So many interesting sites and places shouting “look at me,” so little time

With nearly 70 website categories (from “activism” to “weird” and “youth”) and 17 advertising categories, the Webby Awards give themselves so much room for collaborative-self-promotion that I hate to encourage the annual excuse for a big party I don’t have time to go to.

But the project did give Roger Ebert a 2010 “Person of the Year” award, and cited Vinton Cerf for “Lifetime Achievement,” which are good things.

In the “News” category (one of the 70), don’t hold your breath: The NYTimes.com was the winner, with BBC.com/news getting a People’s Voice award.

NewYorker.com won for “Best Copy/Writing” with NYTimes.com getting that category’s People’s Voice award.

Similarly, under “Best Practices,” Twitter.com (Webby) and NPR.org (People’s Voice)

I agree with all of the above as excellent sites, but, is it me, or does  much of the project appear to be figuring out which category name to put over some of these usual suspects?

Still, every year I browse around the Webby pages and find some things that had been completely off my radar and others that were on it, but that I’ve neglected to visit or use.

Completely off my radar until today:

• The Economist’s Thinking Space
• Isabella Rossellin on Squid Sex
• ThisIsIndexed
• BrokenSecrets
• glympse.com
• 99Designs

On the screen and impressive, amusing or useful, but neglected by me:

• David Lynch Interview Project
• Roger Ebert’s Journal
• ColbertNation.com
• TruthDig
• BarelyPolitical
• Tumblr
• EverNote

For categories they won in, see: Webby Nominees & Winners.

There may be others you find interesting; but I didn’t go there if (a) I clicked a link, counted to 10 and didn’t see anything or (b) the name of the link suggested the destination was trying to sell me something I don’t want, or have enough of already.

A combination of the above kept me from seeing hboimagine.com or Miroslaw Balka‘s exhibition at the Tate… not just because they are massive, slow-loading Flash “art” things, but because the Webbyawards.com link text started with “HBO” for one and “The Unilever Series 2009…” for the other, and I have enough TV and soap.

Internet advertisers & consumer groups eye Boucher bill

Our local 9th district congressman, Rep. Rick Boucher, appears on the techie blogs and news sites today with his draft of privacy legislation for online ad networks.

I suspect this is somehow related to the data-sharing that lets Facebook keep sending me all those “date hot grannies in [your county's name here]” ads.

Organizations like the Center for Digital Democracy and Consumer Watchdog are using terms like “industry-friendly” to describe the draft legislation.

Boucher’s press release says the discussion draft “confers privacy rights on Internet users.” See that address for an executive summary and the 27-page bill as a PDF.

More:

• MediaPost Publications Consumer Groups Pan Boucher Privacy Bill 05/05/2010.
• NYTimes: Privacy Bill Finally in Draft, Both Sides Weigh In
• WSJ: Proposed privacy regulation wins few fans
• WSJ interview (Feb. 2010): Boucher calls for Internet ad regulation

The more digital ink Boucher gets over this, the more my students (and maybe some geeks from farther away) will be asking themselves, “What’s a mild-mannered politician from the hills of western Virginia doing poking around the Internet?”

For those uninformed folks, here are a few bytes of history: Boucher helped invent the commercial Internet; WPost profile; techpresident discussion.

Tell Clyde I’m on the road to Floyd with a Droid

It was a tough decision, but having an excuse to write that headline made it all worthwhile.

My first “smartphone” was a Handspring Treo 180, almost 10 years ago. When I moved to Knoxville a few years later, the lack of T-Mobile service disabled most of the smartness, so I regressed to a Palm TX paired to a Cingular Razr Bluetooth phone, a semi-smart setup.

Last weekend, I wrestled the “iPhone vs. Droid” decision to a conclusion. With a Droid, I get Floyd: Verizon covers the neighboring county, AT&T doesn’t, and Floyd has some of my favorite folks and music stops on the crooked road. (I made the decision despite this horrible Droid website.)

Now I just have to convince my friend Clyde that I ordered the new smartphone (smart new phone?) before reading his blog saying that news folks should get smartphone-savvy right away. “Honest, Clyde, I got the Droid because of Floyd” sounds like one of those 1940s novelty songs.

Maybe I’ll get an iPad next month.

