News: The Hook, The Line, And The Sinker
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Tycho:  Gabe keeps coming into the Goddamn office with his Goddamn tales of high adventure, telling me about how there's tokens or some shit in Burning Crusade now, or maybe tiers, and other words I had scoured from my consciousness.  He also says there is hot new five-man content, which initially sounded like pornography.  The comic is correct - I purchased it in a moment of weakness.  As I must often approach you, the cherished reader, to apologize for this or that indiscretion, it may be more appropriate to say that I have moments of strength which are suspended in cowardice and moral decay.
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Matthew Turland has mentioned his article in the latest issue of php|architect magazine (the December 2007 issue) covering web scraping.   Just a quick post to announce (albeit a little late) that the December 2007 issue of php|architect, which includes my article on web scraping. Please buy a copy, give it a read, and feel free to post comments on the forum thread for the article. I'd love to hear some reader feedback!   Other articles in the issue include "Writing an Object/Relational Mapper in PHP", "Understanding CLI" and the cover story "Going native with mysqlnd".
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It's not very often that you see something new in News.  News is not exactly new technology, but when personal computers came along, and then widespread networking, it created a whole new playing field for news, that has shaken things up for most of my life. Change comes in fits at starts. First there was the web, then RSS, and now I think we're on the cusp of another bit of change. If you want to see what I think it looks like, check out the home page of nytimesriver.com. But that's not the end of the story. A flat completely chronologic view of news probably isn't enough. And earlier this month at a meeting in NY, two engineers at the NY Times set me off in a new direction, with a very simple bit of advice. They told me to look in the HTML source code of their stories. When I did I saw they had applied a taxonomy to their news flow, and this opened the door to what I would like to show you today -- an outline view of the news.  http://nytimesriver.com/outline/  I believe it's fairly self-explanatory.  The topics are arranged in order of frequency in today's news.  In a previous rendering, the stories were shown in a histogram, but this view I think is much better. You can still see how many pieces relate to the indicated topic, but by clicking on the plus next to each topic, you can actually see the headlines and descriptions, and if you want more you can click through to the full stories. (Initially, the outline was sorted by frequency, with the most frequently occurring keyword appearing first. I changed it, based on feedback, to be alphabetic.) Now, there's still more to do, I showed this to a number of people during the weekend and got some excellent clues on ideas to pursue next, and I will do that. Further, in the process of exploring this, I've been shown the work of other developers who discovered the keywords on their own, and one in particular is very interesting. I'm hoping that these projects will come public so I can show them to you and tell you what I think they mean. This is what I live for, professionally -- the sense of being somewhere with great unexplored potential, a virgin landscape of the intellect. I'm never happier than when I get to play in such a place.  Om Malik: A new way to view news. Please comment on the screen shot page.
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U.S. scientists are trying to determine what is causing a widespread fish kill in the Hood Canal, a fjord-like side basin of Washington State's Puget Sound.  The canal has historically been a deep and poorly flushed waterway with low dissolved oxygen concentrations.
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Tycho:  Rhythm games aren't my forte, but I have a lot of inbuilt experience with meter which helps me fake it until I can build genuine skill.  And, as rhythm elements have crept into the entire medium, Tycho stock has been in a boom phase.  It's understandable, then, that while I soar and illuminate - and Gabriel sputters, bound to earth - tensions related to my prowess have begun to burn red-hot.  That is, until they cool again.  These things have a way of working themselves out in the fullness of time.          There's an incredible article over at Wired this month (and possibly also in the magazine?) about the Bungie's psychological approach to game design.  What a tremendous challenge it must be to retain authorial control in such a case!  As someone whose output is rarely screened by any agency, the whole thing gave me chills.  The right to fail nobly in a creative endeavor (as we sometimes do) is such a powerful luxury.  No such luxury may be extended to them, upon whose toil an entire platform rests.  God keep me from such a fate.          I keep hearing that Metroid Prime 3: Corruption isn't being promoted very well, but the person saying this always seems to know about it, and then when people share this complaint in the thread those people also seem to be "in the know."  It ships on the twenty-seventh of August, if you weren't aware - but since you almost certainly are, we needn't dwell on it.  What we should be dwelling on are the series of teaser vids that Retro has been trickling out.  Metroid's largely mysterious heroine has always been a huge draw for me, and going into deep detail about the character would actually damage the mystique.  But the universe she operates in need not be vague, which is why these clips are such a rich meal:  there's the Aurora Unit trailer that modernizes ancient Metroid canon in a classy way, and there's a treat at the end of the Valhalla trailer that ties it all together.  They both cover a setting that has gotten darker and more sophisticated, tones we don't typically associate with Nintendo.       We like to get kicks in on the post-Harmonix Guitar Hero, partly based on their "wacky" multiplayer concept - which ordinary gamers will probably love - but also out of a sort of tribal loyalty.  This having been established, they've built an authentically heroic tracklist that really has a lot of beef.  Going from the most recent Rock Band announcement out of Leipzig, both versions appear to have Radiohead's "Creep" and the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," which is something of a comfort.  After seeing different songs on each game from Metallica and The Rolling Stones, I wasn't sure if they were already traveling down the catalogues securing exclusive weaponry.  I hope that the labels in this case see the old wisdom of arming both sides.
