In case you missed ’em, this week on the TOC blog I wrote about:
* Why Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles needs work. Rolling Stone thought I had a point.
* Last weekend’s Sons and Daughters show at Double Door. I forgot to bring a notebook. I think you can tell.
* “The Gold Violin” episode of Mad Men. Look for more recaps of Mad Men from me on the TOC blog each Monday.
I got tired of looking at my lady’s copies of Us Weekly in the bathroom (you don’t really read Us Weekly so much as gape at it) so I put Reading the OED by Ammon Shea in there. It’s simultaneously enjoyable and infuriating. Enjoyable because I enjoy the minutiae of vocabulary and infuriating because I didn’t think of writing it first.
Each chapter is a letter in the alphabet, with 4-5 pages of reflections on the experience of reading such a massive work, and then a list of words found in the OED, accompanied by clever asides from Shea. It’s very similar to The Know-It-All, which I enjoyed for the same reasons. I need to find a similar reference book or books to dissect in such a manner and then watch the bucks roll in.
Anyway, I’m only on chapter one…er, “A” but it’s already enhanced my life with this word:
airling (n.) a person who is both young and thoughtless
I’ve been thinking that the ubiquity of “douchebag,” and all its variants, has reduced its effectiveness. So from now on, I’m going to use airling where I might otherwise use douche or douchebag, and airlingery where douchebaggery or douchery would have previously sufficed.
Let’s face it, douchebaggery is a young person’s game. Old douchebags are best referred to as jackasses because at that point in your life, you’re aware of your douchery and to continue to act like a douche despite that knowledge makes you a jackass.
I’ve been meaning to write about this post from Merlin at 43 Folders for a couple weeks now. In part, because I think it’s a great outline for how to find a voice and throughline for your own blog, but also because it helped crystallize a few things about what I’m trying to do here.
Despite what the timestamps on this blog say, I started OMIC in 2005. And then promptly abandoned it until 2007. At that time, I felt I needed an outlet for topics I wanted to address that weren’t appropriate for the TOC blog, though the line between the two is often blurred. (This week is a good example of that blurriness as my obsession with ChuffPo has led to posts here and at the TOC blog, including this week’s screed on one of the worst posts I’ve ever read anywhere).
I’ve had some fits and starts with projects here. The Living in Oblivion series (which started as a form of writing discipline and quickly became more a burden than I intended) and the 25 in 12 posts (which I abandoned because I couldn’t quite figure out what I wanted to say in them) to name two. Both failed because I didn’t allow them to be fluid, they were too tied into expectations (my own) and a sense of what they were Supposed To Be.
And that’s something that’s been holding me back here: a notion of what this blog is Supposed To Be, rather than just Letting It Be. It’s why this was a dead blog for two years. It was as if I was staring at 1000 puzzle pieces and trying to figure out what picture they formed, instead of just picking up a couple of those pieces and seeing how they fit together.
All this is a long-winded way of saying I think I’ve finally been able to figure out how to properly curate this thing. These are ideas that have been bubbling around in my head for a little while and Merlin’s post – not all of it, but some – helped crystallize that for me.
You may have noticed that I’ve been writing a lot about social media and the Web. It’s a passion for me right now, and there’s lots to talk about as there are lots of people doing it right and lots of people doing it wrong (ahem, AMC). That will continue here. But I’ve also got more to say about my non-work-related interests like books and music.
Rather than restricting myself or creating a structure, I’m just going to start with a few pieces at a time, and see how they fit together. So forgive me if this post seems to be telling only half the story about what’s next. But think of it like “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story in that it’s pretty much what you’ve come to expect prior, but still signals some interesting developments in the next act.
Speaking of Everyblock, I saw this in the feed today:
* 670 W. Diversey Pkwy. Permit issued for easy permit process
Permit issued on July 29, 2008.
How easy can the process be if you still have to get a permit to take part in the easy permit process?
Yeah, yeah, yeah: I know what it is. Still.
Me3dia tipped me off that the trailer for the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, is online:
Is it just me or does this seem like License to Kill redux? In that one, a lousy Timothy Dalton outing that’s distinguished only by the presence of Carey Lowell, the wife of Bond’s CIA friend Felix Leiter is killed and Leiter himself is mauled by sharks (not sure if they had lasers on their heads or not but they were certainly ill-tempered). Bond goes off on a revenge mission, to MI6’s displeasure, his license to kill is revoked, etc. etc.
I’m not hating, just saying. This kind of plot device wasn’t really new when Bond got around to it either, and they’ve managed to freshen up other long-gone-stale aspects of the franchise, so I’ll still see it.
Incidentally, here’s how much solace a quantum provides:
“At the small scales studied in particle physics, energy often occurs in discrete packets or units called quanta. The amount of energy in a quantum depends on the frequency of the radiation carrying the energy; it is equal to the frequency (in hertz) multiplied by Planck’s constant, 6.626 069 x 10-34 joule second (J·s). The word “quantum” is also used in other contexts where physical quantities occur as multiples of a discrete unit. For example, the quantum of electric charge is e, the charge on a single electron. Via
Wikipedia puts it much more simply (as it often does): “The smallest possible, and therefore indivisible, unit of a given quantity or quantifiable phenomenon.”
