Had a few problems with the website yesterday, my apologies. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to worry about the repercussions of having my blog linked to from a high traffic website like reddit.com. 20,000+ people trying to visit in appox. 8 hours was a bit more than I usually see. Things should be returning to normal today.
Tech week apparently rolls on here on my blog, because as you may know, Windows 7 launched yesterday. It’s the latest in a series from Microsoft that promises that this version will be so much faster, more secure, and less prone to crashes than the last.
Basically, the same marketing script I remember from the Windows 95 launch!
Republican Mark Neumann announced his campaign for Governor last week and launched his new website over the weekend at http://markforgov.com/
One interesting thing about the site is that the Neumann campaign used a local web firm to design and develop it, in contrast to his opponent Scott Walker who used an Ohio based firm to design and develop his website. Walker caught some heat last month for shipping the work for the website out of state while using the site to criticize Gov. Doyle for shipping jobs out of Wisconsin.
Neumann’s site was registered by a company called “c 21 Interactive“, who oddly enough don’t appear to have developed their own website yet, based in Waukesha. c21 Interactive also appears to share a mailing address with another marketing firm, Avicom, who also does website work, so it’s hard to tell who actually did the web site for Neumann. Either way, all signs point to Neumann wisely picking a local web firm to develop his site and avoiding the questions Walker was faced with after shipping his web site work off to Ohio.
Neumann also has created a Twitter account at http://twitter.com/StrongWisconsin. In what’s becoming something of a theme however, he’s using it in a slightly different way than his competition, Scott Walker. Walker uses Twitter more as a way to broadcast tool, mostly ignoring the “two way conversation” aspect of it. Neumann on the other hand appears to be using it to reach out and converse with other Twitter users, even answering questions by Twitter users. It’s a much more appropriate and beneficial use of the technology in my opinion, but in a larger sense, it’s just a continuation of Neumann continuing to contrast himself and Walker, which for his campaign makes sense.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention Appleton businessman Mark Todd! He’s also running for Governor as a Republican, despite being constantly overlooked and ignored by the traditional media.
I’m on a bit of a roll with rap artist birthdays lately, so how about this: Tupac Shakur, had he not been killed in 1996, would be turning 38 today. Happy Tuesday!
I also failed to note that my Red Wings lost the Stanley Cup finals last Friday night. They had a great season and all, but losing the championship is always tough.
Eugene Kane blogs today about the irrelevancy of blogging and asks, “The end of blogging?”:
Just a few years ago, citizen bloggers were all the rage. They were actually going to replace the mainstream media, remember?
The successful blogs in today’s media are actually pretty mainstream, particularly political blogs that are frequently cited by newspaper columnists or editorial writers. The days of solitary citizen bloggers sending their opinions out into the blogosphere to attract attention seem to be a thing of the past.
As this article points out, it’s more about Twitter and Facebook these days.
This is interesting – and incorrect - on a number of levels. First, the hype about ‘citizen bloggers’ that reached it’s fever pitch just a year or two ago was inflated by the very same traditional media that’s now predicting it’s death. You couldn’t pick up a copy of the newspaper or periodical that wasn’t hyping how these “citizen bloggers” were going to change the world(!).
People who write weblogs that happened to be filling the considerable gaps in local coverage by the local traditional media never set out with the goal of being labeled some silly ‘citizen blogger/journalist’ tag. They did it because there was a need for coverage of local events the traditional media wasn’t willing to waste their time on.
Ironically, it was the very same traditional media who’s lack of “real” issue coverage provided the opportunity for regular folks with weblogs to make a niche that was gushing over this new corps of average Joe/Jane reporters. In their race to sensationalize and exploit a pretty simple concept – average people taking more interest in their communities – they only continued to emphasize the ‘style over substance’ mentality that was in part the cause of their own struggles and decline.
Secondly, about Twitter and Facebook… That’s either a gross misunderstanding of what those services do, or an admission that you have no idea what kind of role weblogs serve.
Twitter and Facebook – two services I utilize myself – are nothing more than tools. Useful and practical tools to be sure, but tools the same way that weblogs or email are. They’re different kinds of tools that fit different kinds of jobs. For someone to say weblogs are useless because Facebook or Twitter is “where it’s at” is about as ridiculous as someone stating that every screwdriver and saw in their toolbox was useless because they were momentarily pounding a nail into a piece of wood with a hammer.
Over the years, it’s become easy to identify people who talk about technology and emerging social networking & communication tools but have zero understanding of their utility because all those people share a common trait: predicting the death of one tool in order to justify their excitement/focus of the ‘next big thing’.
Listening to some ‘experts’ out there, e-mail has been ‘dead’ for nearly a decade. Yet it remains the most popular way for people on the Internet to communicate period. The same with weblogs. The same will happen to Twitter, and the same will happen to everything after that. In some ways, it’s the nature of people who don’t truly understand any of the ways these things can, do and will work in harmony as part of a complete tool box.
