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About Me
I'm Michael Koby, and I love technology. I'm also a programmer, currently doing Ruby on Rails development for a small Houston startup. Here I talk about technology, programming, politics, movies, music, and anything else I feel I need to talk about. If you would like to know more, you can check out the About page.Popular Series
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Will Crowdsourcing News Online Kill The Newspapers?
As the newspapers meet in secret to discuss how they are going to increase revenue and look at suing various online news aggregators (like Google News), I have discovered something that will probably only increase the speed at which newspapers will die out. I recently posted about reaquainting myself with FriendFeed. I mentioned in that article how FriendFeed’s shining gem is in how it helps crowdsource the news and as such can help people find news that really matters to them on a wide range of topics.
Social news aggregaters have been around for a few years, one of the most popular being Digg. Digg is one of the few that really aggregates a large number of topics under a single site. Other aggregaters exist and some are even topic specific (like DotNetKicks). Social news aggregaters allow news items to be crowdsourced and have only the most popular (and hopefully the most relevant) bubble up to the top of the heap. This allow users to only grab the best (as decided by community) and never have to see the stuff that no one cares about (they can of course choose to browse these if they want).
So if I can subscribe to the RSS feeds of these aggregaters main pages, I can essentially only see news items that a large number of people deem important. I’ve cut out the newspaper, CNN, BBC, almost completely (one would assume that links to these things would pop up on these aggregaters). This means that I get real news and avoid the fluff.
Of course the downside to this is I am at the mercy of the masses. Digg is a perfect example of a news aggregator that has become little more than a mouth piece for the American left-wing. In fact, I had to stop using Digg altogether because it was so hard to get away from people spouting left-wing propaganda and refusing to listen to facts when presented from a different view point. When that happens the news source becomes worthless. It can no longer be trusted. In order to have a well balanced news intake, one must look at all viewpoints to determine truth and accuracy. There are ways around this, and I’m sure someone will eventually be able to come up with a aggregation site that can’t be gamed (or at least one that is difficult to game).
People have already (mostly) moved to getting their news online. My local newspaper has raised it prices 2 times in recent memory in order to combat fewer print readers. Long term, the general public will come to look towards the educated masses to help them select what news to read, most (if not all) of it will be done online. The printed newspapers are attempting to hold onto their dying media with a tight grip, but it’s usually when you hold on to something tight that you start to you lose your grip on it.
Posted in Commentary
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links for 2009-06-23
Posted in Daily Links
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Physical Media is Dead (Again)
Apparently, people really like to declare physical media as a dead medium. While I can understand, more people are moving towards streaming Netflix and finding ways to download their media, I still feel (as I said in February of last year) that physical media is not going anywhere any time soon.
If you read this article from CrunchGear, you’ll see that the article and the people commenting that “physical media is dead” and pointing to the fact that they “stream from netflix” or “use bit torrent” to watch their movies. And while this is most definitely the case, that geeks are streaming/downloading movies more than buying them, the rest of the non-geek population is not. We as geeks live in our own little world and regularly forget that the rest of the world doesn’t think like us. They also do not (for the most part) act like us either. Which means, when they want to watch a movie they either buy it from the store, rent it from Blockbuster or Netflix, or watch it on Pay-Per-View off their cable/satellite boxes. Watching on Pay-Per-View is about the closest to streaming a movie onto their television that the average consumer gets.
The average consumer of audio/video mediums prefer having the physical media. That’s just how it is. Now, in reference to this and the article’s attack that people aren’t buying Blu-Rays I say if that was true, the Blu-Ray section at my local best buy wouldn’t take up an entire front and back of a very long store shelve. Also, people aren’t buying Blu-Rays because they cost more than DVDs and in case you forgot, we’re in a recession and that means that people are watching their spending. If they can get a movie for 12-15 dollars on DVD or spend 25-30 on a Blu-Ray, chances are they’re going to buy the DVD over the Blu-Ray. And since the report in the article mentions that people are buying fewer DVDs, in this particular recession it looks like that most people are opting against both movie mediums. We’re in a recession, so people buying less is no great shock, but lets keep it in mind when we’re looking at the purchasing of a non-necessity okay?
Just to reiterate, physical media is not dead. It is also not dying like we geeks think it should. The average consumer is buying fewer DVDs and skipping Blu-Ray because we’re in a recession. Before you count physical media as having bit the big one, consider all the pieces.
