Oddly Together

Good Reporting starts with what You've Got

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 08:51:57 -0700

I’ve got a pointer for bloggers and journalists, that’s probably unnecessary: Use all resources on hand when writing.

Late yesterday, I posted: “Google has lost control of Android”. After I completed writing the nearly 2,000-word missive (it’s longer now), I went to a Forrester Research tablet report received on Friday to look for a chart. I had planned to write a separate news story on the report and hadn’t read it before writing the analysis. How stupid.

There are two charts in the report, and the second one contains data that supports the main point my analysis makes. Had I seen that first, and the supporting text, I would have structured the story quite differently and written something shorter, since analyst Frank Gillett so affirmatively supports my main premise.

After posting, I inserted a second lead paragraph and changed the first, to clearly refer to the data. The analysis doesn’t flow as well as I would like, when adding in Frank’s tablet forecast, which is fault of my original construction not his data.

The point: I should have looked at his report before writing one word of my analysis.

Photo Credit: Tony Hall

Do you have a journalism story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.

I made a friend while walking. (Taken with instagram)

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:48:02 -0700

I made a friend while walking. (Taken with instagram)

In what alternate universe am I? Spaghetti O’s cost HOW...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:53:33 -0700

In what alternate universe am I? Spaghetti O’s cost HOW MUCH? (Taken with instagram)

Last week, I bought Train’s new album ‘California...

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:06:00 -0700

Last week, I bought Train’s new album ‘California 37’. It’s a surprisingly good listen, with one helluva anthem in track “You Can Finally Meet My Mom”, which I only discovered this morning (shows how little free time I have). Coincidentally, tickets for Train’s US tour for the album went on sale today.

The song is musically and emotionally rich. The lyrics are timely, but not timeless. That’s okay. The linked video is bit of introduction to what I consider to be the best song on the album.

The best songwriters are good storytellers. The most moving music evokes a story from your own life, as surely this one will for many.

Everything about this track is oddly together.

Do you have a music story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.

I spent some time playing with Neko, with one hand on his...

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 21:09:00 -0700

I spent some time playing with Neko, with one hand on his feather wand toy and the other on the Fujifilm FinePix X100. The camera is light and features a real viewfinder, which made composing the images easier while shooting action shots one-handed.

Do you have an animal story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.

The Queen of Aggregation Takes the Prize

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 16:06:51 -0700

When I look at changing news media and things that go oddly together, Huffington Post and the Pulitzer Prize would be two of them. After all, Ariana Huffington is the queen of aggregation, right? Yet one of her reporters took the coveted journalism award this week. Could it be that—gasp—there is a place for new world-old world journalism after all, or that one becomes the other?

I’m a harsh critic of Huffington Post, and an unfair one at that. I don’t read the site ever and haven’t closely followed changes since being acquired by AOL only to really be the one ultimately taking charge. Huffington is Queen Bee over AOL news, make no mistake about that.

Huffington Post reporter David Wood took the Pulitzer for national reporting:

Awarded to David Wood of The Huffington Post for his riveting exploration of the physical and emotional challenges facing American soldiers severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan during a decade of war.

Wood won for series “Beyond the Battlefield”.

Over at ReadWriteWeb, John Paul Titlow puts the Pulitzer win in context:

In 2009, the company launched the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, a $1.75 million effort designed to support investigative journalism on economic issues at a time when the economy was in deep recession and newspapers were not exactly booming either.

By the time the AOL merger began to be executed last year, HuffPost had already nabbed seasoned journalists from places like Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, often coaxing them with promises of greater editorial freedom and fewer of the kinds of constraints inherent in print media.

On April 17th, I tweeted: “You don’t want to be a dinosaur (old news media) when a meteor (Huffington Post) strikes the earth” and linking to Columbia Journalism Review story: “Six degrees of aggregation: How The Huffington Post ate the Internet”. It’s a riveting read for any blogger or journalist.

I’m the dinosaur, and the meteor has struck. Can I or those like me survive? Dunno. But I will end my personal Huffington Post boycott and seriously start moving with the future rather than being flamed with the past.

