I know it's been said before, but I was shocked when I took a look at former-employer Gannett's stock price this morning -- a paltry $17.xx!
They were treading near or around 80 when I started in November of 2002. They were in the low 50s I believe when I bailed in December 2005. The site I was at, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, was doing about 8 million hits a month with over a quarter million unique visitors ... but just didn't "get it" when it came to technology. They became followers rather than innovators, led by the nose by page views and ad campaigns, mimicking their socially-successful neighboring markets of Buffalo and Syracuse, but only years after their lead tech guy (me) had tried to encourage forums and article comments. Rather pathetic -- so much wasted potential and lead time.
They were starting to push the "hyperlocal reporting" and "local data machine" campaigns in a very drone-like fashion in my waning time there. I had some hope for them when they made the token effort of changing their "newsrooms" to "information centers," but unfortunately I think that corporation is too filled with stodgy, curmudgeonly personalities and mindsets to make the transition to the 21st century anytime this decade. No dancing elephants there -- no Lou Gerstner either, for sure. Over the past five years all their sites have, through corporate edict and ad-driven mania, become cookie cutter, ad-noisy copies of one another. Gross. AdBlock Plus is your friend.
Recently, an editor at the Glens Falls Post-Star haughtily insisted to me, via a poorly-designed article commenting system, that the newspaper wasn't dying -- "just look at all the hits this site gets!" Tell that to your parent corp's stock price:
Just for comparison, let's see how the innovation-friendly (ish) big-budget New York Times has been doing over the same 5-year period:
Only slightly better than the corporately-retarded Gannett Co, Inc.
Say it with me now: "Newspapers are environmentally-disastrous dinosaurs, please quit wasting time, money and resources, liquidate your assets and finish laying off your underpaid workforce already."
Monday, August 25
Thursday, July 24
Short circuit - Meetup.com steals my soul
I never thought this day would come.
I've hit a personal pseudo-Singularity from which I can never return.
This morning, at approximately 4:30AM Eastern, I felt ... wait for it ... over wired!
I've always enjoyed being as connected as I could be. Writing BASIC, Apple BASIC, BASICA, GW-BASIC in elementary school. Modems and BBSes and QBasic and CompuServe and early AOL when I was still a kid. Writing LEGO LOGO in middle school. The wide, wide world of websites, the Internet, opening in high school and beyond. The pagers, the cell phones, dial-up, broadband, ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, clients, servers, distributed systems, SOA. An evolution I never stopped loving. Until today.
At approximately 4:30AM this morning, I was woken by a SMS notification, heard from my bedroom, on my HTC Wizard charging in the living room. SMS had grown noisy -- Twitter was overwhelming, every other SMS-notifying service was making me simply ignore SMS notifications, missing truly important ones -- so I had trimmed it down to just the ping monitoring service used to monitor critical websites and systems, and ...
Meetup. Meetup.com. It's nice, a little while before a Meetup, to get an SMS reminder with an address or directions in it. Very, very handy. I belong to a number of meetups, both here in Albany and in New York, so occasionally the event reminder itself is valuable as well.
There was an Albany small business Meetup scheduled for this morning, though it was a halfhearted effort that never really materialized, in part due to the organizer being out of town, in part due to people being lazy and otherwise occupied in summer. That Meetup was scheduled for 7:30am.
Ever so kindly, Meetup.com sent me an SMS reminder, a few hours before the Meetup. At 4:30 in the morning. There's no SMS scheduling for Meetup, like any sensible SMS-utilizing service, like Twitter. Perhaps Meetup's new backers, Union Square Ventures -- also early and heavily invested backers of Twitter -- need to encourage Meetup to get with the program like the rest of the crowds that they're claiming to source. Being unable to prevent a 4:30AM SMS from a non-critical service like Meetup.com is unacceptable.
Sure, if I wasn't at this point retrained, like one of Pavlov's dogs, to respond to that SMS chime on my smartphone, I probably would have slept through it, but still, the option to schedule SMS notification through Meetup.com is a simple and necessary feature.
I've hit a personal pseudo-Singularity from which I can never return.
This morning, at approximately 4:30AM Eastern, I felt ... wait for it ... over wired!
I've always enjoyed being as connected as I could be. Writing BASIC, Apple BASIC, BASICA, GW-BASIC in elementary school. Modems and BBSes and QBasic and CompuServe and early AOL when I was still a kid. Writing LEGO LOGO in middle school. The wide, wide world of websites, the Internet, opening in high school and beyond. The pagers, the cell phones, dial-up, broadband, ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, clients, servers, distributed systems, SOA. An evolution I never stopped loving. Until today.
At approximately 4:30AM this morning, I was woken by a SMS notification, heard from my bedroom, on my HTC Wizard charging in the living room. SMS had grown noisy -- Twitter was overwhelming, every other SMS-notifying service was making me simply ignore SMS notifications, missing truly important ones -- so I had trimmed it down to just the ping monitoring service used to monitor critical websites and systems, and ...
