Dan Kennedy

Tweaking Gmail with IMAP

It’s tech week at Media Nation. Fresh from foisting my video issues on you, I thought I’d give an update on my ongoing efforts to make Gmail dance to my tune.

Taking some excellent advice from a few astute readers, I set up Apple Mail to engage in two-way communication with Gmail via IMAP. As promised, this proved to be a far better set-up than accessing Gmail via POP. With IMAP, Apple Mail is more or less in constant contact with Gmail, syncing messages and folders so that what’s on my hard drive is exactly the same as what’s in my Gmail account.

One thing that surprised me after I first set up Apple Mail was that copies of all my Gmail messages (and I save pretty much everything except spam) were downloaded automatically to my hard drive. I suppose that’s the idea. But what about when an iPhone user sets up IMAP communications with Gmail? Do all those messages get downloaded to the iPhone, too? That doesn’t make much sense.

Now, here’s the best part. My biggest problem with Gmail is the way it interfaces with my Northeastern account. I had set up Gmail so that it would grab my NU mail. But occasionally there are delays of an hour or more — usually not a big deal, but sometimes critical. Also, although I haven’t found any specific examples for a while, I swear that there were occasions when important NU mail never made it to Gmail.

So, I reconfigured Gmail to stop receiving NU mail, and then set up a separate Northeastern account in Apple Mail using POP (no IMAP available). Now all my NU mail is downloaded directly to my hard drive, bypassing Gmail completely. And once I’ve got it, I can move it into Apple Mail folders that are then synced to Gmail and its labeling system. It gives me all the advantages of Gmail with none of the disadvantages.

I had hoped to be able to sync Gmail Contacts with my Apple Address Book. But to do that, you need an iPhone or an iPod Touch, or a willingness to hack your Mac. Fortunately, it was simple to export my Gmail Contacts as vCards and then import them into Address Book.

All of which means that I’ve attained e-mail nirvana, right? Well, not quite. Here are some issues that probably can’t be solved, and that I’m trying to decide whether I can live with or not:

Cloud computing is better than desktop computing. The single best thing about Gmail is that you’re doing everything on Google’s servers. You don’t have to worry about which computer you’re working on. And you don’t have to have a bunch of different programs open. I’ve now got Apple Mail and Address Book running pretty much all the time, and that’s on top of Firefox, NewsFire, Word and whatever else I’ve got running.
Gmail is more aesthetically pleasing than Apple Mail. And it’s not just aesthetics. Gmail lets you compose a perfectly formatted HTML message. Apple Mail is stuck in RTF, even though it seems perfectly capable of reading HTML. I often find myself switching to Gmail to compose, secure in the knowledge that IMAP will bring everything back together in the end.
Labels are better than folders. Apple Mail uses folders. Gmail uses labels. IMAP makes a seamless transition from folders to labels. But, in Gmail, you can assign more than one label to a message. You can’t do that with folders.
No more Gmail Chat. Not unless I fire up Gmail. I don’t use it that much anyway, but I like to know it’s there.

What’s my bottom line? I haven’t quite decided yet. In a perfect world, I would stick with Gmail on the Web, but my Northeastern account is enough of a complicating factor that a hybrid solution probably makes more sense.

One thing I have not yet done is take up another reader’s suggestion and take Mailplane for a test drive. I did poke around the site a little bit, and I’m not sure it would make my life any easier. If anyone has tried it, I’d be interested to know what you think.

For that clean, squeaky Gmail Soap feeling, click here.

Fair use: The video (II)

I’ve re-uploaded my fair-use video to fix the whopper of a typo that Donna Halper found. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of Steve Garfield and John Farrell, the quality is the same.

I did apply some custom settings when creating a QuickTime file, and it looked terrific on my MacBook. But YouTube didn’t like the file, playing the audio without any trouble but presenting the video as a series of stills.

Why wasn’t Ramírez suspended?

I considered letting this go, but figured some readers might wonder why I was taking a pass on the Manny Ramírez situation.

Assuming Ramírez behaved as has been described — shoving traveling secretary Jack McCormick to the ground, or hard enough that McCormick fell — then he should have been suspended without pay for three games.

It’s really not a hard call. And I don’t like it that Terry Francona and Theo Epstein appear to be more worried that Ramírez would go south on them for a month than they are about doing the right thing.

I don’t want to make too much of this. But the Sox are making too little of it.

Paying for the news voluntarily

How much are you willing to pay for high-quality coverage of your community? Our local weekly costs $46 a year for a mail subscription. The local daily costs $4 a week, with tip. So we’re paying more than $250 a year.

But what if we were talking about a free community Web site? If the site had a chance to hire a journalist, would you be willing to contribute, say, $50 or $100 a year, even if you could still access it for free if you chose? It works for public radio. Why not for online local news?

