Category: Technology

Tuesday tech talk from a non-techie

Welcome to the tech blog whose author almost knows what he’s talking about. I know just enough to be dangerous, folks. Here are three tidbits for your Tuesday morning.

1. Beyond Google Reader. Last week Laura McGann of the Nieman Media Lab was rhapsodizing to a group of us about the glories of NetNewsWire, an RSS aggregator that resides on your computer rather than in the cloud, as is the case with Google Reader.

I was not entirely unfamiliar with NetNewsWire. I’d played with it before, but preferred a competitor called NewsFire. Several years ago, though, I made the switch to Google Reader and hadn’t looked back.

But lately, like many people, I’d found myself looking at Google Reader less and following interesting links from Twitter more. In part it’s because I really like Twitter. In part, though, it was because Google Reader just wasn’t all that satisfying — it’s slower than using a good client-based news reader and shows you less content before you click.

So a few days ago I reinstalled NetNewsWire and found, to my delight, that it now syncs with Google Reader, which means you don’t really have to decide. It’s fast and free (if you don’t mind looking at advertising; I don’t). If you’ve been losing interest in Google Reader, give NetNewsWire a try.

2. From Chrome to Safari and back again. When Apple unveiled Safari 5 a few months ago, I made the switch from Google Chrome. Though not quite as fast as Chrome (I’ve seen test results that say otherwise, but that’s not my experience), Safari was aesthetically more pleasing. My favorite feature, Reader, isolates the text in a story or blog post and presents it in as a beautifully rendered, easy-to-read page. On a properly designed website, Reader will even find the jump and display that, too.

Then Xmarks went out of business. Xmarks is a browser extension that lets you sync your bookmarks in the cloud and use them across multiple computers. An e-mail from the company outlined the alternatives — free for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome, but $99 for Safari via Apple’s MobileMe service.

As it turns out, there are at least two free extensions for Chrome — Readability Redux and iReader — that do what Safari’s Reader does, and are more customizable besides. So goodbye Safari.

3. The future of Reader. OK, different Reader — now I’m talking about Times Reader and GlobeReader, the paid electronic editions of the New York Times and the Boston Globe built on Adobe Air.

I’ve been a big fan of Reader since it was unveiled a couple of years ago, but I find that it hasn’t kept up. And with the development folks furiously working on iPad and mobile editions, it doesn’t seem likely that much brain power is going to be devoted to improving them, my wish list aside.

I recently asked Globe publisher Christopher Mayer how many subscribers GlobeReader had attracted. His answer: that’s proprietary. But, anecdotally, I’ve heard that neither Times Reader nor GlobeReader has attracted many paying customers.

Here’s what I like about Reader: it’s fast, it’s highly readable and you don’t need an Internet connection once that day’s edition has been downloaded. What I miss, though, is the richness of the Web — the slideshows, the videos, even the advertising. Lately, more often than not, I find myself using the “Today’s Paper” feature of NYTimes.com, supplemented with Chrome’s iReader extension. (I still tend to use GlobeReader because the “Today’s Globe” section of Boston.com can be so slow.)

Maybe the Reader editions have a future. But my suspicion is that they are just going to fade away for lack of interest.

The Herald is still waiting for digital deliverance

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Having devoted a considerable number of pixels recently to writing about digital versions of the Boston Globe (here and here), I figured it was time to check in on the city’s second daily, the Boston Herald.

The good news, which you probably already know, is that the Herald has a vibrant, fast-loading free website that’s clearly differentiated from the print edition. But is there some way of paying for electronic delivery of the full Herald, as there is with the Globe through GlobeReader?

The short answer is yes, but no. The Herald does have an “Electronic Edition” (also known as the “Smart Edition”) that costs $11 every four weeks for seven-day access — $10 if you renew automatically. That’s not a bad deal, as it would cost a bit more than $17 every four weeks for print delivery, not counting tip. But though it would be overly harsh to call the Electronic Edition unusable, it’s certainly not good enough to entice me away from the Herald’s website.

Simply put, the e-edition is a full PDF of the paper with a few add-ons. You can make a page larger and try to read it that way. You can click on a story, and the software will attempt to render a text version — not bad when it works, but it doesn’t always capture the full story. If you diligently page through the entire digital paper, you’re likely to run across a few items that you’d miss if you just scanned the website. But it’s not a satisfying experience.

You can also click to have a story read to you out loud. It’s good for a laugh, but that’s all.

The Electronic Edition offers several other options as well. You can read the paper on your mobile device or an e-reader, save it for offline reading using a program called PressReader, or add an RSS feed to your aggregator. But without going into excruciating detail, let me just say that I’ve given all of those options a try (I’m still attempting to get the paper to download to the BlackBerry version of PressReader) and found that they still fell short of simply reading the Herald on the Web — or in print.

