Hey gang,
Sorry it’s been pretty quiet recently. I moved to a new place, have been busy with the day job and a few freelance gigs and I’m also writing for Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits a few times a week — feel free to check that out too (or if you have tips, please feel free to send them my way). I’ll usually post a link in the Jambalaya if I report something that isn’t already here, but the jambalaya tends to run a bit more nimble than EMT, due to the editing process.

Anyway, I’m heading to Poynter this week for the “Big Ideas, Best Practices” conference this week. There’s going to be a live-blog and tons of really great info-sharing, so definitely check that out. I’ll see you when I get back and the dust settles.

Cheers,
Will

Update @ 11:30 p.m. 5.26.09 - We’re at about 78% strength now. The pages are still missing, I think I’m going to have to rebuild those from scratch. And some photos are still missing (those may be gone for good). I haven’t tested all the plugins yet, but have most of them installed and configured.

My (soon to be former) webhost, 1and1, has offered one month of free hosting (Approximately worth $9) to compensate for the week of complete down time and 30+ hours of development time resurrecting the site on my end from archives and backups. They haven’t helped with that at all.

It’s my own fault though. 1and1 had a three day outage about a year ago in the spring and after that I bought hosting from the vastly-superior and highly-recommended,  WebFaction, to make the move off 1and1 but started just using my WebFaction account as a development/learning environment.  I should have dropped 1and1 all together and avoided this disaster. Once I get this site back up to full strength I won’t make that mistake again.  

I also should have also backed up more frequently and I wouldn’t have had to go through all the Wordpress database changes from 1.9 to 2.7. (Which is where I think I lost the Pages.)

Lessons you should take from this: 1- Back up your site frequently.  2- Never, ever, ever, ever use 1and1.com for hosting.

—

Earlier - As you may have noticed the site had been completely down for a week now. 1and1.com, the hosting company, had a hardware failure and has pretty much lost my (and from what tech support told me 27 others sites) that were hosted on the same server. They’re trying to resurrect what they can but it’s not looking good.

I’m working through some of my old backups to resurrect what I can, so please excuse the database errors, missing pictures and whatnot during the transition.

Thanks for your patience and for reading Journerdism,
Will

PBS legend, Charlie Rose, has been interviewing a lot of leading media and Web execs this Spring about the future of the Internet and media. This weekend I finally got around to working my way through all thoughts from the mogul minds and I highly recommend you find time to do the same:

• A conversation about print journalism in the digital age with Arianna Huffington of Huffingtonpost.com and Tom Curley of the Associated Press

• A conversation about the future of newspapers with Walter Isaacson of “Time,” Robert Thomson of “Wall Street Journal” and Mort Zuckerman of “The New York Daily News”

• A conversation with Marc Andreessen, co-founder and chairman of Ning and an investor in several startups including Digg, Plazes, and Twitter. Best known as co-author of Mosaic, and founder of Netscape. He is on the Board of Directors of Facebook and eBay

• A conversation with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

• A conversation with Marissa Mayer, V.P. of Search Product and User Experience, Google

• A conversation with Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn

• A conversation with Evan Williams, Co-founder of Twitter.com

• A conversation with Jeff Bezos, founder, president, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Amazon.com

• A conversation with Chris DeWolfe And Tom Anderson, founders of Myspace.com

While we’re at it, here are a few old but goodies from last year:

• A discussion about Google and emerging technology with Ken Auletta of The New Yorker

• A conversation with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com

• A conversation with Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine

• A conversation about Wikipedia, web technology, and the future of search with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia

A year and a half ago, Microsoft Live Labs released an interesting interactive multimedia experience called Photosynth. It’s basically a 3d-ish environment created from hundreds of photos. You can zoom in, out, view different angles and details of the photosynth environment you create. Microsoft has detailed instructions on how to shoot and create a Photosynth on their site which is very helpful.

