Hypercrit » Site News

Insert perfunctory apology here

Michael Becker — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:23:12 +0000

At this stage in the game, I don’t really see the point of apologizing for a lack of posts. It happens. This is a blog. Moreover, it’s a blog I write as a hobby, sans pay. So rather than an apology, I thought I’d come at you with an explanation.

Back in September, I took up residence as the first-ever Web Editor at the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, where I had worked for several earlier years as a reporter. Since then, an awful lot of my time has been spent getting some of the paper’s social media accounts in order and working on a Web site redesign.

We’ve seen decent online growth since September. We went from zero to nearly 1,000 Facebook fans during that time. Maybe we could have gotten more fans, but gaining fans wasn’t really our goal. I didn’t push it. Establishing a sustainable presence online was more important than becoming popular quickly.

Most exciting is our Web site redesign. We used the TownNews Blox system. While this system would not have been my first choice — I’m more of an open source advocate — it is light years better than the system we used before. It allows us flexibility in our layouts and allows us to make better use of our archives through related links and deep linking.

Between all of these activities, my appetite for the Web at night, after work and after the boy has gone to bed, has waned. Consequently, my time for blogging and microblogging has diminished.

It’ll bounce back, I’m sure. Bear with me, and feel free to check out the new Chronicle Web site (linked above). I’d appreciate your feedback.

Life Streaming

Michael Becker — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 04:02:58 +0000

Since I don’t have enough blogs already, I’m creating a life-stream blog.

It’s running on WordPress, naturally, and it’s using a plugin that takes RSS feeds and publishes them as posts automagically. So far, it’s pulling in my Diigo links, this blog, my Web Works blog and my Facebook postings. For a little while today, I had it pulling in all of my Facebook notifications, but there was just too much chaff.

In addition, I have told my Posterous blog to cross-post here and I have Twitter Tools pulling in my tweets. Disqus is also autoposting my comments to the everything blog as I make them. I couldn’t find a similar option for IntenseDebate, so I may have to go to the RSS-to-post route.

Why am I doing this? Well, it occurred to me that my postings are spread rather far and wide around the Internet. They account for a significant chunk of my life, and until I made the everything blog, there was no unified record of my online activity.

Now there will be, and supposing that the database or its backups survive long enough, I’ll be able to look back on my online activity for years to come.

A self-serving idea

Michael Becker — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 04:38:54 +0000

I have an idea for a new way to blog. I can’t be the first to think this idea up, but I’m too lazy to figure out the keywords to begin searching the Web to find other people who’ve had this idea. Here goes:

This would be a single blog post, the text of which is updated every morning or night to reflect how your thinking has changed over the course of the past day. For the sake of keeping a record, you could create a new post each day with its own permalink but just paste in the copy from the old post and revise.

In essence, you would be producing 365 drafts of the same post per year, refining as you learn more, adding info, removing out of date information or other bad ideas. You could do one of these per blog or even one per topic area, however you want to set it up.

My rationale: I have a hard time keeping track of what I’ve written about in the past. I tend to forget about things the minute I hit the “publish” button. This way, I would construct a narrative in my head. I would reflect on what I have learned every day. In essence, this would be a diary except that I’m literally building on my old thoughts every day.

I may start this soon. You’ll know when I do because I’ll either add a page just to contain that post-of-infinite-drafts or I’ll make it a sticky post at the top of the homepage. Stay tuned.

Blogging less, working more

Michael Becker — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:00:30 +0000

This is a site update. I just took a new job and it’s eating up most of my computer time every day, so very little time is left for reading or blogging. I’ll get back to the site periodically, so don’t give up on me.

(Every time I make a post like this to say that I’m not going to worry about posting as much, I wind up developing a case of logorrhea within a week or two and am churning out blog entries.)

You can follow some of my work-related posts at Web Works or find me on Twitter.

Look and feel

Michael Becker — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:45:33 +0000

A quick note: The look and the feel of the site are once again changing. I love the Manifest theme that I have been using for quite a few months, but I’ve come to the conclusion lately that it’s time to put a sidebar back into play. Hence I’ve switched to the barebones WP Framework theme, which I believe is meant to be a starter for designing your own themes, but I like the clean look of it right out of the box. No doubt, there will be some tinkering to make it look just right, but we’ll get there in time.

Also, I’ve once again changed commenting systems. Say goodbye to IntenseDebate and hello (again) to Disqus. I’m afraid that, despite the fact that WordPress and its parent company have hitched their wagons to IntenseDebate, Disqus offers a lot of enticing features. Plus, it has more active users, which means that I can get more conversations going through my Disqus profile than I can through my IntenseDebate profile.

Sorry, IntenseDebate. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not you. It’s me. Now on with the countdown...

