hard deadlines

Visit the soon-to-be-launched PortsmouthPatch

Patch.com, a growing network of hyperlocal news sites, will be launching their PortsmouthPatch on Thursday, July 29, according to an e-mail from the editor, Sandy McGee. Patch, a subsidiary of AOL, operates community news sites in over 40 localities, drawing on local editors and writers and contributions from people in the town (that's YOU!)

McGee, the PortsmouthPatch editor, comes from a newspaper background, with 8 years of experience in northern RI. "As the local editor," McGee said in an e-mail interview, "I will manage the Web site and cover news in town. I'll also employ a team of 3-4 freelance reporters and photographers to cover news and events."

Asked about the vision for the site, McGee said, "I plan to build a comprehensive local news site, covering everything from government and schools, to sports, religion, and things to do."

McGee also asked the community to get involved. "I'll try to go wherever, whenever to cover the issues that are important to Portsmouth residents. Along those lines, I need help. I would love for people to take an active role in the Web site's development by posting comments, photos, e-mailing story suggestions, etc."

Asked about local advertising, McGee referred me to corporate headquarters, and a e-mail seeking information about rates was not returned by press time.

Based on the other sites Patch runs, the emphasis seems to be on local coverage by folks from the area, and McGee aims to continue that tradition, saying, "I will be moving to Portsmouth very soon."

Editorial note: I strongly believe in participatory citizen journalism and I welcome Patch to Portsmouth. I suggest everyone bookmark the site, and take advantage of all the opportunities for contributing that a community news platform makes possible.

State of the Archive panel at ELO/AI

Scores of practitioners and theorists of electronic text assembled at Brown University this weekend for the fourth annual conference of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). The conference, whose theme was "Archive and Innovate" was a four-day round of papers, installations, readings, and a Saturday night banquet celebrating the contributions of Rhode Island's own star of American letters, Robert Coover.

During the conference, ELO announced the release of their new electronic literature directory, in keeping with one of the main themes, the problem of archiving electronic texts.

One highlight was a panel on archiving featuring Deena Larsen, Stephanie Strickland, Will Hansen, and Marjorie Luesebrink, talking about the challenges of determining just what constitutes an archive for a digital fiction, and the very real issues with operating systems and software changing out from under efforts at preservation. Respondant Elli Mylonas of Brown showed a very promising start, the Brown Digital Repository, and Hansen talked about efforts underway at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

I missed the panel by Jessica Pressman, Mark Marino, and Jeremy Douglass which comprised three approaches to reading a digital text, but had a chance to talk with them later. Jeremy's use of ImageJ, a tool for manipulating 3D medical images like CAT scans and MRIs, as a way of slicing a time-based image stream was just mind-bendingly innovative. Imagine taking a feature film and treating the entire two hours of frames as a three-d object, then taking slices through it. Amazing.

Okay, to be truthful, the real highlight for me was the "unconference" area that Denna Larsen had set up outside the main presentation room. People could just hang out there and talk in between — and, okay, sometimes during — the official panels, and it was an amazing primordial soup of people just dropping in: gearheads, poets, filmmakers, and literary theorists, all in the mix. Got a chance to see folks that I haven't since the digital lit conference I went to, which we all realized was about ten years ago.

There are a bunch of pix up on a Flickr group, and you can get a surprisingly good sense of the flow of the conference from the Twitter stream.

Visit the ELO/AI conference

This weekend, digital artists and theorists will descend on Brown University for the 4th international conference of the Electronic Literature Organization. With nearly 100 program participants, this will be an opportunity to see and hear some of the amazing work that's pushing the boundaries of electronic text, and some of the readings, workshops, and performances will be open to the public. Check out the schedule online.

The weekend will also feature a celebration of the work of Rhode Island's own hypertext pioneer and living treasure of American fiction, Robert Coover.

It's an amazing program, and I'm looking forward to seeing what these wizards are up to. (And just hanging out with all the e-lit folks — we had a great day yesterday showing Deena Larsen and her partner around Aquidneck Island. Woot!)

Ubuntu on the HP-210 netbook

For the past week, I've been writing and updating this site with completely open-source software on a $300 netbook, and I couldn't be happier. For a drooling Apple fanboy like me, call this a grudging epiphany.

My three-year-old MacBookPro was beginning to lose battery life, and wasn't making it through (admittedly Tailgunner-length) Town Council meetings. Like everyone else, I'd heard about the iPad, and wondered if the Apple tablet would meet my reporting needs. Now don't get me wrong, the iPad is one sweet device, but when I stood in the Providence Place Apple Store for half-an-hour entering the opening pages of Gravity's Rainbow (my from-memory touch-typing test) the totally virtual flat-glass keyboard cut my speed in half, and my accuracy by at least 20%. I went back again, a few days later, and tried again. No joy. Touch typing on glass is like putting Wittgenstein on film, as Wendy Wasserstein might have it. In the abstract, a fascinating thing. And someday, we may be surprised to find it works (after all, one of my sf stories features a virtual keyboard overlaid on a digital piano). But today? Not practical.

