Republish your site's RSS feed on Twitter

Joel has been wanting to replicate my site's RSS data via Twitter, to do a quasi-realtime update service. Neat idea, even though I'm not the biggest Twitter fan. He sent me this SWiK page, showing how to repurpose an existing feed as a Twitter bot. Very slick.

require 'rubygems'
require 'active_record'
require 'simple-rss'
require 'open-uri'
require 'twitter'

#twitter account to post to
twitter_email = "yourtwitteremail@bla.com"
twitter_password = "secret"

#rss feed to post
rss_url = "http://yoursite.com/index.xml"
rss_user_agent = "http://twitter.com/yourbot"

#sqlite db
path_to_sqlite_db = "/PATH/TO/db.sqlite"


ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDERR)
ActiveRecord::Base.colorize_logging = false

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
:adapter => "sqlite3",
:dbfile => path_to_sqlite_db
)

#uncomment this section the first time to create the table
#
#ActiveRecord::Schema.define do
# create_table :item do |table|
# table.column :title, :string
# table.column :link, :string
# end
#end

class Item def to_s
"#{self.title[0..(130-self.link.length)]} - #{self.link}"
end
end

#run the beast
rss_items = SimpleRSS.parse open(rss_url ,"User-Agent" => rss_user_agent)

for item in rss_items.items
Item.transaction do
unless existing_item = Item.find(:all, :conditions => ["link=?", item.link]).first
twitter ||= Twitter::Base.new(twitter_email, twitter_password)
new_item = Item.create(:title => item.title, :link => item.link)
twitter.post(new_item.to_s)
end
end
end

Are TV audiences getting smarter?

I just caught something from an NBC promo for "Heroes", in which the tagline read something like this:

To enter the contest and make your theory, go to: "http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/cisco"

Could this signal that mainstream TV audiences are getting smarter, at least in terms of URL savvy? Mentioning a web path that goes more than a single directory deep was a major no-no in years' past in terms of marketing over traditional broadcast media. Since I work for a media company, it was critical to have friendly URLs for our cross-platform teases. Mental bookmarking away from the PC is easier (translating into actual browser bookmarking later), top-of-mind awareness is preserved and you generate a winning connection with users. This was a major design decision that went into our site from the onset.

Most of the better, non-CMS dependent web sites in the early days used to do this, too. Microsoft used to be this way but has largely gone away from such a hierarchy. Google modified the rule, typically using news.google.com, reader.google.com, docs.google.com and the like.

If viewers and listeners can tolerate going one more folder down, I guess that's progress.

It's on

Forgive me for gloating just a tad, but I've compiled a list of the stations that wew're up against for this year's national Murrow award for best small market TV news web site. We won last year.

• KUAM.com (Harmon, Guam)
• KTVB.com (Boise, ID)
• Channel3000.com (Madison, WI)
• 49ABCNews.com (Topeka, KS)
• KVUE.com (Austin, TX)
• 14WFIE.com (Evansville, IN)
• WBIR.com (Knoxville, TN)
• WAFF.com (Huntsville, AL)
• 9WSYR.com (East Syracuse, NY)
• WSLS.com (Roanoke, VA)
  

What do you think and which is your favorite? And why? There are some pretty good sites this year with some interesting takes on presenting news, events and information. At some point, I'd like to be a judge for the Murrows...maybe there's a "Top Gun" rule - ya know, if you win once, you get to come back as an instructor. :-)

Of interest is that a lot of these sites run ASP.NET. I'm just sayin'.

KUAM.com wins third straight regional Murrow

This is awesome! I mentioned earlier how it's the awards season for the broadcast industry. I've known about this for a couple days now, but now the media embargo's over so I can let the cat out of the bag - KUAM.com was selected as the top news web site by the Radio and Television News Directors Association for small markets in our region (Guam, Hawaii, Nevada & California).

A special congrats go out to our colleagues at KSEE 24 in Fresno, who dominated our region. Very nice work.

This is our third straight regional Edward R. Murrow Award at KUAM, and we're up for our second straight national award this fall. I'm also crossing my fingers for an Eppy.

Congrats to all this year's winners!

KUAM goes desktop

If you're wondering about my fascination with desktop RIAs over the last few weeks, there's a very good reason. We launched our KUAM Desktop initiative today, after having worked with our beta community over the last several weeks on a series of desktop tools and utils, with our new IE toolbar plugin being the first in the series.