That’s the idea behind Representative Journalism, a project started by Leonard Witt (above) of Kennesaw State University, in Georgia. Witt plans to give it a try at Locally Grown, an ambitious-looking site that serves the town of Northfield, Minn.

Witt described the project this past Saturday at a “Sharing the News” symposium at UMass Lowell, sponsored by the New England News Forum. You can watch a video of Witt’s presentation here.

Witt said he got his inspiration from a GPS his wife gave him for his car. He entered “barbecue,” and was presented with a list of options — and he realized he would never again consult the newspaper for restaurant listings. The Internet, he explained, has “decoupled” advertising and editorial content.

“The economic structure behind the old model of making the news is falling apart,” he said. “If we want high-quality news in the future, somebody’s got to pay for it.”

The discussion got bogged down when Witt offered two hypotheticals that he presented as being similar, but were actually very different. In one case, a community site might hire a journalist to cover important regional stories, as is the idea in Northfield. In another, a Web project of some kind might be looking for a reporter to cover, say, endangered species in Florida.

The first idea seemed to go down a lot better than the second, as it was pointed out that folks contributing money to the coverage of a particular issue, as opposed to a geographic region, would be tempted to demand that the issue be covered in a certain way. Witt responded that there would have to be some educational efforts undertaken ahead of time. And he admitted that he hasn’t worked out all the bugs, explaining that the Northfield experiment will be a chance to test out the idea.

“The whole reason I’m doing this is that I believe journalists should be paid a fair wage,” he said.

Will it work? I think it’s a promising model. One thing I wonder about, though, is that community sites are not necessarily driven by journalism. At a recent “Future of Journalism” conference at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, Jan Schaffer, executive director of the Institute for Interactive Journalism, said the best community sites tend to be run by local activists who see their role as making connections and expanding the civic conversation.

Grafting a hungry young reporter onto that model could be a recipe for trouble. But it’s certainly worth trying.

More: Here’s a comprehensive rundown on the Lowell conference by Aldon Hynes.

Two contradictory thoughts

Yes, state Sen. Jim Marzilli, D-Arlington, should resign, and I suspect he will now that he’s been indicted on charges that he sexually accosted four women in Lowell on June 3.

But this effort by the Massachusetts Republican Party to push Marzilli out the door is cheap and sleazy. It’s unworthy of a major political party, which, of course, the state GOP isn’t.

Questions about a 22-year-old’s death

Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham does an exceptionally good job of framing the questions over the death of David Woodman, the reveler who stopped breathing while in police custody following the Celtics’ victory, and who died over the weekend.

As Abraham points out, there is a lot we don’t know. Which means that Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis’ approach — announcing there was no excessive force even before the investigation gets under way — is wrong.

File away Shelley Murphy and Christopher Cox’s story on the fact that all nine officers involved in Woodman’s arrest went to the hospital to be treated for stress, leaving it to an officer who wasn’t there to write the report. It could be meaningless, or it could prove to be a key to understanding what happened that night.

Fear itself

In my latest for The Guardian, I take a look at the unfavorable political landscape that Barack Obama will have to traverse this fall: the very public trial of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; heightened tensions, and possibly war, with Iran; and a determination on the part of the Bush White House once again to use terrorism as a cudgel with which to bludgeon the Democrats.

Al Giordano fights for DNC credentials

Narco News founder and former Boston Phoenix political reporter Al Giordano is involved in a nasty dispute with a Web site called RuralVotes.com.

Earlier this year, Giordano was blogging the primaries on a RuralVotes page called The Field (see this and this). But recently, claiming censorship, he took it down and moved it to his own site. Now he wants the credentials to the Democratic National Convention that had been awarded to The Field when it was based at RuralVotes, claiming — with quite a bit of statistical evidence — that his readers have followed him to his new location.

There doesn’t seem to be anything on the old site giving the RuralVotes side of this dispute. As best as I can tell, The Field has been renamed The Back Forty. If anyone would like to respond to Giordano’s charges, I would be glad to post it.

Giordano is an astute political observer and a dedicated rabble-rouser. I wish him well.

Fair use: The video

Check out my first news video — a discussion of the copyright dispute between the Associated Press and the Drudge Retort, featuring Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, and Rob Bertsche, a First Amendment lawyer with the Boston firm of Prince, Lobel, Glovsky & Tye. Cox’s blog post on the subject is very different from what you may have read elsewhere. As he was a close participant in the dust-up, you should read it.

Cox and Bertsche engaged in a wide-ranging overview at Saturday’s New England News Forum “Sharing the News” symposium at UMass Lowell, but I thought it would be interesting to try to boil their talking points down to a video. Cox and Bertsche are both well worth listening to, so I’ll leave it at that. My purpose here is to offer some technical observations with an eye toward improving.

1. In case you were wondering, I took this with my new Canon PowerShot SD890 IS Digital Elph. I’ve had it for a few weeks, and I’m pretty happy with it so far. It was overcast, so the lighting is exceptionally good in this particular video.

