I tweeted this earlier …

we’ve stopped using @trello at @fanzter, but I still love the product. The new board view looks great: http://t.co/fhvRuFN87X #fb

— Sujal Shah (@sujal) June 18, 2013

… which prompted a few people to ask, “Why’d you stop using Trello?”

The answer is pretty specific to us and our particular organizational inertia (such as it is for a small company like us), but here it is:

We liked Trello a lot, but we ended up switching to use Github issues. While it’s somewhat inferior to Trello, it had two features that made it compelling.

1. We use Github for source control, and Trello really doesn’t integrate with that workflow at all. For example, we can manage Github issues from our commit messages, reference them, and comment on them in a place we already have to look.

2. We use Campfire, and Trello didn’t have any integration with it. We could’ve built that, but Github already has it, and so laziness won the day.

In truth, Github issues is pretty nice, too, so it’s not like we’re giving up that much.

I did like Trello’s visibility and the visual metaphor. It also is a lovely app. The other great thing about it was that it was easy to throw it up on the screen and use during meetings. Github issues (or any bug tracker, really), is merely OK projected.

Anyway, all of this might be moot now. Someone did the work we didn’t want to do, and built a service that integrates Github & Trello. We may have to take a look at this.

Almost forgot to mention this: I read the latest print edition of NSFWCorp on the flight here and ended up reading cover to cover. Two great stories. The first one, “The Life and Murder of Anna Loginova“, paints a really worrisome and sad picture of life outside of Moscow in modern day Russia.

The other piece, about immigrating to Canada, is an interesting story, even though it’s unfair to Canada.

Both are going to evoke some disagreement with their conclusions or ideas. Both are worth reading.

Overall, this has been a very different I/O than the one I went to in 2011. Google’s conference is still a different beast than WWDC, even in this current iteration, but in the most important areas, the technical content and types of sessions available, the two are more similar than not.

Here are some observations from this year’s event:

• It’s no less whimsical than it has been in years past. The difference is that many of the whimsical things are very close to shipping or are already available. We live in a pretty amazing time, when you see some of the things people have managed to get working at not-insane prices.

• No announcements for a new version of Android, nothing about Glass in the keynote, and very little “new” stuff in general at these sessions. It’s very odd. On the flip side, that means I’m spending more time at sessions not about Android, learning about the other things that Google is good at.

• On the other hand, the Glass sessions have been packed. I’m sure they were in part because people were hoping for a giveaway during the sessions, but it’s also an intriguing device. If you give up the “always on your face” thing as a requirement to use it, they’re a really compelling accessory for a lot of scenarios. I have a number of cycling related apps in mind, especially tethered to all the sensors on my bike and my phone. At $1500, that’s not a practical use case, but I expect that price will come down to $200-$300 some day, or less. That’s a little more in line with a GoPro + bike computer, both devices that could be replaced by Glass.

• iOS developers should consider coming to I/O. It’s an opportunity to see how another platform does things (more ideas to submit as radars!), sure. iOS is, however, part of a lot of presentations. Google releases support for iOS for things like Analytics, Adsense, their new gaming service, and Google+ login. iOS is also a key part of their web technology discussions.

• The Chromebook Pixel is a gorgeous piece of hardware. I’m still not sure what I’ll do with it, but a guy sitting next to me in a session this AM said it took him 30 minutes to drop Linux on it. Also, the touch screen thing is interesting. One clearly superior use case: scrolling in cramped situations (e.g. airplane, conference seats, etc.) is easier using thumbs with fingers behind the screen.

• I don’t know who chooses the musical acts for I/O, but the last three acts, starting with this year: Billy Idol, Train, and Jane’s Addiction. While I would enjoy seeing any of them, these are definitely “on-the-corporate-gig-circuit” acts vs. Apple’s choices the last 3 years (not including this year): Neon Trees, Michael Franti & Spearhead, and OK Go. While they’re not pop superstars or whatever, they’re all current bands with new albums at the time.

One more day of sessions. I bailed early because I have some deadlines to hit, so I’m working in the hotel. I’m looking forward to tomorrow, but truth be told, I miss my family, would much rather be home and cranking away on Spot.

I was a guest on today’s episode of Where We Live on WNPR. The topic was on Connecticut Startup Culture. Give it a listen, and let the mocking commence (“Check it out, it’s awesome!” groan).

One thing we didn’t get to on the show (and, let’s be honest, there are probably a dozen conversations wrapped into this wax ball of a topic), was the demographic differences between CT and NYC or San Francisco. My sense is, and this is definitely anecdotal, that our mix of entrepreneurs in CT is probably a little older than the folks in those other cities. Probably doubly so in tech.

Before the show, I joked to Gitamba that the prototypical ramen diet isn’t really an option when you have a child at home. Accelerators like TechStars or Y Combinator target that frenetic pace and schedule. That makes sense for their programs, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it might not be the only or best model for areas still building up their entrepreneur base and culture.

Anyway, just an extra thought on the way out the door of the station.

I started backing up my Blu-Ray discs to my Mac this month so I can play them on my AppleTV. It’s nice having 1080p files available without stupid DRM or having to find & load discs into the player.

I’ll write up my workflow once I’m satisfied with it, but you can probably guess it: MakeMKV -> Handbrake -> iTunes + iFlicks. I have an inexpensive Blu-Ray drive for my Mac that’s working pretty well.

The one thing I’ve found that kind of sucks is that Blu-Rays use their own subtitle format (called PGS) that the current version of Handbrake doesn’t recognize. The key there is “current version.” After a lot of searching, I found that the nightly builds of Handbrake have preliminary support for the subtitles in Blu-Ray.

It’s not perfect yet, as you still have to select the right subtitle track. I usually do low quality, fast encodes of a single chapter to test out the subtitle track if I’m not sure which to pick. Not sure if there’s a better way.

Hope this saves someone else a few minutes or a few bucks since you don’t need the MKV tools that are out there for subtitles.

Is it possible to be both really excited and sad at the same time? After this past Friday, my answer to that question is yes.

I’ve been struggling for a few days now to find the right way to express my perspective about the recent changes at Fanzter. A lot of people have texted, messaged, or emailed me various congratulations (thank you all, once again!). To the last one, I’ve demurred,”It’s not that big of a deal.”

But it is.

I am sad because Aaron’s departure marks the real end of an era here. Startups always take on the personality of their founders, and Fanzter is no exception. We are determined, scrappy, and ruthlessly focused on quality, especially when compared to our size. This is almost entirely Aaron’s influence and personality. He’s a very talented guy, and ESPN is lucky to have him back.
 
