randomwalks/dj

Artist Nina Katchadourian lists The Mended Spiderweb series as an uninvited collaboration with nature, and I don't know what is more impressive: that she tried to repair broken webs, or that the spiders rejected her mends and properly repaired them.

"The Mended Spiderweb series came about during a six-week period in June and July in 1998 which I spent on Pörtö. In the forest and around the house where I was living, I searched for broken spiderwebs which I repaired using red sewing thread. All of the patches were made by inserting segments one at a time directly into the web. Sometimes the thread was starched, which made it stiffer and easier to work with. The short threads were held in place by the stickiness of the spider web itself; longer threads were reinforced by dipping the tips into white glue. I fixed the holes in the web until it was fully repaired, or until it could no longer bear the weight of the thread. In the process, I often caused further damage when the tweezers got tangled in the web or when my hands brushed up against it by accident.

The morning after the first patch job, I discovered a pile of red threads lying on the ground below the web. At first I assumed the wind had blown them out; on closer inspection it became clear that the spider had repaired the web to perfect condition using its own methods, throwing the threads out in the process. My repairs were always rejected by the spider and discarded, usually during the course of the night, even in webs which looked abandoned. The larger, more complicated patches where the threads were held together with glue often retained their form after being thrown out, although in a somewhat 'wilted' condition without the rest of the web to suspend and stretch them. Each 'Rejected Patch' is shown next to the photograph showing the web with the patch as it looked on site."

(via)

Originally posted by Anne from Purse Lip Square Jaw, ReBlogged by Dan Torop on Jun 22, 2008 at 12:28 AM

Originally posted by Anne from Eyebeam reBlog, on June 21, 2008 9:28 PM

Speaking of microcelebrities… a few weeks ago, Ze Frank put an open call out (via twitter) for individuals who were interested in giving up their Facebook profiles - and handing them over to him. Eager to rid myself of my growing addiction, I answered the call, wrote a page-long primer on how to be be “virtual Christine Huang,” and hoped he would find my Facebook identity appealing enough to want to appropriate. Amazingly, out of the hundreds of his followers who responded, Ze chose mine to be one of the two to overtake.

What resulted was an interesting experience/experiment on both his and my end. Having been relieved of handling one of my several internet identities for a week, I came to think a lot about the philosophical and ethical implications of giving up my identity to a complete stranger. How much of my real-life persona had become entangled with my virtual one? Was this experiment an implicit deceit of all my 550-some Facebook friends? And if so - would anyone notice? Or care? And if they did both notice and care - would they remember, or would it just become another buried blip on their Facebook friend feed? Ze’s status as a public figure seemed to be the only reason I trusted him with my identity - but what did I really know about Ze? I had never met the guy, and the only things I knew about him were the things I read online - what he presented to the world. And as his experiment pointed out, anyone’s virtual identity is as easily manipulated, forged, and eradicated as clicking a few buttons.

So for a week Ze was me, and I was… not on Facebook. He didn’t do anything too out of the ordinary; he tried to re-establish some long lost friendships through facebook messages and wall posts; he changed my profile picture to a very unflattering photo of me doing a handstand in purple spandex; and he exchanged somewhat suggestive messages with a Facebook friend I had told him was my crush-of-the-moment. And when it was all over, I can’t say I wasn’t a bit sad; a big part of me wanted Ze to take “me” away from myself for good. The sabbatical, though, did quell my addiction - I came to realize how much time I had gotten used to wasting on the site, uploading photos, making comments, writing people I could just as easily call - and decided I didn’t want to be thinking about that stuff anymore. All in all, no harm was done - and I was gifted with one of my most productive, creative weeks in recent memory.

Originally posted by Christine Huang from PSFK, ReBlogged by Dan Torop on Jun 22, 2008 at 12:25 AM

Originally posted by Christine Huang from Eyebeam reBlog, on June 21, 2008 9:25 PM

That pictogram ensemble is a project by german artist Ulrike Gruber. It actually re-uses urban signs targeted at pedestrian and project them on the building facade. As described on the public work authorization (only in french), this painting aims at using pedestrian pictograms to describe new elements added on the facade after the renovation (such as the elevator, new stairs, etc.). The painting shows the movement of the elevator, the rotation of the stairs and also the presence of recycling containers to induce new behavior (turn right, do not lean against the balcony) and suggest new uses (authorized swimming, belvedere altitude).

