Eight Bits of Baseball Fun: RBI Baseball

I realized recently that one of my most prized possessions is a mint condition eight-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. It's in mint condition because my brothers and I have always taken good care of our stuff, and it's a prized possession because sometimes you just get the urge to play a video game that has only two main buttons and a directional pad.

There's something magnificent about the fact that I got in on the ground floor of the Nintendo revolution and that the same small gray box that brought me so much joy throughout the 1980s is still alive and kicking, giving me the (Nintendo) power to face Piston Honda in the Punch Out ring, smash Koopa Troopas with Super Mario and hit a home run with George Brett.

That last example is the one that brings me back to my eight-bit roots most frequently: the original RBI Baseball. In a world of baseball video games that offer photo-realistic stadiums and computer-generated players who share the same facial expressions and superstitious tics as their real-life counterparts, I still crave the simplicity of this 1987 classic. The players don't really even have faces.

Aside from the nostalgia of using players who are now already inducted in or eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame, the controls are surprisingly nimble and a deft tap of the directional pad can yield a knee-buckling strike. The ability to steal a base with the push of a button always resulted in a devilish game of cat and mouse that allowed my brother and I to play out our sibling rivalry between the foul lines. The game also features a style of defense usually reserved for t-ball teams: When you move your left fielder to go after a ball down the third base line, your entire team moves in that direction along with him. Give me the simple life.

Adding to the nostalgia factor is RBI Baseball's MIDI soundtrack that is permanently etched on my soul. I just found a website that has all the game's greatest hits, including such favorites as "introductory game music," "game music with runners on base" and my personal favorite, the immortal "game music with empty bases." That one even has a techno remix. I think I just found myself a new ringtone.

Some people need their MTV, but I need my NES. If it ever dies of natural causes, I will not only bury it in the backyard, but also immediately hop on eBay to find a replacement. How else is Rick Sutcliffe going to throw a no-hitter these days?

In Defense of the Dumb Phone

I haven't gotten a new cell phone since 2005.

Are you suitably shocked? Most people are. Whenever I whip out my vintage Samsung SGH-X497, I usually hear a chorus of "You don't have an iPhone?! Not even a BlackBerry? I thought you're Mr. Technology!"

It's true. I am Mr. Technology. But I've never been Mr. Mobile Technology and I'm not about to start. It's not that I doubt the usefulness or importance of owning a device that can put all the knowledge of the world in your pocket (or, more specifically, put all the knowledge of the world in your geeky Blackberry holster). There's no denying that the present and future of communication, information and the intersection of the two are currently being charted by every new high-priced phone Apple releases. I'm just saying that, for the time being, I want no part of it.

Wanna Get Away?
Remember those Southwest Airlines commercials with the tag line "Wanna get away?" Sure you do. Well, it turns out that's a pretty unrealistic sentiment. You can't get away. Ever. You won't let yourself. The world is a far-too-connected place sometimes, and you can blame that mobile device on your belt. (The holster still looks geeky, by the way.) Along with the ability to instantly hit up Google and find out what other movie that familiar actor was in, the bells and whistles of your smart phone have introduced four little words into the universal lexicon that have changed vacation time forever: Sent from my iPhone. Sure, you're out of the office. But even when you're on a golf course in California, your boss in Chicago knows you're still seeing all those work-related e-mails. Besides, this is urgent and wont' take too much time. Wanna get away? You can't.

Likewise, when the boss is on that golf course in California, he's free to check in with everyone in the office from the sand trap on the ninth hole. Have you finished inputting the revisions he left for you? By the way, it's sunny here. Wanna get away? You thought he did.

It's not that I don't like e-mail. Far from it! When I'm on a computer, I'm devoted to Gmail. Sometimes I have to wait a while to reply to a message, just so I don't freak out the sender with an instantaneous response. But when I'm away from my e-mail, I want to be completely away. It's a voluntary decision that becomes an involuntary responsibility when the inbox follows you everywhere.

