Author: kevin

schadenfreude

today on twitter

kevingoldsmith: I am unreasonably proud of the fact that I just spelled “schadenfreude” correctly without looking it up.

jimhong: @KevinGoldsmith It makes me happy that you were concerned enough that you thought you might have to look it up….. ;-D

kevingoldsmith: @jimhong My style of spelling is to spell it however and let outlook tell me what I messed up, I was expecting squiggles

jimhong: @KevinGoldsmith I guess my attempt @ schadenfreude fell a bit short just now… 😉

kevingoldsmith: @jimhong and I take great pleasure in that! PWN3D!

In retrospect, I think the PWN3D was unncessary. A simple FTW might have surficed.

Creative Destruction in the Newspaper Industry

I saw two things today that somehow connected in my mind. The first was an advert for scholarships for computer programmers to Northwestern’s journalism school (link):
Are you a skilled programmer or Web developer? Are you interested in applying your talents to the challenge of creating a better-informed society? Do you want to learn how to find, analyze and present socially relevant information that engages media audiences? Do you see possibilities for applying technology as a way to connect people and information on the Web or new delivery platforms?

The second item was the announcement that one of Seattle’s two major daily newspapers is up for sale and that it will probably cease as a printed paper no matter what happens:
For sale: The P-I

There are a few things to think about here. A simple one is that the printed newspaper as a product is obviously headed for oblivion. The web is far superior at news delivery, especially extended coverage of breaking news (television isn’t good at the “extended” part). Even the bad part of electronically delivered news (reading off a computer screen) has solutions on the near term horizon (e-book readers). You could say that the journalism school is ahead of the game here, looking to turn programmers into journalists who “get” the future of journalism.

I wonder why anyone would be looking to journalism as a second career at this point though. I can understand that the current upheaval in the computer industry would make a career change attractive, but what we got going in IT ain’t nothin’ compared to the outright carnage happening in journalism.

There is an open question about what is the future of journalism: is it trained journalists researching stories or is it bloggers and “citizen journalists” doing it on their own? I’ve never been one to think that interested amateurs can completely replace experienced professional writers, and I still feel that way. The big stories require real journalists, sniffing out the stories over long periods of time and really getting to the bottom of the issues. However, 95% of professional journalism isn’t that. It’s coverage of city council meetings and the daily reportage that some people care a lot about, some people care a little about and the rest of the people care very little about. Those kinds of things are perfect for the interested and excited amateurs and it is that where the blogging community has been eating away at the journalism community. Without young reporters getting their start on that daily grind kind of stuff, however, I’m not sure how folks become the in-depth-extended-research kinds of reporters.

I honestly don’t think that the future of journalism is going to come from the programmers (even those with masters degrees in journalism). I think it is going to come from the thousands of laid-off reporters being released into the world. I hope that many will start to explore the possibilities and I expect at least one will end up changing what journalism is as we know it.

My Favorite Posts of 2008

As is my tradition, I’m including my favorite posts of 2008 here. These are the posts that I like the best, they are not necessarily the most popular. Thanks for continuing to read my nonsense and ramblings, and here is to more in 2009!

Happy new year, here is to a better one

I realized today that I haven’t posted anything here in quite a while. Maybe it was a normal ebb in the blogging stream, but there is more to it than that.

Those that are parents are well aware of the ability of an a child to pull your head out of the echo chamber of your own thoughts. I certainly felt that effect this year.

Combine that with the rise of the microblogging, of which I am finding myself very fond. Twitter lets me make a simple declarative statement in 160 chars that I would have felt the need to write paragraphs explaining or reinforcing on this site. On twitter, I can just say “I like watching the CBC. Canadian commercials are just nicer.” If I posted that here, I’d need to explain why Canadian commercials are nicer and maybe track down some Canadian commercials on youtube to include or whatever. That is too much effort when there are diapers to change. I also like the immediacy of the microblogging, the responses and directs, the conversations spilling out across multiple people very quickly. I’ve also found that with my limited time, twitter/friendfeed/facebook have basically replaced my RSS reading for the most part. I’m getting the same information faster through twitter than I do through firing up my RSS reader. I would expect, for 2009, that you will see fewer posts here, but there will be much less “chaff” and more “wheat.” If you want the chaff, the random thoughts and weird ramblings, follow me on twitter.