Anyhow, I’ll point AEJMC Newspaper readers to Clyde Bentley at the University of Missouri for a timeline for “Mobile Newspaper Success”…  The road to 2013: A timeline for newspapers.

Responding to a Gartner Research study that forecast  mobile devices would  replace PCs in Web access by 2013, Bentley built a timeline from the endpoint to the present.

If you’re a “key editor” at a newspaper, you should get a smartphone this month, or you’re already playing catch-up.

By August-September, Clyde says, newspapers should be training their news and ad staff on “mobile potential,” if they want to stay on track with the Gartner deadline. Within a year, mobile reporters should be producing niche-market features for mobile customers. Clyde’s examples: “Smoke-break wraps, during-game scores, pre-commute weather.”

He doesn’t mention one  crossover: Twitter (or Facebook status updates), whether Twitter’s  140-character limit is really enough for a “nugget of news” or not. Newspapers, broadcasters and online-only newsies are already tweeting away to anyone with a smartphone Twitter app, including Clyde’s own blog. So obvious it went without saying, I guess.

(I’m @bobstep on Twitter.)

(Note: If anyone from Verizon offers me a “referrer” bonus check for the slogan “Get Floyd with a Droid,” I’ll take it.)

Future of the book, pad, tablet, literature etc.

Wired has  Steven Levy and a baker’s dozen authors, publishers and spirit-channels (how else to include McLuhan?) reacting to the Apple  iPad’s arrival this month: “How the tablet will change the world.”

Over at FutureOfTheBook.org, Bob Stein adds to what he had to say in Wired, under the heading “Follow the gamers.”  See this for background on Bob.

I still have a stack of Stein’s pioneering e-books, which combined text, graphics, audio and video on CD-ROMS or DVDs before we had devices that allowed comfortable reading from a screen. I wish my new OS-X Macintosh would run OS-9 to play them.

See if:book: follow the gamers — my piece in the april Wired.

I met Bob Stein almost 10 years ago, when he was working on an e-book authoring/reading system called TK3 (more about it here), but somehow I lost track of his projects. Archive.org shows his company’s last page here. I wonder what happened. It looks like Sophie is its new incarnation. In fact, checking my bookmark lists, I see I saved a link to it in 2006! So much software, so little time. Still, it will be good to catch up when I have time for more browsing.

Speaking of catching up, Stein’s observation about how long it took to get from Gutenberg to Cervantes reminded me someone else I met around the same time — Mitchell Stephens, whose “the rise of the image, the fall of the word“  would be a great candidate for a multimedia e-book treatment itself.

RSS widgets for republishing

For my intro to Web Production students to ponder over spring break, here’s a demo site that uses RSS plug-ins, content management software widgets, and related aggregation services to consolidate blog postings, social bookmarks and even a Twitter account…

bobwebs & cobwebs

I do similar things on my stepno.com home page and this WordPress blog. (The former uses a free service called RSS include.)

At the end of the semester, I’ll have students use Drupal, WordPress and the hosting services of their choice to make “mirror” (sometimes funhouse mirror) images of the sites they develop for class, so that they aren’t just learning how to use our university server.

Searching the Lost Archives of Whim

That may sound like the title of some Indiana Jones flick or sword-and-sorcery novel, but it’s really how I spent an entertaining — if a bit obsessive-compulsive — hour this morning. I’ve written it up in some detail for possible use in a “how to find stuff on the Internet” lecture for one class or another.

It started when a student e-mailed to ask whether I knew how to find back issues of the campus Internet magazine, called Whim.

(Spoiler: If you just want to see the back issues,  see the “Old Whims” link at the top of this page — or read to the bottom to find out how it got there.)

Around the time I came to Radford, RU Whim made the transition to a WordPress CMS site. Before that, student programmers and designers had been creating a homemade, fresh-design-every-year site, not the most efficient way to build a Web publication, but a great way to learn and  show what they could do… And they did some very creative things.

You can still do very creative things within WordPress, but the students who built entire sites clearly made theirs with pride and a sense of history. (And, I suspect, a practical goal of keeping their past creations available, so that their personal portfolios could link back to them during  a job-hunt.)

Although the publication is going strong at http://ruwhim.com, it previously used http://www.radford.edu/whim

A “redirect” replaced the last actual issue of Whim that had used the university flat-file server as its home page. Goodbye history.