Why do I blog this? what looks intriguing here is how the space of flow is made explicit through the pictograms, and how new affordances can be created on a vertical plane using codes of the horizontal plane. The sort of things to ruminate on a sunday morning perhaps.

Originally posted by Nicolas Nova from Pasta&Vinegar, on June 21, 2008 9:09 PM

pushups
Originally uploaded by freestone

Originally posted by Benjamin Trott from Stupidfool.org, on June 21, 2008 8:50 PM

Just a few weeks ago it seemed like Au Pied de Cochon's summer seafood extravaganza was still just getting off the ground. There were lobsters and shellfish of all sorts, but they and an outrageous roasted mahi-mahi* with fiddleheads and ramps combo were on offer strictly as off-menu specials.

fig. 1: Le Plateau PDC

Just last week, though, Au Pied de Cochon's seafood was back in full effect, as evidenced by the platter of coquillage you see above.

That's the "small," the "Plateau PDC." It runs just under $50. This year Au Pied de Cochon offers four more seafood platters, and each one gets more plentiful, and more intricate. They also get kinda tall--we passed one on our way in that looked like the Eiffel Tower. There was talk of lobsters and seared fish with some of the bigger platters. I can't even imagine what the biggest and baddest of the lot--"Le Gros Verrat"--entails. Its price tag? $350. Our "Plateau PDC" made for a very substantial appetizer for three (along with some cromesquis, of course), so I guess "Le Gros Verrat" would make a very substantial appetizer for you and twenty of your friends? Who knows? All I know is that the quality is unbeatable. So is the creativity.

Au Pied de Cochon has its novelty dishes, of course (Duck in a Can, Foie Gras Poutine), but it's not really a place you associate with molecular gastronomy. That said, the most pleasant surprise of the night came with one of our massive oysters (but not the one you see in the picture). This is one had a mysterious pale translucent cube nestled next to the oyster. I really had no idea what to expect. Could have been lychee jelly for all I knew. Turns out it was something way better, and way more clever: sea water. Eaten together, the sea water jelly just melted in your mouth and mingled with the oyster, taking the natural brininess of that lovely Atlantic oyster to a whole other delectable level.

Sure, we live along a Seaway, but sometimes the Atlantic seems awfully distant. If you've gotta be landlocked, this is definitely the way to do it.

aj

* Apparently it was Atlantic mahi-mahi and the Novia Scotia fishermen who landed it had never seen one before (they don't generally make it this far north [!]), so Picard & Co. got it for a good price.

ps--TY, Jr.!

Originally posted by aj kinik from ...an endless banquet, on June 21, 2008 5:55 PM

A small housekeeping change here at DF: each Linked List entry now has its own unique permalink URL. So, for example, yesterday’s link to Andy Baio’s interview with The Big Picture’s Alan Taylor has a permanent URL here:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/06/20/alan-tayler

Previously, the permanent URL for that entry would have been:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/june#fri-20-alan_tayler

The older month-based URLs still work and won’t change, but the new URLs are better, and, in hindsight, are the way things always should have been. You can also get listings by day and month by chopping the URL.

The only downside is that when the new URLs went live yesterday evening, the permalink URLs changed in the RSS feed. Depending on the behavior of your feed reader, this may have marked all previously read Linked List items as unread — an unfortunate, but one-time, inconvenience.

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on June 21, 2008 3:17 PM

From Required Eating

Only a few months after Starbucks replaced their "bolder" coffee with the Pike Place Roast featuring a "smooth and welcoming everyday blend," The Wall Street Journal reports that Starbucks has yielded to customer demand and will be once again brewing the "classic" bitter and burnt Starbucks coffee:

"Because of your many requests for a bolder coffee choice throughout the day at Starbucks, we are bringing it back in the afternoon to many of those stores that sell lots of freshly brewed coffee all day long," Starbucks said in a message posted on its customer feedback Web site Tuesday.

[via Consumerist]

Previously
Colbert Report on the Starbucks 3-Hour Closure
The History of the Starbucks Logos Through the Years

Originally posted by Raphael from Serious Eats, on June 21, 2008 2:00 PM

Explaining how TPM works can be daunting, especially if you're describing it to someone from a traditional journalism background or, say, older relatives for whom something as simple as email is still intimidating.

