Category: Technology

At GlobeLab, hacking their way toward the future

Did you know that the Boston Globe employs someone whose business card reads “Creative Technologist”?  The holder of that card is Chris Marstall, who hosted a meeting of Hacks/Hackers Boston at the paper’s GlobeLab space Tuesday evening.

Several dozen of us gathered to watch demos of projects that GlobeLab is working on — among them a mash-up that displays geotagged Instagram photos on a huge, six-screen map of Boston, the Big Picture photo blog repurposed for the new version of Google TV, and a tool that makes it easy for folks to see what a page of BostonGlobe.com will look like on various devices.

To me, the most intriguing experiment involved a smartphone app that automatically calls up the online version of a story when you take a picture of a headline in the print edition. From there you can email it, tweet it or whatever. I’m not sure whom it will appeal to — if you’re reading a print newspaper, you’ve already made certain decisions about the place of technology in your life. But it was fun to watch.

I also think it’s pretty interesting that the Globe has committed itself to thinking about the future in ways that might not pay off immediately, but could yield something useful down the line.

Bob Brown of Network World has written a more thorough account of the evening.

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

This is a sad day. Steve Jobs has died. He was a visionary and a genius — a genius of design, and of knowing how we wanted to work and play long before we had any idea. “The world is immeasurably better because of Steve,” said Apple in a company statement, according to NBC News. It’s true, and how many people can you say that about?

This morning’s BostonGlobe.com report

The next few weeks should be interesting as the folks at the Boston Globe work out the bugs at BostonGlobe.com.

Starting last night, the site stopped working on my almost-four-year-old MacBook using Chrome and Safari. (Might be just my set-up, though I did reboot.) On the other hand, it still works fine with Firefox, for which I’ve recently been developing a new appreciation, as it seems to be the most stable of the three major Mac browsers. No problems on my iPhone or on Mrs. Media Nation’s iPad, either.

I’m glad to see Dan Wasserman’s editorial cartoon made it to the site today, and I hope syndicated cartoons will be included on days that Wasserman isn’t drawing. The comics are online today, too. Maybe they were yesterday, but I couldn’t find them.

Other observations: clean as the site is, the organizational scheme is a bit bewildering, with many different options. I feel as though I’m missing stuff. The “Today’s Paper” option doesn’t seem to be quite that. It would be nice to have a clearly delineated separate section of everything that’s in that day’s print edition.

Also, how about combining all the little “Names” tidbits into one column? Other “g” shorts could be combined, too. I don’t want to keep clicking to read 90-word items. It’s one of my main peeves about GlobeReader, too, and I’ll bet I’m not alone.

Media Nation seeks sponsorship

Would you like to advertise on Media Nation? I would like to hear from you. Media Nation is a Greater Boston blog that offers commentary on local and national media and politics, as well as occasional diversions into sports, culture, photography, technology and even dwarfism. Nearly 1,000 people visit Media Nation each weekday. For more information, contact me at dkennedy56 {at} gmail {dot} com.

Want to comment? Use your real name, first and last.

I’m not sure why, but I’ve been getting an unusual number of comments lately from people who don’t seem to realize we have a real-names policy, first and last, at Media Nation — even though the first thing you see in the comment box is “Have something to say? Your real name, first and last, is required.”

Here is our commenting policy in more detail. And here is an interesting post on the good results news organizations are having when they turn their commenting system over to Facebook.

The New Yorker’s underwhelming iPad app

Given the New York Times’ rather rhapsodic take on the New Yorker’s iPad app, I was surprised by how underwhelming it turned out to be when I finally gave it a test. I installed it on Mrs. Media Nation’s first-generation iPad, loaded in the current issue — and found it to be almost identical to the PDF-like version that the New Yorker makes available to its print subscribers, a.k.a. the “digital edition.”

There was one key difference, and I’ll grant you it’s an important one: the digital edition requires you to move the pages around on your computer screen, making them bigger and smaller and switching around among columns, maneuvers that have long made most of us despise PDFs. The iPad version, by contrast, automatically formats to the screen. That’s a big improvement.

Other than that, though, I found the app to be rather flat and uninspiring. Yes, the Times review emphasized that it was designed for people who just want to read rather than be dazzled. But there’s a middle ground between a plain reproduction of a magazine and a distracting multimedia extravaganza. I’d have liked to see the New Yorker aim for that middle ground.

That said, it was a nice way to read Ryan Lizza’s excellent profile of Michele Bachmann — especially since the mailman hasn’t seen fit to deliver our print edition yet.

