It's clear that there is a massive shift is underway with in the journalism world. Blogging democratises reporting, but with mobile content, there's something more subtle happening. The majority of the eyewitnesses in the programme, the alleged citizen journalists, did not really identify with the phrase at all. They saw their role almost just as simple cogs in the machine, snapping pictures to support the real journalists.
Currently at least the citizen journalist model works because content is passed to a major news organisation. It's really an evolution of the eyewitness, rather than a revolution. Bloggers attack the other end of the spectrum, creating mini-news organisations, but they are even less well placed than the mainstream organisation to cover events, as their resources are so small. They might get there 15 minutes, and they're certainly well positioned to comment and review primary sources within their own theatre (e.g. Iraq).
20:56, Friday January 13th, 2006 • feeling insensed • no comments
Audioblog might be a useful tool, but why on earth is providing my daytime phone number and credit card details mandatory for a free trial account!? If they do anything with either, I'll give them a piece of my mind.
I have work-related reason for signing up, otherwise there's no chance they'd get my business.
Got back from Mobile Monday drunk, snoozed for an hour and now I'm learning new hacking tricks! I surely do have the strangest working hours. I have an excuse, Louise started a new job working nights this week, she finishes at four and will be back in an hour. I wanted to stay up and wait for her.
Anyway, Hijax is the combination of two very cool ideas: 1. Ajax, 2. Progressive enhancement. Progressive enhancement, advocated by Jeremy Keith, in his book DOM Scripting (which I do not own and have not read), suggests that whizzy JavaScript functionality should be automatically added to a simple HTML page after the fact. So instead of building an app with a bunch of links that call JS functions, I'd create a vanilla web app with links to new pages. Then I would write JS code that goes and finds those vanilla links and hijacks them, replacing them in the DOM with links to teh whizzy.
This idea doesn't just relate to Ajax of course, but it provides a foundation for building higher-quality Ajax apps. As Mr Keith so eloquently puts it: "progressive enhancement automatically guarantees graceful degradation." Because the old links are still there for non-JS users (old browsers, browsers with no JS, search engines, etc) my app still works perfectly well, if less whizzily.
This is the single coolest JS trick I've ever come across, way cooler than all that Ajax rubbish :-). Deployment of JS whizzitronics follows the same model as the deployment of CSS beauty. The underlying content is preserved, so you can have your cake and eat it too. I highly recommend reading Jeremy's blog and the sample chapter as he explains this stuff much better than me in my tired, post-booze state.
I'm a hacker. Hacking is my raison d'etre you might say. I come from the open source community side, so it's no surprise that my view of Bill Gates has never been that rosy.
I watched Bill's presentation from CES today. I thought it was a bit dull, nothing revolutionary there, but then it is a consumer crowd, rather than technologists so that's fair enough I guess.
But as I watched something strange happened. I had been reading yesterday about the Bill and Melinda Gates' Foundation's support for the "14 big health issues." As I watched him I thought about who this super rich man was, I noticed he was wearing quite a nice shirt. Age has improved his appearance vastly. I'm a bit of a nervous presenter, so whenever I watch a smooth presentation I'm always jealous. Then I realised that I have begun to respect Bill Gates.
Shock! Horror! I have friends (who may even comment) how out of sorts this is. It's quite revolutionary. The key of course is that this respect isn't for a fellow technologist, but for a businessman.
Of course, I was a young fool to be so dogmatic and blinkered in my unkindness towards Mr Gates, but at least I'm starting to see more of the bigger picture.