I value the ability to get completely off the grid, so when I started shopping for a new phone, I knew I would be looking for the best, dumbest phone I could find.


The Quest for a Dumb Phone
I'm going to bury my old phone in the backyard. I loved that little guy and it did everything I wanted: made calls, sent texts and rang when people called or texted me. Unfortunately, the battery wasn't lasting too long anymore and the call button worked about 45 percent of the time. I don't know the exact conversion, but five human years has got to be close to 75 cell phone years. 10-4, good buddy.


But it's hard to get a good dumb phone these days. I was obviously overdue for an upgrade (my phone still said Cingular on it) and AT&T had loads of online deals for me for all the best smart phones. For a while, my inner techie was intrigued by the idea of joining the cast of thousands who think they have all the answers because their iPhone, um, technically does. So I headed over to my local AT&T store and decided to give these smart phones a serious test drive.

I approached each phone as if it were my own and began composing a brilliant test text: Matt was here. It didn't matter which phone I tried. I hated them all. My thumbs slipped off the buttons, forcing ridiculous typos that I would have avoided with numeric keys and the T9 setting. The vast system of menus, icons and navigation to reach the phones' unnecessary features confounded my short attention span. And the thought of brandishing a Blackberry on a geeky belt holster remained as repulsive as ever.

So I came back down to earth, swallowed my Web-savvy pride and combed the AT&T site for the dumbest phone I could find. I settled on the LG GU295. It has a camera (the one upgrade I really wanted) and doesn't do much else, unless you pay extra for some feature.

You can judge for yourself in the picture below, but I would even dare say it's a smart phone, as long as we're using the fourth definition of that word.

Brave New World of Christmas Lights & Decorations

Anyone can string lights up on their house and the Osborne Family kind of took that to its greatest extreme. If you want to impress people today, your Christmas decorations have got to go the extra mile and do much more than just hang there and blink.

Below you will find three examples of where the decorative bar has now been set. Eat your heart out, Clark Griswold.

Computer-Controlled Dancing Christmas Lights
Bonus points for setting the light show to a techno version of "Amazing Grace."


A Guitar Hero's Christmas
The lights only work if you wear sunglasses at night like the kid in this video.


Frosty the Nano-Scale Snowman
All I want for Christmas is a nanomanipulation system.

Newsflash: Tweets Are Pointless!

This just in! According to a recent analysis, 40.55 percent of the tweets flooding into the Twitterverse can be classified as "pointless babble."

Those of you who have not yet hopped on the Twitter bandwagon should probably consider that before signing up. As an avid Twerp (or whatever the singular form of "Tweeple" is), I can substantiate the above statistic. In fact, I probably contribute to it more often than not.

Unfortunately, the study didn't delve into why so many tweets are riveting and timely observations such as "I'm eating a sandwich," "It's so hoooooottttt outside," and "I really didn't want to wake up this morning. Le sigh."

Fortunately, I have the answer: There simply isn't enough of you to go around.

You're not that interesting. Neither am I. And the pressure to craft engaging blog posts, G-chat statuses, Facebook statuses, and Twitter statuses only reinforces that fact. Sure, we care about what we're having for lunch, but no one else really does, at least not all the time and via six different social network notifications.

But still, we soldier forward, self-publishing our comings, goings and clever bon mots to our world of online "followers," "friends" and "buddies." Do they care? I guess it doesn't really matter. The life of these status updates is almost non-existent anyway, with Twitter and Facebook feeds taking their cue from the weather in Chicago: Don't like what you see? Just wait five minutes.

The real question is, why are we spending so much time on other people's so-called pointless babble? If you're reading this right now, I guess you don't have the answer, either...

Just so this post doesn't seem completely negative, I'll close with a sweet little video that is social networking-related, but doesn't have much to do with the above discussion. It does contain a ukulele though, and that's reason enough for you to watch it. Fair warning: The song will get rather lodged in your head.

