Users trying to reach this blog during the past week have been met by a password popup. Essential software upgrades had been postponed for too long, and there was no other choice — the website had to be hospitalized. In fact, the situation was so serious that the decision was taken to migrate from MT to Wordpress. All 884 Undercurrent blog posts have survived the journey. Importantly, as far as I can tell, the RSS feeds still work. Probably RSS subscribers have received a batch of old entries — apologize for that! Please tell me if you find links or other things that don’t work as they should.
Archive for the ‘Undercurrent in English’ Category
Alive and kicking after involuntary vacation
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010Vivian Maier
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010She was an unknown street photographer of Chicago and died last year. John Maloof discovered her photos after buying tens of thousands of negatives at an auction. A selection of photos are already online. Maloof writes:
After some researching, I have only little information about Vivian. Central Camera (110 yr old camera shop in Chicago) has encountered Vivian from time to time when she would purchase film while out on the Chicago streets. From what they knew of her, they say she was a very “keep your distance from me” type of person but was also outspoken. She loved foreign films and didn’t care much for American films.
The Independent has also written about her.
Thanks to document.no for the tip.
Happy 2010!
Thursday, December 31st, 2009
Good advice
Monday, December 28th, 2009Andrew Revkin’s blog Dot Earth is a model for how journalists can use the blog format in reporting. Now Revkin leaves the New York Times with some well chosen words of advice:
I’lll keep blogging, of course. Frankly, I consider it an unavoidable responsibility of communicators. It has not been easy to blog, particularly while synchronizing that effort with ongoing print work. Through moderating tens of thousands of comments, I’lve had to deal with some angry people not interested in learning, but far more individuals with a thirst for community and understanding and a willingness to encounter contrary views as part of that quest. In many ways, this kind of two-way communication is well suited to the implicit complexities and uncertainty attending life on a crowding planet that is showing signs of strain from the blazingly fast expansion of this human experiment.
Helping Google help news media
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009A good idea from Michael Massing:
I propose that Google set up a Journalism Innovators’l Fund with an initial annual budget of $100 million-less than 0.5 percent of the more than $20 billion it takes in annually. The fund would seek not to subsidize existing news operations but to support creative ideas and new programs aimed at reinventing the news as Schmidt suggests. It would support start-ups and fledgling enterprises engaged in investigation, international reporting, policy analysis, blogging, and other forms of probing and provocative reporting and commentary undertaken by the independent journalists who, given the severe retrenchment taking place at traditional organizations, are making up an ever-larger part of the field. More and more journalists are becoming entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs need start-up capital, and who better to provide it than Google, itself a product of, and tribute to, the entrepreneurial spirit?
Dogbert answers Rupert
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
Quite hübsch
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009Even impressive, this demo of what Time Inc is working on, apparently for the coming Apple tablet.
The welcome comeback of the image
Saturday, November 28th, 2009The internet saved our culture of writing, it has often been claimed. The image saturation caused by television had, in this narrative, reached dangerous levels by the mid 1990s. Enter the commercial internet with email and the web. At the latest with web 2.0, everyone is writing all the time. Hurrah!
People like David McCandless bring a fresh approach to question this now received wisdom. By visualising data instead of just referring to them in text, modern infographics can be more enlightening than acres of text, not less:
I’ve spent the last year exploring the potential of information visualisation for my website and a book. I’ve taken loads of information and made it into simple, colourful and, hopefully, beautiful “visualisations” – bubble charts, concept maps, blueprints and diagrams – all with the minimum of text. I don’t just mean data and statistics. I love doing this with all kinds of information – ideas, issues, stories – and for all subjects from pop to philosophy to politics. Personally, I find visualisations great for helping me understand the world and for sifting the huge amounts of information that deluge me every day.
More of his visualisations can be enjoyed at his Flickr page.
Information and data visualisation has come to seem increasingly important to me as I in the past few months have spent a lot of time on the topic of opening up data in government (project blog in Norwegian). Clearly, it’s possible to do harm with data, as it is with all kinds of information. But the solution in an open society cannot be to lock down government data. That’s why it’s so important to have an ongoing discussion about how data can be used to promote better understanding of society, like McCandless does with his infographics. That he helps to improve journalism at the same time, isn’t actually a drawback these days.
Anhängsel
Monday, November 9th, 2009Das Altpapier survives Netzeitung — who would have thought that? Today, punctual as ever with the commented overview of the media coverage of Netzeitung’s end. And with a logical conclusion:
Vielleicht musste die Netzeitung zu oft mitwandern, war zu oft Anhängsel und durfte sich zu wenig selbst bewegen, um sich als printzeitungsunabhängiges und rentables Onlineangebot etablieren zu können. Dabei hatte es an einer Wegmarke 2001 nicht so schlecht dafür ausgesehen: Damals, im November, gehörte die Netzeitung, direkt hinter Spiegel Online und noch vor Bild.de, zu den meistbesuchten Onlinenachrichtenseiten.
And in Netzeitung itself, the story “Aus für die Netzeitung” has disappeared from the media page, though it is still to be found in the archive.
UPDATE: Taz obit.