everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Year: 2005

  • Bring Down the Wall says Gilmor

    Dan Gillmor argues for the newspapers to unlock their archives from behind the pay wall and provide them to the reading (and blogging) public as a community resource, collective history, and public record. With advances in contextual advertising such as Google’s Adsense (now available as an API by the way), there must be a way for newspapers to make more money off their archives than they currently do from the occasional $2.95 they get from individual readers and the collective royalties they get from the commercial databases such as Lexis-Nexis and Factiva.

    If I was a publisher with a pay-per-view archive, here’s what I’d do:

    1) Re-publish every article in the archives with a unique URL,
    outside the pay-wall. It would be helpful if the articles published
    since the newspaper went online could have the same URLs, but don’t
    worry if that’s too expensive; if the stories are important enough,
    they’ll be found and pointed to. It’ll just take a little longer.

    2) Leave every new article on the Web at the URL it had upon publication. That’s easier.

    3) Encourage the readers to use the archives, with house
    advertisements, website notices e-mail to local librarians and other
    ways to get out the word.

    4) Let local bloggers know that you welcome their links, and that you’ve made the change in part because they need it, too.

    5) If a local blogger points to your article, use Trackback or other such technology to point back.

    I think most of the pay-per-view media sites are all looking at each other to see who will make the first move. Large sites such as the New York Times have the most to gain from such a move because of the attraction of their brand will generate the most traffic. But if a mid-tier player makes the first move (especially someone in a wired part of the world such as the San Jose Mercury News), they could gain first mover advantage and keep momentum up from the subsequent blogger pile-on effect that would use this source as their default research and linking resource.

    If no one jumps, the pending citizen journalism efforts will take their place so someone will make the move sooner or later.

  • “to the 40, to the 50, to the 60, he’s going all the way on this one!”

    One of the nice things about walking Tyler to school each morning is that during those 15 minutes we have together, we can chat about any number of things that are on our minds and clear the plate for the day. This morning Tyler announced that he’s decided what he wants to be when he grows up which is big news as we’ve asked him this before and his responses have always been a wise guy, snappy answer, “Big”

    Today he said in all seriousness that he wants to be a. . . Sports Announcer. Bonus points to the kid for originality – I don’t think any of the kids books I’ve read have ever covered this one. Fireman? Policeman? Astronaut? Sure, we’ve all seen these but Sports Announcer? I don’t think they ever covered this one because so little is known about the glamorous life of the sportscasters out there. Travel to exotic cities and sports venues around the world, meet famous athletes, watch all your favorite games, long vacations in the off season – seems like it’d be pretty fun.

    The more I think about it, the better it sounds. Let’s see, Tyler loves to talk so there’s a good fit there, the worst thing that can happen to a sportscaster is “dead air” and Tyler talks like a shark swims – for his life. There’s also the need to know detailed stats for instant recall and there again, Tyler has shown a talent for storing arcane knowledge with his detailed knowledge of the Thomas Tank Engines. The other day Tyler asked me to pause a new Thomas DVD which he had been studying (he really studies these things like a cycling fan studies old 1972 Giro D’Italia films) because he caught a glimpse of a new engine that he’d never seen before. There, in a split second frame was a indeed a new engine (I’ve become a bit of an expert myself).

    Tyler put a little of his talent to practice the other day – two kids were playing catch in our yard and instead of joining them, Tyler narrated the play-by-play.

  • Speed Lumps

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    I’ve heard of Speed Bumps and Speed Humps but here in Alameda we have Speed Lumps. What exactly is the difference and imagine the bewilderment to the road construction crew when they go into the back of their truck to pick up the the appropriate sign,

    “I don’t know Larry, they kind of look like humps to me, what to you think Moe?”

    “Nah, it looks more like a bump, check out the curvature on the approach.”

    “Yeah, but if you look at the peak, yeah, there, from the driver’s perspective, it’s less of an angle, almost flat, this is more like a lump to me,”

    Our taxdollars hard at work. . .

  • TV while-u-wait

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    While filling up on gas on the way to Tahoe the other weekend, I noticed that they had managed to pipe in CNBC business news into the little LCD monitor on the gas pump. Caught up on the latest market news while I topped up the tank.

    Ubiquitous sound bite TV and cell phone browsing fills up every spare moment of down time in the quest for the fully productive lifestyle.

  • Morning Walk

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    We took the kids out for a longish walk this morning. It was a bit nippy (but nothing like what they’re seeing back East) so we bundled everyone up to shield them from the morning fog. It was a real treat to be out in the early morning, before the town woke up. We crossed the bridge over to a neighboring Island and walked along the bay for a while before turning back and heading into town to pick up some breakfast at a local bagel shop.

    I think we may make this a weekend routine.

  • IBM

    There is a very interesting theory about why IBM shed their vaunted ThinkPad & PC hardware division to China’s Lenovo. Attributed to the Petrov Group, in a Business 2.0 article, the theory is that IBM would use it’s partnership (IBM still owns a percentage of Lenovo) to enter the China market with a low cost, Linux-based PC platform.

    As Petrov puts it, China “is a command economy and is price sensitive.” It is also projected to surpass the United States as the biggest PC market by 2010. In fact, in that year, the Chinese are expected to buy 180 million PCs, while the developed world will buy 150 million. If IBM, through its new partner Lenovo, could establish cheap Linux desktops as an acceptable alternative to Windows machines in China alone, it would cut Microsoft’s cash flow from a much-needed growth market. At the same time, it would teach a new generation of IT managers in China that since Windows isn’t a necessity, Microsoft products aren’t needed on servers either. (Subtext: Buy IBM.)

    If this is indeed the scenario that folks in Armonk have dreamed up, it’s absolutely brilliant.

  • Tahoe

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    We went up to Tahoe last weekend to catch some of the record snows that have fallen on the Sierras over the past few weeks. Our digital camera’s battery ran out of juice so I only have this shot of a tricked out Mustang that we saw on the road but Doug Yarrington posted more pictures here.

  • Achenblog

    Washington Post’s columnist Joel Achenbach is up and running on TypePad for his Achenblog. column.

    We’re all having a chuckle as he dives into the world of blogs. In this entry he writes about the levels of authorship that we provide and suggests some greater levels of authorship rights that we’ll be sure to look into for a future release:

    . . .there’s “junior author” and “author” and “owner,” but I think there’s an even higher level than that, an uber-owner, with a sign-on that allows you to rearrange everything on our site AND go over to the Times site and insert mistakes. There’s probably a level yet higher — someone who can, for example, go into the Library of Congress website, into the American Memory section, and fiddle around with the original texts of sacred American documents, such as the Declaration of Independence.

  • Technorati Tag Bookmarklet

    Only a day out and someone’s already created a bookmarklet to make it easier to add tags to your posts.

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