Tag: Technology

Spam is raging out of control

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, too, but it seems to me that the quantity of spam has increased exponentially over the past several months. What worries me is that I’m losing the ability to read through the contents of Gmail‘s spam filter to see whether anything important got caught by mistake.

Right now, I’m looking at 3,671 — whoops, 3,672 — messages trapped by the filter since last Wednesday. Even if I quickly page through them all, am I going to notice if one or two valid messages are in there?

The Gmail filter does a good job, but I’m a little frustrated. On a few occasions, I’ve noticed messages in my spam folder from e-mail addresses that are already built in to my address book. That is never supposed to happen. Am I alone in experiencing that? Am I doing something wrong?

Now up to 3,673.

Browser blues

The last few days, it seems that certain sites take forever to load in Firefox 2 for the Mac — especially the Boston Globe. Firefox freezes up once a day or so, too. So I played around with Safari 3 and found the Globe and the New York Times to be much zippier. But Safari quits whenever I try to load the Boston Herald. Safari is also incompatible with Blogger.

I see that Safari 3 is still in beta, which used to mean that it wasn’t quite ready for public release. Increasingly, though, beta is Greek for “we take no responsibility for our product.” I mean, Gmail and Google Calendar are still in beta, and I use them dozens of times a day.

I’ll be glad when this Internet fad blows over.

Update: I’m trying Camino 1.5.5 for the first time in a couple of years. It’s a Mac-only, open-source browser from Mozilla, and I’m pretty sure it uses the same underlying technology as Safari. I’m living dangerously by posting this from Blogger, but so far, so good.

Meet me at Starbucks

The best news to come out of the coffee chain in a long time is this, promising close-to-free WiFi something this spring. Currently I pay $10 to TMobile for 24 hours of access, which works at Starbucks and Borders. It’s not a bad deal if I know I’ll be able to return the next day and work for, say, five or six hours. Otherwise, it’s way too much.

I like to be a moving target, and now I’ve got several more places to move to in addition to Barnes & Noble, the library and a few indie coffeehouses I frequent. (Via Bits.)

Microsoft’s Yahoo bet

The headline at Wired.com says it all: “Microsoft Bids for Yahoo: Do Two Losers Make a Winner?” And if you read Betsy Schiffman’s article, the answer would appear to be “no.”

Microsoft’s proposed $44.6 billion acquisition of Yahoo is the biggest media story of the still-new year. Yet news organizations seem to be straining to imbue this with the excitement they think it deserves. When it comes to the “what does it mean?” graf, everyone is coming up short. In fact, it may not mean all that much.

Carolyn Johnson writes in the Boston Globe today that this may be all about the coming cell-phone wars, where Google doesn’t have anywhere near the head start that it does on the desktop. Even here, though, Google’s efforts to develop cell-phone software — the so-called Google phone, a.k.a. the “Android” — is the subject of much excitement. Everyone wants to know if Android-enabled phones will be cooler/ cheaper/ faster than the Apple iPhone. So even if Google’s cell-phone efforts are not that far along, they’re still considerably ahead of where Microsoft and Yahoo are.

I’m hard-pressed to say how this could affect the financially struggling news business except to note that this is all about online advertising. If competition between Google and Microsoft/Yahoo somehow helps the pie grow, then that can only be good. At the Online Journalism Review, Robert Niles is asking whether Microsoft should buy Yahoo. Only 19 people had responded by this morning, and they were evenly split.

Microsoft has not been an interesting company for many years. Its success is built almost entirely on two monopoly products, Windows and Office, which have their roots in the 1980s and which came to full fruition in the mid-’90s. The company has done a nice job in recent years with its Xbox video-game systems, but that’s essentially a side project. Contrast that with the iPod, which Apple used to rekindle interest in its Macintosh computers.

Yahoo? Enormous numbers of people go there, so I guess the company is doing something worth saving. But it’s fallen way, way behind Google in online advertising, and I don’t find what it offers to be particularly innovative or compelling. (I do like Flickr, the social network for photography that Yahoo bought a couple of years ago. But Flickr users are already protesting the Microsoft takeover, which could provide a shot in the arm to Picasa, Google’s own underdeveloped photo service.) I don’t use Yahoo Mail for anything more than diverting stuff I don’t want to a mailbox I never check. By contrast, I like Google’s Gmail so much that I now use it for everything. I also use Google Calendar, Google Documents, Blogger (of course), Google Earth and several other Google services. The company’s “cloud computing” concept is taking over my life.

