I love upgrades

One of the things I love the most is when something I already use and like gets better. And that's what has happened with Google Maps and Plaxo.

Google Maps, which long ago passed by beloved Yahoo in the online mapping arena, added a new feature that lets users change the routes generated when asking for driving directions. This can be useful if you want to, say, avoid a particular area on your route or take a scenic detour.

It's a feature would often use in Microsoft Streets & Trips (can you tell I'm a map nut?), but now it's free. This is on top of the very cool "street view" feature the company recently launched.

Here's a demonstration from the Google folks:

Plaxo, meanwhile, just launched version 3.0 of the service that focuses much more on online calendars.

This is exactly the right move, I think. The 6-year-old company is best known for its address book synchronizer, an Outlook plug-in that automatically updates contact info changes of Plaxo subscribers in your address book. But most users didn't know that the plug-in was also a pretty easy way to synch your Outlook calendar, notes and tasks between different machines. Everything happened in the background -- no fuss, no muss.

The new version (which incorporates Plaxo's acquisition of HipCal last year) takes that several steps further. First, Plaxo beefed up its online calendar offerings, making it easier to access one's own schedule online and letting users publish free and busy times so other users can see it. Even cooler, Plaxo now lets users sync Outlook with Yahoo and Google's online calendars. Very Web 2.0 of them.

The new version is still in beta -- and it shows. In my tests, it took the service several hours to update Google Calendar after I made changes in Outlook and vice-versa. But if the company can getting working as advertised, it'll attract a lot of attention.

Heck, Google might even buy it.

Newspapers Should Embrace Online Aggregators

Amen. 

The problem that newspapers and other traditional media brands have is that they still see branding as a function of controlling the distribution channel, rather than branding each unit of content that must now live and survive on its own in a disaggregated online media ecosystem.

But the real missed opportunity for newspapers is in optimizing their content to convert user who find their way to newspaper content via search and other aggregators into subscribers and direct users of the brand. The New York Times, having learned from search master About.com, is using this approach with its Times Topics pages, which rank high in Google for generic terms and draw users in to the universe of NYT content.

Source: Publishing 2.0

Europe, consolidated

I merged the London and Paris photos into a single slideshow. If you'd rather browse individual photos or see larger versions, just click on any picture.

Courier-Journal reporter ejected from U of L game

For once, resistance to change isn't coming from a newspaper:

A Courier-Journal sports reporter had his media credential revoked and was ordered to leave the press box during the NCAA baseball super-regional yesterday because of what the NCAA alleged was a violation of its policies prohibiting live Internet updates from its championship events.

10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head

There is hope. Ryan Sholin, a  graduate journalism student at San Jose State University, spells out a few realities that somehow seem to elude most veteran news people. Here's a summary of his well-argued diatribe.

1. It’s not Google’s fault.
2. It’s not Craig’s fault.
3. Your major metro newspaper could probably use some staff cuts.
4. It’s time to stop handwringing and start training.
5. You don’t get to charge people for archives and you certainly don’t want to charge people for daily news content.
6. Reporters need to do more than write. The new world calls for a new skillset, and you and Mr. Notebook need to make some new friends, like Mr. Microphone and Mr. Point & Shoot.
7. Bloggers aren’t an uneducated lynch mob unconcerned by facts. They’re your readers and your neighbors and if you play your cards right, your sources and your community moderators. If you really play it right, bloggers are the leaders of your networked reporting projects. Get over the whole bloggers vs. journalists thing, which has been pretty much settled since long before you stopped calling it a “Web blog” in your stories.
8. You ignore new delivery systems at your own peril. RSS, SMS, iPhone, e-paper, Blackberry, widgets, podcasts, vlogs, Facebook, Twitter — these aren’t the competition, these are your new carriers.
9. J-schools can either play a critical role in training the next generation of journalists, or they can fade into irrelevancy. Teach multimedia, interactivity and data, or watch your students become frustrated and puzzled as they try to get jobs with five clips and a smile.
10. Okay, here comes the big one: THE GLASS IS HALF FULL.

I wish this were written by a major news executive instead, but at least some journalists seem to get it.

Paris is amazing

We finally got to the Eiffel Tower yesterday. Pictures don't do it justice; it's much bigger and far more imposing in person -- a stunning blend of engineering and art. Everyone should see this once in their life.

We've seen most of the other things you're "supposed" to see here, sights too numerous to mention. Today we're taking a day trip to Versailles, and tomorrow we'll spend most of the day at the Louvre. Friday, our last full day here, will give us a chance to relax and catch up on the little things we had planned to do duing the week but didn't get aound to.

Now we're in Paris!

We found an open Wi-Fi router to leech from, but we probably won't have time to post many pictures until we get back. And yes, we'll properly label all the pictures. Maybe I'll even put together a little slide show.

Photos!

Here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ken_brown/

We're here!

Here in London, that is.

Just a quick post from an Internet terminal at the hotel -- apparently, free Wi-Fi is a foreign concept here. I should be able to post a few photos tomorrow night.

