What Type Of Media Would Your Bring To A Desert Island?
Steve Yelvington writes at Poynter about a new Online Publishers Association study in which researchers asked, if you could choose only two media, what would they be? The Internet ranked first, television second. I think the Internet is an obvious first choice, since you can get the full text of books, television, radio stations, film and news all from the same connection. It's all media combined into a single delivery method. But if you've already got all that, why choose television second -- it's just another screen, and the content available on it gets worse every year, not better. Sadly books ranked on the low-ish side (18.5 percent) in the survey. My second media choice (and I actually wrestled with this a bit, not fro practical reasons, but as a matter of taste and love) would be books, preferably older ones with heavy bindings and yellowing, dusty smelling pages.

Sofia's First Solid Food

Sofia tried solid food -- oatmeal -- for the first time today. Though it seems in the picture to be making her sleepy, she in fact ate with some relish and a skill that belied her lack of experience. When she began pushing the cereal into her mouth with her fingers Kristen commented that Sofia took after mama, while I immediately saw myself in her.

The End Is Near...
The Dark Tower, which is the seventh and last book in Stephen King's Dark Tower series, was recently released. I found out when Audible.com sent me an e-mail saying the book was available on MP3 (read by George Guidall, who also read on the previous two DT books, and whose work I like quite bit). I immediately used my second monthly audio credit to snatch it up and put all other listening on hold to plow through this while running and commuting. The series that began in 1982 (when I was 12 years old) with The Gunslinger is finally finishing, and if the first chapter, which I listened to this morning as I pounded out my regular three mile run, is any indication, it will have been worth the decades-long wait. I'm excited to find out how King wraps up this massive mythopoeic story; and especially how he handles the plunge into self-referential metafiction that revealed itself in the past couple of books. I'm confindent he'll pull it off. A few years back I wrote this in a review of one of the earlier DT books: "[Stephen King] writes the way M. Night Shyamalan directs, laying a fantasy plot over an armature of archetypal conflicts and iconic characters. That, I think, is why I can still read these books after twenty some-odd years, the guts of them speak to the guts of us, the parts that don't change much, the integral parts." I still think that sums it up pretty well.

Children Of The Corn ... Maze

David loved our trip last Sunday to the Beech Hill Farm corn maze, which was in the shape of New Hampshire and reputedly featured paths laid out to mirror the state's highway system. He ran up and down the rows, tripped and fell down a good deal and got up laughing, and delighted in finding the informative signs hidden throughout the maze. We went up after Alyssa and Sandip left. They'd come to visit before our move to Vermont and took us out to lunch, where I decadently ordered two martinis and a bacon cheeseburger. It was great way to decompress after what seems like a very long stretch of work, house hunting, house selling, and the rest.

There are, by the way, a good number of new pictures in the "Fall 2004" gallery.

Now That's A Move
When I was 18 I sold my car for the price of a one-way plane ticket, gave away all the stuff in my little apartment and went to the islands with $250 in my pocket, a backpack, a guitar and a typewriter. Sometimes when I tell that story (and I tell it a lot less the older I get ... a lot of the glamor has gone out of it for me) people wonder at how scary or exciting such a move must have been. That's nothing, I think, compared to being in your thirties with a family and changing jobs from one state to the next. Even with Kristen and I tackling this move as a team, the coordination of this exodus is massive. And the amount of obligation you carry with you at this age makes the little free fall I went through as a teenager seem like a stroll to the corner store. Of course, those obligations that make the whole thing especially stressful are also what make it very good. Wonderful. Defining. Actualizing. It is easy to look at David capering around the room in his striped pajamas or Sofia and Kristen dozing together on the couch just before bed and know exactly what it's all for.

An aside: House hunting and selling are not tasks that involve constant labor. Which is in fact the worst part: so many pieces of these big, important jobs seem often beyond your control. It's a lot of waiting for the phone to ring, for an e-mail to come through, for someone else to make up his mind. It is a good exercise, I suppose, for people who need practice abandoning themselves to divine providence.

You Are Now Approved!
Being in the midst of a big transition – new job in a new state – certain types of spam have taken on a new sort of insidiousness. The “Multiple ways to get home loans” and “You are now Approved” subject lines force themselves into my sphere attention of attention in a new way … since I’m actually in the middle of dealing with mortgage brokers who really are doing things like sending competing offers and verified pre-approvals. I know that most of these are the same old spam, but I am stuck looking at most of them anyway, because a few are legitimate responses to my own anxious queries. Upon opening them I immediately know the difference and send them grimly on to the trash folder, but I now have some sympathy for the one person in ten million who is so desperate as to follow these unwanted solicitations back to their source. House hunting also ads new resonance to spam with subject lines like “Vãlium Here.”

