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So, go check out Daylife, go on… I’ll wait…

Back now? Ok, Daylife (in case you’re cheating and reading ahead) is a “news aggregator” — that means it is a service that, in their own words, “gathers and analyzes mind-boggling amounts of high-quality news and other content from across the web.” Then they package it up in ways that virtually anyone from users (that would be you when I told you to go look at their site) to web-head, code monkeys like me can use.

Now that right there is very cool in and of itself, but the truly over-the-top feature of Daylife is its ability to “chain” topics. Like Wikipedia, you can spend hours clicking through links on Daylife meandering from news topic to news topic (until, I imagine, you end up at Cargo Cults since every web search ends there).

But so what? Well, I got to start looking at Daylife for work. Now this is really interesting, because when I first heard of Daylife (probably via BuzzMachine) it was billed as a way for small web news sites or beat blogs to rival their bigger brethren in content so right away it was strange — being the bigger brethren and all.

We decided (meaning, “I was told to”) to look at Daylife in three areas (and yes I’m being intentionally vague here because we’re not done yet):

1. Pad out an existing strong section with related content from Daylife
2. Bolster a weaker section of our content with related content from Daylife
3. Build out a section that we think could ‘drive traffic’ where we had no existing content before

It’s that last one that was the most interesting to me because, simply put, I thought it was terrible idea. Padding out native sections with related news is one thing, I think that’s a great approach (especially when you can tailor the sources like you can with the Daylife API) and as a believer in the Ethic of the Link it all fits in nicely.

(Hmm, all that Link Ethic stuff is from BuzzMachine who’s proprietor, Jeff Jarvis, is a partner in Daylife… do you see a pattern here?)

But building out what amounts to a virtual section of your web site with no original content at all just feels like, well… cheating. Sure your ad folks can probably sell it (revenue!!!), but it none of that content is yours and I question anyone’s ability to drive sustainable traffic to a section that’s not a natural strength of the site in the first place. And then I can’t get past the whole “negative-sum” notion of it — if everyone simply linked to everyone else, would anyone have any original content? To me this breaks the ethic of the link in a big way.

All that all being said, I still elected to start with this so-called “virtual section” because, ironically, due to it’s very nature of not having any in-house content it would be the quickest and easiest to build. This way, my thinking went, I could wade into the Daylife API, play around a bit, build the section out, deploy it and then move on to the “real” sections with a better understanding of how Daylife works. That seems to have been a good approach so far. I still think the whole virtual-section idea is dodgy though ;).

On the tech side, Daylife has a pretty slick RESTful API (called the DayPI… get it? day-pee-eye?) where you can do generic searches or pull related articles and photos for a given article or photo which is all to be expected. What’s cool is you can pull related topics as well, which come with their own stories and photos (this is the basis for the “chaining” mentioned above). They have a number of libraries and code snippets available (of varying quality) to get you going and I played with a few of them to get a feel for what was doable.

Ultimately, since they offer a native JSON return format, I opted instead to write a simple proxy to their API so I could roll the whole thing up in AJAX calls (made extra simple thru jQuery). This also allowed me to cache the requests on the local side for a quick speed boost.

So we’ll see how the various sections do, I like the idea of Daylife and I like their approach to news. If it’s used correctly it can be, I think, a really nice add-on for most news websites.

Editor’s note: I’m not dead, just insanely busy so I know this is my first update in quite a while….

So I’m loving the new gig in the big paper’s newsroom. Despite the hype, I don’t think I’ve initiated any earth-shattering wizardry that will instantly “save the newspaper” from the perils that it faces.

Instead, what I have done is start with a series of baby steps, and mostly invisible ones at that. For one, I’ve been “fixing” the paper’s RSS feeds, starting with simply adding the reporter’s bylines to them. No, we didn’t have any bylines in our RSS feeds, go figure. Next up came photos: using Yahoo’s Media RSS extension I added each story’s photos to the feeds (yes, including the photoby ;)).

This, while useful in it’s own right (it looks very cool in Google Reader), it is a “baby step” on the way to other things. Now if I wanted to, I could, say, pull stories by reporter — or current photos by story — and place them on other sites. If I wanted to….

I’ve also gotten to play the roll of agent provocateur, a roll that gets little “press” but I don’t mind.

