Matthew Ericson of the New York Times (and former co-worker of mine) put together slides of his recent presentation at AIGA Pivot. The presentation must have rocked because the slide deck, while short on details, is rich in thought provoking: PDF.
For a recent example from his team, check out today’s interactive on the Euro debt crisis.
A story is posted about a private company working to build the largest capacity lifter in service and what do a significant number of commentors fret about?
That the government is wasting its money on building it!
It is pretty clear that most of those who are commenting that way have not read (or worst – understood) the story, but the ‘private company’ part was highlighted in the summary.
Check it out – NPR.org (on Facebook): Plans For World’s Most Powerful Rocket Unveiled
Sad, huh?
But don’t you think there are multiple failures taking place exemplified here? And where do you feel they stem from?
I just took part in a great 3 day training session with Uncle Bob Martin on TDD and healthy software design. One of the tidbits Bob shared was the history behind the Waterfall methodology that some of us older folks strained against until agile and lean methodologies started to get well known. Waterfall originated in a paper by Winston W. Royce, in which he describes the process… as a straw man to tear down! Unfortunately, the poor information design of the paper (it puts the summary tearing down the methodology on later pages instead of right up front) led those who read the nice graphics on leading pages to come away thinking they found the solution to their software engineering process needs.
Watch Glenn Vanderburg’s “Real Software Engineering” talk on Vimeo about this.
Real Software Engineering – Glenn Vanderburg from Engine Yard on Vimeo.
Check out the terrific timeline visualization of protests in the Middle East. The navigation and elements surfaced simultaneously is informative and makes exploring fun.
The NYTimes engineering blog “Open” shares novel uses of its API, some of which are physical!
There have been numerous efforts at building services focused on local communities, and almost all of them, that have not had a community element to them, have failed to one degree or another.
Just being an aggregator is not enough. You need to curate. Moderate. Collate. Summarize. Connect. Most of all – communicate! Sure software helps. But it requires hands on work by people too. And it takes time. Like forming any relationship does.
GigaOm: Mathew Ingram: “Hyper-Local News: It’s About the Community or It Fails”
ReadWriteWeb: Marshall Kirkpatrick: “Hyperlocal Heartbreak: Why Haven’t Neighborhood News Technologies Worked Out?”
Try this nifty interactive, by the New York Times, that enables you to make the hard decisions.
Guardian: Paul Bradshaw: “How to be a data journalist”
ProPublica: Jeff Larson: “The Rainbow Connection: How We Made Our CDO Connections Graphic” (tools mentioned: google-refine (formerly Gridworks), Raphaël, JSON)
I am *not* accusing anyone of coverage bias. I’d bet that Google News’s story inclusion algorithms probably reflect what people are linking to and discussing generally.
Google News: “Republican Party”: 11,579 stories
Google News: “Tea Party”: 22,977 stories
Google News: “Democratic Party”: 15,668 stories
Fascinating.
I like this – a lot. Makes a whole hell of a lot more sense than PMRC warning labels, that’s for sure. I wonder if a Firefox plugin, enabling some social review mechanism to apply these labels would work. Probably too small of an audience. Besides, I think Tom Scott was joking. I think. Gotta send him an email.
Contents Not Verified 🙂
I have been hard on Memeorandum in the past, believing that its story selection algorithm’s were too narrow, that it promoted a small subset of the Web, but just look at it. Look at it again.
Memeorandum is the only one stop shop on the Web to get exposed to both sides of the political conversation taking place. That admirable, helpful, and downright impressive. No one else does this and I am thankful I can go there each day to get a round up of what’s being discussed in the political sphere.