Archive for category Web/Tech

Date: August 25th, 2010
Cate: Internet/Technology/Gadgets, My Life, My Work, Straight Geek, Web/Tech
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Five Tools to Increase Productivity

My last blog post “Generations in the Desert” was abstract, theoretical and academic. I do that from time to time. I’m honored that it inspired folks like Steve Butry, Rick Waghorn and  Stjin Debrouwere to write related posts. But I do not, at this time, see myself as a “thought leader” or an academic. Maybe in the future. But for now – I prefer demos not memos.

With that in mind, I wanted to write a practical post. Five simple things that increase my productivity. Before the list begins a disclaimer: The only way to increase productivity is to do things. You can be equipped with every tool out there – but if you don’t focus it won’t help. As my friend Cyrus says “Being a good writer is 3% talent, and 97% not being distracted by the Internet.”

What tools save you time?

(As an added bonus example – this image provided via Tagaroo. Waste time looking for good photos, try Tagaroo!)

Text Expander

Do you write a lot of emails? Do many of them have the same elements? Do you run an organization and sometimes you need to do reach out to various people but you don’t want to mass email people (lame?). Do you write a lot of html and would love some shortcuts? Check out Text Expander. This original tool came to me via Amy Gahran, bless her soul,  and has been a life saver. It even keeps track of how much it estimates its saved you. To date for me: 92 hours (estimating that I type 400 characters a minute). It also has an auto-correct tool that fixes common typos. Lucky for me, my typos are never common.

Jing

This tool comes via Kara Andrade and Erik Sundelof. Jing is a screencast tool which is incredibly useful if you work with a remote team building and managing a website. If you’ve ever had a phone conversation with a web developer about a bug,  you’ll know that communication is hard. You’ll ask them to get on the computer so they can see what you see. But you are never 100% sure if what you are saying translates. All that goes away with Jing. Now take a quick screencast of what you are seeing and upload that to screencast automatically and then share the link. Boom – you and your team are on the same page. No need to schedule a conference call, no worries about miscommunication.

xPad

It is as cool as it sounds. The xPad is the ultimate notebook. Do you take notes on your computer? Do you use Microsoft Word to save those notes. If so – please stop reading this right now and slap yourself. Microsoft Word is a horrible way to take notes. It is clunky, big files, slow to open, slow to close and worse yet – doesn’t easily transfer online (people that cut and paste word documents into a WYSWIG editor are a pet peeve.) For a long time I just had an internal system of using TextEdit (Rich Text Documents). It worked okay. I’d keep one blank document open at all times (note taking) and save important ones. Luckily Joy Mayer, a fellows Missouri Reynolds Fellow told me about xPad. I have not needed to open up Text Edit since. The xPax stays open. I can create a new internal document in seconds. Rename it whenever, delete it and flip between notes in a breeze. If you have tons of Word documents or any other kind of documents clouding your desktop this is your solution.

Rapportive

This little plugin helps you know who you are talking to. If you are like me and you get an email from somebody new one of the first things you do is Google them to get the details. Rapportive does that for you. Right there in your inbox they’ll search for related social media accounts on LinkedIn, facebook, Twitter, and more. Forget searching to find out who this person is – it’s already in front of you. Related but not as practical: Gist.

Grease Monkey

Grease Monkey is the script that fathered all scripts. First: If you don’t use Firefox, stop reading this and slap yourself.

If you do use Firefox, are you using it to its full potential? Maybe not. Download Grease Monkey and then search through the seemingly endless add-ons. The important thing here is not to get lost in the sea of possibilities. Instead think about a problem you already have in your browsing experience. Maybe you want a better way to find the latest news. Then go to Grease Monkey and search news. You can see already there are more tools here than one person could use. But – I promise that picking the right one will save you a TON of time and energy.