As most of you know, we have a bricks-and-mortar office in Manhattan. But that's just the anchor for our operation. We have a reporter in DC, another reporter who works most of the week from Connecticut, and I'm in Missouri. So a third of our staff of nine is not based in the NYC office.

For that model to work, we rely some on phones, a lot on email, but primarily on Skype. That means a whole series of Skype chats going on at any one time between and among editors, reporters, and interns. Even most of the internal office interactions are via Skype, so that those of us not in the office proper can be kept in the loop. Picture a staff of mostly 20-somethings squeezed into a 700-some-odd-square-foot newsroom, hunched over their computers, fingers flying across their keyboards as they IM with colleagues who may be sitting right next to them.

As I say, it's a hard arrangement to explain to the uninitiated. Spencer Ackerman, who used to work for us at TPMmuckraker, captured it pretty well in this blog post:

If you want to understand what it's like to work at TPM, spend a couple days with your ten smartest friends and constantly IM with them. Set up IM windows for multi-person conversation, and break out those discussions with individual participants. And make the substance of those conversations deep-in-the-weeds investigative journalism. Make sure you don't often go more than, say, two minutes without contributing to the discussion. And see if you can avoid being overwhelmed.

As odd as all that may sound, one of the most out-of-the-box things about TPM was that until Wednesday, I had never met any of our staff in person, including Josh, even though I've worked at TPM in one capacity or another for approaching two years now, the last 10 months as managing editor.

It had just worked out that way. Josh and I both have young kids. Travel is expensive. Whatever. A hundred reasons why it hadn't happened yet. But since I was flying from St. Louis to Serbia this week, it made perfect sense to stop off at the office for a couple of days on my way back through New York.

There were suspicions among staff that I might not really exist. Maybe I was just Josh's imaginary friend and that I would walk into the office, take off my sunglasses, and be revealed to be Josh himself. (When my kids were younger, their toddler-level understanding of my online work was that I had cleverly managed to squeeze the people I work with into my computer. It suggested that they thought I had superhero powers so I was content to let that misapprehension linger.)

I'm about to catch a flight out of JFK. After a week of Belgrade and NYC blogging, Missouri blogging doesn't have quite the same allure, especially after such a beautiful day in NYC.

I walked from Chelsea all the way down to Wall Street -- passing Philip Seymour Hoffman, or someone who bore a stunning resemblance to him, at a sidewalk cafe in Greenwich Village -- before making my way back up to West 23rd. Not only had I never met my TPM colleagues, but I had never been to NYC before, a point of personal embarrassment I cringe to admit. So I wanted to soak up as much of the city as I could in the short time I had and by foot seemed like the best way to go.

I hope it's not so long until my next visit.

Originally posted by David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo, on June 21, 2008 12:54 PM

languagehat writes "My wife and I were watching the author on Bill Moyers last night (did you see it too, and decide to post?), "

Yup. Though I was idly listening, not watching, so it wasn't until nea the end of the interview that I was paying attention.

Rangeboy writes "The Communist Party made a determined but mostly futile effort to create a genuinely biracial coalition of the working class in Alabama. "

And they weren't the first. Some time before the Civil War, a Southern pamphleteer proposed the same thing, asserting that slavery was a tool used by rich whites to keep poor whites down -- if you had slaves, you didn't need to offer decent wages to whites or blacks, and as long as only some whites had free labor, they'd continue to be on top economically. I can't recall the author or title. And, yes, historically the way the ruling class keeps on top is by creating or exacerbating divisions and inciting hatred of "inferiors", whether the target of that hate is black, Jew, Kulak, Hispanic, Muslim, or Emanuel Goldstein.

But why then, do we mock poor whites?

sonic meat machine writes "It's always the poor Southerner who is mocked.... Some people, even progressives, find it terrible to mock the first but acceptable to mock the second--without understanding that it wasn't primarily the poor of either race who made the South's problems what they are today."

Well, part of the reason is that Cletus swallowed the myth of Herrenvolk Democracy fed him by his social superiors, wiped his mouth, and asked for seconds.

That's the "beauty" of a race-based system, of Herrenvolk. As long as you're white, you're always intrinsically "better" than a nigger, and you can never lose that birthright and the black can never gain it. On the other hand, if race equality is achieved, you're at the bottom of the totem pole as a poor person. But as long as you support the your superiors, the rich whites, in their access to free labor, you too can exercise your superior social status by bullying, terrorizing, raping, or lynching a black whenever your self-esteem is threatened or your poverty is too depressing. And being white, there's always that distanct dream that you too (or your kids) can join the upper crust -- something no "nigger" can ever do.