To the Queen I ask: Could you use another peasant?

Photo Credit: Huffington Post

The Delicate Art of Anonymity in the News

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 14:22:34 -0700

Doreen Marchionni:

Quoting anonymous sources in the news these days is about as verboten as telling your waning audiences to bug off, as the student reporters at the college where I teach might attest. In some ways, they’re synonymous.

For decades, lazy journalists routinely attributed controversial material in stories to anonymous sources — until readers and media critics lashed out. By the time I got to college, the practice was so out of favor that I hardly imagined its use. My teachers preached the rigors of fact-based reportage and deep sourcing that comes from humping a beat. And if a source wouldn’t go on record with vital information, backdoor it with a comparable source or leave it alone — it’s not worth losing your credibility with audiences if the source turns out wrong.

Then I got in the news business, and shit got real.

Read More

My 90 year-old father-in-law is really big on hugs, and he...

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:25:57 -0700

My 90 year-old father-in-law is really big on hugs, and he collects plenty during any day. His behavior gave me an idea.

Last week, while walking with my wife, I suggested how much better the world would be if hugs were currency. What if we paid for everything hugs?

At one Coca-Cola machine in Singapore, you can. It’s part of the “Open Happiness” marketing campaign and plan to spread more “Coca-Cola Hug Me Machines” in select places across Asia. Definitely hugs and Coke go oddly together. #hugmecoke

Have you hugged your Coke machine today? Better: Have you hugged someone for a Coke—or for no reason at all? That will be three hugs, please.

Do you have a hugs story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.

ABC's 'Titanic' sinks, ah, stinks

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 14:15:00 -0700

Say, did you watch ABC’s “Titanic” mini-series? Three of four one-hour parts aired last night. The first commercial came within 10 minutes and they followed fiercely thereafter. As if the meandering plot wasn’t difficult enough, the frequent commercial breaks made getting into the characters that much more work.

The costumes and dialogue took me back to 1912 and gave stark sense of the class society. But I found the characters to be absolutely boring to watch. I fast-fowarded through Part 1 in about 15 minutes. I can’t imagine watching anymore.

The ship sank. How is that not an exciting story? Titanic’s maiden voyage is rich with plot twists and class conflict. Surely there should be some action in that, or at least more intrigue. Not on ABC, the network that brought us sizzling “Revenge” and mind-searing “Lost”.

In preparing to write this post, I Googled reviews. For LA Times, Mary McNamara writes:

Each hourlong episode follows a similar timeline, from ship’s boarding to assignation with iceberg, intended to allow events to be seen from the perspective of the various characters, some historical and some fictional. Unfortunately, this diminishes whatever natural tension the actual tale still has and makes it even more difficult to keep track of who loves whom and why.

Oh I can see that, and it’s really too bad. Done right, following the same plot from different perspectives can be quite effective. My favorite example is Alan Ayckbourn’s “The Norman Conquests”, three plays that follow the same events over three nights from the perspective of characters in different rooms of a house.

Days two and three build from the others and make great comedy as someone leaving the room one day enters the next and the audience sees what really happens. But such effect requires attending all three nights (a smart technique for generating ticket sales).

The 1977 TV version is classic.

Do you have a pulp media story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.

Gawker this Dung Beetle

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 11:09:00 -0700

On Friday, “What is a dung beetle’s favorite kind of manure?” popped up on my Google+ feed and, foolish me, click, click. I’m a sucker for a good, oddball headline and confess to writing plenty of them. Besides I studied entomology some in college.

These types of question headlines are more common, and you see them in unexpected places. People often ask a question when Googling something, which is major reason for headlines like this one. Then there are the topics that go so oddly together with the site presenting them.

Google Economy Journalism
Consider Gizmodo, “the gadget guide”, with these:

Welcome to Google economy journalism. What does any of this have to do with gadgets? Nothing, unless it’s an audience interested in the same oddball things—or Gawker groping for pageviews. Little of both, likely. To Gizmodo’s credit, and parent Gawker Media, the stories interest, headlines appeal and content is (mostly) original. Surely original content is worth something?

