Links
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I, on the other hand, am allowed to tell you that DOMA is reprehensible and shameful, and every Congressperson who voted for it or didn’t vote against it is a spineless coward and an embarrassment to their country and to humanity. ↩
- The Times Needs a Policy on Quotation Approval, and Soon by Margaret Sullivan at the Times's opinion column Public Editor’s Journal
- Jeff Bezos, inheritor to Steve Jobs’ crown? by Om Malik at Om.co
- Making Money While Keeping Prices Low: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Explains It All (Mostly) by Tricia Duryee at All Things D
Planet of the Tweets
Twitter’s extensive research identified four ways news outlets can better engage their audiences.
Funny how all four look like things Twitter’s early and most “engaged” users have been doing since the service’s inception.
The same users Twitter is frequently screwing with reckless abandon these days.
Don’t you see? We gave them the tools to leverage increased brand engagement (buzzword overload!).
Kind of like how the planet of the apes wasn’t another planet at all…
Gamers confront copyright law
Professor Greg Lastowka of Rutgers-Camden Law School, in a press release earlier this week about his current research:
User-generated content can make a game very valuable, but developers have a legal obligation to look out for copyright infringement. I’m interested to hear from developers how concerns about copyright infringement affect the kind of games they create.
I’m interested, too, and glad someone is looking into it. I look forward to reading about his findings.
Welcome to VentureBeat’s reporting-driven Friday
Welcome to VentureBeat’s reporting-driven Friday
Good on ‘em for trying this out.
Temple Law Profs Feed
I used Yahoo Pipes to make a feed that unites all posts by Temple profs writing at their various law blogs. The feed still needs some work, specifically to ensure that the author name, and preferably the name of the blog at which they’re writing, is published in every entry. But overall I’m very happy with it.
I didn’t get permission from them or from their respective blogs, but since the stuff is posted publicly, all the content in my united feed is available freely in each separate feed, and all the entries in my united feed link directly out to the source posts, I don’t see why anyone would object.
But, of course, if anyone does object, I’ll remove them from the feed immediately. In fact, at any point in time, and without warning, I may need to delete the feed altogether, so consider yourselves warned.
For now, though, it’s a convenient way to follow what interests Temple Law professors on a day-to-day basis, particularly with regard to current events in their respective areas of expertise.
So, here’s the feed, and here’s the Yahoo Pipes URL so you can see how I did it.
Justice Ginsburg Smile
Justice Ginsburg isn’t allowed to say whether or not she would find equal protection arguments against the “Defense of Marriage” Act1 persuasive.
But she’s allowed to smile.
NYT quote approval policy is (only) a good start
The new quote approval policy at The New York Times, as quoted by Times opinion writer Margaret Sullivan:
So starting now, we want to draw a clear line on this. Citing Times policy, reporters should say no if a source demands, as a condition of an interview, that quotes be submitted afterward to the source or a press aide to review, approve or edit.
I first wrote about the quote approval problem when I linked to David Carr’s piece on it. Then I expressed my agreement with Temple Law professor David Hoffman, who wrote at Concurring Opinions about the frequency with which experts such as himself are misquoted or taken out of context.
I’m not sure the Times policy does a very good job of distinguishing between approval by PR folks and approval by subject-matter experts. The former try to approve quotes to control messaging, while the latter try to approve quotes to ensure their opinions on a given issue aren’t manipulated to further a skewed narrative.
I don’t think those two cases can be dealt with in the same policy without explicitly pointing them out and setting up a framework for each one. The Times policy allows for exceptions with senior editorial approval, and that may allow experts like Professor Hoffman to explain that they want to ensure their comments are presented in the manner in which they intend them to be presented. Or, it may not.
Marco Arment suggested disclosing when quotes have been approved for an article, instead of calling for an unqualified end to the practice. I’m not sure that’s the perfect solution, but I think I prefer Mr. Arment’s policy to the Times policy.