This allows us to have yet another aspect of Constant Connectivity with our users, given the fact that the embedded newsticker pulls content from our news RSS feed, and has a search bar that lets users lookup stuff on our site.

I put it up about a half-hour ago and already it's been downloaded a bunch of times by Guam news junkies, so things are looking good!

Let's talk tech...live!

Make some time to check out KUAM's booth at the Home and Living Expo this weekend. We're hosting a very fun and interactive session this year - you and your friends/family can star in a commercial! I'm not presenting anything formally (I wish I was), but it's still a very good time.

I spent a lot of time talking to people about ASP.NET, RIAs, scalability, Ubuntu Linux, Ruby on Rails, RSS and other non-tech subjects like how the Yankees are going to do, the NCAA tournament, sweep arpeggios and other fun things.

I might even stop by the electric guitar exhibit and do my rendition of George Lynch's "Mr. Scary". It's less impressive than "Eruption" but still fun to watch and less predictable.

(If you're lucky, you might able be able to catch a sneak peek at some of the new products we're working on for KUAM.com.)

Hope to see you there!

Web servers supporting desktop traffic

Serving traffic on the World Wide Web used to be so easy. Long gone are the days when simple web servers process HTTP conversations, returning content requests with pages containing text, images, applets and dynamic script. Now with the Web being truly programmable, there's a lot more to think about in terms of total accessibility.

It's been a busy day at Camp Happy, but I've been taking a couple of moments in between breaking stories, thinking about architectures for desktop RIAs. Particularly, I'm thinking about scalability in the vein of how much additional traffic cross-platform desktop apps, desktop widgets and browser plugins impose on traditional web site infrastructure (a browser and server engaging in a stateless client-server transaction). They're essentially yet another venue to tap your site's resources, so now your server assumes the additional responsibility of pulling data for extra-browser devices and clients.

Ironically, emerging web technologies are pulling us further and further away from the Web as we've known it.

Unless the RIAs ship with embedded databases that in some way sync with their source (possible, but not likely) or have some snazzy means of making offline access feasible. Web services built on SOA are a good place to start - using SOAP or REST to architect and maintain servers just for devices and access points not intended for traditional web browsing.

Componentized, middle tier caching across disparate platforms and devices via properly written business objects, not just replication at the individual page level, is critical to sustaining performance and minimizing lag. Done properly, this ensures synchronization across platforms, not having modified data seen on a web page be different than that viewed seconds later on a mobile phone.

Constant consumer connectivity also worries me. Most people close their browsers when done with a web session. Even the truly hardcore exit out of the program every now and then when not actively surfing. But terminating an individual application is far more common than rebooting an entire machine. A user's desktop, being ever-resident, can mean non-stop polling for new data if a desktop RIA's running on top of it. This could result in an escalating amount of service requests or method invocations - a few users could easily tax your system without even trying, just by being connected to it.

From an app provider perspective, if you're building a desktop RIA really take the time to consider and properly use HTTP headers as a means of good data access practice, as is commonly done in well-designed RSS readers. Or, use a clever timeout setting like Digg's BigSpy, which halts incessant loading of information after a certain period of time or if the system detects dormancy. Such a pausing feature is also possible with AJAX.

Data access is changing very rapidly, and developing the APIs through which to get at information is only one part of the equation. You need to properly setup your backend to not only serve up your stuff quickly and in the right format(s), but also to facilitate a growing number of clients. And those programs living on the desktop will very soon be hitting your services with increasing - and possibly alarming - frequency.

Revenue strategy for web services

Adobe notes that it's developer revenue isn't really taking off, and interviews from Amazon's Jeff Bezos indicate that he's hopeful that someday, their web services platform will be a major driving force in the company's profit plan. This is something I've been struggling with, too - trying to find that secret sauce to monetizing APIs, RSS feeds, mashup models, and JavaScript imports.

At KUAM, opening up our news data more and more to programmers naturally means we'll need to support more bandwidth to facilitate the additional data transfer from remote clients accessing our stuff. This means more costs to our overhead.

Borrowing from the volume model made popular by Google for Google Maps, I've thought about using free license keys, allowing a certain number of API calls every day. Additional method invocations against the base service would either (a) not facilitate the service thereafter, or (b) apply an overage surcharge. I've even thought about developing tiered rate cards based on similar expected volume/overage levels for high-end consumers.