J-School Envy

If any fellow journalists/Medill alumni are reading this blog, you should check out a video on Apple's Web site that shows the new journalism school building at Arizona State University. I had no idea ASU was even on the j-school map, but the facility is incredible and it looks like they really know what they're doing in terms of training the Journalists of the Future.

The video goes a little overboard on the "Macs are AMAZING!" message (it's a commercial, after all), but it's evident that ASU has taken a smart approach to teaching the multimedia aspects of journalism that a lot of other j-schools have publicly struggled with.

At this point in time, journalists need to be self-sufficient jacks-and-jills-of-all-trades. The point is, you can't just write. You can't just shoot and edit video. You have to be able to create quality content for multiple platforms or you're going to be unemployed. (Actually, each passing week seems to bring another sad obituary of another daily newspaper, so chances are you won't be employed as a traditional journalist anyway.)

I think the caveat of creating "quality" content is where much of the tech-focused journalistic training falls apart. Giving someone six different colors to paint with and not telling them which colors go together or when to use blue and when to use orange can make for a lot of ugly art. So to for multimedia news coverage. All the fancy Macs in the world won't help you become a better journalist unless that technology is paired with training in the fundamentals of reporting.

Despite my training as a print journalist, my platform these days is almost completely multimedia--audio, video and slide shows. Sure, the fact that I could teach myself how to use Final Cut Pro was a great help in making the leap from written words to video frames. And, yes, the medium is different, but the skills and elements needed to turn a blank Final Cut Pro timeline into a finished video are eerily similar to what it takes to turn a blank word Document into a publishable text story. Good reporting matters.

OK, I'll get off my soap box now. As long as we're talking about text vs. video, check out my latest effort. For this one, I had so much good stuff that I made a video and wrote a story to go along with it. Incidentally, the subjects of the profile--Michael Mahler and Alan Schmuckler--are definitely going places. I can't wait to say "I knew them when..."

One More on Twitter

I really should have included this in yesterday's post. It's more than a week old, so it's kind of made the rounds already, but, if you haven't already, watch Old Man Stewart Shake His Fist At Twitter:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Lastly, I forgot to address another strange aspect of the micro-blogging service (Micro-blogging? Someone must have invented Twitter after coming across my long-winded, mega-blogging style): It makes some celebrities accessible to their fans in a way that the impersonal fan letter never could. There are a lot of fake celebrity Twitter accounts out there, but some of them are legitimate (or have really good ghost-tweeters) and the celebrities actually respond to followers who Tweet them.

Jimmy Fallon is making this the basis of his show on some nights (The Bryan Brinkman Experiment) and soliciting ideas from fans through his Twitter account.

Rainn Wilson might Tweet with you. Shaq, too. (No guarantees that you'll understand what he's saying though...)

Now do you want to join Twitter?

Make Every Site a Sight for Sore Eyes

Have you noticed that the Web is getting a little too busy? If it's not a pop-up ad, it's a strip of contextual Google ads or an animated banner ad or one of the most annoying ads on the Internet with the talking smiley faces or the "Congratulations! You've already won!" announcer. Who in their right mind would ever create a Web advertisement with audio that you can't turn off? We're all doing our best to ignore the ads as it is. Don't give us extra reasons to hate your product.

But these problems are a thing of the past. Now you can read the content you want to read without any of the visual clutter you couldn't care less about. Readability is an experimental service provided by the arc90 design firm. Through the use of a Bookmark (in Firefox) or a Favorite (in Internet Explorer), you can instantly transform any Web page into a comfortable reading experience. No ads, no images, no banners--just the text of an article or blog post.

Readability allows you to customize the style, font and margin width of the stripped-down page to ensure maximum viewing pleasure. Now that I think about it, this could serve as a fairly nice printer-friendly page, especially if you want to print something out in a larger typeface for your offline relatives.