So we mock Cletus, in part, because he enthusiastically fought against "Northern Aggression" and his own economic interests to try to protect a disgusting and dehumanizing system that didn't even economically benefit him (and indeed, hurt him economically and mired him in poverty for generations). We sneer at Cletus because he still today takes great pride in his ancestors' fight for the "Lost Cause". We sneer at Cletus because for decades he's reveled in his lack of education ansd ignorance, "'cause jus 'cause I ain't got no book-learnin', I's still better than any them niggers!"

We mock Cletus because decade after decade, when his ruling class has needed to hookwink and blind him to how he was being used, how his children's future was being robbed, Cletus could be distracted and whipped up into a frenzy by a simple "look, a nigger tryin' to get all uppity and use your water fountain!" or school or voting booth! (Not that Cletus voted all that much, poll taxes if not literacy tests applying as much to him as to any black.)

We mock Cletus because now once the ruling class had to allow blacks to vote, Cletus provided the essential counter-weight, a counter-weight that now drives the Republican Party's Southern Strategy, its overt racism masked by the efforts of Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater. And so even today, Cletus votes against his economic interests, content to live in squalor with his kids' teeth rotting out so long as he can clutch his Rebel flag and proudly announce that he don't abide with no niggers (or to make prejudice more socially acceptable today, no welfare, abortionists, and faggot marriage).

We mock Cletus, because he's happily traded his education, economic security, and his children's futures, and allowed himself to be used as a tool, all for the mess of pottage that allows him to sneer at (and maybe lynch) anyone, more matter how educated, wealthy, or competent, who has a black skin.

Originally posted by orthogonality from Popular Comments Across MetaFilter, on June 21, 2008 12:06 PM

Spotted on Newlaunches, a 1975 Volkswagen Beetle made into a phone car by Howard Davis. OK.

Likecool

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, ReBlogged by Dan Torop on Jun 21, 2008 at 12:52 PM

Originally posted by emily from Eyebeam reBlog, on June 21, 2008 9:52 AM

Today we checked out the “Telectroscope” a large, man-made tunnel that connects London, UK to Brooklyn, New York. The tunnel was built by Paul St. George and remains one of the wonders of the world. The tunnel works with an intricate assemblage of mirrors that reflect live images under the Atlantic in real-time between the two cities. Forget the Internet, this is all analog, all the time. If you don’t believe me, check out the link above.

Originally posted by jonah from coin-operated, ReBlogged by Dan Torop on Jun 21, 2008 at 12:51 PM

Originally posted by jonah from Eyebeam reBlog, on June 21, 2008 9:51 AM

"I feel sometimes it is as important for us to see our mistakes as it is for us to see ourselves at our best, it gives us direction and allows us to progress..." The scary thing about Parkour is that you have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is usually in public and involves lots of falling down.

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on June 21, 2008 9:01 AM

More people taking Amtrak, even though it's reaching capacity and can't meet demand. Amtrak only has *632 usable rail cars*?

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on June 21, 2008 8:51 AM

In a moment of brilliance (I suspect fuelled by gin), my guildmates Kuya and Tikker (a.k.a. Kim and Anno) sent the guild a postcard each ... from Azeroth.

The postcard was printed using Moo's postcard-maker...

... and it's a treasure!

(Thanks ladies!)

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, on June 21, 2008 2:04 AM

Ok, well, actually Delicious Library 2 shipped like four weeks ago. Sorry I didn't tell you. It's not because I don't care. Honestly, I tried to tell the press, but I think they're pretty sick of me, so there wasn't much of a splash on the news sites.

Sales have been great, though, so I can't complain.

But, hey, enough about me... what's up with your life? (Use blank space provided.)

_______ ______ _______ _____ _____ _____ ____

Really? Wow. Well, you know, stuff changes. I think it'll work out.

Oh, also, I launched a new company down at WWDC last week, called Golden % Braeburn. I'm going to license out the store I wrote to sell Delicious Library, since it was a huge pain in the tush to write, and I actually would have licensed a store from someone else if there'd been a decent option back when we launched Delicious Monster.