So there you have it – these are just five tools that I use on a regular basis that have probably saved me countless hours. More than 92 at least ;)

Date: August 3rd, 2010
Cate: Straight Geek, Uncategorized, Web/Tech, Weblogs
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My Vision of Tech Blogs

Tech blogs play an important role in the larger journalism community. I have long said that tech reporting/blogs/journalism will often be at the forefront of our industry. It is an occupational hazard. This is possibly why Dan Gillmor was one of the first to blog (don’t forget he started out as a tech reporter). I refer to my time as a tech reporter as the saving grace of my career. I was studying blogs and internet culture so it made sense for me to dive in head-first. Not only are tech blogs/reporting/journalism at the forefront but the way they interact makes an important statement about where our industry is and where general internet culture has become mainstream and accepted.

I do not think we hold our tech blogs to high enough standards. I think we let them take us on cult of personality rides and we get infatuated. Today I am a total back-seat tech-writer. As I read various tech blogs I find myself wondering how I would cover issues. I have lots of praise but also constructive criticism for the current tech blog scene. Since people often ask me what sites I follow to stay on top of things I figure a post like this will let me rant and answer that question.

Disclaimer: I’m focusing on organizations that cover technology. If this list were to include tech pundits or individuals (Kottke, Laughing Squid, Rough Type, etc) it would be much longer. I am also excluding sites that cover the cross-section of technology and media (Nieman, MediaShift, Buzzmachine, PaidContent, etc). This is not an exhaustive list. It’s tech-blogging 101 for those that need to be introduced.

So without further adieu – my list of tech blogs and their vibes.

Read Write Web

Right now Read Write Web is the New York Times of tech blogs. This isn’t just because they have a syndication deal (which they do) but because RWW provides a sense of analysis that other tech blogs don’t. I recently met Richard MacManus, the founder of RWW, who confirmed that their emphasis was on context rather than speed. This may seem counter-intuitive in a world of speed and constant updates, but it is what separates them and as a reader I appreciate it and trust them more than most tech blogs because of it.

Wired

It’s hard for me to objectively describe Wired. Not that objectivity is the goal, but I worked there for the first year out of college and it is still one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. As a result, thinking about Wired gives me warm fuzzies and I know first hand how much love and attention goes into the editorial process. As a result this is a go-to source of tech news. It is for many people because Wired is one of the first sources of tech news. For some, like my father, Wired isn’t a news source – it’s a cultural touchstone. It represents the tech revolution itself.

TechCrunch

TechCrunch is guilty of the cult-of-personality. You cannot separate organization from Mike Arrington who has shaped it from the ground up. This is not a bad thing. Mike has a strong personality and he knows it. His importeur is all over TechCrunch. So whenever I read TechCrunch (which from what I can tell values speed over context) I have to put on my Mike Arrington goggle filters. That said, TechCrunch pushes boundaries in reporting and that is why I love following them. They have mastered the art of respectfully changing an article based on reader comments. At one point they even tried to kill embargoes for their site. I am sure it didn’t work – bu that kind of radical thinking shows the role that techblogs can have and that’s why TechCrunch is notable. They are not afraid to push boundaries while covering technology.

Mashable (Updated from Comments)

The truth of the matter is – I love some of the PEOPLE at Mashable (Vadim Lavrusik and Tamar, etc) but I DON’T like Mashable. In fact, it comes to mind as a tech blog who I wish would step it up.  First: In tone and ethos it comes off way too much like MTV. Everything is very flashy, glitzy, etc. It makes an old man like me have seizures. More important: They are a tech company disguised as a news site. They write how-to’s, lists, digg-bait, etc. As a result they have a dog in the tech-race that they are covering. I think all tech blogs have a dog in the race to some extent – but none more obviously so than Mashable IMHO. I like their content when I’m in a certain mood. But if I’m not in that mood – it can actually irk me.

