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I've initiated the process of moving my blog to a new WordPress site. If all went all well, you should receive this message and need do nothing else. If all went somewhat well, I may need to send you a request to sign up for a new email service.

Notes from The Media and Politics Frontier

As mentioned earlier, I am attending (gate-crashing)  a program on politics and the media at the 2011 25th Anniversary Schedule - Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. (As I write at table in the hal, Clay Shirky is pacing the hall, talking to himself, getting ready for his lunchtime speech.)

Xeni Jardin interviewed Miles O'Brien on science in the media. O'Brien, formerly of CNN until they jettisoned their science department, talked about the difficulty that we as a nation have in teaching about science. The mainstream media, fulfilling that circle, limits its science coverage because it seems that people aren't interested. There was a lot more about a lot more. You can find the recorded sessions at Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy - Home Page

The audience discussion came around to several themes:

• I'm an old-school journalist and I don't understand what you're talking about.


• What about quality?


• Where are the editors?


• Where are the authorities?

I offered a few themes that I've used before:

• The web offers a large-scale version of what we would otherwise call peer review. Instead of a dozen reviewers taking a month to read an article, you can get 100s of people giving you feedback in minutes. The scale is fast and large and solid.


• This is an evolving model that's only a few years old. It wasn't designed as such; we're building as we go along. As a result, we can't expect the level of maturity or completeness that traditional news or science publication companies have had (and have decimated).


• The stuff is personal and people react as such. When there was news about prostate screen or mammograms, people read the reports and reacted as if their lives depended on it. Science becomes real.

More later.

 

Notes from Harvard Square

The ride in to the seat of all Western knowledge took less than an hour on this foggy Friday. I left the house at 5:40, parked, and was greeted by a bearded doorman at Peet's Coffee by 6:45. Even though it's a mild morning, the doorman has made his transition to a winter jacket. The fur-lining of the hood on his jacket is indistinguishable from his wild white beard. Man Becomes Coat, should be the headline in the morning Metro.

It should be busier here. Just a half dozen folks reading their papers.

Peet's offers the oddly-flavored coffees, but refrains from promoting them too much. There's a brightly-lit Dunkin' Donuts in the same building as the parking garage. They are promoting some pumpkin abomination. I miss the Coffee Connection with their single-origin coffees. I miss lots of stuff. We go on.

I'm here to attend a symposium on  The Media and Politics Frontier at the Shorenstein Center. I have no affiliation with the center and am here pretty much as a groupie. I'll have notes about the forum here and on Twitter and Google+.

Our bearded doorman has moved into the small park in front of the door where he can have a smoke. The pigeons give him little attention.

RoasterBoy on the move

I am in the process of migrating this blog to WordPress. You can find out more here: RoasterBoy on the move « Hakkarainen Clipping Service.
These links  and other services will continue to work for quite a while. When I get the email and RSS feeds set up, all new content will go onto the new site. My goal is that current readers should have to do anything to receive the blog posts at the new site. I'll let you know directly if I learn otherwise.
Thanks so much for your interest and support.

The daily news of the future

Giving us a chance to say as much as we want about nothing.

Worcester Telegram & Gazette - telegram.com -

Book Review: Social Media for Lawyers

Professionals such as attorneys and physicians are using social media to establish their professional reputations, promote discussion of important topics, and, yes, build their practices. Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier offers practical tips for attorneys who are new to the idea of using social media such as blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter as a part of their marketing and outreach. The book walks you through the setup of these services and suggests some best practices for using social media specifically and marketing in general. The book concludes with the expected notes of caution regarding ethics. You can see the table of contents here (PDF).
The book is useful, but could be a lot more so. The biggest problem, by far, is the lack of an online resource to help the reader with the number of lengthy links used in the book.

The book includes a number of sidebar notes. The trouble is that they're called Factoids. Norman Mailer coined the phrase to describe "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority." (via Online Etymology Dictionary).
At $50, the book is too expensive for what it offers. A bit of web research and perhaps even a copy of Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies would be more useful and less expensive.

G'bye, delicious

One of my maxims based on 30 years of high tech:

All software will break your heart.

I've used the public bookmarking service delicious (formerly known as del.icio.us) more than six years, nearly a lifetime for a web service. I've relied on it to park items of interest, share topics with friends and strangers, and  build blog posts from the accumulated links. I currently have more than 9500 bookmarks stored there. You can see them on my links page.
Yahoo bought delicious from its founder in late 2005 and did very little to help or hurt it. Late last year, Yahoo signaled that it was going to shut down delicious, prompting a bit of panic. Along with many thousands of other bookmarkers, I opened an account with pinboard.in. They had some fun dealing with the sudden influx of interest, but they survived: Anatomy of a Crushing (Pinboard Blog). Pinboard later got through an unfriendly visit from the FBI: FAQ about the recent FBI raid (Pinboard Blog).
Pinboard costs a few buck; delicious is free.
I was in the habit, though, of using delicious. I had browser extensions, scripts that put selected links into selected blog posts, and a bunch of other stuff that I didn't feel like replacing. I was lulled into this inertia by delicious's continued and unchanged presence.
In the spring, a couple of guys who'd been at YouTube formed a company called AVOS and bought delicious for pretty much couch changed. They worked behind the scenes through the summer and launched the new site in late September: A New Flavor…Still Delicious | AVOS.
The reaction to the new web service was consistent: AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure | ZDNet.
The new service has broken too many things that used to work on their way to adding eye candy that almost no  one wants or needs.
I've been patient, giving them time to listen to their customers and respond.  They've tried, but I fear that they've gone too far down the wrong path to come back and fix what they left behind, the stuff that made delicious really useful.
Today, though, I tried to do some real work with my bookmarks and couldn't.
delicious was a pickup truck that was good for real work. Now, it isn't. I don't know what it is, but it isn't what I need.
I'll be re-migrating my stuff to Pinboard over the next few weeks. Most of you won't notice or care, but a few might see a few changes. I'll keep my delicious account, but won't be adding to it.
In the 90s, there was a nifty product called Calendar Creator. It helped you build family calendars with birthdays and other recurring events of note. I don't remember if it was version 2 or 3, but one release broke everything. They tried to make it do more and wound up doing less. I bought the new version, tried it once, and never used it again.
Since then, I've seen countless products bloat themselves out of existence. Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution, has added a bunch of eye candy that prevents it from running on older, slower, less powerful systems.  Facebook may be on that track as it keeps adding features that make it more difficult to use.
I like new stuff, particularly in technology. I'll try lots of products in their earliest stages and stick with them if they show promise.
When I find utilitarian products, however, I don't need improvement. I go to the store, point to my shoes and say, "I want these shoes, but new." I've worn button-down shirts for close to 50 years. (No, not the same ones, although not for a lack of trying.) My pillows are older than I am.
Google has it right. The basic design of their home page has changed very little over the years. They've added powerful features, but mostly hidden from view. When they've tried fancy stuff (Wave, Buzz), they failed and quickly dropped the products. They know how to add changes without breaking their core product.
delicious didn't do that. It broke what they did well and gave us new stuff that we neither wanted nor needed.