What revenue model are you using for your web services?

Mashup point/counterpoint

Read/Write Web perfectly and succinctly describes the argument over the legal concerns about web scraping:

Scraping technologies are actually fairly questionable. In a way, they can be perceived as stealing the information owned by a web site. The whole issue is complicated because it is unclear where copy/paste ends and scraping begins. It is okay for people to copy and save the information from web pages, but it might not be legal to have software do this automatically. But scraping of the page and then offering a service that leverages the information without crediting the original source, is unlikely to be legal.

Desktop RIAs & digital footptints

Since the big news of this afternoon seems to be the release of an Apollo-driven YourMinis desktop RIA, I did some snooping and wanted to see the footprint left by Apollo desktop apps. So I downloaded YourMini's 211K .AIR file, which being cross-platform, works on a Mac or Windows box. Contrast this against some of the early desktop news readers running WPF and the system demands (typically either WinXP with SP2, 500MB RAM recommended, the .NET Framework 3.0; or Vista).

Specifically, Forbes' impressive app requires an initial 1.4MB MSI download. I like both approaches, specifically Adobe's, being an easily distributable package, consistent with Flash. There's a slight wait, but nothing too unconscionable.

Tired of scraping data? Just ask!

A constant source of stress for modern-day web programmers is finding a good source of data (or two or three). Hackers constantly bemoan how their favorite sources for information don't have public APIs, web services, RSS feeds or other Web 2.0-style remote access. Thus, they're thus relegated to considering one the few options we have left: web scraping. This is can be tough (coding isn't simple), fickle (if the source changes its HTML, the app breaks), and arguably illegal (a form of unauthorized stealth). However, Alex Iskold points out a compelling argument against the theft concern.

With more and more local web programmers getting into mashups and remixing, KUAM.com has become a popular candidate as a data source, since we generate a lot of content frequently. But even with the various ways we offer developers to access our data, sometimes it's not enough. I totally understand. Some people have even e-mailed me asking if they can get a view of a database table, an XML file or an Atom feed of some aspect of our data. In some cases, I've accommodated them. (Hey, making this type of stuff available gives us one more thing to show of in our RSS gallery.)

In fact, a project I've started recently seeks to develop a web UI that serves as contact form and end-user license agreement, and upon submission dynamically builds RSS feeds based on a user's specifications and filtering options. So, you could easily request certain information, inherently comply with the legalese, and have a new source of data...instantly!

(Other more specific APIs, non-standard formats or complex data types to be serialized as XML are routed to site administrators who write the SQL or data shaping to spit the data out in the desired format with the intended structure, with proper frequency.)

So next time you get stuck looking for a good raw source of data, just ask if one can be set up for you. The worst you'll get back is 'no', and it's a safer and more reliable alternative to scraping.

Where's the Linux guy in the Apple spots?

Here's an interesting take on the question of how the Apple commercials might be if Linux was represented.

Want to work with me on cool web stuff?

In addition to actively looking for a full-time web UI designer, I also routinely shop around for developers and designers for seasonal projects we have. And it's about that time. Do the work from home, knock out a task, get paid, and get on with your life. If you're in Guam or Hawaii and want the chance to do some really cutting-edge, meaningful work that gets seen by of a ton of people and really expand your abilities, e-mail me at jason [at] kuam [dot] com and send me your resume and URLs to some of the work you've done.

If you can recite every single Java 2 method, property and event in reverse alphabetical order while whistling Dixie, that's impressive, but not the core skill. I'm more interested in attitude than API knowledge. I need people who are constantly creative and like solving interesting problems in innovative ways while under intense deadlines. This isn't an introductory gig, so you'll need to have a high level of technical ability and experience and be willing to bring your 'A' game to the table every day.

I'm also heading-up a group that's developing some really interesting web projects on the side...some really cool data remixing and social sharing concepts not limited to the Guam market. I'll need some help getting these off the ground, so e-mail me if you're interested in joining a really talented, diverse team.

Shying away from MSM

I came across a really engaging headline today while sifting through my aggregator, "Blogs Turn 10 - Who's the Father?", which instantly made me click on the link, but when seeing that the site pointed to CNet, my gut reaction was to close the window on principle. I'm sure the article's brilliant, well-written, properly edited and decently researched, but it just seems like there's a distinct disconnect between the quality of content found in blogs and mainstream media (MSM).