Watch the video below for full details. Obviously my site is so well-designed and engaging that it probably wouldn't be a good page to experiment with, but I guess you could give it a try... ;-)

Yesterday's Tomorrow Today!

Thanks to my friend Julie's Tumblog, I was reminded of a wonderful site that is always good for a laugh: Modern Mechanix.

It's unbelievable that these articles and ads are not Photoshopped in any way, but actually ran in the 1930s and 1940s. It looks like the service described above was a veritable Match.com of yester-year. "No man is any good without a woman?" I'm not sure who this add is more insulting toward--the "anxious" and desperate women or the single men who aren't "any good."

Almost every post on this blog is a winner. Even the less-funny entries provide an insightful look into how people thought science and technology would progress. This leads to the age-old debate: Were people dumber back then? Or just more willing to get carried away by their curiosity? I tend to think it's the latter. Everyone is so sardonic and jaded today (myself included) that I don't think we're even willing to entertain the ideas that seemed plausible to the folks who wrote these articles. After all, some of these things were way ahead of their time! Cordless phone, anyone?

A few others:
If You Want the Ladies to Like You, Clip This Coupon

For Fun-Loving Executives

License Tag in Miniature Identifies Auto Keys

If you find other good ones, share 'em in the comments!

Cool New Tool: Embedr

I'm a sucker for new (free) Web services and Embedr is pretty nifty. It allows you to create playlists of videos from all the mainstream video-sharing Web sites and then link to or embed the playlist elsewhere.

To test the new service (and see how well it might function for work-related purposes), I made a list of my top 10 favorite videos I have produced for my new gig at NU. Watch 'em all!

Build your own custom video playlist at embedr.com

Related Posts:
Experimenting with Sprout
Look What Google Docs Can Do!
High School Journalism Day Links
Useful Web Sites You Should Know About

No Facebook For Lent: I'm Getting Smarter Already

The verdict is in from British scientists: Increased Facebook use is giving you a "baby brain." Quoth the Tribune:

Baroness Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, warned that the instant feedback and impersonal communication offered by social networking sites could drive human brains and behavior in negative directions.

"As a consequence, the mid-21st Century mind might almost be infantilized, characterized by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize and a shaky sense of identity," Greenfield said Feb. 12.

Looks like my 40-day hiatus is coming just in time! I've previously discussed the issue of the Internet making us lazy readers and decreasing our attention spans, but I guess I haven't considered Facebook's level of culpability for turning my brain to mush. It's ironic that the study would find Facebook to shake a user's sense of identity. Maybe that stems from frequently changing your profile picture. If so, I'm in trouble.

Instant feedback? Yes. Impersonal communication? Sometimes. But I would argue that the seemingly mindless back-and-forth of photo comments, wall posts and status updates is simultaneously meaningless, entertaining and wit-sharpening (if done correctly). It also allows me to communicate--however briefly--with people who are no longer in my immediate social circle. I like that and wouldn't want to lose it.

On the other hand, "baby brain" aspect of Facebook is what compels me to sacrifice it for 40 days. My need to stay connected with far away friends is not served by the hours I spend every week reading the status updates and perusing the photos of people I hardly know. That's got to stop, before I start craving nap time and apple juice more than I already do.

Google Is Making You Stupid (Me, Too)

The latest way to rage against the Google machine is to say that everyone is now dumber for having used it.

In an article for The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr argues that the ease with which we can find information online and jump from page to page is changing the circuitry of our brains and preventing us from engaging in the "deep reading" that we used to enjoy in the pre-Google era. Carr writes:

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

And you know what? He's absolutely right. As a pathetic case in point, I didn't even read Carr's entire article, even though I'm interested in the topic and offering my own two cents on it now.

For an easier-to-read illustration of how short your reading attention span really has become, check out Michael Agger's How We Read Online. You don't read much of anything online, do you? You're scanning headlines, looking for bold text and pull quotes, and spending less than a minute on a page before a link takes you somewhere else.

