I took this picture Saturday afternoon and at the time, it seemed things were being contained. Now, they definitely aren’t as I saw flames in the hills this morning on my way back from the gym. The kids don’t have school since their school isn’t that far from the fires.
I filled up the car last night on my way home. The good thing is only have to do this every two weeks but still, almost $50. The summer could be even worse and the train more crowded but I’m ok with that.
I finished reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. It’s one of those books which causes your brain to constantly look for patterns in everything you do. If you haven’t picked it up yet, you really should. It’s really good.
One of the main points I took away from it was how the lowering of transaction costs caused new ways of communicating to happen as well as causing people to interact with each other and other things in different ways.
I work for a newspaper which is part of a large media company. We are definitely aware of what happens when transaction costs are lowered. The transaction cost for getting news used to be high enough that people were happy getting their news printed on paper once (maybe twice) a day, usually in the morning. Now, those costs are non-existent and the explosion of choices for finding news is proof of that. Sure, we could whine and complain about it (and lots of people do) but there isn’t a way of putting that genie back in the bottle. The transaction costs for the acquiring of news will continue to be low and the need for a daily print edition of a paper will become less and less.
I’ve been thinking about the transaction cost for RSS lately as I’m trying to get our blogs to have the full-text feed instead of just the partial. I’m sure others have figured this out before me but it finally dawned on me why this is important. The person reading the full-text feed in their RSS aggregator doesn’t just have lowered transaction costs for reading the blog but they also have lowered costs for sharing what they are reading. If someone has to read a snippet of a post, click a link and then continue reading before they even think about sending the link around, they probably won’t do it. On the other hand, if they are in the flow of reading something cool and can easily send a quick note off or put it up on del.icio.us, that’s way more likely.
If you want traffic, you need people to share links and tell others. It’s really not that hard yet we constantly miss chances to help people out.
It seems that yesterday and today were filled with various bits of Twitter. First, I added the Top of the Ticket blog to our various Twitter accounts at latimestot. I’m thinking about releasing the code for how I do it if I get approval. It’s pretty basic but could be useful for anyone needing to update multiple accounts.
Yesterday, Tara Hunt posted a great intro for companies to use Twitter. It has great advice plus some good tools for keeping track of who is talking about you.
One was Tweetburner which shortens URLs and keeps track of how many clicks you get. The other is Tweetscan which allows you to search thru all tweets for a keyword.
I’ve found some interesting ones which weren’t complimentary to the Times but are a great look at people’s opinions.
The Notre Dame bookstore is now selling the 2008 shirt. Looks really good on first impression.
LiveNewsCameras.com is an aggregation of online video streams from television network affiliates. You can easily move from city to city, seeing what is going on throughout the country. There is also an online moderator who updates which streams are doing interesting things.
bub.blicio.us has additional information on it. This looks very interesting and a great way of keeping tabs on anything happening.
LiveNewsCameras.com started on Super Tuesday with only a couple of feeds focusing on the Republican and Democratic candidates. What started as a humble newsroom experiment has earned the participation of ABC, CBS and NBC stations.Using Mogulus, the site also features a livecasting moderator who helps us navigate through the available and upcoming content. And media isn’t truly social if it’s not portable. You can also embed “the moderator” on your site, blog or social network profile and also interact them them and other views in real time.
Kevin Burton has posted his slides from the MySQL conference. It’s based on his blog aggregator, Spinn3r which uses MySQL in write-heavy processes instead of the usual read path.
It seems with all the problems the airline industry is having lately and the addition of screening devices which look underneath your clothes, you’d think Amtrak would have tons of discounts and ways of getting people on trains. But I haven’t heard anything form them in the media. That’s too bad because I know the kids would love to take a train.
Since everyone else is doing it:
a21772:~ jlucas$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s \n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
126 rake
121 svn
69 vi
57 ./script/console
21 ./script/server
17 cd
15 ssh
13 cap
10 ls
7 mysql
As you can see, most of my work lately has been Ruby / Rails. No complaints from me.