And since I'm in the news media as a professional journalist/developer, this is both contradictory and hypocritical. But that's kind of the harrowing point.

These days, I give a lot more credence to items written by non-professional writers from the blogosphere. The best pure writing I've seen over the past two years, without doubt, is from MSM authors, although bloggers more often than not make more of an impression - asking the right questions, issuing the appropriate challenges, making fair predictions, drawing accurate conclusions, and connecting resources where necessary. They just lack the grand scale circulation system indicative of newspapers, TV networks, publications and radio channels.

MSM sources also typically are slower to respond because of a need to cross-reference, fact-check, cross-promote a piece, in addition to running it through the editorial wash several times.

Take for example an article BusinessWeek did on Digg's Kevin Rose as the reluctant leader of the under-30 Web 2.0 movement. A masterful composition to be sure, but for guys like me in the know, incomplete. There were just perspectives not investigated, important history that was undocumented, achievements not chronicled, and associations that weren't made. And this was written, says the corresponding podcast, over four months. I could have gotten a lot more from Kevin's Wikipedia entry. But it is a major U.S. publication, so where it might be arguably lagging, it does give phenomenal exposure and circulation, as opposed to the relative obscurity of the blogosphere.

The scope in blogs is surely far narrower, but hits the mark more often.

(And in fairness, I did read the CNet piece after all, and it is very good, and bookmarkworthy. And despite my earlier criticism, the BusinessWeek pieces is one of my favorite articles on Digg. I guess we lash out against those things we adore the most. But these are still two of the exceptions of MSM.)

Your favorite blogger or your evening news anchor?

Steve Safran at Lost Remote has an intriguing post about a survey being undertaken by a researcher trying to prove the correlation of an audience's enjoyment of a media platform (blogging vs. TV news) with the strength of a direct relationship with them. Since I'm on both sides of the equation, I wonder how I'd fare.

Knowing my luck, I'd cancel myself out.

Progressive publishing at KUAM.com

Several of you have asked me for more insight into KUAM.com's web operations and analytics since I wrote a couple of recent items on the topic having to do with traffic, syndication, publishing volume and growth and viewership. An interesting thing to consider and something I discuss during tech talks is how our publishing has gotten greater and greater in volume over time.

The chart (full size image available here) plots the time its taken us to publish stories in blocks of 1,000 since I started in 2000 and we began doing news online. It shows how in Year 1 (when we ran FrontPage on a 14" monitor and a 33.6Kbps dial-up Internet connection), it took us about that long to run our first 1,000 stories online. Most recently, we set an internal record by pulling off 4-digit publishing in 69 days, and we're on pace this month to do that number in just under two months. Over the last year, we've averaged 88 days per each 1,000-article block.

There are several notable milestones within this timeline, such as when we migrated from a static system where we were saving physical files to disk to a dynamic, database-driven templated architecture based on ASP 3.0. We also implemented a custom content management system, built in-house, that publishes stories more rapidly, pulling them straight out of our Win32 newsroom backend. This lets us get stuff online fast, mirrored across web/SMS/WAP/RSS platforms, all in one operation, instead of the sequential authoring so common to blogs. (Before you ask, yes - we used this approach before and it drove me nuts to have to upload stories one at a time, with people reading them as you made them available. I got the idea from a BizTalk service I was using with MSNBC.com).

But of course, more than bragging about quantity, of chief concern to us is quality.

Web app scale and scalability

I'm borrowing from Om Malik's clever "Scale and Scalability" article and podcast (a must listen), which is turn borrows of course from Jane Austen. I've been consuming a lot of media lately on growing Web 2.0 sites, and handling the additional traffic concerns made possible by the programmable web. And I've been contrasting such growth headaches using the LAMP stack against more formal, closed frameworks.

I'll use Microsoft's .NET as an example and then discuss open source architectures.

Outside of best practice coding and performance tuning of the web applications themselves and aside from bandwidth considerations, most Microsoft apps can be co-hosted, with several sites per box. Despite the tidal wave of criticism against IIS, this is a credit to Microsoft's web server platform. During growth, the primary mentality of site managers overseeing ASP.NET sites with massive daily traffic is first to cleanly separate machines, with one box each functioning as web server(s) and database servers. Under larger loads, getting a dedicated box would be the typical next step. The next tier under heavy loads would be to build out the distributed processing, adding more servers (web farms) or more processors (web gardens). Features directly baked-in to the .NET Framework like garbage collection, managed code and ensure automated, if not better, memory management and object disposal.