Disclosure makes sense and would show great respect to readers by allowing them to decide whether the reliability of a particular quote is or is not affected by its pre-approval by the source. Experts could ensure accurate representation of their opinions, and readers could be kept in the loop when a communications department has manufactured the CEO’s statement to the paper.
In short, the Times quote policy is nothing less than a good start, but it’s also nothing more.
Longread: Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty
Longread: Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty
I usually like to include a quote from the longreads I share, but this story cannot be reduced to a single blockquote. Whether you support or oppose the death penalty, you should read this 2009 article by David Grann at The New Yorker.
Related
If you like Grann’s work, consider having a listen to the Longform Podcast interview with him or visiting Longform’s archive of his pieces.
Twitter changes force removal of related IFTTT triggers
IFTTT CEO Linden Tibbets, in an email to users today:
[ … ] on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook. All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed.
IFTTT is everything Yahoo Pipes could have been and I’ve been using several Twitter triggers for a long time, to do things like save my tweets to Evernote and add favorite tweets to Instapaper.
My “Twitter” tag is becoming so littered with the company’s user-hostile decisions and their unfortunate consequences that, soon, it will make more sense to post something when and if they ever put users first again.
Here’s the full email from IFTTT’s Linden:
Dear joeross,
In recent weeks, Twitter announced policy changes* that will affect how applications and users like yourself can interact with Twitter’s data. As a result of these changes, on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook. All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed. Recipes using Twitter Actions and your ability to post new tweets via IFTTT will continue to work just fine.
At IFTTT, first and foremost, we want to empower anyone to create connections between literally anything. We’ve still got a long way to go, and to get there we need to make sure that the types of connections that IFTTT enables are aligned with how the original creators want their tools and services to be used.
We at IFTTT are big Twitter fans and, like yourself, we’ve gotten a lot of value out of the Recipes that use Twitter Triggers. We’re sad to see them go, but remain excited to build features that work within Twitter’s new policy. Thank you for your support and for understanding these upcoming changes. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at support@ifttt.com.
Linden Tibbets IFTTT CEO
*These Twitter policy changes specifically disallow uploading Twitter Content to a “cloud based service” (Section 4A https://dev.twitter.com/terms/api-terms) and include stricter enforcement of the Developer Display Requirements (https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-requirements).
Twitter continues to value advertiser utility above user experience
Twitter continues to value advertiser utility above user experience
Romain Dillet at TechCrunch explains it like this:
Now when you land on a company profile page, you will see a big brand name with a small @username below, a gigantic header photo, a small logo next to every tweet, photos of new products in the sidebar without having to scroll, a pinned tweet at the top of the timeline for a current promotion, and finally the traditional flow of tweets.
Twitter is not hiding the ball on this one: their advertising blog post makes it hard to see the new profiles as motivated by anything but improving advertiser utility.
Twitter’s downward spiral into user-neutral (at best) and user-hostile (at worst) changes suggests their ignorance of the operating principle I mentioned last week.
That’s a shame, because the company-first-via-users-first approach is serving Amazon and Apple, and their partners and users, very well.
David Hoffman on quotation approval
David Hoffman on quotation approval
Two days ago, I mentioned a piece by David Carr on quotation approval. This morning, I found that Professor David Hoffman, whose corporate law class I took at Temple Law, had posted his own thoughts at Concurring Opinions.
Specifically, this part stuck out to me:
There’s a simple reason that most sources (including me) ask for quote approval: we don’t trust reporters to avoid making a hash out of our comments, pulling quotes selectively to fit a pre-existing narrative, and consequently turning the source into the reporter’s sock puppet.
Professor Hoffman’s reaction illustrates an important distinction that we need to make in thinking about the integrity of quote approval. I think that experts have a right to approve not only their quotes, but the context in which those quotes will appear.
After all, a journalist’s use of an expert extends beyond the quote, and can be honest or manipulative depending on the integrity of the journalist in question. The press seeks quotes from experts like Professor Hoffman, and I believe their seeking creates an obligation to accurately report not only the words but the context.
