Posts Tagged Under ‘Internet’

More From Slate: Political Ringtones

I’ll tout another piece of the site on which I recently worked, the new political ringtones we launched this week. We don’t yet have Verizon support–annoying for me since I have Verizon service–but anyone else can download these and annoy your friends with the Hillary laugh:

It’s 3 a.m. What’s Your Ringtone?

Redesign State of Mind

Nothing like starting afresh, so here is the new hotness. I have four color schemes to choose from in the rightnav — your choice will be cookied onto your PC and saved for ya — plus a more intuitive professional-pages navigation for people of the future trying to hire me. (Pray that there will be many once the b-school loans come due.)

As far as the motivation behind the facelift, sometimes I just want to do hoodrat stuff with my friends, you know?

Quality Dig at West Virginia

While Perry Bible Fellowship is solid, my favorite web comic would have to be Toothpaste for Dinner. Here’s one reason why:

CSS Naked Day

Today is an unofficial day to celebrate front-end web developers, and hey, that’s me. So here’s a look today at my site without any CSS. Note how I still did the bomb job of keeping the content readable even without the styling.

Word(press) up.

On the Sirius Tip - The Audio

Hey all,

Here’s the audio from today’s Sirius appearance. Good times.

I’m New to the Job Thing and Into Web Media. What Systems Should I Learn?

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 know

First, 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.

Going A Bit Too Far With Web Advertising

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.

I’m a White Person, and I Like Stuff

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)

Pittsburgh Penguins: Worst Actors Ever

Thanks to Jerry for cluing me in to this awesome commercial. The first nine seconds are blank, but keep watching:

Why didn’t Malkin get an equally terrible/hilarious line?

Awesome Maps Site

I just happened across strangemaps.wordpress.com, which is a site dedicated to — believe it or not — strange and interesting maps. If you like geography, history or pretty much anything statistical, you should check it out. Here’s a thought-provoking map of religion in the United States, with the light blue being counties that have more Catholic churches than other faiths, and the red counties being those that have more Baptist churches that other faiths.

Good jorb, strangemaps!

Free!

The Atlantic Monthly just opened up its paid site to be free to web users. I was just saying the other day how I had heard this 2005 article about talk radio was an excellent portrait of the industry, and that I wished the site were open to non-subscribers so I could read it.

Obviously I’m now off to read it. Nice work, Atlantic Monthly.

AT&T

Agreed on this one:

Has AT&T Lost Its Mind?

I’ll decline the surveillance service, thanks, and I too don’t envy their customer service workers.

Pat’s Going to Michigan

I got the good news on Friday: I’ll be heading this fall to the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan to be part of the class of 2010.

I mentioned this fall that application essays were sapping my blogging resolve, so now yinz know what that was about. I’m definitely relieved to hear I was accepted, and more than that, I’m psyched to start grad school. I’m also hoping I don’t revert too much back to undergrad, but I don’t think business school students tend to beard-out quite as much as your average 20-year-old junior. (Note: that photo is of Microsoft’s staff in 1978, but it’s so awesome that I had to link it.)

“But Stack,” you may be saying, “where’d this MBA idea come from? I thought you were a web media guy.” You’re right: I am a web-media guy, and on first glance, it might be confusing. But the longer I’ve been doing what I do, the more I’ve realized an MBA is a solid idea.

I’m all about the success of online media: the format is still new, and media companies are finding their way through the changed climate, so it can be a scary thing for those steering the media to where it needs to be. Good websites are built on three legs — content, technology and business — and having worked a lot on the first two, I knew that strengthening the third one would help me out in the field. There’s a lot of harsh rhetoric on both sides about who’s going to “win” in the new / old media divide, but non-suckas know that it’s a mutually beneficial relationship up in this. Both old and new media need knowledgeable people to help guide the industry along and use the web’s opportunities. That’s where I’m coming from.

Journalists have long believed very strongly in the separation of business and editorial, and I share that opinion. But I think there’s a definite role for website managers who can navigate both sides of the field: an appreciation for the vital democratic role of the media with the ability to keep the site economically thriving is what’s needed here, and in a nutshell, I’m going to b-school to play that role.

And for the record, I’m agnostic on the football question right now. Sure, Michigan will help with future success, but I lived in Columbus from ages zero to one-month, my mom’s family is all over Central Ohio, and I can hardly turn my back on the greatest NU football moment of all time:

Conflicted.

Firefox

Though I’m a huge Firefox booster, lately version 2.0.0.11 has been eating up virtual memory like a fat dude at a Louisiana Chinese buffet. And that’s both on my home PC (which is mad old) and work PC (which is still sorta old but faster, like Bruce Smith in his waning days.) Version 3.0, now in beta development, is supposed to fix the memory leaks, but if you use version 2.0, be sure you close firefox.exe from the Windows Task Manager now and then.

And if you use a Mac, you should probably be visiting condescendinghipstercult.com instead. At the moment, nobody’s registered that. Now’s your shot to create the web’s most accurately named Mac community!

Strangest Brand Partnering of the Day

I just saw this today:

http://www.cyberjournalist.net/fox-news-for-iphone/

Fox News and Apple? That one just strikes me as a really unlikely pairing. But maybe Apple devotees have become so contrarian-cool that they’ve abandoned the leftist political views of the urban traditional-cool and embraced right-wing viewpoints as a sarcastic collective paean to right-wing America.