• ifmoneygrewontre.es (for showing off the things she wants to buy, but can’t/won’t/shouldn’t)
• ukulel.es (because I wanted an .es domain, too)

Aren’t we clever?

There’s a photo gallery at the GO website, and courtesy of Tom, YouTube clips of Jimmy the Uke playing “When You’re Smilin’”:

and Jimmy, Steve McNie, and me playing, “We Will Rock Uke”:

I think there are different jobs that make up a twenty-first century journalist. One is to be a highly intelligent filter of information coming in. Another is to be an expert in reputation and reliability systems so that you are able to know who a reliable source is because there are so many sources, right? Another is community manager. Managing a community of people who have knowledge and interact with you as a journalist. Knowing how to have not just several dozen sources in your little black telephone book that you use to do your beat, but thousands of sources. Tens of thousands. And how to work efficiently with large groups of people to synthesize information is important. And also important is how to take the greater knowledge we have coming from how people use the internet. Because everything people do online is recorded. How to take this information about what people are clicking, what they’re interested in, where they’re going on the web, what they’re doing now. And treating it as clues to demand. Produce into that demand, without reducing yourself to simply a ratings-driven, click-driven reflex machine.

I think the most successful journalists are going to excel at various hybrid forms of traditional reporting, editing, checking, verifying and new forms of gathering, managing, interacting with people.

(via Jenny)

Episode 56 – Jim Dupree: Moon Enthusiast

Just north of our apartment in Corktown, the development at the corner of Dundas and Parliament continues. Yesterday, I noticed these harbingers of gentrification:

A good chart can take an elusive concept and clarify it in a visually appealing manner.

It’s pretty cool. You can dynamically generate charts using URLs. Their example turns this:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World

into a pie chart:

While this _is_ pretty slick (and Google’s service generates many, many types of charts), I think this is as good a time as any to remember that pie charts are terrible. SEED magazine summarizes findings from Bill Cleveland (emphasis mine):

although we’re good at comparing linear distances along a scale — judging which of two lines is longer, a task used in bar graphs — and we’re even better at judging the position of points along a scale, pie charts don’t bring those skills to bear. They do ask us compare angles, but we tend to underestimate acute angles, overestimate obtuse angles, and take horizontally bisected angles as much larger than their vertical counterparts. The problems worsen when we’re asked to judge area and volume: Regular as clockwork, we overestimate the size of smaller objects and underestimate the size of larger ones, to a much greater degree with volume than with area.

(via Tom)

(via Jason Agnew)

I noticed something strange earlier this week. Peter’s Cajun Creole Pizza, our favourite pizza place, was dark before midnight. Then, Tina left a comment at this blog suggesting that Pete’s has been “shut down by the landlord.”

Tonight, upon closer inspection, I confirmed that Pete’s (and Peter’s Corner) are indeed closed, and there are notes on both doors from the landlord.

Not good.

Where will I get my panzerotti fix?

At around 46 minutes into episode 79, Joel Spolsky mentions brochureware-style web design:

You know the kind of site I’m talking about? It’s just like you can imagine it printed on glossy paper and being given to you by hand. And it just doesn’t look like a web page.

But it’s the next line that’s the kicker:

It’s on the web. But it’s not of the web.

And right there, Joel put his finger on exactly what bugs me about so much of what CBC does online, particularly with radio show websites. Yes, it’s on the web. But it’s not of the web.