Metaphor: aging, impotent beasts

An aging, impotent beast
Mimi Johnson’s “Did it ever occur to you that even the most deathless love could wear out?”

The people who run newspapers and those who work for them are engaged in useless foreplay. They cling tightly, trying again and again to make the way they’ve always done it still work, but the passion is gone. They talk change: tearing down silos, building audience and monetizing content. But talk is their only capability. They eye non-profit status with government subsidies like it’s Viagra for print. They tussle through regrouping, “right-sizing,” and stripping down to “lean and mean.” They reorganize, then reorganize again, then grope their way back to same old position that no longer works. The wretched gyrations are hideously frustrating for the poor souls involved, and sadly fruitless. They give birth to nothing new. The newspaper business is an aging, impotent beast, bringing down a lot of good journalists who are tangled in its foundering arms.

I want a better Twitter client for Android

Since I bought my Droid last November, I’ve used a bunch of different Twitter clients. I have yet to find one I’m really happy with. I know development is hard, and it seems whiny to complain publicly. My hope is that the developers will read this and incorporate some of my suggestions. Or someone else will build a new app that I will fall in love with. I’ve paid for Twitter clients before and I’ll pay for them again.

Let me start with the clients I’ve used, sort of in the order I used them, and my disappointments with each:

Twidroid

I was constantly running into bugs. At first it was random crashes that would lose all the information and settings I had added and changed. When I stopped using it, direct message threading was broken so that it would only show me the most recent thread of all my conversations. I want to tweet, not deal with bugs.

Swift

A simple app that I used briefly. I stopped using it because if I hadn’t checked my Twitter steam for a while (you know, like I was working or eating or sleeping), there was no easy way to jump to the top of the stream so it took forever to get to the top, especially since I had to wait several seconds for the app to update the stream every few scrolls.

Seesmic

The most recent version was a big update from the first. It doesn’t hold features ransom until you pay (Want bit.ly support? Buy the pro version!1), but it take at least two taps to open a link, or favorite something or whatever. Otherwise, better than the rest.

jibjib

I asked on Aardvark about new Twitter clients and the developer of jibjib asked me to try it out. It includes no images, including avatars are icons suggesting what a button does. Couldn’t keep using it.

Touiteur

This is the newest one and the one I’m using now. Like Seesmic, it has the same too-much-tapping problem. Say I want to favorite something, which I do often for things I find funny or that have a link I want to check out later (since Pinboard saves these links for me). That take three taps: one to select the tweet and get the menu, one to select “more,”  and a third to actually star it. It’s also missing an easy way to follow a conversation between users. Nor can I view anyone’s followers in the app and it doesn’t give me a way to get to Twitter.com to see that information.

So I want a better Twitter app. I want it to do these things:

  1. Just works. No bugs.
  2. Easy favorite-ing. I want to be able to tap a star right in the tweet without having to go through menus.
  3. Easy link following. I want to be able to follow a link without extra taps.
  4. Conversations. Twitter makes it hard enough to follow conversations between and among users without the app defeating the few tools Twitter gives us. Incorporating conversations can be as simple as letting me easily follow the “in reply to” link that Twitter generates for @replies or something better, like a built-in Bettween.
  5. A “jump to top” button. I need to be able to skip to now in my timeline.
  6. Native/new-style retweeting that confirms before posting. I hate when jerks mangle my perfectly crafted 140-character masterpieces so they can slap “RT @bergus” in front, so I use native retweets on the rare occasions I retweet. I also hate it when I accidentally retweet something and there is no easy way to undo it.
  7. Link shortening. Does it suck that we have to shorten links in Twitter? Yup. But I want at least bit.ly support that I can tie to my bit.ly account. Even better would be something I can tie to an install of yoURLs.
  8. Access to profiles and follower, following and user lists. I like to look at profiles. I like to look at lists. I use my own lists to make my Twitter stream manageable. My lists need to be viewable in the app. I’d prefer profiles and other lists be in-app, too, but I’m flexible. I should be able to follow and unfollow easily, too.
  9. Notifications that take me to the new mentions/direct messages. Never occurred to me that a notification of a new mention wouldn’t take me to the new mention or direct message, but that isn’t the case with Touiteur for some reason.
  10. Saved searches. Because I search for the same things over and over.
  11. Sync with Twitter. Everything I do in the app should be synced with Twitter: lists, searches, etc.
  12. Twitter login via OAuth. So I don’t have to type my username and password into your sleazy app. Touiteur does this. Nothing else does, as far as I can tell.
  13. Drafts. I don’t work on Twitter jokes enough to need something as heavy duty as the iPhone’s Birdhouse app, but I would like to save a tweet while I double check a fact, URL or something else.
  14. Doesn’t make me mess with setting only used for multiple accounts. I use one Twitter account. Don’t make me select my Twitter account from a list that contains … my one Twitter account.