Landon Lecture by Arthur Sulzberger
New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger delivered the Landon Lecture at Kansas State University Monday. It's good reading. He makes some interesting observations about the state of the news media and political discourse. A few of his points about online news got me thinking, though. He says of bloggers that "the vast majority of them are just folks with something on their minds" [...] and that "too many simply contribute to the sense that we're in the midst of an opinion-ridden free-for-all." Later he goes on to cite "Bowling Alone" and lament the loss of community participation. It seems like there's a connection there; one thing newspapers need to do in the next few years is recognize the potent phenomena of participatory journalism and community building that Web tools like blogging make possible and figure out how to tap into that. That shouldn't mean relaxing journalistic standards, but it would mean opening the channels -- in some cases -- in both directions. And perhaps seeing beyond the opinion-ridden free-for-all"
to some deeper meaning in the vast sea of personal thought now making it into the community consciousness. Besides that, it may be that the community consciousness may be helpful to journalism ... blog pundit Andrew Sullivan wrote recently: "The blogosphere is a media improvement because the sheer number of blogs, and the speed of response, make errors hard to sustain for very long. The collective mind is also a corrective mind. Transparency is all."

CyberJournalist.net: Spokesman-Review.com Harnesses Readers For Election Blog Project
Great idea ... according to Jonathan Dube, "Perhaps what's most innovative about the Spokesman-Review's project (Searching For Democracy) is how it found the guest bloggers -- by tapping into all those readers who are always e-mailing complaints and suggestions to the paper."

New Pics Added To Family Album

Some new shots of David, Sofia and Kristen to added finish out the Summer 2004 section, including the one above, taken Sept. 6 on David's second birthday. That he's a guitar prodigy is beyond question! (Now if we could just get him to stop trying to play it with his toes as well as his fingers... but then again, if people make a big thing about Hendrix playing with his lips...)

DenverPost.com Allows You To Run Presidential Campaign
Interactive game allows player to run ad spending and presidential appearances from either 14 days or 60 days before the election, trying to win states. (Plays a little like Risk.) Good example of a newspaper site using multimedia well...

David Cumple 500 Años
¡No, no mi hijito querido (el acaba de cumplir dos años las seis de este mes), pero la famosa escultura de Miguel Angel! As usual, El Mundo has an amazing package of graficos interactivos for this event.

The main site documenting the Eyetrack III study

Poynter Online - Eyetrack III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes
This summarizes the results of the Eyetrack III study, which looked at how people look at news Web sites. I got a preview of these findings down at New Media World in Hershey this spring, and was impressed by how non-intuitive, and yet how, on consideration, sensible some of them were. For example, small type encourages more focused reading, large type encourages scanning, visual breaks like lines or rules discourage people from reading beyond those breaks, and navigation across the top of the home page performs best, right column navigation worked better than left. There was also information gathered on ads, images, reader recall of story facts depending on whether those facts were presented as text or info graphics and more.

In all, the study provides stimulating food for thought, though its limited scope and preliminary nature mean there are still many questions to answer about how people use newspaper Web sites and why. I can't help but wonder if most subjects react to the test sites in specific ways because they've been commonly habituated to the fairly homogenous design of newspaper Web sites... what would the study have shown if there were radical differences in the designs of the news sites they were already familiar with?

Gal Beckerman at the Columbia Journalism Review writes about journalism meeting religious faith in a special school where young evangelicals train to enter the mainstream media.

The Holistic Approach to Search Engine Marketing
Scott Buresh of Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing writes about what he sees as the three elements of search engine marketing: pay-per-click ads, natural optimization and Web site conversion.

The Telegraph Online Launches New Online Voter Guide
The paper ran a front page story today on our new online voter guide. Dave Brooks wrote: "The immovable logistics of the largest state Legislature in the country are about to face the irresistible force of the Internet, and The Telegraph hopes the winner from the resulting collision will be overwhelmed voters."

This has been a great project to put together, and though I'd passed on eThePeople's pitch in past years, their tools for creating an interactive candidate and race database that allows users to create and print their own sample ballots based on their address seemed very worthwhile this time around.

I'm quoted saying: "We're at a point now where readers are coming to not only be interested in these kind of tools, but to really expect these kind of tools."

Good for democracy, too.

A Wild Couple Of Weeks
We celebrated Kristen's birthday yesterday (David's is tomorrow!) and jokingly I wrote on her card, "P.S.: Who else do you know has gotten a house for her birthday?" To keep backtracking: Friday we were house hunting in Barre, Vermont and made an offer on a place. Tuesday I was offered the job of New Media Director with the Times Argus and Rutland Herald newspapers. I happily accepted. It's an amazing time to be in newspaper New Media. It won't be without sadness that I leave my coworkers, my great bosses at The Telegraph and McLean Communications, our friends in Nashua and Concord and, of course, the great state of New Hampshire. Barre is beautiful, though, and the team at the Times Argus/Rutland Herald is amazing.

A travel note on Barre:

After house hunting Friday we had about two hours to get some food and relax before we were to meet back up with the Realtor. We got some sandwiches and ate lunch in the little gazebo on the town green and then drove up to Hope Cemetery. Barre is known for its granite quarries, and these quarries attracted an influx of Italian stone carvers, who expressed their creativity in the design and sculpture of their own tombstones. The stones are beautiful and it is curious to see so many Italian (and Spanish, I think...) names on these stones nestled among the green hills of Vermont. The carvings are ornate, elaborate and beautiful and the whole place has a serene beauty that made us wish we had more than forty five minutes to walk around. David loved it. Sofia slept the whole while.