The problem is that reading online is simply a different experience from reading in print. The Herald website respects that difference; the Electronic Edition is the complete opposite, as it represents a kludgy attempt to shoehorn the print edition onto your computer screen. (I do not know whether the e-edition is different from the Herald’s NewsStand edition, another PDF delivery service. It does look like NewsStand costs a bit more.)

When the Globe announced last week that it would move some of its online content behind a pay wall next year, Herald publisher Pat Purcell acknowledged that he’s considering his options as well. I hope one of those options will be to drop the electronic edition and embrace a first-rate digital-delivery system similar to GlobeReader.

How to make Reader editions better

No doubt the best coding brains at the New York Times Co. are focused on iPad development these days. But as a paid subscriber to the Reader editions of the New York Times and the Boston Globe, I have a few suggestions for how they could be better. I’d want to see these ideas incorporated into the iPad app as well, so please consider this a two-fer:

1. A front-page image of the print edition should be included, just as it is on the papers’ websites. We Reader readers, to coin a phrase, exist in a sort of electronic halfway house: we still read the paper as the paper, but we don’t mind giving up ink on dead trees. So we, of all customers, want to get a sense of what the front looks like.

2. The Reader organizational scheme should be as clear and easy-to-follow as the simple list format the papers use on their websites for that day’s edition (Globe here; Times here). Yes, I can skim through every Reader story very quickly, but sometimes I’d like to select a section front, then pick and choose.

3. Mega-dittoes for the Globe’s “g” section, which is just a mess in Reader. Way too many short items are just thrown up there. It needs a complete rethink.

4. Folks at the Globe need to take photos more seriously when putting together the Reader edition. There are too many instances of context-free pictures with no captions.

5. Reader editions should always link to multimedia extras such as videos. I know of a few occasions when I’ve found out hours after reading the paper that I missed on a terrific video.

My fear is that the Reader platform hasn’t attracted enough users to make further development worthwhile. I almost never see an ad other than a house ad, for instance. I still think it’s a promising idea, though, and perhaps development can take place in parallel with the iPad.

WordPress and audio files

Media Nation is built with the endlessly customizable WordPress.org. Yet I find that the more limited WordPress.com makes certain key tools more readily available.

A few days ago I posted an item about the New Haven Independent’s fifth-birthday party that included an audio clip of founder and editor Paul Bass. When you click, it takes you away from the post and to a blank page. Yucko.

In WordPress.com, there is a simple command that embeds an audio player on your page. For instance, take a look at the Sermons page of our church’s website, which I maintain using WordPress.com. All it takes is a simple line of code that looks like this: . For URL, of course, you substitute the actual URL of the MP3 file.

I’m thinking that if I could just find the right plug-in, I’d have the same capability in WordPress.org. Anyone know what it is?

The New York Times’ gift to BlackBerry users

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A few weeks ago, my BlackBerry notified me that a new version of the New York Times app was available. I downloaded it but didn’t expect much. Previous versions had been slow and kludgy, and I found that I preferred the Times mobile website instead.

But version 1.1.1 turns out to be a major improvement. You can download the latest Times content to your BlackBerry, either all at once or section by section. That means you can use it in places where the cell signal is erratic or non-existent, like on a train or in a subway car. (I’m pretty sure that was true of earlier versions, too, but those just weren’t usable enough for me to test.)

It also means that you don’t have to wait for pages to download every time you click, as you do with the mobile website. Stories load quickly and are presented on one page — no additional clicks just to read one article. And though the screen on my BlackBerry Tour is tiny, it is also ultra-sharp. I can pretty much plow through the whole paper without experiencing eye fatigue. It’s a nice, under-publicized utility at a moment when most of the media world is focused on the sleek but expensive iPad. I’d love to see the Times make the software available to other newspaper companies — starting with its corporate cousin, the Boston Globe.

Mobile has emerged as a crucial outlet for news organizations, and I have a bit of advice for them: Don’t give it away. Though I staunchly believe that users won’t pay for basic Web access, new delivery platforms require new revenue models.

Yes, there are ads (mainly house ads) on the Times app, but there’s only so much you can do with a tiny screen. The app should be free only for customers who already buy the paper through some other delivery channel, whether it be print, Kindle or Reader.

The Times app has me feeling better about my BlackBerry these days. I still plan to upgrade to an iPhone or a Droid when my contract expires next summer. But now, at least, I find myself gnashing my teeth a little less.

How Google’s phone services are pushing the law

I made my first phone call with Gmail this morning — to Mrs. Media Nation, who was sitting in the kitchen, about 20 feet away. This is very exciting, and is likely to revolutionize phone-calling. Not just to the kitchen, either.

Farhad Manjoo of Slate tells you everything you need to know.