I know, it seems kind of pretentious for one guy to have two companies. Even *I* blush a little at it. But, it kind of makes sense — Golden % Braeburn's only going to have customers in the dozens, and they'll all be Mac developers. I didn't want to confuse my Delicious Monster customers by saying, "Oh, hey, now that you've bought Delicious Library, would you maybe be interested in buying a store to sell software on the internet?" That doesn't pass the "mom" test. (Incidentally, as my mom gets battier I'm finding it harder and harder to write software that passes the "mom" test. I'll have to go back to using Matas' mom as the eponymous mom from the test.)

You can see how it kind of de-focuses my message, yes?

---

A lot of people have been asking about Pimp My Code... No, it's not dead, it's just that those entries take approximately a day to write, and when I was in the final months (and months and months) of Delicious Library 2 I really felt like I owed it more to my customers to actually write my dang software than to publish my vanity blog. (I know, I wrote about my cat and girls and stuff — those entries take like half an hour. I don't have to fact-check them or anything.)

So, we'll have some code pimping here soon... coming up first is the on-the-fly localization code that's part of what I'll be sharing with all Golden % Braeburn customers (one of the advantages of licensing the store is you also get all my helper code), and also the system I'm trying to get Apple to switch to. You can evaluate for yourself whether it's better than AppleGlot or FoobleBlot or whatever you are using.

---

On a personal note, recently my shrink said to me, "Hey, Wil, why don't you drop the pimp act? Nobody actually looks at show-offs and thinks, 'Oooh, I like him.' In fact, everyone resents them."

This made a lot of sense, so I'm officially renouncing my phony pimpitude. Honestly, I'm just a geek who stays up late and plays GTA and makes clumsy passes at pretty girls and tries to write software. That's me.

Originally posted by Wil Shipley from Call Me Fishmeal., on June 21, 2008 1:23 AM

one of the smartest guys I know, I'm keeping a close eye on this  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on June 20, 2008 11:24 PM

I hadn't realized this was the same guy behind Amazon Light, who's name-checked our work at conferences in the past. Big Picture is wildly awesome.

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on June 20, 2008 9:38 PM

With its vibrant oversized photographs and minimalist design, the Boston Globe's The Big Picture weblog launched on June 1 to instant global acclaim. It's designed, programmed, and written by Alan Taylor, an old-school web programmer and blogger, in his spare time while working on community features at Boston.com. (You might know Alan from his popular MegaPenny Project, Amazon Light, or his other projects.)

The idea's simple, but extremely effective. Spend a few minutes with the Iowa floods, the faces of Sudan, or the daily life in Sadr City, and you feel like you've opened a window to another world.

I interviewed Alan about the inspiration for the site, his methodology, and what it's like being a programmer in a journalist's world.

The Big Picture's become an essential read for me, and I totally agree with Jason Kottke when he called it "the best new blog of the year." What inspired it?

Alan Taylor: Lots of things — my parents used to always have Life and National Geographic magazines around the house, I fell in love with the visual storytelling way back then. When I was getting my feet wet in the online journalism world as a developer at msnbc.com, I had the good fortune of working alongside Brian Storm and a few others in MSNBC's photo department, who were just phenomenal as far as selection, editing and presentation.

I wondered why other sites didn't reach that level. Many have by now, but I was still frustrated by the presentation — either far too small, or trapped in click-after-click interfaces that were in Flash or just acted as ad farms.

How did you pitch it to the Boston Globe? Was there any resistance?

Not really any resistance, but a lot of "hmm, well, we need to check on it." Mostly things to do with licenses and contracts with image providers. I put together a few mockups that look almost exactly like the final product and shopped it around. A few people loved it, went crazy for it... Others weren't immediately sold, but I asked for a chance, and I got it.

I have an advantage in that my main role is as a developer here, so I could build all my own templates, format my own style, and so on. I sort of bullldozed some things through though, like extra width, few ads, and I made it simple internally by doing it mostly on my own, no requests for development time, marketing or promotion. After the legal questions were settled, I was free to try it out. It took off fast.

Isn't that unprecedented? For a web developer at a newspaper to get their own column?

I don't know. I guess the first thing that springs to mind is the New York Times' Open Blog — where it's mostly techno-focused, but still an interesting format. I did feel that I had to make some kickass mockups to show the editorial group that I had a good eye and decent judgement. That really helped them give the go-ahead.

Again, I got no pushback, just a lot of "Oh, well, this is new, um, okay, let's try it," you know. Plus, I didn't ask anyone else to do any extra work.

