sances.info

This should be fun. The Boston Globe has added a comment feature to select articles. But for a week or so after introducing it, these select articles would feature a box with "Comments ()" at the top of the article, with an empty parentheses where the actual number of comments used to be, and an empty space at the bottom of the article, where the comments themselves would be displayed.

As of today they seem to have corrected what I would classify as a major embarrassment. (Imagine something similar happening in the print edition, day after day without being fixed.) Most of the articles draw few comments--and then we get to James Caroll's piece today on religious fundamentalism, and there are 25.

The New York Times reports (via the Associated Press) that the Wall Street Journal has begun offering its news stories free to Blackberry users. Almost makes me wish I didn't go with the iPhone, with its useless NY Times and Associated Press applications. However, don't expect this to be anything like a free PDF of the paper delivered to your Crackberry. According to the article,

Content will come from The Wall Street Journal Digital Network -- the newspaper's WSJ.com site along with MarketWatch.com, Barrons.com and AllThingsD.com. Users will have the option to pull content from other sources as well, including rival sites and blogs with Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, feeds.

In other words, it will be cluttered up with a bunch of useless crap that didn't actually appear in the print edition. Also:

The Journal, owned by News Corp.'s Dow Jones & Co. unit, plans to begin showing ads from an unnamed advertiser beginning next month. There are no plans to charge for the WSJ.com Mobile Reader, although the company will eventually make some content available only to paying subscribers of its newspaper or Web site.

In other news-news, the NY Times has finally caught up to the Washington Post and included page numbers on articles appearing on its website--albeit in an almost invisible font and at the bottom of the page. Nevertheless, I noticed, and so did The Laboratorium blog.

Alright, one last unauthorized excerpt from Schmidt (which I've finished now) and I'll get back to fixing that front page feeds blog post, I promise.

Schmidt ends, as he begins, with a reference to newspapers and the audiences who read them:

"The Wall Street Journal is for decision-makers--not just those in business, but all decision-makers throughout a society that is dominated by business. Unlike the New York Times and other newspapers for wider audiences, and contrary to popular mythology, the Journal does not push the establishment's side in its reporting. It serves the establishment in a different way: by informing its members from an above-the-fray perspective, trusting them to come to their own conclusions. One of its most important functions is to give top managers the comprehensive social intelligence they must have if they are to boss their employees effectively and market to the public successfully. Thus the Journal keeps its subscribers up-to-date on contemporary sociology and popular culture, giving the bosses the intimate details of the lives and aspirations of individuals at each and every level of society, from skid row on up, while always quickly reporting on anyone who is doing something out of the ordinary. The fact that the Journal does not use photographs, together with the widespread but incorrect belief that it contains only boring financial data and articles that praise the system, help keep the wrong eyes from seeing the big picture." (278-279)

In other news, I think the Newseum has blocked my server's IP address to prevent me from scraping full-sized images of the New York Times front page. Understand that I was scraping the images once daily, copying them to my own server, to reduce the amount of hits to Newseum's servers. So if 100 people click "full size" on my Google gadget every day, the Newseum website isn't bogged down.

At work today I also successfully turned a non-syndicated web calendar into an iCal feed. Now that was a fun puzzle to solve.

"An unsatisfying work life is much more than a 40-hour-per-week problem, because of its profound effect on your morale while you are off the job. You may be pained to think of it as such, but your job is probably the biggest project of your life. It is probably the only activity to which you will ever devote the most alert of your waking hours with such disciplined regularity, day after day after day. During no other period of comparable length in your life will you make an effort of this magnitude on any project of your own. Thus, for all practical purposes, your life's work is at stake, and so it is understandable that your most serious struggles are to control it, not to sell it to the higher price.

"A work life controlled by others has severe and inevitable consequences, and accounts for much of the stress that individuals suffer. Powerlessness at work can mean many things, all of which are stressful: difficulty getting assigned to work that is interesting and creative, lack of control over (or even sight of) the end result of your work, lack of control over how to do your work and when to do it, close supervision, lack of control over the work environment, lack of privacy, vulnerability to sexual harassment, lack of respect, and job insecurity. This attractive package comes with the worry (although you try not to think about it) that your blood, sweat and tears are going into work of questionable social value, work whose bottom line is enriching some corporation, serving the military or bolstering some elite. People stuck with such unfulfilling work often find themselves engaging compulsively in any of a variety of escapes. The escapes themselves are a reliable sign of someone who lacks intrinsically satisfying work: anxiety eating, alcohol and drug use, compulsive buying, vegetating in front of the TV, total scheduling and extreme busyness--anything to avoid the pain of reflecting on your situation."

(Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds, 98-99)

"Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will"

-Rallying Cry of the Labor Movement

Via a noisy and half-useless e-mail list I came upon a website called NASPIR, Network of Activist Scholars of Politics and International Relations. An article on that site discussed a book called Disciplined Minds; I visited the website and was very interested by the introduction reprinted there. I checked the book out of the library last week. It's a great read, and I was struck in particular by the opening anecdote.

'No two people are allowed to read the same thing,' I said above the noise, gesturing toward the other passengers on the crowded subway car. My out-of-town visitor glanced around the clattering train. Indeed, the commuters hurtling toward their jobs in Manhattan's office buildings, restaurants, shops and other workplaces were reading such a wide variety of material that my joke almost held up. That typical weekday morning found riders engrossed in all kinds of magazines, paperback books, the Daily News, the Post, the Times, office documents, a software instruction book and, yes, the Bible. Those who weren't reading were listening to headphones, talking to others or, apparently, just thinking.

