Archive for January 2007

Holy Headlines, CNN!

January 29th, 2007

I’m not complaining or anything, but has anyone noticed how tabloidy the CNN.com front page has gotten lately? The subject matter is more topsy-turvy than ever and the headline writing seems deliberately offbeat.

“Libby’s Defense Tackles Bush’s Former Spokesman” (TACKLES?!?)

“Dead Soldier To Father Kid With Woman He Never Met”

“Idiot Window Washer Hangs By Toes 6 Floors Up”

A screenshot of the front page as of one minute ago is below:

Just to repeat, I’m not complaining, but I’ve definitely noticed a gradual change from CNN’s matter-of-fact hard news approach to a more entertainment-based approach over the last year. For better or for worse, I think most news outlets will move in the same direction if they aren’t already.

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How To Best Stalk Jeff Croft

Once his Twitter-roll is on here, you'll even be able to track what the boy eats.

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January 28th, 2007

Get DOM Assistance with Nyman's DOMass

A nice, compact set of javascript methods to manipulate the DOM. Like me, Robert is all about the filesize.

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Oh, Minty Day!

A few minutes ago, The Wolf released version 2.0 of his highly successful and highly awesome stat package, Mint.

I’ve been beta testing it for several months now. It’s good. You should get it.

(Shaun also launched a new version of Shauninman.com because the paint was starting to dry on the “old” one, but we’ll ignore that for now.)

The Wolf has also figured out something Alan Greenspan never could: how to buck inflation. The price of Mint is still $30 and existing users can upgrade for a mere Jackson.

Anyway, that’s it. It’s a nice upgrade. My only beef is that the interface is de-Mint-ified a bit by default, but by throwing this hack at the end of your /mint/app/styles/vanilla_mint/style.css file, you can get green again:

/* BEGIN RETURN TO MINTYNESS */

.display table.striped tr.alt td,
.display table.visits table.striped tr.alt td
{
background-color: #F0F7E2;
border-top: 1px solid #E7F0D0;
border-bottom: 1px solid #E7F0D0;
}

.display table tr:hover td,
.display table.visits td tr:hover td
{
background-color: #F0F7E2;
}

.display table.striped tr:hover td,
.display table.visits table.striped tr:hover td,
.display table.striped tr.alt:hover td,
.display table.visits table.striped tr.alt:hover td
{
background-color: #cde9a7;
}

/* END RETURN TO MINTYNESS */

At the request of Chris, here is a sample of what the mod looks like:

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Introducing the Newsvine Question of the Day

January 23rd, 2007

One question per day. 150 words or less per answer. One answer per person.

Those are the only rules for the freshly announced Newsvine Question of the Day competition, and thanks to the nice people at Nike, each winner this week will receive an iPod Nano and Nike + iPod Sport Kit as a victory keepsake. Did you know Nike means victory in Greek?

We’re very excited about the launch of the Newsvine QOTD because it’s the first in a series of “lighter” activities we’re prepping for debut on the ‘Vine. Sometimes you’re just not in the mood to read and debate articles and essays and would rather spend a minute or two here and there doing less time-intensive things. The QOTD is designed to be read quickly and answered quickly. We’ll see how it evolves.

So head on over to the QOTD landing page (http://questions.newsvine.com) and answer the first question. It’s about the public figure below:

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January 19th, 2007

My New Favorite Web Site

An instant daily read.

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January 18th, 2007
A clear sign that something is wrong with this medium is that people are updating their Twitters with “doin stuff”. Hmmmmpf.

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January 17th, 2007
Another gem: http://www.hotchickswithdouchebags.com/2007/01/fraggle-choad.html

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January 16th, 2007
Just discovered http://www.hotchickswithdouchebags.com. Good times (and remarkably SFW)!

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January 15th, 2007

Footnote: The place for original documents online

Chris Willis' new effort. I likes!

