The blotter: Week ending 7 March 2010

By Michael Fraase

Sunday, 07 March 2010 07:24PM CST

Section: Blotter

Business

Janis Joplin blotter acidBob Collins, writing in his news cut blog for Minnesota Public Radio, cites the Economist and US News with the first wave of a potential political push for delayed retirement. Collins notes, “the push to delay retirement is gaining some favor at a time when many older workers are being forced into early retirement because they’re losing their jobs.” Here’s the nut graf from US News: “The number of unemployed Americans ages 55 and older expressing interest in finding a job has grown by 60 percent since the end of 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But finding work has proved difficult. The unemployment rate for older job seekers has more than doubled since 2007 to 7.2 percent in December 2009, and the average duration of the job search for older workers was 36 weeks in November—far longer than the 28 weeks most younger workers remain unemployed.”

ESRD

Gary Schwitzer, tenured University of Minnesota Journalism School associate professor, announced his resignation via Twitter. Schwitzer wants to focus on helping people understand issues related to healthcare and devote more time to healthnewsreview.org (hey, full-text for your RSS feed would be nice) which provides analysis of healthcare journalism. Last year, Schwitzer helped develop a health journalism program for the University’s J-School. It’s been shelved, because, after all, who needs quality healthcare journalism.

Intellectual property

Apple this week filed a series of lawsuits against HTC, the manufacturer of Google’s Nexus One smartphone which runs Google’s Android operating system. Apple claims infringement of 20 of its patents. The question is why Google wasn’t named in the actions.

Internet

Sunlight Foundation’s interactive coverage of the healthcare summit last week was among the best uses of the internet yet seen. Jake Brewer writes an in-depth article detailing how the organization pulled it off.

At the RSA security conference, Microsoft Vice President for Trustworthy Computing, Scott Charney, suggested an internet usage tax be instituted to quarantine and cure malware-infected computers. “You could say it’s a public safety issue and do it with general taxation,” Charney reportedly said at the conference. IDG’s Robert McMillan reports that Micrsoft claims “there are 3.8 million infected botnet computers worldwide, one million of which are in the US. They are used to steal sensitive information and send spam, and were a launching point for 190,000 distributed denial-of-service attacks in 2008.” Not for nothing, but most malware-infected computers run Microsoft’s operating system. Hey, Microsoft, here’s an idea: You broke it, you fix it.

Mercury 1.0, a standardized best-practice stack for running Drupal has been released by Chapter Three. Mercury includes everything you need to run an enterprise-level, Pressflow-based Drupal instance and includes Varnish, Memcached, and Apachesolr. Oh, and it also runs on Amazon’s cloud servers.

Steve Yelvington loses a little virtual shoe leather tracking down blog and comment spammers.

Finally, all six working drafts of the HTML5 working group have been published.

Media

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new report on how Americans get their news, “Understanding the Participatory News Consumer.” Not surprisingly, most in the US get their news from multiple platforms. Local and national television lead US news platforms, followed by the internet. The Pew report reveals that 33% of mobile phone users access news on their devices and 37% of internet users have “contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.”

Jay Rosen spells out eight key terms for determining legitimacy in journalism: Veracity, accuracy, transparency, intellectual honesty, currency, inquiry, utility, and polyphonicity (a plurality of voices). Rosen’s list comes as a reaction to the generally accepted legitimacy keys: objectivity, professionalism, code of ethics, balance, certification, etc. Highly recommended.

Publishing

The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) surveyed magazine website practices of 665 responding consumer publications running the gamut in both size and publication frequency. Looking only briefly at the findings, I see things haven’t changed much since I was the online managing editor and webmaster at Utne Reader from 2002-06. A disturbing 45% of respondents reported that factual errors on the publication’s website are corrected with no indication to readers. (At Utne, as here, I was transparent with all corrections, liberally using the del tag.) Fact checking was another eye-opener: 27% reported that online content is fact-checked less rigorously than print, 8% reported online content wasn’t fact-checked at all, and another 8% said no published content—online or print—was fact-checked. (At Utne, print content was fact-checked thoroughly by dedicated staff members, while online content was fact-checked by writers and editors.) Overall, the report is really bad news for online publishing.

Craig Mod writes, in “Books in the age of the iPad,” that Apple’s iPad and what comes after will rid us once and for all of disposable books. That’s a nice fantasy, and I hope it comes true, but I suspect it will be quite a while before someone creates a definitive non-disposable long-form work for the iPad. I find myself, ever more often buying disposable books in electronic form, but still buying non-disposable works in physical form. And I find myself drawn more and more to what Mod calls “definite content.” I’m not sure I agree with him that definite content will get split between the iPad and print. But go ahead and try anyway, iPad publishers, amaze me.

Marc Andreessen takes a decidedly different view of the forthcoming iPad, telling TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld, “All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.” Andreessen says that no matter how many iPads Apple sells, the open web will always be a bigger market—and the iPad will have a great browser.

User experience

Nishant Kothary of Mix Online has written a provocative article on the future of wireframes. Kothary posits that content strategy, information architecture, and visual design are converging. I’m not so sure. In my own practice content strategy, information architecture, and usability have converged, but I still prefer to work with a creative director that’s responsible for visual design. Kothary argues that wireframes—as commonly implemented—overly restricts the potential of a design and suggests a more visual approach (even though he calls it “functional”). Kothary takes for granted that wireframes should be visual, and by using the “functional” label, he clearly defines what is and isn’t in scope for a particular wireframe.

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