Seattle PI Globe, AP Photo/ Elaine Thompson

It is with deep regret that today, March 17 2009, the Seattle Post-Intellingencer has written its own obituary and ceased production of its paper version. In business from 1863-2009, the 146-year old Seattle newspaper served more than 117,600 weekday readers. While the online version will continue, the PI has layed off 90% of its reporters, whittling its staff down to 20 reporters, a shadow if its former self. The PI will certainly be missed.

___Just to disclose that I have no affiliation to the Seattle PI. In fact, I do not recall reading any of their articles, nor referencing the newspaper in online posts or research. Still, one must regret the passing of such an old newspaper that has stood the test of time. Until today.

___My regret is also brought on by my a worry that many other newspapers are also on the brink of collapse, particularly here in Canada. I note that while Canada’s Toronto Star and Globe and Mail circulation numbers are higher than the Seattle PI, looking at circulation by population, they are very much the same. With a population of 528,000 people, the Seattle PI was delivered to 33.6% of Seattle residents. With a population of 2.6m, the Toronto Star weekend edition is delivered to 24% of Torontonians. While you can argue the statistics, suffice it to say that circulation numbers between the newspapers are comparable.

The most widely read paper in the country is the Toronto Star, which, as of the six-month period ending on March 31, 2007, averaged 634,886 copies sold on Saturday, 436,694 Monday to Friday, and 442,265 on Sunday. The second most widely read paper is Toronto-based national newspaper The Globe and Mail, which averaged 410,285 copies on Saturdays, and 322,807 Monday to Friday.

___Perhaps they were simply an organization that lost touch with their readership and deserved to die, dinosaurs in an era of the electronic word. Maybe Seattleites simply do not read news as much as they used to, though I do doubt that. It seems the transition to electronic format somehow went awry for the Seattle PI.

___I can only comment about my own reading habits. I acknowledge that my reading habits are different between online and print newspapers. I use and enjoy both, but they serve me in different ways. Internet news is quick, succinct, efficient, global and targeted to knowledge acquisition. Print newspapers are leisurely, curious, playful, local and mind expanding. One cannot supplant the other.

___I read the vast majority of my news on the internet, though I rarely hit the front page of any newspaper site. I also read widely and internationally. Using the internet I am no longer restricted to regional news. Worthy news is international. When reading with such breadth one can easily get a low signal to noise ratio, or more crudely put, you need to wade through too much crap out there in order to find the news jewels worthy of your time.

___In reading internationally I depend on internet tools to help me find my daily fix of news. I take my top 50 world-wide newspaper sites, filter by keyword, aggregate, sort by reverse date, categorize and serve up my news du jour. With my reading list I can scan the article title and summary. Most articles I leave unread. My browser automatically removes advertising, though global advertising is pretty much useless to me anyway.

___In reading print newspapers I am much more leisurely. Glancing at each page I let my mind wander. Whatever tickles my fancy I read. I entertain divergent opinions and scan topics I would never think about filtering online. You could say that I’m a news window shopper.

___On top of reading from 50 global newspapers I also read over 100 global blogs. Blogs can be entertaining but their signal to noise ratio is much lower than that of global newspapers. While blogs can be entertaining, one quickly realizes that quality writing is a rare skill. The number of blogs I read on a regular basis amounts to a grand total of 5. You really need some pretty sharp internet tools to whittle down the noise out there in the blogosphere, for their sheer weight can literally bury you. To stay on top and search for quality blogs is a constant battle. The ones you find are true gems.

___With the demise of the Seattle PI I worry about the overall content quality of news on the internet. Investigative reporting is so valuable to quality news. Though many blogs try to follow suit, the vast majority simply do not have the talent, resources, connections nor infrastructure to do a good job; not even a good enough job. Good bloggers cite newspapers to bolster their arguments, leaning on them as a reliable news source as well as the inspiration for their blog posting. Real investigative reporting needs real professionals, journalists, like the journalists that just got laid off at the Seattle PI.