As Robert Guth emphasizes (sub. req.) in the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft has not been Bill Gates’ company for some time. Steve Ballmer is firmly in charge, and that will become clearer later this year, when Gates retires. Ballmer is fiercely competitive, but if he shares Gates’ vision for how to shape technology markets, he’s never really demonstrated it. (Even Gates never had much vision regarding how good software should work, a shortcoming with which tens of millions of us must contend every day.)

Let’s not forget, too, that though Yahoo and Google have both been criticized for helping the Chinese government with its efforts to censor the Internet, Yahoo went quite a bit farther — actually providing information that helped the government arrest dissidents. Its fierce competitive culture aside, Microsoft has a reputation for being socially conscious. So maybe Microsoft will curb Yahoo’s excesses. But that has nothing to do with catching up to Google, either.

This John Markoff piece in the New York Times seems to get it directionally right. Google isn’t perfect by any means. Someday, someone will come along and knock it off its pedestal. But that challenge is not likely to come from two of yesterday’s giants. Microsoft still makes a ton of money, and will for years to come. That should keep Yahoo afloat.

Still, when Google one day feels the heat, in all likelihood it’s going to come from people who today are still in college or even high school. At the Guardian, Jack Schofield offers some sound advice to Microsoft, arguing that the deal might make sense if Ballmer and company transform Yahoo into their consumer division. His conclusion: “But is Microsoft ready to take that step? I think not.”

Photo (cc) by Erwin Boogert. Some rights reserved.

The multimedia journalist

It wasn’t long ago that a local reporter could head out on an assignment with nothing more than a notebook and a pen. Maybe a camera, but only if there were no photographers available. But those days are rapidly drawing to a close.

Take, for instance, Cathryn Keefe O’Hare, a longtime print and radio reporter who’s been editor of the Danvers Herald since 2000. The Herald is part of the GateHouse Media chain, which is pushing its journalists to supplement their stories with videos for its Wicked Local sites. O’Hare shot video for the first time last Memorial Day. Now she does it regularly.

For a Flickr slideshow of O’Hare shooting and editing her story, click on the photo above.

Last Monday I met her at the Danversport Yacht Club for the eighth annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Awards Dinner. It was a routine assignment — take some notes, write it up. It was also a good opportunity for her to put together a video package. And for me to tag along and watch how she does it.

O’Hare wielded a Casio Exilim ex5600, a tiny, relatively inexpensive piece of technology that shoots still photos, video and audio. She had a simple goal: to ask some of the 450 people who were on hand why they had chosen to attend and what King’s message meant to them. She shot in ambient light, which, as you’ll see, was good enough, if not perfect. Audio is recorded through a microphone in the front of the camera.

O’Hare still finds being a multimedia journalist a challenge. She stands on her tip-toes when interviewing people taller than she. A couple of interviews proved to be unusable. “It’s more stressful than just taking notes,” she says. But she got sufficient material to put together a nice video supplement to her print story.

Three days later I met her in the local GateHouse newsroom in Beverly, where she was editing her clips into a news video. She used Microsoft’s Windows Movie Maker, a free program that lets you cut extraneous material out of the clips, piece them together in any order you like, and add transitions, titles and an extra soundtrack. (The Macintosh equivalent is iMovie.) O’Hare spliced in music from the Follow Hymn Interfaith Choir, which had performed on Monday, to supplement the interviews.

To read O’Hare’s story and watch her video, click on the YouTube graphic above.

Finished videos are uploaded to YouTube and then embedded on the Danvers Herald site. O’Hare still hasn’t figured out how to do that, so she leaves it to one of the regional managing editors, Peter Chianca.

“The thing that remains true, whether it’s in print journalism or the Internet or video, you have to tell a story,” says O’Hare. “And you have to tell it as true as you can make it. And you have to try to speak for those people who can’t tell their story.”

To listen to an audio interview with O’Hare, click here.

To watch other videos from the Danvers Herald, click here.

Howard Owens on community nudity

Howard Owens, GateHouse Media’s chief online guy, has weighed in on the Somerville Journal’s video/photo coverage of the Naked Quad Run at Tufts. An excerpt:

This is no time for community journalism to be squeamish — and keep in mind, we’re talking about a video that shows, essentially, nothing. What it does capture is the spirit of the moment. What it does record for posterity is a real event, in a real community, that is seemingly important to a lot of people in that community.