Which would have been a worse title: Multiples of a Discrete Unit of Solace or The Smallest Possible, and Therefore Indivisible, Unit of Solace? Also, doesn’t the last one sound like one of those movie titles translated from the Chinese?
This weekend I was hanging out with some friends and they mentioned that they’d had some trouble viewing this blog in Internet Explorer. I checked, and sure enough, IE would only display the main page prior to the first use of the “jump” link I use (that link you see on the longer posts I write) and wasn’t displaying the right-hand links at all. So figuring that hack was causing the problem, I yanked the code. And sure enough, problem solved.
Having the job I do, I know that the fault lies more with IE’s developer-unfriendly, ass-backwards code, not the hack code that works on every other damn browser (incidentally, which one of you is using Camino?). But as I once pointed out to Time Out’s developers, you have to code for your users, not for yourself. And if IE is causing a problem on Time Out’s site, and 40 percent of our user base uses IE, we have to fix it. Since a whopping 64 percent of OMIC’s user base uses IE, I had no choice but to fix the problem especially since it was preventing people from reading my posts, which is pretty much the whole point of this blog.
There’s a lesson here: No matter how right you think you are, sometimes it’s better to stop beating your head against the wall and just try something else.
Not sure which upsets me more: R. Kelly’s acquittal or Tim Russert’s death.
By the way, there’s a problem with the way this blog displays in Internet Explorer. I think it has to do with a script I run that allows for “jump” posts. I’ll do my best to fix it, but you really ought to be using Firefox. I know, it’s my problem, not yours. But still.
Over at the TOC blog.I’ve got an open letter to Sam Adam Jr., one of R. Kelly’s defense lawyers, about his legally specious and questionably human closing arguments. You might also want to see Bill Wyman’s thoughts at Hitsville on the defense’s closing arguments.
I’ve been amazed at the seeming ineptitude of his team, and I hope it sounds as ridiculous to the jury as it does to me.
“Scott C. Smith, publisher of the Chicago Tribune and president of Tribune Publishing, announced today he plans to retire.” – Chicago Tribune, June 12, 2008
Finally, this dude will stop trying to hog my spotlight.
Back in Jaunary, I had a little fun with Chicago magazine. Annoyed that they were taking too long to post an online version of its “171 Great Chicago Websites” story – even though the print version had already been out for weeks – I had one of our interns write a blog post listing every site they mentioned, along with a link to it. It was a tweak of their nose for not understanding the medium of the Web and as a bonus, it ended up being a nice traffic boost for us.
This week, Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 wrote a post titled “What Magazines Still Don’t Understand About The Web” that details his frustration over a similar situation: Wanting to write a post about a story in The Atlantic, he discovers it isn’t available on their site, even though it’s available in print and – as he later discovers – available via Google. He doesn’t go to the trouble of posting the thing himself but maybe he doesn’t have an intern.
I’m not ignorant to the difficulty of balancing a print product and a site that’s largely built on what appears in it. I have it easier with TOC in that it’s a weekly. Most of our subscribers receive the magazine on Wednesdays, and the new content is always available on Thursday at the latest. If there’s something particularly exciting – food/drink content or something related to a weekend event, we’ll push it live earlier. So we don’t have near the delays associated with a monthly like The Atlantic or Chicago magazine.
Why not make everything available immediately? Partly it’s because of the way our metrics are assembled; Utilizing specific dates when we push new content out helps us to understand how people use our site. And we’ve – and by that I mean me, I guess – become adept at how to serve new content out to people each day of the week using this schedule. There’s something to be said for “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” There’s also a production/time aspect, too: Just because the articles themselves are ready to go, doesn’t mean the rest of the site is ready to show it off. But if I knew that content was already out there in print form, I’d absolutely move it live on the Web ASAP. Because I know that someone else would, whether that someone is Google or someone like me.
The real challenge, though, is this: Using the Web to provide more context, information and value. For example, this week’s TOC feature story is about tourist spots and how even a jaded city-dweller can find the fun in them. (Yours truly braved the wilds of Excalibur for the first time in ten years, and you can read all about that here.) On the Web, we created a spot-the-tourist photo quiz, and had editors name their favorite recurring events that are fun for tourists and locals. In the Web version of the story, you also have quick access to the listings of the places we mention. For reasons of medium and space, you can’t do that in print.
Creating content like this presents its own set of challenges. Someone has to go out there and take the pictures (in this case, Jake Malooley, the TOC Reporter With No Fear. Dude ate a bug once for a story because TOC asked him to), editors need to spend extra time selecting events, in addition to all their other work, and someone has to link to all the event listings. To really create exciting Web content, you need more people power. And yet every time you turn around, magazines and newspapers are letting go of their employees. As Karp notes, related content about what’s in a magazine is easily available via Google so it’s the job of a magazine to create content that satiates the reader’s desire for more.
So in addition to Karp’s complaints about what magazines don’t understand about the Web, I’d add “that just getting the story up on its site isn’t enough.”