___Without journalists internet news would be of much lower quality than it is today. There must evolve a way to reward journalists for their work while evolving news dissemination in electronic format. How this will work remains to be discovered.

Drupal 6's Feed Aggregator works well

I really love Drupal 6′s feed aggregator. It has the ability to aggregate numerous RSS (Really Simple Sybndication) news or blog feeds, categorize them, and keep them current, all in the effort to save you the trouble of going to each news source and hunting for relevant news. All you have to do is chose a category, read the summary and click the link for the article you what you want.

___What the feed aggregator will not do is filter your feeds by keyword. As well, when the RSS feeds are displayed, they can have short descriptions or full article descriptions. These full article descriptions clutter your screen, which I did not want. All I wanted was a link, a short description, and no more. When you are looking at hundreds of articles, less is indeed more.

___My solution was to use Yahoo Pipes. My current Pipes help aggregate 40 blogs (mostly from China), 40 news feeds (world wide), as well as aggregate about 100 other blog sites fed from yet another Drupal site (mostly from Asia). Yes, you can daisy chain Drupal news aggregators! With Yahoo Pipes I was able to filter by keyword, as well as go down to the RSS variable level and truncate full article descriptions. I was also able to eliminate duplicate entries and sort by article date.

___The difficulty was that my cron jobs were not completing and therefore not updating my feeds. I would get a MySQL server has gone away error, which means that my Yahoo Pipes were taking too long to complete. My Site5 host provider said that MySQL has a timeout of 15 seconds. One timeout will kill the cron job, leaving the other news feeds not updated. The Cron jobs were returning 1.2MB to 2.5MB error logs of not very helpful information. Web searches yielded very little on the MySQL error message, how to get my cron jobs to complete, and on increasing the efficiency of Yahoo Pipes.

___My original cron strategy was that I only needed to update my feeds every 3 hours, so I scheduled cron as such. What happens is that all the feeds need to be updated at once, the cron job gets overwhelmed, dies, and most of the feeds do not update.

___An alternative cron strategy proved to be the solution. I scheduled cron to run hourly, even though my feeds did not need to be updated no more than every 3 hours. A staggering pattern organically emerged. Those jobs that were easily completed were quickly done, and did not need to be updated for the next 2 cron jobs. Those jobs that took longer initially timed out. During the next cron job, because the easy feeds were already completed, there were far fewer feeds to run, so the cron jobs could concentrate on these stubborn few. In the end they were also completed.

___I used some other Yahoo Pipes strategies. I broke up one larger Yahoo Pipe into two, though I think I will try merging them together later. These larger Pipes should be run hourly, even though they may only change every 3 hours. If run hourly they will return with fewer updates but more quickly and therefore will have less of a tendency to time out.

___Take a look at my feed aggregator at DonTai.com and my Yahoo Pipes if you’re interested.

___I tried other alternate RSS solutions but they did not fulfill my requirements. Google Reader will aggregate RSS feeds but does not provide any filtering capability. Feedrinse will aggregate RSS feeds and filter, but there is no way to truncate full length RSS feeds. I could use a feed reader, but then would not be able to share my aggregated feeds with multiple people on the internet. A feed reader may be better for those who WANT the full article anyway.

___In China, blogs and blog service providers get shut down on a regular basis. No explanations or warnings are given. This is what happened with a large Chinese blog provider Bulldog.cn last month. A blog that has run for one year is considered to be long lived. Search for the most popular blogs in China and you’ll find many that are posted on local blogrolls no longer exist. Here today, gone tomorrow. You’ll find previously vibrant URLS shuttered, all content gone, no comments allowed, no explanation given. It’s all very subtle.