Isn’t that an essential part of journalism’s role, even if offends some people’s sensibilities, even some of the participants (read the comments on the story)?

Should journalists really be in the role of hiding the truth of what really goes on in a community? I feel like that is what Dan Kennedy is suggesting.

You should read the whole thing. Increasingly, local newspaper editors are going to be dealing with issues like this. And I’m certainly not in favor of “hiding the truth of what really goes on in a community.” Text-only coverage wouldn’t have been as entertaining, but it would have gotten the essential truth out.

By the way, Owens goes slightly astray in referring to the Boston Herald’s Jay Fitzgerald as a blogger, and then criticizing him for not linking to the Journal’s coverage. Fitzgerald wrote his story for the print edition and would have had nothing to do with whether any links were added for the Web.

Owens also slams a Facebook group formed to protest the Journal’s actions, writing, “Think about it — [a] group of students throw privacy concerns to the wind by running around naked in public (even posting pictures to Flickr), and then get upset when that event is covered by a media outlet. How ironic.”

In fact, the Facebook group he links to appears to be a parody. Check out the video.

Friday morning update: Jay responds to Howard: “I didn’t mind the Journal’s coverage. I also like what WickedLocal is doing on the web in general, though I could do without the hair-trigger self-righteousness at the slightest whiff of controversy.”

Just because you can …

Universal Hub has the lowdown on the Somerville Journal’s decision to post photos and a video of the Naked Quad Run at Tufts University. The Journal is getting slammed with comments, some of them funny, some of them questioning the Journal’s ethics.

Now, don’t get excited — you won’t find any full frontal nudity, as they used to say on “Monty Python.” And allow me to lower the excitement level a little more by picking up on the ethical theme.

The Journal is part of GateHouse Media, which has unveiled an aggressive online initiative called Wicked Local. GateHouse’s online guru, Howard Owens, is a huge proponent of video. I hope he weighs in on the Tufts shenanigans.

Greg Reibman, editor of the GateHouse territory that includes the Journal, tells Jay Fitzgerald of the Boston Herald: “For students to be shocked that newspapers would show up and take photos, I don’t see how they can be so naive in this day and age.”

My reaction? Neither the video nor the photos are offensive. I don’t think anyone is recognizable except for the guy who’s wrapped himself in the Israeli flag. You can also find slightly more revealing photos of the event at Flickr. (No, I’m not going to help you, but it’s not difficult.)

Still, posting pictures of drunken students running around in their birthday suits is not the sort of thing a community newspaper ought to be doing. Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.

This isn’t a big deal, but it does illustrate how technology is changing not just the content of journalism but the ethical decision-making that goes into it.

The Amazon Kindle and paid content

The Amazon Kindle is being marketed as the latest e-book, but I would imagine it will have a tough go of it on that basis. As Steven Levy observes in Newsweek, what could be a more perfect content-delivery system than the book? Instead, what I find intriguing is that it can be used as a portable, always-on virtual newspaper with — get this — paid subscriptions. If the Kindle succeeds, we may finally have a solution to the devastating revenue problem that newspaper and magazine publishers have created for themselves in giving away their content for free.

The Kindle strikes me as the purest realization to date of a vision I first heard articulated at a conference at Columbia University in the early 1990s. At that time, news executives fully understood that digital was the future. The idea was that content would be distributed on high-resolution digital tablets that would be so cheap they’d be given away. At night, you’d plug your tablet into the cable box on your television so that it could download newspapers, magazines and other content that you’d paid for. In the morning, you’d unplug it and take it with you. A wireless connection would allow for interactive advertising so that you could, say, make a reservation by clicking on a restaurant ad.

What we all missed, of course, was the rise of the Web, which made closed systems like that envisioned at Columbia impossible. Content quickly became free and ubiquitous. And you know the rest of the story. Yet even at a time when the idea of paying for content online is at a low ebb (the New York Times has gone entirely free, and the Wall Street Journal will soon follow suit), there remain considerable doubts that online advertising alone will ever fully support the public-service journalism we need. Just yesterday, the Times ran an intriguing op-ed by Discover columnist Jared Lanier, who argued that advertising will never add up to enough to pay the bills.