Gmail-calling does raise two interesting questions:

  1. Given how popular this may prove to be, is the series of tubes wide enough to handle the traffic? This may prove to be a huge test for broadband capacity.
  2. Will Gmail-calling prove to be the death knell for laws that prohibit you from recording your phone conversations without permission?

My second question requires some explanation. I am now planning to run out and sign up for Google Voice. Now that I’ve seen the glory of placing a call from my computer, I want to be able to receive, too. And Google Voice lets you record your calls if you wish.

This is fully in accordance with the overall Gmail philosophy. Google encourages you to save all except your most trivial e-mail messages. It does so by giving you enormous capacity to store your mail on its servers and to search through them instantaneously.

Gmail Chat, which I also use from time to time, saves everything as well.

Massachusetts is one of a number of states in which it’s illegal to secretly record a phone conversation (or a chance encounter on the street, for that matter). I teach my journalism students that if they want to record a phone interview, they should get permission, press “record,” and then say, “I just turned on my recorder. Is that all right with you?” That way, you’ve not only got permission, you’ve got proof.

But with Google encouraging a recording/sharing culture, are we going to end up with millions of accidental law-breakers? What will be the best approach for dealing with that — changing the law or educating the public?

Google Talk may well prove to be yet another example of technology running ahead of the law.

Instant update: Carly Carioli and Bob Ambrogi tell me that Google already offers protections against secret recording. See this. In fact, now I’m tempted to say that Google doesn’t go far enough. If it sends out an automated message informing the other party that a call is being recorded, then why not allow that on outgoing as well as incoming calls?

The resurrection will be (slightly) delayed

The idea that Apple’s iPad would save newspapers and magazines, always dubious, is so far not even getting a decent tryout. Evangelists for the iPad put forth a vision of users switching from free websites to paid apps.

Since a very good Web browser is built in to the iPad, it was never clear why any more than a handful would pay. And, so far, there are few apps. Among the better-known is the New York Times’ “Editor’s Choice,” a free, experimental app that doesn’t include the full content of the paper. (The Globe is reportedly working on an iPad app, but I have no details.)

PressReader offers some 1,500 papers around the world (neither the Times nor the Boston Globe is available, though the Boston Herald is). But it’s based on a PDF-like representation of the actual pages in the paper, which is no way to read online.

Meanwhile, because Apple has been slow in implementing subscriptions, we have absurdities like Time magazine’s paid app, which costs approximately 650 percent more than a print subscription.

If I had an iPad, here’s what I would want: a simple way to subscribe to the papers I read every day at a much-lower-than-print price. Since I wouldn’t pay $30 a month for an always-on 3G connection, I’d want to download the entire paper via WiFi, and then be able to read it whether I was in a hot spot or not.

It’s not as though what I’m looking for is particularly exotic. In fact, two very good alternatives already exist — yet neither one of them will work with the iPad.

First, the Times and the Globe are both available in low-cost “Reader” editions, built on top of the Adobe Air platform. The Reader, based on flipping pages, is seemingly made for the iPad. But because of Apple’s ongoing battle with Adobe, you can’t run Air on an iPad. (The forthcoming Google tablet, running Air, would be a great way to access Reader content.)

Second, many papers are available on the Amazon Kindle. But though Kindle software runs on a variety of devices, including the iPad, Amazon has restricted newspapers and magazines to its proprietary Kindle devices. If you’re running Kindle software on your laptop or smartphone, you can only use it to download and read books.

So far, it seems, the iPad has been very good for Apple, but not so good for newspaper and magazine publishers. That’s not surprising. What is surprising is that there are no good options even for people who are willing to pay.

Photo (cc) by Steve Garfield and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Hacking their way toward journalism’s future

I was going to try to write up last night’s Hacks/Hackers meeting at Microsoft’s Cambridge headquarters. But I can’t do any better than Kyle Psaty, who covers it for the BostInnovation blog. Hosted by Matt Carroll of the Boston Globe, the gathering brought together about 75 journalists and technology folks. What follows are just a couple of quick observations.

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of Flowing Media showed off a new data-presentation tool taking campaign-finance information from MapLight.org and slicing and dicing it in a number of different ways. Interesting, though the tools Viégas and Wattenberg demo’d struck me as a little exotic. Globe technology reporter Hiawatha Bray was very excited, so I’m sure those more technologically adept than I will find uses for it.

Somewhat more down-to-earth was a project called Pinyadda, a website that combines journalism, community and social networking. Based on the presentation made by Austin Gardner-Smith, the Boston-based company’s vice president for product and development, Pinyadda may be groping its way toward a just-right space between Digg (too dumb) and NewsTrust (too hard). I’m hoping to find the time to play with it and see for myself.

I learned a few things, met some interesting people, ate some free pizza — what more can you ask for?