Jamie’s Blog

Jamie’s Top Ten: Stanford POW Day 2

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 | Work Life | No Comments

Ten MORE observations-slash-things I learned at the Stanford Publishing on the Web workshop—links, quotes, random things:

10. If you’re trying to get your company to invest in good equipment for web video, don’t skimp on the audio piece. Good mics cost money. If your money people balk, ask them how it feels to get a bad connection on a cell phone, because that’s how a lot of the audio on YouTube sounds.

9. Great idea from Kenji Kato: Record audio for your web video separately. Camera noise (whirring, handling) is often unavoidable since cameras portable enough for print journalists in the field are too small to keep machine noise at bay. The moving parts are just too close together. This happens even if you use an external mic. So record the audio on a separate recorder, like the Zoom H4. It’s cheap, rugged and has two XLR inputs along with pretty good on-board mics. To sync up audio with video, clap three times on camera before each take. The spikes in the audio track will be easy to sync up with the claps on video.

8. Mr. Kato has promised to post a gear list for different entry levels for web video, and what it costs to purchase what you need. I look forward to sharing it…

7. The next big trend for web analytics is desktop widgets that update in real time. Track usage minute by minute without signing on and downloading reports from Omniture? Sounds great! Our speaker Shari Cleary tells me the functionality is on its way, but it will be expensive. I don’t think that will stop every exec, sales director, or marketing director from wanting it.

6. Google Analytics: surprisingly powerful considering it’s a free service.

5. Much of what I learned today has to do with Twitter, the crazy social networking-slash-glorified text messaging I’ve used personally but haven’t found too many business applications yet. Well… if Twitter can’t build a business, it can help take one down: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=132622

4. Maybe Twitter CAN build a business… some good tips: http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/30041

3. A few years ago, legacy publishers looked at blogs the way many of them look at social networking these days. But now, even the New York Times has dozens of “bloggers.” The way we see blogging today—essentially live, user-driven web versions of old-fashioned editorial pages—isn’t really how they started. Early blogs were lists of links; just random things people found interesting (similar to today’s stumbleupon.com). Links are still powerful in blogs, and editors who blog should use the opportunity to link off to research and tools that helped them write their entry or article. Google LOVES links—pages are ranked based on how many other pages link to them. And the more you link out, the more you GET linked. Good points from speaker Scott Karp.

2. You may think Twitter is as useless as facebook, but the fact is there are knowledgeable people tweeting about everything imaginable. Today it took about 10 seconds for me to learn about Cottage Living shutting down by following Twitter searches on Southern Progress titles using Tweetgrid, which allows you to set up panes with multiple search grids.

1. DEEP thought of the day: “Print publishers: What will you do when the world goes from words with buttons for videos to videos with buttons for words?”—Elizabeth Osder

Jamie’s Top Ten: Stanford POW Day 1

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 | Work Life | No Comments

Top ten observations-slash-things I learned today at the Stanford Publishing on the Web workshop—links, quotes, random things:

10. Forget surfing around to cnn.com, msnbc.com, foxnews.com, whatever. The best way to follow a breaking news story is meme tracking. Check out http://memeorandum.com/.

9. Quote from Kevin McKean of Consumer Reports: “Good content entertains, informs, enables and protects. The ‘protects’ part is what separates ‘content’ from ‘marketing,’ because it means you’re on the reader’s side.”

8. The goal for user generated content is to help your audience help itself (and incidentally your site and brand in the process). Another gem from McKean.

7. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen says web users are inherently “selfish, lazy and ruthless,” and that we should design our web sites accordingly.

6. Nielsen also says only about 20% of users scroll past the fold on a homepage, 40% on interior pages.

5. Great book on design and usability: “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug

4. Another great tip from Kevin McKean: Publishers should not try to create their own social networks. We’re in the content business, not the social networking business. Your content should shine, not your “ideas.” Imitate and use existing social networks to make that content shine. Do something familiar, predictable, simple: user commenting, posting tools, make easy to share on digg and del.icio.us, embed, e-mail.

