Leonid meteor showers peak tonight. Nasa info on viewing times is here. Boing Boing has more here.
Redesign ruckus
Jim Romenesko’s widely read media-industry blog — once known as Media Gossip and now, under the aegis of the Poynter Institute, published under the more staid Media News flag — hs just undergone a redesign, and the readers are howling. Where are the left-hand column links we loved? Why did they mess with a good thing? Why can’t I change the font size? The “feedback” feature doesn’t work right! And so on, and so on.
As a veteran of a half-dozen redesign projects, I think I can guess what was happening behind the scenes at Poynter: The project is rolling down the road, there’s a deadline that has been pushed back once or twice or three times and just can’t be pushed back any more, a lot of what the designers wanted to do is working and a lot still isn’t, the developers are working as hard as they can, and as the deadline approaches triage kicks in: You put up what’s working and you start prioritizing fixes.
As far as I could tell, the Media News redesign went live some time Friday morning and then went offline for most of the rest of that day — during which time my browser showed the old Thursday edition of the page, in the old design. Which suggests that this redesign launch, like most, hit a few bumps in the road.
What most people — even the savvy journalists who congregate at Romenesko’s site — don’t seem to get is that Website redesigns are nearly always slow-motion train wrecks. No matter how smart and experienced the people behind the redesign are, no matter how much testing you do, once you go live you encounter a million and one little problems. You spend the next several weeks fixing them. By the time you’re done, most of your readers have grown accustomed to the graphical and functional changes that first irked them. Many of them start to discover, and appreciate, the actual improvements that the redesign incorporated. The world moves on.
Meanwhile, much of the value in the redesign is often invisible to the public but of great import to the publishing organization — usually (if the managers have done their homework) there’s a more solid infrastructure in place, a good database is storing the content, and more flexible and speedier publishing tools are in the hands of the writers and editors who need them.
I’m not saying that the Poynter redesign is a big improvement, or that some of the complaints aren’t justified. I liked the “old” Romenesko too, probably because I was used to it. But mostly, I’m feeling empathy for the folks at Poynter.org, who I bet need some sleep right around now.
Democratic regrouping, redux
After the election I wrote about the need for the Democrats to accept that one reason they lost the election was the paucity of ideas emerging from their camp. Several readers and fellow bloggers wrote in with pointers and comments, plus the debate in comments on that post was extraordinary.
One point my colleague Joan Walsh makes — which I’m hoping she’ll elaborate on in a piece she’s now writing — is that the Democrats have plenty of think tanks and plenty of ideas, but there seems to be a problem getting the ideas into the mouths and heads of the party’s leaders.
The One True Bix points to this article from The Hill about Democratic think tanks.
Dave Johnson wrote in to recommend the new Web site of the Commonweal Institute.
Several people wrote in to point to the Apple “Switch” ad parody at Working for Change. Clever as it is, it feels rather more desperate than funny to me.
Wyman vs. Wyman
Our old colleague Bill Wyman — formerly arts editor here at Salon and now at the Atlanta Journal Constitution — always took his share of ribbing for the name he shared with a certain bass-playing Stone. But this takes the cake: A lawyer for the other Wyman sent Bill a cease-and-desist letter for using his own name. Bill used the opportunity to write a funny piece.
Big Brother redux
William Safire’s must-read column today reprises the reporting John Markoff did last week on the government’s plans for a master database of personal information. You thought online marketers were bad? Admiral John Poindexter (of Iran-contra scandal fame) is spearheading a plan — it’s currently a part of the Homeland Security Act, which is seemingly on the verge of passage into law — for “Total Information Awareness,” a centralized federal spy database with dossiers on every U.S. citizen.
It’s significant that the outcry against this plan is hailing not just from the left but from civil-libertarian conservatives like Safire. Safire, of course, served as a speechwriter in the Nixon White House, where routine abuse of FBI files on American citizens was the order of the day. That era’s rampant and hideous misuse of government surveillance for private political ends should stand as a reminder of the perils in Poindexter’s plan.
