Lars Pind

From Dragon Dog Press’ Glossary of Writing Terms

Slushpile – What the editors call the overwhelming amount of unagented and unsolicited material they receive. Most no longer look for gems among the slush (they rely on agents to do that job now). It’s very difficult for a new/unknown writer to find their way out of the slushpile and onto a desk.

Does slushpile have negative connotations? Or is it just this definition of the word that suggests that it’s overwhelming and not worth going through?

According to folks at the magazine’s advertising department, The Economist has a circulation of 4,093 in Denmark. The European average is 4.5 readers per copy, for an estimated readership in Denmark of 18,418.5 readers. (I should probably round that number.)

Not sure why you needed to know that, but I think it’s interesting to see what the market for high-quality English language journalism is in this country. (Føhns reminds me that I forgot to ask about readers on the web.)

In comparison, Weekendavisen had a circulation of 61,375, and Berlingske Nyhedsmagasin 14,094 in the first half of 2005, according to Dansk Oplagskontrol. No numbers on their readership.

Strunk and White elementary rule no. 17:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Your typical newspaper, on contrast, is a blank piece of paper that has to be filled each day, whether there’s substance enough or not. And it shows. Loads of unnecessary words and sentences.

But online, there’s not that physical number-of-pages-to-fill demand for superfluous words, so we should see much more vigorous writing online, once journalists break that nasty old habit. We’re already seeing it in the blogs.

SAS Surprice, is that as in surcharge, the SAS surcharge? Or is this just someone ignoring the first rule of jokes: It doesn’t work if you have to explain it.

SFGate:

With the motto “every citizen is a reporter,” 5-year-old OhmyNews has engaged its audience in ways that U.S. print and television news outlets, faced with a steep decline in readers and viewers, only dream of.

The site has a cultlike following, among both writers thrilled to see their views spread widely and readers who say they like getting an uncensored, if uneven, version of the news.

I am very much in awe of OhmyNews. They seem to have figured out the online journalism model so perfectly, and I don’t understand why we haven’t seen more American or European contenders in this space. I mean, with $10 million in revenue, 54 staff, profitable for 2 years and counting, and 70 book deals testifying to the quality of the reporting, what’s not to like?

To me, this is the next logical step after weblogs and the nanopublishing empires, and I think we’re going to see a lot of action in this space in the coming months and years.

Seems like others are wondering the same things as my friend Skipper and I.

Here is what Bill Robinson has to say in The Register:

During this period and before, it was clear Zennstrom was desperate to get filthy rich like many of his propeller-head compatriots had before him and that he was troubled by not having done so. Having come up impecunious after the VC millions invested in the Kazaa phenomenon and missed their fat chance, these two were not going to be denied this time around to the money trough.

Nor were their VC’s.

Some may applaud the Skype VC’s “cleverness,” but I see a greed /integrity issue here.

...

The Skype customer will lose in a multitude of possible ways, not the least of which comes when Skype is no longer “free,” said change coming very quickly indeed. They’re going to have to “monetize” these freeloaders and do it promptly.

While on the subject of Skype, I found it interesting, that when I broke the news of the takeover to a friend last Monday — a friend who is a user of Skype, but not an IT person — his reaction was “bummer”. He couldn’t help but thinking what was in it for him, and the answer is, probably nothing good. For that kind of money, chances are they’ll have to find ways to extort more money from it. Or at the very least, they may loose the upstart groove that we have come to love.

There’s been some backlash against funding and exits in the tech community recently, most notably from the 37 gang (couldn’t find a better link for now), I found it interesting to see this sentiment mirrored in someone not reading the 37s. What is in it for us, the customers?

Here are two little things I would love to see in Skype, in case Ebay still have a buck or two left over to fund future development:

1. When on a conference call, automatically have an IM chat room open for the same group of people. This is particularly useful for sending around link.
2. Also on a conference call, let me set the volume for each participant individually—people have different sorts of mikes and setups, and the difference in source volume can be annoying.

For all I know, these could already be in the Windows client, but I thought I’d throw them out there.

I’m playing around with Mint, just because it looks so cool, but I’ve been having some trouble.

For some reason, I thought it was a hosted app. It looked so, you know, web 2.0, that I thought I’d just have to install some javascript on my server, and that would be it. That seems to be at least one way WebTrends works. But Mint requires installing on the same server that’s hosting your site, and it has to do PHP and MySQL, something that caused me some grief, because I’m on a non-standard server (AOLserver with OpenACS—let me know if you need help configuring this.)

The source code contains this nugget:

REMOVING OR MODIFYING THIS CODE WILL TERMINATE YOUR LICENSE.
That’s right, I didn’t even try to obfuscate the activation code. I figure this way, if you do decide to remove or modify this bit then there can be no confusion—you’re not being clever, you’re just taking food off this honest, hardworking developer’s table.

This all makes sense, of course, except the activation code is precisely what was causing me problems. So after paying the $30, going through a lot of sysadmin pain, then I keep getting bounced back to the screen where I have to enter the activation code, and that is a little frustrating. In the end I did remove the verification, and everything worked just fine, but I felt really, really guilty doing it. And I’m a little scared of saying it out loud here, too.

