No great rush to post the handful of photos I’ve taken. There are 674 shots on flickr at the end of day one.
Category Archives: Science & Technology
The Long Tail
The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson (Wired) explains why you can’t find movies like Sorcerer (Roy Scheider) at the corner Blockbuster but can at Netflix. Anderson’s easy-to-follow-explanation is a tad long but an informative piece. In the (near) future, everything will be available online. While nobody cares about everything, somebody cares about every thing.
Edward R. Murrow Awards
Warning: Self-serving shop talk follows. The Radio-Television News Directors Association announced the winners in their annual Edward R. Murrow Awards competition today. This is kind of a big deal in the radio and TV news business. This year they started out with 3,182 entries and gave 74 awards to 53 news organization. The regional winners were announced a few weeks ago and today they announced the national winners. And one of our network websites won.
Entries fall into one of three categories (Network/Syndication Service, Large Market and Small Market) for radio and the same three for TV. And this year they added a category called Websiste Non-Broadcast.
Our entry (Missourinet.com) won in the Radio Network/Syndication Service category. Pretty cool given that the competition was ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN and god only knows who else. You gotta figure there’s some “online journalists” in NY and Atlanta scratching their heads and asking each other, “What the hell is a Missourinet? Somebody get a map!”
For some reason the RTNDA website provide the urls of the Website winners but didn’t create links. That seems a little clueless to me.
*Radio Network/Syndication Service: Missourinet, Jefferson City, MO
*Television Network/Syndication Service: MSNBC
*Television Large-Market: News 14 Carolina, Charlotte, NC
*Television Small-Market: Capital News 9, Albany, NY
*Radio Large-Market: KSL-AM, Salt Lake City
*Radio Small-Market: WBLL-AM, Bellefontaine, OH
*Website Non-Broadcast: Washington Post, Washington; Belo Interactive, Dallas
I’ll probably never know what they judges liked about our site. And let’s face it, those big national network websites have some cool features our site does not. But I can name a few things we’ve got that are unique or cool or both:
Crash Reports: Missouri State Highway Patrol accident reports, updated 24/7.
Legislature.com: Live debate audio from the state legislature. Then we archive. We’ve got it back to 2002.
Supreme Court Arguments: Oral agurments (live & archived). I think we have nearly 500 arguments online.
Missouri Death Row: Ours has become the “official” site for Missouri.
Last time I checked, there were no other websites featuring this content. On the planet. At least not the way we do. Of course, there’s a lot we can do to improve our site but, for now, it’s nice to know someone appreciates the effort. The big award show is October 4th in NY. Gomer Goes to Manhatten in a Rented Tux.
Sprint DSL
Two years ago I signed up for ADSL service with a local ISP. 512Kbps down/128Kbps up…for $50 a month. Yesterday I switched to Sprint and now have 1.5Mbps down/256Kbps up…for $60 month. I was really dreading the switch but it went smoothly. And the Sprint reps were amazing. My initial contact (“Dave”) called frequently with updates and early this morning to be sure everything was working properly. I ran into a little snag during set up and called Sprint tech support. “Rocky” was in North Carolina (not Pakistan). He spoke English and was very helpful. Had me going in 15 minutes.
I’m now surfing at twice the speed for just pennies a day more. Since the early modem days (300 baud!) I’ve dreamed of a fast connection. Oh, if I only had a T1 line! Imagine my surprise when I learned that my DSL line is the same speed as a T1. Next challenge: going wireless at home. To be continued.
Broadband Internet growing
The number of Americans with access to high-speed Internet connections either at home or work is growing. As of March 1, the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that 68 million adult Americans log on via broadband either at home or work. Fully 48 million adult Americans have broadband connections at home. For the first time, more than half (52%) of a key demographic group college educated people age 35 and younger has broadband connections at home. But this trend will have absolutely no impact on time spent listening to your local radio station. Everything is fine. Go back to your homes.
DSL service
My local ISP buys ADSL service from Sprint and sells it to me for $50 per month (512K up/128K down). If I sign-up directly with Sprint, I can get 1.5M up/384K down, for $60 per month. This must change.
US broadband penetration
US broadband penetration Jumps to 45.2% – US Internet penetration nearly 75%.
Kodak to stop selling film cameras
Eastman Kodak Co. on Tuesday said it will stop selling traditional film cameras in the United States, Canada and Western Europe, another move by the troubled photography company to cut lines with declining appeal in favor of fast-growing digital products.
Jakob Nielsen on Clutter
“Saying less often communicates more. Our lives are littered with extraneous details that smother salient information. Each little piece of useless chatter is relatively innocent, and only robs us of a few seconds. The cumulative effect, however, is much worse: we assume that most communication is equally useless and tune it out, thus missing important information that’s sometimes embedded in the mess.” Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, August 11, 2003
Google now “strategic infrastructure”
Nick Denton is helping spread the the rumor that “Google has been advised to keep the location of its servers secret. The rationale: the Internet search engine now counts as strategic infrastructure, and could be a terrorist target.” I have NO trouble buying that.