Eyes East: Latest posts

Iffy

Chris Amico — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:20:37 -0500

James Fallows, on why it's ok to give "iffy" answers to questions about China:

If anyone starts telling you with "certainty" what is or is not going to happen in China, you should mistrust that person -- precisely because of the certainty. There are contradictory pressures, trends, and "truths" in every part of the country every day. You can imagine the current system surviving more or less intact for another generation. You can also imagine it blowing up -- and, after it has happened, either would seem "inevitable" and "pre-ordained." So while this may seem like equivocation, it's actually a reflection of how truly complex the dynamic there is.

There is one essential truth of modern China. This is it.

Two Tricks For a More Interesting VirtualEnv

Chris Amico — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:48:51 -0500

Ian Bicking's virtualenv has become one of those apps I just can't code without (or at least, I hate to code without). I have so many quick-hit, one-off, throwaway apps with so many strange and sometimes conflicting dependencies that I can't imagine how I'd get anything done if they all swam in the same soup.

This is all made better by Doug Hellman's virtualenvwrapper, which makes creating and managing virtual environments dead simple.

Given that, here are two tricks I figured out yesterday that could make things a little more interesting:

Using (Some) Global Site Packages

Part of what makes a virtualenv so useful is that it doesn't inherit any Python packages installed globally. That's also a downside in a few edge cases. One of those is Mapnik.

Mapnik is a tool for rendering maps from spatial data. I was toying with TileStache last night and couldn't get Mapnik's Python bindings to install in a virutalenv. Mapnik itself was installed globally (using homebrew), along with all its dependencies. Boost is the troublemaker here.

After hours--yes, hours--trying and failing to pip install mapnik2 and getting errors saying I didn't have boost_python installed (it is, globally), I was about to just give up and install the entire stack globally. But it made me queasy to have TileStache, gunicorn and whatever other Python libraries I needed for this one thing installed system-wide when all but one dependency could be safely left in an isolated virtualenv.

The trick here: toggleglobalsitepackages

Yes, that's a mess of concatenated words to type. There's also add2virtualenv, which adds just one library to a particular environment.

Use the global Mapnik. Source everything else locally.

Not just for CPython

I've been watching PyPy develop lately and the more I see, the more I want to try it out. But for all the reasons above, I'm a little nervous. How do dependencies work? Can I still pip install pypy-awesome-lib?

Yes, and virtualenv is the answer.

Both virtualenv and mkvirtualenv take a --python argument to set the Python interpreter for that virtualenv. Pass in pypy and you're up and running.

Features as Apps, Apps as Services

Chris Amico — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 12:49:47 -0400

The CMS is a dying concept. Erik Hinton at TPM gets us started on thinking beyond One System To Rule Them All:

Instead of revolving around a monolithic central piece of software, we have adopted the paradigm of feature-as-app. Our frontpage: an app. Our slideshow: a different app. Article publishing: yet another app. You get the picture. At the heart is a simple and flexible API that digests manifold requests from the different applications. For example, Moveable Type is great at publishing entries and updating its database accordingly. Our new system will simply wrap the MT database in a cached layer and incorporate its content. Our new gallery app — currently active on the site — creates slideshows, writing its changes to central datastore as well. The frontpage maker reads from the API and is made aware of MT updates, galleries, and all other content that has passed through the system.

How does this solve the CMS problem? Isn’t this just a metastisized not-invented-here-syndrome?

First, the core of our new system is its input-agnostic API. This makes it easy to drop in replacements for facets that have outlived their usefulness. One day, we may no longer want MT publishing our entries. All we have to do is write a wrapper for Tumblr, Wordpress, or some new backend and we are set. We don’t have to worry about dependencies being broken. Because all requests go through our as-of-yet-unnamed central API, all requests are translated into generic requests. From the point of view of the other apps, nothing has changed.