Watching our now photo-capable RSS feeds update throughout the day really illustrated something troubling: we’re really slow with updating photos. We can break a news story in seconds but for photos we usually have to wait for the shooter to come back to the building. It only made sense that I jumped at configuring a Nikon WT-2a for wirelessly sending photo’s off the camera.

While it was originally poopooed, when it was shown to work, it got some interest and now the paper has invested in another unit (a WT-4a for their newer D3 bodies) and when I started asking about Bluetooth GPS adapters for the photographers, I got some real traction instead of, “who are you again?” (geocoding photos and stories is another “on the list” thing of mine).

Also, it was I who passed along the specs of the Nokia N95 and info on Qik (not to mention helping to configure them) to the photographer who ultimately took them to the Olympic torch relay.

So I’m doing my thing… slowly, in baby steps.

So I just read off Romenesko (sorry Howard) that Rick Rodriguez, The Sacramento Bee’s Executive editor resigned today.

That’s interesting, I thought, doing my best mental Jack Sparrow imitation.

You see, I don’t technically work for the Bee, but I often work at the Bee (ok, yes, I did once work for the Bee but now I don’t… it’s confusing) ANYWAY not long ago the AME in charge of the Bee’s “online operations” casually mentioned, “oh, hey, Rick wants to meet you.”

Say what?

Now, I know very well, I’m “known” around the papers I support. I tend to speak my mind and have these crazy web theories and opinions that sometimes impress people but sometimes…. um… not so much. I honestly asked, “uh, is this a good thing or a bad thing?” It was good thing, I was assured. “Maybe lunch… next week?”

That was two weeks ago.

I walked past the AME the other day and casually asked, “Yo, where’s my lunch?” with a grin. Apparently Rick had been out all week, and it was not normal. I don’t know newsroom politics really at all so I had no clue how to read that. Hell, I had no clue how to read any of this. Is it normal for exec editors of papers to, “want to meet you?” It had a weird Sopranos feel to it.

“…differences are not about resources, they’re not about staffing, they’re not about expenses…”

Well Jiminy, what does that leave? News coverage? Internet strategy? More importantly what about my lunch?!?

The next editor will not be a Bee employee but will come from the ranks of the newspaper’s owner…

Oh I can think of a few people offhand, it’s a zillion-billion to one shot but a certain Indians fan…

These days my world at work revolves around getting news stories out of my employer’s newspaper publishing system and onto the web via my employer’s in-house web CMS.

Welcome to my nightmare.

You’d think it would be easy, just issue a SELECT * FROM news WHERE date = $today; and be done with it, right? Well, not so much.

Continue reading ‘Why it’s so hard to get print stories online’ »

Hey, I updated WordPress to version 2.3 and now I have real honest-to-goodness tag support. Of course I have 100+ untagged posts too. It should be interesting to see how the tag cloud over there on the right changes over time.

I also went and imported an experimental Blogspot blog I had set up to blather on semi-anonymously about newspaper technical issues, called “Journo-Geek”. As it became really clear that I couldn’t fill one blog with interesting crap let alone two, I decided to nuke “Journo-geek” and incorporate it’s content here. WordPress has a nice import feature that made it pretty simple. If you care about such things, the Mass Media category houses most of those posts.

I’d also been hiding non-flattering posts about my day-job behind a login wall. Technically this was a pain because the WordPress plugin I was using to enable this was dodgy and quite frankly, the idea of hiding commentary clashed with what limited personal mores I may have (“Be Open, Be Vocal; Stay Open, Stay Vocal“).

So I looked through all the offending posts and edited them for clarity (and perhaps a little dulling of the sharper edges) and opened them back up. I did wind up deleting one or two (seriously, they were stupid) and I decided to keep two posts locked away (marked them “private” in WordPress) due primarily to personal content (but I still wanted a record of them).

What can I say, even the best jobs suck on some days.

This week was gonna be a tough one, no matter what. My company was launching a major update to one of our systems at The Modesto Bee and so a gaggle of us were on site and were planning to spend the night when…

“Um, where did Fresno go?”

Suddenly all the systems at The Fresno Bee dropped offline… followed by all the Fresno staffers I have in my IM buddy list disappearing. One of our guys was on the phone to someone down there and said, “I heard the fire alarm and then the line went dead.”

Holy crap!

It turns out that a fire sprinkler pretty much blew apart and flooded a small room where all the network and phones came into the building.

I wound up driving down that night because with the network out web updates — my domain — would be awfully tricky and while they would probably have the network back up sometime that night, if they didn’t by the time we knew for sure it would be too late to drive down and implement any wild hair ideas.