There’s also a personal connection: Aaron is how I ended up at ESPN and in CT.[1] My career prior to ESPN was enterprisey things, with a lot of fun software projects on the side. Without Aaron finding some of them, liking them, and convincing me to move down to CT, my career probably looks very different. Heck, I’d probably be a solutions architect for some giant company (no offense if that’s your job, but it’s not for me). Instead, I got to build stuff for the best sports web site anywhere, got to be on stage for an Apple event (look for fat Sujal in the background – I’m driving the demo), and got to build some of the best sports apps for iOS & Android.

For those (and many other) reasons, the “Thanks for everything” I said to him on Friday was heartfelt and beyond sincere. I really appreciated having Aaron as a colleague. We’re going to miss his day-to-day influence here. There’s really no other way to say it.

So, that’s the sad part.

The excited part is more obvious and easier to explain. On a personal level, it’s a new challenge and a whole new experience and perspective inside our business. For the company, Fanzter is in a great position. Business is good. There’s a new product launch on the immediate horizon so we’re in a good position to grow from there. Even the pain of learning how to deal with insurance, payroll, etc. is worth it knowing what we’re capable of building.

So, it’s going to be a good, fun ride for as long as we can keep executing. And we’ll keep executing. That’s my promise to Aaron and our team. There’s really nothing holding us back.

That, obviously, is the exciting part. Looking forward to the rest of 2013 and beyond.

 
[1] He discovered some open source sports stuff I wrote and basically suggested I do it for a living instead.

Side note: I just found that MacWorld article (or maybe I forgot about it?) — cool! I wish I had screenshots of the Baseball Monitor widget. It was a fun project. I’m also surprised I’ve never written up the “How I got hired at ESPN” story, actually. ↩

Over Christmas, I hacked together my first hardware/software project. It’s been a long time since I’ve picked up a soldering iron, let alone built something worthy of sharing. It turned out to be a fun little project.

Cause, effect, agency

I got the idea to do a project over Christmas while looking for toys for my son for Christmas. I wanted to find something that would teach him simple cause and effect relationships where he could cause something (e.g. clicking red & blue blocks together) that produced an observable effect (e.g. the blocks changing color to purple). I hoped that I could prime some interest in science. I also really wanted to instill a sense that he can make things happen for himself.

For a two year old, I basically came up empty.

But for a kid slightly older, we’re living in a golden age of hackable creativity. We have 3D printers that are slowly becoming affordable. The Internet makes finding (and sharing!) instructions on building everything from customized furniture to undersea robots easy. Open source and community based tools are getting cheaper and easier to use every year. Several businesses have grown up offering easy instructions and tutorials. (Come on, these look cool, don’t they?)

So, I decided I’d use the four-day Christmas long weekend to hack together a hardware prototype (with help from my wife’s nephew).

The project

For the project, I set out to build a simple thermometer & barometer that I could check from my iPhone. I also wanted it to have some visible indicator that would be fun to look at so my son could check it. As a beginner, I also wanted something I thought I could pull off.

My project centered around an Arduino microcontroller board. An Arduino is an inexpensive open source “electronics prototyping platform” that can be programmed using nearly any computer and a USB cable. Because it’s cheap and freely documented, people have hooked up dozens (if not hundreds) of sensors & other electronics to it.

I had an old kit laying around that I rediscovered after I returned to Fanzter and started working with our resident hardware hacker extraordinaire, Josh. I recommend starting with a starter kit if you’re just getting into electronics projects. You can get several decent options from Adafruit, MakerSHED, or Sparkfun. I have an older Sparkfun Inventor’s Kit, but any from these three vendors will do.

You should go through a few of the tutorials before trying the rest of this to get familiar with the basics of Arduino programming.

Here’s the full parts list:

• Arduino board (got mine from kit, an Arduino Uno R2)
• Breadboard (also from the kit)
• Breadboarding wires (from kit)
• Single LED (from kit, for debugging)
• Bosch BMP085 Barometric Pressure & Temp sensor kit from Adafruit
• Adafruit 8×8 Bicolor LED Matrix kit
• RedBear Lab Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Shield
• A little bit of 0.031″ solder

Tools:

• Soldering iron (I used a cheap Radio Shack model for this build)
• Flush Diagonal Pliers

In addition, if you want to get an app running on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, you’ll need to have a developer account with Apple.

The build out is really simple. The BLE shield snaps onto the Arduino board basically extending the pins and sockets on the Arduino through itself. Just make sure you line up all the pins and sockets. More details at RedBearLab if you want them.

For the LED matrix and the temperature sensor, there’s a little soldering involved. For both the soldering and the basic wiring setup, I followed the instructions in Adafruit’s tutorials:

• Tutorial for the BMP085 sensor
• Tutorial for the 8×8 LED Matrix

Make sure you position the LED matrix correctly before soldering it. I got multiple warnings about that from people.

Here are the results of my soldering job:

I’ll admit, I’m proud of how well that came out considering it was my first soldering project in 20 years.

The only difference in my final wiring from the two tutorials is that I hooked the matrix CLK and DAT pins to the same rows containing the CLK and DAT lines from the Arduino to the temperature sensor. In the picture at left, those are the green and orange wires (Click through for a larger view). This works because they both speak a protocol called I2C and have different addresses. [1]

For power and ground, I used the breadboard instead of hooking the sensor or backpack directly to the Arduino board. This is standard, and what the kit tutorials encourage. Just thought I should mention it, since it’s not directly mentioned in the two Adafruit tutorials above.

The next step is programming the Arduino. Rather than walk you through all the details, here’s the source code. Feel free to fork the project and mess around. I’d appreciate any bug fixes if you have them. To use the source code, you’ll need to install the Arduino software & the Ino tool. I used Ino so that the github repository would have everything you need. To run the project, launch Terminal, then type ino build and then ino upload to get the project onto your Arduino. If you want to see the serial output, you can use ino serial -b 57600 to get that on your terminal screen.

I also have the iOS code available if you’d like to play with that. You’ll need to be comfortable with iOS development to use this. I may submit a version to the store if there’s enough interest. Let me know.

That’s it. The finished wiring looks like this:

When lit up, it looks something like this (only 2 readings are displayed – normally there are 8):

The iOS app is really simple:

Drag up to trigger a connect or disconnect. Eventually, I’ll add a pull down to trigger a temp refresh. Otherwise, it polls every minute.