(Different Strings has posts on this issue here and here, as well.)
Bin Laden pipes up
So Osama bin Laden breaks his radio silence with an audiotape. Experts tell us it seems to be real and it seems to be bin Laden himself. It makes reference to recent events so it is unlikely to have been recorded a long time ago.
My colleague Joe Conason will have a lengthier piece on this up later this evening. In the mean time, various press accounts have wondered why we are hearing but not seeing the al-Qaida leader. For instance, here’s Nicholas Kulish in the Wall St. Journal: “The qustion remains why, if Mr. bin Laden is alive, no videos have been released.”
One possibility, of course, is that bin Laden is ill and not in good enough shape to show his face — it would dishearten his faithful followers. But another possibility that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere is that bin Laden and company learned their lesson from their videotape releases of last fall.
As you may recall, Western experts analyzed the rock formations behind bin Laden and tried to figure out his location from every possible clue on screen. The choice of audio this time might be simple prudence. Bin Laden has managed to elude American pursuit thus far, and he is presumably even less eager to be located today than he was a year ago.
Spam-a-rama
Several years ago, when Salon’s technology coverage was published under the now-antiquated label “21st,” I assigned crack reporter Andrew Leonard to look under the hood of a spam operation. We published Spam Bombers in Sept., 1997. Spamming tools have only gotten more sophisticated since then, and the volume of spam has exploded.
Today’s Wall Street Journal offers an interesting update on our old “Among the Spammers” feature, profiling a “spam queen” named Laura Betterly. It’s a good piece (and this link will let you read it even if you’re not a Journal subscriber — thanks to Slashdot), but it left me with some questions. Ms. Betterly claims that her income from her spam business will be $200,000 this year. Yet each example of a particular spam deal or mailing cited in the article provides a measly payoff. The only deal that seems to offer substantial return — $1,555 in commissions on one week’s worth of mailing for a particular client, which Ms. Betterly somehow extrapolates to a total take of $25,000 — is a spam message that, ironically, sells antispam software.
All of which just makes me wonder whether our friendly spammer is borrowing a page from the playbook of online porn merchants, who have been known to inflate their earnings.
Keeping up with the blogses
Mark Hoback, on Fried Green Al-Qaedas, is providing regular tours of Salon blog-space. You can also access good updates from Christian Crumlish’s Radio Free Blogistan’s “Salonika” channel, which is aggregating salon-blog-stuff from multiple channels.
Out and a-blog-out
From the Raven: “Xtreme” Blogging! “I’d like to find the guy that coined that usage, because if I did, I’d wrap him up in kerosene-soaked rags and set him on fire while dragging him down the street tied to my rear bumper and I’d cut him loose into a gator-infested swamp, smoking, bleeding, and screaming. It would be Xtreme…. This isn’t just the devaluation of a word, it’s a full-scale linguistic holocaust.” Raven traces it back to the ’70s usage “Terminate with extreme prejudice,” which of course was a line from “Apocalypse Now.”
Kat Donohue takes on Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Shania Twain.
Portrait of a “fringe family” in difficult straits, from Rayne.
ExplodedLibrary.info reports on anti-linking policies at the L.A. Times.
Julie/Julia: “Something about the physicality of cooking, especially something complex and/or plain old hard to handle, is enormously sexy. Beef marrow bones are sexy. Chopping up a lobster is sexy. Making a three-layer cake is sexy.”
Tips for writers from Gareth Branwyn. [link courtesy Boing Boing]
Blog worthy
Steven Johnson’s books — “Interface Culture” and “Emergence” — represent some of the most thoughtful and idea-laden writing on technoculture you’ll find anywhere. Johnson, who was co-editor of the late lamented Feed as well, is now blogging away at www.stevenberlinjohnson.com.