Arthur Sulzberger via Donna Bogatin at ZDNet: “The New York Times [...] supports a $200 million annual “news gathering” budget, [and] as digital has brought in $200 million in annual revenue, interactive can support our news gathering function.”
Of course, news gathering isn’t the only cost of online journalism, but surely the costs are much lower than the print counterpart. And with online advertising continuing to grow, this will only get better.
DR has launched a DR-branded wikipedia site about sports.
It’s interesting to see DR experiment with wikis, in particular helping the Danish language Wikipedia site get more attention, but I’m not sure what’s gained by integrating and skinning wikipedia into the DR site, other than making the navigation even more confusing. The links back to the front page don’t work, but I’m sure they’ll fix that quickly (and then proceed to take off the beta label).
Overall, though, a big thumbs-up for initiative.
Mark Cuban: To me, the proof is always in the details. No matter what business Im in, most people work in headlines mode. They think that if they say or write something that makes a good headline , then there must be substance to their point. That’s not the way business works. Which is why most people never get further than the middle.
Substance comes from detail. Luck comes from detail. Winning comes from being willing to do the work on the details. Learning comes from investing in details.
(Via Fraser Speirs.)
I was having an off day yesterday, so I watched the Stephen Colbert talk at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner again, and it was really worth watching again. His humor and logic is flawless, as in “you have more nerve endings in your gut than in your brain … you can look it up, but not in a book … look it up in your gut”.
Maybe it’s just me being a sissy, but that he has the nerve to stand up there and say the things he does, with POTUS sitting just a few feet away away, and not even flinch, I’m awed. Way to go, Stephen. If only the press corps would be more like that.
I loved Guy Kawasaki’s book, Thae Art of the Start, which Christina pointed me to after having experienced this talk last year. Now there’s a video of the talk on Guy’s web site. Great stuff, 40 minutes, watch it.
Wow, this guy built a free dating site, making money through Google AdSense, and the picture shows a cheque for almost $900K CAD, covering 2 months. That’s serious money for a one-person shop.
I find it really interesting to see how the online ad market evolves and changes the game. Online advertising is bound to keep growing, as more ad dollars shift to the web, and in doing so, it’ll enable new classes of small publishers to compete seriously.
Interestingly, most of the ads on the site seem to be for other dating sites. Go figure. (Via Workhappy, who has an interview with Markus.)
Guy Kawasaki interviewed Pierre Omidyar, the founder of Ebay, in 2000, but only put the video up recently. I downloaded, watched, and thoroughly enjoyed. You should, too.
Ebay’s only made him the world’s 38th most wealthy man, despite, or because of, the fact that he’s quite and idealistic chap. Watching the interview sure beats the trite writing in The Perfect Store, a book about Ebay by journalist Adam Cohen.
Speaking of which, why is it that when journalists write books about great entrepreneurs they have to sound so evangelical? Their enthusiasm is so over the top it comes across as phony, something that rarely happens when the book is actually written by or for the man himself.
Wow, Bill Gates is stepping down from day-to-day work at Microsoft. Is that why he left so quickly from his recent meeting with Anders Fogh Rasmuussen? Something else on his mind?
It’s a bit surprising to me, just as their road ahead seems bumpier than it has been for so long, what with a delayed Vista release and software generally shifting to the web. Smart move to promote Ray Ozzie, but wouldn’t it have been better to let Steve Ballmer step aside and keep Gates more involved?
At a personal level, of course, it makes all the sense in the world that he should now start focusing more on charity and perhaps playing more golf or whatever his hobbies are.
A lot has changed in Javascript land, in the way that we write and test code, to the point where you can now use Javascript seriously in real web apps. But where’s the reference manuals to help you along? There’s the indispensable tome, The Definitive Guide, but it’s huge (900 pages) and a bit dated, and there’s way too much Netscape 4.7 stuff.
What we need is a book that serves as a reference to safe, cross-platform Javascript for modern browsers, with documentation of the inner workings of the quite funky and quite powerful language that Javascript is.
Well, it seems like someone finally took on that job: John Resig is writing a book called Pro Javascript Techniques, due out in the fall, and from the table of contents it looks like it’ll be an instant hit. I’m looking forward to it.
Thanks to Jesper, I just learned about findvej.dk, a great mapping tool for addresses in Denmark, using Google Maps for the rendering, and Kort og matrikelstyrelsen for geocoding. Awesome, I’ve been longing for a tool like this for ages.
Even better is that you can just type in the address in the URL, so eg. say findvej.dk/konggeorgsvej6a,2000 will take you straight to where I live. That’s the way to do it, period.
There’s also a blog. Subscribed!.
In case you haven’t heard already, Jesper is arranging a Rails meetup in Copenhagen on Thursday June 29th at 8.30 PM, at Cafe Selina, Skindergade 43. I plan to be there myself.
The Danish language doesn’t have a word for “flavor”, and it doesn’t have the verb “to cook”. Sure, there are words. Flavor can be translated to “smag” (taste) or “aroma” (aroma), but there’s no direct translation.