Known issues

The code isn’t perfect and, as I get free time, I’m still cleaning up a few things. Here are some known issues:

• Bluetooth reliability: For some reason, the iPhone doesn’t seem to disconnect and/or reconnect properly to the device. Pressing the reset button on the BLE shield usually fixes it, which makes me think there’s something wrong in my code.

• Memory usage: So, the main challenge programming an Arduino is that the device only has about 2K of RAM for the sketch. Yes, that’s two kilobytes. It’s a challenging environment when I’m used to phones that have 256-512MB RAM (or more). My code is definitely not particularly optimized. The program did run out of memory regularly. I think it’s stable now, but it’s not as good as I think I can get it.

Next steps

I’m going to try and hook it up to a Raspberry Pi and put it in an weatherproof enclosure so I can leave it outside. My other goal is to change the LED Matrix to an LED strip like this so I can make it look like an actual thermometer.

I’ll update this with photos if I get that far.

Hope that helps someone out. It was a fun project, and I’m looking forward to working on this more.

[1] I2C is a simple two-wire interface to hardware components. I2C allows the Arduino to control multiple devices over just two pins. The Wikipedia page has the gory details, but just know that each device has an address which has to be unique, and then you just wire them up in parallel. The LED Matrix backpack that Adafruit provides provides an I2C interface to the LED matrix, and the Bosch sensor comes on a board that also speaks I2C, so all the work is basically done for you.

That’s more detail than you probably need, but I thought it was neat.↩

Update: Two corrections above, both minor but notable. I accidentally described an Arduino as a microprocessor instead of microcontroller, but then Josh pointed out that it’s really a whole platform because the microcontroller is the specific chip at the heart of the Arduino. It’s a significant detail when you get more advanced because different versions of the Arduino might have different microcontrollers at the heart of the platform.

The other is how I described the I2C wiring in the footnote. The sensor and the LED matrix are wired in parallel, not series. I had a feeling that was the wrong word, but forgot to look that up. Minor detail, but again significant for deeper understanding.

Sorry about both of those. They’re fixed above.

A quick note on this trend I see of people switching to Flickr from Instagram over the various kerfuffles.

My only worry here, as a user of both services, is that I use Flickr as the place to dump a LOT of photos all at once. It’s my library of photos. I use Instagram for those few shots that are worthy of sharing RIGHT NOW.

Even with the grouping that the Flickr app does on my iPhone, I’m not sure it’ll be a good experience for keeping up with everyone’s photos, especially when we all do the occasional post-vacation or family event bulk upload.

Or, maybe it’ll be like Facebook and everyone will be OK with the volume/trusting the feed algorithm. I’m not confident about that, though – there’s a reason I choose Instagram over Facebook. Selectivity & signal-to-noise matter to me.

This is, admittedly, an incomplete thought, so I’ll share it as an observation:

The problem we’re trying to solve is gun violence.

Gun control is a vague label attached to policy ideas. Calling this a gun control debate already cuts off a number of possible solutions that may not involve simply banning guns. The mental health angle that so many folks are talking about isn’t about controlling guns, for example.

We could also talk about mandatory gun safety education. Or tax incentives for using gun safes at home. Incentives or coverage to have periodic mental health screenings just like we do vaccines. I’m sure there are a dozen different ideas out there that I can’t even imagine that might work.

Sure, we will want to talk about gun purchasing restrictions, too. And, yes, there are problems with all of those things I just mentioned, but something tells me there’s not a simple solution that’s going to be perfect to deal with this. The point is to get ideas on the table, then evaluate them. Can’t do that without getting the ideas out first.

Anyway, just a random thought this morning as I spent it with my wife and son. We need to focus on the violence part and deal with the guns as much or as little as we need to in order to reach that goal.

PS: I don’t know what to call people that don’t believe in unfettered gun access… the motivations are quite different among various groups, and as such the common labels seem to carry too much baggage.

On a normal Friday of a normal December, a bunch of families said goodbye to their kids and sent them off to school. Announcements. Meetings for the Principal. A normal Friday.

Then the abnormal sound of gunfire. Of violence. Of death.

And now, the sound of tears, of sadness, of remembering and loss… of fears and nightmares past and future.

I keep imagining what it must be like for the parents of the victims today, especially of the young children. I imagine myself in their shoes, I imagine walking by a now-always-empty room with bright paint evoking happier times.

My thoughts are with the families affected by the tragedy.

When I walk into my son’s class, the kids say “Hi Che’s Dad!” They make me smile no matter how crappy my morning has been. I keep thinking about what someone must go through to walk into a classroom full of children and open fire. Why would anyone want to hurt them?

It’s unfathomable. The loss is unfathomable. The chance and the randomness is most unfathomable of all.

I wrote this earlier today re: discussing gun control policy on the day of a tragedy (slightly edited for grammar):

My only point is that today should be about the tragedy itself, to burn in the news and to cope with the loss & fear of loss that these events bring up.

We get wrapped up in hammering the stats, the policy ideas, and how “stupid” the other side is on this debates today, but the real work is how we keep this in the public eye going forward.

I’m also seeing things like this at TPM that ask good questions. This is the nitty gritty of how we help prevent these sorts of tragedies in the future. Even on the mental care front, how would those laws work?

I’m just incredibly sad & angry about this, and I’m not ready to have those conversations today. That’s all I’m saying.

The response I got from people on Twitter & elsewhere primarily centered on getting people talking about the issues at play while attention is fully on the tragedy. They argue that tomorrow the pain will be a little less for those of us not directly affected. In a month the national media will forget about this completely.

There’s probably a lot of truth to that… the second, little tragedy that goes along with the big, evil tragedy that happened in Newtown.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

So, it seems our job is to keep us from forgetting this bit of our past, to keep it squarely in focus during the next Congress and the next legislative session here in CT and beyond. Take a moment and ask yourself, “What am I doing for the victims of Newtown?”

If you’re upset about this, and want the government to do something about this, learn what you can about the issues at play. What ideas do people have for reducing gun violence? What should we ask our representatives in government to do? Is gun violence reduction about more than guns? Do we need to rethink mental health policies in this country?

As you do learn about these things, contact your representatives in your state legislature, Congress, and anyone else you think is in a position to advocate for better policies. Tell them what you’re learning, ask them to look into the best ideas you find.

There’s always a risk that bad laws get rushed through in the wake of tragedies. This one will be no different, so it’s up to all of us to become smarter about the dynamics at play here and what public policy options people have considered. We need to do something. Let’s make sure that something lives up to the memories of those lost today.