The large concern for running such architectures is cost. Closed systems can be pretty expensive to run on your own, and private hosting services, while outstanding, largely aren't as cheap as their LAMP counterparts.

In contrast, since most Web 2.0 endeavors are born of open source, garage frameworks and have limited budgets, the need to organically grow a site's capacity to process requests and serve information can be daunting (outside of theory, I'm not a hands-on server guy). Excellent resources to consult on tools and techniques to utilize are the Danga/LiveJournal whitepaper on scaling web apps running LAMP, and the podcasts from Flickr's Cal Henderson and del.icio.us's Joshua Schachter from the 2006 Future of Web Apps conference. Topics discussed include things like using separate servers for HTML and multimedia, memcache, database indexing strategies and more.

Although I totally love Ruby on Rails, my one criticism of it is that we don't have enough projects akin to the size/scope of Amazon, eBay, del.icio.us or major-scale site running it yet. Lots of blogs, some really cool projects, but not much that gets Net Neutrality traffic yet. So in my mind, the jury's out on RoR.

But the one thing that all platforms have in common in terms of scalability management is the critical, basic need for proper planning, testing, performance monitoring, upgrade thresholds (at what baseline point does our traffic get such that we need to start buying more servers), intelligent use of caching, downtime notification for administrators (paging, e-mails, SMS), and clearly-defined escalation paths (who to contact when something goes awry).

Bottom line: don't skimp on scaling.

Softies on Rails take a look back

Jeff and Brian give a hilarious look at how ASP.NET has evolved, noting the inclusion of MVC architecture into the mix. It's funny how much I have in common with these guys. I totally need to make it out to their next training session.

Projects I'm thinking of doing

I'm mulling over several repetitive actions or web fallacies that might make nice side projects. Without actually looking around and seeing if any of these are already in existence, these would be fun to hack out. Among these:

• A web service that scrapes article/blog content and formats it for formal printing
• A Firefox add-on thesaurus
• A Guam mapping mashup of some sort
• A podcatcher for Windows smartphones
• A freeware RSS reader for Blackberries
  

All of these would be open source. Can you think of any more? I always enjoy working with other talented, mature programmers on such work, so get in touch with me offline and let's talk about it.

Report details MSM's community development

Right on the heels of the 2007 State of the Media Report, I'm now engrossed in the Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement report. True to form, it chronicles the efforts of mainstream media companies to build applications and embrace user-driven content. Nice work.

Download the 66-page PDF here.

Get up and running with Apollo

So you grabbed Apolllo. To help get you started, here are some good free videos on installing, configuring and running Apollo. Slick.

Adobe unveils public alpha of Apollo

Good news for RIA devs, both existing and potential. Adobe announced the release of the first public alpha for Apollo. Grab the runtime and SDK and start hacking!

I'm warming up to membership

I used to really be against the concept of forced membership for web sites, and fought hard for anonymous personalization. (It's good to see that people have developed workarounds.) The web's gotten so membership-centric these days that it seems you can't use any Web 2.0 applications without a login. It just irked me that services couldn't be used without belonging to a system. It was lethargy more than privacy or fear of commercialization of my info - as a user I didn't want to go through the extra step of registration, and as a developer didn't enjoy validating, (re)routing and conditionally displaying content based on inclusion.

I begrudgingly wrote systems like blogs and photo galleries that used membership where appropriate. But I've since gotten over my anti-membership days, mainly because out of ubiquity.

I you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I guess...

Usability decisions

I've been a voluntary Reese's Monkey in enough IT focus groups to learn a thing or two about human processes and usability. I've participated in several such endeavors for Microsoft, having gotten to use desktop sharing software that would eventually become Live Meeting, giving honest feedback on everything from the menu layout for Visual Studio, control nomenclature, and the syntax coloring scheme applied to T-SQL in Query Analyzer.

So I've grokked a few things about top-of-mind awareness and user psychographics. Today I ran a draft layout for a new project we're working on in-house, and observing the reactions to the layout of the controls and the logical flow of things. It's interesting feedback, and we always approach such design by considering the combined feedback of internal resources, our beta user community, and plain common sense.

Funny how simple stuff like this stalls the much more complex task programming a lot longer.