2. Yes, yes, I know I need to pay closer attention to background noise. I probably should have started over when the Laconia-style motorcycle rally (actually, it was one guy) nearly drowned out Cox. What I hadn’t anticipated were the bird noises sounding like something out of Alfred Hitchcock.

3. I edited the video with Apple’s iMovie 6. I’d like to try iMovie 7, but it keeps quitting out on me — even after I installed an update yesterday. In poking around the Web, I see that I’m not even close to being alone in finding iMovie 7 impossible to work with. Has anyone else had acceptable results? (And are iMovie 7 and iMovie ’08 one and the same? I think they are.)

4. I don’t like the titling options provided in iMovie, so I did the title slides in Photoshop Elements and saved them as JPEGs. I couldn’t figure out how to do them in color, so, as you’ll see, they’re in vivid black and white — or, as they translate to YouTube, vivid dark gray and light gray.

5. Steve Garfield tried to offer me some pointers on how best to export it for uploading to YouTube, but the dialogue box I got was different from what he showed me. The video looks really nice in iMovie. It degrades a lot when I save it as a CD-quality QuickTime .mov file. The title screens, in particular, look really bad.

Thoughts, comments and suggestions are welcome.

A new source of Mass. political coverage

Did you know that Republican congressional candidate Nathan Bech wants U.S. Rep. John Olver to save the planet by not sending mail to constituents who don’t want it? Or that Watertown councilor Jonathan Hecht is running hard for a state rep’s seat? Or that former Ted Kennedy aide Melody Barnes has signed on with Barack Obama’s presidential campaign?

These are just a few of the tidbits you can glean at PolitickerMA.com, which slipped quietly into view in mid-June. The goal of the Politicker project is to provide intensive coverage of state and local politics, combining original reporting with blogging on what other media outlets are saying.

I mentioned Politicker earlier this year when James Pindell, who blogged the New Hampshire primary for Boston.com, left to become the national managing editor. So far, Politicker has set up shop in about 15 states, according to the list under “PolitickerMA Partners.” The goal is to launch a Politicker site in all 50 states.

In an instant-message conversation with my Reinventing the News students this past spring, Pindell said Politicker’s revenue base will likely be issue-oriented ads aimed at the political and public-policy community in Massachusetts. Smart move. It doesn’t strike me that anyone is going to read Politicker other than serious political junkies. The mass media are giving way to many little niches, and Politicker aims to occupy one of those niches.

Politicker reminds me of a slicker PoliticsNH.com, which Pindell ran during the 2004 primary season, and which no longer exists. (Politicker appears to have acquired the name, as it now forwards to PolitickerNH.com.) Pindell’s earlier project became briefly famous for sponsoring a contest to find a wife for Dennis Kucinich, who was then single. It was great fun, though Elizabeth Harper, the woman whom the congressman later married, was not one of the contestants.

Another similarity to PoliticsNH is the presence of an anonymous columnist. At PolitickerMA, the nom de opinion is “Wally Edge.” In a story in the New York Times back in February, Politicker founder Robert Sommer (who’s also publisher of the New York Observer) described the undercover columnists who are being turned loose in each state as “the secret sauce,” and could include lobbyists, political consultants and former officeholders. Edge’s views seem benign enough so far, but I’m skeptical about this innovation. I’d rather such insiders be identified so we know their associations and potential conflicts.

PolitickerMA’s staff reporter is Jeremy Jacobs, a recent graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism who has worked for The Hill, among other places.

An early fan of PolitickerMA is Bay Windows editor Laura Kiritsy, who writes that the site “has already provided me with hours of late-night, on-deadline procrastinating thrills.” Kiritsy especially likes the lists of best and worst Massachusetts campaigns, which are pretty amusing.

Oddly enough, there are no RSS feeds [correction below] at PolitickerMA, though you can sign up for a daily e-mail.

As the news-media landscape morphs into something totally new, PolitickerMA is the sort of project that’s worth keeping a close eye on.

Neither the Boston Globe nor the Boston Herald provides the kind of small-bore coverage that is Politicker’s purview, especially as they shrink their staffs.

State House News Service does a good job of covering the Legislature, but it charges high subscription fees and is aimed mostly at media and political professionals.

Blue Mass Group rounds a lot of political news, but it’s partisan and almost wholly dependent on what its members can find in other media.

Politicker is exciting because it suggests a possible way out of the morass in which journalism finds itself these days. If it succeeds, it will occupy a sweet spot between full-service news organizations, which are shrinking, and citizen journalism, which is important but which does not meet the need for a reliable, edited news report.

And it gives young journalists who wish to cover politics some reason to hope that they’ll be able to make a living at it.

Correction: Robert David Sullivan has found an RSS feed. I was deceived by the lack of an RSS symbol in Firefox.