Continuing the theme about how we need to re-learn how to disagree without disrespect in our political conversations, I wanted to recommend the most recent This American Life episode. Called Red State Blue State, it’s a great episode. The first half of the episode has stories of friendships shattered by political disagreements among ordinary people. It’s eye-opening. (ear-opening?)

We need to stop assuming the worst about each other, and recognize that our 50/50 voting split is the result of two highly efficient parties who have reached some sort of Pareto optimal result in the battle for votes. We need to step back, and recenter the conversation away from the language used by people whose goal is to divide us.

That’s a rough thought. More when I have time.

I know how many of you feel this morning. I felt something similar in 2004. You should take some comfort from Obama’s victory speech yesterday. Instead of talking about a mandate, as a certain President did, this is what he talked about:

Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions. Each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions as a country, it necessarily stirs passions, stirs up controversy.

That won’t change after tonight, and it shouldn’t. These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty. We can never forget that as we speak people in distant nations are risking their lives right now just for a chance to argue about the issues that matter, the chance to cast their ballots like we did today.

…

Now, we will disagree, sometimes fiercely, about how to get there. As it has for more than two centuries, progress will come in fits and starts. It’s not always a straight line. It’s not always a smooth path.

By itself, the recognition that we have common hopes and dreams won’t end all the gridlock or solve all our problems or substitute for the painstaking work of building consensus and making the difficult compromises needed to move this country forward. But that common bond is where we must begin. Our economy is recovering. A decade of war is ending. A long campaign is now over.

And whether I earned your vote or not, I have listened to you, I have learned from you, and you’ve made me a better president. And with your stories and your struggles, I return to the White House more determined and more inspired than ever about the work there is to do and the future that lies ahead.

Hold him accountable. But hold him accountable for the things he is and his actions, not the things you imagine him to be.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’d love to talk more with you about your ideas about policy and politics. If you’re interested, let me know. (Democratic friends, you’re welcome, too, of course!)

You can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

Please remember to get out and vote, and if you have relatives who are sometimes reluctant voters, please remember to call them and encourage them to get to the polls.

I have, on occasion, taken the time to endorse a candidate here. I’ve refrained this year. Most of you know who I’m voting for, but more importantly, at this point I know I won’t change your mind. Just go vote.

Instead of explaining my vote, I want to make sure you see what’s happening in Florida:

Chaos reigned in South Florida, where Republican Gov. Rick Scott has refused to extend a reduced early voting period despite lines lasting as long as eight or nine hours, and an emergency lawsuit from state Democrats. His GOP predecessors Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist both extended early voting hours by executive order, and on Sunday Crist called Scott’s refusal to follow suit “indefensible” and “unconscionable.”

As you go to vote tomorrow, watch what’s happening around the country. Regardless of the outcome, these events in Florida or the lines and procedural hurdles in Ohio are unconscionable. We talk about how important it is to vote and how much blood and tears have been spilled to secure the right to vote but then we make ballot access, at worst, a partisan issue, or at best unnecessarily difficult. For example:

Early voting is crucially important to working people, many of whom cannot take time off from work on a Tuesday to wait in line and cast a ballot at the polling place. Many black churches also use the Sunday before Election Day to take their congregations to the polls to vote early, a practice that is especially important to parishioners lacking transportation.

If we really care about the right, and value it, we should make it easier for everyone to find a time to vote. It seems like something we should all be able to agree on. It’s time to recognize how people work in the 21st century.

Either way, getting out to vote tomorrow is important. But it’s also only the least you can do as a citizen. As important as it is, it’s just dipping your toe into the water of our great democracy.

So, I’d like to ask you to make a promise to yourself and to your community: Engage your neighbors in conversation about issues. Find friends & neighbors who voted for “the other guy” and talk to them about why. Be respectful. Try to understand their reasons and ask what outcomes they want.

We talk about politics as if it’s a team sport. “I’m a Republican, I’m an independent, I’m a Democrat.” But politics isn’t a team sport. It’s ultimately about making policy. Policy is choosing, choosing involves tradeoffs, and people legitimately can disagree about what tradeoffs are important. That’s the basis of political differences. It’s not our identity but our choices.

It’s taken me years to understand this. We need to talk with each other more and leave the team identity stuff to the paid partisans on TV. That’s my promise to you for this space going forward. I hope you hold me accountable.

Get out and vote tomorrow!

For folks that live in the Hartford area, my son’s daycare/preschool has set up a nice fundraiser with Moe’s Southwest Grill in Blue Back Square in West Hartford. Here are the details:

On Wednesday, November 7th, print out & bring the fundraiser flyer to Moe’s between 4-8PM and a portion of your order supports the Knight Hall School. It’s that simple. Enjoy some Moe’s and support our school.

The toughest thing about this one is printing out the flyer, so if you forget, we’ll have folks in Blue Back Square with more on hand. Just text me if you forget.

We’re[1] doing another fundraiser that week at Toy Chest in West Hartford center. I’ll post more when I have all the details.

Update: Here’s the flyer for the Toy Chest fundraiser. Same drill, print it out and bring it to the store to support the school. The fundraiser is this week through Friday, 11/9.

We’re also have a 15% coupon for Modell’s Sporting Goods. The coupon is good through 11/29 in the New England region. A portion of whatever you buy supports the school. You can download the coupon here.

Let me know if you have any questions.

 
1. I’m on the board for the school. It’s a non-profit, private preschool that’s been open since 1927. Heidi & I love the school and the teachers, and our son really loves it there, too. If you’re in the area and looking for a preschool or toddler daycare, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Election season can be frustrating. Endless commercials, constant spin, and very little real information about policy proposals by our candidates. Most political coverage is too focused on horse race coverage and inside baseball to help people understand anything. Friends ask me all the time how anyone is supposed to make sense of all the claims, “plans”, and policy proposals.

I don’t have a great answer, but I know that watching cable news or reading most newspapers isn’t going to work. They’re good for understanding what a broad swath of Americans are seeing, but they don’t do a good job cutting through the spin and noise of election season. That requires writing about sometimes boring and complicated details, things that don’t necessarily create sexy headlines and viral pageviews.

I’m a policy wonk wannabe, so I crave that detail. It’s really hard to find. The rise of the “fact check” has helped a little, providing a space where candidate plans get some analysis. Unfortunately, fact checks are too focused on producing a scorecard (“Half true!” “Pants on fire!”) rather than understanding.

That’s because understanding isn’t all facts and figures. Political choices are inherently subjective. Take any issue. Each possible policy choice will bring with it different tradeoffs. Two people can reasonably agree on the facts but still disagree on how to rank those tradeoffs.