I’m finding myself cautiously optomistic about this coming year, but much less optomistic than I have been for quite some time. The morass and decline in the country following eight years of George Bush’s presidency is unlikely to be cleaned up quickly, no matter what kind of wunderkind that Barack Obama turns out to be. Barack Obama’s appointments have been somewhat underwhelming so far, the “team of rivals” justification rings somewhat hollow given the political infighting that could arise. An inexperienced executive leading a team of rivals could be a recipie for disaster. I’m delighted with Obama’s victory and what that can mean for our country, but he is taking on a herculean task and he has raised expectations so high that it can all fall apart very quickly.

I want to start this year on a positive note (for a change). So, I hope that for anyone reading this that your 2009 is better than your 2008 was.

And I was starting to feel good about us as a nation again…

Wal-Mart worker dies in rush; two killed at toy store – CNN.com
a temporary Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death in a rush of thousands of early morning shoppers as he and other employees attempted to unlock the doors of a Long Island, New York, store at 5 a.m., police said.

I guess it is still too early… Lively bites the dust

There is a bit of schadenfreude here on my part. Lively was reviving concepts from the mid to late 90s and passing them off as something new (including one I worked on). All of the efforts of that time died a slow death, and the thought was that we (they) were ahead of the curve. Lively’s lack of uptake slams the door on graphical chat once and for all, I guess.

Official Google Blog: Lively no more

That’s why, despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we’ve decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year. It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business. Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams.

We’d encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms.

Intonarumori performs in Seattle 11/7/08

SIL2K and BROWNBOX
present

*SIL2K*
performs
Tetraktys

An Oratorio after Pythagoras
Rachel Lissman, narrator

Based on Lucretius'
"On The Nature of the Universe"

And closing the evening:

*inBOIL vs. Intonarumori*

Friday November 7
7:30pm
$5 cover
The Rendezvous
2322 2nd Ave, Belltown/Seattle

[Update 11/7/08: The Stranger's Classical Music Column, The Score, previews the show]

Sarah Palin/Katie Couric parody

What I think would be awesome, just do the interview parody straight. Palin was so goofy in those interviews there was no need to change what she said to parody her. They could have just redone the interviews verbatim and it would have been hilarious!

Here’s the original in case you haven’t seen it:

iPhone shuffle usability suck

My iPhone is the fifth iPod I’ve owned over the years, so I’m pretty familiar with how they work. One thing that has been bugging me about the iPhone though is that there was no shuffle mode without going into a playlist and hitting the shuffle button at the top of the list. This seems like it was a bit anti-intuitive and off from how previous iPods worked. When I found out that the new iPod Touch would shuffle by shaking it, I assumed that was how the iPhone must already work, which wasn’t true. It was starting to be a bummer because I often have the iPhone in my pocket and I just want to listen to some music without having to unlock it. I finally did a web search figuring that I must be missing something and I came across this page which describes the problem of always having your iPhone in shuffle mode. I’d always seen the shuffle and repeat icons in the second screen of info when playing a track, but I’d assumed that they were either: notifications, not buttons, since they weren’t in the primary interface; or applying only to the currently playlist since they were only accessible while playing a track. Since the iPhone has a settings menu for the iPod and every other iPod stores the repeat and shuffle mode switches there, that is where I assumed they would be on the iPhone.

It seems the the iPhone UI designers decided that the iPhone was a significantly new device that they could change the user expectations about how the user interface should work. That is a classic blunder in UI design that Apple above all other companies should not have made. Maybe they need their designers to go back and re-read the Apple human interface guidelines where this rule was made very clear.

This choice was bad on other HCI levels as well. What is my expectation when manipulating controls on a song while it is playing? Would it be that I’m making a global settings change when there is another location where the global settings are edited? I doubt it. Did Apple do any user trials? Because of their secrecy, I somewhat doubt it, but it would have been dumb of them to do none.

Since this paradigm was established in the iPhone 1.0 software and has obviously not changed since that time, let’s hope that Apple at least has the sense to add setting switches for shuffle and repeat in the settings menu if they don’t want to get rid of the ones they currently have. That would save a lot of frustration from their customer base as we get iPhones.