This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in February 2005.

Everybody’s bloggin’ these days

Seems like there’s been a rash of blogging happening lately. Back in 1996 everybody had to have a Homepage. Ooooh, the hallowed Homepage. The New Style of course is the blog. Ooooh, the Blog. At any rate, I think the Blog is an improvement over the Homepage if only because most people’s blogs tend to use other people’s templates that look far better than when they were trying to do their own Homepage designs. The point? Overall, blogs look okay. And reading about someone’s life is generally a lot more interesting than looking at their Hot Links.

With that said, I’d like to point out some blogs of people I know that are fine, quite fine. There’s Ken Clinkenbeard who was nice enough to link me. Ken started his blog in December. Also, I’d like to draw your attention to Scott Fiddelke and his technology oriented blog. Scott got his start in August and is going strong. Scott also posts photos from his picture phone.

Finally, I’d like to highlight the entry of Amalia Vagts onto the blogging scene. Amalia is making a life shift, which happens to be the focus of her blog. She’s only been blogging a little over a month, but I can tell that she likes to write. Keep on blogging, Amalia! As a special treat, take a look at the blog of Mama J. Oh my.

Comments (1) »

iTunes + Firefox: The little things matter

I love it when programs that you know and love continue to get better. I’m recently reminded of that by two small but very nice additions to iTunes and Firefox. In iTunes for Windows, they’ve added a mini-player to the task bar, if you want. This is great. When you minimize the iTunes window, a little player shows up at the bottom of the screen. It can skip a tune, change the volume, etc. Simple, but elegant. Here’s a screenshot:

The other feature I’m happy to have is in Firefox 1.0.1, which I just installed yesterday. Finally, Firefox allows you to open links from other applications as a new tab in the current Firefox window. This is awesome! I’m often clicking links in my email or other places, and before this Firefox’s default behavior was to open the link in an existing Firefox window. I’ve tended to go from my email program to Firefox, open a blank tab, and then go back to my email to click the link, so that whatever else I was working on in Firefox didn’t get overwritten. How do you access this wonderful feature? It’s under Tools and Options. Click on the Advanced button and look under Tabbed Browsing. Here’s a screen shot:

No Comments Yet »

The WSJ Online: irrelevant?

Wired News has an interesting opinion piece entitled Whither The Wall Street Journal? that claims that the WSJ has become irrelevant because their online content is locked behind the wall of paid subscriptions. As a subscriber of the print edition and having grown up reading the WSJ, I can say that the Wall Street Journal is by far the best paper out there. The WSJ is a paper that I’ve always grokked deeply. The type and quality of their brand of journalism is best-of-breed.

At any rate, the article fails to make a key qualification. It’s not so much that the WSJ doesn’t have an impact online; they just don’t have an impact with bloggers. The Wall Street Journal Online has 684,000 paid subscribers, and yet it’s irrelevant? Don’t think so. The WSJ has a huge impact—just not with the crowd the author runs with, which apparently believes heavily in the all-information-should-be-free notion. I’ve always been inclined to believe that there’s a cost involved in getting the best information. (Though that cost may not always be monetary e.g. NYTimes.com registration.)

Is it a risk for the WSJ? Certainly. But I don’t think the problem as framed by the author is unique to the WSJ. Newspapers in general are becoming less relevant—and people (esp. the younger crowd) are getting their news increasingly from TV and online. NYTimes.com gets 9 million visitors daily, but their online revenue is a small slice of the pie. The print edition of the NYTimes is their cash cow. The WSJ has a fraction of that, but the people visiting their site paid for the privilege.

I’ll be the first to admit that reading the NYTimes online these past six or so years has been wonderful. I’ve come across so many great articles and often linked to them on my blog. Do I mention the WSJ less? Certainly. I get the print edition, and it’s harder for that information to make the jump, that is, to go from paper to screen. Perhaps that would be an argument for subscribing to the online edition. (If you get the print edition, the online edition is $39 a year.)