That’s because as impractical and limiting as it would be for me to have nothing but a set of hammers to be able to use in building a house or fixing my car, it would be impractical to rely solely on something like Twitter with it’s limits of 140 characters and limited reach.
How could I have gotten past the first sentence in writing my thoughts here if I had to rely just on Twitter? Or Facebook?
Of course, the inverse is true as well of weblogs. Sometimes a weblog isn’t the right tool for quick blurbs about where I’m at or what I’m doing as Twitter might be. Likewise, there are a million things that Facebook does that no weblog can ever hope match.
So when I need to write something that requires both thought and explanation unencumbered by length or word count, I’ll use my weblog just as when I need to change a spark plug, I’ll skip over the stapler or hex wrench and select the right tool for the job.
Or more likely, as I do today, I’ll continue to use the tools together to make the combined product more effective than any one could be on it’s own.
Finally, I get that perhaps it was just an off the cuff remark by Mr. Kane, who’s articles I enjoy in the MJS, and nothing serious was meant of it. But I also realize that his employer has gone all in first the weblogging craze, then the Facebook thing, and most recently you couldn’t open up a copy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel without being forced to get the “Twitter angle” in every one of it’s stories.
Perhaps if they spent less time jumping from craze to anointed craze or spending resources on silly ‘tweet shows’ that add zero value to journalism where they show elderly folks “why the craze matters!” as a way of justifying their own attention to it, and focused more on, you know, reporting the news instead of capitalizing on a fad, they wouldn’t be slashing jobs left and right.
As for the answer to Mr. Kane’s question, “The end of blogging?”… Well, I don’t get into the business of making predictions in the world of technology, but I’d bet a small wager that the “citizen bloggers” like me are still here and still digging long after the Journal Sentinel has declared bankruptcy and closed it’s doors.
Channel 12 once again proves why it is gaining a loyal following among Milwaukee residents who want more local news from their TV stations instead of “gotcha” sensationalism that several other stations provide. Even if it’s in high definition.
As I and several others pointed out earlier in the week, Scott Walker’s own campaign website criticizes the Governor for our forcing jobs out of Wisconsin, was in fact developed by an out of state firm. Hard to have credibility with that issue if you aren’t willing to put your money where your mouth is.
Channel 12 ran a piece about the web site last night you can watch here.
As the guy from Layer One Media pointed out, the excuse the Walker campaign gave that his website was “too complex” for a Milwaukee firm is utter nonsense. Then the campaign says the website was “cheaper” with the Ohio firm anyways. So which is it? Either a local firm couldn’t do it, or they were more expensive. As you can tell from the answer Walker gives in the interview, he doesn’t even seem sure himself.
Not that it matters. When you’re making a huge deal in your campaign about “keeping jobs in Wisconsin”, you need to walk the walk.
Details are still trickling in, but it turns out that the wait and last minute push by myself and countless others in Milwaukee and Southeastern Wisconsin paid off.
Overnight, the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee voted to create a commuter rail authority in Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha counties funded through a rental car fee.
They also voted to allow Milwaukee County to impose a 1% sales tax that would allow the County to remove transit, parks, cultural programs and emergency medical services from the property tax levy.
As you may recall, I was heavily involved the group that was behind the passage of the referendum last November, the Quality of Life Alliance, so this is really just mind blowing news. To have worked on something so big and with so many moving parts and six months later have it bear fruit… it’s an amazing feeling.
Even more amazing is knowing that finally, Milwaukee County and all of Southeastern Wisconsin can start playing catch up with the rest of the Country when it comes to our mass transit system and how we fund our parks and cultural programs.
More soon I’m sure, but I wanted to get something out there early this morning.
Great work by all those involved. We made a very hard push last night with several State Senators who were on the fence, and who’s support in making this happen was crucial. Everyone deserves a huge round of applause.
Kudos to all those involved in getting Milwaukee recognized by the United Nations as one of the world leaders in water technology! We’re joining an elite group of cities identified as leaders in their respective areas.
The United Nations on Tuesday will designate Milwaukee as a U.N. Global Compact City, making it one of 13 such cities worldwide, in a move that will help the region promote its image abroad as an international hub of water technology.
The 5-year-old U.N. program obligates member cities to showcase progress on issues that involve human rights, environmentalism, health or labor standards. Milwaukee’s application centers on water quality, with a pledge to tackle a catalog of projects ranging from the development of sensors to monitor water safety to pilot technologies meant to strip radium from underground aquifers.