Venture Beat

I like Venture Beat because it is straight and to the point. Follow the money. This is the Wall Street Journal of tech blogs. I’ve known a few writers who have worked here over the years and I think they do a good job of following the industry. It’s also interesting to note that like GigaOm this blog was started by a tech reporter from a newspaper. Today in journalism we talk about entrepreneurialism and personal branding. These tech blogs are living proof of why.

GigaOm

Similar to Venture Beat this is an example of a tech reporter who owned his beat and turned that into owning his own media company. That is admirale and has a larger lesson for the journalism industry. In fact, GigaOm is becoming more and more of a general purpose destination. They cover everything from the environment and media, but with a tech spin. They also do a good job of letting you know the individual writers including Mathew Ingram (one of my all time favs).

Engadget/Gizmodo

In truth I am not an Engadget or Gizmodo fan. My interest in technology is rarely gadgets or gizmos. These two sites occupy the same space in my mind. The recent iPhone 4 kerfuffle was notable. I think these blogs tend to be caught up in shiny new play things and that is not interesting. It’s straight consumerism. They might as well be printing catalogs for Apple and other companies. Just my anti-consumerism two cents.

Business Insider

I’ve been following Business Insider back when it was called Silicon Alley Insider. One of the defining things about this site is it’s New York attitude and approach to covering technology. They are distinctively not caught up in the hype machine that can be silicon valley. I love this about them. They also BLEW ME AWAY with their investigation on Facebook. Talk about holding a company’s feet to the fire.

Lifehacker

I love this site for thinking out of the box. This shows you how technology can improve your life on a very practical level. Whereas Venture Beat is all about following the money, this site is about following the practical uses for your everyday life. For that, it is invaluable.

Search Engine Land

I’m including this as an example of a niche tech site. There are tons of these (some of the best cover specific sites like All Facebook). They are fantastic when you want to dive deep. Search is arguably the most important online industry and this is a great blog to follow it. I also recommend John Battele’s Searchblog if you want the go-to independent blogger source and for many of these niche topics the independent blogger who covers the beat is just as insightful as the niche organization.

Silicon Valley Watcher

The last on the list Silicon Valley Watcher does an amazing job of staying very personal (Tom Foremski) but with an air of professionalism. It’s just a good read. No final analogy (although I think Tom’s time at the Financial Times is reflected in this blog.

So what is your favorite source of tech news and how do you describe it?

——–

As many a reader know, I love drawn out analogies. Here are some of my favorites.

Date: July 7th, 2010
Cate: Current Affairs, Journalism Practice, Journalism Theory/Analysis, Web/Tech, Weblogs
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Five Lessons to Learn from NewsTilt

Note: This is the second attempt at this post on a sleepless Saturday night. The first and better draft was lost. Alas, this one may be less robust.

I’ve always wanted to see a Crunchbase for journalism startups. If this is a time of experimentation then we need to keep better track of projects that start and fail. When I talk to young journo-entrepreneurs that don’t know what Backfence was, I’m concerned we are going to reinvent the wheel. Or worse – reinvent a squeaky wheel.

All of this is to say – we can learn from projects that fail (failure is not a bad word). Recently a Y Combinator project “NewsTilt” launched to great fanfare only to shut down three months later, returning money back to the investors. I want to examine this not from a high-horse position, but because from my point of view the speed at which this happened allows us to hone in on specific lessons.

1. Under Promise and Over Deliver

This is a general rule of thumb whenever you are going to try something for the first time aka a web-startup. When you launch, you probably only have one iota of functionality. That is the functionality you can promise. From their press release: “NewsLabs aims to save journalism by building community around news.”

Stop right there. No ONE thing will save journalism. You will never find me claiming that Spot.Us is going to save journalism. I often say that Spot.Us is PART of the solution or PART of the future for journalism – but there is no silver bullet. As awesome as you think your startup is, don’t claim that you are inventing the coolest thing since sliced bread. If you have indeed done that, others will say it for you. When Spot.Us launched my stated goal was to fund 4-6 enterprise reporting projects in the first year. Looking back that might have been a VAST under-promise. But hey, I delivered and then some.