The author besides blogging also mentions online research as another key category in which the WSJ is nonexistent. He cites Google searches as evidence that the WSJ is irrelevant. A question I hear a lot from students is “What’s the proper citation format for online sources?” People have stopped going to the library even to do research. It’s basically what they can do from their dorm room online. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but for undergraduate students doing online research, the low hanging fruit is generally the most attractive. I think that’s true for the blogosphere. A lot of bloggers don’t want to have to work to find or gain access to information. “Who needs to?” they say. With RSS feeds, everything comes streaming right to your desk. There’s no point in having to go find information, and the top 10 or 20 hits in Google can fill in when needed.

Ultimately, as newspapers increasingly become the objects of another era, new sources of information will arise. A site that charges for content rather than being run off of advertising may be the only way to maintain the level of quality that the WSJ consistently has. The WSJ has the best journalists because they can afford to do so. A lot of content is being released on the Internet for free—the Wired article I’m responding to being a good example of that. I think the question is: are bloggers setting the media agenda? That is, would the influence of bloggers be enough to dissuade people from the WSJ?

So what the hell are newspapers going to do?

Comments (1) »

Culture Clash in Arizona

In the continuing copyright saga taking shape on the internet and elsewhere, an Arizona student will be doing hard time for copyright infringement. News blurb via Edupage, an electronic publication of Educause.

ARIZONA STUDENT SENTENCED FOR COPYRIGHT VIOLATIONS
A student at the University of Arizona who pleaded guilty to unauthorized possession of copyrighted movies and music has been sentenced to three months in prison, three years’ probation, and 200 hours of community service. The 18-year-old student, Parvin Dhaliwal, was also fined $5,400. Andrew Thomas, attorney for Maricopa County, noted that illegal possession of intellectual property is a felony. Thomas said some of the movies Dhaliwal had copies of were, at the time, only being shown in theaters. Dhaliwal was also ordered to take a copyright course at the University of Arizona and not to use file-sharing programs.
Associated Press, 17 February 2005
http://kvoa.com/Global/story.asp?S=2934754

So what’s the right approach? The teenagers think everything should be free. The companies want to lock things down so much that you don’t even own the media that you buy. The techies want information to be transferable and convenient. Where is the DRM balance? (DRM being Digital Rights Management.) Microsoft is way over on the DRM side of things, which is why their media efforts are corporate-friendly, consumer-unfriendly. Apple seems to have developed the best mix of DRM/convenience to date. There are restrictions on what you can do with music purchased from the iTunes Music Store, but by God if you want to burn the stuff to a CD you can without having to pay through the nostrils for the privilege.

No Comments Yet »

librarian in tow

I read a variety of blogs and weblogs via RSS feeds over at Bloglines.com. One thing Bloglines does is recommend blogs based on your current subscriptions. Based on the 84 or so feeds I currently subscribe to, Bloglines feels I should be reading a lot more library-oriented blogs. I don’t subscribe to any librarian blogs though I used to work for a certain university’s library. Could it be that Bloglines has sussed out a secret longing? I don’t know. Out of the 8 or so librarian blogs it recommended, I saw one that I thought was worth passing along. It’s infozo the moron librarian. Worth a glance certainly. As a personal note, I’d also like to point out LibrarianGear.com. I especially like the Less Shush More Lush t-shirt.

Comments (1) »

Time to get a life

The San Francisco Chronicle has a great article about the vicissitudes of blogging—focusing especially on why people stop blogging. The summation of the journalist’s point is that for dedicated bloggers there is no “end.” Blogging is something that people leave and come back to at a later point. I’d add that for some people blogging comes naturally, and when events in your life shift it may make it difficult to maintain a blog. But I’ll agree with the writer, it’s definitely something that we keep coming back to.

No Comments Yet »

The Rubik’s Cube of Conversation

One thing I’ve noticed in my travels is that when being introduced to people in big cities, they are often in a hurry to size you up. I like to call it the Rubik’s Cube of Conversation. Here’s how it works:

After being introduced to someone or striking up a conversation, the person will ask you several questions to size you up. In my experience, it usually works out to be about three questions. It’s like a Rubik’s Cube. Suppose you are given a Rubik’s Cube that could be solved in three turns. If you make the right three turns of the Cube, the puzzle is solved and all is well. If not, well then forget about it.