However, David Carr’s thesis on the problem with quote approval holds true when those approvals are coming from public relations departments or firms, campaigns, or others who actively seek press coverage. The difference is between controlling the narrative (in the case of PR) and ensuring accurate context (in the case of experts).
Virgin Mobile USA's inadequate response to a good-faith vulnerability disclosure
Virgin Mobile USA’s inadequate response to a good-faith vulnerability disclosure
Developer Kevin Burke describes in damning detail how easy it is to brute force Virgin Mobile USA account PINs, as well as the company’s incompetent and opaque handling of the situation.
The New Feedly Mobile
Anti-disclosure: This post raves about the new Feedly. They didn’t pay me, I don’t know them, and all I get out of writing the below is the satisfaction of pointing fellow Android users to one of the best-designed apps in the Play Store.
I love both Pulse and Flipboard and I can’t think of many ways I would improve them. They’re elegant and functional, which are really important descriptors in my mind when it comes to app design. But they feel best to me on a tablet. Both use interface paradigms (buzz word!) that just feel (again, to me) a little overwrought on most mobile phone displays.
I uninstalled them this morning after trying out the new update to Feedly. Feedly has always integrated Google Reader, but the update includes a swipe-from-left menu letting you easily access your Reader folders. Those of you who aren’t Google Reader users can find sources in their slick new topic menu. Instapaper (and Pocket) integration, syncing read items to Reader, a dark theme, and some new font choices round out what I consider the best newsreader available on Android smartphones today.
Try the new Feedly people, and thank me later.
Mitigating My Mitigating
This post by Michael Schechter at his site A Better Mess hit home for me because I recently migrated this site permanently to Tumblr from a self-hosted Wordpress installation as part of a larger effort to consolidate the things I do in life and on the web. I’m also looking for a way to squeeze some exercise into what amounts to a 12-hour “work” day between my day job and evening classes. I am like Mr. Schechter in that I start lots of little projects, often with little or no eye toward whether they will still interest me in the long-term.
Sometimes they do. For example, I made Memeframes as a way to quick-glance Techmeme and its sister sites and I use that daily. But Fiction By Joe Ross, a Tumblr vehicle for my original sci-fi, hasn’t seen an update since July—and not for lack of material. It just isn’t in my weekly workflow.
Anyway, give Schechter’s post a read if you ever find yourself struggling with a similar problem.
David Carr on quotation approval
David Carr on quotation approval
Keep in mind that when public figures get in trouble for something they said, it is usually not because they misspoke, but because they accidentally told the truth.
News junkies probably know this already, but it’s worth letting the Times's David Carr remind us that what we find between the quotations marks isn't always accurate: sometimes it's edited by the speakers themselves.
Further Reading
Apathy and ecstasy for the iPhone 5
Mat Honan, writing at Wired’s Gadget Lab blog:
It is an amazing triumph of technology that gets better and better, year after year, and yet somehow is every bit as exciting as a 25 mph drive through a sensible neighborhood at a reasonable time of day.
I am still waiting for Verizon to push Jelly Bean to my Galaxy Nexus. Meanwhile, the damn thing throws a force-close dialogue every couple of hours, stutters whenever I try to switch between apps, and occasionally reboots itself just for fun.
My fiancée has had an iPhone 4 for a little over a year, so I’ve had a lot of time to sit on the couch late at night and compare the two phones (like the unashamed geek one has to be to do such things…). The verdict is clear, quick, and simple: go Android for customization and Gmail (a far bigger point in Android’s favor than non-Gmail users might imagine…) but go iPhone for stability and app availability.
That has been the state of things for some time, and it’s no different with the introduction of the iPhone 5, iOS 6, or Android Jelly Bean.
Maybe it’s because I’m 29 this year, but my desire to customize the hell out of my phone is fading fast, especially at the high cost of stability. I’ll always keep an Android phone or two around for playing with custom ROMs, but I need something more refined for my primary phone.