Tracer by Tynt

Michael Becker — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:34:55 +0000

After reading Zachary Seward’s article at the Nieman Journalism Lab about the new service Tracer, I decided to give it a try. Tracer is a javascript that tracks when people select or copy text from your site. When they copy the text, the script inserts a little “read more” link at the end of what they copy, along with a link back to the original (and a CC license note, if you choose).

I’m not saying that I’ll definitely keep the script on this site. But it will be interesting to track what sorts of things people are highlighting and copying from the site.

I’m a little worried about how it will work with some readers’ text editors. I’ve run into some trouble with it this morning already, but I think those problems were related to the typography and hyphenation plugins installed on the site. I uninstalled them and things seem to be working better now — though pasting into Apple’s Pages is a little dicey.

Also, a handy plugin I have in Firefox that allows me to “copy as plain text” negates the Tracer script and just copies the text without inserting any link. Little quirks. We’ll see how it goes.

New blog theme, one that will stick for a while

Michael Becker — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:33:18 +0000

That settles it, I’m slightly in love with Manifest, a theme by Jim Barraud. It’s got just the clean look I wanted. With a little tweaking, it will serve perfectly.

On that note, look for some of the features of this blog, specifically any posted videos, to look funny. I embedded them all into this blog with width settings appropriate for another theme. I’m not going to go back and fix them, but I’ll embed correctly from here on out.

Design doldrums

Michael Becker — Fri, 08 May 2009 04:49:06 +0000

I looked at my blog today and realized that I hated the design. I suppose I have only myself to blame. I made it after all.

Yet I was possessed of some strange desire to revert back to the default theme, Kubrick. Unfortunately, I changed the hell out of the Kubrick files to create a theme a while back.

For now, I’m looking to simplify, to worry about content more than about design. That may change in a few days. It may change tomorrow. Who knows.

I guess this is kind of like a mid-blog crisis.

Hypercrit 6.5 is coming

Michael Becker — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:41:48 +0000

If anyone would like to take a look, you can check out the demo of my new site design. It’s content-centric and very much a work in progress. It’s probably about two weeks away from going live at this URL.

I welcome your comments, critiques and suggestions, of course.

And yes, I know this is the second redesign in recent memory, but the point of this redesign is to get the look of Hypercrit away from the Nieman Journalism Lab’s site, which inspired me to adopt the current look — plus it was a challenge to see if I could code something that looked that neat by hand. (I did. It wasn’t easy, but it was rewarding.)

So again, I welcome your comments on the new design. Go ahead and leave them here on this post, if you please.

Revolution and the unthinkable scenario

Michael Becker — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 16:03:01 +0000

We are living through a revolution, writes Clay Shirky, just like the one that Gutenberg started around 1500. And all revolutions are more or less the same, he writes: “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff gets put in its place.”

The old stuff getting broken in this case is newspapers. More and more of them are failing or approaching the verge of failure. No doubt dozens more will close by the end of the year, if not more. Why is that?

Because the business model that they operated on for centuries has shattered, Shirky writes. It is no longer difficult and expensive to publish information; the Internet makes that possible for next to nothing, and that is a serious problem for an industry that counted on that advantage to pay for itself.

Shirky’s essay, posted Friday, winds us through a little of the history of the print revolution and, now, the digital revolution. The focus is, of course, newspapers; but separating the problems facing newspapers from the transformation that is happening to the world of printing (thanks to the Internet) is impossible. The Internet didn’t set out to kill newspapers, but it has made good work of it by accident.

This is important to note: The Internet is killing newspapers, the physical product printed on paper and delivered (at ridiculous expense) to customers every day. The Internet is not killing journalism, the practice that is vital to a free and informed populace. However, the Internet is killing the business model that supported journalism, hence the current crisis.

“‘If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?’” Shirky asks. He answers, “Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.”

In fact, he goes on:

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

It’s like the singularity, that point in time and technological development that will trigger so much change that predictions beyond that point are impossible. I’m not saying that the current crisis is the singularity, but I am saying that we are in the midst of revolutionary times. Predicting the outcome of that revolution or what will work when the dust settles is not possible, not yet.

Nobody has any answers for the newspaper industry. There aren’t any. As long as the Internet continues to have at least as much influence as it does now and as long as access to the Internet is as free and open as it is now, there won’t be any answers for the newspaper industry. The Internet is its replacement; now it’s time to figure out what “replacing newspapers” means.

Shirky says that, like all revolutions, this one must have a period of unbridled experimentation. The entrepreneurs and volunteers who will drive (and are driving) those experiments must not be afraid to fail. It won’t be until long after the revolution, when we all have the benefit of hindsight, that we’ll be able to know which of those experiments (even if they were failures) were transformative and vital.