In the space of three questions, the other person is sizing you up. If you answer “correctly” (by their estimation) three times, then the Rubik’s Cube is solved, and the conversation will continue. If you answer in a way that is not of interest to the other person, then the conversation will quickly end.

I’ve seen it go both ways, and it really just depends what the other person wants out of you. On my recent trip to DC, my friend Amy indicated that the typical attitude there is: what can you do for me? Usually, there’s not much you can do about the Rubik’s Cube when someone takes that approach. It’s really all about the other person, and actually has very little to do with you.

By no means is this always the case when meeting people in an urban environment. But I’ve seen it enough to give it a name. So that, my friends, is the Rubik’s Cube of Conversation.

Comments (1) »

What if? The Apple Equation

When it comes to computers, Apple’s big selling point used to be the operating system. That was in the Mac OS 9 and before days. You could compare Windows 3.1 and the Mac OS, and it was very clear that the Mac was a superior operating system. Mac OS X is still a selling point, but not in the same way Mac OS <=9 was. The reasons for switching to Mac OS X are geekier—a lot of Linuxheads I know have switched to Mac OS X at least for their mobile platforms. Mac OS X is interesting under the hood to the geeks.

But Apple’s big selling point now is software. Take a look at iLife. This software is freaking awesome. I installed iLife ‘05 on my PowerBook on Friday. This is amazing stuff. The ease of use of this software is truly great. I used to use Windows Media Player on my PCs until iTunes came out for PC. iTunes is superior in every respect. I’ve been comparing iPhoto 5.0 to the Canon ZoomBrowser EX 5.0 installed on my PC. No comparison!

The fun part of the equation is participatory. It’s saying “What if?” about Apple. So how about: What if Apple ported Mac OS X to the Intel platform and sold it for $100? What if Apple released iLife for Windows? What if Apple released a cheap Mac? (Okay, they did this in fine fashion.) Or how about: What if 15% of the Windows userbase switched to Mac?

The lynchpin preventing Apple from porting their software over to Wintel is Hardware. Apple’s hardware business has historically been the most profitable area of the company. They make billions from their hardware. This is changing because of the iPod. The iPod has sweetened Apple’s bottom line, and in my opinion makes some of these What if? questions more plausible. Given that Apple’s hardware business is less important to the company’s financial health, what are the chance that Steve Jobs would port the Apple assets to Wintel? Not likely of course. But it’s a fun rainy day activity to imagine a world in which Mac and Windows were side by side, rather than being in separate universes. The iPod has been a great uniter. I will be watching closely to see what Apple decides to do given that most iPods are sold for Windows.

And just to throw this out for discussion: What if Apple brought their design sense to Wintel and started releasing Apple-branded boxes with Intel/AMD chips inside that ran Mac OS X?

No Comments Yet »

Sneak Peek: Manufactured Fotos

I’m pleased to give my regular readers a sneak peek at what’s happening over in the photography area of this website. Check out Manufactured Fotos, a new fotoblog. The RSS feed for the fotoblog is http://feeds.feedburner.com/ManufacturedFotos.

Obviously, I’m still working on the templates, and I’m adding my existing fotos into the blog framework. But with RSS syndication, it’ll be even easier to keep tabs of when fotos are going up on the site. So take a look and enjoy.

No Comments Yet »

RSS 1.0 + Atom 0.3 feeds are going away

Rather than maintain three separate syndication formats for this website, as has been the case for the past couple of years, I’m downscaling to just RSS 2.0. That means that my RSS 1.0 (index.rdf) and Atom 0.3 (atom.xml) feeds are going to go away. If you subscribe to either one, please update your links to:

http://manufacturedenvironments.com/index.xml

That’s the RSS 2.0 feed, and the one that will be active.

No Comments Yet »

Okay, I posted this, so where’s my commission?

This has been making the rounds lately, but in case you hadn’t seen it, here’s a freaky cool video short of Gene Kelly in Singin’ In The Rain, updated for the Volkswagen makes cars that don’t work generation. Beware: viral advertising in tow. (quicktime req’d.)

No Comments Yet »

Light tunnel at the Detroit airport

Light tunnel at the Detroit airport, originally uploaded by dstout.

