MySpace Muckraking

Yesterday, when rumors began to swirl that all may not be as it seems with GOP VP pick Sarah Palin's family, I said the first thing I'd do if I was investigating the story was to find the MySpace and Facebook pages of daughter Bristol's friends. While you can scrub your family's past to a certain degree, the social graph is too deep to clean completely. If there were secrets to be found, they'd be lurking in teenage exhibitionism. All it would take is someone to look.

Well, someone(s) did.

If you expect it to help clear things up, it only makes things more confusing. But it does show the power of an individual blogger to do an end-run around much larger news organizations and discover some hidden truths about a family that gets more complicated by the day.

Four years ago, that wouldn't have been possible. Four years ago, it wouldn't have even been thinkable.

But today, it's clear that a run for higher office holds any number of web 2.0 pitfalls--including your kid's boyfriends sister's MySpace page. And that you're facing not just oppositional researchers and well-funded news organizations, but also anyone who wants to ask why.

Mozilla debuts a mashup engine for the rest of us

The trick with mashing up with the web is that it's actually not very easy or very intuitive. That's why people like Adrian Holovaty are so brilliant: they make it look so easy.

The lack of ease-of-use has, however, created a gulf between those that get it (those fluent in dozens of different APIs) and the rest of us. Well Mozilla (that's the Firefox people) just built a bridge across that gulf:


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Will this do to the programmable web what Blogger and Wordpress did to publishing--finally democratize it and make it ubiquitous? Clearly, when you name a piece of software "Ubiquity" you hope the answer is a resounding YES.

Holy Balls! Chicago Tribune prototype floated

I'm speechless.

nicely done: NY Times Medal Count

The team that churns out the NYTimes interactive graphics, always a good crew, did a fantastic job with a visual representation of Olympic medal counts among nations from the 1890s to today. As with much of their best work, I'm sure it's pretty great on hallucinogens too.

PS. Back from a very chaotic summer. Finally planted in once place for the long haul. More soon, promise.

brace yourself

The second half of the year looks like it's going to be even worse for newspapers.

magazine ad sales down yet again

Good news: It's not the freefall that newspapers find themselves in.
Bad news: Yet.

and one news site to rule them all

Jeff Jarvis makes a very compelling argument that newspapers need to get out of both the paper industry, but also the website industry as well. Let them do what they do best--news--the argument goes, and leave the hosting and the technology up to the company that does that best: Google.

There's fault in the argument for sure--most notably, it creates a massive monopoly on Google's part; secondly it still doesn't address the redundancy factor completely--but it's an interesting, innovative take on the whole problem.

Much of the argument is built on the backbone of Googler Bob Wyman, who explains it most effectively:

An online paper isn’t much more than a complicated Blogger.com. If Google can provide free hosting to the “citizen journalists” who are making life difficult for the newspapers, Google should be able to host the newspapers for free as well. The newspapers would certainly generate more revenue than cat pictures! The idea would be to have each “newsroom” focus on whatever it does best and then link them all together into a larger whole which is greater than the sum of the parts. Google has search engines, alert systems, video serving, annotations, database services, AppEngine, more scalability than you can imagine, etc…. Ideally, every newsroom would be able to think of Google, and all its capabilities, as their own. It just doesn’t make sense for hundreds or thousands of newspapers to try to craft their own versions of all this stuff.

Yowza is right.