But there remains the perpetual quest for pageviews. Google has Gawker and aggregation whore Huffington Post (and its imitators) running the hamster wheel. They fill the InterWebs with loads of crap posts, clogging up your searches. Huffington, and its new bitch AOL, bows before the great Google god, feeding it aggregated stories rather than original content.

Strange as Gizmodo (and other Gawker) stories sometimes are—and the headlines so tempting behind them—topics are interesting and often timely. The Jesus story was appropriate for Easter and make-your-own hot dog pie comes as Pizza Hut starts selling them. How oddly together is that? Hot dogs in pizza crust? Quick! Someone get the calorie counter!

The Experiment
In January 2012, Gawker conducted an, ah, experiment, for two weeks:

The writers of this site have all agreed to participate in an obnoxious, but worthwhile exercise. Each day, a different staff writer will be forced to break their usual routine and offer up posts they feel would garner the most traffic. While that writer struggles to find dancing cat videos and Burger King bathroom fights or any other post they feel will add those precious, precious new eyeballs, the rest of the staff will spend time on more substantive stories they may have neglected due to the rigors of scouring the internet each day to hit some imaginary quota. The writers not relegated to traffic-whoring duty will still post, just less frequently than many of them are probably used to…

The purpose of this is to make it perfectly clear to the staff of Gawker (and to the readers, hopefully) that just because this is technically a ‘blog’, there is plenty of room for other pieces that aren’t aggregated and repackaged with blockquotes and snappy snarky snarking snark-snark shit.

Nieman Journalism Lab is one of my regular haunts, but somehow I missed this March 2012 Gawker experiment analysis. Andrew Phelps writes:

On their assigned pageview-duty days, Gawker writers produced a cumulative 72 post—about 14 posts per writer per day. On their off-duty days—and remember, each had four off days for every ‘on’ day—the same writers cumulatively produced 34, or about 1.3 posts per writer per day…

Those 72 pageview-duty posts produced a combined 3,956,977 pageviews (as of the days I captured data, Friday 3/9 and Monday 3/12), a mean of 54,958 pageviews per post. The 34 off-duty posts produced 2,037,263 pageviews, a mean of 59,920 pageviews per post.

Clearly the experiment isn’t over if Andrew did March measurements. In my RSS reader (I use, and highly recommend, Feedly), I click through at least one Gizmodo headline a day, not necessarily seeing the site before I do. Reason: These damn snappy, snarky, goofball headlines. That’s a new trend, within the last 60 days, for me. Something is different now. But much of the content, while more original, is unsatisfying. Andrew observes:

The allure of that cheap content—”I Can’t Stop Looking at This Weird Chinese Goat”, 46,358 pageviews—is in its higher apparent return on the investment. Why bother working all day on a piece if something you throw together in 20 minutes will get the same attention from the world?

Instahit Video
I got a strange taste of this phenomenon last week. On April 11, a vlogger submitted a video link to BetaNews Tips box with text: “InstaHam app for smartphones, an idea worth $1 billion”. A day earlier, Facebook paid $1,000,000,000 for photo app Instagram. The parody was the dumbest, fraking video I’d seen in weeks. But the link came from the creator, and I was down a writer, needing some filler. So I posted InstaHam, using the email text as headline, along with two paragraphs introduction (we need at least that many for the home page newsfeed.

The video flopped. Disastrously, racking up just over 1,000 page views by the time I shut down for the night. But the next morning, the numbers topped 5K, then 10k and kept climbing and climbing. That stupid video turned out to be my pageview burner for the week—and I’m not paid by them, BTW; InstaHim was no disaster, after all.

You’d never know from the two comments and 11 tweets that InstaHam burned down the barn. Surely it got link love somewhere, perhaps from one of the aggregators I loathe. Point: Dumb content, easily and quickly put together, generated good numbers. This is what Gawker seeks.

