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Edwards dropped out of the race to get VP nod?

Wednesday | January 30, 2008 | 9:17 pm  

I’m definitely no political junky, and I’ve definitely watched too mutch West Wing but something hit me while watching an Onion TivoCast about John Edwards in New Hampshire.

(Okay my Tivo watchlist has a tendency to pile up, so sue me…)

Anyway, I’m thinking that John Edwards bowed out of the race, earlier than expected, in an attempt to guarantee a Vice Presidential spot on the ticket.

• He campaigned on issues and didn’t get into mudslinging about his other Democratic nominees so there’s no bad blood
• He can bring youth and being a man (sad that some voters will require this) to Clinton’s campaign if she gets the nomination
• He can reinforce the youthful image Obama is going for, and bring whiteness (again, sad that some voters will require this).
• And no matter what, he can represent the South for either campaign

But, what do I do know…

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Politics

Journalism job description tag clouds

Wednesday | January 23, 2008 | 7:23 pm  

A colleague of mine, (whom may or may not remember me from my Dow Jones Online Internship), Eric Ulken built a tag cloud of keywords in postings to journalismjobs.com.

Not surprisingly, “blogs”, “interactive”, “flash” and “graphics” top the list — it seems, so far, that those are the key terms that have been labeled ‘online’ by most newsrooms.

Let me offer folks my ideal tag cloud:

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Journalism, Python

Urban renewal for data ghettos

Tuesday | January 22, 2008 | 8:18 pm  

So, I gather that in newsrooms it’s become fashionable to put public records online.

I totally love the term that Matt Waite coined — calling them data ghettos:

But if you take a step into one of the databases and you get to my second problem with them: couple of search boxes and a button.

Is that really it? Is that the big newspaper.com push into data? Sprawling, barely organized pages to get to a couple of search boxes and a button?

I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself.

But I love the solution that my team came up with at work for a Georgia names project that went live tonight.

They provided both a searchable interface and some pre-set searches that highlight interesting names.

The best part is that Zellyn made it so that journalists, developers, designers, or anyone in our group can create new lists on the fly in our neat-o keen Django application.

It’s the first time at work that we’ve built a tool around a set of data. Normally we lump our work into two camps:

• Data-driven applications like my purchase card project expect that the only human interaction is our loyal readers contrasted with…
• Tools like our gallery publishing system expect staff users on the ‘backend’ and loyal readers to interact with them on the ‘front’ end

This the first time that we’ve merged aspects of both and I think it provides some urban renewal to what could otherwise be a data ghetto.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Databases, Journalism, Programming

Mail.app and Gmail performance boost

Monday | January 14, 2008 | 5:38 pm  

So I’m loving that Gmail finally got IMAP as a feature.

It makes the iPhone experience soooo much better and it is nice to be able to read my mail in a desktop app at work and at home.

However, I noticed that Mail.app and Gmail were not getting along so well. Mail.app’s activity viewer would constantly show it syncronizing, updating, downloading or doing various other network activities that made it decidedly not cool.

I tried Thunderbird for a while, and it had great performance.

I wanted to switch back to Mail.app, though, as I got an iPhone for Christmas (sweetness), and I wanted to use the pretty sweet platform of Mail.app/Address Book/iCal + iPhone.

Long story short… the secret is to not let Mail.app download and store your messages from Gmail. With my 1.8 GB of mail it. Takes. A. While. To. Download.

Secret sauce is to go: Mail -> Preferences -> Accounts -> Advanced and set “Keep copies of my messages for offline viewing” to “Don’t keep copies of any messages.”

The only downside that I can see is that you can’t search your mail very well from within Mail.app or Spotlight. But, uh, that’s what Gmail is for!

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Technology