Working the T Shirt Table at WordCamp SF 2009

I think it is certainly appropriate that I write a blog post documenting my time working the t-shirt table at WordCamp SF 2009, considering that my blog is on WordPress, so is The General History Project and The Bead Store SF.  Yes I’m a big fan!  And, I don’t think I need to extol all the great features, you can find that by doing some easy searching.

I’m meeting a lot of cool people – bloggers, theme designers, and the rest.  The Mission Bay Conference Center also has a gym, so I have a lot of people stopping by to ask me what WordCamp is about.  It seems a lot of people know about WordPress!  And others want to know about me and what I can do to help them with their website, which is also very cool.

Some of the highlights of my morning include:

• Meeting the LaidOffCamp guy, Chris Hutchins. He let me talk my headoff about Turkey and traveling through the Middle East. I told him about Matador Travel, which is an awesome online travel community.  The people there helped me plan my trips to Costa Rica, Greece, Turkey and Israel.  I’m hoping he’ll contact me so I can put him in touch with Laura Lee; she’s a great resource for traveling in Africa.
• Hearing one woman say, as I gave her the American Apparel shirt – “It’s probably some cheap shirt made in China”.  It’s nice to see that some people don’t pay attention to what seems obviously a pop-culture-brand success.  American Apparel’s whole pitch is that they’re the largest clothing manufacturer in the USA.
• Meeting Om Malik and asking him if he ever filled that position posted on 37signals.  Sounds like he did! Congrats!
• Having a run in with the guys from MediaTemple.  They’re a sponsor for WordCamp, and came to the table with a little sway and swagger.  I asked them if they were competitors for GoDaddy, and then if they could help me secure a domain name in less than 5 minutes by phone the way I did for tacocrawl.com last Saturday night.  Their response? “What kind of phone do you use?  Blackberry? It looks a whole lot cooler on the iPhone!”  Me? “Looks like those bloody mary’s this morning were a good idea”.  Bad idea for two reasons.  First, I’m the type of GoDaddy customer they want to acquire.  I buy domain names like other girls go clothes shopping online.  Second, it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone, these guys and my friends that were with me last week, that securing a domain name by phone is a good feature.
• Seeing how truly humble Scott Beale is from Laughing Squid.  I follow him on twitter, and have been reading his blog since I moved out here in fall 2005.  When he came to the tshirt table, and I saw his name tag, I said something to the likes of “hey you’re that guy”.  He seemed surprised that I would recognize him, which really impressed me since he has 40K followers on twitter and a significant fan base.

If any of you are reading this, come say hi!

The Economist Wrote Back

I wrote a previous post on an article the Economist wrote about the decline of the newspaper.  I used the post to consolidate my thoughts concerning the article so that I could write a “Dear Sir” to the editor.  Here’s the letter I ended up writing:

SIR – In your article “Tossed By a Gale” (May 16th), I believe that by using the traditional definition of “editor” as having to be a person, you misstated the way in which Google News actually operates.  Google News certainly employs, rather puts to service, an editor through “layered editoring”.  The design of Google News and its functionality certainly act as an editor, particularly since the search results are, by default, sorted by “relevance”. The news aggregate determines “relevance” by identifying particular news sources as more trusted or reliable than others. After Google decides which sources are more relevant, the availability of particular news items on the relevant sites rests in the hands of actual journalists and editors.  This means that Google News relies on editors employed at other institutions to decide which news is important for the user to know.

If I have proved to you that Google News search by “relevance” acts as an editor, and the entire service rests on what we call layered editoring, then we can say with confidence that the following two are true:  If all the editors in the world disappeared, then Google News could not work.  And, if there are fewer newspapers in 10 years, Google News is going to be far worse, not any better.  The service is not a competitor that can replace newspapers because it can not exist without them. With the evolution of life on the internet, there must exist a business model to support traditional editors and journalists outside of subscriptions and advertising.  Unfortunately, we have yet to find that model, nor a trully sufficient replacement for the newspaper.