When I graduated from college, I looked forward to having the free time to read quality books of my choosing and continuing my own personal education by reading. I was going to use technology to better organize the information I found online. Instead, my Google Reader has way too many feeds, making me a lazy reader. And Delicious has become my personal clearinghouse for viral YouTube videos and links to banal trivia. Things worth reading? They're few and far between.

Even this blog was meant to serve as a way for me to process my thoughts on all the brilliant and useful information that I read online or in all the books I would be reading for pleasure. But I can feel my mind being melded by Google's information overload and I can probably count on one hand the number of books I've read in the last year. At the same time, there is a long list of books that I've started reading and never finished. My online reading habits have overtaken my off-line reading habits!

It's well past time for me to turn over a new leaf, so I'm going to force myself to read something in its entirety. I just renewed my library card...now who has book suggestions?

Friends with the Colonel

Last night I received a Facebook friend request from Colonel Tribune. When I clicked on his profile, I initally thought it was just another "fake" profile that someone had created to give a Facebook presence to a celebrity or dead historical figure. After all, I'm Facebook friends with Derrek Lee and Kelly Ripa, too.

But after inspecting the Colonel's profile and Facebook activity, it became clear that this was not some college kid's homage to Col. McCormick. It is in fact a clever online marketing strategy being employed by the Chicago Tribune's online division. Rather than creating an impersonal Tribune account on various social networking sites, the Colonel serves as the Trib's "Web Ambassador" on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube. They have cross-promoted him in Redeye and must have someone closely monitoring his Facebook account, because every new friend receives a personalized "Thanks for the add!" wall post. Mine arrived this morning.

This is ridiculously clever and, at least for me, it works. I've clearly spent some time poking around Tribune content to see what this is all about, and oddly enough, I still want to be the Colonel's Facebook friend, even if he is just a portal to chicagotribune.com. What can I say? I'm a sucker for the newspaper hat.

Experimenting with Sprout

I recently came across Sprout, an online tool for making Flashy interactive presentations. I tried my hand at a photo gallery and found it both easy to use and unexpectedly broad in terms of what you can do with it. If you put in some time, you could make some snazzy presentations. Compared to learning how to use Flash itself (which I'm also in the process of doing), this was a walk in the park. The only downside I encountered was that photos had to be 1MB or less. In this day and age, that's asking a lot. I got around it by uploading the photos to Webshots first and linking to them, which worked fine, but was a bit tedious.

My finished product is below. Aside from showing the capabilities of Sprout, I hope it will serve as a gentle-yet-realistic reminder and pick-me-up to fellow Cubs fans, considering the Cubs have now started the season at 0-2.



Click here for the non-resized version.

Google Hoax (Beta)

It's no secret that I love all things Google. From Gmail to GCalendar to GChat to Google Reader to Google Analytics, the company always finds new ways to improve the quality of my online life.

Every April 1, I'm reminded of another reason why Google is awesome: They have a fantastic sense of humor.

I hate to break it to any Gmail users who didn't get the joke, but today's newest Gmail feature--"Gmail Custom Time"--is just the latest in a long line of Google-rific April Fool's Day hoaxes.

Since Google is such an innovative company, it's in a perfect position to propose a completely ludicrous new feature and leave you wondering if it could possibly be real. These prank features are written in such a normal, matter-of-fact tone that I always seem to buy into it at first, until I either A) remember that it's April Fool's Day or B) read a line that blows the whole thing completely out of the realm of possibility.

Here are a few of my favorite Google hoaxes from over the years (some more believable than others):

Google AdSense For Conversations (2008)
"Now, in just a few simple steps, you can begin displaying ads that are relevant to the topics you're discussing -- in an unobtrusive screen above your head."


Google MentalPlex (2000)
"Search smarter and faster with Google's MentalPlex. MentalPlex technology senses electronic field variations created by concentrated thought and can interpret those field variations as broad categories of content."

