Monday, April 03, 2006

New header graphic clipped from a picture of a thunderstorm forming over the Atlantic Ocean, at Crescent Beach, FL. 

Baseball season is in full swing, and I'm a BART ride away from both Bay Area stadia. Riding to JFK in a cab on Sunday, it turned out my cabbie, who lived in Queens, was a Yankees fan. The most hated team in baseball. I was deeply offended and asked him to stop the cab immediately so I could get out, in protest. He refused. How typical. I asked if he was a Republican, and he actually took offense. I said well geez which is worse, being a Yankee fan in Queens or being a Republican in NYC. He laughed. I said I wasn't joking. 

Rex Hammock notes that the NY Times is staying with the white on orange XML icon. Same here, I never thought the solution to having too many icons was to invent a new one. Note that Yahoo hasn't budged either. Microsoft isn't the Lord Master God of RSS, it seems, thankfully.  

12/28/05: "One way to do something, no matter how flawed that way is, is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is." 

BTW, I had a friendly and productive lunch today with John Markoff, tech reporter at the Times.  

Tom Morris started an OPML Editor wishlist site. 

I'm not very excited about the redesign of the NY Times home page because it ignores most that has been learned about reading news on a computer screen, and instead models the front page of the print pub. Not a good use of the screen, it ignores the fact that they can produce a new document for each user every time they visit. The print publication was limited by having one layout that had to work all day for every reader, and it had to fit in a fixed piece of real estate. The screen can be (vertically) infinite. I'd be happy to make another bet with Martin that eventually the home page of the Times is going to be a configurable River of News. I'd bet the first MSM news org to make the switch will not be the Times, that'll happen in 2008; the Times will do it in 2011. 

Jeff Jarvis tells the flip side of the story, about the editorial side of the Times. It's at times like this that I think Jeff and I should team up and create an alternate NY Times, outside the Times organization (using their syndicated content, mixed with blogs and other MSM pubs), and then sell it back to them. It would save us all a bunch of time, and who knows, it might prevent a war, or whatever.  

Okay both the Sopranos and the West Wing sucked this week. And they used Leo's death in a totally stupid way. Damn. Maybe next week they'll tell us who won. Maybe they're being kind to us, they figure no matter what they do the series finale is going to be one of the most watched shows ever so they might as well make it suck so we won't miss it too much after it's over. And what they had Donna and Josh do just made me nervous and feel as burned out as they must feel. I just want to know if Santos won, and then let's put the baby to bed. And don't get me started about the Sopranos. It seems it couldn't be crappier, but the previews of next week's show look even worse. 

The Reform Club: "This is New Jersey, with marks to be extorted and wiseguys to be whacked." 

Ed Cone liked last night's Sopranos, and says I didn't explain why I didn't like it. We're going into more detail in today's comments, but basically I didn't like it because it made no sense. And I agreed with the Reform Club appraisal, above. .