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By The Stamford Advocate, Conn.  Mar. 8--Any region that gets deluged like we did late last week is going to find parts of itself under water.
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By Mark Taylor, The Roanoke Times, Va.  Sep. 21--Overview   Autumn officially begins Saturday, and the fall fishing frenzy seems to be getting rolling on cue.
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Doc: "A year from now every newspaper will have a newsriver." I think so too because: 1. The idea is so compelling and 2. It's so easy to implement. Thanks so much to Doc Searls for writing a great evangelical piece about the power of rivers. The stream is turning into a current, and soon really will be a river.  It&#185;s so weird to see rivers show up in Facebook, and Twitter is just a big river of all the people you&#185;re following. The idea is actually a descendent of the teletype terminals that used to be in the movies (and for all I know in actual newsrooms). The news would be printed on scrolls of paper, and when a new story would come in it would push all the older stories onto the floor. You could catch up on the news by scrolling back through the news. Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Katherine Hepburn did it. We&#185;ll all be doing it soon enough. And it really helps to get other people singing the song, esp from within the hallowed halls of Harvard. The more attention we get focused on it, the more other developers will tune in. And what may not be so clear from the narrative is that this project got its start from a meeting I had with some technical people at the Times last week in NY. Like most organizations, it's not of one mind, there are people who are scared of what comes next but there are others who know that the Times has to change. By opening up their internal data to me, all kinds of interesting stuff can happen. We've been here before. The Times are the unsung heroes of RSS, without them it never would have solidified, with the publishing industry falling in behind the Times. It was this consensus that created critical mass for RSS 2.0 in 2002 and 2003. I really hope some of this stuff feeds back into the Times support of RSS. And as you have seen, there are now lots of new opportunities in user interface for news. This is what I do, when I'm in my "flow" -- we're there now again, with a new toy to build and then play with, every day.  Betsy Devine: "Dave Winer has been improving the New York Times for as long as I&#185;ve known him." Phil Windley: "With more sources, who are themselves continuously updating, the keyword river could be as dynamic as you&#185;d want it to be."
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By Tom Angleberger   tomangleberger@yahoo.com
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By Seth Freedland, Daily Press, Newport News, Va.  Jun.
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Fishing is steady although the number of anglers going out has been down somewhat. Walleye can still be taken most anywhere, but you have to work for it.  Dropping water levels have led to unusable ramps.
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To marine biologists, âplasticsâ is a dirty word. Fish and birds can eat or become tangled in fishing gear or other plastic flotsam.
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Today we released version 1.6.3 of Streamline, a stream-based network subsystem for Linux.   This first release in over a half year has been thorougly stress-tested, so it should be more stable. New features include support for named and unnamed pipes, the full POSIX file IO interface, a write-after-read optimization similar to splicing, a method for catching HTTP GET requests and self-resizing (based on load) ringbuffer designs. Please read the changelog for more details.
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A few notes on the NY Times outline... 1. I switched it back to the frequency sort, having tried it as an alphabetized list for about 18 hours. Now I want to see what happens with it flipped around so the most frequent keyword bins appear first. 2. Not sure, but I think it will empty out later this afternoon, as yesterday's stories expire, and before tomorrow's stories ship.  3. It seems that at least some people have bookmarked the site and are refreshing it. If so, I'm glad -- because that's the way these pages are most useful, they tell you something about what changed. Remember this is "news" not olds. 4. The outline view is something like TechMeme for the Times news flow. Not exactly because the keywords are assigned by people. Unseen news mavens. Where do they reside? Are they on the upper floors or in the basement of the NY Times skyscraper on 8th Ave, or somewhere inbetween? Maybe they work out of their homes. My mind wants to visualize these people, but I have nothing to cling to. It's not an algorithm that's determining where things sort out, it's people. Otherwise known as editors? Or are they librarians? 5. Do you bookmark the outline or the river? I'm a river guy for sure. I wonder about other people. 6. Francine Hardway twitted at me: "Times River is awesome on my iPhone! Was reading it while waiting for eye surgery and it was very distracting." Amen. That's the big secret. I wish there were a way to get everyone to look at the river on their cell phone. Eyes would open. 7. Thinking about integrating the two views, cross-relating them. Not sure exactly what I'll try first. That's why I wanted to let it settle in for a bit before moving in a other directions. 8. Of course, I know that if this ever becomes a "real" product, the user is going to control the view he or she wants to be the default. But for right now I'm experimenting. I want to see what people think. Enough people were asking for an alpha view that I wanted to see what would happen when I gave it to them, and if anyone would scream. Screaming isn't a bad thing, it's data.
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I read the March 4 story "Water woes" about Rhode Island's problems with fresh water with great interest. My view on this issue may be oversimplified, but there was no mention of harnessing the state's greatest resource, our proximity to the ocean.
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By JOHN SEEWER  TOLEDO, Ohio - Frank McDonald felt the tug on his fishing line and knew he had something big. "I was hoping it was a gigantic walleye," he said.  It was much bigger.
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Barry Carpenter called to let me know our local news spot got bumped to NEXT Thursday. I&#8217;ll post again to remind everyone when we get closer to the story airing. Share This