To find out what went on at that site in previous semesters, I used my two favorite Web tools to track down some of that history: Google and Archive.org, and this blog item is here to show students how to do the same.

First, a Google “site” search:
Putting “site:radford.edu” at the beginning of a Google search for “Whim” found me a whole directory full of archived years on the university’s flat-file Web server:
http://www.radford.edu/~archive/season01/
http://www.radford.edu/~archive/season02/
and so forth, up to
http://www.radford.edu/~archive/season17/

Next, using the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive:
The original “home” page for Whim’s own archive has been deleted, but I found a copy at archive.org — and it wouldn’t take much to re-code the archival copy to make it point back to the complete originals, not the archive.org’s sometimes-incomplete copies. I gave that a try, using an editor called TextWrangler with global search-and-replace to insert full link URLs, then pasted the results into a WordPress page.

I added to this blog’s page tabs above, and here’s a copy:

Old Whims

The archive.org spiders brought back some pages of http://www.radford.edu/~whim almost every year from 2000 to 2006; you can see he results here:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.radford.edu/~whim

(How did I know where to start looking? Like any person or organization on campus, Whim’s original address was http://www.radford.edu plus its name.)

You also can find scattered bits of Whim if you add the season numbers like “season 18″ in quotes to the end of a Radford site search in Google: site:www.radford.edu whim “season 18″

Examining search results also gave me a hint of the original “flat file”
directory structure, which is still in place for the last edition that used it:
http://www.radford.edu/~whim/tech/
http://www.radford.edu/~whim/life/

A working “Issues” dropdown menu on those pages goes deeper into the site, which looks like parts of “Season 18″ and  “Season 19″ (2006), the year before I got here. Links to the “inside pages” still work, despite the “refer” block on the old “home page”  http://www.radford.edu/~whim

For keeping an archive of more RECENT history, the student editors will have to get to know  WordPress better than I do. Perhaps there’s a way to export a “flat file” copy of the current site structure each year. I was able
to do that kind of conversion with my old blogging software (see
http://stepno.com/oldblog), but haven’t had to try it with WordPress.

If you know a site that says how to do that, please post a link in the Comments here!

Tangling where the wires meet the Web

AP, Yahoo Near Deal on Content Use – WSJ.com.

The Wall Street Journal says the Associated Press wants tighter restrictions on Yahoo’s use of wire stories, and that negotiations may wrap up “in the next few weeks.”

Official AP quote: “The AP is one of Yahoo’s most important content partners. Yahoo values our long-standing relationship with AP and expects it will continue for years to come.”

Google’s  is also facing the renewal date of its AP contract and has stopped putting new AP content on Google News “in case a deal isn’t reached,” the Journal said.

The story also has a handy chart of  comScore figures on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft  traffic going to major newspaper Web sites — the Washington Post, L.A. Times, USA Today, New York Times and the WSJ itself. (There’s no text explaining the chart, but it looks to me like biz.yahoo.com sends the WSJ a lot of visitors.)

For students, here’s some background on the Associated Press:

http://www.ap.org/pages/about/about.html

Notice the “.org” — yes, AP is an organization, and non-profit. It calls itself “the backbone of the world’s information system,” which might be a title Google or Yahoo would like to arm-wrestle over.

The AP is a cooperative, owned by its base membership: 1,500 U.S. daily newspapers, and distributing contributions from those papers as well as its own staff of correspondents and photographers.

News Corp. and Microsoft Corp.

The WSJ article also mentions that “according to people familiar with the matter,” the newpaper’s parent company, News Corp., “has held discussions with Microsoft Corp. about a plan to remove the publisher’s newspaper content from Google’s search engine while continuing to feature it on Microsoft’s online properties.”

Here’s an earlier story from the not-NewsCorp-owned Guardian, with a few more colorful quotes (“parasite”) on News Corp.’s attitude toward Google.

New media models: Video on plain paper, or text that controls video

Video on paper: MIT doctoral student Pranav Mistry’s “SixthSense” technology is a wearable device that makes it possible to project video on any page of a newspaper, snap a picture by framing a scene in the rectangle between your fingers and thumbs, and project a stranger’s Facebook info onto his T-shirt for a quick introduction.