Good journalism, then, needs to highlight those tradeoffs, explain why one might choose one over the others, and then connect that to candidates’ positions. It’s unsexy, but critical. It’s also not well suited for a daily news org trying to crank out issues.

The good thing is that we’re living in a really amazing time for journalism.  There are a lot of new business models for journalism under development now. Free but ad supported isn’t the only way. In some cases, you may have to pay a little, but, as the saying goes, if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product getting sold.[1]

So, to bring this back, my answer to how I make sense of this stuff is simple: I’ve been paying for some journalism, some new, some old. If you want to keep abreast of issues in a fairly even-handed way, maybe some of these things will be worth it to you, too. I’ve got a full list at the end of this post, including some of the free stuff I read.

The great thing about many of these sites and publications is that they’re really tech aware or tech friendly.  What I mean is that I can use them with things like IFTTT to read articles wherever I want. It also makes it easier to track things that only publish one or two articles a day. For example, I have articles from NSFWCorp pushed to email so I don’t miss any.[2]

I’ll do my best to keep this list up-to-date as my mix of sources changes.

News products I use & pay for

• The Economist: Easily the gold standard for a news magazine, the first three pages are required reading to get caught up on the news every week. They’re also generally ideologically consistent.
• NSFW Corp: longer form commentary and reporting laced with a strong dose of attitude and interpretation.
• Newsblur: An interesting news aggregator. The popular blur blog is worth the signup alone. (has a free option, too)
• TPM Prime: not yet launched, but it looks good. I use TPM’s PollTracker and follow a few of their writers on Twitter, so have high expectations.
• The Magazine: Brand new, but from someone I trust, I subscribed on day one. Looking forward to seeing how this evolves. Probably will be mostly tech oriented, but thought I’d mention it as a model to keep an eye on.

Free News products I use.

• Evening Edition: excellent daily news summary.
• Wonkblog: A good column that gets into the weeds on issues.
• Daniel Larison at TAC: One of the conservative blogs I enjoy reading, even if I don’t always agree.
• ProPublica: Decidedly non-partisan, they focus on investigative journalism about some of the biggest issues of the day. Great organization.
• The Morning News: I just started reading this last week, but it’s a good mix of stuff to know.
• Twitter: Yes, it’s not a news site specifically, but it’s a great news source. Find the reporters you like reading/watching and follow them directly. They’ll usually promote their best stuff.
• DecodeDC: I’ve backed this on Kickstarter (thanks to Catie for reminding me of this one). From Andrea Seabrook, a veteran NPR reporter, DecodeDC is trying to provide the kind of post-red/blue analysis I’m talking about. The first few episodes are worth a listen. They’re on the blog, available for free.

A note about local, etc.

The sources I covered above are for national news. I do similar things for local news. I would pay for it if I found something worth paying for, but everyone locally is doubling down on the free+ads model, or going non-profit. Locally in CT (for Hartford & West Hartford), I’ve found excellent coverage from our local Patch site (especially their email newsletter), The West Hartford News, Real Hartford, and a comprehensive array of local news folks on Twitter.

There are excellent blogs and new media experiments starting up everywhere. I am more familiar than I probably ought to be with a lot of these because of my time working on Storyline, so ask me if you want pointers. Some good work getting done out there.

One last note

I’m lucky to have a number of conservative or libertarian-ish friends who are respectful of me and thoughtful about their positions. Any time I need an echo chamber check, I know I can hit them up and make sure I’m not missing some aspect to a story or inadvertently tuning out some important, but inconvenient, information.

I can’t overstate the importance of that connection enough. Nothing is more helpful than a good conversation with someone that you respect. Finding good news sources is just the first step.

 
1. From Metafilter. The worst part of the ad driven model is that it forces the business to get the biggest reach possible. This dumbs down the news in order to appeal to the broadest audience. ↩
 
2. Another bit of advice: find ways to get the news in front of you where it’s easy for you. If you take your kindle everywhere, for example, try and get the news sent there. There are free options for that. ↩

Here are a few things I would love to see.

1. Fact checks during the debate

I would love a half-time or a post-debate rebuttal time where the candidates could interact with fact checkers on details in their debate comments. The candidates would remain on stage and someone would go through the fact check scorecard.  If you’ve ever seen ESPN’s excellent PTI show, I’m thinking something like Stat Boy at the end of each show [1] . We’re watching, get us the information right there. I suspect it would cut down on the more aggressive lies or spin and keep the candidates more honest.

My goal is to simply allow a neutral voice into the debates. The point of the debates isn’t to see who wins, but to draw out comparisons and details from the candidates. If 90 minutes of air time results in little information and a “winner” on style points, we’re wasting a precious opportunity IMHO.

2. No debate time limit

As someone pointed out on Twitter:

what force keeps the presidential debate from lasting as long as it has to? If football games can aired be open ended, why not this?

— John Wonderlich (@JohnWonderlich) October 4, 2012

I have no idea why the debate simply can’t go on as long as necessary so the moderator doesn’t have to cut out a “pod” (as Lehrer called it last night).[2] We’re all watching. Let’s get as much out of it as we can as a nation.

Those two things would make a huge difference IMHO.

Of course, the campaigns negotiate every little detail of these things to neutralize any sort of adversity for their candidates, so these things will never happen. After all, the Commission on Presidential Debates is a racket.

 
1. h/t to @KenTremendous via @joehribar on Twitter for that analogy. ↩
 
2. I’m guessing it’s because the debate is ad free air time. Does anyone know how this air time is scheduled and what, if any, compensation the individual stations get? IMHO, yet another great argument in favor of a halftime or fact check epilogue segment. ↩

No doubt, Romney “won” this debate by nearly any measure. He told a better story, he had the right balance of facts and vagueness, and he did a good job attacking constantly even while seeming “nice.”

Obama was too polite, almost tentative to interrupt the moderator, and got too focused in the nitty gritty of policy points. He also seemed taken aback by Romney’s brazen unveiling of yet another tax plan (sorry, tax principles) to start the debate. That move by Romney will probably come under the most criticism by post-debate fact checkers, but as a debate tactic, it was well-near brilliant. It took one of Obama’s key talking points (“Arithmetic!”) away by simply removing numbers from the conversation.

As you all know, I’m an Obama supporter. So, here’s how I would advise him for the next debate:

Arrange the points you bring up to tell a story. Debates can be effective when the points you raise draw an arc about your opponent. The story I would keep coming back to is that Romney will tell the voters whatever they want to hear in order to get their vote. Like any good salesman, he never will tell them the catch. That’s why he doesn’t have any numbers, that’s why he doesn’t want the conversation to be about numbers, and that’s why the American people should demand them.