KUAM - "The Most", v.1.1

I previously mentioned our philosophy on managed growth with our online products, trying to create winning user experiences right out of the gate that get incrementally better. Just today I implemented an additional twist on a home-mashup-turned-feature "The Most", adding another tab to the UI that shows how many times people have e-mailed a KUAM News story, in addition to the top reads, search keywords and video clips.

Thanks to some very helpful feedback (thanks Jonah), we're already mapping out v.2.0.

Basketball jones

At long last, here's the Google Video presentation of the IIAAG boys basketball championship game I broadcast the other night. Journalistic objectivity aside, my alma mater won and the coach is a friend of mine, so I'm happy for the team and the school. Read my thoughts on the game.

Enjoy!

Can't get my LJ fix this month

There's only one publication I actually read anymore in its physical form - Linux Journal. So you can imagine my dismay that the local bookstore for whatever reason hasn't received/unpacked/put out their March mags. They're super behind.

Dang!

Old and curmudgeonly

Can someone explain to me why "Stephen King's It" was playing on the lineup during ABC Family last night? Even though I wound up watching without turning away, am I the only who finds this fundamentally flawed? What's next - Hellraiser on Nick Jr.?

Geez, am I already that old that things like this matter to me?

IIAAG 2007 boys basketball championship

I did color commentary during our live broadcast of the local high school boys championship basketball game last night, wherein the Sanchez Sharks met the defending champ FD Friars. It was a good game, with Sanchez holding on to beat FD by 7. I'm getting a lot of e-mail from people asking me when we'll stream the game...and that's coming.

I'm uploading the entire 90-minute show to our Google Video channel, but the 317MB file may take awhile to pass approval. By Monday, for sure, so keep checking back and I'll have something on KUAM.com when its ready!

* UPDATE: I just finished uploading and its pending Google approval, which normally doesn't take too long. Hang in there!

Alan Graham on designing for Web 2.0

Alan Graham continues his excellent series on Web 2.0 design strategies for ZDNet. I enjoyed and Dugg his article, but respectfully disagree with one of his conclusions. He noted in Part 1 that architects should avoid the Perpetual Beta:

I like solutions that know where they are going, and get there. Period. It was a clever little marketing ploy using the "beta" phrase once upon a time…now it is just annoying.

This was a major factor in Tim O'Reilly's seminal writing on the topic, which I took at the time, and continue to believe, is about the philosophy of continually improving your software by making rapid modifications and upgades - and being on the web, implementing them instantly in the background and not redeploying.

The open source dictum, "release early and release often" in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, "the perpetual beta," in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. It's no accident that services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, and the like may be expected to bear a "Beta"logo for years at a time.

Understood as being a principle of software design and QA, this is critical and can't be dismissed as being a bad thing. I don't believe the "beta" phase should refer to marketing efforts, promotional tactics, or versioning; it's about developing good products that continually get better. The legend of Flickr (re)deploying every 30 minutes is an example.

If hiding beneath the guise of perpetual beta work means making excuses for touting shoddy programs with buggy code that perform poorly, I'm with Alan.

Tour the Apple Store in Second Life

Having been to the 24-hour Apple Store in New York City, I can tell you that this Second Life video is dead-on accurate.

I just don't get Twitter

I might be the goofy minority, but I haven't jumped full force on the Twitter bandwagon like a virally growing segment of the online community. Half-blog/half-IM...all odd to me. Telling people where you are, what you're doing and who you're doing it with is like encouraging legalized stalking. I'm glad I'm not the only one.

Granted, there are some sound, useful applications for it, like for breaking news or big events.

Maybe it's because I'm largely sedentary. Maybe it's because I'm personally introverted and value my privacy. Maybe it's because I'm in the news media business in a small market I know pretty much everything that's going on most of the time anyway. Maybe because the group of people with whom I communicate most are already on a closed cellular network.

Maybe I should just try the damn thing already.

Comment spam envy

TechCrunch is getting hit by comment spam 15,000 times a day, reports Michael Arrington. Geez. Before I implemented a custom CAPTCHA on my blogging framework at its peak point I usually got slammed several hundred times daily, and once 2,000 times in 24 hours. That was an unwelcome surprise.

Popularity does have its downside, I guess...

