News

I've lately been interested in journalism topics.. despite not posting here in quite a while, which I guess shows a sort of disinterest in "citizen journalism".

In any event, in my opinion it's fairly simple to create a "good enough" news organization - and I purposely don't specify the media because I believe the media part of it to be irrelevant. Here are my criteria:

1. Be accurate. I want news that I can trust to be factual.
2. Cover it in depth. I can read headlines anywhere. When I get interested I will look into it more deeply.
3. Make it easy for me to get your news in whatever media I want.
4. Don't waste my time asking me useless questions ("will it rain tomorrow? We'll let you know after the break/this word/the fold")

It's just that simple.

"Good Enough" programming

Look, I'm not exactly a Web Developer, having spent most of my career bending mainframes to my will (while mainframes can and do perform Web duties, my job is to install the software making it happen, not the applications) - but this post by Tim Bray, who IS very knowledgable in web development, resonates with my "good enough" meme.

It appears to me that the RESTful and LAMP techniques, which you can certainly read about in a hundred different places should you be interested, are the application development embodiment of "good enough". This is also stated elsewhere (probably again by the inimitable Mr. Bray) as "the simplest thing that could possibly work". The WS- stuff, however, is at the other end of the spectrum, being dependent upon the definition of a bunch of complex standards and specification. Which isn't to say that it won't work - but if you want an analogy, REST and LAMP are the 32" color TV you bought cheaply this year, to replace something else, and which shows the game quite well thank you, whereas WS- stuff is the multiple-thousand-dollar plasma screen which also does the same thing.

Beyond that, there's also the resource cost of developing in these technolgies: these days, people doing the down-and-dirty development work of applications for businesses know that their application may have a short shelf life: business needs change very quickly, and therefore the software does too. Why spend all that money developing WS-compliant stuff if you're just going to throw it out later? Use something instead that's "good enough" to get the job done, and move on!

Comments

A quick post to say I've adjusted comment settings to hopefully stop the comment spammers.. who are not "good enough" by a long shot.

Further cell phone calendar stuff...

In a previous post I mentioned using my cell phone to carry calendar information. I just did this for a conference I was attending. It was, in fact "good enough" for carrying the schedule I intended to follow, and when I did follow it, it worked pretty well other than trying to read a smallish screen. However, when things changed such as a breakout session being cancelled, the UI of the phone wasn't the best for making updates. Possibly a Treo-like device with more of a keyboard-like interface would work better, if anyone reading this has experience in that vein, let me know in the comments.

Cell phone as organizer, again

Well, I was wrong. In a previous post, I said that you couldn't load calendar items to my phone.

Turns out, you can, but it's a convoluted process.

First, you have to have the items in Outlook - no other calendar program will do. Second, you have to, as with contact information, export the calendar items you want to a comma-separated values file. Third, when you export, you have to tell it to use the defaults so that all the default fields, whatever they are, are exported - if you try to use only the fields that the phone software can contain, you won't be able to import, because it will tell you it's not a valid Outlook file. Then fourth, with the phone connected to your PC and while running the desktop software from the phone manufacturer, import the calendar file.

And in a spectacularly brain-dead design, the calendar in the phone is replaced by the items you imported! There's no merging, the calendar is wiped out and re-written with what you just imported, so be sure to select all the items you want in the phone.

So, now I have to decide whether or not to start using Outlook for organization, just so I can get stuff to my phone.. more later.

Further television thoughts...

So, Congress is debating giving networks until 2008 to completely cut over to digital from analog television. While I like the display of high-def television, I think by 2008 no one will care whether it's "broadcast" digitally. IPTV, or television sent over Internet Protocols, will be a major competitor to broadcast and cable by then.

Here's my thought on how it will go:

First, more and more people jump on the broadband wagon, mostly via cable modem as opposed to DSL but the method doesn't really matter.

Second, Tivo and media PCs are set up to receive content via an Ethernet connection Tivo-to-Go pretty much enables this already. So does BitTorrent, and there are others.

Third, the inexpensive "TV-out" cards you can get have s-video, DVI, etcetera as output . Bypassing the tuner provides a picture on an analog set that's "good enough" (you knew I had to get it in there!) for most people. HDTV output is already appearing, too. Possibly instead of adding a card to your computer there'll be a "converter" - wireless or cabled, but you plug it into the component/s-video input of your TV, the other receives output from your computer.

Put it all together, and you have time-shifted and space-shifted television where people can watch what they want on the schedule they want, much like Tivo (or EXACTLY like Tivo if Tivo jumps on this method) but the middleman of the cable company or broadcaster is eliminated.

The method of paying the content creators is yet to be determined: will we have ads and product placements embedded in shows, or will we subscribe to shows we want for a per-show price? Will we get Yahoo!TV Unlimited for $10 per month?

I don't know for sure how fast this will happen, of course, but I do know it is already happening, it's just a matter of which media companies will survive it.

Thoughts on television

When will television producers begin to get it?

A new show comes along, that people like to watch (pick your own example, because I don't want to single one out) and they start watching that instead of other stuff that's on. The year after, there are 10 shows like it! The main reason we watch the new show, however, is because it's different from everything else. If they'd just grasp that simple fact, perhaps we'd have a broad spectrum of innovative programming to watch rather than having to choose from among several clones of the same concept.

Update on the cell phone / organizer issue

In this post I hypothesized that the cell phone would be better than the organizer. It is, in fact, better.

The desktop software enable me to export some contacts from Palm Desktop - of course in the lingua franca of data exchange the comma-delimited file, rather than some contact standard - and import them into the Desktop program for the phone, then sync them to the phone. A cumbersome process, but it works. Maybe there's a better way but I haven't found it yet.

It's got one nagging problem - you can't download schedule items from the PC software, only contacts. If I want a schedule item on the phone, I have to enter it by hand, which is not only a pain but violates one of my cardinal rules: if data is in a computer, one should never have to re-enter it to move it to another computer (and your cell phone is a computer, nake no mistake about that). So, I'll have to see what can be done about that, but otherwise the cell phone is "good enough".