Gmail Paper (2007)
" Now in Gmail, you can request a physical copy of any message with the click of a button, and we'll send it to you in the mail."

Google TiSP: Toilet Internet Service Provider (2007)
"Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines." (I love the photo on the home page with the toilet in the background.)

Google Romance
Google Romance is a place where you can post all types of romantic information and, using our Soulmate Search, get back search results that could, in theory, include the love of your life."

See the complete list.

The Internet, Hollywood Style

Last weekend, Chicago Tribune Internet critic Steve Johnson wrote an entertaining piece about the place of Internet technology at the movies. Johnson states that movies such as The Net (1995) have frequently relied on the Internet's vast and mysterious nature as a compelling (and convenient) plot device.

If [filmmakers are] smart, they understand that the murky technology that makes the Net function will let them get away with outlandish plotting. Few audience members will know enough, in the heat of a chase scene, to dispute the likelihood of Harrison Ford in "Firewall" rapidly downloading a bank's records database to an iPod. (Where is the pop-up message saying he first needs to update iTunes? What will happen to his daughter's playlists?)

His point is well-taken. It's a good thing Ford had the foresight to switch the iPod to hard drive mode, too.

In the interests of full disclosure, I used to be one of those people who bought whatever technology Hollywood was selling. When I first saw The Net, I didn't have access to a computer and had no clue what the Internet was all about. I do remember thinking that the movie seemed really cool and extremely realistic. Look what the bad guys did to her with computers! (always plural)

Back in the day, I was blown away by the mere presence of computer technology in a movie's plot line. The cinematic representation of "hacking into a system" or "downloading files" was enough to provoke a dizzy spell. When I saw Sneakers in 1992, I wanted a computer so badly that I went home and "hacked" my way into my Mom's electric typewriter, with a cardboard box for a monitor. I think I downloaded a lot of secret files that day, too. I was one heckuva tech-savvy spy.

By the time I saw Firewall in 2006, I was a bit more discerning. Although the film wasn't bad overall, the technology was often used as a laughable deus ex machina, as Johnson described above. Perhaps more upsetting than the unrealistic use of technology, however, was the disturbing appearance of Harrison Ford's expanding gut, which inconveniently pops out of the bottom of his shirt during a key fight scene. At least he was doing his own stunts, right? (Fortunately, he seems to have shed the paunch for the upcoming Indy flick.)

But back to the point. I would predict that a day will come when Web technology is so well-known and accessible that filmmakers won't be able to employ it as a plot device unless they adhere to the confines of technological reality. But I know that's not true. After all, everyone's been driving cars for quite some time now and Jason Bourne still didn't have to stop at any red lights.

Incidentally, I really miss that typewriter sometimes.

The Flash Mob Mentality

While the concept of the flash mob is nothing new, I'd never actually seen video footage of this type of prank/performance art/social experiment before. (Thanks, Julie!)



The group behind the mayhem, Improv Everywhere, has taken the initial idea of flash mobs to a new level of artistic hilarity. One of their most recent stunts involved sending three people to a Starbucks with huge desktop computers and monitors, where they settled in to do some work and use the cafe's wireless network.

It's ironic and fascinating to watch these "scenes" unfold. Varying numbers of people confidently engage in seemingly nonsensical behavior in public places. In doing so, they actually cause the non-participating bystanders to feel awkward and out of place. Truthfully, watching the festivities and their chaotic aftermath is the majority of the fun. The flash mob phenomenon probably wouldn't have taken off so well in the pre-Internet days. If a man walks into a Starbucks with a desktop computer and 2.5 million YouTube viewers aren't there to watch it, did it really happen?