And the other factor was the increasing maturity and sophistication of the open source operating system Ubuntu flavor of linux. I'd been running dual-boot on my MacBook for a couple of years, and finding fewer and fewer sticking points. The most recent release — version 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" came out last month, and for me, closed the gap completely. Ubuntu is now a totally mature, rock-solid, consumer-ready OS. The free Open Office suite is file-compatible with MS Office, simple everyday applications have been added (F-Spot photo manager, Rhythmbox music player), a new cloud-syching option perfected (UbuntuOne), and with the enormous linux community, there are tools available for any advanced task you might need (image editing, web development, programming) which can now be downloaded with a click from a software center app. Especially important for folks like me who live in social media, chat and broadcast (Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr) are built right into the operating system, with a slick new small-footprint client, Gwibber, that lets you track and post everywhere from a unified interface.

So last weekend, we headed over to Staples and picked up an HP-Mini 210; after trying a bunch of netbooks, I really liked the feel of the HP's lightly rubberized island-style keys. Installing Lucid Lynx from a USB stick was straightforward: It took a little google-fu to figure out how to set up dual boot with the existing install of Windows 7, and one command-line tweak to get the buttons on the touchpad working right, but that was it. Everything else I threw at it Just Worked, including connecting my iPhone to get photos, hooking up an external monitor and keyboard, plugging in SD cards, even sticking in a USB Bluetooth dongle. I can run my MacBook in a Remote Desktop Window, mount my two terabytes of hard disks, and open and save to my web server right from the text editor. The HP's 6-cell battery is giving me about 8 hours of runtime with browsing, tweeting, and text and photo editing.

Now my MacBook isn't going anywhere — it's still a clear winner for video (getting h.264 to work on Ubuntu is still proving tricky) and the recent release of Steam for OSX means I can play Portal (and Windows games to come!) in my copious free time. It's got the HDMI port that lets me hook it up to the big TV, and it's got hella compute power for compressing and burning DVDs and such.

And I may still buy an iPad, eventually, because it is so beautifully crafted for its sweet spot of digital media consumption. But for all the daily stuff, for creating content, I'm now pure open source, and not looking back.

Tips o' the hat: Doing all my writing and coding in Gedit, with awesome tweaks from Micah Carrick, TuxRadar, and Eckhard M. Jäger. Thanks!

Full disclosure: Our family owns Apple stock. And, no, we won't be selling it any time soon.

Citing problems with a "handful" of anonymous commenters, the East Bay Newspapers made the decision to suspend anonymous comments on their web sites, according to a story posted this morning on EastBayRI.com.

Click to visit.

It's always a good thing when a new media option broadens our choices for information, and as a fan of hyperlocal news on the web, I have to welcome the new GoLocalProv to the Rhode Island media ecosystem. For a just-launched site, they have a great roster of reporters and columnists, and the stories I've read in the past couple of days have been uniformly well done, with strong images and multimedia elements. The site also works pretty well on an iPhone

But that's where the kudos end. Because this site is a user interface (UI) disaster. The endlessly scrolling text and hyperactive display ads take up enormous screen real estate and give the site the feel of a 2005 MySpace page. Trust me: not a compliment.

And the information architecture (IA) is more than a match for the design. While there are reasonable top-navigation choices (News, Sports, Politics), once you drop into one of these buckets, you are in a linear scrollable list of stories, with no section navigation. Only once you visit a story do you get tag (or keyword) links, and no matter which one I clicked on, it always takes you to an empty page that says "Tags: Tag." For a site with this much display advertising — seven ad blocks on on every page — you would think they might have ironed these things out before launch.

And one final bone to pick: No RSS. Hey, guys, this is 2010. I do not come to your web site to consume content. Your content had bloody well better come to me. I strongly suspect, based on the way the code is written, that they expect a lot of users to repost through Facebook, and that's a fine strategy, but there's just no rational reason for a contemporary site not to have an RSS feed.

And these are not just idle gearhead criticisms: the medium is the message. What you are telling visitors is that your site is dominated by the corporate sponsors so prominently displayed, and that you don't care about how readers want to get their news. That's not a winning strategy in today's digital space.

Update: See the comment thread below. The staff at GoLocal Prov took the time to respond to this review, and fixed a bunch of stuff overnight. That kind of responsiveness makes me a little ashamed of how harsh the review was. You should go check 'em out — we need more pure-play Web news, and the content here is top notch. (And, now that they have an RSS feed, I can track them in Google Reader and don't even see the display ads. Thank you, thank you, thank you.)

If you read one piece of content in its entirety on the web today, make it Clay Shirky's recent post called The Collapse of Complex Business Models, a brilliant meditation on how systems can hoick themselves into states so complex they cannot respond gracefully to changing conditions.

h/t to BoingBoing where Cory Doctorow uses the piece as a lens into the web/entertainment industry (where its lessons are already painfully obvious.)

But I think those interested in politics and rebooting education will also find much here to consider.