Mistry’s video on TED.com and this earlier demo with MIT Media Lab professor Pattie Maes show the prototype device in action. The hardware consists of a Bluetooth-equipped smartphone, webcam and a miniature projector, with a mirror to redirect the image. (Yes, this is one MIT Media Lab demo that is literally done with mirrors.) The software is the hard part.

Mistry has a project website with photos, related articles, and this summary:

‘SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information. By using a camera and a tiny projector mounted in a pendant like wearable device, ‘SixthSense’ sees what you see and visually augments any surfaces or objects we are interacting with. It projects information onto surfaces, walls, and physical objects around us, and lets us interact with the projected information through natural hand gestures, arm movements, or our interaction with the object itself.

While I doubt that video projection from an iPhone-size pendant will become the next way to “save the newspaper,” the technologies in the TED videos are fascinating — and not only Mistry’s demo.

Text controlling video: Reading-oriented new media fans, notice the “interactive transcript” link on those TED videos. The transcript doubles as an index to the video — click any sentence in the text and the Flash video player jumps to that point. (I’d missed this feature in earlier TED videos, thanks to  watching a lot of them embedded on other sites, including my own. Here’s its announcement.)

The TED version isn’t the only “interactive transcript” technology around. See the New York Times video and transcript of President Obama’s speech in Cairo last June for another example; it uses a navigation timeline to choose points in both the text and video. MSNBC’s presidential inauguration coverage included something similar.

Thanks to simpsonmedia.net for more info on the interactive transcripts, and to Sree Sreenivasan for the pointer to both the transcript and the TED videos. For more advanced Adobe Premier and Flash users, here’s a related tutorial.

Digital Culture Catch-Up: Books to Video

Here are a few links to recent news about various kinds of online media… from digital access to “orphan” books to digital access to new-born television series.

Google and Partners Revise Terms of Digital Book Deal -NYTimes.com

“Google and groups representing book publishers and authors filed a modified version of their controversial books settlement with a federal court on Friday. The changes would pave the way for other companies to license Google’s vast digital collection of copyrighted out-of-print books, and might resolve its conflicts with European governments.”

Using the Web to adjust the color on TV –WashingtonPost.com

“Web television has been around since the ’90s, but in the past year edgy new shows by, for and about minorities are proliferating on the Internet. Many of the new series take the form of webisodes — episodes that usually last about five minutes, aimed at the short-attention spans of the all-mighty Millennium Generation…”

The Post item features rowdyorbit.com and Chick.

The Man Who Made You Put Away Your Pen — NPR

An interview with Ray Tomlinson on the dawn of e-mail and the @ sign:

“To send messages between different computers, he needed a way to separate the names of senders and recipients from the names of their machines. The @ sign just made sense; it wasn’t commonly used in computing back then, so there wouldn’t be too much confusion. The symbol turns an e-mail address into a phrase; it means ‘user “at” host,’ Tomlinson explains. ‘It’s the only preposition on the keyboard.’”

What is Digital Culture? — Chris Pirillo

From last summer… an interesting video, discussion and links from the organizer of the Gnomedex tech conferences.

“When I think of digital culture, I think of it as a part of ourselves, and an extension of society. What it means to me is a step in mental evolution, and social responsibility. The phrase that explains the idea that technology connects us as humans which I coined is ‘Human Circuitry’ – which is now the theme of my Gnomedex conference.”

Happy 39th birthday, digital rodent

Douglas Engelbart‘s patent for what we know as the computer mouse was issued Nov. 17, 1970, which isn’t exactly a “birthday,” since the actual invention was about seven years earlier, and the device had made its public debut during the “mother of all demos” Dec. 9, 1968, which would make it 41 years old next month.

In some circles, however, there is a tradition of remaining “39″ as long as possible.

The original, which Engelbart created at Stanford Research Institute, was a fist-sized wooden box holding two perpendicular wheels, and called an “X-Y Position Indicator.” Xerox PARC replaced the wheels with a trackball later, and Apple’s Macintosh picked up the ball from there.

Resources:

• Historical photos from Doug Engelbart Institute (formerly Bootstrap Institute)
• Stanford – MouseSite
• The 1968 Demo (includes video)
• The patent (US Patent Office uses TIFF image files, which are viewable with Safari on a Macintosh, but I’ve had trouble with Firefox)
• Howard Rheingold’s Tools for Thought, the first place I read about Engelbart and his Augment project.