3. I’ve been all over the new Nikon D90 because it shoots HD video. But our resident video expert, Kenji Kato, makes some sense about avoiding shooting to memory cards: Tape is still good, cheap, uncompressed and easy to store. And, video from memory cards can take as long to convert as it takes to digitize tape.

2. The best video asset most publishers have RIGHT NOW is their photo archive; combine stills, video, audio, and previous articles into something special for your site.

1. Kenji Kato: The very best camera for web video right now is the Canon HV30. Time for me to buy one of these puppies.

Blogging (and Tweeting) from Stanford Professional Publishing Course

Monday, November 17th, 2008 | Work Life | No Comments

If you’re wondering why all of a sudden I seem overactive on Facebook and such, it’s because I’m sending all manner of information from Stanford’s Publishing on the Web course. For the next few days, I’ll be posting items here, on Twitter and on Facebook (all of which are tied together so you’ll see a lot of repeats, so you can also follow it anywhere).

Click here to find out what the workshop is all about. You can see my thoughts here on my Twitter feed on the right, or just follow me on Twitter, or check my Facebook page… Twitter will update my status as well.

You can follow the tweets of ALL the participants in the course, as well.

If you have any interest at all in publishing, this course is gold. Here’s the schedule if you’d like to have some structure to all this Twitter madness.

Are You Ready For The Digital TV Conversion?

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 | Pop Culture, Random | No Comments

It’s simple, really.

The Boy Is Growing Up

Monday, November 10th, 2008 | Home Life, Sullivan | 1 Comment

Sully turned 1 year old today, and we had a great day with family to celebrate. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins came to Maylene for the party. The boy didn’t get his nap, so it got a little testy toward the end, but he made it.

Happy Birthday, my buddy!

• Sully’s 1st Birthday

Facebook gallery Click to see it

Sully The Spider

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 | Home Life, Sullivan | No Comments

A little late, but here are some Halloween photos of the boy:

• Sully The Spider

Facebook gallery Click to see it

“The Stand” Turns 30

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 | Pop Culture, Spiritual | 1 Comment

I’d like to say that my favorite novel is something a little more high-brow than Stephen King, but I’d be a liar. You can have your requisite “To Kill A Mockingbird,” “Catcher In The Rye,” “Rings” trilogy, whatever… Yeah, they’re on my list, too, but nothing really compares to the raw thrill of reading “The Stand”—hidden under my desk at Lexington High School during math class, on the back porch of our house during a rainstorm, shivering under the covers alone in the little apartment over my dad’s workshop… you can tell these are vivid memories for me.

There was also a feeling of doing something forbidden in reading Stephen King. My parents weren’t that strict about it once I was old enough, but Stephen King’s books were verboten in my high school library. I once had a close friend tell me that he couldn’t believe I could sleep at night with an “evil” book on the nightstand beside me. Funny, I know… but these are the things I remember…

There have been volumes written about this book, strange considering the fact critics see it more as a piece of pop culture than a serious piece of literature. I won’t try to defend Stephen King’s place in American letters. Whether you see him as a modern Dickens or—as King describes himself—the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries, you can’t deny this one novel’s place in the apocalyptic sub-genre. You could make a case for the better-regarded classics such as “Earth Abides,” “Alas, Babylon” or even “I Am Legend” being every bit as prescient as King’s opus, but none of those are as specifically prophetic. In fact, King’s languid, everyman prose actually elevates the reality of the book: it’s the end of the world through the eyes of Joe The Plumber.

So today, as the entire population of the country quite literally stands at a crossroads of sorts, a future where we are forced to choose sides or die doesn’t seem so far-fetched. Add to that the novel’s unique—and again prescient—mix of religion, politics and nationalism, and this epic seems all the more visionary.

Here’s a great interview with King about the book, its relevance and its ties to his forthcoming novel, “Under The Dome.”

