Links for 10-29-2009

• Strobist: Brain Food: Three New Offerings - Lighting is something I've never really gotten into. Maybe I should one of these days.
• Technology Review: A Note on the Type - The geeky but important matter of web fonts.
• magCulture.com / editorial design - Obviously has an agenda behind it but interesting stuff here. Things like Conde Naste's troubles notwithstanding, magazines are generally in a much healthier place than newspapers.
• A New Financial Model For News, Straight From The Cable Industry | paidContent - This is really just a different billing mechanism for a paywall and has the same problems. And if you do something like essentially add a tax to ISPs that gets divvied up among content providers you're effectively mandating a subsidy.
• DRM by any other name: The latest from Hollywood | Freedom to Tinker - " If it's going to work on my iPhone while I'm sitting in an airplane, the entire video needs to be stored there in advance. Furthermore, if the video is supposed to be "high definition," that's a bare minimum of 5 megabits. (Broadcast HD is 20 megabits and Blu-ray is 48 megabits.) Most home DSL or cable modem connections either will never go that fast, or certainly cannot maintain those speeds without hiccups, particularly when sharing the line with other users. To do high quality video, you either have to have a real broadcast medium (cable, over-the-air, or satellite) or you have to download in advance and store on a hard drive. And, of course, once you've stored the video, it's just not that hard to extract it. And it always will be. The challenge for Hollywood is to change the incentives of the game."
• Charting US newspapers' decline | Media | guardian.co.uk - A striking chart of circulation changes.
• The Media Death Spiral - Megan McArdle - Depressing opine. But I think that Megan is probably right on multiple counts. "Maybe there will be jobs, online. But if so, more web outfits are going to have to get into the habit of paying salaries that will support an adult middle-class life. Right now, a lot of web outfits tend to churn through twenty-somethings who are also building their resumes . . . but I'm not sure how well this works in a world where a job churning out blog copy for pennies a word is the last stop in a journalistic career, rather than the first."
• William Vambenepe — Exploring “IT management in a changing IT world” - Interesting framework for looking at IT. Ops/apps is a useful division.
• The need for clear data licenses :: High Earth Orbit - I have more issues with Creative Commons than Andrew does but a good look at the issues around licenses for data.
• Speed versus accuracy in journalism: towards a new debate | Regret the Error - Thoughtful piece. The opinions pretty much mirror mine.
• ASCII by Jason Scott / GeoStupid - The erosion of the Web's memory.
• Can We Secure Cloud Computing? Can We Afford Not To? | Rational Survivability - Good high-level take on security and cloud computing.
• Lighter Than Arrogance - TIME - "Modern media did not invent greed, eccentricity or lust for attention. What they did was monetize them. There have long been odd families and obscure men pursuing bizarre theories and cobbling together flying machines in their backyards. But only in the reality-TV era has unstable behavior become a valid career choice."

Links for 10-22-2009

• SEOmoz | Explaining (Some of) Google's Algorithm with Pretty Charts & Math Stuff - A lot of interesting detail related to Google ranking algorithms.
• Chart Shows How Few Missions To Mars Succeeded - Space - io9
• Against 'Moneyball' | The New Republic - A critique of Lweis' Moneyball.
• Shakespeare, Plagiarism Detection and Authorship | PlagiarismToday - I know that I tend to reuse phrases and so forth. I'd be curious to run a number of my pieces through this some day and see what I find.
• Information Retrieval Gupf » Music and Exploratory Search - I find myself increasingly letting services and software create my playlists for me.
• Emerging Internet Trends: An Analysis of Mary Meeker's Web 2.0 Summit Presentation - RWW's analysis of Mary Meeker's presentation.
• Kirk's Rants: Monty, Stallman, MySQL, Oracle, and Sun: Open Letter Wars - As one of the comments puts it, well-articulated rant. I have no idea whether all the specific allegations therein are true or not.
• Adobe demos next-gen erase tool in Photoshop | Deep Tech - CNET News - "Every time Photoshop gets something like this, some folks--not without some reason in my opinion--get concerned that we can't trust the veracity of the images you see. But let's be clear: while the ease and sophistication of editing is increasing, photo manipulation has been going on for more than a century. And the way I see it, the profusion of digital cameras and ease of posting photos online probably reality is being documented in unretouched form more comprehensively than ever. "
• This Photo Is Lying to You | Outside Online - Good discussion of manipulation in nature photos.
• Mary Meeker's Internet Presentation 2009 - Mobile will be the incremental driver of Internet growth.

A Few Thoughts on Photo Manipulation

CNET's Stephen Shankland writes:

Every time Photoshop gets something like this, some folks--not without some reason in my opinion--get concerned that we can't trust the veracity of the images we see. But let's be clear: although the ease and sophistication of editing is increasing, photo manipulation has been going on for more than a century. And the way I see it, the profusion of digital cameras and ease of posting photos online probably means reality is being documented in unretouched form more comprehensively than ever.

I guess I largely agree although I was a bit shocked at the amount of manipulation that apparently happens in nature photography according to a recent article in Outside Magazine.

It's fair to say that the amount of "casual" manipulation will probably continue to increase. By this I mean the post-processing of fine art photography and other pictures that primarily serve an aesthetic purpose. Or the routine elimination of telephone poles and other distractions in snapshots posted to twitter.

A lot of photographers will decry this trend and I sympathize up to a point. Especially because there's rarely a hard line between art and documentary. But it's probably inevitable--at least outside of organizations that have strict editorial policies.

To their credit, news organizations have generally maintained strict policies and aren't especially tolerant even of what some might dismiss as minor retouching. Which is as it should be. One day you're removing an awkwardly positioned fence post. The next you're making the subject of a news photograph look more handsome or more haggard.

Stephen's other point on the increased documentation of reality is doubtless true. Indeed, there's now a game based on the concept.

Furthermore, with photographs from a variety of sources so widely distributed, we've already seen a variety of cases where readers have spotted alterations as likely would not have happened in an earlier age.

The general conclusion I draw is that, while photography has always been a selective reality, the arbitrary photograph will increasingly be "optimized" to a degree that would have taken, at a minimum, considerable effort in the past. At the same time, many sources and many eyeballs will tend to both capture and confirm reality when it matters most.

Links for 10-21-2009

• What is Layering, and why does it matter? - Gabe Knuth - BrianMadden.com - Rundown on layering concept in client-side virtualization.
  
• A Visual Guide to Computer Cables and Connectors - Identify The Right Cable Easily - If you're familiar with A/V and computer hardware, there's nothing here you won't know but a nice rundown on common cabling for those who aren't.
  
• Kefir: Interesting Thing of the Day - I'm quite fond of Kefir.
  
• Schneier on Security: Ballmer Blames the Failure of Windows Vista on Security - "Security warnings are often a way for the developer to avoid making a decision."
  
• Mark Logic CEO Blog: Gartner Sued Over Magic Quadrant for Alleged Damages of $132M plus Punitives of $1.3B - Pretty nice summation.
  
• 10 Things You May Not Know About Memcached | Gear6 - A lot of these characteristics are why the idea of a memchached appliance could make sense.
  
• The Song Decoders at Pandora - NYTimes.com
  
• Code: Flickr Developer Blog » Small Bridges (to Proximate Spaces) - Some interesting stuff about the "web of data" in the context of photos and the Flickr API.
  
• Swissdisk suffers spectacular cloud snafu • The Register - Another online data loss. Don't think these problems negate the potential value of cloud-based storage but they do raise questions about trusting any single cloud provider for storage of primary data.