Also, I’ve found on other Android devices that the four-inch display is my preference. The older iPhone displays were too small, and the Galaxy Nexus, at 4.6 inches, is a bit too large. Some people are complaining that iPhone 5 looks the same, just as the 4S looked the same. But it doesn’t: it has a bigger display and a thinner depth, without sacrificing anything in the spec department. That’s change enough for me.
Honan nailed it: iPhone 5 is great and it’s whatever. But it’s stable, app-rich, uniformly-updated whatever. And unless my first experience with it in a store or from a friend’s unit is surprisingly negative, it’s what I’m getting the next time I need a new phone.
Twitter forced to turn over protester's deleted tweets
Twitter forced to turn over protester’s deleted tweets
Mike Isaac, writing at All Things D:
In the end, the New York DA and the judge used a legal maneuver to put pressure on Twitter, threatening to hold the company in contempt of court and levy steep fines if it didn’t hand over the data.
You can’t say they didn’t try.
They have even appealed the judge’s threat to hold them in contempt. The envelope—yes, a physical envelope—containing the tweets at issue will remain sealed until that appeal is complete.
I’ve said it before: it may not be a good time to be a third-party Twitter developer, but the company truly goes to bat for its users when it’s appropriate.
Apple's Comfortable Middle
Hamish McKenzie, writing at PandoDaily :
With two product launches in a row that show Apple is merely keeping pace with innovation rather than leading it, the world’s most valuable company will start to seem mortal.
I disagree.
For the record, I’m usually on board with Mr. McKenzie’s analyses, and I think he’s right that the iPhone 5 doesn’t restore the staggering lead Apple once had in smartphone innovation. I just don’t agree that there is any probable circumstance in which the iPhone 5 marks the beginning of the end of Apple’s dominance. I want him to be right, but I believe it will take action on the part of Apple’s competitors, rather than mere inaction from Cupertino, to catalyze that descent from the pinnacle.
I want to see something truly threaten Apple’s dominance: it would be good for consumers and even good for Apple, potentially motivating just the sort of next-generation innovation everyone wishes we saw with the iPhone 5. But Android is peddled in an ever-changing array of hardware of wildly varying quality, its interface often marred by manufacturer “improvements” and carrier-mandated bloatware, with no cohesive or remotely predictable software upgrade schedule.
Yes, it’s customizable, “open” (depending on how you define the term), and a provider of competitive pressure. In fact, Android, the OS, in its pristine Jelly Bean state on glorious hardware, is functional and gorgeous. But Android, the experience and, for lack of a better word, the brand, is truly a mess.
Then, there is the iPhone.
Apple tried for years to make things people loved. They succeeded. Now they are in the business of making improvements on the things they make that people love. And they’re succeeding there, too.
Whether or not they revolutionize TV next, and whether or not they drastically refresh iOS in the next couple of years, I think they’re still comfortably in the middle of their dominance, and at the top of their game.
Gruber on "Amazon's Play"
John Gruber writes one of the most respected and prolific tech blogs on the web, Daring Fireball. Some people deride him as a blindly-worshipful Apple fanboy who delights in pointing out the failed attempts of other companies to copy Apple’s products and strategy.
I don’t agree with those people.
This article by Mr. Gruber is a great example of his willingness to praise true innovation. Amazon has taken inspiration not from Apple’s hardware or software design, but from their approach to product development.
Place the delight of your customers first and the device and multimedia sales will follow. Put another way, Amazon, like Apple, operates on the premise that putting customer experience first is the best way to put corporate success first.
Further Reading
"The Math"
Once again, MG Siegler nails it on HBO’s missed opportunity for direct-subscription innovation.
Most companies are so desperate to maintain anything close to an upward slant in revenue year-over-year that they never even know opportunities like this one exist.
The worst part of this situation, to me, is the fact that HBO is being repeatedly told about this opportunity and actively ignoring it merely because it doesn’t make short-term business sense.