Year: 2009

Kindle needs to open up – Tim O’Reilly

Tim writes in Forbes that unless Amazon adopts open standards, the Kindle is gone in three to five years.

He advocates moving to ePub. I know nothing of e-book standards, but thanks to Tim, now I do.

New paper launches in Barnstable

One newspaper is swimming against the ebbing tide in the news business — The Barnstable Enterprise launched this week, a weekly paper owned by the people who publish the Falmouth Enterprise. It joins the venerable Barnstable Patriot which was picked up by the News Corp. controlled Cape Cod Times a few years ago.

Neighbor and erstwhile Cape Cod Today blogger Paul Rifkin is the Cotuit correspondent. He interviewed me last week in my home office about Capt. Thos. Chatfield. I also see a good history piece in the inaugural issue by Prof. James Gould, Cotuit’s local historian, on a dance club/speakeasy that existed in Marston’s Mills during the Jazz Age.

Anyway, here’s a link to the kickoff.

Curriculum Blogtae – your blog as your resume

No fewer than five former colleagues and friends have lit up blogs since the New Year, starting down a road that is remarkably rewarding if you have an affinity for it, but can also be frightening if it’s a forced march being taken on because someone suggested a blog is a smart career move (it is, done right). Thankfully for me spreadsheets haven’t migrated into the social domain – I’d be tongue tied if I had to communicate in cells and formulae, and I expect some new bloggers are more accustomed to communication through a Powerpoint slide than they are through a paragraph. I guess ex-journalists will have the easiest time in this medium, with quants and more analytical types a little more tongue-tied.

I sense a lot of these efforts are being launched because of the rising need to market their skills in an uncertain job market, to establish new ventures, and to put their expertise on public display. All, I might add as an aside, were launched on WordPress.com (and that is good). I wish the best to all, and regard their first posts with the same nervousness I felt when I started blogging. If I have any advice from those years, it’s this: it is all worthwhile when someone comes up to you and says those ego-stroking words: “I read your blog ….”

A blog is (to borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman) a song of yourself, a constant give and take between privacy and exposure, sharing and guarding, safety and risk. It’s not a printing press for cash, but there are those out there who feel compelled to launch blogs as businesses, and to that subculture there is a bleakness of affiliate marketing, PPC, linkbaiting, and SEO gaming techniques ripe for the picking but which never seem to yield much in the way of honor or cash. I understand when people in tough financial straits need to do what needs to be done to make a living. If blogging is your best idea of an at-home business plan, let me refer you to Dan Lyons – The Fake Steve Jobs — and his recent column in Newsweek on the futility of chasing $$$ from a blog.

For those who manage to stick with it, a blog can be an interesting ego exercise – a public diary and soapbox that needs some weekly tending before it withers. The following big issues will emerge.

  1. Your “about page” is your new bio. If you optimize anything, try make sure the about page encapsulates your bio as succinctly and accurately as possible. This is the new resume. This is a freeform space for you to paint the picture of you. Add LinkedIn ties, Facebook, twitter accounts, photos, and a link to your actual resume.
  2. Focused: there are highly focused blogs that mine one specific vein of expertise. This is a tried and true tactic to establish one’s self as a subject matter expert. For some, particularly those with a technical skill, a highly focused blog can work wonders in building reputation. Particularly if the blogger is actually smart. These blogs thrive in their niche by being social with other experts in the same niche. Web analytics is a perfect example.
  3. Unfocused: there are blogs, like this one, that cover the gamut from professional to personal issues. I have wrestled with the idea of launching a separate blog or two, but in the end have decided to stay consolidated and veer from one area of interest to another.

Courage is the toughest issue. I get the most traffic and comments when I go out on the limb and say something provocative. Sometimes I regret going too far and not moderating my opinions. I launched my first blog in 2002 and gave up because it felt too weird writing polemics and highly opinionated pieces in public after a career as an objective journalist. It still feels weird. I won’t ever feel comfortable stating a political or religious opinion in public out of an old habit of trying to remain as neutral as possible. This is a curse, not a virtue. Then again, I know a novice blogger who was just shown the door because of some ill-considered blog posts.

Drafting and knowing when to just hit the publish button is an art. I am a sloppy grammarian, punctuater, and copyeditor. Some people are picky about those errors, I just go back and correct them as I find them. Blogs are not nuclear fission. The world won’t end if you publish a mess.

And one final note: you will look and look for some verification that the blog is worth the time it takes. If you start collecting scalps and measuring your net worth in terms of followers, subscribers, readers or page views, I feel sorry for you. It’s not about the numbers. For the Dour Marketer, a blog is a reward unto itself. Do it for the experience, not the followers, and certainly not the cash.

