Month: March 2006

How to Save the Merc in 8 Easy Steps

There’s a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the Save the Merc campaign launched by some of the writers of the San Jose Mercury News in the hopes of finding a buyer who will save the newspaper.

First, I think the Mercury News is a good paper and while I don’t read any newspapers in their native online or offline format, it has been a bookmark of mine for a long time.

The reality is that the Merc can’t be saved. Not in its current format. Because traditional newspapers are in the twilight of relevance and the verge of obsolescence. In one of my favorite quotes of the year so far, Steve Rubel summed up the future thusly:

Flash forward 10 years from today. We will look back and laugh how quaint it was that we received our news on dead trees. Yes, I am saying the word “newspaper” will be a misnomer. News will be delivered automatically each day, not by the paper boy, but via wirelessly enabled e-paper devices that are easy to read. All of it will be powered by RSS.

If someone wants to really save the Merc, here’s exactly how to do it:

1) The first thing we do, is kill all the pop-up ads. A hip, forward thinking organization should know better.

2) Drop the print version. Gone. No More. Nada.

3) Go completely online. Sell text-based and static ads. No flash and no pop-ups. Require a free registration to get most (but not all) content online and require free subscribers to accept one email per day with special subscriber features and, of course, targeted ads.

4) Create a premium subscription, required to get all content, including some audio-video content. Sell these subscriptions for something close to the cost of a current newspaper subscription. In addition to all content, this will include the ability to search archives at no additional cost and some sort of bookmarking, tagging feature for future reference.

5) Create a complete RSS feed of the paper, organized by section- just like the print edition (Front Page, Local, Business, Sports, etc.). This would be a better organized version of the many RSS feeds that are already available. Create an online application that will allow subscribers to customize their subscription feed to include just the parts they want. The idea would be that each user could receive a custom edition of the paper via a single RSS feed.

6) Sell that feed as a subscription (as an alternative to the online edition and with a discount for people who want both the online and RSS editions). This is the future of news distribution, and the place to spend the most time and effort.

7) No adds in these feeds. None.

8) Once you make this move and perfect the online delivery of news, create a subsidiary to sell transition services to every other newspaper in the world as they follow you online.

This is the way to save the Merc.

Whether the saving is done by the new owner or some other owner, who likely would not be a traditional newspaper company, doesn’t really matter. What matters is that one of the best newspapers in one of the most tech focused parts of the world with the highest percentage of tech readers is available to blaze the trail into the future of news distribution.

So someone should step up to the plate and do it.

Everything else is either delaying the inevitable or wishful thinking.

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Blogging Bandera: The Tech Report

We had a grand time at the ranch in Bandera. Lots of trail rides, hay rides and other really fun stuff. Spring break is over and the girls are back in school. I’m on the last day of my vacation, cleaning horse poop off of trucks, shoes and clothes and storing our camping/ranching gear until we head off for Frio II in August.

Now it’s time to talk about the tech aspects of the trip.

My travel hardware consisted of:

My X41 Tablet PC
My Blackberry 7130e
My Sprint Power Vision phone

The X-41, as I said in the post above, is the best traveling computer I have ever owned. It worked great. With my Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks I was able to easily record daily summaries, and, had I wanted to bore you to tears, could have easily published them to my blog. The X-41 (with the help of a card reader) was able to view the photos on the Memory Stick I use in my digital camera. In fact, I uploaded a few photos while we were still there.

What I didn’t know before we got to the ranch was whether I would have any internet access. There is none there and there are no wireless networks in the area to “borrow.” So I had to hope Verizon’s national wireless broadband network would reach to Bandera.

Not only did it reach, but the signal strength was 3 out of 4 bars. Connecting was easy and stable. This wireless deal is definitely worth the $15 extra per month that I pay for it. I will be able to use it in airports, hotels, etc. And the best part is that the phone charges off the USB cable, so the phone is being charged while you use it to connect to the internet.

While my Blackberry is my primary mobile phone, I used my Sprint phone while on the trip and it worked perfectly.