When I got there I immediately set up my laptop on the local network and popped in a Verizon EVDO card. Worst case I’d move updates to my laptop from the internal net and then bring up the EVDO card and move the updates manually to the web staging server.

Then I went to check out the damage. There had been 6″ to 8″ inches of water in this tiny little data room and most of the equipment had been either submerged or completely sprayed with this mucky 25-year-old sprinkler water. When I first walked in I didn’t have my camera, which was too bad because there was muck on the walls and guys were basically laying in it trying to get equipment pulled out to dry it off.

Then I sat in a pretty grim meeting of powerful people. The print operation was unaffected as all the internal systems and networks were fine, they’d still put out a paper. The major concern was the phones, the next morning people would be calling to place ads, to make complaints, to do any amount of business all via the phones. For an hour we discussed a variety of ways to get the phone traffic handled in the event they couldn’t get the phone system back up by morning.

Interestingly what was NOT discussed was the myriad of internet feeds than any newspaper has to put stuff on the web in various places including daily news feeds, classified feeds and the like. By exclusion, I got to see what really mattered.

So after the first edition went to bed, I dutifully juggled the data from one machine to another over the EVDO card and as expected 5 minutes later the network came up. While I called it a night, other folks were still at it using hair dryers to dry the remaining equipment.

Amazingly, they had most systems restored by morning, which is a testament to the hard work a lot of people did (but not me, I was in a hotel room working on the aforementioned system upgrade).

I need to keep my camera at the ready more.

Yesterday while leaving one of our remote offices I came across one of those guys that plasters his car with signs. Usually its just some extreme political viewpoint or other, but as I read this guy’s high art I just started laughing — then I frantically grabbed for my camera.

Let me get this straight, the judge ate your kids for breakfast… whaaaa?

Sadly I was on the slow side and there was traffic to deal with, so it’s not the best shot, but you get the point.

Then a few offramps up the freeway there was the kid in a toga on a Segway advertising pizza.

You heard me.

Like most newspapers, the one(s) that I support are trying desperately to control expenses and are looking under every rock for spare pennies. One tactic oft deployed is the “write once; deploy many” approach to software (or more commonly: “buy once; deploy many”).

The problem is every newspaper is unique. Simply put, what works for one doesn’t necessarily work for another.

As an example, the papers I support were recently introduced to a new web content management system. The system isn’t really bad, although there are some latent issues, but every paper got — or will get — the exact same interface.

But every paper has subtle differences in the way they do things and this “standard” interface causes issues. It slows down production, forces workflow changes, and even in some cases forces product changes — all in the name of saving some nominal amount of money.

To avoid such nastiness, those papers lucky enough to have access to journo-geeks have them work up all manner of band-aids and workarounds. Yours Truly is certainly guilty of such hackery. The problem here is that who’s gonna support said band-aids if/when that journo-geek disappears? What if your journo-geek gets hit by the proverbial bus? Furthermore, what will happen when the offending system/application/whatever is updated? Will the band-aid update with it or will it blow apart requiring frantic emergency pages in the middle of the night?

The obvious (to me) solution is to shoot for “one size mostly fits all,” then provide ways for the journo-geeks and their ilk to tweak and modify things as they need. Make that way flexible yet scalable (upgradeable). And for crying out loud, make it documented.

Make it an interface so that programmers can modify your application.

Get it?

This is really amazing…

In a nutshell it sums up what I do. No, I don’t make neat videos, nor do I work at Yahoo or Flickr, but I understand at a very technical level how these web2.0y sites work, and more importantly their value (minus the hype), especially to certain companies.

Well, now wait. It’s not what I do right now. It’s what I haven’t been able to do despite my desire to.

It’s what I want to do.

A co-worker dropped a gift on my desk today: a black Nikon “F” with motordrive.

Whoa.

It apparently sat on a shelf in his house for a number of years gathering dust (quite literally as I can attest to). Prior to that it was owned by a professional news photographer and it shows some substantial wear and tear. The serial number is quite early (6482469) so seems to indicates that this camera is most likely older than I am.

The one down side is that 3 batteries have leaked in the motordrive’s battery pack and are pretty much corroded in place. He had tried WD-40 to get them out (yikes).

So this thing is very dirty, very banged up, smells a bit funny… and is simply the coolest gift ever.