Over time I’ll fix some of the broken links, or at least the ones that seem like they need fixing. There’s something to be said for leaving them as they are, almost as a fossil record of something that existed once.

Tags: meta // 2 Comments »

I’ve said the word “master’s” so many times it’s lost all meaning. Master’s master’s master’s masters. Now that I’m finally done (see a few graduation photos on Flickr) I feel both elated and a little let down. What do I do now?

Of course I’m busy enough that the question makes even less sense than it usually does. There’s such a wealth of wonderful ways to spend my time that finishing the MS is like having the biggest birthday of my life. I’m happy.

Tags: school // Add Comment »