There’s no need to get into a point-by-point explanation of each of Romney’s flawed assumptions or incomplete proposals. Let the post-debate fact checkers do that. Simply point out that Romney flips and flops based on whatever audience he’s talking to. That new tax plan he unveiled on stage today is simply the latest flip because he knew his old plans weren’t selling.

It kills me to say that, of course, because I’m an Obama supporter in large part because I care about those point-by-point details and care that the arithmetic works on these proposals. Unfortunately, a debate is simply not the place to get into that level of detail, especially one as poorly moderated as this one. There’s just not enough time in 2 minute answers. (This is such a ridiculous format.)

It’s really no surprise that it took President Clinton, a guy who might be the best political orator of our time, to boil it down to one word every answer to every policy question I’ve answered for friends or family.

Arithmetic.

Bill Clinton rocked the DNC tonight. Sure, he might’ve gone on a little long, but for someone like me, starving for a little more policy and a little less sloganeering, it was awesome. I normally wait until the next day to watch speeches (often reading them first) but I’m glad I watched this one live. A prime time speech where someone explained policy for 45 minutes is better than learning about the lovely personal histories of our presidential candidates every single time.

I just care about the arithmetic.

Great speech. If you are interested in politics, whatever your ideological or political affiliation, you should watch this. It’s textbook.

Just a quick post that I’ve set up a link blog on Tumblr called FM Notes for things I want to share or excerpt without blogging more about them. Think Marco.org or DaringFireball style links. I’m keeping them separate for now, but maybe some day I’ll fold them back into FatMixx proper.

Andrea Seabrook covered Congress while working for NPR for over a decade. She quit after getting tired of getting “lied to” daily by Congressmen. She’s launching a new project called DecodeDC to help cut through some of the spin. In one of her intro blog posts about the project, she shared some of her appearance on Talk of the Nation. Worth reading as we approach yet another major election:

“Americans, real people, have bought this line that we are on two teams in this country. There is a red team, and there is a blue team.”

“We vote for people who are going in there to fight red or blue instead of put that stuff down at the end of the election cycle and work on real problems that need to be solved.”

“When we’ve gotten to the point where your partisan stripe comes before your American citizenship, our shared culture, our shared values in this country, then we have a real problem at the federal level.”

A few thoughts on the rule changes Twitter announced for developers using their third party applications. Even if you’re not a developer, you’ll probably be affected by these changes. A good reading list if you want background:

• The original announcement
• Marco Arment’s breakdown of the Display Guidelines (which will become requirements)
• Matthew Panzarino’s rundown at TNW

These guys (and nearly every tech blogger/writter/pundit/dev-with-a-blog) have already covered the crap out of this, and we’re unlikely to get more insight without either action or communication from Twitter itself.

That being said, I had a few thoughts which I wanted to share. Specifically, these two questions popped into my head:

• What is a Tweet? Is it the text you submitted to Twitter? Or is it the reply from the Twitter API? Seriously, it’s not defined in the “developer rules of the road”.
• Who owns the content of a tweet?

The Terms of Service (sec. 5) say the user owns their tweets. How does this interact with their display guidelines? The API made the rights they granted in Sec. 5 real and tangible. I had the ability to get the data out to do what I wanted to with my tweets. It’s unclear to me what these rights mean in this new world, especially in the extreme interpretation where I can’t even quote my tweet without using the official Twitter embed.

One other, recurring yet unfinished thought: Social networks benefit from network effects, too. In other words, the apps I use the most facilitate the most connectivity to other social networks even though they are social networks themselves. For example, Instagram is my hub for photo sharing – Flickr, Twitter, Facebook are merely spokes from that hub. I stopped using TwitPic, YFrog, etc. because they locked down my photos. [1]

So, now Twitter wants to lock down my tweets. We’ll see how they end up enforcing these rules, but I don’t have a good feeling. They’re too focused on monetizing the reading of tweets, ignoring that the value of their entire network is driven by the people writing. My sense is that the people most likely to use third party apps and services are the folks that post the most.  

Will be interesting to see how these things shake out. [2]

 
1. This still drives me nuts about Path, btw. I want my photos on Flickr. It’s why I rarely upload photos to it directly. Actually, for Twitter, the first client to offer easy Flickr integration got me to switch. ↩

 
2. Any bets on which moderate or high profile app will be the first to get their API key revoked under the new terms? Also counts if they kill their own app after a dispute w/ Twitter. You can’t say LinkedIn, since that already happened.

The Nexus 7 is the first Android device I’ve been excited to play with since my first Android phone, an Evo 4G that, quite frankly, sucked. The hardware was great, don’t get me wrong. The software has always been the problem. Apple may not always sell the fastest hardware on the block, but scrolling is smooth, the UI is fluid and responsive, and the overall fit and polish is best-in-class.

So, when Google spent a significant portion of their Jellybean unveil talking about Project Butter, it immediately got my attention. In a clear, direct, and public way, Google was admitting that maybe their prior work wasn’t so good on the performance and polish level. Then they went on to demo and explain the kind of things they focused on fixing. It all made sense and hit the big problems I always perceived.

So, super excited, I plunked down my cash and put in the order. When it got here, I did my usual thing: stopped using my iOS equivalent device for a week or two, and used the Nexus as my primary tablet. [1]  

Here’s what I learned:

The Good

I like this device. A lot, actually. This is the first version of Android that feels complete. It feels downright good. There are apps for most things, even top end indie iOS apps like Instapaper or Temple Run have solid, official ports. The UI is responsive (mostly – more on that in a bit). It’s a solid, solid choice for a tablet, especially at this price point.

It’s hard to overstate the performance improvements over the previous versions. System apps are fluid. Scrolling follows my touch closer than it ever has. It’s great. I imagine on a phone, it’s going to be even better. Compared to my Honeycomb Galaxy Tab 10.1, it’s insane how much of an improvement it is. [2]  

Combine this with improving third-party app quality over the last 7-8 months, and things are starting to look alright. Google has started highlighting top developers and making more staff or editor picks which makes it easier to avoid the scam apps. Plus, they recently announced a tighter set of Google Play guidelines which should only improve the situation.

The Bad

It wouldn’t be an Android device if it didn’t have a few issues. At the top of the list, without a doubt, have to be some intermittent performance bugs.

