MSM and Tour de France

Floyd Landis in the last five stages of the Tour de France has one of the top sport’s  performances of the year. Winning the yellow jersey, then hitting the wall to lose it, then coming back in the mountains to be in a position to win it back in the sprint the following day. Plus, he has a personal story and seems to be embraced by the French though his francais vocabulary est petit.

But does the main stream media (MSM) in America follow this story? Hardly. The Washington Post had their Foreign Service cover the story, not a sports reporter. One of the local TV sports channels didn’t even mention it last night. Most media lead with a story about Barry Bonds not be indicted like the MSM said he would the previous day. So the MSM was the news and not a truly heroic sports story. Jim Caple on ESPN’s Page Two thought this was nuts.  No wonder the term MSM was invented and now it is becoming an unflattering adjective.

User Experience Week 2006 (Aug)

While Europe is on holiday in August, I’ll be at Adaptive Path’s User Experience Week 2006 in DC. In preparation, I’ll be reading of books, blogs and sites plus listening to podcasts. Some creating. And I’ll be writing on my design blog heavily as I prepare. So see you there at multipurposeroom.com

No More More AJAX meets River of News

Humanized has a demo of an RSS aggregator that keeps adding more content at the bottom of the page without needing to click on a more button. It is an excellent River of News format with Ajax. I just worked on a 1.2.3.4 script and was thinking about slowly showing more and this is a great example.

JavaScript Custom Objects - Fun Ajax Stuff

With my recent JavaScript coding I’ve been using more objects. Simon Willison has a complete set of notes from a three hour tutorial – A (Re)-Introduction to JavaScript. I’m reading it Custom Object section and will be reading it again. In this section he provides a step-by-step guide to creating better objects and using the keyword ‘this’ which is always tricky. I found this tutorial while reading  Jamie Orchard-Hays’ post about Prototype’s bindAsEventListener().

JSON

Every new document type that gains popularity has many cultural impacts. JSON is a data syntax as is XML. JSON on the Web, or: The Revenge of SML on XML.com is a very good summary with lots of links to details.

Best Friends

Just heard that a dear friend died a few days ago. Heard a few days ago that more Americans than ever say they have no best friend. He could have been a best friend. I’ll miss him. I’ll miss he and his wife as a couple. And his laugh. Halloween will be bittersweet this year. Don’t worry about the future, make your friend a best friend for today.

Rocketboom and Paul is 64

Good business partners are hard to come by, especially in the creative world. Look at Lennon and McCartney or any number of other feuding twosomes. So it seems that Rocketboom has exploded with Amanda Congdon and Andrew Baron feuding and likely ending their mutual success. Too bad. The lawyers will get involved with the 49% issue and probably kill any chance the Rocketboom survives as a brand even with its spot on Tivo. I’m certain we’ll see Amanda again has her name and face are now recognizable.

Scoble brings up money issues as a possible problem at Rocketboom, but more interesting is his discussion of a salesforce. In our advertising driven internet days, never underestimate the need for sales. They are the real partner in any business and one sorely missing from most. Thus the overwhelming success of Google’s Adsense. This is also why many lasting partnerships include a salesperson.

I hope we’ll see alot more advise for structuring startups in the blogosphere in the next few days, even if it repeats classic lessons learned. Good time for Guy Kawasaki and others to speak up.

Engineering Discussion: RSS and Atom

Have the flames died down enough that engineers can now talk about RSS and Atom? I hope so, because there is an interesting post by an Amazon engineer that you can do things with Atom that you can not do with RSS.

Unless the Atom was an exact copy of RSS, that would always be true. The real question is “Can you do something significant with Atom that you cannot do with RSS?” DeWitt Clinton provides a good example of why that is true for those that care about the technical details (like engineers). I might find a case in my coding where that is true. And I’d also look at the Yahoo media RSS namespace in that case. However, for the majority of sites providing new information on a daily basis (e.g., news media, bloggers, etc.), RSS is still the best match.

And as Dewitt points out, for the average user or manager, RSS is a fine term for syndication. Which leads me back to my hope that engineers can now talk about Atom and RSS.

Business Week Tries to Billboard Google's Products

In So Much Fanfare, So Few Hits, Business Week looks the lack of number one products beyond search: News, Gmail, Maps, Instant Messaging, Checkout and more. Google says that they expect several new products to fail. This is the publishing model and should be examine more thoroughly. I’d also like to see a side by side comparision of Google’s products and Yahoo’s. Might as well add in MS, Amazon, Cnet, AOL and a few others. Many of the big and small players follow this publishing model and is should be discussed.

Dave Winer Doing S3 Heavy Lifting

So often Dave Winer is working and thinking along the same lines as myself but a few steps ahead. Here is is again talking with Amazon about developing with S3. Keep pioneering Dave!