Posted by Jacob Harris
Fri, 11 Apr 2008 01:30:00 GMT
In which the author continues to use a title formulation—one that seems right out of the 19th century, but these days denotes a certain overweening preciousness well suited to be published by McSweeney’s—to explain his long absence from-,
Ah, screw it. The question on the minds of my remaining readers (all 10 of you) might be where the heck have I been (sorry for the sad invective, but I’ve been trying to cut down on my cursing for reasons that should soon be clear) and why am I blogging again now? 250-some days is a long day to be quiet, and it’s not like the blog was that awesome before it went on hiatus. What happened?
Good question. To be honest, the main reason is I’ve been rather busy. For starters, I have still been blogging all this while, but for the New York Times’ open source initiatives at our blog Open. The main reason though is that I am a proud father of the most amazing kid in thr world. It’s not that the baby keeps me from blogging, rather it’s just that blogging doesn’t really compare at all to spending time with him (my personal coding productivity has similarly been very low). Especially since, to be bluntly honest, the writing on this blog had become as boring as listening to a Garrison Keillor marathon. Better not to do it.
So, why restart now? Because it just feels fun again. And because I actually feel like it might also be interesting as well to continue my musings on the future of newspapers (and my experiences and experiments along those lines) in a forum that is not as official and fraught with consequences for misplayed snark like the official New York Times blog would be.
This is not to say I will be dishing dirt and spilling secrets. I like my job enough to not want to lose it, and that’s not really my style. But I think it would be fun (at least to me) to post my occasional rants with perspective from inside the New York Times, and perhaps, if I’m lucky, fun for some random people on the Interwebs to read it. Sound like a plan?
If worse comes to worse, I’ll just stop again. It wouldn’t be the first time…
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Posted by Jacob Harris
Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:37:00 GMT
Sometimes, it’s best to just come out and say it, so here we go: I suck at blogging these days. This is not me beating myself – I don’t feel bad in the slightest – I just am acknowledging the truth of the matter. Sorry for any of my readers who haven’t consigned me to the dustbins of their feed readers yet, but it’s unlikely I will be producing any riveting content anytime in the near future. I have a lot of changes in my life coming up – new coop! baby! projects here at the Times! – that I’m spent when I get home to blog (of course, thanks to Time-Warner Cable I haven’t had Internet at home anyway) and don’t produce any writing that meets my high standards for Original Blogging Content (TM).
However, I do still have time to feed content into a few other places, for those that need to get their Jake fix. For starters, you can follow the minutiae of my random thoughts (all less then 140 characters) at Twitter. In addition, I have started what’s known as a tumbleblog over on Tumblr, which is where I will post content that’s the opposite of Nimble Code: pithy, snarky, non-technical, and varied. Feel free to check both out and one day I will get back to writing here as well.
Finally, if you were interested in some of the topics from my Future of Newspapers posts but want to see a professional journalist’s perspective, I strongly suggest Frontline’s News War series, being broadcast now on PBS and also viewable on the Web.
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Posted by Jacob Harris
Fri, 10 Nov 2006 21:39:00 GMT
So, if you’ve been checking on my blog lately, you might have noticed I’ve been rather lame about blogging lately (as opposed to before when I was somewhat lame). Sorry about that, I can promise I’ll try to change, but I have a lot of stuff going on in my life that doesn’t involve sitting in front of a computer. Mainly, this:
Yes, that’s right. I’m going to be a father for the first time (expected due date: May 9th). Now that we’ve passed beyond the first trimester superstitiousness and jitters, I want to tell the whole world. Thanks for reading, and hopefully I’ll write something else for you one of these days.
Posted in Meta | 4 comments
Posted by Jacob Harris
Mon, 24 Apr 2006 17:26:57 GMT
I’d like to apologize for the silence on this blog. Way back in the days before MeasureMap I used to feel like I had to keep writing for my many regular readers (all 12 of you as I now know), but the inspiration has just not been there recently. It hasn’t helped that I have been out of town on 2 separate occasions and with enough work to keep me busy and focused. But I also have been purposefully staying away from my blog. It’s not that I can’t find things to post about, it’s just that I haven’t felt they’re really interesting enough to say (I like to do more than belabor the obvious).
I hope to return with more content in the future, but this period of lying fallow has been immensely inspirational and productive in so many other ways; in short, it might be a while. Thanks again for your continued patronage.
Posted in Meta | 2 comments
Posted by Jacob Harris
Thu, 16 Feb 2006 20:18:00 GMT
I am aware there is something so deeply ironic about this, but I wanted to share a great link about the practice of blogging titled A Great CD Is Not A Failed Radio Station.
If you’re a blogger, you should read it. You can go there now, I’ll wait.
Most blogs suck. They don’t really say anything new. This is largely because search engines, aggregators, and advertising models all encourage quantity over quality – many short and quick observations over long analysis. Search engines love freshness in content, and fresh posts mean more clicks means more advertising revenue. And so, many people labor strenuously to post daily to their blogs, even if this makes their writing suffer.
The problem is that like any writing, blogging takes time and mental energy, and if you find yourself having to write daily or more, your blog postings will usually become little more than “me too” or “check this out” declarations – filler content with no real additional thought or analysis. This reductive trend is accelerated by the desire to want to be the first post to comment or link to something new on the web. This leads to initial kneejerk appraisals on big stories instead of more thoughtful analysis days later when the story is “old.” And so, the reckless pursuit of freshness in blog content only encourages staleness in the ideas on those pages. And the Internet begins to resemble Sunday political talk shows with their empty talking-points and flip-reactions.
As you can see from my posting schedule, I’m hardly a victim of this syndrome (I’ll call it Premature Blogification). But if you find yourself on a never-ending race to keep up posting to your blog, maybe you should try a change. Get the Blogging Monkey off your back and embrace quality and sanity again. Your readers will love it. And so will you.