The first and most debilitating is a degradation in touch response. In other words, you tap the screen, but it doesn’t register or it registers after a noticeable delay (up around 1sec). This is happening to me when I’m playing games, mostly. After some Googling, it seems like this is happening to others.

I’m actually seeing a host of similar issues which seem to pop up when the device gets warm. I’ve also seen tweets like this from time-to-time:

@dhh I’ve actually had the N7 become more unresponsive after a few days and then a reboot fixes it. Might be your issue too, not the patch.

— Joost Schuur (@joostschuur) July 31, 2012

These issues are concerning, quite frankly. My sense is that this isn’t a usable gaming device yet. Hopefully this is a software or firmware bug and can be fixed in a software update.

Either way, when this happens, it basically negates every positive thing I said about the device. These are major bugs – not sure how they didn’t get picked up in development by Asus or Google.

Two other much less important issues:

I miss Airplay when using the Nexus 7. In the last 4-5 months, it’s basically become indispensable. All of our standup meetings at Fanzter, along with all whiteboard-style sketching is done on an iPad or MacBook mirrored to a plasma. Google needs a solution that’s not the way-too-expensive Nexus Q.

In fact, this is keeping me from buying movies on my Nexus 7. I don’t want movies that I can’t watch on my TV. Google gives each Nexus owner $25 to spend in the Play store, so those movies would’ve been free to me and I still won’t buy them. [3]  

The other small issue is that I managed somehow to scratch the screen. It’s my fault, to be sure, but I treated this with about the same care as my iPad. Three iPads later, no scratched screens… Make of that what you will.

Still…

For $199, it’s a great Kindle/Nook/Google Books reader, Netflix/Hulu/Google video player, and internet communications device (to quote Steve Jobs). I just wouldn’t expect to play a ton of games on it until they fix the touchscreen issue. If that’s what you’re looking for, get an iPad or an iPod touch.

I still prefer and recommend an iPad, assuming it fits in your budget. The device is smoother and more refined, doesn’t have these weird touchscreen bugs, and has a gorgeous display. If you’re going for a budget tablet, though, you really should get a Nexus 7.

One last thing: after using this for 2 weeks, I believe Apple has to release an iPad mini. I don’t see how they can leave this form factor and price point open to their competitors. I’m looking forward to seeing what they do next. A 7 or 8″ iPad would be awesome. I’m clearly not the only one who had this thought. My main concern with Apple will be price. At $250, it’s still recommendable to a budget-first buyer. At $299, I think I’d tell them to save the $100 and get a Nexus 7. Really. Well, assuming they fix the touchscreen bug

1. It turns out that I only used my iPad for development work, so I was true to the mission. I haven’t always been successful with the phones. It’s much simpler to temporarily swap tablet than to swap phones, it turns out. Especially when I worked at ESPN and had to deal with corporate IT for email access… ↩

2. To be fair, though, the 10.1 is a monumental embarrassment to Samsung and Google. Seriously – it came out soon after the iPad 2, with better hardware, and still performed like an underpowered phone next to the iPad. Plus, don’t get me started on the lack of an official ICS update from Samsung… this was the device they gave to developers to help them build tablet apps, but they still haven’t updated it to the now outdated release of Android. WTF. ↩

3. Ironically, I used the $25 Play credit to buy games which is the only reason I found the annoying touchscreen issue. I probably wouldn’t have bought any games without that credit… ↩

Interesting observation from a commenter at Asymco:

There’s two (main) kinds of people out there.

One: I buy everything that comes with the longest list of specs.
Two: I buy everything I can operate without a manual.

Tides may shift from One to Two.

I’ve noticed that I’ve definitely migrated to the second camp. I’m a specialist when it comes to computers, phones, and tablets, but I still use products that predominantly fall into that second category. Why? Because when products in that group blend that ease of use with powerful enough features, they can serve both the mass market and the specialists, too.

(Note: I wrote this on Goodreads.com a few days ago as my user review. So, “last night” is actually a week or so prior to this post.)

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I finally decided to ignore sleep and finish this book last night. I’m glad I did.

By now, you’ve heard the standard comments about this book. Yes, it’s not flattering to Jobs. Yes, it provides a lot of insight and details that I hadn’t heard anywhere else including directly from Jobs himself, and so on. Instead want to share my reasons for loving this book.

Jobs is a hero of mine. I didn’t realize this until he passed away… I’m not one to have heroes, quite honestly, and I don’t know if I could honestly name another. But Jobs was one, and it took his death to understand how much I respected him and how much he impacted my life and my career.

The book opened up another side of this man: his demons, his quirks, and his warts. He’s not a perfect man, and that made him more real to me. I got to know this hero better than I ever did. At the end of the entire thing, I understood that these flaws are part of his success, and that his failings were human failings. He’s not perfect, which makes his achievement in his professional life even more amazing.

Heroes aren’t perfect, whether they’re Jobs or Gandhi. Isaacson manages to humanize him without diminishing his accomplishments. Great read, and great tidbits scattered throughout.

(I went into this book a little wary based on some early reviews. I’m happy I ignored those and read it.)

View all my reviews

I’ve managed to stay away from discussing campaign controversies & news (more or less) for years now. Granted, mostly because I’ve stopped reading about them. However, the latest round of attacks on Mitt Romney were hard to miss, seeing as they’re on every TV station and news site.

As usual, I’m annoyed at what grabs the news media’s attention. This seems like a stirred up controversy based on a debate over semantics and SEC rules. Quite plainly, it’s dumb. So, of course the news has jumped on it and the Obama campaign, sadly, is trying to press it as hard as they can.

Fred Wilson, who plans on voting for Obama in the fall, tackled how weak this line of argument is. Good post, go read it.

Granted, it’s been funny to see GOPers talking about how this is a “swift boat attack” on their candidate (perhaps they can now admit they lied about Kerry?).

To me, this is going to end up being a missed opportunity. There’s a lot to attack in Romney’s Bain ties that are legitimate, meaningful things. I’m glad, for example, that Romney’s tax returns are back in the news. I don’t envy the man’s wealth, but it will be the first time regular people get to see how the wealthy manage their money. Have a hobby training horses? Make a holding company so you can write off your expenses. Want to escape taxes while still taking home a lot of cash? Base your income around dividends so you get a flat tax on your earnings.

These aren’t bad or evil things, but they’re worthy topics for a national debate.

Ultimately, we’re facing a decision about whether to work together or not in order to better our country. This isn’t about socialism vs. capitalism. It’s about how much and in what ways we want to be neighbors to each other. That’s the schism we’re screaming at each other about. One party says everyone can fend for themselves. Another says we should hold out a helping hand by default.