But that’s not the lesson here I want to communicate to bloggers or journalists. Headlines matter. Original content matters. Journalism 101 still means something in the Google economy era. You write for people, not some search algorithm. People click, not some machine. They want to read interesting stuff.

Betanews commenters are an unforgiving lot, and they constantly beat me senseless for writing provocative headlines. But they clicked to do so. I got their attention and hopefully a few minutes time to read the story. I write what I, and hope readers will, find interesting. That’s the impetuous for my stories and the punchy headlines above them.

By contrast, one of my freelancers obsesses about Google News. He carefully watches trends there and attempts to calculate what stories submitted when will place higher and get a flood of quick pageviews. I repeatedly tell him to forget Google News. It’s a drug!

Instead I say: Focus on original content that will grab real people and generate long-burn pageviews via social media: That’s better for building readership community. By comparison, Google News is quick, super-nova-like traffic from skimmers rather than truly engaged readers. Instead, give people a reason to read your stuff, and that starts with the headline.

As for this post, a more mundane headline feels appropriately poetic to the topic. But I did briefly consider something like: “Dung beetles infest Gizmodo offices”—referring to the one story and new cheesy trend for others. Shameful I didn’t.

Photo Credit: Heath Windcliff

Do you have a news media story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.

Keeping with the weekend’s Titanic theme is this video,...

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 09:25:17 -0700

Keeping with the weekend’s Titanic theme is this video, from National Geographic. Filmmaker James Cameron gathered together experts to assess what happened when the ocean liner broke apart and sank 100 years ago. The National Geo special aired a week ago, and, yes, I watched it.

Based on the forensic analysis, Titanic’s keel raised no more than 23 degrees out of the water, which is more consistent with 1958 movie “A Night to Remember” than Cameron’s 1997 “Titanic”. But the older film kept to inquiry findings the ship sank whole, which we now know is wrong.

Last week, this tweet train was by far the most popular meme in...

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 09:02:07 -0700

Last week, this tweet train was by far the most popular meme in the social circles I hang out. Bad as this is, what happens a year from now should “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer” be a blockbuster?

Do you have a pop culture story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.

12 things you should know about RMS Titanic

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 09:48:00 -0700

Today is the 100th anniversary of Titanic’s sinking. As the height of technological and engineering innovation of its day, the great ocean liner is more than fascinating for its sinking—reminder that today’s tech obsessions are nothing new.

In 1977, before the wreck had been discovered and when few people knew much about Titanic, I wrote a term paper on the ill-fated vessel in between college and high school. I participated in the federally-funded Upward Bound program for teenagers from low-income families wanting to go to college. I spent three summers at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. The Titanic paper completed my three-year participation. Much about the disaster has changed since the wreck site was found, more than 2 miles beneath the Atlantic, in 1985, and my research. I confess. I am a Titanic buff.

For my 1977 paper, which I no longer have (sigh), I culled published testimony from US and UK inquiries, newspaper articles, a riveting 1912Scientific American article and several books. Research is easier now, in the Internet era. In the spirit of the centennial remembering Titanic, and those who tragically fell with her, I present 12 things you might not know about the great steam ship disaster.

This post is modified from one published at BetaNews earlier this week. The story didn’t get the pageviews I expected, given the timeliness. Hopefully you’ll get more value from it than readers there.

1.There were three ships. William James Pirrie, president of shipbuilder Harland and Wolff, and Bruce Ismay, White Star Line chairman, conceived the Olympic Class ocean liners during a dinner party—in 1907, if I rightly recall. Harland and Wolff would build three: Olympic, Titanic and Britannic—in order of their going into service.

That’s right, before Titanic’s tragic maiden voyage, White Star Line launched Olympic about 10 months earlier. “Oly” sailed to New York on June 14, 1911.

Titanic was 9 inches longer and lavished with grandeur compared to her sister. Olympic, nicknamed “Old Reliable”, stayed in service until 1935, when she was scrapped. After being refitted as a hospital ship, Britannic sunk during World War I, in 1916.

