The Digital Storytelling Association opens its doors. This is the group forming out of the key people and energy from the Digital Storytelling Festival that used to take place every year in Crested Butte, Colorado, organized by the late and much-missed Dana Atchley. Here’s the group’s definition of digital storytelling. Operating for now out of Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen’s Center for Digital Storytelling but international in scope and ambition, this association should serve as a useful resource for anyone interested in using digital tools to tell personal stories — which would at this point include quite a large portion of the species.
Archives for November 2002
Salon Blog watch
Amanda Brightwell of Everything That Sucks sends a message to that guy in the Mercedes Benz.
The Raven takes apart Gregg Easterbrook’s Wired piece on “The New Convergence.”
Paul Hinrichs says it’s time for W. and Vlad to get it on already.
Barbaric Yawp’s Christopher Key offers a bit of autobiography, from Vietnam to business magazine-editing.
Necrolicious: Blogging about death.
Driver 8: “Salon’s status as last man standing after 7 years of New Economy boom-and-bust has made it an attractive pi𠳡 to pummel.” But we haven’t busted open yet…
Don’t miss your regular Salon Blogs Tour of Quality courtesy of Mark at Fried Green Al-Qaedas.
Delisting
I’m getting concerned e-mails from bloggers and readers regarding Salon’s delisting from the NASDAQ Small Cap market.
Here are some things to know:
(1) Salon’s stock is still traded, now on the OTC Bulletin Board.
(2) The delisting does not affect our day-to-day operations.
You can read our FAQ on the listing issue here, and our press release here.
Since Salon is a publicly traded company there are necessary limits and constraints on what I can say here. You might want to read David Talbot’s recent letter from the editor for a review of the past record of doomsaying about Salon’s future.
Boxing corner
Computer manufacturers are forever trying to come up with new ways to get us to put their boxes in our living rooms and integrate them with our stereos, TVs and home theaters. Doing so makes sense technologically, with the advent of MP3, online video and so forth; but it has never made sense aesthetically. Apple is the only computer maker to have ever addressed this issue head on (Gateway’s home-entertainment PCs have always struck me as laughable). But this thing strikes me as a step forward: It’s packed with geek appeal but looks more at home with a stereo or TV than your typical ATX Tower beige box. [Link
courtesy Gizmodo]
Lisa Guernsey’s blog
Lisa Guernsey, the New York Times Circuits reporter, has a new Radio blog focusing in part on the ins and outs of the search-engine biz.
Asia Business
Rich’s Asia Business Intelligence is going strong, with lots of commentary and news on China in particular. Today’s post: accounting reform — coming to China?
User comment
Mike Pence wonders why Salon doesn’t couple user/reader comment/feedback more closely to our articles:
Don’t miss the user’s comments — they add so much to the value of the content of online magazines like K5.
The loose coupling between Table Talk and Salon causes Salon to be missing this entire dimension of content — user comments linked directly to a story, including the ability of other users to rate the comments of their peers. |
Answering Mike involves a little bit of a detour through Salon’s history, but I think it’s worth it, so here goes.
When we started Salon we thought Table Talk would be the place where visitors to our site would go to comment on our articles. We envisioned links at the end of every article pointing to discussions in TT, and we included them for some time. But we quickly learned several things: The people in TT were mostly not that interested in talking about Salon articles; they were extremely interested in talking, but wanted to talk about what they wanted to talk about.
At the same time, we discovered that our readers were inundating us with literally hundreds of e-mails every day responding to the articles we ran. (This was true even before we included the “send us a letter to the editor” link at the end of most articles.)
We chose — I think wisely — not to try to push the river: We let TT evolve in the direction its users were taking it, and since the readers of Salon articles were deciding to use e-mail to respond, we started running their responses on letters-to-the-editor pages.
When we started Salon in 1995 there was no Slashdot or Slashcode and the availability of any kind of software for organizing user interactivity was extremely limited, particularly on the platform we then used (Mac servers!). In the intervening years this realm has of course exploded with cool innovations. Meanwhile, Table Talk has gone through its own evolution, most recently becoming a pay-to-post forum — a move we had to undertake for financial reasons (advertising support for such user forums has largely evaporated since the popping of the Web-industry bubble). And our flow of letters-to-the-editor remains huge.
To return to Mike’s point, we’re still interested in finding better ways to yoke the user-response to the original content. But we can’t simply move Salon onto an existing platform like Slashcode or any of the similar software packages out there, for all sorts of reasons. (We’d have to rebuild our existing content management system, ad serving software, and so on.) So we have an ongoing project here to move our existing letters-to-the-editor model onto one that is more user-directed — there’d be a script-generated letters page corresponding to each article, and users could post their responses themselves. (Other sites do this without calling it “letters”; I think we just like that label’s heritage, its connection with the old print world that Salon grew out of.)
Nothing revolutionary here, for sure — this is something lots of sites do. We’d be catching up. In any case, this plan is on the drawing board, waiting its turn while our stalwart production team deals with other, more immediately pressing projects. My hunch is we’ll have it in place sometime this winter or at latest next spring.
One note tune; see SPOT crash?
Since Microsoft is the only company left in this tech-industry depression with the money and the ambition to conduct real research and push new types of products, it pretty much gets to call the shots at events like the now-humbled, on-the-verge-of-bankruptcy COMDEX. Bill Gates kicked the conference off with one product announcement that strikes me as fascinating and one that seems ludicrous.
On the interesting side there’s Microsoft One-Note, slated for a mid-2003 release. This is a new twist on the PIM (“personal information manager”) that sounds like it might be fun and useful. (It’s tied in various ways to Microsoft’s new Tablet PC initiative, but don’t hold that against it.) PCs have never done a great job at collecting one’s notes, and note-organizing software like Ecco and Info-Select have never really seized the public imagination. Most of us still use pad and paper. If One-Note does half the things it promises — and if Microsoft doesn’t lock it down too tightly into the company’s use-all-our-products-together template — it could be important.
On the ludicrous side there’s a new Microsoft initiative called “small personal object technology” — or SPOT. Here’s one report:
The most bizarre announcement was saved for last, which Gates described as the culmination of an idea that began three years ago.
He informed the audience that Microsoft’s Smart Personal Object Technology group has been looking at embedding intelligence into small, everyday devices. Gates showed off a range of fridge magnets, key chains and wristwatches that are automatically updated with the time, current weather and the latest news. More information was promised at next January’s Consumer Electronic Show. Gates said that the company hopes to ship a smart alarm clock based on the technology next year. It always tells the right time, gives a default wake up time based on user patterns, and checks the weather, traffic and news to calculate the user’s journey time to work. |
Typically, the problem with all such “smart device” projects is that the device is too small and too poorly designed to have an intelligible interface. So that in order to program it to do what you want you have to cycle through ridiculous “modes” by punching little tiny buttons, or spend hours reading an instruction manual that has been translated, poorly, from the language spoken by the engineers who created it. I guess the coolness of Dick Tracy watches remains a powerful lure to geeks everywhere, but I will be shocked if SPOT proves anything but a great big money-hole for Microsoft.