Were there any issues in getting permission to publish images that large from the wire photo services? The photos on the Big Picture must be twice the size of any other news site.

We looked at the contracts pretty well and couldn't identify anything that prevented this sort of thing. The general rule appears to be (my understanding of it) that the images should not be easily reproduced in print. Big Picture images max out at 990 pixels wide at 72dpi. If you scale that up to print resolution of 300dpi, you get an image that's only about 2 inches wide, so we'd appear to be within that limit.

I think it may just be conventional wisdom and some old one-size-fits-all templates that hem in other sites. Not every picture site needs to be gigantic, but a few should, considering what's available and what people are capable of viewing.

Tell me a little bit about your curation process. Are you browsing the wire randomly for amazing photos and building a post around it, or do you start with the story you want to tell?

A little of both. Browsing the wire is really fun, and leads to some incredible finds. If there's a specific story I want to tell, I'm at the mercy of what I can find. Sometimes there's a lot, other times, not. For instance, I'm dying to do some "daily life" entries about Iran, but the wire feeds I have available have almost no images from there at all, other than photos of Ahmadinejad — but that's not what I'm after. I try to stock up for a rainy day too. I have some stored searches, some favorite photographers, some perpetually interesting subjects, and so on. I'm trying to automate the gathering as much as possible.

What kind of tools?

I use Firefox to browse the wire on an internal site, wired up with Greasemonkey scripts to give me decent-sized thumbs, extract caption and photo ID from the IMG tags. When I find an image I like, I save it to a local folder until I get about 25 or so good ones to choose from. Then I open all 25 in Photoshop, arrange the windows in a horizontal tile and drag them around to get a rough ordering that makes sense. Then I start to edit out images that don't make the cut, run a couple of recorded Photoshop Actions to size the images, and do some hand-cropping if necessary.

I also wrote a Photoshop script in Javascript that will grab all the images in a given folder and generate HTML with proper heights and widths for the images — that's what I use as the body of the entry. Then I paste in captions (with some editing), grab some relevant links, write a short intro and post it.

Clever. I noticed that the Big Picture's wider than any other page on Boston.com, even wider than the navigation bar. How'd you pick the size?

After googling some design sites where they were talking about optimum size for a blog template and finding no great consensus, I just punted a bit. You take a typical 1024 pixel-wide screen, subtract 34 pixels (enough to cover most browser's scrollbars), and you get 990px. I wanted to go as big as I reasonably could without causing horizontal scrollbars on most screens.

Is Boston.com planning on integrating The Big Picture into the site at all? The only reference outside the registration-wall I could find was a single link on the Blogs page.

It's been featured on the "Inside Boston.com" sidebar a few times, has a semi-permanent link in the left column of the News page. I think they (we) are still working on the relationship between articles written for the Globe that are online, and content that is produced for our online property only. It's a tough nut to crack. Scott Karp really hit the nail on the head. Newspapers websites are still gelling into whatever it is they will become in a few years (or more).

It's funny, but not too surprising, that the biggest innovation in photojournalism right now is coming from a computer programmer. Browsing the major newspaper sites, it's rare to see more than a single small photo accompanying an article and the occasional slideshow. Is that a legacy of the newspapers' print origins?

Good question. Even some of my favorite photo sites are often limited to "Photo of the Day" or "24 Hours in Pictures" features. That's interesting, and you can find some mind-blowing images there, but I always felt like it lacked context, depth, story. When there is more to the story, it's often just a link to a news story, not more photos. I think msnbc.com and the Washington Post are doing quite well though.

It's interesting, you don't link to Boston Globe articles about the photos you're posting. In fact, one of the only external links I've seen is on your most recent Mars post, and you link to the primary sources instead of the Globe article. No pressure to link to other parts of the site?

Yeah, no pressure to link to anything in particular. I do try to keep it in the New York Times family when possible — if the links are good, I'll take them from anywhere.

How's the response been? I've seen the buzz in the blog world and the over-the-top positive comments in every one of your posts.

Yeah — totally unreal. Over-the-top positive response. More than I expected for sure. Internally, externally, everywhere, people are being really thankful to me. I need to make sure (with some link-love in my upcoming blogroll) that the response gets directed to the photographers as well. I'm just a web developer with access to their photos and a blog — they're the ones out there working hard to get these amazing images. "Photographers" here is a loose term, encompassing photojournalists, stringers, amateurs, scientific imaging teams and more.

