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Archives for September 2007

After Times Select: how do you support a big newsroom online?

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The demise of Times Select (see previous post) has served as a milestone moment for the continuing debate over the future of news online. Kara Swisher says it’s inevitable now that her paper, the Wall Street Journal, will follow the Times and tear down its pay gate. Jay Rosen offers a good overview of the discussion. His conclusion is optimistic:

I think real value is in weaving yourself into the Web. “Conversation” is blogger’s shorthand for that larger idea…. Advertising tied to search means open gates for all users. It means link rot cut to zero, playing for the long haul in Web memory and more blogs because they are Web-sticky.

If you read me here you know I agree. But of course there’s a “but.” And the “but” is all about money. The “but” is something that many of the believers in the bloggy future of news don’t always confront head on.

When you accept that the future for news on the Web is open and does not include much subscription revenue, you also have to accept that your revenue online isn’t going to match your old revenue; it won’t support as many full-time staff. Maybe it will improve steadily, but I don’t think it will ever reach the equivalent of print.

This is basic economics: in most cities, newspapers were monopolies or near-monopolies on paper for the last few decades. They’ll never be monopolies online. Or maybe a very small number (2 or 3) newspapers will become near-monopolies online by establishing their brand and authority — surviving into the Web age while the rest of their peers die off, as the Web replicates for the entire U.S. the same process of consolidation that happened, city by city, in the second half of the 20th century.

I write this with some experience from the trenches at Salon, where we had what I would consider hands-on, ahead-of-the-curve experience in trying to support an online-only newsroom with online-only revenue. For all Salon’s quality and achievements, that has always been an uphill fight.

Institutions like the Times will face the battle with all sorts of resources Salon lacked. Still: the near-monopoly newspaper always had subscription revenue, display ad revenue and classified revenue to bank on. Google ads can’t match that today, and probably not for a long, long time. Display ads placed on pages readers find through Google are better. But right now, all of the online advertising an open newspaper Web site can garner is at best icing on the old three-layer cake. If that’s all you need, great. But each of those three old revenue streams has already started to dwindle, and if you take the long view and accept that they’re all likely to vanish eventually, then you face inevitable shrinkage.

None of this is any argument for simply behaving as if the Web weren’t here and rolling up a drawbridge against change. It is instead an exhortation for both sides of the whither-journalism debate — the blogosphere and citizen’s journalism believers, and the old-school newsroom brigade — to come to terms with the bottom line of the journalism business today.

We know that the old newspaper business is on the way out. (We don’t know how fast but we know where things are heading.) We knew how to pay for newsrooms under the old business. But we still don’t have much of a clue how to take a newspaper-scale newsroom and support it on the Web.

Given all this, I think it’s important not to sugarcoat things. Even a well-managed transition from print to Web will diminish newspapers and shrink newsrooms. It’s understandable that newspaper workers are fearful: their jobs are indeed on the line.

If their profession has a future — and of course it does — the answers for how to support that future are unlikely to come from the sort of old-line newsroom management that gave us Times Select and so many other ill-fated big media schemes on the Web. It will come instead from some of the thousand and one little experiments in the Web journalism business that are flowering today.

Spolsky on Web app development

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Joel Spolsky’s latest essay, “Strategy Letter VI,” offers a smart analogy between the desktop software wars of the 1980s — when companies like Lotus bet on producing code that could run on the slow, small-memory machines of the present, only to lose as PCs got faster, quick — and the Web-based software wars of today.

I think the following passage about Web-app development today could even be read as a (partial, qualified) endorsement of Big Ball of Mud:

The developers who put a lot of effort into optimizing things and making them tight and fast will wake up to discover that effort was, more or less, wasted, or, at the very least, you could say that it “conferred no long term competitive advantage,” if you’re the kind of person who talks like an economist.

The developers who ignored performance and blasted ahead adding cool features to their applications will, in the long run, have better applications.

[tags]joel spolsky, web development[/tags]

Times kills for-pay service — till next downturn

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It’s hard to argue with the New York Times’ decision to tear down the ill-fated Times Select pay wall. (Here’s the paper’s letter to readers.) I never really understood the logic behind the for-pay service, launched in 2005, at a perfect counter-cyclical moment, just as everyone else on the Web was finally realizing that online advertising was beginning to fulfill the outsized promises made a decade before.

At Salon, we were more in sync with the Web’s business cycle: we started offering a for-pay service in early 2001, as we saw ad revenue heading into the toilet. In more recent years, as the ad revenue opportunity swelled, the company ratcheted down its subscription efforts.

So the Times is acknowledging a reality: that, for better or worse, charging for news content online is nearly impossible. The product is available in great abundance, for free, and the extra edge of brand and (frequent, though not guaranteed) quality that an institution like the Times offers is not enough to transmute into paying customers. (Watch Rupert Murdoch flip his abacus to the same conclusion at his newly purchased Wall Street Journal.) The Times was especially foolish in thinking that its columnists were the thing that people would most pay for — when commentary is the form of journalism in greatest over-supply on today’s Web.

