Month: June 2007

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10 Obvious Things About the Future of Newspapers

Ryan Sholin knocks one out of the park: “10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head“. Pretty much mirrors a lot of lunchtime conversation at the J-School over the past few years, with the discussion seeming somewhat more urgent lately (because the writing is on the wall for dead-tree distribution). I liked #7 especially:

Bloggers aren’t an uneducated lynch mob unconcerned by facts. They’re your readers and your neighbors and if you play your cards right, your sources and your community moderators. If you really play it right, bloggers are the leaders of your networked reporting projects. Get over the whole bloggers vs. journalists thing, which has been pretty much settled since long before you stopped calling it a “Web blog” in your stories.

… though all of his points are spot-on. John Battelle has some interesting commentary in a similar vein. On where newspapers are falling down (this was directed at the SF Chronicle, but could be applied to many/most municipal papers):

400 reporters and what is the paper DOING with them? Not much, I’m afraid. The paper should OWN the Valley Tech story. Does it? No. It should OWN the biotech story. Does it? No. It should OWN the real estate/development story. Does it? No. It should OWN the California political story. Does it? No! … I agree that Google and others should be more engaged in helping shore up and – GASP – evolve the fourth estate. But assuming the way to do it is to support more of the same – the approach that gave us a bloated newsroom that puts out a product fewer and fewer people want to read each year – is to ask for tenure over evolution.

Music: Ry Cooder :: Train To Florida
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Speak to Me of Love

Had a gas writing Speak to Me of Love for Stuck Between Stations this week, on an album that’s been in heavy rotation at our house recently – “Parlez-moi d’amour” by Les Chauds Lapins. Steamy songs about love and sex from pre-war France, performed with sincerity and verve by a New York quintet led by a pair of banjo ukuleles. The music is absolutely wonderful, and so is the recording quality. Les Chauds Lapins even let us offer a few tracks for download. Get this music under your skin.

Music: Ornette Coleman :: Sleep Talking
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Mountain Goats

Cerritos-Cache-Creek     Miles-Scot-Ccc

Great time geocaching with Miles around Kensington today – pegged three caches in one day. First two pretty easy urban and park finds, but the third was a level-3 difficulty hike – a creek bed at the bottom of a steep canyon with no trail to speak of – bushwacking and slip-sliding our way down, holding onto roots and vines. Miles keeps up without complaint, loves the challenge. I swear the kid is a mountain goat in a boy’s body.

Once at the bottom, had a really hard time getting coordinates from the GPSr – couldn’t see the sky for the trees, and the steep canyon offered a much smaller horizon to scan. But using provided hints, finally honed in and M scrambled into position. Nothing really special inside this one aside from an autographed picture of Brad Pitt, signed “I was here”; it’s all about the fun of the hunt. Ecstatic day.

Music: Green-Eyed Lady :: Jerry Corbetta formerly of Sugarloaf
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Patenting Yoga

Not all goes well when East meets West. The U.S. patent office has been granting patents (yes, patents) on yoga postures and practices, and India’s government isn’t happy about it.

Searches of the database of the United States Patent and Trademark Office show dozens of yoga-related patents have been granted, including one for a breathing exercise, and more than 1,300 such trademarks have been registered.

First of all, I find it almost impossible to imagine that American practitioners are busting moves or other yogic practices that have never been conceived in 5,000 years of Indian tradition. Second of all, is nothing sacred? Third of all, the absurdity of patent overload has been going on for years, but just keeps getting sillier. Except it isn’t silly. It’s bad.

via Weblogsky

Music: The Fugs :: Fingers Of The Sun
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Looking Glass

Birdhouse Hosting congratulates long-time user (and frequent commenter on this blog) Jim Strickland, who just had his first novel, Looking Glass published by Flying Pen Press.

Dr. Catherine Farro, or “Shroud,” as she is known online, is a 40-year-old paraplegic. She works in a virtual reality tank on the security team for a large discount store chain. Friday, payday, she is attacked in the virtual world, where violent hackers run rampant. …

Way to go Jim! Huge congrats.

Music: Phyllis Dillon :: Woman of the Ghetto
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iPhone Ads

Apple has started pushing the iPhone on TV. Probably nothing you haven’t seen already, but damn, the presentation is sooooo fine. The Calamari ad ties it all together with silk — portable video, geolocation, maps as bridge to… the lowly phone call (it can make phone calls too? Damn!)

Music: Paul McCartney & Wings :: Mamunia
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MaximumPC Puts 256kbps AAC to the Test

Now that Apple has begun to release tracks in DRM-free 256kbps AAC through the iTunes Store, the listening tests are on. MaximumPC gathered 10 people, and had those people select 10 familar tracks, which they then encoded at both 128kbps AAC (which is the current iTunes Store offering), and at 256kbps, which is the new DRM-free bitrate. They then asked their ten subjects (in a double-blind experiment) whether they could tell the difference between the two tracks after repeated listens.

But they also threw a twist into the mix, asking subjects to listen first with a pair of the default Apple earbuds, then with a pair of $400 Shure SE420 phones. Their theory – that more people would be able to tell the difference between the bitrates with the higher-quality earphones – didn’t quite pan out.

The biggest surprise of the test actually disproved our hypothesis: Eight of the 10 participants expressed a preference for the higher-bit rate songs while listening with the Apple buds, compared to only six who picked the higher-quality track while listening to the Shure’s. Several of the test subjects went so far as to tell they felt more confident expressing a preference while listening to the Apple buds. We theorize that the Apple buds were less capable of reproducing high frequencies and that this weakness amplified the listeners’ perception of aliasing in the compressed audio signal. But that’s just a theory.

Also interesting is that the older subjects (whose hearing is supposedly less acute) did a better job of telling the tracks apart consistently than did the younger participants. Could it be that the younger generation has grown up on compressed music and doesn’t know what to listen for? Or it could be an anomalous result (the sample size was so small).

Readers who feel, as MaximumPC did going into the test, that 256kbps is still too low for anything approaching real fidelity, will likely cringe at the results. I’m not cringing exactly, but do wonder why they didn’t bother to give the subjects uncompressed reference tracks to compare against.

Notes: Remember that 128kbps AAC is roughly equivalent to 160kbps MP3, since the AAC codec is more efficient. There’s apparently some suspicion that the iTunes store uses a different encoder than the one provided stock with iTunes. Testing for both bitrate and headphone differences throws variables into the mix that shouldn’t oughta be there – would have been better to give everyone the good phones and focus on the bitrates, without confusing the matter. 10 people is a pretty small sample group – not small enough to be meaningless, but not large enough for substantial findings. Not that we need MaximumPC or focus groups to tell us how to feel about codecs and bitrates…

Music: Les Chauds Lapins :: Ces Petites Choses