On the other hand, this sort of performance art-induced awkwardness crops up in off-line arenas as well. Late last year, I read a very entertaining story in the Chicago Tribune (that inexplicably isn't on their site anymore...) about Tino Sehgal's Kiss exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It basically involves two "dancers" making out on the floor of the museum, while museum patrons usually avert their eyes or quickly leave the room without realizing it's an exhibit. In this way, their reaction to the piece helps shape the context and meaning of the piece. (Whoa...that last sentence sounded like something out of an art history term paper or something. Sorry about that.)

So where should the flash mobbers go from here? Since they're based in New York City anyway, I'd kind of like to see them cause this scene:

I should have been a programmer...

How cool is Adrian Holovaty? This guy never seems to run out of ideas. Lucky for him (and us), Holovaty has been blessed with the endless curiosity of a journalist and the technical know-how of a programmer. He already made a name for himself with his Chicago Crime Google Maps mash-up (which plots recent crimes reported by the Chicago Police Department on a Google Map and sorts them by type, date, street, etc.), and his latest project is potentially even cooler.

EveryBlock is a site devoted to telling you more about your neighborhood than you ever knew you wanted to know. Currently unleashed on Chicago, San Francisco and New York City, the site aggregates location-specific (er, city block-specific) data, news and online activity from a variety of disparate sources and organizes it all by neighborhood.

As a journalist, a new media enthusiast and a Chicagoan, I am slightly in awe of this. With the proliferation of innovative online methods for sharing news, opinions and information, EveryBlock wants to serve as both a compass and an EKG machine: Point it toward a neighborhood and it delivers the pulse through a combination of news, data and the latest geo-tagged Flickr photos. What a phenomenal idea!

In his introductory statements about EveryBlock, Holovaty offers a new definition of "news" that is potentially shocking to old school newspapermen, but perhaps quite prescient given the shifts that are occurring in the media industry today.

We like to toss around the word "news" to describe all of this, and that might surprise you at first. Isn't news what appears on the front page of the New York Times? Isn't news something produced by professional journalists?

Well, it can be -- and we include as much of that on EveryBlock as possible. But, in our minds, "news" at the neighborhood or block level means a lot more. On EveryBlock, "Somebody reviewed the new Italian restaurant down the street on Yelp" is news. "Somebody took a photo of that cool house on your block and posted it to Flickr" is news. "The NYPD posted its weekly crime report for your neighborhood" is news. If it's in your neighborhood and it happened recently, it's news on EveryBlock.

At the very least, Holovaty's latest innovation gives whole new meaning to the phrase "citizen journalism" and this could be the start of something big. Stay tuned.

And as long as we're on the subject of programmer-journalists, I definitely should have studied the technology first and then learned how to report. It would have been so much cheaper that way...

Absolutely Scrabulous

I'd been meaning to write about my addiction to Scrabulous almost since I started this blog last summer, but now it appears I've been scooped by the Chicago Tribune.

Nevertheless, it's worth investigating this strange Facebook-driven Scrabble craze, as the Trib says that more than half a million word junkies play Scrabulous online every day. That's an astounding number, especially when you consider the extreme nerd-factor previously associated with Scrabble. When did it become trendy to play a game that encourages you to have a big vocabulary?

An even better question: Why is everyone freaking beating me in online Scrabble? When I have a wooden tray of seven wooden letters in front of me, I can take you down with minimal effort. The words come to me quickly (after all, there's nothing worse than playing in-person Scrabble with an overly discerning Wordsmith), the triple-word scores go my way, and my score soars to triple digits in no time. Not so in front of the computer monitor. I currently boast a disturbingly wretched record of 6-56-1, with 10 games in progress (six of which already don't look very promising). Having spent five years as a student of journalism, words are kind of my thing. As such, I have been subjected to the worst trash talk imaginable via the all-too-convenient Scrabulous message board. Worse yet, I have actually received apologetic messages from my opponents.

"I'm sorry...that was really lucky."

"Sorry....I know you don't like it when I use medical words."

"Wow...how did I do that?"

"I swear I'm not doing this on purpose."