Britannic construction completed after Titanic’s tragic maiden voyage, leading to design changes later made to Olympic, too, such as extending watertight doors from E to B deck.

2. Olympic Class was too big. Titanic and her sister ships used three normal-size docks. Meanwhile their innovative triple-screw propellers created hazard for other ships. For example, as Titanic left the harbor on her maiden voyage, New York pulled from its moorings and towards the giant liner. The ships came within inches of collision—averted only by stopping Titanic, even with tugs pulling on New York.

Many seaman called the near collision, by the New York on the way to New York, a bad omen. It was.

3. Olympic’s accident added to the unsinkable myth. In September 1911, the battle cruiser HMS Hawke rammed Olympic midship, sucked in by the triple-screw propellers. The accident opened two compartments to seawater—damage that would have sunk most any other vessel. But Olympic’s watertight doors contained the leakage, allowing her to return to port and to service, with repairs, less than two months later.

The accident helped foster Titanic’s unsinkable myth and arrogance about human technological achievements.

4. Olympic’s collision delayed Titanic’s launch. White Star Line needed to get the first ship back in service before completing the second, for financial reasons if none other. Work at the Belfast shipyards shifted to Olympic repairs, and one of the triple-screw propellers meant for Titanic went to her sister ship. If launched at a different time, Titanic wouldn’t have struck the iceberg that sank her.

5. Head-on collision with the iceberg likely would have saved Titanic, but killed many passengers. The ocean liner’s design allowed for any two compartments to be flooded or all of the first four. Had Titanic hit head on rather than “port around” the iceberg, the damage likely wouldn’t have flooded all four compartments. Olympic herself is example. She rammed and sank a German submarine in 1918.

Damage done by the glancing blow opened five compartments to seawater, allowing it to flow over the watertight bulkheads at E deck. A glancing blow killed Titanic.

6. Still waters made the iceberg difficult to see. The official inquiries conducted following Titanic’s sinking faulted the crew and White Star Line for not having enough binoculars handy, particularly in the crow’s nest where lookouts spotted for ice. The oversight proved crucial that night because the ocean was still, like a lake, and it was a moonless night. Waves would have created mist off the iceberg, making it easier to see—as would reflected light from the moon had there been any. Lookouts spied the iceberg just a quarter mile away. Too close.

7. There was another ship close by. James Cameron’s 1997 movie “Titanic” left out a hugely important detail—rightly so considering it had nothing to do with the storytelling. But this omission creates misperception in popular Titanic lore. Somewhere between six and 10 miles away, the Californian had stopped for the night because of ice—something Titanic should have done, frankly. But the ship did nothing to save Titanic, leading to reprimands for captain and crew during post-disaster inquiries.

These determined that the Californian’s wireless operator closed down for the night within minutes, perhaps seconds of the collision. Titanic was unusual in having two wireless operators—one was standard for the time. Unfriendly banter between Titanic and Californian wireless operators reportedly contributed to the signing off for the night.

In a strange twist, wireless operator for Carpathia, which steamed to Titanic passengers’ rescue, returned to check the time over wireless before going to bed. Otherwise he also would have missed the distress call, sent first as CQD and later as SOS, which was new.

Later, Californian’s crew observed Titanic on the horizon, not knowing the steamer’s identity, and the rockets signaling trouble. Several times, crew members woke their captain, who dismissed the flares’ significance. They would later wrongly view the sinking as the unknown ship disappearing over the horizon.

US and UK inquiries hotly debated whether or not the Californian could have saved Titanic passengers. Likely not, given how long the ship took to navigate past the field of ice during daylight. But, of course, captain and crew should have tried.

8. The distress call was a hoax. The Carpathia’s quick response defied that of others. Wireless operators on many other vessels assumed the distress call was a joke, a hoax. Everyone knew that Titanic was unsinkable.

Even later, when convinced Titanic struck an iceberg, crews of other vessels still didn’t comprehend the crisis. That wireless operators signaled for such a long time, meaning there was electricity (see #10), and the unsinkable myth contributed to their failure to understand how dire was Titanic’s plight.