And a Mr. Joel Budd, Media Editor, replied:

Dear Lindsay Tabas,

Many thanks for your email letter (below). I do think that the word “employs” connotes a paid position. I certainly think of myself as being employed, rather than put to service, by The Economist. You make a very good point that Google News depends on editorial decisions being made by others. If newspapers continue to weaken the website will in turn decline-although, as I argue in the piece, it will also become more important. This is the paradox of aggregation.

Notice that I do not side with those who claim that Google News is actually damaging newspapers. If anything, it and the other aggregators are exposing the fundamental economic flaws in the news business. Google News allows the print news industry to harm itself.

Again, many thanks for a shrewd letter.

He called my letter shrewd, I’ll take that over nothing!  We’ll see if I get published in the Economist, I think that might be an unfulfilled dream.  New Years Resolution for next year?  Or goal for this year?

Are the water, weather, food and lifestyle worth it?

Last week’s Economist spoke to the recent election held in California, describing the impact of the various propositions and how they would impact the state.  Of the propositions, only one passed, the one in which state legislators salaries freeze when there’s a deficit.  The article plainly said that if the other propositions didn’t pass, the deficit would balloon to $21 .3 billion over something like $15 billion if they did.

The state is now compromised (if it already wasn’t), and I didn’t vote.  A lot of people didn’t vote.  Most of my friends didn’t vote.  And now I’m reading the post-election Economist article, which points out:

• California will cut funding to Medi-Cal and change eligibility rules which will leave about 225K children uncovered.
• Programs dealing with birth-control, HIV prevention, counseling against drug abuse and domestic violence will be reduced or chucked.
• Child-welfare programs will be cut by 10%, so that less accounts of child abuse will be investigated and there will be less supervision of foster care.
• Education will be cut so that school will be shortened by one week.
• The UC system will probably layoff almost 5K people, and could take in almost 50K less students.
• The state will have to sell a lot of its assets, even the San Quentin prison.
• We might have to review projects for off shore drilling.

My question then is:  Is the daily landscapes of water and hills, generally beautiful weather, delicious food and produce, and relaxed lifestyle worth all of this heartache?

Most of my friends here in the Bay Area are not originally from this city, nor from this state.  We’re often faced with  questions surrounding why we live so far from home, and why we love San Francisco so much.  We hear the argument that the city is so expensive, and we justify that its worth the price to be seconds away from the mountains and the clubs at the same time.  But, in reality, reading an article like this one only makes it harder to justify to friends and family our insistence to remain.

But as I think of all the problems this state will face, and ask myself if its worth it I realize one thing is true: For the most part, none of these cuts in programs and healthcare will directly impact my life, save a few less frequent bus routes I use to traverse the city.  I don’t use social programs, I’m no longer in college, I’m not employed by the government (my roommate is), I don’t have children, and I don’t have any domestic violence, HIV or unwanted pregnancy issues.  I fall in this comfortable bracket defined by the unfortunately abhorrent term “yuppie” – Young, Urban, Professional.

This is all very selfish of course, and hopefully I earn some credit for at least acknowledging this realization as such, but I cannot be blamed for the years upon years of bad decisions the state and its people made before I even arrived.  And, as a friend (who only partially grew up here) said, by voting no on all the propositions, we’ll force the state to hit rock bottom.  And once you hit rock bottom, there’s only one way to go, and that’s up.

The News Business – The Opinion’s of John Markoff and the Economist

In the past week, I’ve been tuned in and turned on to the debate surrounding the death of the newspaper, and possibly to the editors, journalists and other parts of the formal structure that delivers us, citizens, the news.  I will admit, that I am a stereotypical 25 year old.  I don’t watch the local news, I barely watch any network news channels, and I do not have a newspaper subscription.  I abhor the San Francisco Chronicle, and the majority of my newspaper news comes from the New York Times daily news digest.  My primary sources of news include the 15-20 minutes of NPR I listen to on my way to and from the gym each morning, and the weekly Economist.  All this said, I do have a particular affinity for the newspaper.  After all, my favorite activity has always been to read the New York Times Sunday newspaper, spread out across the table, and breakfast sitting nearby. If, it’s possible, my grandparents are sitting at the table with me because they provide excellent commentary.