That’s it. I don’t need widgets. I don’t need multi-account support. I don’t need geolocation (but it you’re going to include anything like that, please include geolocation as metadata instead of as a link2). I don’t need plug-ins.

So, who’s going to build this?

—

1 This is actually the case with Touiteur. And while I understand the developer’s need to get paid, withholding basic features in the free version isn’t the way to do it. ↩

2 Seesmic will figure out your location and this stick in into a tweet, either as an address or a link to a map, but not as metadata that doesn’t suck up those precious characters. ↩

Examples of great multimedia

For a semester now, I’ve pointed my  multimedia introduction students towards a bunch of good multimedia sites and asked to  find and share in class something that they’ve really liked. It’s good for them because they have to look at multimedia in a critical way. It’s good for me because I find neat new things I haven’t come across before.

“Highrise,” from the Canada’s National Film Board,  is an interesting way to present what is essentially a feature length documentary about “vertical suburbs” in a non linear way. Lots of opportunity for exploration here, lots of stills and animation. It’s so big that I haven’t had a chance to fully explore it.

“Threat Theater,” from the Washington Post, is a nice little video about “threat assessment instructor,” a man who trains personal protects to identify and deal with threats. He does this by acting out the roles. No B-roll to speak of, but interesting and well edited.

As always there were several from MediaStorm, including “Driftless: Stories from Iowa,” “The Marlboro Marine” and “The Ninth Floor.” All good, photo-driven multimedia pieces. It must be the heft that so impresses students.

Several students selected part from The New York Times‘ “One in Eight Million” series. Each piece tells the story of a single New Yorker. The favorite was The Ladies’ Man, but I love how each story is introduced with a great audio clip from the subject.

Taste on Melrose closes

Last night, we ate at Taste on Melrose for the umpteenth time. Tonight it closed for the final time.

I didn’t know Christian, the owner and chef, particularly well, but we were friendly enough to greet each other in public (and I can’t say that about many people). But he clearly wasn’t happy about it closing. When I asked him what he was planning to do next he said, I think only half joking, “rob banks.”

Even if the 90-percent first-year failure rate is a myth, the restaurant industry is brutal. Taste lasted eight years. I don’t know what killed it. But speculation — completely unsubstantiated speculation — was that rules preventing drug company reps from wining and dining doctors from the nearby university hospital made a huge dent in the restaurant’s business. It couldn’t have helped the there were likely fewer recruitment dinners as budgets there were slashed, too.

Taste is where my wife and I ate dinner the day we were married; just the two of us after a simple morning wedding in a magistrate’s office. The magistrate’s office was destroyed in an F5 tornado in 2006. And now with the closing of Taste, we’re left with Village Inn, the family restaurant where one of our witnesses took us to breakfast, as the last physical reminders of our wedding day.

And that makes me as sad as another good restaurant closing.

Photo by Taste on Melrose on Flickr.

Metaphors: lawns and mass extinction

Mass extinction
Alan Mutter’s Journicide: A looming, lost generation of scribes

But the loss of a substantial portion of what would have been the next generation of journalists also will be tragic for society. The loss will deprive citizens in the future with the insights that only can be delivered by dedicated professionals with the time, skills and motivation to dig deeply into difficult stories.

Grass
Jeff Jarvis’s Get off the lawn

What we need is a level lawn where the tender shoots of these new businesses can grow without government trampling them on its way to try to protect the legacy players.

Metaphors: stores who hate customers, customers who don’t buy and a bunch of clichés

A headline shop
Danny Sullivan’s If Newspapers Were Stores, Would Visitors Be “Worthless” Then?

At the store, the news exec owner greets visitors by asking them what the hell they want. Perplexed, they visitors say they heard about these stories and wanted to know more. The exec shouts at them. “Get the hell out of my store, you freeloader! This is for members-only. We don’t need riff-raff like you in here.”