Posted in Meta | Tags blogs, writing | 3 comments
Posted by Jacob Harris
Mon, 19 Dec 2005 18:08:00 GMT
For the past 5 years, the New York Times has graced with an annual roundup article titled The Year In Ideas. The issue actually came out last week, but it’s a sign of my recent workload – and the excessive number of holiday parties I had to attend – that I only read it on the commute into work today.
It actually was rather boring. Not because of the ideas themselves, but because I had actually read many of them before on various blogs and other geeky websites (Sometimes, I long for a service like “del.icio.us” for feed subscriptions just so I can share how hip the feeds I read are). I am not an information omnivore by any means, but it was apparent that I was cued into some of the same idea sources as the editors of the New York Times. Which led to an idea of my own. Since the New York Times has declared its Year In Ideas issue to be an annual tradition, I’m going to start my own personal tradition of tabulating my personal New York Times Year In Ideas Hipness score (or NYTYIIH for short). The methodology is simple. Look at every idea listed and if you had heard of it before reading in the Times, give yourself a point. Okay, let’s get started then.
The following table lists the titles of the ideas in the 2005 Year in Ideas issue with bold ones being ideas I had encountered before. I know some of the titles are cryptic, but you can take that up with the New York Times editors and not me.
| Accredited Bliss |
Playoff Paradigm, The |
| The Anti-Paparazzi Flash |
Pleistocene Rewilding |
| The Anti-Rape Condom |
The Porn Suffix |
| Branding Nations |
Preventing Suicide Bombing |
| Cartoon Empathy |
The Readable Medicine Bottle |
| Celebrity Teeth |
Republican Elitism |
| Cobblestones are Good for You |
Robot Jockeys |
| Collapsing the Distribution Window |
The Runaway Alarm Clock |
| Consensual Interruptions |
Scientific Free-Throw Distraction |
| Conservative Blogs are More Effective |
Seeing With Your Ears |
| Dialing Under the Influence |
The Self-Fulfilling Trade Rumor |
| Do-It-Yourself Cartography |
The Serialized Pop Song |
| Dolphin Culture |
The Sitcom Loyalty Oath |
| Econophysics |
Solar Sailing |
| Embryo Adoption |
The Sonic Gunman Locator |
| Ergomorphic Footwear |
Splogs |
| The Fair Employment Mark |
The Stash Rocket |
| The False-Memory Diet |
Stoic Redheads |
| The Fleeting Relationship |
The Stream-of-Consciousness Newspaper |
| Folksonomy |
Subadolescent Queen Bees |
| Forehead Billboards |
The Suburban Loft |
| Gastronomic Reversals |
The Synesthetic Cookbook |
| Genetic Theory of Harry Potter |
Taxonomy Auctions |
| The Global Savings Glut |
”The Crawl” Makes You Stupid |
| The His-and-Her TV |
The Toothbrush That Sings |
| The Hollywood-Style Documentary |
The Totally Religious, Absolutely Democratic Constitution |
| The Hypomanic American |
Touch Screens That Touch Back |
| The Infrared Pet Dry Room |
Trial-Transcript Dramaturgy |
| In Vitro Meat |
Trust Spray |
| Juvenile Cynics |
Two-Dimensional Food |
| The Laptop That Will Save the World |
The Uneavesdroppable Phone Conversation |
| Localized Food Aid |
The Urine-Powered Battery |
| Making Global Warming Work for You |
Video Podcasts |
| Medical Maggots |
Why Popcorn Doesn’t Pop |
| Microblindness |
Worldwide Flat Taxes |
| Monkey Pay-Per-View |
Yawn Contagion |
| National Smiles |
The Yoo Presidency |
| Open-Source Reporting |
The Zero-Emissions S.U.V. |
| Parking Meters That Don’t Give You a Break |
Zombie Dogs |
So, what is my final score? 51 out of 78, which gives me NYTYIIH score of 65.38%! I’m quite pleased with myself this year; since I have just started, I can unabashedly call this year’s score my personal best. Can you beat me?
Posted in Meta, Silly | Tags ideas, memes, nytimes | no comments
Posted by Jacob Harris
Thu, 27 Oct 2005 17:09:49 GMT
Apologies again for the lack of posting. I’m in the midst of another long rut of writer’s block and working on a lot of outside projects. In the meantime, be sure to check out this blog’s hosting company Planet Argon for their lovely new site design, written in Ruby on Rails of course. Things have been running a lot more smoothly since I moved this blog over, and I highly recommend them for your hosting needs.
Posted in Meta | 2 comments
Posted by Jacob Harris
Fri, 26 Aug 2005 07:50:00 GMT
Posting will be light, my nonexistant readers for the next week. I am off to Cape Cod to enjoy the fine weather and calm beaches before September starts up. I hope to spend most of the time away from the computer too. So I will see you when I get back, and be sure to enjoy the last of summer and eat more ice cream.
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Posted by Jacob Harris
Thu, 11 Aug 2005 09:50:00 GMT
Just wanted to note that I have moved this blog to Typo, an excellent blogging system written in Ruby on Rails . If you’re not reading this in an RSS reader, the change should be pretty apparent, although I must apologize for not having rethemed yet. Otherwise, I look forward to hopefully spending more time blogging and less time doing maintenance in the future.
Posted in Meta | Tags blog, rails, ruby, typo | no comments
Posted by harrisj
Sun, 10 Jul 2005 07:01:36 GMT
Apologies for the silence recently (here I pretend I actually have readers), but I have been overwhelmed with work of late. Soon I shall be back with more posts and what I hope is insight into my little realm of computer science.
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