And it has me completely sold on Sirius Satellite Radio. You can listen to a selection of the Sirius stations with the Sprint phone and, with the supplied earbuds, the sound is excellent. It does drop the signal periodically, which is mildly annoying, but this is a cool feature. It is just one of the legion of audio and video features of this very cool phone.

I’ve been an XM subscriber for years, but nothing on XM is as good as channel 14 on Sirius. It’s called 60’s and 70’s Vinyl and I have yet to hear a bad song on it. I wish Sirius made a truly portable device. If so, I’d buy it (the Sirius S50 is not truly portable in the sense that it doesn’t receive the signal while unattached to its base).

I don’t know who’s paying whom to carry the Sirius stations on these Sprint phones, but Sirius ought to be paying Sprint because this feature will sell some Sirius equipment.

The tech worked as it was supposed to and allowed me to check my email and remain connected to my home and office while deep in the Texas hill country.

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Blogger to WordPress: No Sunday Drive

As I have mentioned before, while Newsome.Org is hosted on my server, I use Blogger to publish and manage content. While not perfect, there are a lot of advantages to doing that. One, it was easy to set up when I first started using a blogging platform. Two, it allows me to easily publish from the road when I travel- even if I am using a borrowed computer.

But it is not perfect. On those infrequent, but regular, days when blogger is down, I can’t post. Plus, there are a lot of features I need (categories, built-in trackbacks, etc.) that blogger doesn’t have.

So I looked around, consulted Eric Scalf, my blog platform guru, and decided to try to move my content to WordPress. I talked some about this project before.

Eric recreated my blog template perfectly, and everything looked like a go.

Then we hit a roadblock.

It seems there is no easy way to move my prior posts to WordPress without changing the URL of the post pages, which would break my inbound links. Sure, I could leave two versions of the old post pages up, but that sort of defeats the point, at least in my mind.

There is a work-around, but that work-around requires technical chops that neither I nor 99.9% of the world’s bloggers have. The last thing I’m going to do is push a button and rely on technology I don’t understand to gently and accurately handle a year or two’s worth of content. If it doesn’t work, then I don’t know how to fix it. That would be, to quote Jim Rome, “below average.”

So, here’s the thing.

First of all, this has got to be a serious obstacle to any established blogger who wants to move his or her blog over to WordPress. I’d move today if not for this problem. Granted, it may be a problem created by Blogger’s crackhead URL handling, but Blogger is not going to fix it. In fact, Blogger probably loves it because it operates as user glue. So if established bloggers are going to move to WordPress, WordPress is going to have to fix it.

Second, and of more use to readers, Eric has published a very detailed and helpful post outlining how to move from Blogger to WordPress and describing the hurdles we experienced.

I can vouch for Eric’s expertise at template transfers, so if you are thinking of hiring him to work on your template, consider this a reference. Don’t ask him to do it for free, because it is a lot of hard work.

What even Eric can’t do, however, is fix the URL naming convention problems that stopped me in my tracks.

I’d love to move to WordPress, but at the moment that looks to be nearly impossible. I wonder how many other bloggers have considered moving only to turn back in the face of this hurdle?

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Web 2.0 Wars: Round 16

It’s time for Round 16 in Newsome.Org’s Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

This is the final heat of the first Round. The playoffs will be next.

Other Rounds:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

Here are the contestants for Round 16:

Vizu
Digg
Del.icio.us
Omnidrive
AlmondRocks
Tagyu
30Gigs
Writely
Simpy
Gtalkr

Vizu lets you create and share polls, both on the Vizu site, via RSS feeds or on your blog or website. I like it, but not as much as Dpoll.

Digg is a wildly popular, user driven site that allows users to link to and vote on internet blog posts and news stories. It has huge mindshare and I greatly admire the technology, but I’ve found that I don’t always like finding my content in an American Idol fashion.

Del.icio.us is a very popular social bookmark manager. I use it all the time.