People walking along the moving walk at the Detroit airport on my way back from Washington DC.

Comments (1) »

Amy in DC

Amy in DC, originally uploaded by dstout.

A night out on the town with Amy in Washington DC. West African food, reggae bands, birthday celebration, dancing. A good time was had by all.

No Comments Yet »

Ten Things I’ve Learned about Blogging

Last Tuesday marked the five-year anniversary of when I started blogging. February 1, 2000, I headed out into relatively uncharted territory. (Read my first post here.) In the past few years and especially in 2004, millions of people have started blogs. What have I learned in my first five years of blogging?

1. Blogs are not for everyone. I’ve met a lot of people who tried it but gave it up quickly. If writing is a chore for you, then you might think of another avenue for personal expression.
2. Links are your friends. Some blogs, like dooce.com, present a narrative and rarely link. But for those of us who are more interested in news and online happenings, linking to other things helps bring people back for more.
3. Register a domain. It’s a lot easier for people to find you if you have your own domain name rather than anonymousblog.blogspot.com. Over the years I’ve gone between fishthing.net, danielstout.com, and manufacturedenvironments.com among others.
4. I like to blog. Over the past 5 years, there have been ups and downs on the blog. The main thing is to keep on plugging away at it. Whatever is happening at the moment—both good and bad—will pass. Blogging is akin to writing—the more you do it, the better it goes.
5. Write for your audience. If you don’t have your audience clearly in mind when you write, then you’ll miss the mark. This is true of all types of journalistic writing.
6. The blog is not a journal. I write daily in a journal and write occasionally on my blog. The two shall not meet. The stuff I put in my journal would rarely be at home in public on the internet. People who mistake the two tend to get fired.
7. To win, you’ve got to play the game. This might also be expressed as, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” There are certain conventions to the game. If you’re thinking of starting a blog, begin first by reading blogs and see how other people do it. Learn what the rules are, and then go off and do your thing.
8. Be responsive. When people send you comments or emails in response to your blog, in the long run it’s best to respond back. Something about what you wrote caught somebody’s attention, and it’s good to reward their interest in some way. Although, there is a small class of people who bite the hand that feeds them (read: trolls), which leads us into…
9. Don’t let the fools get you down. Sometimes I’ve gotten responses to my blog filled with curses and invective. That seems to just come with the territory. Whatever opinion you may express, there’s someone out there who for whatever reason disagrees and feels the need to tell you about it. Best to just hit delete and forget about it.
10. Productivity is rewarded. Your blog may be a hit, but if you stop posting people will stop coming. Some people find the time to post several times a day. You needn’t post anywhere near that much, but you do need to post semiregularly if you want people to come back. Blogging can be about rhythm. People get used to visiting your blog, and traffic may take a hit if you interrupt your usual rhythms.

Well, those are 10 things I’ve learned in no particular order. Do you blog? What have you learned about blogging?

Comments (3) »

Technorati: ManufacturedEnvironments is in Top 4%

According to Technorati, ManufacturedEnvironments.com—the blog you’re currently reading—is ranked in the top 4% of all blogs on the internet. That’s a great honor, and we here at ManuEnvi HQ are very happy to hear this news. As Clark ov Saturn would say: Keep on truckin’!

No Comments Yet »

My day on Capitol Hill

It’s now Sunday morning, 5am ET, here in Washington DC. Here’s a recounting of my Thursday:

Had a busy day. Flew out of CID at 6:50 this morning to Detroit. Interesting thing was that the director of my department at the university (e.g. my boss) was on the same flight. She was headed elsewhere, but sharing the flight the whole way to DC was a professor of political science who I know. I also shared the flight from Detroit with A. from Ames who is on the state executive board with me. (I’m in town for the winter leadership conference that the non-profit I volunteer with is putting on. The non-profit is based in DC and has organizations in all 50 states and 1,100 local chapters. I’m on the state board and also the board of my local organization.)

At any rate, we got to DC exactly at noon eastern time. A. and I took a cab to the Hyatt Arlington where we’re staying. We grabbed a quick bite to eat and then headed via the subway to Capitol Hill. There’s a subway stop right across the street from the hotel. The opening down into the subway was intense. A. said she felt dizzy.