• Stephen King’s God Trip

On the 30th anniversary of “The Stand,” the novelist confesses what haunts him about religion and today’s politics. Click to read it

Bleak Days At Southern Progress

Friday, October 24th, 2008 | Work Life | No Comments

My former employer and former owner of The Progressive Farmer was hit hard this week by another round of Time Inc. layoffs. My best to the folks affected.

Here’s the scoop from Folio:

• Layoffs at Time Inc.’s Southern Progress

Editorial and accounting departments hit hardest. Click to read it

Great Magazine, Great Issue, Great Piece

Friday, October 3rd, 2008 | Pop Culture, Random | No Comments

The new issue of Esquire is one of the mag’s best ever, at least since I’ve been a subscriber (admittedly not since 1933). The best piece in the issue—and that’s saying a lot—is Ron Suskind’s “What Bush Meant.”

For the next several weeks, you’ll see an awful lot of gray space about W’s legacy. Some of it will be in the form of pages-long vitriolic diatribes (expect that from, say, Matt Taibbi); some of it will be column-length sideswipes that aren’t likely to say much of anything (Maureen Dowd? Paul Krugman?).

Amidst all of this, Ron Suskind takes exactly 2 pages to show them all what a good opinion piece should do. And he does it as only a reporter can. This is total immersion in the subject matter, with all the opinions backed up by real, personally-observed events. As complete as these two pages are as a bookmark-worthy example of editorial writing, they beg for something long-form. If Suskind decided to publish his reporter’s notebooks unedited from his coverage of the administration, I’d buy a copy and read it twice.

It’s unfair to lump Taibbi into the typical opinion-writer milieu—he’s a terrific straight reporter and the threads of far-left thinking in his keen observations make for amusing reading—but excepting him, I often wonder how long it has been since some of these blogosphere-blasted writers actually chased a story.

Good for Mr. Suskind. This is an A+ paper.

• What Bush Meant

The lasting influence of the last eight years. Click to read it

Riding The Island in Cali

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 | Work Life | No Comments

Last week I got to test a new utility vehicle from Honda in quite the gorgeous setting: Catalina Island off the coast of California. I’ve been on a few UVs—and of course spent most of my adolescence on an ATV. Honda’s Big Red was the best UV I’ve been on, as far as comfort and what I was comfortable doing on it. I probably could’ve gotten a little more reckless with it—the writer from Popular Mechanics was pretty brave, for instance—but I took it pretty easy and had a nice ride. It’s not the most powerful in its class, but it’s probably the safest.

The setting was breathtaking. Honda knows how to put on a vehicle introduction. I didn’t have much space for the review in the magazine and could only run one photo, but I thought my blog visitors might enjoy some of the photos from the experience.

Click here for the Flash gallery: Honda Big Red / Jamie in Catalina (photos by Kevin Wing and Lazelle Jones)

Here’s my review:

Big Debut For Big Red

Sometimes being late to the market has its advantages. While Honda watched its competitors release their side-by-sides, the company known for its precise engineering took its time with research and development. If you judge by what a farmer would expect from a work vehicle that could double for a leisurely ride across the acreage, Honda’s new Big Red is worth a look—this is without a doubt a farm machine.

We tested the MUV on the rough terrain of Catalina Island in California. While engine braking felt a little precarious downhill—you’ll eat up some brakes in hill country—the 4-wheel drive differential lock handled the steep climbs well. The vehicle’s low center of gravity helped on the side hills, too; we did things in Big Red that we wouldn’t have attempted in other side-by-sides.

The bed has a progressive strut that makes dumping easy, with releases on both sides so driver and passenger can share the work. Load and tow capacity are competitive. The ride is where you’ll tell the difference. The automobile-inspired automatic transmission keeps noise and vibration low; rubber-mounted seats smooth bumps. And, Honda claims 30% better fuel efficiency in their testing over competitors.

The MUV is shipping now, but it may be tough to find. Honda’s Tim Patnode says they’re making as many as they can, but only about a third of dealers will get them this year. Price: $11,399 for the red model, $11,899 for camo.