Milwaukee becomes only the second such U.N. city in the United States alongside San Francisco, which champions a Business Council on Climate Change that encourages Bay area companies such as Google Inc. to adhere to low-carbon environmental practices. Milwaukee is also the second U.N. city anywhere with a focus that involves water. The other is Jamshedpur, India, where Tata Steel’s giant mills are working on industrial sewage treatment projects. – jsonline.com
Couple quick pieces of good news:
Happy post-Earth Day!
Are the latest financial reports from the Journal Communications group – owner of the major radio, TV and print media outfits in Southeast Wisconsin – good or bad news? Depends on how you look at it I suppose.
On one hand there’s this headline from today’s Business Journal of Milwaukee:
Journal Communications’ net income drops 98 percent
Then there’s this piece from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel itself:
Journal Communications reports small profit
The bottom line is Journal Communications squeaked out a $120k net profit in the first quarter of 2009.
I’m not one of those who cheer the death of local media like it’s some kind of sick bloodsport. There are many people behind the scenes who are just trying to do their jobs, feed their families and who believe in the work their do, but after reading this article by journalist Jeff Jarvis, (Thanks Sonya for the link) I find myself with little sympathy for those who were actually in charge while the proverbial ship has been taking on water, and to boot are giving themselves raises and stock options for their shortsightedness.
Whether or not the industry is doomed is besides the point right now. There should be some serious questions asked of those in charge about why they were so slow to adapt to change, if in fact they could have even done so. I know the common bogeyman is the Web, craigslist, blogs etc. But those things didn’t just pop up yesterday, ya know?
It’s like the American car companies being shocked that the demand would drop for the gas guzzling SUV’s that were Detroit’s cash cows for so long. No one could have saw it coming, right? Except for the foreign car makers who were producing smaller, more efficient cars to anticipate market demand years in advance.
So what are companies like Journal Communications doing, if anything, even at this late hour to compete and change their business model? Putting annoying full page ads on your web site isn’t going to right the ship in the long term.
One interesting line from the Business Journal that caught my eye? The biggest loser in the Journal Communications trifecta of newspaper, TV and radio was it’s radio operations.
Revenue from radio stations was down 21.9 percent, to $13.2 million, from $17 million. Operating earnings from radio stations was about $800,000, compared with $3.5 million a year earlier.
Journal Communications owns many radio stations across the Country, but it’s flagship is the conservative right wing talk station here in Milwaukee: WTMJ 620.
Several months ago, I made a bit of a splash by detailing the amount of money the State of Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board spent on developing a web site to track and manage the campaign finance reports political campaigns.
People were surprised to learn that not only did the web site cost an astonishingly large amount of money – $2 million – to develop, it was outsourced to a Connecticut company that delivered a product that was not terribly functional or well done. In short, we paid a lot of money as taxpayers for a system with less functionality than my weblog, and to top it off, it’s never really worked very well.
It’s disheartening to hear that a full two months after I wrote that original piece, and several more months since the system was supposed to be functional, that the problems with the Campaign Finance System web site continue.
From today’s Journal Sentinel:
Candidates were required to file reports Feb. 2, and most of them said they did so. They said the reason their reports weren’t available publicly was because a newly developed state Web site is riddled with problems.
Officials with the Government Accountability Board acknowledged problems with the campaign filing computer system but said candidates may be at fault in some cases.
The state board says the new system has problems, but that campaigns should be able to file their reports. Computer developers are continuing to work out bugs, said Jonathan Becker, head of the board’s Ethics Division.
In my personal and professional opinion, when you submit data to a web site that disappears or can’t submit data at all, it’s not a “bug”.
If that’s how the GAB is choosing to classifying these substantial problems, it goes a long way in explaining why months after it was launched, this web site that should allow the public to keep an eye on campaign finances is still not working properly.
This is why when I originally blew the whistle on this project and detailed it’s massive cost and shocking shortfalls, I made the case for having a group of IT professionals involved in big projects like this in an advisory role of some sort.
Such a move would prevent many of these problems from happening and help the non-technical staff deal with vendors when problems do pop up. As anyone who works in the industry knows, there’s a big probability here that the vendor is pulling out confusing technobabble here to cover their mistakes and redirect the blame.
It’s how massive functional failures are labeled as nothing more than “bugs”, and if there was appropriate technical staff to push back against the technobabble these issues could resolved more quickly and with less cost to taxpayers.
Months delayed and well beyond a reasonable cost, it’s about time the Government Accountability Board either have the vendor they paid several million dollars fix the site, or cancel the contract and find a company that will be held accountable – preferably from Wisconsin – who can.
I live in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI with my wife Jen, our daughter Emerson, and sons Carter and Colton.
I'm the President of The Park People of Milwaukee County, President-elect of the Washington Heights Neighborhood Association, an elected official of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, a union leader, community organizer and transit advocate who is working to make Milwaukee great again. I've been writing this weblog for nearly ten years ... read more...
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