But hey, I’m the honest, paying customer, and I’m pretty hard-working, too, and those were my hard-earned money I just handed you. And then you come and say I can’t fix your software so it actually works? Why do I need to be treated to this?

Shaun, how about just removing the activation code altogether? I think the way it currently is, you’re still insulting our intelligence. You have to spend time coding this, and it’s costing us time and grief when it doesn’t work, and we both know that. There’s got to be another way—just leave the notice, but not the code? Have an easy way to check if you remembered to purchase a license for this domain from the mint UI, for honest but forgetful types? Right now, it’s still the honest guys who get punished.

All in all, this does clearly illustrate some of the downsides to the non-hosted software model – the pain of install, the related support cost to the software maker, and the copy protection ritual.

PS! There was one other problem, which I also fixed, with the cookies being set for the wrong domain, so they didn’t work. It’s probably related in some path stuff it can’t figure out because of my non-standard setup. Oh, and once running it does look quite slick.

Mygdal pegede på denne artikel i Børsen, om New Media Days, og det slog mig, hvordan det – udover at være luderjournalistik – aldrig ville kunne forekomme i en seriøs blog.

Forestil dig at du i en af de blogs du læser fandt denne meningsløse udtalelse ukritisk citeret:

Det gør de ved ikke at holde sig til jorden, men ved at bruge teknologien kreativt og give brugerne værdi. Det vil man kunne se på New Media Days – der bliver højt til loftet og samtidig fastgrund under fødderne. Vi kommer til at vise, hvordan de nye medier spiller,når de spiller rent.

Og hvad er de nye teknologier? PSP (wow), iPod (4 år gammel), Windows Media Center (har vi hørt om i mange år nu). Xbox (har også nogle år på bagen) og bredbånd (har vi også haft i nogle år, og vi ville have endnu mere, hvis vi havde det lige så godt som svenskerne).

Ville du ikke unsubscribe med det samme hvis du fandt noget tilsvarende i din RSS reader? Hvem er mest troværdig, blogs eller old media? Der gik i hvert fald lidt en prås op for mig, da jeg læste det her. Jeg er blevet så forvænt med kvaliteten af det jeg læser online, at jeg havde glemt hvor ringe aviserne kan slippe af sted med at være.

Guan just pointed out that there’s now a craigslist for copenhagen. Woohoo! I’ve been wanting one ever since we moved back in 2001. (I know, I could’ve just asked for it, but you want others to use it, too.)

We used craigslist to organize the perfect move from New York to San Francisco, selling all the big stuff at the last minute, and organizing to buy replacements as soon as we had landed on the other end. Much better than the stuff we shipped, which took several days.

TIME.com:

Ive fondles a tiny Nano affectionately, pointing out all the things that nobody will ever notice but that he sacrificed months of his life for—things like the laser etching of the logo on the back or the surface’s being slightly rougher on the click wheel than on the rest of the front. “I know you’re not going to consciously find these details particularly appealing,” he concedes, “but I think it’s the fact that we’ve worried about all of them that makes the product so precious.”

I love this level of attention to detail, a level much higher than most of your customers expect or even consciously notice. But you feel the difference, and those that notice them consciously, too, will be psyched.

It’s a great experience to venture into a tiny hidden corner where you think you’ll be on your own, and discover that someone was here already and they thought of you and left you a little note.

That’s how it makes me feel.

While talking about splogging, the automated creation of fake blogs that steal content from others for the sake of making money from advertising, Doc Searls mentions a possible new business model for old media in the online world:

But if Google starts crawling past the paywall, life will change. Suddenly authoritative links to old Times pages will show up with high PageRank values. How long after that will Google offer a “passport” (or will we see the equivalent from some other intermediator) through any number of paywalls, for one low subscription price?

That’s an interesting twist, I hadn’t thought of.

I hope, and I’m sure, we can find ways to make writers make money on the web without having to wall themselves in, just like publishing has historically been paid for mainly by advertising.

Daring Fireball:

BRUSHED METAL: Calculator? I’m out of iTunes and you tell me I’ve still got Calculator? When is the Special Event scheduled for the next version of Calculator? Oh, that’s right, there is none, because no one gives a shit about Calculator.

I like the new look, and I hope they fix up the rest of them soon: Safari, Finder, iChat, iCal, iPhoto, ...

And the custom radius on the rounded corners is slick, I hadn’t even noticed at first. It’s weird how a tiny detail like this can look fresh, and make the old radius suddenly look tired.

Hvor holder du af at tage hen, når du tager din laptop med i byen for at arbejde? Jeg tænker på cafeer, der har wi-fi, ikke har noget imod at man sidder med sin laptop og arbejder i mange timer, må gerne have åbent fra kl. 8, har rimelig mad til rimelig penge, noget rart at kigge på, og mange andre ting, man kunne have behov for.

Hvad er dine personlige yndlingssteder?