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John Gruber's beneficially paranoid advice about maintaining recent and complete backups.:
“Every hard drive in the world will eventually fail. Assume that yours are all on the cusp of failure at all times.”

I still rely on TimeMachine for everything but it’s probably time to buy an external disk and at least do a full monthly on it.

Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.

But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.

- Matt Thompson on why the way we report and consume news is precisely wrong. Matt is, of course, precisely right. If you’re at SXSW next week, I don’t know how you could justify missing this talk.

Cameron’s Colosseo letterpress poster is now available: The only question is, black or white? The black is oh so tempting!

Jon Stewart Skewers Media’s Obsession with Chat Roulette: Funniest Wii Craps reference ever, as well. It’s really interesting to me that Chat Roulette is getting this much “attention” when TinyChat has been around so much longer, essentially does the same thing and more, and is much more useful to the average person. Just goes to show how viral public sex acts can be.

"Add features and customers forever and rake in the dough.":

The 2005 email that spawned Picnik, Google’s latest buy. If you’re thinking about launching a startup, you should study this e-mail carefully. It’s a perfect example of exactly how a crazy little thought becomes a big idea, and even on its own, it’s better than most “official company business plans” people present to VCs.  I gave a talk at Webstock in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago about creating a startup and I wish I had this to dissect at the time. Really good stuff.

50 Useful Coding Techniques (CSS Layouts, Visual Effects and Forms):

(via doug)

Tumblr Finally Rolls Out Comments. Sort Of. Trolls Not Welcome. :

I actually really like how clubby it is.  Unfortunately it means I won’t be commenting on any Tumblrs since I don’t officially “follow” anyone besides via RSS, but that’s probably ok. Maybe the answer to the world’s wide-open commenting problem is something like this.

Episode 2 of Dan Benjamin's "The Conversation" is Live:

I was a guest on Dan Benjamin’s new weekly radio show last week, along with Merlin Mann, Christina Warren, Adam Keys, and Dave Nanian. Subjects discussed include Newsvine, keeping your own identity after becoming part of a big company, and the RADICAL concept of only publishing stuff to your readers and followers that is actually true.

LESS - Leaner CSS:

Given that pre-compiling CSS is an official “best practice” these days, why not use that compile step to extend CSS in powerful ways? LESS lets you use variables, nested rules, and other niceties at author-time to clean up your rules and keep everything tidy. I believe The Wolf made something like this a few years ago, but I haven’t heard about it since.

How 3D works, and why it's back:

Great article on the ins and outs of three dimensional imagery. Still doesn’t change my opinion that well-shot conventional cinematography is more impressive than the novelty that is Avatar.

The Importance of Removing Features:

This is one of the most useful articles I’ve read in a long time. As we work on focusing, strengthening, and simplifying Newsvine, the concepts discussed by Lukas ring true. “Saying no” has never been a strong suit of mine. It’s very helpful to remember how important of a quality it is. (via fullstopinteractive)

Newly released video of the space shuttle Challenger disaster: It was 24 years ago, I was in 5th grade, but I remember it like it was yesterday. School was stopped immediately and they wheeled out televisions in every classroom for us to watch the news footage. It’s great that this video has been released, but holy crap, how do you tuck something that away for two decades???

A nicely done british parody of 60 Minutes style video journalism. It’s easy to miss how formulaic our news is sometimes. (via B-Tizzle, originally via E-Chizzle)

Colosseo: This is why Cameron is a king and we are all just pawns in his world. I can’t wait to get my hands on this poster. I will point out, however, that the outro credits on the video need some kerning. Someone is going to lose their right hand for that.

Spezify:

New ways of searching are almost never as useful as old ways of searching. Spezify is pretty awesome though. It’s a visually interesting, never-ending, horizontally and vertically scrollable, topic explorer. I don’t think I’d use it for digging deep on anything, but to get a quick visually rich sampling of a topic, it’s quite fun (via tiff, a long time ago actually, over email).

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