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Yahoo goes scrum

July 24, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Buried at the tail end of yet another which-portal’s-on-top? feature in the Times is this interesting tidbit about software development practices at Yahoo:

Meanwhile, Yahoo says it is now trying to emulate Google’s faster method of creating products. Like most big companies, it used to develop software by first creating a comprehensive design that defined how features would be written and tested. Instead, it is now trying what is known as a scrum method, where it will plan, build and test parts of a product every 30 days.

“We may not know how everything fits together,” Mr. Patel said. But by creating partly completed products that can be shown to customers, “We can get insights from users and react to that over a three- or four-month period to put it all together,” he said.

Scrum is a species of agile software development in which the development team, among other things, holds quick daily meetings and delivers new bits of functioning software on very short schedules. It’s all about “moving the ball forward,” scrum expert Ken Schwaber says.

Filed under: Dreaming in Code, Software, Technologyreport an error
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Dabble launches

July 24, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Dabble, the new service for sharing Web videos that Mary Hodder has been developing, just launched. Think Flickr for video, but without the hosting of content and a more sophisticated focus on sharing “finds” than Youtube offers. I’m looking forward to experimenting with it.

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Paella at Andrew’s

July 23, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

It’s been a decade or so, I think, that I’ve been attending the midsummer backyard bashes that my friend and colleague Andrew Leonard throws for his friends and colleagues to celebrate his birthday each year. These events are extraordinary outpourings of hospitality, good cheer and culinary excess. (Several years ago, a whole pig was buried in the yard and cooked over coals.)

This year the centerpiece was a paella that Max Garrone cooked up in a colossal shallow metal pan that must have been a yard in diameter. I am still savoring its flavor — and I don’t even really like bivalves. Above you’ll see the dish in all its beauty.

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Dean

July 22, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

This link is for Dean! Congratulations to Steven Johnson on the birth of his third boy.

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Short attention span theater of war

July 21, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Today, Lebanon; yesterday, Iraq; the day before, Afghanistan.

There’s no question to me that the Bush administration has a kind of global attention deficit disorder. Any large organization has difficulty keeping its eye on more than one ball, but the Bush White House is a special case. It’s clear that one reason the U.S. project in Afghanistan is now faltering is that the administration stopped paying much attention to it soon after Bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora. “On to Baghdad!” was the cry then.

Iraq has held White House attention for a good long time — unsurprisingly given the enormous investment of money and blood and credibility in a misbegotten misadventure. But now, as American goals disappear into the mist of implausibility and Iraq sinks into the confusion of a sputtering civil war, Iraq, too, has become yesterday’s problem — displaced on the front burner by the alarming escalation of Israel’s war with Hezbollah and Hamas.

Watch in coming weeks as the diplomatic energies of the Bush team, such as they are, concentrate on Israel and Lebanon. We don’t talk with Syria or Iran so there isn’t that much diplomacy to do right now. But the potential for wider regional war is dangerous, and the White House’s ability to juggle multiple problems isn’t impressive, and to the extent anyone in Washington has any imagination and energy left to try to nudge the world towards peace, for the moment it will be aimed at the Israeli/Arab conflict.

In the past, each time the Iraq situation has seemed to be deteriorating, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have patched together some sort of face-saving event (A turkey for the troops! A government that only took six months to form after the elections!) to maintain an illusion of progress. I think it’s quite likely that Iraq will deteriorate as the Lebanon crisis continues, and I also think this time the U.S. is going to be stuck without a rabbit to pull out of the hat.

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NYT NSFW

July 21, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg 2 Comments

Back in 2003 my jaw dropped to find the word “asses” on the New York Times’ front page. Today, it dropped again: There, in Tom Friedman’s column, was the full quotation from President Bush’s now notorious open-mike moment at the summit in Russia in all its barnyard epithet glory. The Times hadn’t published Bush’s “shit” in its news columns, which bowdlerized the president, referring to his choice word as “a vulgarity.” But Friedman boldly seized the four-letter moment in his op-ed column. I assume this is some by-product of the bureaucratic Maginot Line that separates the Times’ news department from its editorial and op-ed pages.

It used to be that the niceties were supposed to be observed in newspapers because of the old “breakfast table” argument and related “protect the children” rationales. In an era when the breakfast table (and the kids) are treated to depressingly regular displays of mangled corpses, grieving relatives and collateral-damage rubble, those niceties simply seem out of touch with reality.

POSTSCRIPT: Lance Knobel points us to this fascinating post by Benjamin Zimmer on the Language Log, chronicling the Times’ publication (in transcript, though not in news columns) of “shit” as used by Nixon on the Watergate tapes. A.M. Rosenthal then made clear that the Gray Lady was not swooning into the gutter, saying “We’ll only take shit from the President.”

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Pew Study: Bloggers ‘r’ us

July 21, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg 2 Comments

I’ve been reading and digesting the new Pew study of bloggers (page, PDF) that’s been making headlines this week. The study’s central finding — that the majority of bloggers are in it as a creative personal outlet, blog occasionally rather than obsessively and don’t seek or expect mass readership — come as no surprise. But the coverage, along with portions of the report itself, reveals some confusion about the relationship between blogging and journalism. Let’s dig in.

Take that Chronicle story. Its lead tells us that we think that bloggers are “pajama-wearing partisan ranters” who “fancy themselves a new type of journalist.” Now, thanks to Pew, we can see that in fact bloggers are “more like Christina Palsky,” who “blogs as a creative outlet and does not fancy herself a journalist.”

Note that we are being told that there’s an either/or situation here: Either you’re a wannabe-journalist partisan ranter who dreams of making a big splash or you’re a creative diarist who blogs for friends and relatives.

This misses the most interesting characteristic of blogging (and the Pew report, though less oversimplified than the Chronicle piece, misses it too): because of the nature of the Web, any posting to a little public diary can, under the right circumstances, end up in a national or global spotlight. Every “I’m just doing it for myself” blogger is a potential journalist. If you’re in the right (or wrong) place and time — when the next tsunami hits, say, or the next Rodney King incident unfolds — and you decide to write about it or post photos or video, you’re a journalist, whether you think of yourself as one or not. You’re witnessing events and telling the world about them. And the Web’s structure means that the information you provide can spread quickly and widely.

At its worst, if people see blogging as a competition for the spotlight, this potential could drive people to do dumb things to attract attention. This happens, but it’s hardly epidemic. At its best, it creatively blurs the boundaries of the old mass-market news world. Every “consumer” of news is also a potential producer.

I am saying nothing new here. It’s just strange to see the Pew report — and the discussion around it — fail to take note of the obvious.

Filed under: Blogging, Mediareport an error
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