Omnidrive is an online storage and backup service. The good, it’s based in Australia. The bad, it’s been in invitation only beta forever.

AlmondRocks says its the fastest blog reader in the world. It wasn’t as slow as some of the ones I’ve tried, but it wasn’t greased lightning either.

Tagyu is some sort of tagging serive. I put newsome.org in the text box and it came back with mycomments, feedlounge and inbound. Two of those are tags I use a Del.icio.us, but the other is pretty random.

30Gigs is a free online email application that gives you 30G of storage. They are “in the 2nd stage of our best test.”

Writely is an free online word processor which recently was bought by Google. It probably has the most mindshare in the space, but that assumes people want an online word processor.

Simpy is a social bookmarking service, that lets you save, tag, search and share bookmarks and notes.

Gtalkr let’s you access your Gtalk IM application from anywhere. I thought you could already do this. They need to put something on the main page that describes exactly what this application does.

Before Today I’d Heard of:

5 out of 10.

And the Winner of Round 16 is:

I’d pick Del.icio.us because I find it so useful, but you can’t factor in prospects for success to any degree and not pick Digg. So Digg it is.

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Party Like It's 1999

Just when the buzz from the last exclusive blogoparty party finally faded out, we get to read about another insiders party that precious few of us are likely to be invited to.

The blogospats didn’t do it. The gatekeeper business didn’t do it. But if I have to read story after story about another exclusive party where invitations are handed out from the very in-crowd to the semi-in crowd, I just might have to follow Scoble‘s lead and take a Memeorandum hiatus.

While I think the idea of Web 2.0 awards is generally a good one, the true point of this party will be known when the voting panel and invitation criteria are known.

I hope this is more about awarding the companies than awarding the invitees.

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Web 2.0 Wars: Round 15

It’s time for Round 15 in Newsome.Org’s Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

This is the final heat of the first Round. The playoffs will be next.

Other Rounds:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

Here are the contestants for Round 15:

Chatsum
Pandora
LookLater
30 Boxes
Webjay
Plazes
Noodly
Wondir
Diigo
Squishr
Jots
Xdrive
Blummy

Chatsum is a free add-on for your web browser that lets you chat with all the other Chatsum users that are looking at the same website as you, sort of like Yakalike.

Pandora is an online music service that helps you discover other great music. I wrote about it here.

LookLater is a private on-line bookmark and information archive.

30 Boxes is…is…is…another online calendar. A lot of people whose opinions I respect really like it, so it must be good. My hunch is that it will own the non-integrated (meaning not part of Outlook, Yahoo, etc.) calendar space.

Webjay is a tool that helps you listen to and publish web playlists of songs you like. It looks like you can browse for and stream playlists created by other people. Cool idea, but I’m sure the RIAA will object.

Plazes is a social navigation system that lets you find people and places near you. You can search for wi-fi networks and other stuff.

Noodly says it’s a “new service harnessing the power of user-generated content.” It’s not live yet.

Wondir is a place where you can ask questions, sort of like the now-retired Ask Jeeves. It didn’t know “how cool is Kent Newsome?” (which may be an answer in and of itself), but it did know where Cheraw, SC is. Pretty cool, but couldn’t this be found via Google just as fast?

Diigo is a social bookmarking service that focuses on “social annotation.” It’s an invitation only beta, and I don’t have an invite, so that’s all I can tell you about it.

Squishr has no information about itself on its page. It’s not live. Someone tell me why these sites are tossed up there before there’s anything to see or read? These logo only sites are the new “Under Construction.”

Jots is a collaborative bookmarking system. Users can store links and choose whether to make them private, share them with with a select group of people or share them with the world.

Xdrive is a popular online file storage and backup service. 5G of storage costs $10 a month.

Blummy is a bookmarklet manager. If I used a ton of bookmarklets, I’d give it a try. Neat idea.

Before Today I’d Heard of:

5 out of 13.

And the Winner of Round 15 is:

Pandora, because both the theory and the execution really amaze me.