___I’ve seen ChinaSMACK on many blogrolls. Yesterday the site was functional. There were graphics but no content nor comments. Today it’s gone. Here is Google‘s text-based cached version. How would you like to play a technological cat and mouse game with the China Communist Party? The situation even has famous Chinese artists looking over their shoulder.

___It’s not that blog providers want to get shut down. They are gently squeezed by warnings from the police about what their customers are posting. When the level gets too hot, they talk to the blog owners and try to get them to tone down their language. After warnings, the blog providers take action and censor, because if hey do not, then the government will, and they could be out of business.

___One might think that the purpose of a blog in China is freedom of expression, to shout out the inequalities of society, to initiate and participate in change, and to promote democracy. It’s a noble thought, but is blogging effective? If a tree falls an no one hears it, did it really make a sound?

___Alternately, maybe the purpose of blogging in China is a benign tool to allow the Chinese to blow off steam, like a psychological pressure relief valve. As long as people don’t plan gatherings, blogging at home by yourself is pretty safe. More importantly, blogging is not an effective tool to promote democracy and freedom. That’s the theory of Rebecca MacKinnon, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Center. After all, there’s no harm done, so let people blather along, with only a mild risk of arthritis in the fingers. When the pressure gets too high, the censors smack it down, and hard.

___There have been cases where blogs have informed local officials of wrongdoing and low level officials have been slapped on the hand. I question the ability of a blog to garner enough support to get Chinese citizens to protest in public. There are serious repercussions that await the Chinese nail that sticks up. Even when the government has a complaint process, people still get hauled away, put in “black jails”, sent back to their village, then get sent to a real jail. What’s to be done when human rights lawyers and others suddenly disappear? These cases are not uncommon. In fact the Chinese government technological arsenal includes a country-wide firewall, and a long list of banned words, supposedly distributed every couple of months to internet service providers.

___Happy blogging. You might think of your Chinese brethren as you type.

Links:
China’s Secret “Black Jails” Hold Sordid Tales of Injustice, and my comments.

Technorati Profile

I sure was not disappointed. I only got around to looking at the first 10 pages of themes, and the first 10 pages of plugins. There sure are a number of very busy WordPress themers out there.

The move was painless. A simple export and my data was downloaded. Another simple import and my data was uploaded. Starting and configuring WordPress was really easy. The work started when I began looking at themes.

It’s difficult to get a variable width 2 column theme. It really is. I did not want the banner to be overly large, for the sake of precious screen real estate. I also did not want a dark background with a dark font, resulting in minimal brightness contrast. It’s just harder for everyone to see. Cool, yes, but not good web usability.

I settled for the theme “Default-Enhanced”. While I am unsure of the origins of the graphic, the layout suits be very well. Navigation is boxes has a light blue background, showing some contrast from the main content area. Headlines are in red and really stand out. The included widgets should do me well for a while. I do like the “tag cloud”.

I tried other themes. Tarski had an interesting banner graphic but was fixed width. Sunset met with approval from the elder weed, but was too orange for my taste. I did like the flexible width, though. Maiden-Voyage was fixed width, with a very sunny flower graphic, was judged to be too flowery for me.

I downloaded and installed a couple of plugins. AJAX seemed a good idea and should help me speed up editing, but after I installed it I did not see much difference. More experimentation is probably needed. It’s a little complex. The Askimet plugin was a no-brainer; Who does not want less spam, and I already had a WordPress.com ID, so what they hey. I added a plugin to upload and store my photo. That was standard on WordPress.com. The plugin “Post Teaser” is pretty useful, truncating your post to 100 words and adding a link to the full article, the number of words and how long it would take to read the article. I like it a lot.

I’ll let it run for a while and see how it shakes out. My RSS aggregators have been updated and the overnight CRON jobs should run and pick up my new site tomorrow. In all it’s been pretty painless, no-eventful and even a tad boring, all thanks to the very smart architecture of WordPress. Many thanks to the designers.

Foresight is when you think of your customers long before you or they know you will meet. WordPress is great software.