CRASH-Bs are underway without me

I was too much of an injured, vain toad to wake up and drag my butt to Boston for the 2009 World Indoor Rowing Champs.

So I pulled a 5k by my lonesome in the boatshed and felt sorry for myself. Right shoulder is a mess, but hey, the body is evil and must be punished.

Follow the CRASH-B’s on twitter and best of luck to those poor souls about to endure the worst 6 minutes or so in athletics.

What I’m reading and watching this week

The New Yorker: John Updike issue. Amazing. The excerpts from his writing over the decade were magnificent. Starting the current issue with A-Rod on the cover signing autographs for cartoon kids with Popeye arms.

Saturday by Ian McEwan. Due to a review in the current New Yorker. I kindled a copy and started it on a flight. About a brain surgeon. Great voice.

My Life in France by Julia Child. Recommended by Chas. Dubow at Businessweek.com in response to last weekend’s sausage posting. I need to post more on French cooking, one of my winter weekend hobbies.  Julia Child was more than the woozy TV cook played by Dan Ackroyd on SNL, she wrote the bestselling treatise on French cooking for the American cook and loved France with a passion. Just a great book. I’d put it on the shelf next to A.J. Liebling’s Between Meals and Geo. Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.

Atlantic Monthly – crash issue. Four different covers for four seperate metro markets. Each with the tag line that New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco come out for the better after the current panic abates. Custom magazine covers aren’t news. The issue is okay. I need to go back and find the ultra prescient piece by James Fallows on the coming meltdown. Here it is. Great piece of early eco/sci fi crashapalooza set in 2016. It freaked me out when I read it three years ago, and I think a lot about it today.

Movies

  • The Reader, Kate Winslet up for best actress. I could argue for that.
  • Le Jour se Leve,  1939. Jean Gabin, directed by Marcel Carne. Wow. Poetic Realism at its best.  Jules Berry as the evil dog trainer was pretty awesome.

Whereabouts week of 2/23

Monday – 2.23 Cotuit

Tuesday-Thurs. – 2.24-26 Morrisville, NC

Friday 2.27- Cotuit

Post-rib recovery

I just climbed off the erg for the first time since Jan 7. Six weeks without exercise (other than beach walks) has left me fat and out of shape. So back on to the erg I went today — 5,000 meters in under 20 minutes so the news wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. Rotator cuff not affected by the stroke, so it would appear I have no more excuses and can try to work off the pounds in anticipation for the first water row on or around St. Pat’s.

I have over 500,000 meters logged so far in the Concept 2 log book for the year (C2’s year begins May 1), maybe I can get another 100K onto the books before the calendar resets.

Tomorrow is the CRASH-B sprints in Boston. I have an entry, but I think my best effort might be a feeble 7:30-7:45. Maybe I should man up and waddle up there anyway. Guilt will weigh on me for the rest of the day. And this was to be the year I went for a 6:15 race as it is my first in the 50+ heavyweight category. Oh well. Always next year.

Where the stimulus falls short: where’s the railroad?

The New York Times took the words out of my mouth Friday morning by raising the criticism that the economic stimulus package – which is long on tax breaks and non-infrastructure projects – totally misses the opportunity to restore the American railroad network through a heavy investment in high-speed train lines on the two coasts.

Michael Cooper writes:

“It may be the longest train delay in history: more than 40 years after the first bullet trains zipped through Japan, the United States still lacks true high-speed rail. And despite the record $8 billion investment in high-speed rail added at the last minute to the new economic stimulus package, that may not change any time soon.”

Acela is a feeble disappointment, hamstrung by a 19th century railroad bed from Boston to Washington and a xenophobic Congress that demanded the train be built in the US on inferior American technology rather than on the state of the art advances seen in France, Japan and China. Result? A bad train capable of 150 mph that generally runs at 86 mph except for a brief stretch in Rhode Island near the site of the Great Swamp Fight. The French TGV operates at average speeds of 173. I should, in this era, be able to ride from Providence, Rhode Island to New York Penn Station in two hours. I should be taking the train from New England to North Carolina and accomplishing the 750 mile trip in less than six hours. Instead I get $100+ one way ticket prices, no wireless, antiquated speeds, and broken down equipment. Thomas Friedman is right – walk through the new airport in Beijing and then walk through JFK and tell me who is the superpower.

Friedman wrote on Christmas Eve, 2008:

“A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.

The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.

All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity?”

 

I don’t think it is backwards nostalgia to state that America was built on the strength of its railroad, was a pioneer in mass transit at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries with its Interurban line systems, and then let it all go to hell in the 1960s when the Eisenhower administration decided to pave America with superhighways. The result was the birth of the automobile society, the rise of Detroit, and a short-term mortgage on our future predicated on $0.25 a gallon gas, muscle cars, and the Kerouacian vision of every man expending his rugged individualism on the highway to hell.