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Blogging Bandera, Day 2


We got up early and took a hay ride to a great breakfast. On the way, we saw about a hundred deer. Later the big kids did a trail ride while the little kids rode ponies.

After lunch we went fishing. No luck, but it was still fun.

The big girls went back to ride their horses some more, while Luke takes a nap and daddy checks his email.

Old Friends and Pancakes

One of the old school, larger than life lawyers I learned from as a young guy trying to make my mark in the legal profession used to begin his opening statement for every trial the same way. He’d talk about the way his grandmother cooked pancakes. First one side and then the other. And that even though the pancake looked ready to eat after the first side was cooked, the pancake wasn’t finished until you’d dealt with both sides.

That is a down-home, connect with the jury way to say that there are two sides to every story.

Of course long before my mentor ever got to the courtroom to deliver that opening statement, he had sized up his client to determine how good and sympathetic a witness he or she would make in front of the jury. Sometimes an unsympathetic witness can make even a case where the facts are favorable a dicey proposition.

It’s easy to march into court, be it of law or public opinion, when you have the facts on your side and a client the jury will love. When one of both of those aren’t the case, things get harder. The stakes go up. And you start to see what the lawyer is made of.

I remember many years ago a good friend of mine did something that while technically appropriate was very unpopular and perhaps a little shortsighted in the context of a business relationship. Consequently, he made a lot of people mad at him. Even people who didn’t know him or the actual facts began criticizing him publicly. A few other guys and I sort of shook our collective heads and lined up in support of him, if not necessarily his actions. We suffered our fair share of abuse as a result. We did it because he was an old and dear friend of ours and supporting him, even when he did something that we might have wished he hadn’t done, was more important than the reactions of his detractors.

I promised to stop writing about Dave Winer. Because even though he looks from afar to be in full self-destruct mode, there are at least two sides to the story and likely many more than that. Additionally, I have some friends who are close to him and I chose to stand down for that reason as well.

So when you see a post like this from Scoble. When you see words of encouragement from Doc. And when you see Nick Bradbury lament the mob mentality, you have to understand only one thing.

These guys see one of their real world friends getting attacked. They are standing up for their friend even though doing so will subject them to some of the same enmity that is being directed at Dave. The easy thing to do would have been to join in the bashing. They made the hard choice to stand by their friend.

I don’t know who’s right or wrong, and neither do most of the people weighing in on the matter. But I respect what Scoble and these other guys are doing. I hope my friends would do the same.

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Web 2.0 Wars: Round 14

It’s time for Round 14 in Newsome.Org’s Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

This is the final heat of the first Round. The playoffs will be next.

Other Rounds:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

Here are the contestants for Round 14:

Gabbr
Gcast
Blinkx
Openomy
Riffs
ajchat
Blogger
Jambo
Protopage
Rollyo
Alexa

Gabbr is a social news community. It’s a little like Digg, a little like Delicious and a little like Tailrank.

Gcast is a free podcast creation and hosting site. It contains tools that let you create your podcast online. I haven’t used it, but it looks pretty comprehensive.

Blinkx is a multi-format searching and organization application.

Openomy is an online storage service. It uses tagging to identify and organize stored files.

Riffs is a social recommendation site. You can recommend and review all the things you like and don’t like, and to find others who share your interests.

ajchat is a simple online chat system which uses Ajaz.

Blogger is a free blog creation and hosting service. I use it to publish this blog, though my files are hosted on my own server.

Jambo is a social wi-fi service that allows users to locate people who share similar interests, etc. via wi-fi.

Protopage is a free personal portal, similar to Netvibes and Pageflakes. It looks pretty nice. One of my favorite personal portals so far.

Rollyo lets you create your own custom search engine. Sadly, the one I created tells me that neither Scoble, Om, Steve nor I have ever written anything about cat juggling (until right now). Shame on us.

Alexa is a search engine.

Before Today I’d Heard of:

4 out of 11.

And the Winner of Round 14 is:

I’ve got to go with Blogger, simply because it helps so many people join the blogosphere.

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