Newspaper site reformation 1.1

Okay. I’m pretty sure I’m going to build a new system to act as the CMS of the new newspaper sites.
Since I’m doing so, I may as well choose the technologies that I feel most confident with.
In this case the web pages will be built with PHP and Apache, and the database will be Postgresql. These will all run on FreeBSD.

Why build instead of using Drupal or Joomla? It is a tough call, but I have yet to see a CMS that isn’t story centric, or even more importantly, “site centric.”

Yes, you can achieve a great degree of “community” with a lot of CMS’s out there, especially with a blogging platform like Wordpress, which I seriously considered for many good reasons.

But the future, IMHO, is in distributed systems, and I don’t see anything that is built specifically with that in mind.

I’m basing the system on RSS 2.0 and all of the data that will be treated as atomic units, whether it was created by a staff reporter or photographer, a site visitor, or it comes from another system or site entirely.

If it sounds like an aggregator, well it is, but it’s a very smart aggregator, because I don’t mean to suggest that we won’t be displaying our original content with some prominence. But that’s just one view of the content. OPML will be the skeletal structure that suports the multiple views. We may even try to implement checkbox news. ; )

You see, it’s based upon a feed-centric view of items, so if the feed is from the editorial department and has a category of sports, we know what it is.

If the feed is from elsewhere, we know what it is.

Ultimately this is based upon a web-centric view of things, not a company-centric.

Also of note, is the idea of groups, or groupings, as Stowe Boyd might more aptly describe them. AdHocracies, is the way I’ve put it in the past. Stowe hinted at this some time back with his blog trees idea.

The concept here is that a feed, or a blog and its items are a thread of expanding contributions. I’ll be using SSE to help that along. Two-way news is something I’ve been ineterested in for a while, but have yet to hammer down.

Greg Narain told me (at Ajax World) that it was too complicated and I agree that is an issue.

The only way this can work is if it’s transparent to the people using it. It’s just got to make sense from a user interface perspective right off the bat, or it won’t fly.

I know. Good luck.

A lot of this decision was based upon the ideas that the projectvrm folks have been throwing around lately. In addition to a distributed approach to the content, we’ll be supporting OpenID and other distributed identity ideas like XRI/inames. (like =matthew)

Lastly, along the same lines as VRM, is the idea of user attention data, but It’s way too early to tell in what ways we can make that useful. But i think we will.

Jarvis on Newshour

Just watched Jeff Jarvis on Newshour.
It was basically a reassertion that we have abandoned objectivity for transparency.
Couldn’t agree more there.
While I agree that not every reporter has an intentional “hidden agenda,” the fact remains that every decision made is one made with some sort of baggage. For example:
“We covered this yesterday.”
“We need to get this out now before we get scooped.”
“I don’t think the readers are interested in this.”
“We can’t verify that so don’t mention it at all.”
And so on. Perhaps they are all questions that a “good” journalist asks. Maybe. But as Jeff said in the conclusion of the piece, “It’s not whether you have an opinion, it’s whether you tell the truth.”
Update:That may not be an exact quote of Jeff. You see, a journalist wouldn’t have pointed that out. They misquote all the time and never point it out.

Reformation of a newspaper site: Step 1

Who would think I’d have trouble picking a platform.
Roll my own, Drupal, Wordpress, OpenACS, Joomla, People Aggregator?

The list goes on. Granted, I’m leaning toward PHP systems. I know it best.
I like Postgresql but I’ll take MySQL. Don’t think I’m interested in a commercial DB.
It’s definitely Unix or Linux. I tend to like FreeBSD.
Aside from OpenACS, all run on Apache.

Drupal looks great, but it’s always a struggle learning new ways to do things that are simply achieved with PHP.

Cobbling together systems is also always a pain. I like clean data. Yet, who can argue that Wordpress is a great solution for the blogs that will be on the site.

There is just too much good stuff out there.

I’m leaning towards simpler rather than a monster like Plone. Master the basics and build on.