Even Carpathia’s crew expected to find the damaged Titanic, instead of lifeboats, debris and ice.

9. Official inquiries concluded Titanic sank whole. Survivor testimony conflicted about the ocean liner’s plunge into the Atlantic. The UK inquiry ignored passengers who insisted Titanic broke apart before sinking, which we now know is what happened. Even after the sinking, and technological innovations’ failure to save Titanic, arrogance and the unsinkable myth misguided those seeking answers to the disaster’s cause and the ship’s final minutes.

10. All the engineers were lost. In the romanticized view of Titanic’s sinking—and men of that era putting duty before life—engineers bravely stayed at their posts, stoking coal and adjusting boiler and electric controls so that Titanic had lights. The ship went dark just minutes before sinking, and all the engineers were lost. None survived.

Perhaps they were brave, but there was another factor. Contrary to presentation of Cameron’s “Titanic”, the ocean liner’s keel did not rise 90 degrees high out of the water, but no more than 23 degrees, which by the way is more consistent with survivor testimony. This means the sinking was more sudden and unexpected, particularly the time between the fracture and stern’s plunge into the Atlantic. Point: Titanic’s final moments came quite suddenly and while the steam ship appeared seaworthy to those on top and below decks.

11. White Star wanted to send Titanic’s ghost to ferry survivors. Following Carpathia’s rescue of Titanic passengers, some dimwit wanted to send Olympic to take them to New York. Reasoning: Provide them with better accommodations. Fortunately, this didn’t happen; for already traumatized passengers, Olympic would have been like a ghost ship—Titanic returned.

12. It was “A Night to Remember”. The definitive pre-wreck discovery work about Titanic, based on the original testimony, is Sir Walter Lord’s book “A Night to Remember”, from which a movie was made. If not for the 1976 Copyright Act, the book would have entered public domain this year. What irony! I purchased the ebook yesterday, which Amazon offered as “Daily Deal” price of $1.99.

My wife and I watched the 1958 movie last night. “A Night to Remember” is iTunes “Movie the Week”, rentable in HD for just 99 cents.

The movie offers a fairer portrayal of Captain Edward John Smith than Cameron’s “Titanic”. In the newer film, Smith becomes depressed and contributes little valuable during the sinking and launching of lifeboats. That’s because Cameron’s story ignores the Californian. In a “Night to Remember”, Smith works with Titanic’s quartermaster trying to signal another ship they can clearly see. The Californian.

I think about our lost cat Kuma every day. There’s no...

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 19:59:00 -0700

I think about our lost cat Kuma every day. There’s no replacement for him, and we’re not trying to.

But we have another kitty now, adopted from San Diego animal shelter, where he was for six weeks. He came to us with temporary name Dermott. He’s Neko now. That’s Japanese for cat.

Taken with instagram

One Direction performed on Saturday Night Live over the weekend....

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:02:38 -0700

One Direction performed on Saturday Night Live over the weekend. The production was so slick, I wondered if the boys lip-synced. I would say no after watching the original music videos. However, there unmistakably are prerecorded bits—the clapping, for example, on “One Thing”.

These boys really go oddly together. 1D formed from five contestants who failed to make the solo competition during seventh season UK “X Factor”. They placed third as an ensemble.

I typically loathe boy bands, but I like these guys. Yeah, they’re highly-marketing manufactured but also seem in control and use the Internet like no band before them to rally a fan base. Better than Bieber.

Girls scream hysterically around 1D. I haven’t seen that reaction to a singing group in years.

But, damn, they make me feel old. Four are close to my daughter’s age and look even younger.

Do you have a music story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.

"Along comes Facebook, the great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as..."

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:16:00 -0700

“Along comes Facebook, the great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as we wait and fear. You turn on the television and there it is, right above the Empire State Building, humming. And now a hole has opened up on its base and it has dumped a billion dollars into a public square…You can’t blame users for becoming hooting primates when a giant spaceship dumps a billion dollars out of its money hole.”

