Challenging conventional wisdom about the direction of media

New Yorker: Malcolm Gladwell: Priced to Sell – a scathing review of Wired’s Chris Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” and the concepts promoted within.

NYTimes: Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia – the NYTimes coordinated with Wikipedia staff to keep a factual event from appearing on the service.

Say Everything: Chapter One: Putting Everything Out There [Justin Hall]: a review of Justin Hall’s history and his efforts on the Web. How they laid the foundation for all that came later.

NiemanJournalismLab: Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment

Scott Rosenberg: Salon.com IPO: It was ten years ago today

Chris Anderson (not Wired’s): We’ve Been Living Through a Twitter Revolution for the Last 10 Years

Michael Jackson’s reach was across generations, across the seas

YouTube: (Michael Jackson) Billie Jean – Sungha Jung:

Wow.

I had posted the following to Twitter, but it belongs here:

“11 years old, standing on chestnut st. near 11th, outside store, watching tvs play Thriller thru a window. that was me.”

Michael Jackson’s death triggered moments of reflection for many. So many that services across the Web struggled to stay functional as people either reached out for news, or to share their memories with one another.

He stands as a kind of Rorschach test. What you think of him and his contributions to music and entertainment are dependent on you – the information published about him you cared to absorb, rationalize, relate to, or reject.

He was a force. He left an imprint.

YouTube: Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” cover by Amanda Palmer (live):

Some links:

WNEW.com: The Epic of Michael Jackson

Metafilter: Ongoing thread

Attytood: The Love You Save: Michael Jackson and the rear-guard Baby Boomers

NPR.org: Michael Jackson: Life Of A Pop Icon

Susie Madrak: The Life and Death of Michael Jackson

Jeneane Sessum: Have You Seen My Childhood

Comcaster Scott Westerman: Michael Jackson’s place in the pantheon of our lives

Lisa Marie Presley: He Knew.

CSMonitor: Outpouring over Michael Jackson unlike anything since Princess Di

Koax! Koax! Koax! (via boing boing): Some thoughts on Michael Jackson

YouTube: I’ll Be There Acapella:

And lastly, a very deep thought by co-worker John: “The Michael Jackson we knew died a long time ago”

Two Links on Car Repairs, Crashes, and Infrastructure

Mr. Aaron Held: Designing a new Infrastructure is like buying a new car:

** You usually start this process due to a crash **

code: User gen data + no cache eviction = FAIL
car : SUV from the side + swerve = One less Stop sign.

Shelley Powers: Car Repair:

Car repair is not a linear progression, with incidents sweetly spaced so as to remind us, gently, that nothing lasts forever.

It is an aggregation of aggravation, where one failure begets another, in clumps timed to crest when your wallet is flattest.

A Blogging History Worth Reading?

I’m really looking forward to reading Scott Rosenberg’s “Say Everything”.

I’m sure “Say Everything” will be a book I can share with others (which I do with “Dreaming in Code”) to provide them insight into why I do some of the things I do and why I get so damn passionate about them.

Writing a book on blogging’s history and how it related to the Web, Internet, and society is a difficult task. Based upon excerpts I’ve read so far, Rafe’s review of the first half, and reading his fantastic “Dreaming in Code”, I know this book is going to be terrific and insightful.

Speaking of blogging, I got to agree with Rafe – the most awesome thing about blogging *is* “corresponding with so many of the people I met through blogging back then here, on Twitter, and elsewhere.”.

Absolutely.

Thank you Web.

Reading about Graphviz

While gearing up on a content management project, a few developers were wrangling with how to share solution diagrams between Visio and OmniGraffle. While there is a level of compatibility between the two, its not ideal. While researching, I went off into a related tangent, a cross platform tool that I can manipulate from a text editor or programming language, and ended up reading about Graphviz.

Graphviz – command line tool and DSL (dot) to define and render graphs and diagrams.

Doesn’t sounds like much, but check out this magic: Visualizing traceroute output with Ruby and Graphviz or how about Maven based dependency graphing?

I think prefuse (with the unbelievable looking flare) is an excellent related toolkit to look into next (interaction and animations!!!!!) .

O’Reilly: An Introduction to GraphViz and dot

O’Reilly: Graphviz – Why draw when you can code?

Orgmode.org: org-exp-blocks.el: pre-process blocks in org-mode files in Emacs to generate diagrams – rocking!

Bernt Hansen’s fantastic Org Mode – Organize Your Life In Plain Text! is a working example of the above org-mode use case (and a great org-mode tutorial)

Forever for Now: UML Diagrams Using Graphviz Dot

Haven’t read or experimented with yet, but will…

Linux.com: Create relationship diagrams with Graphviz

IBM developerWorks: Visualize function calls with Graphviz

Graphviz Resources – large list of viewers, navigators, language bindings, etc

WikiViz: A large list of related tools and libraries

ZGRViewer: a Java-based desktop GraphViz/DOT Viewer – Adds interactivity to viewing a dot defined graph.

Graphviz Eclipse plug-in

pydot

NetworkX

UMLGraph