If you’re Jenna and me, you buy two Spanish domain names:
Aren’t we clever?
I just watched this video interview with Jay Rosen from The Economist’s Tea with The Economist series. The interviewer asks Jay, “What would be the job description of a journalist in the future?”
I think there are different jobs that make up a twenty-first century journalist. One is to be a highly intelligent filter of information coming in. Another is to be an expert in reputation and reliability systems so that you are able to know who a reliable source is because there are so many sources, right? Another is community manager. Managing a community of people who have knowledge and interact with you as a journalist. Knowing how to have not just several dozen sources in your little black telephone book that you use to do your beat, but thousands of sources. Tens of thousands. And how to work efficiently with large groups of people to synthesize information is important. And also important is how to take the greater knowledge we have coming from how people use the internet. Because everything people do online is recorded. How to take this information about what people are clicking, what they’re interested in, where they’re going on the web, what they’re doing now. And treating it as clues to demand. Produce into that demand, without reducing yourself to simply a ratings-driven, click-driven reflex machine.
I think the most successful journalists are going to excel at various hybrid forms of traditional reporting, editing, checking, verifying and new forms of gathering, managing, interacting with people.
(via Jenny)
Yesterday, Google announced Google Chart Tools, reminding us that:
A good chart can take an elusive concept and clarify it in a visually appealing manner.
It’s pretty cool. You can dynamically generate charts using URLs. Their example turns this:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World
into a pie chart:
While this _is_ pretty slick (and Google’s service generates many, many types of charts), I think this is as good a time as any to remember that pie charts are terrible. SEED magazine summarizes findings from Bill Cleveland (emphasis mine):
although we’re good at comparing linear distances along a scale — judging which of two lines is longer, a task used in bar graphs — and we’re even better at judging the position of points along a scale, pie charts don’t bring those skills to bear. They do ask us compare angles, but we tend to underestimate acute angles, overestimate obtuse angles, and take horizontally bisected angles as much larger than their vertical counterparts. The problems worsen when we’re asked to judge area and volume: Regular as clockwork, we overestimate the size of smaller objects and underestimate the size of larger ones, to a much greater degree with volume than with area.
Apparently, R. Kelly has finished 15 more chapters of his serial hip-hopera, Trapped in the Closet:
(via Tom)
File under “television cliches”:
(via Jason Agnew)
I noticed something strange earlier this week. Peter’s Cajun Creole Pizza, our favourite pizza place, was dark before midnight. Then, Tina left a comment at this blog suggesting that Pete’s has been “shut down by the landlord.”
Tonight, upon closer inspection, I confirmed that Pete’s (and Peter’s Corner) are indeed closed, and there are notes on both doors from the landlord.
Not good.
Where will I get my panzerotti fix?
What are the major consequences of internet on society and culture? Perhaps it’s too early to tell.
Clay Shirky, on last week’s episode of Spark:
If you had gone to Germany in the mid-1470s and said, let’s see what this printing press is doing, right, you would miss novels, you would miss newspapers, you would miss the rise of scientific publication, you would miss Martin Luther’s “95 Theses,” you would miss the Venetian publishing industry. So many of the changes brought by the kind of abundance created by the printing press were in the second 50 years of its existence, if not the second century of its existence, that I think that over-extrapolating from current trends would leave us in the same position as if we tried to do the printing press in 1473.
And Bob Stein, on last week’s episode of On The Media:
Here’s a wonderful sort of factoid which may be helpful: The Western version of the printing press is invented in 1454. It takes 50 years for page numbers to emerge. It took humans that long to figure out that it might be useful to put numbers onto the pages.
Or, as management-types like to say, “It’s early days.”
Lee Rainnie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life project, from this week’s On the Media, speaking about social isolation and internet use:
For centuries, when new technologies come on the scene there’s almost an instinctive human reaction, particularly among those who are challenged by the new technology, to blame the technology for any social ill that happens to arise at the same time. Something has gone on with our social networks in the past 20 years. Our data matched the data that the previous researchers had collected showing the networks are shrinking.
And so, now we’re inviting other social scientists and researchers like ourselves to go out and find the real culprit and not just think that the Internet lies behind it just because the Internet was being adopted at the same time this harmful social trend was emerging.
Reminds me a bit of Russell Davies’s The Internet Isn’t Killing Anything.
Laura Godfrey wrote a nice piece about the latest Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids show:
On Wednesday night at The Tranzac downtown, a 34-year-old man took to the stage and spewed more than 60 insults and obscenities to a large crowd. They hooted with laughter, gasped at the more taboo terms and broke out into applause when it was all over.
Andrew Jehan’s performance was an extreme example of what audiences might hear at Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids, a free reading series whose name pretty much says it all. This was the eighth installment of a show where people read old diary entries, angsty teen poetry and mystifying grade school assignments to a roomful of strangers.
A big thanks to everyone who came out to GRTTWaK8 at the Tranzac on September 17th. It was a great time.
I have two more Wednesdays at the Tranzac this month, with two very excellent shows:
Hope you can make it out.
So, I’ve had my Brompton for four weeks now, and I’m very pleased with it. It rides well, folds well, and I’ve had no trouble bringing it anywhere. It’s come with me into work, restaurants, and shops. And just yesterday, I learned that it fits perfectly inside a shopping cart:
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