"I didn't even know that was a word."

Herein lies the answer to my question. Why does everyone beat me? Because Scrabulous contains a technologically enhanced element of luck that a flesh-and-blood round of Scrabble simply does not tolerate: A nearly unlimited amount of time to take your turn and a nearly unlimited amount of words that are only words because the Scrabulous dictionary says so. My Scrabulous turns have devolved into a twisted series of trial and error. I put down a series of letters covering as many colored squares as possible, click the "Play Word" button and say a silent prayer that my 32-point gibberish is accepted by the dictionary deity. It usually isn't. My opponents' words usually are. Game over.

But I don't want to come across as completely bitter. Scrabulous is the greatest procrastination tool to come along since Facebook itself and the game lends itself to the leisurely (or not so leisurely) pace of people logging into Facebook to take their turn. I want to live in a world where people play Scrabble in their free time and Scrabulous is helping to make that a reality, half a million people at a time.

Incidentally, does anyone know a word that contains six vowels? If so, I usually have the necessary tiles to put it on the board...
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UPDATE: Uh-oh! Looks like Hasbro is finally taking some action against the makers of Scrabulous. I'm not sure why the company would want to alienate half a million people who are demonstrating their love for Scrabble. Doesn't seem like a smart business move to me. They're probably just miffed that they didn't think of it first.

Look What Google Docs Can Do!

While poking around my Google Reader this weekend, I discovered that Google Documents now gives users the power to not only create presentations, but also to publish and embed those presentations online through a unique URL. I learned some other stuff during this 60-degree weekend as well, but I guess you'll just have to view my presentation to find out about that.

Still Schweddy After All These Years

For your viewing pleasure (and to make this post satisfy my Christmas requirement), a delicious holiday dish from SNL:



I received an early Christmas present in my inbox today--an invitation to try hulu, a new online video site that has partnered with NBC Universal and News Corp. (Fox, among others) to stream video clips and entire episodes of new (and old) TV shows such as The Office, Family Guy, The Simpsons, Arrested Development and many others.

At this point, I would never pay iTunes to download an episode of a TV show, but it's nice to know that I now have the option of logging into hulu wherever I am (as long as my Internet connection is fast!) and watching clips/episodes of some of my favorite shows.

Best of all, it has a fairly decent archive of old skits from SNL. Since well before the dawn of Lazy Sunday, I've been thinking that SNL skits should be available online for repeat enjoyment. Previously, the only way to see old skits was to hope that they would find their way on one of the SNL "Best of" DVD collections or to hope you could catch it in reruns at some point. Enter hulu! I've already found a bunch of old skits that I had completely forgotten about and it's been wonderful--especially since there hasn't been any Schweddy Balls-caliber material coming regularly from SNL in quite some time.

Hulu and other sites of its ilk seem to hint at a larger phenomenon: Media companies have no way of knowing how to harness the online audience and make money from it. All of the media partners on hulu are basically giving their content away for free at this point. Sure, hulu makes you sit through a 15-second ad before each clip and full episodes contain a few 30-second ads, but it's not really a deterrent. This free-but-for-the-ads setup doesn't seem to bother the media company, as long as you're jumping through their online hoop to obtain the content. Take Lazy Sunday for example:

-Shortly after the skit aired almost exactly two years ago (has it been that long already?!), NBC made it available for free download on iTunes.

-Then it got 5 million hits on YouTube.

-Then NBC made YouTube take it down.

-Then NBC sold it on iTunes.

-Then it was back on YouTube.

-Then NBC joined hulu.

-Now it's not on YouTube.

-But it's on hulu.

Did you follow that? Whoever figures out the best way to deliver content in a format that people are willing to pay for will be a rich man indeed. Right now, online video appears to be an alternative to TV, but it's too vast, uncontrollable and publicly available for the media to harness at this point.

Bottom line? Add yourself to the hulu waiting list and watch your favorite shows while they're free!