And to cook becomes “tilberede” (prepare) or simply “lave” (make), neither of which can stand on its own, ie. you have to say “make food”. The closest phonetically is “koge”, but that means to boil.
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
My favorite: The Work vs. Home ad. And hey, isn’t that John Hodgman from the Daily Show? (via TUAW).
So in order to be considered for an internship at A List Apart, you have to explain your views on the serial comma.
Honestly, I didn’t know there were more than one point of view. I didn’t know the object of the dispute had a name. At first I thought they were meant as a joke, but I guess not. Maybe it’s a test, to have people look through the articles at ALA and grok what Zeldman likes?
For the record, I like the serial comma, even though we don’t have them in Danish.
Am I the only person in the Maciverse that regularly switches between using my laptop with and without a desktop monitor? Judged by the beauty of the Apple Cinema Display, I doubt it. But judged by the problems I run into with the OS, I do.
The issue is that as I switch from laptop with monitor to laptop without monitor, windows end off-screen, and I can’t get them back on-screen without attaching the monitor, dragging the window, and then detaching again. On the right is a screenshot of where that just happened again. Note how I can’t actually get to drag the damn window, because Yojimbo is on top.
In this case, the fix was simple: Close Yojimbo, then move the window, dragging in those few pixels that are on-screen and not buttons. But in other cases, the window will be completely off-screen, but on some virtual screen, which can be witnessed by minimizing the app, which causes the window to do the geenie from where it is (isn’t) to the dock and back. I’ll usually close and reopen the app, even though I know that the friendly app will remember teh window position for me till next time. Ugh. In a few apps I can do Window > Zoom, but it’s far from all.
In Windows I also had this problem, but there you can hit Ctrl-Space and get access to the window menu which lets you move the window using the keyboard alone. Problem solved. I haven’t found the equivalent for Mac. Is it there?
TextMate offers another weirdance, which is that after attaching or detaching the external monitor, the Find In Project window will get its bearings wrong, and when you click somewhere to select a result line, it’ll get the link wrong by a fixed number of pixels. Resize the window by any amount, and it recalculates and gets things right again.
All of this just makes me wonder if I’m the only one. Admittedly, with the laptop having the world’s best keyboard, it’s tempting to just give in to the wife and leave the beautiful 23” in the living room with the Mac Mini PVR and just use the 15” or 17” built-in, but is that really what you all are using your 23” cinema displays for?
I just ran across this bitching about Jeopardy-style quoting, ie. when you have your reply at the top, and the thing you’re replying to at the bottom.
I never understood people’s problem with that. I understand it in theory, it reads more naturally when you have the thing you’re replying to first, and then your reply below. But that’s not how I process mail.
Most of the time, I’ll already have an idea about what the thread is about, either because it’s a reply to something I wrote myself, or because it’s part of a thread I’m following. So the common case is that I just want to read the new part and not bother with the quotation.
Every once in a while, I do need to dive in and find out the context, and in that case it’s right there, and I don’t mind reading backwards, because that way I can read just far enough for me to understand it, then stop.
When the post is a point-by-point response to some other post, sure, I want it chronologically. But those are fairly rare.
My user experience with non-jeopardy style is that I often have to actively grab my mouse and scroll past all the things I already saw before, before I can see the new stuff and judge whether it’s even worth reading.
Bottom line, it makes it slower to follow a mailing list where you’re not 100% interested in 100% of the posts, which happens to be the case for 100% of the mailing lists I’m subscribed to.
In the same vein as the last post: For a while there, I thought I could take a shortcut by saying:
<label><input type="checkbox" name="foo" value="1" /> The label</label>
Instead of the more cumbersome:
<label for="mycheckbox"><input type="checkbox" name="foo" id="mycheckbox" value="1" /> The label</label>
That way I don’t have to worry about setting the ID for the checkbox, making sure it’s unique, and all that.
It works fine in Firefox, and Safari ignores it, just like it ignores any old label tag. But Internet Explorer, of course, had to not work. So forget about that, and just use the for and id attributes like you always did. Bah.
Note to self: Always use onclick, not onchange, on checkboxes.
Most browsers work fine, but Internet Explorer only seems to invoke onchange when the checkbox loses focus. However, onclick is invoked whenever the value changes, even if it wasn’t clicked, but triggered with the keyboard. Go figure.
@media hadn’t even registered on my radar until now when Roger Johansson mentioned he’s going. And now I really want to go. I’m not a web designer, I’m a hard-core coder, but I absolutely love learning as much as I can about web design, and I love even more working with great designers.
Is there anyone out there with a spare ticket I can buy?
We’ve had some problems with links embedded in MS Office documents. The symptom is that when you click the link, you’re bounced to the login page even though you’re already logged in, and after logging in again, you’re dropped on the front page rather than the page you wanted. Copy-pasting the URL manually works perfectly.
