Archive for March 2008
Optimism isn’t in great supply for this Zimbabwean election, because even though the opposition party has apparently defeated the 28-year incumbent Mugabe, I don’t see him giving in to any concept of fairness when he could simply rig the vote on a massive scale. Already the vote results are being delayed, so there’s that. And as for democratic leverage, what is the West going to do, devalue the currency?
Still, I’m a sliver hopeful that the Zimbabwean Howard Beale vote will prove powerful enough to triumph this time, giving such a strong “F this” vote that it’s too embarrassing even for Mugabe to rig things. The country has a deep pit to climb out of, but dropping the shovel is a good start.
I feel like I’ve run into iterations of this question a few times lately, so here go some words of whizzzdum.
If I were some 21-year-old dude again, but my 21-year-old self was transported to 2008 and I was looking for a job in media websites, I’d pick up some books on the following languages at SBX. I could stop in during my next trip to EV-1 for a Busch Light 30-cube. ($10.99, readers. But that was in 2001 prices. I imagine with the surge in grain prices, it’s gone all the way up to 46 cents per beer or so.)
The geek glasses knowFirst, I’d learn Flash. Front-end developers can do really well with this, even though I think it’s a really bad idea to use Flash for basic page templating. Instead, Flash is awesome for news graphics, such as the popular delegate calculator we rocked at Slate. It’s really portable for things like embedded video players and widgets (see the Bushisms widget), it can do great visual effects that DHTML still can’t do with ease (or at all), and it’s a lot less dangerous than Javascript for site stability. If your swf file is f’d, it’ll take down your movie but likely not your site performance. (Unless it’s way huge and you’re seeing too many downloads, but file size is a problem for anything.)
Second, I’d get really good at CSS. It’s the best way to control page display, so clearly it’s mad useful. The HTML part is fairly simple; you’re just wrapping things in divs of different class and ID. Then the CSS comes into play and keeps your site looking tight.
Third, I’d learn object-oriented programming. It’s the basis of Javascript behaviors and used in back-end programming as well, and that’s across all platforms. ASP.NET, Java or PHP, you’ll want to know the underlying structures. And that’s once you know basic programming stuff like loops, conditionals and database connectivity; if not, learn that first.
Assuming you already have the media knowledge down — journalism and such — you’d be representin’ for an entry-level producer or front-end developer job. Other useful technologies include Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXPress (for the occasional print thing), IIS or Apache server admin, and database structure. That last one is obviously useful in general web development, but I’m assuming you’re looking for a job with a media company big enough to have its own DBAs.
As far as the PHP / open-source question, I definitely advise people to learn it, but I say that with the knowledge that you probably won’t be using it working for a media company in the next few years. PHP is great and I love all the innovation around it, but most companies are still running legacy systems in ASP.NET, Java or other technologies and will bust out some criticism about scalability and support issues if you suggest moving to PHP / MySQL. (Facebook apparently not being large-scale and uptime-critical enough.) So, while PHP is great if you want to set up a site from scratch and will be useful when it becomes more supported with big sites, you probably won’t need it on a day-to-day job basis.
Apologies to any non-code people who were bored stiff on this one.
Saved | March 24th, 2008
Ignore my previous dour economic analysis. I just got this in the mail:
Dear Taxpayer,
We are pleased to inform you that the United States Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, which provides for economic stimulus payments to be made to over 130 million American households. Under this law, you may be entitled to a payment of up to $600 ($1,200 if filing a joint return), plus additional amounts for each qualifying child.
Our national woes are over, thanks to this $600. ($1,200 if filing a joint return — that’s me now! Even better!)
Our $1,200 will go right into my Citibank money-market account, so at least I’m doing my part to prop up the personal-banking arm of one of America’s crucial investment banks. Holla!
I’m all for innovative Internet advertising — it puts enchiladas on my table — but Phorm’s plan for tracking users’ comprehensive Internet behavior via their ISP seems a bit overboard. The privacy concerns are obvious, so I’ll come at this from a business perspective.
Phorm on its face is obviously bad for individual media outlets, whose perspective I’m admittedly favoring: this all-sites-visited method of advertising prompts advertisers to buy based on users’ web behavior as one singular package, not separate entities grouped by the aforementioned individual outlets. The ability for each individual outlet to tailor its advertising message to its particular clients is thus diminished: this is ultra-individualistic without taking into account what visitors to, say, the New York Times have in common with other visitors to the Times‘ site. But I think this all-the-web approach is inconvenient for advertisers: Instead of buying up space on NYTimes.com based on the common interests of the Times’ audience, advertisers are going to have to do their own aggregating work to design a broad base of characteristics that somehow coincide with each other. The NY Times can provide demographic info on its audience and advertisers can reach that audience by buying on the NY Times, but how is a company wanting to reach a targeted group going to isolate that group based on their visiting tons of different sites? Phorm could probably aggregate packages of user characteristics and sell those, but it’s an issue nonetheless.
There’s also the much bigger problem of having every potential site that the user visits opt into this advertising network — it’s either that or put some sort of ISP-based spyware onto the user’s machine to serve up desktop ads. Serving advertising over top of other sites’ own advertising is a recipe for being sued, and desktop ads always drove me nuts with various file-sharing services. And that was back in the day of 2000, so I doubt users have grown an appetite in the time since.