Here’s a handful of recently produced Photosynth examples (in their publication order):

• National Geographic’s historical landmarks
• St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sue the T-Rex Photosynth
• CNN’s “The Moment”
• Inauguration Photosynths Mapped by Microsoft
  
• Washington Post Lincoln Memorial | Air & Space Museum | American Indian Museum

I’d been jonesin’ to try this new technology out after I saw National Geographic’s experiment with it in 2008. So at the Post-Dispatch, we created a photosynth of Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex (an exhibit at the local science center) in the beginning of 2009. Our multimedia intern, Ryan Gladstone, shot hundreds of photos of Sue at multiple angles in the Science Center and Brian Williamson, Erica Smith and Gary Hairlson helped stuff it into the Internet and skin it to our site (as well as offer an example to Mac users who can’t view Photosynths).

Having gone through the exercise now (and having seen a few others follow in our footsteps), here are some thoughts about the technology, it’s benefits and it’s limitations:

+ Innovative experience
It’s gotta be said. When this technology works, it’s really, really cool. Photosynths are a great interactive experience to explore a place/event/thing. I think anyone who saw the Blaise Aguera y Arcas Seadragon demo from TED had their mind blown. (I just watched the original demo again and I’m still excited about this idea — especially the ability to have almost inifinite zoom in visual experiences.)

- Low penetration
Unfortunately, barely anyone has the Photosynth plugin installed on their computer. So your users are going to have to download a sizable plugin to view any content you create.

- Only PC & Intel Macs
The other major, major (!) technical issue, is Photosynth is only built for PCs and Intel Macs. So straight away you wipe out a sizable chunk of your audience. I’m really not a fan of this at all, so I doubt we’ll do many more of these until that issue is fixed or until we can find a workaround/solution. It was a nice experiment but not something I’d want to subject an audience to regularly.

- Image Quality
The download time for the image quality is a bad proposition. Since Photosynths are a high-bandwidth challenge, images are compressed substantially. Part of me thinks I’d rather just have a Boston.com Big Picture experience with just huge, beautiful, sharp, clean pictures than a grainy, small, 3d-ish expereince. It’s early though, bandwidth and the compression technology will improve.

- Graying reality
Photosynths can raise ethical issues among photojournalists. Unless you are shooting an inactive object or have hundreds of cameras simultaneously set up to actuate at the same moment, you’re going to get a whole lot of ‘gray area’ for what happened at *that* moment. A good example of this is CNN’s “The Moment”, if you poke around you’ll see multiple versions of Barack, some smiling, some not, some with his hand raised, some not. So photosynths can create a blurred or grayed example of reality, which can be a bit slippery if you’re billing something as an exact moment in time.

- Navigation
As with any new technology, it can take some time to figure out the Photosynth navigation interface and how users are supposed to interact with the content. It really relies on the user to be curious and persistent. (I wouldn’t want to unleash this on any of my elders because of this.)

+ Collaborative media potential
What is also really exciting about Photosynths is the opportunity to create collaborative multimedia experiences with your audience — and imagine mixing video clips into this too!

So overall, Photosynths are interesting, but there are some large technical, navigation and software penetration issues to resolve before this becomes any sort of ‘mainstream’ multimedia expereince. It’s an exciting development though and the immersive deep-zooming technology could definitely become a fixture in our lives very soon. In some senses, the multi-touch experiences on iPhones parallel the Photosynth navigaton experience.

Hey gang,
The feeds appear to be working fairly regularly now! Please let me know if you see anything funky (email will [at] journerdism.com).

Thanks for your patience and for your attention.

Cheers,
Will

As you may have noticed, the feeds from this site have been all sorts of jacked up. My feed (through Feedburner) has been working on and off (mostly off) the past week. Google says their working on it. It’s not just my feeds either — Google asked Feedburner users to migrate their feeds over to Google’s servers (it was all done by Google though, I just had to click a button to migrate them) and evidently some of the tubes  have been busted because the feeds have been producing 502 errors fairly regularly.

All the aggregators that take my feed, run it on their sites and make advertising money off of it are probably pretty bummed.

There’s hasn’t been an official ETA on a fix, although my feed count moved from zero today, so something’s going on. In the meantime, that means to get your Journerdism jambalaya, you gotta come and scoop it off the site yourself.

I also should take this moment to get another meta matter on the table. I haven’t been posting many longer entries recently, mainly due to time constraints keeping the Jambalaya flowing and (I think) also because I’ve been microblogging on Twitter more. I have a handful of entries half ready for publication and hope to start getting those out on the table soon.

Thanks for your patience and for your attention.

Keep up the good fight,
Will