Still, let’s be honest: the Web industry is cyclical. No one knows when this decade’s tide of froth will peak. (This event suggests we may be nearing the crest.) But someday it will. It will be 2001 all over again. And at that point all the execs who have been staking their careers on the promise of online advertising will stare at their dwindling quarterly returns and wonder why they hadn’t banked some subscription revenue as a hedge against a downturn.

It is this form of continuous knee-jerk reaction to market fluctuation that dooms the dinosaurs of today’s news business. These companies, like their companions in the broadcast and movie and publishing industries, seem to be incapable of taking risks and making long-term bets on new businesses. So they’re stuck in this dance of death, circling in the quest for a business model, always a little behind the curve.

Of course the Times, and the Journal, and institutions of similar scale and value will survive in some form. But they will never be as important tomorrow as they were yesterday. They can’t help viewing technology transitions as threats. So companies with no “legacy” revenue streams to protect will seize the opportunities that they can’t.

MORE: Jeff Jarvis’s commentary. Staci Kramer’s analysis. At O’Reilly, Jimmy Guterman, too, wonders what will happen to these companies in the next Net advertising dip.
[tags]journalism, media business, new york times, times select[/tags]

Code Reads #12: “Big Ball of Mud”

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Code ReadsThis is the twelfth edition of Code Reads, a series of discussions of some of the central essays, documents and texts in the history of software. You can go straight to the comments and post something if you like. Here’s the full Code Reads archive.

“Big Ball of Mud,” a 1999 paper by Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder (pdf), sets out to anatomize what it calls “the enduring popularity” of the pattern of software construction named in its title, “this most frequently deployed of software architectures,” “the de-facto standard software architecture,” “the architecture that actually predominates in practice”: a “haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape and baling wire, spaghetti-code jungle.”

This is dire stuff, and when I first glanced at “Big Ball of Mud” I thought I was in for an amusing satire — perhaps a parody of the “software patterns” school. Instead — and what I found most fascinating about the paper — the authors actually walk a fine and narrow line between a Swiftian embrace of the mud-splat school of programming and the sort of “we know better than all those idiots” arrogance that’s found in a lot of the software literature.

Despite the best efforts of “best practices” advocates and methodology gurus, mud is everywhere you look in the software field. This cannot be a coincidence or represent mere laziness. The authors ask, “What are the people who are building [Big Balls of Mud] doing right?”

Their answer: “People build big balls of mud because they work. In many domains, they are the only things that have been shown to work.”
[Read more…]

Computer reuse center needs help

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A brief note to express my support for the Alameda County Computer Resource Center, an outfit not far from my home that has done creative work over the years in restoring and finding new homes for donated or broken electronic equipment that would otherwise be headed to landfill. I’ve donated my share of stuff to the ACCRC over the years. Now it seems that the center has been targeted by a government inspector for technical infractions of the regulations regarding recycling centers.

I’m no expert in that area of the law. But I know a good organization when I see it. ACCRC is such an outfit. If there are issues or problems with how ACCRC does its thing the government should be helping it achieve compliance, not threatening to shut it down.

Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly has the scoop. You can also read ACCRC founder James Burgett’s version of the saga. I’ve already written to the state agency involved; Burgett’s blog has more info.
[tags]recycling, reuse, alameda county computer resource center[/tags]

Nothing to fear but complexity itself

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Over my many years at Salon — in my role as the geekiest of our editorial management team — I found myself often being asked whether some particular problem we were having with our site or our email system or something else might be the result of “hackers.”

Most of the time, I spared my inquisitors the lecture on the history and proper use of that term. Except in a tiny number of cases where there was specific evidence suggesting at least the possibility of some sort of foul play, I’d simply remind everyone how many different things could go wrong on any digital network, argue that the odds favored the likelihood of some sort of malfunction rather than malfeasance, and suggest that everyone should relax (except for our sysadmins, of course, who were busy trying to diagnose the problem).

Bugs are many, break-ins are few. John Schwartz had a good piece in the Times earlier this week offering further reinforcement of that perspective, looking specifically at the transportation system and the slow-motion train wreck of the effort to computerize our voting systems.

…Problems arising from flawed systems, increasingly complex networks and even technology headaches from corporate mergers can make computer systems less reliable. Meanwhile, society as a whole is growing ever more dependent on computers and computer networks, as automated controls become the norm for air traffic, pipelines, dams, the electrical grid and more.

“We don’t need hackers to break the systems because they’re falling apart by themselves,” said Peter G. Neumann, an expert in computing risks and principal scientist at SRI International, a research institute in Menlo Park, Calif.