Meanwhile NewsLabs (the company of NewsTilt) claimed “This is the future of journalism.”

It seems the CTO also learned this lesson as stated in his farewell note:

In retrospect, I now believe that we should never have made promises about building your online brand or large amounts of traffic (early email threads about how to deal with large number of comments now seem very ironic).

2. Duty and Teamwork

It is easy to start speculating here because of the nature of how this venture shut down. The CTO wrote a farewell post noting that the CEO had left two-weeks earlier. There was also mention that for one of the three months the startup was around the CEO was on a honeymoon. This leaves room for a lot of WTF questions which I won’t go into, but my friend Matt Mireles does (glad somebody asked these questions and pointed out the craziness). I’m less interested in the drama that probably occurred behind the scenes than I am from the lesson we can take here – which is around the role and relationship of founders. (note: Hacker News has a thread where the CEO says he will give his own postmortem explanation).

I was lucky to meet Paul Gahram the week before NewsTilt shut down. He gave a talk about successful startups and his first rule is: Founders, founders founders (to the tune of – location, location, location).

The idea and technology behind a startup is not nearly as important as the founders. That is the heart and soul of a startup. He went on to talk about dynamics of founders, the number of founders and the relationship between founders. Bottom line, it’s important that they have a strong and trusting relationship. Things WILL get tough and you need to be able to lean on each other. The analogy Paul used was that of soldiers. They form a bond with each other such that they don’t want to let each other down. Marines go through hell during training to become “brothers” so that in the thick of battle you don’t show a tint in your armor. It’s not because you aren’t scared – but because you don’t want to cause concern for your other brothers. When things are tough, you smile and carry on, usually bearing more than your normal load. The startup world moves so fast that if both founders feel that bond, they’ll both smile, carry more than they can – and will often come out of it with a stronger startup than when they entered the tough times.

3. Your value is NOT just for journalists

NewsTilt had a good proposition for writers, as Spot.Us contributor Matt Baume noted, but it needed to be checked with an appeal to a larger audience. I’ve ranted about this recently. NewsTilt was not the startup I was discussing in that original post – nor do I think they are 100% guilty of this journo-startup-sin, but I think a comparison with True/Slant gets my point across.

  • In fact True/Slant and NewsTilt are VERY similar (they should have studied True/Slant. The technology NewsTilt offered wasn’t that much better.
  • Both had a shot at marketing but True/Slant‘s efforts were more geared toward attracting readers (same with The Faster Times). NewsTilt started by appealing to and attracting to reporters. Great for a discussion in the journalism community among journalists who discuss the future of journalism – bad for the other 99.99 percent of the population.
  • An interesting side note: True/Slant was bought by Forbes, although it was not a true acquisition Forbes was an early investor and the founder was a former editor of Forbes and is now head of innovation. This could have been a signal to NewsTilt that potential exists are tough.

4. It takes more than three months

If your goal is traffic and engagement (for the sake of traffic) it will take more than three months. Plain and simple. Which is to say – don’t quit on your startup. Granted if lesson #2 (duty and teamwork) is hitting the fan, you have other issues and maybe should throw in the towel – but you can’t quit after three months because the traffic isn’t where you want it to be. Iterate, learn and adapt. Three months is not enough time to evaluate if you are able/unable to achieve your under-promised goals. The lesson here: The best way for your startup to fail is if you quit.

If you build it – they will come only works with ghosts and baseball fields. Websites don’t possess that power (except for Kevin Costner’s website)

5. Technology won’t necessarily solve a social problem.

Journalism faces a lot of problems. Some of them are technical. Or better yet, some of them are the inability of news organizations to become technical. Or better yet, some of them are a result of technology changing the way we exchange information. Or better yet, some of them are about how technology is changing the economics of content. Or better yet, some of them are related to how technology is changing the way people spend their time (I know you’d rather be LOL Cating right now).