Redefining “Christian” music

Interesting article mentioned on the site of some of my favorite conservatives:

CCM (formerly Contemporary Christian Music magazine) is going to start covering music on non-religious labels. Considering that some of the best Christian artists despise Christian music labels (take Sam "Leslie" Phillips as an example), this move should have happened years ago. As Phillips' husband, T-Bone Burnett, once put it: "You can sing about the Light, or you can sing about what you see because of the Light. I prefer the latter."

Anyway, from CCM:

“We’re going to start mixing indie and general market Christians such as The Fray, Mary J. Blige and Sufjan Stevens in with artists with traditional Christian label affiliation. Rather than define ‘Christian music’ just by its label or distribution, we’re now defining it as Christian worldview music. CCM Magazine has always taken its role as a leader seriously, and we believe this is the way of the future.”

Or as David Byrne would say, "Same as it ever was." Or at least "should have been."

Source: CCM, via Christian Realism

Journalism-is-doomed roundup

• Timothy J. McNulty on why local journalism can't be outsourced.
  
  Unlike most of my colleagues, I think PasedenaNow's experiment is actually pretty interesting, if only for forcing journalists to ponder the value they bring to readers and what makes journalism different from, say, PR.
  
  But I agree that PasedenaNow's effort will fail badly. And it suggests that the editor there doesn't understand his own profession.
  
  
• The San Francisco Chronicle is cutting 100 newsroom jobs, or 25% of its news staff. Ouch.
  
  
• Susan Goldberg, Andrea's now-departed boss, addresses both of the above-mentioned points, at least obliquely, in an interview for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.
  
  Notable quotables:
  "As painful as any kind of cutting can be, the upside is that it does force you to focus on your priorities. ... You really need to think long and hard about what makes you special in your marketplace. In San Jose, one of the things that made us special was our technology coverage. So, if that's at the top of the heap, than maybe something else falls off the bottom so you can keep doing technology coverage incredibly well. So in Cleveland, perhaps that would be coverage of the growth industry here -- the medical industry."
  
  "Whiny people who live in the past, they drive me crazy. Because, there's nothing we can do about the massive changes in our industry. ... Just whining and moaning about the way it used to be will not solve anything. ... I find as time goes on and our problems become more and more apparent, and our need to change becomes more and more apparent, my patience for 'whiny people who live in the past' becomes shorter."

Google: better and better

Not to sound like a fanboy or anything, but it's now officially easier to find a library book on Google (well, WorldCat through Google, actually) than on my library's own Web site.

Switching hosts

I'm moving the blog portion of this site over to Blogspot. This should result in better performance (and more flexibility with photos), but I may run into some transitional issues.

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What does it take to get fired from this administration?

Apparently, nothing short of losing a war or an American city.

From the Washington Post:

The Justice Department said yesterday that it will not retract a sworn statement in 2006 by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales that the Terrorist Surveillance Program had aroused no controversy inside the Bush administration, despite congressional testimony Tuesday that senior departmental officials nearly resigned in 2004 to protest such a program.

The department's affirmation of Gonzales's remarks raised fresh questions about the nature of the classified dispute, which former U.S. officials say led then-Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey and as many as eight colleagues to discuss resigning.

I think it's about time for Congress to exercise its constitutional prerogative and impeach the lying SOB.

P.S. I just realized that "lying SOB" could apply to any number of people in the White House. In this case, I mean Gonzales.

Interactive guide to Republican scandals

Just in case you have trouble keeping up -- and who doesn't? -- Slate has a handy interactive feature. Unfortunately, it doesn't cover instances of the administration's staggering incompetence, just those that justify impeachment and/or jail time. 

Source: Slate Magazine

Shopping for Europe

Actually, this is mostly a test to see whether blogging in Europe is practical through the phone.

Joost invites

Chris Lanier is giving away Joost invites on his blog.  All you have to do is reply to his post and/or blog about it and you have a chance to win an invite.  This is my entry, but you can click here to find out more and enter for yourself.

For those who don't know what Joost is, it's a peer-to-peer TV download service created by the same guys who did Skype. Supposedly, it will revolutionize television.

But will it play on my Xbox Media Center Extender?

A good first step

Someone else notices the too-chummy relationship between the Washington press corps and the people they're supposed to be covering, as manifest by the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Tucked inside Frank Rich's Sunday column in the New York Times is indication that the newspaper will no longer play ball with the annual White House Correspondents Association dinners in Washington, which he calls "a crystallization of the press's failures in the post-9/11 era." He writes that the event "illustrates how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows....

"After last weekend's correspondents' dinner, The Times decided to end its participation in such events," wrote Rich. "But even were the dinner to vanish altogether, it remains but a yearly televised snapshot of the overall syndrome. The current White House, weakened as it is, can still establish story lines as fake as 'Mission Accomplished' and get a free pass."

Source: Editor & Publisher

For once, I'm glad I don't live or work in San Francisco

 Another day, another bridge collapse...

Bay Area residents began potentially their worst commute in almost two decades Monday, a day after one of the region’s most traveled sections of freeway melted and collapsed following a fiery crash.

...

Transportation officials said it could take months to repair the damaged interchanges, and advised motorists to use public transportation in and out of San Francisco. They added trains to the rail system, and bus and ferry operators also expanded service.

There's a "ferries in San Francisco" joke in here somewhere, but you won't hear it from me.

Source: MSNBC.com