It was this tension between our social dependence on complex software systems and our continuing inability to produce software in a reliable way that motivated me to write Dreaming in Code.
[tags]complexity, john schwartz, software development, dreaming in code[/tags]

Quicktime: we own your desktop

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Apologies for slow blogging. Been working in parallel on a number of important tracks. Some interesting stuff coming up shortly. In the meantime, I will trouble you with this rant on a trivial annoyance.

If you use a Windows computer for any period of time, your system tray — the little box next to your clock on your task bar — will get clogged up with a million and one icons you don’t need or care about. The tray is useful for stuff like “safely remove hardware”, but it’s stupid as a location for applications. That’s what the “quick launch” icons are for; that’s what your “start” menu is for; that’s what any number of other utilities are for. When an application pushes its icon into the system tray it’s almost always redundant — a case of corporate overreach.

So when renegade applications insist on putting their icons in the system tray anyway, in a sort of desktop manifest destiny policy, I get peeved, and I try to figure out how to banish them. Usually, though not always, it’s possible.

I hate to think of something as routine and plumbing-like as Quicktime as a renegade application, but in this way, at least, it is. I went through the “get this thing out of my tray” routine with Quicktime a long time ago; I found the “preferences/advanced” dialogue that let me express my wishes; I did so and thought that was the end of it.

Today, suddenly, it turned up again. I soon realized I’d recently allowed Apple’s auto-update install a new version of Quicktime. OK, I’m willing to turn this sort of routine patching and maintenance over to the software companies — I’d rather they worry about it than have to worry about it myself.

But how rude is it to overwrite a user’s preferences and force the reappearance of an annoying icon that you’ve already ordered the program to suppress? Why does Apple do this stuff? To me this is just one tiny but telling instance of the company’s perpetual dance between delivering useful innovations and behaving as a desktop Big Brother that pretends to know better than you do what you really want.

Me? I just want Apple to keep its fingers out of my system tray.
[tags]apple, quicktime, software, interface design[/tags]

Chatting with Josh Kornbluth

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Last Saturday morning I visited the nearby KPFA studios to chat with my old friend Josh Kornbluth, who was guest hosting the “Morning Talkies” show. It was a lot of fun sharing a radio studio with Josh again — we’d collaborated many years ago, in Cambridge, on an ebullient but slapdash variety show that was plagued by all sorts of live-radio mishaps. Something about our on-air reunion seemed to summon that spirit; as we started our interview, someone barged into the studio and began hauling boxes out on a dolly. Before she was done she’d even tried to nab my tote bag. It threw us off track for a spell, but we managed to regain our composure and have a great chat about Dreaming in Code, blog-reading addiction, and how to manage one’s informational diet.

You can listen to the show here. The same hour features two other great guests: Gray Brechin, author of “Imperial San Francisco,” talking about the Living New Deal project; and Berkeley philosophy professor John Campbell on the nature of perception and questions like, do colors have any reality independent of our individual perceptions? (I’m a little late posting about this — busy round here right now — but better late than never!)
[tags]dreaming in code, kpfa, josh kornbluth[/tags]

Ecco Pro — back from the dead, again

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Longtime readers here know of my interest in the subject of outliners and in particular my dedication to an old program called Ecco Pro. I used it as my main organizer for my first book, and now, as I begin work on a new one, I find myself turning to it once again. (If you want to understand why, Andrew Brown’s recent piece in the Guardian offers a thorough explanation.)

Ecco devotees long hoped the program might be open-sourced, but the hopes never materialized. Nonetheless, in one of those twists and turns that keep the software world interesting, there has been much movement in the Ecco world in recent months — and, even without the code being open-sourced, there’s the first significant new work on the program in years.

Here, as far as I can tell, is what happened: A programmer who goes by the handle “slangmgh” posted a message to the Yahoo Group “ecco_pro” on April 16th: “I write little utility, have upload to the files directory! It’s only work for EccoPro v4.01.”

The file was called “EccoPro extension.” It included a half-dozen significant fixes and upgrades to the program. A day later, he’d uploaded a 1.1 version of his “little utility.” Today, he is on 3.6 or so. His furious pace of development has involved, if I understand correctly, the incorporation of the Lua scripting language into the extension. It’s all made possible by the essential solidity of the original program and the API hooks its creators provided — so that, even though the original Ecco code can’t be changed, it can still be built upon.

The only downside to the whole thing is that “slangmgh” is plainly not a native English speaker and so his explanations of the changes and features are sometimes difficult to follow. In recent weeks, other members of the Ecco support group have stepped forward to provide better documentation.

There you have it: an orphaned program that hasn’t been touched in a decade but that still has a devoted community of users suddenly starts evolving again in the hands of an energetic programmer. I don’t know where the Ecco story will ultimately lead but I’m delighted to see it still unfolding.
[tags]ecco pro, pims, outliners[/tags]