The blog really launched on June 1st (I had a few earlier posts, but hadn't opened it up yet). In its first 20 days of existence, it's almost reached 1.5 million pageviews and over 1,500 comments for just 20 entries. It's also brought out a lot of emotion — commenters can really go crazy on some of these entries. It adds to the mix, that's for sure.

There's also a lot of international attention, relatively. Largely, I think, due to the visual nature of the blog.

How are you balancing your coding responsibilities of your job with this newfound editorial popularity?

Ha! The clock doesn't stop. Big Picture right now is a side project for sure, and I spend some off-work time compiling it. I just announced that I'm going to three postings a week instead of every weekday, just for sanity's sake. Each entry is about 2-3 hours of work. My main responsibility is helping add community features to the rest of Boston.com.

In journalism, the divide between salaries for engineers and journalists can be pretty wide. Often, a relatively junior programmer can make more than a senior writer. Are there any complications with getting paid a relatively high software developer's salary for doing a writer or editor's job?

I was a bit worried at first that I'd be stepping on toes — treading on other people's domain or doing someone else's job, but so far there doesn't seem to be anything but love for it. I think everyone know that what I'm doing is a side project, not what I'm mainly being paid for.

Programming expertise is rare in journalism, I think partly because of the lure of tech company salaries. Historically, I think there was a reluctance to pay enough to be competitive when it meant a programmer would be making as much as a senior editor
But I assume that's changing... The New York Times, for example, is getting incredibly talented people.

Yeah, I had a lot of friends who looked at me like i was crazy when I joined the Boston Globe a few years ago. But it's precisely this sort of opportunity I was hoping for. The access to great storytelling resources, a great platform, and the ability to contribute to that, albeit in a more technical role. I saw the opportunity and ran with it, with everyone's blessing. It's a very hard question — how to attract programmers to journalism roles. For me, it's just far more interesting than, say, working on a massive financial services backend system.

Finally, as someone obviously passionate about photojournalism, have you tried it yourself?

Yes, and I suck! When I was in college, I tried to get into a "Visual Communications" major but found that even though I knew what a good photo looked like, I could never make the damn camera do what I wanted. All my photos look like pedestrian snapshots or worse. I have a lot of respect for the skill of the pros.

John Gruber told me that when he saw the site, his first thought was, "I can't believe nobody has done this before."

Same thing my wife said, and many others. I know it's totally copy-able, I just hope it inspires good new stuff.

There have been photoblogs using similar formats with images just as large, but I can't recall any that did what you're doing, with multiple high-res photos on a single page around a theme. It would've had to come out in the last couple years, simply because of changing bandwidth and screen sizes.

Yeah, maybe right time, right place? Bandwidth concerns aren't huge, I'm just a blip in overall traffic. 1024 pixel screen sizes are more prevalent, more people have faster connections. When considering that, everyone seems to go right to thinking about video, but you can get so much quality from a good still image. So why not go that route as well?

I'm glad you did. Thanks, Alan!

 

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on June 20, 2008 7:55 PM

all the memes are found, thanks to help from ChopShop  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on June 20, 2008 4:56 PM

It’s a toasty 105 degrees this evening in California — what better way to cool off (and celebrate the solstice) than to dive into the wild with some of the many YUI items that have caught our eye since the last post?

