Oct 06 2011
Current Affairs

A sad night

The first Mac I ever saw was at my aunt and uncle’s house. It was a Mac 128 and my uncle showed me how to make art with MacPaint. I was hooked.

The first computer I ever bought with my own hard-earned cash was the original iMac. I pre-ordered it and was at the launch party on the first day at the Mac Store near Lloyd Center. They called our names during the party to come get our iMacs. I was #5.

As computers went, that first iMac wasn’t much to write home about. It was neither fast nor technologically interesting. But it was a triumph of design and focus. It worked in ways that no other computer even dreamed of. There was nothing else like it and I was thrilled to make things with it.

I’ve owned and used a lot of Apple gear since then, each so much better than the ones before it, each giving me the tools to make better and more interesting things.

Steve and his team have been delighting and inspiring me for years. He was one of my few heroes.

As Jeff Jarvis said tonight, “We have lost our Gutenberg, Edison, Picasso, Carnegie….”

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May 27 2011
publishing, social media, Work

How do you build local engagement on Twitter? (via The Buttry Diary)

Steve Buttry nails it with this post in building community engagement on Twitter. The meat of it is this:

However you find people tweeting about your community, the key to engaging them is conversation. If your Twitter feed is a one-way stream of self-promoting headlines and links, people are not likely to engage with it. But if you answer their questions, ask them how they know newsworthy information that they tweet, retweet their observations about community life, they will engage with you.

Excellent advice for anyone or any business on Twitter. He goes on to give tips for using several 3rd party tools and Twitter’s own Advanced Search.

In my experience working with small newsrooms the tools we provide have to be both comprehensive and easy to use. Continue reading →

May 23 2011
journalism, publishing, Work

Outing Your Commenters’ Identities

RulesIt’s important to have a clear set of rules.

Your Terms of Use document (terms of service, community guidelines, FAQ, rules of the road, etc.) is your social contract with your site’s users. Whether you craft it to your specific needs or use boilerplate, your Terms are the rules and a good site lives by and enforces those rules.

The rules should lay out what behavior is expected and what is unacceptable in your online community, and what happens the rules are broken. You expect your visitors to abide by the terms, and they should expect the same of you. Continue reading →

Nov 10 2010
entertainment, geekery

Not enough people watching HD content? Here’s one easy fix

So half of U.S. homes have an HDTV but the vast majority of what’s being watched on those screens is SD content. There could be a lot of reasons behind this but one I’ve seen many times could be easily solved by the cable companies.

HD programming packages from your local cable monopoly include both SD and HD versions of many channels. The problem is that the HD versions are located on different channel numbers. This is crazy. Most TV viewers have a set of channels that they bounce between. It becomes habit: muscle memory. Telling one of these people to use channel 107 instead of channel 7 is ridiculous. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to remind relatives to switch to the HD version to get a better picture, or to get the picture they’re paying for.

Cable companies need to re-map the HD channels to the original channel #s. There’s probably a complex, possibly even regulatory, reason they haven’t done this, but it needs to be done.

Oct 15 2010
advertising, mobile, publishing, Work

New York Times’ iPad app: Advertising done right

NYT app iconThere’s a lot to like in this week’s update to the New York Times’ iPad app. The new version has much more content than the previous “Editor’s Choice” app, the navigation is improved and the app feels much more polished. But it’s the handling and placement of the ads that really impresses me.

In-app advertising so far has been a mixed bag. Many apps rely on ad networks and phone-optimized ad units. Some have created custom ad units, including “sponsored by” messages on the app’s splash screen.

The Times appears to have taken a different approach: their ads make excellent use both of the iPad’s form factor and new user interface features in Apple’s iOS. Continue reading →

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