Meetup. Meetup.com. It's nice, a little while before a Meetup, to get an SMS reminder with an address or directions in it. Very, very handy. I belong to a number of meetups, both here in Albany and in New York, so occasionally the event reminder itself is valuable as well.
There was an Albany small business Meetup scheduled for this morning, though it was a halfhearted effort that never really materialized, in part due to the organizer being out of town, in part due to people being lazy and otherwise occupied in summer. That Meetup was scheduled for 7:30am.
Ever so kindly, Meetup.com sent me an SMS reminder, a few hours before the Meetup. At 4:30 in the morning. There's no SMS scheduling for Meetup, like any sensible SMS-utilizing service, like Twitter. Perhaps Meetup's new backers, Union Square Ventures -- also early and heavily invested backers of Twitter -- need to encourage Meetup to get with the program like the rest of the crowds that they're claiming to source. Being unable to prevent a 4:30AM SMS from a non-critical service like Meetup.com is unacceptable.
Sure, if I wasn't at this point retrained, like one of Pavlov's dogs, to respond to that SMS chime on my smartphone, I probably would have slept through it, but still, the option to schedule SMS notification through Meetup.com is a simple and necessary feature.
Tuesday, July 1
Philo-blurb: child vs. adult
I've been ridiculously busy -- I'll be back to posting on a more regular schedule soon! Major software release underway at the day job, and lots of good stuff going on with Change Round-Up!
Wanted to shoot a little blurb out into the blogosphere: children sit around and talk about what they dream of achieving. Adults, on the other hand, talk about what they're doing to achieve those things.
Am I off here? Am I too much of a cynic? Are adults "allowed" to idly dream as well? Who has time for that?
Wanted to shoot a little blurb out into the blogosphere: children sit around and talk about what they dream of achieving. Adults, on the other hand, talk about what they're doing to achieve those things.
Am I off here? Am I too much of a cynic? Are adults "allowed" to idly dream as well? Who has time for that?
Thursday, June 19
The Digg Paradigm: Community Spirit vs. Active Promotion
Everyone knows that having an article hit the front page of a popular social bookmarking site is an instant traffic boon that can't be ignored, but how do you get to the front page? Learn more about the issues involved.
read more | digg story
read more | digg story
Wednesday, June 4
Republishing, crawling and linking in 2008
There's an ongoing conversation on the nextNY mailing list regarding linking and republishing of RSS feeds.
An interesting discussion on robots.txt has sprouted as well. Ed Costello wrote a post well worth reading. A few highlights:
"Why might a site owner block a crawler?
"A spider is not one spider on its own, it's one of potentially thousands hitting popular sites, sucking up bandwidth and other resources away from other users of the site. "
"My advice:
Finally, perhaps most importantly:
"If someone complains, don't quibble, stop crawling their site first then work with them to address their concerns"
Long story short: don't be abusive. Crawl others as you would wish to be crawled. Respect published instructions. In this internetworked world populated by an ever increasing amount of content and plumbed by an ever wider variety of open APIs, simple rules of etiquette still apply.
An interesting discussion on robots.txt has sprouted as well. Ed Costello wrote a post well worth reading. A few highlights:
"Why might a site owner block a crawler?
- on analysis of the site's server logs they realize that a section of their site has been crawled that they had no intention of making crawlable (this doesn't mean that the content is supposed to be "private", but perhaps it's the output of their inventory control system and they just don't want it in the world's search engine caches)
- abusive behaviour by crawlers, pounding away at CGI scripts for example, or systematically posting content to forms found in retrieved pages
- misrepresentation of a site's content
- pretty much any reason at the discretion of the site's owners. It's their site, they set the rules."
"A spider is not one spider on its own, it's one of potentially thousands hitting popular sites, sucking up bandwidth and other resources away from other users of the site. "
"My advice:
- be absolutely certain you comply with robots.txt,
- make sure your spider is well behaved (take a breather between requests to a single site, or do a bunch of requests at a time, then move onto another site for awhile)
- make sure your spider responds to weird server behavior by backing off (the number of spiders which don't process redirects correctly is sadly high)
- include a URL to your spider's description/info page in the User-Agent field of the request (suggest using a tinyurl or something comparable to keep the number of bytes down, no need to waste bandwidth)
- make sure your spider's IP address(es) reverse resolve to your domain
- make sure someone's actually monitoring the spider as it runs, or gets alerted if something bad or strange happens. "
Finally, perhaps most importantly:
"If someone complains, don't quibble, stop crawling their site first then work with them to address their concerns"
Long story short: don't be abusive. Crawl others as you would wish to be crawled. Respect published instructions. In this internetworked world populated by an ever increasing amount of content and plumbed by an ever wider variety of open APIs, simple rules of etiquette still apply.
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