Furthermore, we are not tied to any language or technology. Through the core of our system is written in Ruby, any language that can make a request to the API — details on this to come in subsequent entries — can talk to Baroque. Rather than design the system just for our needs, we are designing it to be used by future editors and developers who think every feature was misconceived. That’s fine with us. Just drop in something new.

Even better, here's TPM's new front-page workflow:

"The easy way isn't even an option."

Chris Amico — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 14:27:33 -0400

Over the months of the Chicago mayoral race, like a lot of people, I became a huge fan of MayorEmanuel, and the vulgar stream of ad hoc literature that sprung from the mind of Dan Sinker. Which is funny, because I've still never been to Chicago. I should fix that.

Watch live streaming video from pdf2011 at livestream.com

On Building Communities

Chris Amico — Thu, 26 May 2011 11:56:10 -0400

Building communities on the Internet is a new kind of profession. There are an awful lot of technology companies, founded by programmers, who think they are building communities on the Internet, but they’re really just building software and wondering why the community doesn’t magically show up.

From Joel Spolsky, talking about modern community building, who goes on to detail the unique challenges of the field.

Even better, there's a job opening at the end.

Speaking of dated imperialist dogma...

Chris Amico — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 09:57:34 -0400

I've been muttering lines from this all morning:

Props to The Guardian for giving me a way to make extravagant demonstrations of inherited wealth disappear from their homepage. And to other news organizations that remembered there are more important issues at hand than a marriage in someone else's monarchy.

And if you must read something about royal weddings, read what Jeff Jarvis had to write about the last one.

Happy Accidents. And Then What?

Chris Amico — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 19:48:32 -0400

If this was a new startup, a one or two person shop, I’d give it a thumbs up for innovation and good execution on a simple but viral idea.

But the fact that this is coming from Odeo makes me wonder – what is this company doing to make their core offering compelling? How do their shareholders feel about side projects like Twttr when their primary product line is, besides the excellent design, a total snoozer?

That comes at the end of the first post on TechCrunch about Twitter, then known by the shorter Twttr. The rest is history.

Twitter, like Blogger before it, was a side project that turned into something more important than what the team originally thought it needed to build. For me, reading that post sharpened something I've been thinking about over the past few days, as I've been getting ready for Hardly, Strictly Young and helping others gather data on past Knight News Challenge winners.

Twitter and Blogger were accidents, or side projects, that solved a problem, and someone was around (in both cases, Ev Williams) who knew how to turn them into tools for a general audience, and did this as the core product faltered.

There's a parallel here with open source software. Someone solves a problem in the course of doing something else, sees some common functionality and releases it to the wider world where it can grow into a more general tool.

This is what I like about DocumentCloud. Sure, I use the core product, but I also rely on Backbone and Underscore. I've played with CloudCrowd and Jammit looks interesting.

If one day, DocumentCloud shuts down, there's still lots of really useful software I can and will keep using. Beyond building tools, it has helped the news ecosystem.

Every time I use one of those tools, though, a part of me wonders why DocumentCloud is the stand-out among Knight Challenge winners. Why isn't this kind of incremental code release, and the community-building that has happened around it, the norm among winners of a contest that requires open sourcing your code?

The other thing I haven't seen (it might have happened, but it hasn't been obvious) is a major change in direction from any grantees. EveryBlock might be the closest here. it's recent redesign shifts focus from pure data aggregation to community cohesion. But that happened two years after MSNBC bought the site. A few projects have simply disappeared.

I don't have good or easy answers for these questions, and I don't want to pick on Knight unfairly. They've funded some fantastic projects (including some of my past work). But this is part of what I'm thinking going into this weekend's conference, where our goal is to help the Knight Foundation figure out its next steps in building better information ecosystems in local communities.

For $25 million, how can we produce more projects that don't just succeed on their own, but build a better ecosystem for those that come later?

Let's Build a Better DC News Aggregator

Chris Amico — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 22:29:08 -0500

This month's Carnival of Journalism asks: What can I do to increase the number of news sources?