• Nicora.net’s YUI PhotoViewer: Can you ever have too many lightbox options? Check out nicora.net’s YUI-based PhotoViewer Control, with a variety of flavors and built-in support for Flickr APIs.
• Instant Shiny Forms with Rails and YUI: That’s the title of Enleitened’s new tutorial that "demonstrate[s] how to convert standalone Ruby on Rails forms to a YUI Dialog (hey, it’s one less page load) in only 4 easy steps."
• Javascript Framework Usage Among the Top 100 Websites: Royal Pingdom started some interesting discussions a few weeks back with its article exploring which JS frameworks were in use at the top 100 websites (based on Alexa and Webware data). They found Prototype, JQuery and YUI leading the way among these top sites (excluding most of Yahoo!’s own mainstream properties, which all rely on YUI to some degree). The authors were quick to point out that theirs was not a scientific survey, but they noted their surprise at what the research turned up — and what it failed to turn up. (Note: YUI’s popular CSS components were discluded from this survey; Mint, which also uses YUI extensively, was acknowledged for its use of MooTools.)
• Exploring YUI Custom Events: Speaking of Mint, Matt Snider is back with another YUI tutorial, this one using YUI Custom Events to create an "Object Subscription Pattern."
• Using YUI CSS with Django: Over on Sofeng’s Blog, Sofeng noticed that The Django Book uses YUI CSS; he worked up a tutorial to show you how to do the same in your own Django project.
• Learning YUI: Nathan Smith recently started work at one of my favorite alt-search-engines, Viewzi, which uses YUI. He picked up Dan Wellman’s book to learn the ropes, and then he posted a nice review of some of what he’s discovered as a new YUI user.
• Adam Moore + Douglas Crockford = Epiphany: Lenny Burdette writes on his Rule52 blog about "How YUI’s event listeners changed the way I write JavaScript", bringing together insights from the sample chapter of Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts and the expressive power of Adam Moore’s YUI Event Utility.
• Richard Benson’s YUI Rich Text Editor Plugin for Movable Type: In Richard’s words: "YUI has become my new favourite Rich Text Editor and I have been implementing it left right and centre. Its extensibility, features and ease of use are unparalleled. It made sense for all these features to be available to me in Movable Type so why not package it up into a plugin too? … Options include stretching the editor to fit the content automatically and disbaling use of the MT assets selection tools in favour of a simpler URL-based image chooser." Check out the plugin in the Movable Type Plugin Directory.
• Adding Tabs to Your WordPress Blog: Adrian Diaconescu at Rubiqube went looking for a good tabbed-content solution for his WordPress sidebar, but he couldn’t find something that fully scratched the itch. His response was to deploy the YUI TabView Control, and he’s written up a detailed tutorial so you can leverage his work.
• YUI DataTable in Grails: Marcel Overdijk recently whipped up a nice example integrating YUI DataTable in Grails.

Did we miss something good? Probably so…if so, let us know in the comments.

Originally posted by Eric Miraglia from Yahoo! User Interface Blog, on June 20, 2008 4:03 PM

We leave you for the weekend with this wonderful mix from Braydon Givon Fuller. A great CC BY-SA licensed melange of freely licensed electro to listen to while you decompress from your week.

Originally posted by Cameron Parkins from Creative Commons » CC News, on June 20, 2008 4:00 PM

• Jim Romenesko’s Impact on Journalism - Media Column - Howell Raines - Portfolio.com
  Want a huge dose of self-important old lecturing in the guise of a prominent blogger?
  (tags: blogging journalism newspaper howell.raines romenesko portfolio poynter)
• Connecting The Dots Of The Web Revolution - Publishing 2.0
  Karp explains what’s so deeply wrong with the AP’s link/quote/copyright scheme.
  (tags: ap blogging copyright journalism new.media msm publishing2.0)
• Quoted: Tim Russert on Diversity in the Media at Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture
  Interesting.
  (tags: russert msm race gender inequality military)
• Huffington Post to expand into local news across the US | Media | guardian.co.uk
  V interesting
  (tags: blogging new.media journalism local huffpo chicago)
• Too Sense: The Vile Racism of Pat Oliphant
  Wow. Um. WOW.
  (tags: race inequality msm cartoons)
• Politico’s Advertising Pitch
  Want to know how Politico sells itself? ESPN for sports with a huge dose of insidery goodness.
  (tags: politico new.media finance beltway video)
• techPresident – Obama’s Organization, and the Future of American Politics
  Forgot to delicious this earlier. Summary: BHO’s is the biggest political operation put together in the history of the US, what happens next is a BIG DEAL.
  (tags: new.politics organizing politics transparency grassroots obama 08)
• The Twitter Hall of Shame: 50 Tweets That Will Echo in History - Inside CRM
  Learning from the mistakes of others.
  (tags: funny history twitter new.media)
• techPresident – BREAKING: PdF2008 Hosts Obama-McCain Twitter Debate
  Silly, hilarious, “groundbreaking.” Probably won’t be that interesting.
  (tags: twitter pdf new.politics new.media)
• Google Trends Comes To Web Sites: Trends For Web Sites
  Huh. Another bad public analytics measure to add to compete.com and alexa.com?
  (tags: statistics metrics new.media google search)
• SPIKE LEE + DAVID SIMON + KATRINA = AWESOME, IF IT ACTUALLY HAPPENS. - TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect
  DUDE.
  (tags: david.simon the.wire katrina spike.lee prospect)