Point is: Technology is very much a part of this discussion – but it is not necessarily the solution to what is a very deep and nuanced social issue. I think (although I certainly don’t know) the folks at NewsTilt put too much emphasis on their tech-wizardry and the idea that they would build tools for journalist and all the sudden POOF – journalism would be solved.

Again – technology is certainly a PART of the solution, but it needs to be integrated within the fabric of a social context – where the problem exists.

Date: June 16th, 2010
Cate: Journalism Practice, Open Source and Community, Social News, Web/Tech
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Meet the 2010 Knight News Challenge Winners

Mark Glaser at PBS Idea Lab has the FULL scoop.

As a past winner I try to help out at the PBS Idea Lab blog when I can, so I interviewed a few of the winners. The video is below.

It should also be noted that one of the winners PRX is going to work with the Spot.Us code! I included a video of Jake Shapiro explaining what exactly they are going to do.

Winner: Brad Flora from Windy Citizen. For details on his project check out the PBS Idea Lab post.

My friends at USC Tom Grasty and Nonny de la Peña and their creation Stroome!

The folks from Davis Wiki are launching Local Wiki

From Arizona’s School of journalism: City Seed

The folks from Front Porch Forum

Jake Shapiro explaining PRX’s StoryMarket

Date: March 13th, 2010
Cate: My Life, Travel, Web/Tech
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At South by Southwest and Updates

Today I am at South by Southwest.

Yes, you can tell I’m a noob because I didn’t refer to it as just “South by.” Perhaps when this event is done I’ll write a bit of a contrarian post about SXSW. The quick takeaways are.

1. Spring break for the internet: W000! Show me your A.P.I.!

2. The Ikea of tech conferences.

Regardless of that – it’s always a blast to see folks like Matt Thompson, Patrick Thornton, Sean Blanda, Will Sullivan, Dan Gillmor, Tristan Harris, Joe Edelman, Matt Mireles, Raines Cohen, Scott Rosenberg, Jonathan Berger Scott Hocker, and more. You’ll just be walking down the hall and boom, there they are. Working on the Internet often means you don’t get face-t0-face time with your colleagues. Even though I don’t directly work with any of these individuals, I consider them allies in a changing media landscape which we are all defining and redefining. Being able to shake a hand or give a hi-five never hurt. I’m sure I’ll run into more good folks tomorrow.

Meanwhile my geek out moment today was seeing Bruce Sterling breeze past me. Almost stopped him while he was walking just to say “thanks” without giving that a qualification.

Tomorrow I’m giving a talk on community funded reporting with Lynn Headley. My quick powerpoint is below. But as I often say: “Power corrupts and PowerPoints corrupt absolutely. Still – they provide me a mental map of things I want to cover.

SXSW

View more presentations from David Cohn.

Also a few of us are organizing a journo-meetup on Sunday at 5pm at Opal Divine’s  – 700 W sixth St. I’m told everyone organizes something at Sunday at 5pm. Furthermore that everyone does it at Opal’s – so it should basically just be a bar where we will run into each other.

From here I’ll be going down to Columbia Missouri to visit the Reynolds Institute of Journalism. No doubt I’ll speak with more interesting journo-media-folk. I’ll try and grab some video/photos to share later. I used to make sure that at every conference I went to I would grab one good interview – even if it was five minutes nonchalant. Lately I’ve let that practice go. I hope to revive it.

There is lots going on in the life of Digidave. I also hope to revamp this website. Spot.Us though remains priority number one!

I have been a bad personal blogger as a result of this priority. I can’t say it will change dramatically anytime soon and I think most folks who follow this blog understand that and support what I’m doing with my work. Still – I owe you more.

Also note: I have started a more quirky personal blog: Digidave’s Quickies. These are mostly cool videos, links, etc. That space will be for personal rants, raves, links and more. I’ll keep this one more professional and of course the MOST professional stuff will be on Spot.Us since – that’s what I do in my day-to-day.

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