Meanwhile the railroad slipped from backbone to creaking embarrassment. Not to be a cheese-eating/European-loving surrender monkey, but I did spend two years of my life in Switzerland and got a close look at how mass transit is supposed to work. From my government subsidized “halb-tax” pass, to a precise schedule that insured the train arrived at a station on time where a bus arrived – on time — to make the transfer to essentially any spot in the country within a half-kilometer of one’s final destination … this obsessive coordination included mountain trams! How did the Swiss and rest of Europe do it? First they taxed the snot out of a liter of gas, making it prohibitively expensive. Then they invested those taxes in the subsidization of the railroad, making it the most attractive form of transportation there is.

If the objective of the stimulus package was to turn things around for the future then why doesn’t it reduce reliance on petroleum, create heavy duty public works projects, push a green agenda, increase the efficiency of travel and commerce …. why didn’t Congress stuff a ton of cash into a total rebuild of the coastal rail systems? Instead we get a weak last minute allotment and keep shipping stacks of cash to Detroit. I don’t want to make this a car vs. rail post – but if we learned anything since the Oil Embargo thirty years ago, it’s that the car is doomed in the long term. Amtrak is a joke, kept on life support, and barely so, by a congress enthralled with the Big Automotive Supply Chain and the public works implications of an ever expanding federal superhighway system.

The historian in me can’t help but compare these early days of the Obama administration with FDR’s 100 Days – nowhere do I see the same hardnosed emphasis on public works, reform, and true Keynesian stimulus that my grandparents saw with the rise of the WPA, the CCC, and the reforms of Glass-Steagall. As rock-ribbed Cape Cod Yankee Republicans they were doubtlessly horrified by the socialization of the American economy, but the net result of FDR’s stimulus was a pump priming that put people to work. This package reeks of give-backs, tax breaks and dispensations to people who can’t pay their bills and not an investment in the future that government can, and has made in the past. This is the time to rebuild our power grid, air traffic control systems, railroads, nuclear power, wind, solar, invest in a new DARPA, and find the technical innovations that will drive the next generation of progress.

Facebook retreat — back to the past

via Entropy Gradient Reversals – Would You Like Fries With That?.

So Facebook changes its terms of service to basically say “all your base belong to us” and the mob goes mental, so Facebook backs off.

Basically they tried to pull a Burger King and claim anything put on their service belonged to them and not the author.

Hit the rewind button to Rageboy, aka “Chris Locke” — who took Burger King’s early “Have It Your Way” web site to a fine-print extreme by uploading all of Project Gutenberg into their text entry box. I suggest someone do the same to Zuckerberg if his lawyers regain the upper hand.

“Sure we like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Who doesn’t? But to get our vital juices really flowing, there’s still nothing quite like a hot lick from Foreigner. And it seems that Dave@Burger_King.com feels much the same way. Although the band’s hit single Double Vision was initially an ode to psychedelic drugs (“I never do more than I really need…”), BK must figure that the generation who intrinsically understood this message must have long ago either OD’d or gone into advertising themselves. Thus their use of the Double Vision sound clip to hawk their double cheeseburger. Are we talking blinding marketing brilliance here or what? But never mind what we think. Thanks to the Miracle of Interactivity, you can let Burger King know what you think directly by clicking on their tasteful animated graphic.

Having suggested such feedback, however, we feel duty-bound to pass along the following notice. It’s at http://www.burgerking.com:80/legal.htm, but you know, sometimes a link just isn’t the same as the Real Thing.

All remarks, suggestions, ideas, graphics, data, questions or other information communicated to Burger King Corporation through this site or through electronic mail (together, the “Submission”) will forever be the property of Burger King Corporation. Burger King Corporation will not treat any Submission as confidential, or proprietary and will not be liable for the use of any ideas for its business (including without limitation, product or advertising ideas) and will not incur any liability as a result of any similarities that may appear in future Burger King Corporation operations. Without limitation, Burger King Corporation will have exclusive ownership of all present and future existing rights to the Submission of every kind and nature everywhere. Burger King Corporation will be entitled to use the Submission for any commercial or other purpose whatsoever, without compensation to you or any other person sending the Submission. You acknowledge that you are responsible for whatever material you submit, and you, not Burger King Corporation, have full responsibility for the message, including its legality, reliability, appropriateness, originality, and copyright.

Fill my eyes with that Double Indemnity. When you get right down to it, isn’t this what the Web is really all about? (Our own contribution to the furtherance of responsible Copyright Protection consisted in feeding the entire collected corpora of Project Gutenberg through the Burger King form, thus ending Literature As We Know It.)”