Media Nation seeks a new local sponsor

If you’re a Greater Boston business person and would like to help sponsor Media Nation, I’ve got a deal for you. To place a banner ad at the top of the page, please contact me at dkennedy56 at gmail dot com. You’ll be alternating with the Boston law firm Prince Lobel, whose ad will continue to appear in that space.

Big Brother Steve is not watching you

I started writing an “Apple’s not really spying on you” post a little while ago and ditched it on the grounds that I don’t fully understand all the issues involved. (That’s a first, eh?)

But I recommend this post at the Center for Democracy and Technology by John Morris, who speculates that the real reason Apple set up your iPhone to track your location is to save on battery life.

I do think there’s less to this controversy than meets the eye (as Morris writes, the location file “normally never leaves your devices”). Still, Apple (and Google, which does the same thing with its Android operating system) could have done better.

Official Twitter clients still not ready for prime time

The folks who run Twitter are starting to lose their tolerance for third-party clients, according to Jolie O’Dell of Mashable.

She specifically mentions two of my favorites: TweetDeck, which may already have run afoul of the Gods of Twitter, and HootSuite, which Twitter apparently has no problems with, but which I find to be a bit more complex than it needs to be.

I would have no problem using Twitter’s official clients for my Mac and my iPhone if they included some of the basic functionality that third-party apps offer. To wit:

  • The ability to post to multiple Twitter accounts. I use two — my own (@dankennedy_nu) and Northeastern’s School of Journalism’s (@NUjournalism). As best as I can tell, if I do it the official way, I have to log out of one account and then log into another. By contrast, on TweetDeck or HootSuite, I simply check which feed I wish to post to. I can even post to two simultaneously.
  • Automatic link-shortening. If this is available on the official Twitter client, I can’t find it. Why would I want to copy a link, paste it into a link-shortening site like Bit.ly and then copy the result back into Twitter when I can just copy and paste it at TweetDeck or HootSuite and watch it automatically shrink? (HootSuite does require a trivial extra half-step.)

Twitter recently cracked down on ÜberTwitter, which was literally the only decent client for BlackBerry. Glad I’m not using a BlackBerry anymore. O’Dell writes:

Twitter has already adopted many of the ideas third-party devs brought into the system. For example, the impressive interface of the “New Twitter” felt more to us like a really great third-party app than anything else. And Twitter’s mobile apps, which were a boon to overall Twitter usage, were informed and inspired by existing third-party apps, too.

Well, fine. But Twitter is going to have to make a few more improvements before I’m willing to switch to its official apps. I hope Biz Stone, Evan Williams and company don’t force the issue and more than they already have.

The last word (I hope) on the Googletron and me

Last week Google restored my AdSense account without explanation, though I had already learned through a back channel that an employee discovered I’d been hacked. A couple of days later I received the following e-mail from Attorney General Martha Coakley’s office:

Dear Mr. Kennedy:

Thank you for contacting the Office of Attorney General Martha Coakley. The Office is not able to handle every matter that is brought to its attention; however, we do take note of every complaint received, and watch for a pattern of complaints related to a particular company, individual, or industry.

Thank you for bringing this matter to the attention of the Attorney General’s Office.

Sincerely,

Benjamin Vitalini
Public Inquiry & Assistance Center

Here is my response:

Dear Mr. Vitalini:

Thank you for your letter of January 25 regarding my complaint about Google for cutting off my AdSense account and confiscating the money I had earned. I agree with you that my issue was a small one, but I hope you will find it useful in establishing the “pattern of complaints” that you are looking for. I would note that I gave you information about other, similar situations in my original letter.

Since I last wrote to you, Google has restored my AdSense account and returned my money. I have received no official explanation as to what happened, but have learned through a back channel that a Google employee determined my account had been hacked. Though I’m grateful, I know that the only reason my account was restored was because I am fairly well known in the blogging community. In my case, someone who reads my blog contacted a personal friend who works for Google. That is not something that is going to work for most people.

The central problem, I believe, is that Google has automated the process of detecting problems with AdSense accounts and shutting them down — and then offers no recourse to a human being. I think regulators nationwide should insist that Google offer some way for aggrieved customers to complain to a person rather than to a computer, and to receive a clear explanation as to what went wrong and why.

Sincerely,

Dan Kennedy

I hope I’m done with this. And I still plan to replace the overhead with local advertisements, which will allow me either to eliminate or play down my Google ads.

Earlier coverage.