Chronicle of a newspaper site reformation

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be rebuilding some newspaper sites.
If you are weak in the knees, don’t click through, because it’s pretty bad.

http://www.thehour.com
http://www.thestamfordtimes.com
http://www.wiltonvillager.com

Tomorrow, we have our first meeting and I’ve decided to take the rest of you along.
It should be fun.
Subscriber vs. Free. . .
full text feeds vs. partial. . .
traditional journalism vs. community and blogging. . .
display ads vs. collecting detailed attention and gesture data with which to empower users to control their vendor relations. . .
(well, you know)
stay tuned

Truemors is true web 2.0

Guy Kawasaki’s new startup called Truemors is true web 2.0:

All kidding aside, I wonder if web development is dead. Just hack Wordpress.

Google is like Custer. . .maybe

This quote surfaced by umair is almost as sad as the historical event it references.

No disrespect, but Custer lost the battle, but the Sioux nation lost the war. (again, no disrespect) The point is, for better or worse, Custer was on the winning side. So, yeah Google is like Custer.

newspapers need to “take one for the team”

Newspapers need to take a lesson from baseball.

It’s mid to late innings and your team is losing but you have a man on first.

You give a decent hitter a “sacrifice bunt” sign. No one likes to get this but it’s part of team play.

The hitter bunts and the infield comes charging. The runner is going and safe at second and the hitter is thrown out.

Now you have a man in scoring position. There is no gurantee that the next batter will get a hit. In fact, the chances are pretty slim.

Still, it’s a popular managerial strategy.

Newspapers have a man on first (classifieds and local ad dollars), but they are losing the big game (search and Attention). If they don’t make a sacrifice (open up), they’ll need two hits to score, and that’s a long shot to say the least.

Sometimes you need to take one for the team.

Can Second Life be Second Business?

Kent Newsome is on a roll lately.

In his latest post he rags a little on Steve Rubel for saying that he believes

. . . that 3D virtual worlds are going to become a place where people will increasingly spend time and conduct business online.

It’s a fair enough skeptical look that he presents, but in all fairness to Steve who says,

Second Life is like Geocities was in 1998 - a big idea, but a little ahead of its time. I suspect that within a year or two robust 3D virtual worlds will eventually get far easier to use and run completely in a browser. Then they will become more mainstream.

,

I think there are a couple of major questions to consider.

The most important is whether these 3D worlds will ever provide a richer experience than a web-based collaboration. If not, then Kent is right.

Right now it seems is more productive to use “traditional” means of online collaboration to accomplish things.

But here is a little anecdote.

One day I knew that a conference being webcast on the west coast was happening and that I was interested. I also knew that Kosso (Koz Faraina) was simulcasting it in Second Life. So I signed on and joined a group of five or six others and it was a much better experience than watching the webcast alone.

Second Life is embryonic, but it’s the potential that has people excited, I think.

No, it’s not a viable threat to online collaboration yet. But online collaboration itself is the future of business, and when the day comes that a 3D world is as easily accesible as other online collaboration tools and provides a richer environment to do business, then it will be a place to do serious business.

It may not happen, but it’s certainly possible.

Identifiers as a platform

Drummond Reed collects some thoughts leading to (well, he says it best):

.
With XRI 2.1 and the XDI RDF model, about which I’ll start blogging much more extensively after IIW, that’s what we’ll have laid the foundation for. A semantic web where the semantics are actually in the identfiers.

Excelllent. XRI or OpenID could be used to identity resources of all kinds without even the need to access those resources beforehand. Whole services could be built on top of identifiers alone.

Is AdWords advertising?

This quote [Thanks Doc] from the academic paper written by the founders of Google is interesting for more than one reason.

The first and obvious is that it seems to stand in stark contrast to Google’s most lucrative intitiative, AdWords.

The second is that search itself is a VRMish RFP (request for proposal) at its most embryonic level.

The question, then, is whether Google sold out, or has just laid the groundwork for a new era.