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Trying to Use FriendFeed More
I’ve made a concious decision lately. I’m going to use FriendFeed more. What is FriendFeed? Lets see if I can explain this. You have a blog right? Flickr account? Delicious? Digg? You get the idea. You write to your blog actively, upload photos to Flickr regularly, and bookmark sites to delicious daily. When you create an account at FriendFeed, you tell it about all of these sites and accounts. You can even add things like your Amazon Wishlist, YouTube account, Google Reader shared articles, and many more. You tell FriendFeed about all these sites, accounts, and things so that it will aggregate it all into a single place. Your friends on FriendFeed can then subscribe to your FriendFeed account and see updates as they happen. Twitter posts show up as you post on Twitter, new blog posts are aggregated, and new photos from Flickr are displayed. With me so far?
FriendFeed’s been around for a nice little while. You might have even heard someone mention it. It’s a little like Twitter in that people will at first, have a hard time understanding it. But it is a nice and interesting way crowd source news.
And that’s where FriendFeed’s shining gem lies. As people get on the service and begin marking “Like” on different articles and share various findings from the web you can find a lot of interesting articles on a lot of topics. Everything from information on the latest Iran election riots to iPhone news.
With all this in mind, using FriendFeed takes some getting used to. It’s different than Twitter. And it requires a lot more than just casual observence. You have to read the articles and “Like” things and comment on items as well. You have to be involved. While I don’t have the time to focus on it full time like some people do, it is a nice way to see what’s going on. If you utilize it’s Groups feature you can really segregate your news by subject. But it still works best when you follow people that talk about the things you’re interested in. That is where you will derive the most value out of the service.
I’m hoping that over time I can really come to understand the full power of FriendFeed and find a way to integrate it into my daily online routine. This is going to take time though.
Michael Koby 
State of Wireless in Linux Distros
Over the past few days I have downloaded a few different Linux Live CDs. If you don’t know what a Live CD is, it is a bootable CD that boots into a completely working Linux desktop, allowing the user to test the Linux distribution without having to install anything to a hard drive. It’s a nice way to try distributions without formatting or installing anything.
The reason I downloaded these Live CDs is so I could test other Linux distributions (distros) and check to see if they would work with my wireless device, since all the computers in my house run on the wireless network. I can’t install a Linux distribution unless it allows my wireless device to work “out of the box” (without needing to download additional drivers).
Sadly, I have to report that attempting to install Debian’s latest stable version from a DVD or a Live CD, neither had my wireless USB adapter working. Same goes for the Fedora’s latest (released just this month). Also sad, my wireless USB adapter uses a chipset who has released driver source code specifically for Linux, so it not working on two major Linux distributions is disheartening. Ubuntu seems to be the only major distribution that supports my wireless adapter from the get go.
There in lies the problem. Wireless is now an important part of computing. While my main concern is my desktop, none of the CDs I tried had my wireless working without major hoops on my work provided laptop either (Dell Latitude D830). And wireless is pretty much standard on laptops these days. Wireless has to work and it has to be painless. Fedora had my wireless network working, but it wouldn’t find my wireless G compatible access point for some reason. Even typing in the SSID (network ID) manually didn’t help get it to work. The Debian Live CD didn’t even activate the wireless at all, and the install DVD said I needed to install firmware off of a removable drive, but it didn’t tell me where I could download said firmware.
Just to note, yes, I can do a google search to find the firmware. And yes, I could install the distribution and then download, compile, and install the wireless device drivers manually. I’m quite capable, but that’s not the point. The point is that, since driver source code is available from the chipset manufacturer, it should be included already. I understand something not working because of lack of support from the manufacturer, but when they are already making the them available in a Linux friendly fashion, why do I need to download, compile, and install? Shouldn’t the distro handle that? What if a non-geek has the same hardware I do, would you expect them to know how to compile? Even if you do expect them to, they won’t do it. They’ll simply move on.
Again, wireless needs to work out of the box, you can’t expect non-geeks to go and download wireless device firmware especially if you don’t tell them where to go online to find it. I understand that the main reason this is still an issue is because manufacturers are not opening up their drivers or releasing drivers that can be used in Linux. We’re in the year 2009, can’t we just please have the drivers so we can run the operating system we want to run? I guess that’s a taller order than we thought.