Last Saturday I attended UC Berkeley’s School of Information (my alma mater), primarily because I wanted to hear John Markoff, of the New York Times, speak.  I read Markoff’s book “What the Dormouse Said:  How Sixties Counter Culture Shaped the Personal Computing Industry” in the Summer of 2006, and have been a fan of his ever since.  Markoff’s speech was uncharacteristic of other commencement speakers because rather than offer life lessons to the new graduates, he took the opportunity to propose the “death of the newspaper” problem for the graduates to solve.

The few remarks that I have still been pondering include the following:

• Markoff stated that the average New York Times newspaper subscriber spends 30 minutes per day reading the news, where  the average New York Times online subscriber spends 30 minutes per month reading the news.
• He fully believes that there must be another way of supporting the business of news, editors and journalism besides advertising and subscriptions; it is now our job to figure out that other “way”, i.e. business model.
• He likens the way in which we are consuming news online – via blogs, rss feeds, twitter, short headlines – now to the crank of the Model T; very exciting at the time, but outmoded, in retrospect.   Essentially, sometime in the future we will look back at the present and be glad that we’re no longer consuming little packets of information at rapid fire.

Markoff alluded to a large point I learned in my Quality of Information class at the I-School.  The technorati, and now the twitterati, have stripped away the formal institutions of editorialship.  We’ve decided that we don’t need a news channel, newspaper or government telling us what is important information for us to know.  We can decide for ourselves what information is important to us, and which opinions we want to hear.  If the other old adage of the internet -  a wide open place where people can explore new ideas that challenge their existing beliefs – was true, we would be better off in this situation.  Unfortunately, homophily (“birds of a feather flock together”) is ever present in studies of human behavior online.  This means that different opinions are less likely to circulate outside of those people that already hold those opinions.  In theory, with journalists and a really balanced editor, news consumers should be presented with both sides of every story.  Without these people, this most likely is not the case; people just don’t look for opinions different from their own.

The writers of the Economist’s “Tossed by a gale” took a very traditional look at the downfall of the industry and the takeover of the “citizen journalists” of the internet.  While Markoff spoke to the human experience of consuming news, the Economist offered a more analytical view of the problem, using statistics and commentary from editors and politicians.  One paragraph struck a deep chord with me:

The Wal-Marts of the news world are online portals like Yahoo! and Google News, which collect tens of thousands of stories.  Some are licensed from wire services like Reuters and the Associated Press.  But most consist simply of a headline, a sentence and link to the newspaper or television website where the full story can be read. The aggregators make money by funneling readers past advertisements, which may be tailored to their presumed interests.  They are cheap to run:  Google News does not even employ an editor.

It was primarily this last sentence that sparked off my internal debate this week, which I externalized to a few friends via personal conversations.  My original thought was that the Economist’s definition of an editor led them to misinterpret how Google News actually works.  Most dictionaries say that an editor has to be a person, but I argue that it does not.  As a user interface designer and engineer, I can say that applications are structured in a way to guide the user down a particular path of actions and assumptions.  The design of Google News and its functionality certainly act as an editor, particularly the default “sort by relevance”.  This functionality is not a person, as the definition of “editor” states, but performs the duties of an editor.

Google News determines “relevance” by identifying particular news sources as more trusted or reliable than others. This simple act is editing.  When a user searches on a topic, the service will offer an article written by CNN over John Doe’s blog, which might be reposting the same content that is on CNN or reporting their take on the topic.  A search by date may show both sites with the same article.  After Google decides which sources are more “relevant”, its news items on the “relevant” sites rests in the hands of actual journalists and editors.  This means that Google News relies on editors employed at other institutions to decide which news is important for the user to know.  A friend of mine called this layered editoring, as the preference of different sites over others is based on the reputation of the editors from those sites.

If I have proved to you that Google News search by “relevance” acts as an editor, and the entire service rests on what we call layered editoring, then we can say with confidence that the following two are true:  If all the editors in the world disappeared, then Google News could not work.  And, if there are fewer newspapers in 10 years, Google News is going to be far worse, not any better.  Then we better believe that Markoff’s hope for another business model to support the news industry is out there and ready to be implemented if we are going to have a way to filter through to well-written articles by real journalists.