(Granted, both vote in ways that reinforce systemic biases within the system — go read that if you haven’t, awesome essay. That’s a topic for another day… and probably someone else. I’m already tired, again, about talking about this stuff on this blog.)

Like many towns, West Hartford has a advertising supported, free weekly paper that’s mailed to everyone. The latest issue arrived today with this as the front page article:

Fire, police overtime nears $3 million in 2010

The Town of West Hartford paid nearly $3 million in overtime compensation in 2010 to police and fire department personnel, according to data released under a Freedom of Information request.

…

Town administrators this year combed through expenses, trimming nearly $1 million from the original proposed budget before approving a 2012-13 spending plan. But in trying to cut, administrators lack the power to control specific items, such as overtime paid to union employees.

You should go read the article.

Here’s what stood out to me: the next several paragraphs (easily the first third of the article) includes quotes by the Republican members of our town council (the minority party) and other claims that collective bargaining is to blame for the OT in 2010.

At first, I wondered why they didn’t include any quotes by the Mayor or from Democrats on the council. Then I realized that I actually didn’t really care about that. I don’t really care about balance in that sense.

What bugs me is that there’s no context given to these numbers or information. For example, the reporter names particular police officers and firefighters who earned a significant amount of overtime. The reporter writes about how the Republican members of the council want to go after the contracts negotiated with the unions. They give particular salary numbers out.

I read all of this and was left with… “and so what?” I don’t know if this is a matter of lazy reporting or tight deadlines and a need to print something or an assumption by the writer that readers are already super informed, but as a pretty regular watcher of town news, I was left with a bunch of questions. I needed context in order to put the numbers in perspective and to understand some of the claims made in the article (both by people quoted as well as the author).

Some questions I would love to see answered:

• What is a typical yearly budget for overtime expenditure?
• What is typical overtime budgeting for towns around the state with similar populations?
• Why did the cited officers get so much overtime pay? How many hours did they work? What was the purpose of those hours?
• What are some of these union rules that drive overtime costs? What union rules do the Republican members find objectionable?

That’s just a small list. These numbers sound big (“$3 million in OT!” – “That police officer doubled his salary!”) but given some context, they may not be crazy. For example, if the officer is working double shifts most days to make up for staffing shortages, that may be reasonable compensation. If he does it every year, maybe there’s a policy change required. How can we tell with the information provided?

I want better reporting from our papers. People might be willing to pay for them if they actually dug a little deeper than a blogger with SEO skills…

We recently got a phone call and a mailer that was ostensibly from our health insurance company that were sent to remind us of a new vaccine that was recently added to the recommended schedule for our child. The part that makes it somewhat creepy is that the message contains a disclaimer that it was paid for by Pfizer.

I haven’t really been able to find out much about this online. I did find a presentation by one of the companies involved in executing the campaign. That’s basically the spiel we got on both the mailer and the phone call.

This seems like a weird escalation in the advertising campaign for drugs. On one hand, I guess there’s a public health angle here, but why isn’t this coming from my child’s physician? It’s not like we don’t go to our scheduled appointments. The whole thing is very odd.

Anyone else get these calls? Do you know what vaccine they’re pushing?

Worth watching these clips. ESPN has one up, but Business Insider and HuffPo have more. I’ll add my two cents: I really wish there were more breakdowns of plays as games happen. One of my favorite post-game blog posts was this one at Yahoo! Sports that broke down Tracy Porter’s interception to end Super Bowl XLIV. It’s insight and analysis that added some insight to the play, and something that could be done realtime with the right tools.

It’s what makes ESPN’s NFL coverage so awesome and, quite frankly, more appealing to me than their NBA coverage. Jaworski, Hoge, and the rest of the NFL live crew do a great job breaking down film. Imagine what good film breakdowns could do for basketball or hockey – both sports are hard to observe unless you’ve played seriously and even then, there’s a lot of detail in there. Would love to see more of that on ESPN.com or on air for basketball or hockey.

Anyway, here are the links:

• Mark Cuban Takes Issue with Skip Bayless (ESPN.com)
• Mark Cuban Also Obliterated Stephen A. Smith On ESPN This Morning (Business Insider)

Yes, I’m linking to BI – I’m sorry for that, but I can’t find that clip anywhere else with a quick search. Mark Cuban is over-the-top, but he’s right here. There’s a place for analyzing why a player didn’t execute, and surely a large part of it for some players is mental, but it can’t and shouldn’t all be armchair psychoanalysis.

The extended interview of Edward Conard from last Thursday’s The Daily Show is worth watching or listening to. I just listened to all three parts while working this morning. It doesn’t come to any conclusions, but the conversation, the terminology, and the mix of perspectives are interesting.

My one observation:

Conard is talking about banks. Stewart is talking about bankers.

Conard talks about the banks going bankrupt, which Stewart would, I think, argue doesn’t harm the individual bankers as much as it does the depositors and pensioners that funded the bank.

It’s a complicated discussion, for sure, but that distinction is at the heart of all of their back and forth. Interesting discussion, nonetheless.

I’ve been thinking about what to do with The Storyline now that I’m not working on it full time. I started working on updates, but after thinking about this for a bit, I’ve decided to take a slightly different course. I’ve realized we had a decent vision for what could get built, but we tackled the problem from the wrong end.

So, to that end, I have a rethink for what the first iteration of the product should be. Quite frankly, it should’ve been what we focused on at Vario, but we got caught up with the cool problem that solved a real, but ultimately secondary need. Basically, we planned out the steps to the big vision in the wrong order.

So, I’m taking Storyline on as a solo side project and am basically throwing away the whole front facing product and lot of the backend and starting over. It will be radically different than what we showed you so far but the grand vision is the same: building a resource that harnesses the best reporting and primary sources to help people understand their world better.

Now, there are some pros and cons about working on this as a side gig: Because it’s a side project, expect it to take a while – months, probably, before the site re-appears. But, because I’m not trying to create a venture-funded business out of Storyline, I’ll be focused on scratching my itch and making a useful product for me. Should be nice thing to hack on while building Fanzter’s next.

I’m also considering treating this like I have Proxigram: keeping the app open source and inviting everyone to come along. I really like what Samuel Clay is doing over at Newsblur, and his business is doing well enough, it seems, even though the core platform is open source.

I’m still noodling over the first set of details. More here as I have things to share. Hopefully this explains the maintenance page for those of you that have stuck with the product.