- Paul Ford, “Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out“—New York magazine.

Many of those hooting primates are leaving Instagram. Are you among them? Hell, I just got there, and, damn, Mark Zuckerberg clones invade.

"Instagram and its various analogues have created a legion of smartphone users who are quite..."

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:16:28 -0700

“

Instagram and its various analogues have created a legion of smartphone users who are quite literally uploading billions of damaged images into the public record. Yes, damaged’. Because when you apply a parlor trick filter to your photo, you’re not enhancing it, you’re destroying it. You’re robbing it of its realness, its nuance, and replacing it with garbage that serves no function other than to aggrandize your own false sense of artisanship.

And make no mistake, you aren’t an artist.

”

- Chris Zeigler — The Verge.

Today, Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram.

I don’t really agree with Chris. But the quote zings!

The obligatory kitten photo is required of every blog. Kuma...

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:01:00 -0700

The obligatory kitten photo is required of every blog.

Kuma kitten came to us on Sept. 10, 2010. He and his siblings had been thrown in a bag over the fence of my daughter’s friend’s neighbor, in La Mesa, Calif. He was a Maine Coon, or Coon blend, near as we can tell.

We lost Kuma on Jan. 15, 2012. After San Diego city workers found his collar in a canyon, we’re sadly convinced a coyote got him.

Do you have a cat story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.

Butterfly is Free

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 19:22:13 -0700

Since accepting the role of managing editor at BetaNews 11 months ago, I all but stopped personal blogging. Actually, I entered a cocoon of sorts. Well, the butterfly is free. I’ll regularly post here at Oddly Together again and engage more on social networks—Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

Facebook and Tumblr (where Oddly Together is) will be my main communities. Google+ should be one of the primaries, considering I’m in more than 12,000 circles there. Reach is greater than any other social network I participate in.

But Tumblr is a community of people I want to be with. Facebook is for intimate relationships, or will be when I’ve culled my friends list (don’t be offended if you’re defriended; we can be friends somewhere else, perhaps Google+ or LinkedIn). I often will cross-post to Google+.

Big change here: Past comments are gone. I’ve ditched Disqus and switched to Facebook for comments. I see Facebook as better choice for identity and community.

Photo Credit: Greg Foster

Do you have a social networking story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.

Fuji X10 or X100?

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 18:17:00 -0700

Yesterday, someone asked me by email about the Fujifilm FInePix x10 and X100, which to buy. I’ve used both compact digicams and mini-reviewed the X100 in May 2011. They share in common retro-styling.

Both are compact cameras with big sensors: X10 has a two-thirds incher and digital zoom and sells for $599. The X100 has an APS-C sensor and fixed-focal length lens—f/2 at 23mm (35mm film equivalent)—and sells for $1,199.

I offered this quick response:

They’re both excellent cameras…

It’s about trade-offs.

If you want zoom, X10 is better.

If you want lots of effects you can easily add and have the camera use special settings to accurately shoot in rough contrast situations, X10 is better.

If you want an auto mode (X100 has none), X10 is better.

If you want 1080p view, X10 is better.

If you want to do super closeups, X10 is better.

However…

If you want the cleanest photos in really low light, without flash, X100 is better.

If you want a larger APS-C sensor (like in dSLRs), and all the benefits that come with it, X100 is better.

If you want an optical (with optional digital) viewfinder that displays all the info you need when taking a photo, X100 is better.

If you don’t mind spending twice as much as the X10 for a fixed lens, X100 is better.

If you want to shoot images beyond f/11 (the limit for X10), X100 is better.

Both are excellent cameras. Both take superior photos.

Other considerations: What will you use it for? If I had a dSLR, I might go for the X10 as my on-the-go digicam. I don’t. As my only camera, the X100 is better choice. I also need to shoot indoors without flash, and there X100 beats X10; that said, X10 is a stellar low-light performer in this class of camera and even compared to some costlier ones.

Based on my quickie comparison, he chose X100, in part because it will replace a Canon EOS 40D dSLR.

Do you have a photography story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.