The problem has appeared both on Mac and Windows in certain configurations, though the only reference I’ve found on the web is about the Mac. It happened both with Basecamp, as well as with the web app I’d developed.
What happens is that the first time the URL is requested, the cookies aren’t sent along, and so the server redirects to the login page, storing the URL that you really requested in the session on the server, rather that in the browser, in the URL of the redirect. That’s the first problem. Because then when the login page is requested, the old cookies which were there all the time are suddenly sent along correctly. But that also means that your session cookie changed, and the information about which page you were trying to get to is lost.
Thankfully, the fix is simple:
With these two changes in place, links in MS Office documents now work every time on every platform. Provided, of course, the page is actually still there.
UPDATE: An additional nugget of information: It seems that regardless of your default browser, the first two requests will come from IE, and then only the later ones come from your default browser.
UPDATE 2: Credit where credit is due: The packet sniffing to figure out what’s going on was done by Ximon Eighteen at Greenpeace. I used to not be allowed to mention in public that I work for them , that’s why I didn’t, but now that Martin’s blogged this, I figured I’d give Ximon the credit in public.
It’s not the first web app to place ads inline. One that springs to mind is the old intranets.com (are they still around?) which seemed to be all about selling you stuff. But for a modern-day web you-know-the-number type web application? And on the inwards-facing side of things? I’m more accustomed to someone like Flickr putting ads against my photos, but not against the screen I use to upload my photos. Maybe it’s because I’m on the free plan, and they go away if I pay? Interesting.
I frequently find myself doing rake deploy with capistrano, and then wander off to do something else, while the checkout process runs its minute-long course. And then I forget what I was doing, and only 15 minutes later stumble upon that shell buffer again, only to discover that it’s still sitting there, waiting for my sudo password so it can restart the dispatchers.
Well, with this little snippet in my deploy.rb, it now asks for my sudo password up-front, so it’ll still be cached and valid when it really needs it at the end:
task :before_deploy, :roles => :app do send(run_method, "date") end
That’s it: Force it to execute some shell command using sudo. It doesn’t matter which, so long as it doesn’t actually do anything. I chose date. Calling run_method instead of sudo directly will ensure that if you’re not using sudo, it won’t ask for your password here, either.
A friend pointed me to the counter on boligsiden.dk, which currently lists 40.875 apartments and houses for sale. Just last week the number was in the low 39.000’s. It’s going up fast. It’s gone up by more than a hundred today alone. And my friend says it’s been rising fast for at least the 6 weeks since he started following it.
It seems a pretty clear that the insane housing inflation that we’ve seen in the past years has come to a halt. Whether prices will fall is a bit too early to tell, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
UPDATE: Added the links from Guan here, because Textile trips over them: rolf/JL_FI2.pdf”>http://www.math.ku.dk/rolf/JL_FI2.pdf, → 3 comments
Doc Searls, in his talk at Reboot8, mentioned this 10 year old clip of Steve Jobs lambasting Microsoft for not having any taste. It’s a great clip because, as Doc mentioned, he really nails Microsoft, but at the same time, he nails himself, in that Steve Jobs had at the time nothing but taste. There’s also A New Brand World, which similarly nails Microsoft as having no heart, and thus being unbrandable, it’s essentially the same thing.
The quote stuck with me, because taste is so critically important to me in my life. Taste as in caring about more than just the functional value of things, caring about the emotional value, about beauty, culture, about all the things a piece of food, clothing, software product, writing, or music says about the values of the creator. I could probably live with not being the richest person alive, in exchange for a little taste.
When I saw the story on Pixel, a cross-platform Photoshop replacement, it hit me again how ready I am for something to replace Photoshop.
Photoshop, at $649, is way too expensive for a typical web developer. I can see how an artist who spends most of his time in Photoshop would easily pay that price, but for a designer who works primarily in HTML and CSS, and only need to make the occasional web graphic, that’s just too much.
But more than the price, it is also too feature bloated for this type of use. It has too many features, and at the same time, saving for the web, with ImageReady, seems an after-thought.
Something like TextMate for image editing would be ideal. Something designed for the web, not print. Something scriptable and configurable. Something Mac-native. People doing hard-core photo work can still use Photoshop, but web developers and web designers, it seems like there’s room for a small, cheap replacement.
Pixel could be it, although the first peek didn’t convince me it was. I have yet to use it for anything real, though.
There were also some people wanted to use it for a paper magazine, so they’d run the process of putting together the magazine, but then instead of only publish it on the web, they’d also make a print version, via PDF or something. I hadn’t thought of it, but you can definitely use PublicSquare for that as well.
I can’t wait till we can go live.
Doc Searls: If you need a good quote, go write it yourself on Wikipedia, and then quote it. (at Reboot8.)
<!Technorati Tags: reboot8
<!I’m giving the first public demo of PublicSquare tomorrow at Reboot tomorrow Friday. It’s at around 4PM in Room A. Be there … uhm … and be square.
I'm a coach and entrepreneur in Copenhagen, Denmark. Read more…