The subway was pretty easy though, and we got off at Capitol South not knowing where to go (Travel = Adventure). We hadn’t talked to any of our folk at this point, but we knew there were meetings going on. At any rate, we found the House office building we needed to be at. There was snow coming down then—huge white flakes. We were glad to get inside. We found Rep. Leach’s office (he’s my local Representative) and joined a meeting in progress. We had several meetings through the course of the afternoon and early evening. It was A. from Ames, S. from Cedar Rapids, myself and Andrew, the full-time lobbyist for our non-profit in the Washington DC headquarters. Anyway, we talked to Leach’s staff for a while about issues. From Leach’s office we went down through some tunnel system and up into a Senate office building. We met with Senator Grassley’s staff. Grassley is from Iowa. He’s very powerful in the Senate because he’s the chair of the senate finance committee. At any rate, we talked with some of his policy wonks. Andrew said the meeting went well—that the staff were receptive. They were polite, but it was a little hard to tell from my perspective how it went. It was cool walking around with Andrew because he knew so many people, and it was interesting to eavesdrop. We then hung out at Senate Chef for a bit before our Harkin meeting. We actually got to meet Senator Harkin (also from Iowa). We introduced ourselves and shook his hand. He was cordial and said he’s always willing to meet constituents. He had to go though because he was rushing down to the Senate floor to vote on the Gonzales nomination for Attorney General. I checked the news later that evening, and it sounds like Gonzales was approved by the Senate (Harkin said he was voting against the nomination). Gonzales is the guy who legally validated Bush’s use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, etc. It was a real honor to meet the Senator.

We met with Harkin’s staff, and they were by far the best. The other people we met during the day were very knowledgeable, smart people, but the Harkin folk really knew their stuff when it came to our issues. It was a really good session.

We then headed over to a reception in the same building they were having for all of the folk from our non-profit who were on Capitol Hill. A couple Senators showed up too. I talked to M. from Des Moines who is the president of the national board and is also the executive director of the Iowa organization (and who funded my trip). And met lots of other people.

Got back to the hotel around 7:15 and had a session from 7:30 until 9pm. A. and I were both exhausted. A few of us walked across the street and had supper about 9:30pm. It was a long, but very good day. I had been up since 4am central time and needed some rest, which I finally got.

No Comments Yet »

A Dream of Apple

I woke up this morning around 4:30am remembering a dream…

I was in the backyard of my grandparent’s house. And I was there with two people —a man and a women—and they were both reps for Apple. I hadn’t met them before, but I was working with them—I had just joined the team. I talked for a while with the woman. At any rate, the guy was shooting off model rockets into the sky (something I used to do as a kid). The weird thing was that attached to the rocket was an Apple Cube. The guy was shooting a Cube up into the air…repeatedly. The cool thing is that the Cube would come falling down out of the sky and bounce harmlessly off the grass. It withstood the impact.

That’s all I remember. Weird, huh? Maybe it’s a sign that I’m working too hard. I figure it’s okay to dream about work though. It’s strange though how childhood memories of shooting off rockets and my grandparent’s backyard were mixed with more recent stuff like the Apple presentation I went to and the work I do with Macs. Anyone care to interpret?

Update: I consulted my friend Amy here in Washington DC who is an expert on these matters. She said that dreams come from the individual and only that individual can truly interpret the dream. But, another person can help you along in the process of discovering what a particular dream meant. Amy was willing to oblige.

What I uncovered in talking this out with Amy (while we were at Cafe Mayorga in Silver Spring, Maryland) is that the childhood memories represent a coming home for me. The shooting rocket I could clearly tell was about getting past my inhibitions. And the Mac Cube was also significant because it was about getting in touch with my creative, freer side. The fact that it bounced unharmed off of the grass was a sign of my own resilience and ability to work through adversity. And the Apple reps were representative of my new job at the School of Journalism. This dream was telling me, in short, that my job change was a good one—it has put me more in touch with those qualities in me that I want to enhance.

No Comments Yet »