Enter the Kindle. Unlike the device we talked about at Columbia some 15 years ago, it’s not so cheap that publishers will give them away (indeed, it’s $400), and the e-ink resolution, though better than that of a typical computer screen, isn’t nearly as nice as a glossy magazine’s — a Kindle reportedly gives you 150 dots per inch, whereas even a cheap ink-jet printer will give you 600. But there are some features that are really appealing for news executives and consumers alike. For instance:

  • It’s small, portable and light, about the size of a thin paperback book. Yes, it easily passes the classic test: you can take it to the bathroom with you.
  • You don’t have to plug it in to a computer, and, because it’s connected to a cellular network, you don’t have to find a WiFi hot spot, either.
  • You can subscribe to newspapers such as the Times, the Journal and the Washington Post for considerably less than it would cost to get the print editions. The Kindle automatically downloads the entire paper, which means you are untethered from the Web. (Here is the list. The Boston Globe isn’t there, at least not yet.)

From the little bit that I’ve seen of the Kindle online, the newspapers look rather ugly. Obviously the Kindle will have to become enough of a success for newspaper designers to come up with something specifically optimized for a paperback-size vertical screen. Color would be nice, too.

The Kindle is hardly the only experiment in paid online content. The Times has something called TimesReader, which costs $15 per month and which, according to Jack Shafer, is much easier on the eyes than the Web site. (No Mac version, so I haven’t been able to test it.) But TimesReader requires you to lug your laptop around, which makes the Kindle a much more portable solution.

I do have doubts about the Kindle. It’s easy to imagine a Kindle-killer — a similar device that lets you browse the free Web via a WiFi connection and download content so that you can read it even when you’re disconnected. (We can already catch a glimmer of such devices with Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch, though I don’t want to read on a screen that small.) The free-content paradigm is powerful, and may prove too difficult to overcome.

But the Kindle does offer a possible alternative to the free, Web-based regime that has been such a boon to consumers and a bane to publishers. I hope the Kindle is at least enough of a success so that we can arrive at some judgments over the next few years.

Update: Peter Kafka of Silicon Alley Insider thinks I’m full of it, writing, “The existence of the plan has made at least gulled at least [sic! sic! sic!] one blogger, MediaNation’s Dan Kennedy, into imagining that the Kindle will help save the newspaper industry.”

Kafka notes that the Kindle has a built-in Web browser, which means you could read newspapers for free. But he fails to acknowledge that the paid versions of those papers might make for a much better reading experience, especially since you can download them ahead of time.

Update II: Actually, I’m not sure the Kindle does include a Web browser. I can’t find anything here. I would also note that Amazon touts “free built-in access” to Wikipedia, which suggests that there is no generalized browser. Otherwise, why make a big deal about Wikipedia?

Update III: It does, but not a very good one. From Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch:

In addition to being a book reader, the Kindle has some experimental features. One is a limited Web browser customized for the device with some preselected bookmarks including Amazon.com (in case you want to buy a digital camera instead of a book, which you can do just fine from the main Kindle shopping page), Wikipedia, Google, BBC News, Yahoo Finance, Weather Underground, and the Yellow Pages.

You can also enter any URL, including Bloglines (but not Google Reader, which requires Javascript and which the Kindle browser does not support). So here is a Kindle hack: you can check out your RSS feeds for the New York Times or the full feed of blogs like TechCrunch for free using the browser, rather than choose to pay a subscription to get them downloaded to the Kindle. I don’t have high hopes for the Kindle’s ability to bring back subscription revenues for publishers of any kind.

We’ll have to wait and see.

Gmail changes quietly

I noticed some changes to the Gmail interface yesterday as I was catching up on my mail. (That’s not quite an accurate statement. I’m never caught up on my mail.) It seems slightly more attractive, and “Contacts” has been beefed up considerably. But it also seems to be slightly slower.

I switched to Gmail last spring, and, for the most part, I’m glad I did. My mail is now available on any machine on which I happen to find myself, and searching is lightning-fast — a real boon, given that I can’t remember where I’ve filed anything. (Although Gmail’s labels are much more flexible than folders.)

My one complaint: Gmail lets me set up several different identities, so that I can send outgoing mail so that it looks like I’m using either my Northeastern account or my personal account. But my official Gmail address, which I do not use, gets stamped on my mail anyway. That’s led a few of my contacts to start using my Gmail address. I guess I’d put that in the “mildly annoying” category.

Nothing specific at the Gmail Blog about what’s going on, although I suppose this is related somehow. Thoughts?

Bug alert! Unless I’m doing something wrong — always a possibility — it looks like you can’t save changes in someone’s contact information.