I take the following as given: DC doesn't have a shortage of news, or an inadequate supply of sources. There are three daily newspapers (with metro sections), a weekly, several TV stations and radio on both AM and FM. TBD's community network points to 225 blogs focused on the metro area. Between Wordpress, Facebook, cell phones and cheap broadband access, anyone with an urge to participate in conversation and report news (however defined) can do so.

(A disclosure I'll come back to: My wife's site, Homicide Watch DC is a member of TBD's network.)

The problem (here, at least) is surfacing useful and relevant information in a timely matter. DC has a low signal-to-noise ratio, and, to extend the metaphor, there are large zones of radio silence, but those areas are hard to spot because there is no way to see the entire picture.

So, let's build a better aggregator. The point here is to assemble the many bits of news and try to see the big picture, and from there, to see the gaps.

Start by pulling the RSS feeds of every outlet I mentioned above. Include every blog in TBD's network, the metro sections of the Post, the Times, the Examiner. Text is easier to deal with, so we'll start there. We'll get to TV and radio later.

Run every story and blog post through OpenCalais, tagging it with known entities and social tags. Geocode, probably using code from OpenBlock. Sort by neighborhood, zip code, etc. For simple news stories that are mostly text, none of this is hard. Add some weighting based on voting, or click-through rates, and you have a little Hacker News for DC.

The first goal here is to start driving traffic to smaller sites covering niche issues. TBD's promotion, for example, has been a boon to Homicide Watch, giving the site early exposure that has led (in part) to more attention (and hopefully, eventually, resources).

But the second goal is to start seeing the gaps. Chart how many stories cover Anacostia, or Petworth, or Adams Morgan. How many mention each member of the city council? Does Michelle Rhee still get more coverage than Kaya Henderson, her successor? Now we have a metric to find under-reported stories.

What Business is HuffPo In?

Chris Amico — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 10:38:09 -0500

One reason that The Huffington Post gets a lot of criticism for not paying its bloggers is because most people think of it as a publishing company, when really — like Facebook — it is more of a technology company. Whether the content is paid or unpaid, the site is able to generate a comparatively large amount of revenue from it because of things like search engine optimization, and the way that its editors use their page space: a poorly-performing article will all but disappear from the site almost as soon as it is posted, while a strong one can hold its 32-point headline for hours. The Huffington Post, also, makes itself “stickier” by providing an abundance of links to other articles and to social networking tools.

Nate Silver, The Economics of Blogging and The Huffington Post

Onward to NPR

Chris Amico — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:48:45 -0500

I've been holding off writing this post. It is, for a number of reasons, a hard one to write. Maybe it shouldn't be--but it is.

Wednesday is my last day at the NewsHour. Two years and a week ago I moved across the country with a backpack for a job I was recruited for in a tweet. Since then, I've worked on projects than reshaped how I think about journalism and changed the way I call myself a journalist.

Patchwork Nation got me thinking about local-national collaborations and frameworks for reporting.
The Annotated State of the Union brought context to a saturated story and leveraged the NewsHour's core competency.
That oil ticker taught me to value simple solutions and embrace uncertainty.

There were other, smaller projects along the way, many of which simply taught me to learn from failure and keep good notes.

I'll be carrying all of that with me when I start at NPR next week, where I'll be helping build a platform for reporters around the country covering public policy at the state level. That project is Impact of Government.

Two years ago I couldn't set up a web server or build a RESTful API or do much of anything in javascript. I wasn't much of a CAR guy in the traditional sense (I'm probably still not). I had a vague sense that I liked programming in the context of journalism, but I mostly thought of coding as my wood carving (something relaxing and mostly harmless) after long days freelancing in the emptying newsrooms of the Bay Area. Then someone hired me as a carpenter.

This is all a long way of saying thanks to everyone at the NewsHour. I'll do my best to live up to what I've learned.