Eubie's notes

Dan Gilmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media, continues to be a strong advocate of viewing the journalism glass as being half-full. Here’s what he said in recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle: Journalism isn’t dying, it’s reviving

There’s never been a better time, I tell students, to be a journalistic entrepreneur — to invent your own job, to become part of the generation that figures out how to produce and, yes, sell the journalism we desperately need as a society and as citizens of a shrinking planet. The young journalists who are striking out on their own today, experimenting with techniques and business models, will invent what’s coming.

Most experiments will fail. That’s not a bug in the system, but a feature. It’s how we get better.

No one says the transition from what we’ve had to what’s coming will be painless. At best, it’ll be messy.

Try to ignore the fringes of this conversation: the old-guard doomsayers and/or elitists who see nothing but woe for journalism, and the tech-triumphalists and/or media haters who can’t wait to see today’s system blown to utter shreds. These are vapid, false choices. Let’s work to keep the best of traditional media.

Meanwhile, smart people — including the ones working for traditional media companies, most of which are still quite profitable even as trends work against them — will invent, discover and use democratized media tools to create updated and new kinds of journalistic products and services. The journalistic ecosystem could end up healthier in the end, if we get this right.

Interesting profile of the hectic life of Michael Arrington, who writes the TechCrunch in current issues of Wired Magazine and recently released on Wired News: TechCrunch Blogger Michael Arrington Can Generate Buzz … and Cash. The empire and influence that is techcrunch is from the bedroom on his rented house in Calif.

And unlike most solo bloggers, Arrington has turned his passion into a tidy business. Revenue from advertising, job listings, and sponsorships now totals about $200,000 a month. He says he could have sold the operation last fall to a media company (which he won’t name) for $8.5 million, and he may still. But with a new top-flight CEO from Fox Interactive Media, roughly $1 million in the bank, and VCs lining up around the block to invest, Arrington talks like a man who wants to build an empire.

and

By any measure, it has been a remarkable rise. Two years ago, Arrington was a nobody — a former attorney and entrepreneur who, at 35, looked as if he might never hit it big. Now, without a journalism background or media-giant bankroll, he is mentioned in the same sentence as big-shot tech journalist Walt Mossberg and venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz, two of the guys who backed Google. But Arrington is not only a self-made Silicon Valley rock star, he’s a textbook example of how to turn intelligence, tenacity, and arrogance into an Internet brand.

At a recent World War II show at the Charlotte History Museum, one person had a portable gramophone — a Columbia Grafonola. It operates just on wind-up power. The volume is controlled by the baffles behind the turntable.

The most interesting part was the part below — the reproducer. Its tracks the grooves in the record and through the clear chamber of the reproducer out the tone arm. The record that was playing was “White Christmas” sung by Bing Crosby. Trivia question: What’s on the flip side of “White Christmas”? “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”.

Google’s share of the search market is almost 50 percent — not bad for the youngest player in search. Trying to keep up with millions of web sites and pages updating daily though is challenge. The NY Times spent a day with some of the software engineers who keep tweaking the search algorithm that is the heart of its search engine to make it easier for users to find what they want when they type in phrases such as “Brittany Speers” are looking for “Britney Spears” (Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine).

As the NY Times notes:

As Google constantly fine-tunes its search engine, one challenge it faces is sheer scale. It is now the most popular Web site in the world, offering its services in 112 languages, indexing tens of billons of Web pages and handling hundreds of millions of queries a day.

Even more daunting, many of those pages are shams created by hucksters trying to lure Web surfers to their sites filled with ads, pornography or financial scams. At the same time, users have come to expect that Google can sift through all that data and find what they are seeking, with just a few words as clues.

The authors of What Color is Your Parachute have expanded into those who have retired — What Color is Your Parachute? For Retirement, which is reviewed by USA Today, Review: Career guru parachutes into retirement arena

What Color is Your Parachute? For Retirement follows many of the precepts of its predecessor: To figure out what kind of life you want, you need to figure out who you really are — and to do that, the authors provide a plethora of worksheets and exercises to examine, for example, why you might like some things better than others.

In a way, your retirement decisions are more difficult than those you faced during your formative and career years, because then, most of those decisions were dictated by others — your parents, teachers and bosses.

And retirement is certainly not all about money.

“Financial security helps protect against unhappiness, but doesn’t directly lead to happiness,” Bolles and Nelson write early on

Dell began selling new PCs installed with Ubuntu Linux, which raises the question in Wired: Is Ubuntu Linux for You, Too?. Looking at uses such editing photos, watching DVDs, and other software that runs with Ubuntu, the answer is not yet. It can be used in limited-use situations but for most folks, including many tech-savvy folks, it’s beyond their reach, especially if it needs a bit of troubleshooting.

Stories such as Jessamyn Charity West’s blog itemand YouTube video of installing Ubuntu on some old computers at the Vermont Library where she works makes it sound exciting and rebellious, but in the end most folks want it do work smoothly and easily.

I’ve found Knoppix to be the easiest to use for my uses, but Ubuntu is almost as easy, followed by DSL. With all three offering Live CDs where you can use the software from a CD, it’s very easy to try it.

Flooded by email that will never get read, some have declared “email bankruptcy” where they just delete all the messages in the inbox and start over, reports the Washington Post, E-Mail Reply to All: ‘Leave Me Alone’

Those declaring bankruptcy are swearing off e-mail entirely or, more commonly, deleting all old messages and starting fresh.

E-mail overload gives many workers the sense that their work is never done, said senior analyst David Ferris, whose firm, Ferris Research, said there were 6 trillion business e-mails sent in 2006. “A lot of people like the feeling that they have everything done at the end of the day,” he said. “They can’t have it anymore.”

For some, they’re returning to the telephone or instant messaging to communicate.

USA Today:Honda’s FCX fuel-cell car ready for its close-up

The biggest customer issue is expected to be the lack of noise.

It will be interesting to see how the automaker deals with the noise issue. Honda knows people want to hear something when they step on the throttle. Otherwise there’s little to reinforce the feeling of acceleration. A noiseless car can seem sluggish even if it’s not. But what kind of sound, and how do you get it from an electric powerplant?

No point putting it on the list anytime soon. In 2008, it’s expected to be available only in places where hydrogen refueling stations are available, such as California, Detroit, Washington.