Jerks who look but don’t buy
Steve Yelvington’s Lookie Lou isn’t really a customer

To use the storefront analogy: When I have people in line to buy big-ticket merchandise, I’m not going to shut down the cash register line so I can provide personal assistance to the guy who’s agonizing over whether to buy a 50-cent postcard.

And the “Lookie Lous” who are shopping but not buying? So long as they don’t get in the way of the real customers, or start knocking the china off the shelves, they’re not really a problem. But I’m not going to go out of my way to serve them on the off chance they might accidentally drop a quarter on the floor.

Jerks who eat but don’t drink
Steve Yelvington’s Lookie Lou isn’t really a customer

A more appropriate analogy — and one more easily understood by journalists — might be that of a bar. If you’re sitting in a bar warming a seat but not consuming anything, are you a customer? If you’re eating the free peanuts but not drinking, are you a customer? Not all visitors are customers.

Every cliché under the sun
Arianna Huffington’s Journalism 2009: Desperate Metaphors, Desperate Revenue Models, And The Desperate Need For Better Journalism

They were asleep at the wheel, missed the writing on the wall, let the train leave the station, let the ship sail — pick your metaphor — and quickly found themselves on the wrong side of the disruptive innovation the Internet and new media represent

.

“I speak restaurant HTML”

There was a Roger Ebert — yes that Roger Ebert — Twitter post the other day got me thinking: “I speak restaurant HTML.”

When I worked in restaurant kitchens, before launching into my current, glamorous career, I could speak what is commonly called “restaurant Spanish;” that is I knew some basic vocabulary and syntax that helped me communicate with the native Spanish speakers we employed.

It didn’t get me very far during the week or so I spent in Spain, but got the job done in the limited confines of a kitchen during the dinner rush.

Restaurant HTML, as Ebert coined, is the bare minimum journalists need to know to operate. Most don’t need to understand the difference between a <div> tag and a <span> tag, but they should be able to embed a video, place an image and hyperlink text. Basic stuff.

Are most journalists going to be whipping up Web pages from scratch? Of course not; most will be using CMSs that have be built by Web designers fluent in HTML. But they do need to understand enough basic vocabulary and syntax so that they can post their own images and videos in blog posts, or format text online, or add links. You know, those things that make the Web the Web?

If your school’s curriculum hasn’t found a way to incorporate this basic stuff into core classes, you’re doing your students a disservice.

Metaphors: socially useless supervillians and the Titanic, yet again

Skeletor, Gargamel, Cobra Commander or Wile E Coyote
Umair Haque’s “Is Your Business Useless?”

Business supervillains have something in common with the cartoon supervillains above: they rarely win. That’s because socially useless business is built on shoddy, poor economics — and like most things too good to be true, it rarely lasts for long.

The Titanic, yet again but different!
The New York Times‘s publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., quoted by New York Magazine‘s Jada Yuan in “Times Publisher Compares Print Media to the Titanic”

He thinks that physical newspapers will stick around as well. “The best analogy I can think of is — have you ever heard of the Titanic Fallacy?” he asked. We hadn’t. “What was the critical flaw to the Titanic?” We tried to answer: Poor construction? Not enough life boats? Crashing into stuff? “A captain trying to set a world speed record through an iceberg field?” he said, shaking his head. “Even if the Titanic came in safely to New York Harbor, it was still doomed,” he said. “Twelve years earlier, two brothers invented the airplane.”

Metaphors: Greek tragedy, the French Revolution and wild boars

Wild boars or something; I mean, you don’t want to die with your dick hanging out, do you see what I’m saying?
Primary Colors

The French Revolution
John McQuaid, on Twitter (here, here and here)

When I say “citizen journalism” has a French Revolution vibe, I mean a couple of things (1/3)

Citizen journalism/French Revolution I: CJ reflects a chaotic, democratic power shift as old, monolithic institutions fade (2/3)

Citizen journalism/French Revolution II: the (overblown) fear in the 4th Estate that angry mobs of “citizens” will destroy journalism 3/3

Greek tragedy
Steve Yelvington, on Twitter

Strangling your own website: When the parent sees the child as a threat, the stage is set for a Greek tragedy.