News sites prefer syndication over customization

I've been doing something I don't normally do lately: reading slowly. I've been poring over the phenomenal State of the Media report, absorbing each line in great detail, letting every precept and conclusion soak in like fine prose. (Of course, being a good journalist I'm taking everything with a grain of salt, but it is fine work to be appreciated.)

It comes as no surprise in the healthy discussion on digital journalism that the determination that for news web sites, syndicated services are trumping user customization/personalization in terms of dominant distribution features:

Apparently, for now, the ability to have content sent to you, or to find what you want, is taking precedence over letting people make a page theirs.

This isn't shocking in the least. RSS/Atom, being text-based, is really easy, inexpensive , templated, low-maintenance, platform agnostic and low-tech, and can be up and running in a matter of minutes. And the number of outlets, third-party tools and service providers that provide managed platforms for syndicated content are growing each week. Plus, there are a growing number of companies doing work in the RSS analytics space, as well as those making some headway in the in-feed ad insertion market. So the technology can be picked up by anyone and implemented practically on any web server; or there are a plethora of places to get help.

Contrast this with page customization, which in the context of content-heavy news destinations is a fairly heavy undertaking, to say the least. This makes for a serious sofware development project, probably ripe with advanced JavaScript to enable a high-end presentation layer. Advanced web frameworks like ASP.NET 2.0 might have a portal API that can power offshoots of Start.com as a widgets container, or a custom drag-and-drop UI like The LA Times' personalized portal to enable personalized layouts or an array of default content displays, but that's some serious, costly coding and equally uncheap IDEs.

So while the personalized experience is a feature either not in wide use, or only at the moment a luxury of major market corporate entities, it is growing. But RSS is here, and is formidable.

Emceeing the Miss Guam Tourism Pageant...again!

I was fortunate enough to have been asked to emcee the 2007 Miss Guam Tourism Pageant. I emceed last year with Sonya Artero, and it was great fun. It's on April 28, so make it out to the UOG Field House and check it out!

You can watch our interview with '06 MGT Risha Aguon.

Moderation blues

I hate censorship. Were I old enough at the time, I would have testified at the PMRC hearings, right along Dee Snider, Frank Zappa and John Denver. (I was 11 in 1985.) My mood this morning is fittingly as blue as the Blogger theme I've applied for this site...which is sadly about the only measure of control I have left these days.

Since I started JasonSalas.com, I've waged an escalating battle with my blog's producers over the level of feedback allowed and how closely I can interact with those who read my stuff. Despite this being my personal space and not being affiliated with KUAM, invariably it gets linked back to my station and what I do for a living as an anchorman. And I don't mind producers going through comments in the interest of quality control, and, to no small degree, safety.

Feedback my producers have deemed questionable has gotten so that they've decided to turn off anonymous commenting and go back to moderating feedback again, rejecting questionable comments (this happened once last year and I fought to get it removed). Bottom line: they're at the point where they're deleting more comments than ones they're allowing to remain. I welcome feedback and appreciate criticism, but it's apparently a bit much for the people whose job it is to make this a safe and happy place to be.

This isn't the result of one particular post or a specific user...just the overall tone certain people use, the relevance (or lack thereof) to the subject matter of the posts, and people's seemingly unending curiosity about personal details and schedules...and utter rage when I don't divulge such.

I wish I could more directly control it, but it's for the best. I've argued long and hard to allow those comments that make it online just to get there in the first place, so believe me when I say I'm with you on this. Consider this blog quasi-read-only for now...and do continue to leave comments and I'll do my best to get them published. To the 99.997% of you that do behave, I apologize and do appreciate your patience.

A few people pissed in the corner of the deep end of the pool, and now everybody's got to get out. So if you know me, you know how to get a hold of me.

That's show biz, baby. :-)

Fixed searchbar for IE7

Internet Explorer 7 was having some behavioral issues (what a surprise) with the KUAM searchbar I implemented earlier this week. The parameters were being passed to the URL, so I wrote a different XML file than the one used by Firefox 2 to manage the bar in IE.

IE apparently expects the parameters right in the URL template, while Mozilla uses separate elements to contain the name/value pairs making up the query string.

Which is better? You be the judge. I'm just glad I got my new toy working.

How to Bluff Your Way in Web 2.0

Here's the talk that's got everyone talking. It's a great tongue-in-cheek stab, presented at this year's SXSW, at the (non)sense that's become of Web 2.0. Perfect timing, given that people are saying the bubble's now bursting.