I’ll leave the very legitimate privacy concerns to other peeps — like the New York state legislature — but I think that Phorm as an ad strategy doesn’t really address the all-important point of finding appropriate inventory for your ads.
On a related note, I think the quadrantONE network is a great idea for newspapers, but what I really want to see the network do is get into local-market ad production and sales. Once newspapers provide effective venues for small businesses to advertise online as they do now in print — the production issues in creating web ads obviously have a different set of challenges from those of print ads — then that’s a big breakthrough for newspapers.
Two great moments in quotations today, both from men with the power to influence and shape America’s economic and political situation. The first comes courtesy of Aron Wilder, the CEO of HTFC, a small firm that takes loan applications and sells residential mortgages to larger lenders like GMAC. They’re one of many direct players involved in the subprime mess engulfing the economy. Here’s Mr. Wilder in response to a question from the lawyer representing GMAC, in GMAC’s lawsuit against HTFC for selling improperly underwritten loans [link]:
Q: This is your loan file. What do Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald do for a living?
A: I don’t know. Open it up and find it.
Q: Look at your loan file and tell me.
A: Open it up and find it. I’m not your fucking bitch.
Q: Take a look at your loan application.
A: Do it yourself. Do it yourself. You want to do this in front of a judge. Would you prefer to [do] this in front of a judge? Then, shut the fuck up.
Q: Sir, take a look—
A: I’m taking a break. Fuck him. You open up the document. You want me to look at something, you get the document out. Earn your fucking money, asshole. Better get used to it. You’ll retire when I’m done.
That’s usually not the sort of guy whose ilk you want as a huge force in your national economy.
Second, we have Vice President Dick Cheney, the No. 2 member of the United States executive branch. He is thus responsible for executing the will of the people, as written by the people’s representatives in the legislative branch. Here he is being interviewed by ABC News’ Martha Radditz about the Iraq war [link]:
Raddatz: Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.
Cheney: So?
Raddatz: So? You don’t care what the American people think?
Cheney: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls. There has, in fact, been fundamental change and transformation and improvement for the better. That’s a huge accomplishment.
That is an awful lot about the Vice President summed up in the one-syllable clause “So?” The man is concise!
I think this has floated around the web a bit, but if you haven’t read it, check out this NY Times magazine piece:
Battle Company Is Out There
It’s very heavy, but gripping. I’ve read a few people complaining that it’s biased or gives an incomplete picture of the war, but that’s not what it’s about; it’s a piece about one particular piece of the Army in one particular part of Afghanistan, and does a great job of painting that with a sympathetic eye toward the soldiers. Endorsed by my friend Jeff, recently of the Army himself.
- Barack Obama’s speech today was a good one, but I don’t quite know why it’s being presented as a game-changer. He had some really intelligent things to say, but he said them over half an hour. Now he’s dependent on a soundbite media to convey that message to voters who won’t otherwise seek him out, those being the ones he’s trying to win over in PA and in the general election. Rev. Wright, meanwhile, offers plenty of soundbites.
But maybe I’m still wrong and voters this election cycle want broader information from their candidates. This dude’s grasp of things is certainly encouraging. (The best part is how the interviewer gets completely owned after expecting some sort of dumb-ass answer.)
- On that note, why does the man-on-the-street interviewer in that clip come at his subjects with such a chip on his shoulder? I always followed the “catch more flies with honey” principle when doing man-on-the-streets. Considering you’re going up to a complete stranger and asking them to give you honest opinions, that seems like the only way to do it.
- There are some things that Rev. Wright says amidst the vitriol that make sense and are legitimate criticisms. Certainly the United States has serious issues with how it’s treated its minorities. But how much positive change are you really going to affect by turning all of your listeners off of the very system that needs to be fixed? This is my problem with many leftists: conservatives jump in and take control of societal institutions, but so often liberals prefer to sit on the sidelines and wait for some perfectly fair system to magically evolve — while they leave control of that system to the aforementioned conservatives, mind you. I’m a liberal and I’m heading off to get my MBA in part because I believe you can only change things by engaging them. And yes, I know that the media exists to spotlight things for scrutiny, but it’s a powerful societal institution that can’t be ignored.
Criticism is always more fun, but so often ineffective.
P.S. – did you know Wright was in the USMC?
- Should the U.S. boycott the Olympics this summer because of China’s brutaltreatment of Tibet? I really don’t know. I do know that it would be the greatest thing in years to see the entire U.S. Olympic contingent walk in to the stadium in “FREE TIBET” T shirts.
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com
Granted, the title “stuff liberal white yuppies like” is a lot more accurate, but this is still quality satire. Here is a good example; I had a design prof in college who loved AdBusters. (Ironically she was not white.)
Advanced white people will supplement No Logo with a subscription to AdBusters, where they will learn how to subvert corporate culture and return it to the masses. Specifically, this means taking ads and redoing them to give a negative message about a product. Apparently the belief is that when other people see this ad, they will be hit with an epiphany that their entire existence has been a Matrix-style manufactured universe.
For more satirical stereotype fun, check out Stuff Asian People Like and Stuff Educated Black People Like.
(via The Root‘s blogroll)
older posts