Seeing this every day on the subway set me up for a surprise one morning when I went to catch a suburban commuter train to Manhattan. I had stayed overnight in Westchester County, an upscale New York City Suburb where many executives and professionals live. I would be riding into the city with lawyers heading for big corporate law firms, financial analysts going to investment banks, editors bound for publishing conglomerates, as well as accoutants, journalists, doctors, architects, engineers, public relations specialists and a host of other proessionals. Boarding the train felt something like entering a library. There were no conversations even though nearly all the seats were occupied. Almost everyone was reading. But the dozens of passengers were reading only two things: the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. I could have formulated another joke about allowed reading matter, but the scene was too spooky, like the aftermath of an invasion of the body snatchers: everyone dressed the same, in suits, sitting silently in neat rows and columns, each holding up a large newspaper, absorbing the same information. (Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds, 9)

That "joke" sounds a little chilling reading it the third time here, that no two people are "allowed" to read the same thing. In general the image is reminiscent of the Beat the Press discussion I transcribed in my previous post.

It also made me think of a (2007) book manuscript on Internet politics by Matthew Hindman I just finished reading. Hindman to a large degree downplays the impact of blogging on politics and the media, arguing that the top political websites in terms of hits are big media sites such as the New York Times; and those bloggers that do receive a lot of visits tend to be former or current journalists, lawyers, white and male. I enjoyed his analysis, but thought he might be overlooking the aggregate hits of all lesser-known blogs and how that compares to the top 10 sites. For example, how many combined hits do the bottom 90 blogs get compared to the top 10? Isn't the point of Web 2.0 decentralization?

Then last week I read this article on Google releasing a new version of its RSS reader for the iPhone. I was particularly struck by the last paragraph, about who actually uses feed reader software.

Google Upgrades iPhone Reader

The newsreader offers many of the same features as Google's desktop version, but optimized for smaller mobile phone screens.

By Antone Gonsalves, InformationWeek
May 13, 2008
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=2076032...

Google has released a new beta version of its newsreader for the Apple iPhone.

Google, which released the first mobile phone version of its reader in 2006, said the latest version is for the iPhone and other smartphones with advanced browsers. The iPhone uses Apple's Safari browser.

The new reader, launched Monday, is designed to offer many of the same features as the desktop version, but with shortcuts for acting on items on the smaller mobile phone screens. People who have used list views in readers should find the interface familiar, Google said.

In scanning items, a person can simply tap on the one of interest to get an expanded view in place. Starring, sharing, and keeping unread items are also done in place, so a person never has to leave the list view or refresh the page. "We think it's a very fast way to power through your reading list," the company said in its reader blog.

People who have added the reader homepage module to their Google personalized homepage can access the reader by visiting google.com on the mobile phone's browser and clicking the link to "Personalized Home." Google launched a discussion group to get feedback from users.

Web-based newsreaders are used for checking blogs and story updates on a variety of news sites. RSS, or really simple syndication, is the content format news sites and blogs use to publish updates over the Internet.

A study conducted about a year ago by Web metrics firm HitWise found that newsreader users in the U.S. were mostly businesspeople and the technology savvy, not the typical Internet user. While the report was not conclusive, indicators showed that most people headed directly to the blogs and news sites for the latest info, rather than using an aggregator.

An interesting exchange from the May 2nd, 2008 broadcast of WGBH's Beat the Press, "Press Packet" segment.

Side note: I have been watching this show religiously since the Jayson Blair scandal, and have never seen an episode with more than one woman on the panel, excluding host Emily Rooney; and very rarely more than one minority. Why is that?

Snarky blogger comment: The reason it took me a week to type this up is that I had to edit out all the "uh's" and "yaknow's".

Joe Sciacca (Boston Herald): I think this notion that you take a newspaper and you simply take it and you sort of slap it into a website is just not the way it's going to be. It's a different vehicle for news, it looks different, writing for the web is different, because you're writing with key words that you want to be searched to get the hits; the web changes, it's a very fluid product. So that raises to me questions long term about the impact of a paper that goes entirely on the web--it's not going to be sitting on the board room table in the CEO's office, it's not going to be sitting on the Governor's desk. What's the impact in the community, what is lost when that happens? Those are I think open questions.

...

Kara Miller (Metrowest Daily News): I think newspapers are going to have to find a way of putting themselves on the web. I mean look, I write a column for a newspaper and yet nobody, none of my peers subscribe to a newspaper. It doesn't mean they don't read them--I get several artices a day e-mailed to me by people, they're like "look at this"--so they're reading the New York Times online or they're going to Boston.com, but people--and in terms of having a print product on the table in a CEO's boardroom, people have their Blackberrys now, they can read on their iPhones or whatever article they want, or they can say "hey look at this." So I think that's increasingly the direction things are going, so I think advertising's going to have to move to the web, and actually the Newspaper Association of America said that's up almost 20% in the last quarter, so that's a good sign.

...

Joe Sciacca: To me, the thing about a newspaper is, you see it on the street, you see it in the coffee shop, it's "there," it's ever-present, the headline is there. And so clearly something will be lost, the impact might be lost, and yet we've seen big stories break on the web, so we know there's hope that you can have an impact.