(I was hoping for a podcast version of "Why XSLT is sexy" myself, but no luck yet.)

KUAM.com on Rails

...well, not really.

Guam's News Network will be using Rails, I got the green light this morning from our executive producer to start hacking on a blogging app highlighting the behind-the-scenes goings on at Camp Happy (think allDay). I'm stoked because it'll be the first web app we'll put out based on Rails that'll be customer-viewable. To date, we've cobbled together minor admin utilities, but nothing I can link to. We'll be putting it on a different domain, which means a new application space, meaning the freedom to deviate from Microsoft architectures.

It's not like JasBlog, which I built in ASP.NET 1.1, or the mini-app I did for our election season last year. (The URL mapping's hella easier in Rails, letting us lean towards RESTful functionality.) I'm not going to attempt to set any landspeed records, although I know guys that have whipped out entire robust blogging apps during a lunch break.

More to come!

Best commenting systems

One thing I've noticed has been the micro-innovation within the blog commenting space. Some developers are getting pretty clever with displaying the feedback their posts generate. This makes reading the comments almost as much fun as the main article itself.

The two best examples I've found are those on Softies on Rails, Digg, and the Django Book beta site. Many of them leverage script.aculo.us to do DHTML wipedown animations and such. Very impressive.

What cool, outside the box commenting systems have you noticed?

You don't need people to make your apps social

Being Dugg. The Slashdot Effect. Having your site Farked. All facets of the network effects that are indicative of, but not exclusive to, Web 2.0 applications. This is the sensible result of the impact community involvement directly has on new media services - allowing users (registered or otherwise) to access, remix, share or interpret your core data in new, innovative, interesting ways.

So while the "Social Web" continues to be all the rage and legions of new sites pop up daily and existing media companies creep towards adoption of emerging paradigms with tons of phenomenal features centered around viral user interactivity, I'm reminded of the fundamentals of network effects, and what makes such services work in the first place. So consider this a lesson in pragmatic technical marketing next time you start pondering how to evolve your online projects.

I realize that not everything's got to have a friends list, AJAX-laden commenting systems, support for one or more IM clients, or tagging to the nth degree. The real magic is in delivering a positive user experience so that growing numbers gravitate towards and frequently use your stuff, promoting it communally.

Recently I implemented a little feature on KUAM.com exhibiting the content of ours that people are consuming with the greatest frequency - "The Most". Similar lists have proven hugely successful across media platforms - from the old radio countdown shows, to Letterman's nightly Top 10 rundowns, to VH1's infinite collection of ordered views of modern day pop culture. So it became obvious to me that expressing such a popularity contest through hypermedia was an opportunity that needed to be exploited. Consequently, we've been able to build a winning social service...without people.

The Most has been received extremely well, has generated positive feedback and has boosted our web traffic, so in that regard it's an instant hit. As a result, our video downloads have tripled. People are re-reading articles and bookmarking items they've already gone over. Users are checking back to see if their search keywords generate more and different results than with previous queries. It's a network effect of a different variety - the "Wow...people are checking this out...it must be good!" upshot. There's no direct user interaction with our lists, but they're the exclusive result of people's browsing behavior.

In other words, we've capitalized on fostering a time-honored marketing device: good ol' fashioned community hype.

The point of this all is that sometimes the most effective solutions are the simplest. And on today's Web this so often gets lost. Developers insist on having bark overshadow bite. Granted, KUAM.com is a well-rooted, existing online property creating and distributing content in a proven industry (news) - not the latest player in the fickle Web 2.0 space. Admittedly, our solution by today's standards was arguably low-tech. With our little creation we haven't wowed anyone from O'Reilly, appeared on Digg's front page or secured a spot atop TechMeme (themselves canonical exhibitions of the power of Web 2.0 network effects), but it works for our users. It was easy to incorporate such a feature into the flow of our existing style of distributing news information without forcing our audiences to learn a radically new UI, or impeding our site's performance. We tapped existing data sources and reshaped the information so that it could be viewed in a new and different way.

Plus, this puts about 40 additional links on my homepage, which is better for SEO. And, more importantly, it gives individual stories one or two more precious hours of primetime exposure.

So give some thought to the effectiveness of your development next time you map out some cool hack. Don't get me wrong - I'm all about next-gen programming, but of greater concern to me is creating the best possible experience. If in certain situations this means scaling back from using high-end techniques and technologies, I've got no problem with that.