Today on the Blog Network
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Blog: Check out the latest postings from the CNET Blog Network.
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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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We have some big news today for FlickrFan users, a major new source of high-def photography for the networked living room. They come from Agence France-Presse, one of the world's great news organizations, and a fantastic source of high-resolution news photography. I met with Agence France-Presse when I was in Paris in December, introduced them to FlickrFan and explained what we were doing with the Associated Press. They got excited, it took a little while to work out the technical details, but now we're ready to go. The updates are all out, here's the howto for FlickrFan users. Change #30: Agence France-Presse photos in FlickrFan. There were unique challenges in this project because their flow is huge. Yesterday we got over 3000 new photos. Because there are so many, I asked my friend Matt Mullenweg, if his company Automattic could help us out with server space and bandwidth, and he said yes. The AFP pictures are hosted on wordpress.com. Many thanks to Matt and his company for helping us out. To the extent we're bootstrapping a new use of the net, which I hope is what we're doing, Matt's company has made the kind of contribution we'd like to see more companies make. Usually the companies are happy to make the money, but not willing to help out with the bootstrap, which often costs money. Matt has always been a great guy and a visionary. I thank him and hope that FlickrFan users find an appropriate way to thank him too. And also, please consider the generosity of Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. We all hope that there's a market here, a way to monetize the flow of high-resolution photography to enrich and inform. Other content companies have been reluctant to take a chance on the Internet, we saw that in the early days of RSS and podcasting. I feel that these two media companies are playing the same pioneering role that the New York Times played with RSS 2.0 and NPR played in podcasting. Associated Press and Agence France-Presse deserve our respect and admiration for steping out, for going first, this is how new Internet activities get going. This is what we call market leadership, the real kind. Bravo!! And this couldn't come at a better time, with tomorrow being Super Tuesday here in the USA. Think of all the great photographs we're going to get in the next few days! Kevin Tofel helped test the feed over the weekend.
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Tycho: New one's up, for last week's "The Spore Cult." Feed is here. (CW)TB
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Some readers gain new insight on Microsoft's music player from our resident Mac-o-philiac while others rant about Wi-Fi's potentially painful kiss. Plus: Links to our most popular blogs.
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Although Userland have been kind enough to let me stay on, I have decided it might be wiser to self-host this site. So I intend to move to http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/ I have managed to preserve the content, but the article comments were not ported over. Kindly update your links. This will be the last post on the site. The RSS feed will be http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/?q=node/feed/1 Thanks for all the fish. PS: I am using drupal.
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Iowans caucus to select presidential preferences .... Giuliani relies on Sunshine State strategy ... NH doubts it will ID push poll culprits before vote ... Romney supports fellow Mormons by using their businesses ... Jesse Jackson and wife split over endorsements ... Judge won't delay Florida primary
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Ligaya Turmelle over at PHPWomen has posted on their 1st birthday.  In that one year we have set up this site, been to 2 conferences sending 2 people who would not of normally been able to go, handed out t-shirts at those conferences, grown a member list of 250+ strong and made some really strong connections to the PHP Community as a whole.  She continues to give thanks to many of the PHPWomen contributors, members, and supporters that have helped in these past twelve months. Happy Birthday PHPWomen!
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In March 2002, I made a bet with Martin Nisenholtz about the relative importance of weblogs and the New York Times. I was and am a blogger, and Martin worked then, as he does now, for the Times. For the actual terms of the bet, read the piece on the LongNow site, and a story I wrote to announce the bet. A few comments.  1. It seems now is the time to decide who won the bet, if either of us did. 2. The world that I hoped would come about did not. While blogs have broken many stories, they have not, in general, turned into the authoritative sources I hoped they would in 2002. When the blogosphere resembles journalism it's often the tabloid kind.  3. I wouldn't mind losing the bet. That is, I wouldn't mind if the Times fully embraced the web, and I suspect Martin wouldn't mind if blogs rose to the quality of the Times. 4. If the bet had been held a year later, it seems there would be a pretty good chance that Martin would have won the bet because they recently took down the firewall at the Times, allowing search engines to index the full content. In the past, articles would remain visible for a couple of weeks then you'd have to pay money to access them. I believe they have a special deal with Google and other crawlers that allow them to get past the membership wall. For most of 2007 the Times articles were behind the firewall, and were less likely to be pointed to (which is how they rise in rank at Google). 5. It certainly is fun to speculate, but the decision about who won belongs exclusively to the Long Now Foundation. They have to decide who determines what the top stories of 2007 are, and imho they should consult with search experts to determine how to do the queries. Apparently it makes a difference how you do it.  But ultimately it's their decision. 6. Whether Wikipedia has more or less results seems to be a sidebar to the bet, which only talks about blogs and the Times. 7. Another interesting sidebar is rich media. In 2002, before podcasting had taken hold, before YouTube existed, it would have been hard to forsee the story of the South Carolina beauty queen, or the Don't Tase Me Bro guy. Questions about the future are always framed in the context of the past. Did the question Martin and I asked have any value in 2007, or did it just say something about the world of 2002?   Update: Paul Boutin who arranged the bet, apparently in conjunction with Google (I didn't know this) in 2002, weighs in.
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Democrats honor King in South Carolina at chilly outdoor rally ... Republicans praise King's legacy, belief in equality .... Obama airs biographical ad on national cable ... Giuliani draws small crowds at Florida stops
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and who is MBL, DIGG and what-not anyway?Â  The MyBlogLog hype is pretty much over by now it is also not everything as peachy with them as it used to be. The issues with the security holes that were uncovered and theÂ banning of the user from the Network that uncovered them, privacy issues about data collected [...]
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Daily Blog Tips has put together a list of 30 traffic generation ideas as compiled from 30 different bloggers.  Of course, you don&#8217;t actually have to be a blogger to take advantage of some of these ideas, such as participating in the comments of other blogs which are read within your industry, article distribution and [...]
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I love Twitter, but there have been a lot of problems, and this is too much. They're taking it down tonight, for two hours, and we're hot on a big story, and it's developing -- on Twitter. This seems like a bad night for Twitter to go to sleep. (But there probably never is a good night.) I don't think the Twitter guys really understand how much we're doing with their service.  It's been going down a lot lately. And while other people have been complaining about it losing posts, I had never seen it lose one, until yesterday, and now it's losing them regularly, for me too. Read the first three words of this post again.  They raised $5 million, it seems now it's time for them to get the bugs out, hire some people who really understand scaling, if necessary re-implement the system from the ground up. Do whatever is needed to make it as reliable as the other tools we depend on. We need Twitter to work. It's not a fun experiment for us, we're using it.  Jack, Ev, Biz, Fred -- please take note. Postscript: The announcement changed, now they're saying it'll be down on Sunday night. Much better. Thanks!
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News, Infocus, Columns, Vulnerabilities, Bugtraq ...
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Heidi Montag wants to set the record straight about a surprising posting that went up on her Web site Mondayâshe didnât post it.  âMy Web site was hacked last night, so Iâm not sure what was posted up,â she said Tuesday during an event at a Lo...
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Featured links from the CNET Blog Network
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What's new in search? Found in the forums: But Is The Traffic Any Good?; What is Your Best AdSense Tip?; Ranking Without Links; and more.