Phillip Smith

Beyond the click: getting to actual engagement. Send me your questions!

2013-05-21T19:38:56Z

Quick note that I’ll be trying to keep things civil (though, spicy) for this afternoon’s conversation with Chartbeat, Contently, Disqus, WNYC, and Big Fuel. If you have questions for Joe (Chartbeat), Sam (Contently), Ro (Disqus), or Stuart (BIg Fuel), please fire them my way on Twitter. I’ll take questions for WYNC too, but Caitlin is not able to join us today, so I’m waiting to see who arrives to represent WNYC.

The discussion will take place at Chartbeat’s new office near Union Square in New York.

It’s not all talk either. There will also be demonstrations showing off some new projects that Chartbeat and Disqus have been working on, and there will be time for you to get social with other attendees over delicious treats from Brooklyn’s Pies & Thighs and never-out-of-style kegs and cocktails. What could be better?

Questions should be in the form of a question, i.e., something you want to know, and focused on the topic of engagement. What does engagement mean for different types of business? Is it measurable in a meaninful way? Is engagement the Holy Grail that will transform publishing and advertising forever? This is what we’ll try to get the bottom of this afternoon.

Hope you’ll join us.

Refections on 40: Honesty and acceptance

2013-04-27T01:40:46Z

Photo from Deanna Wardin @ Tattoo Boogaloo on Flickr

When I woke this morning, the first day of my forty-first year, I thought to myself: going forward, there is one idea that will guide me in life, above all others, and that is honesty.

Call it what you will — radical honesty, microscopic truth, total transparency, proactive honesty, or just plain ol’ honesty — but don’t underestimate the change that it can bring. It is this one simple idea — honesty — that has had the most profound and lasting impact on my life this last year, and I will choose it again and again.

My close friends will likely roll their eyes at these words, as they’ve heard my gospel on honesty many times no doubt, but I’ve seen the change that it has had in their lives too. And when it comes across as gospel, friends, remember that I too am just a novice on this path, imperfect, and trying to find my way.

But the thing that is clear to me now is that when I reach a fork in the road of life, there is only one lamp that will show me the way, and that lamp will be honesty, plain and simple.

I imagine how it must sound, reading a reflection on honesty, as before this year I thought myself an honest person through and through. But when inspected closely, my honesty — both with myself, and with others — was partial at best, and I suspect that is the norm not the exception.

It was little things said to make a situation more comfortable or, inversely, small details left out to avoid a misunderstanding. It is a silence at the end of a conversation unresolved. It is the answer given to please others. It is working within the confines of the “socially acceptable.” The motive was almost always the same, not wanting to unnecessarily hurt another person, but I no longer believe that even the purest motives justify half-truths or concealment. There is a liberation that comes from embracing the idea that people deserve the truth.

There is a balance to this scale, however: on the one side is honesty, but on the other side is acceptance.

To embrace honesty, I have to surrender the outcome of any given situation and trust that it will resolve fairly: I have to be ready to accept any outcome and recognize that, with honesty, I have no hold or sway over what that outcome might be. I have to acknowledge that when I was withholding honesty, it was to effect the outcome of a given situation, to make it work out in a way that was better for me — perhaps less uncomfortable, less dramatic, or to my benefit. With honesty, the outcome is in hands of the other, and that is the way it should be.

But this is what I believe it means “to reveal rather than conceal”: it is the greatest form of respect to look another person in the eye and to say “you can hear this truth;” to know that they are able to hear it; to trust that they can find a way to integrate or resolve it; to have faith that the outcome — no matter what it is — is the correct one. And to accept that outcome. That is honesty to me.

It had been the most challenging to be radically honest with those that are closest to me — my family, my life partners, my closest and dearest friends — because those are the relationships that I cherish the most, those are the relationships where I feel like I have the most to lose, those are the relationships with the most emotional tension. The irony of this is not uncommon, I would guess. But in this past year I have chosen a new path and, one step at a time, that is changing.

And each time in my life when I am proactively transparent, each day that I choose to reveal rather than conceal, and each moment when I can share or receive a microscopic truth with someone close … I feel that much closer to knowing myself, that much more confident that others know and accept me, and I feel a little bit more liberated from the bonds that I have confined myself with for so long.

Perhaps it will be that way for you too.

Reflections on 40: Relationships and belonging

2013-04-25T20:06:05Z

The night before my fortieth birthday I received one of the most profoundly moving gifts of all time. It was not a thing, an object, or a possession; it was something that money could not buy. It was a collection of memories — a virtual scrapbook, full of thoughtful words and photos long forgotten, gathered from friends old and new, close and far — and it reminded me that, more than anything else, the quality of my life is a reflection of the incredible people that I am surrounded by.

Flipping through that scrapbook took me back almost 30 years, to friends made in elementary school, high school, and the years that followed. In many ways, the story of my life could be charted by simply connecting the dots between these friendships and relationships. The childhood friends like Frank, the young-adult friends like Jonathan, the thirties friends like Melanie and the Marks. The friends that I get into trouble with, like Rein, and the friends that push me to be on top of my game, like Todd. So many great friends. And I am blessed that — in some way — I have each of these friends, and the whole rich fabric of friends they represent, still in my life to this day.

It is probably not easy to be my friend, I must admit: I am notorious for running away, staying out of the spotlight, and I’m not particularly great at staying in touch. I’m always ever-so busy, even though I yarn-on about being a slacker. I refuse to go down the paths that have any resemblance to the “traditional,” and as much as possible I refuse to “grow up.” I take a long view; I trust that our connection will continue for years to come, but perhaps with the shortcoming of letting too much time pass in between. I am imperfect and rely on your grace and forgiveness to maintain our bond.

As I closed the scrapbook that night, I was left with a powerful sense of belonging. My friends, my family, my spiritual and emotional partners, are the foundation from which I have built my life, the firm ground on which I continue to build it, and the shore in the distance that enables me to embark on each new journey without fear.

For me, it has been too easy to be reserved and guarded in relationships, because that is my natural disposition. But I realize now that it is better to be fearless: to dive into each relationship as I would dive off a cliff into a river, secure in the knowledge that there are no sharp rocks below, because this is friendship not an unknown body of water.

I have not found it easy to open my heart to new relationships, I must admit, this past year, and perhaps — more generally — in the years before. But this last few weeks has helped me to see, to understand, to believe, that a life rich with relationships, is a life lived without fear. That diving into new relationships fearlessly helps to grow a sense of belonging. And that a sense of belonging helps to uncover a path to self-actualization.

I may be a long, long way from self-actualization, but I am thankful that the path ahead is paved with incredible, inspiring, life-long, honest, caring, and fearless relationships.

To all of my friends that contributed to this incredible gift: thank you for being in my life, for being there for me again and gain, for being my rock.

To my dearest Tania, who so generously and bravely made these gifts possible: you are my inspiration. Thank you for living fearlessly with me.

Reflections on 40: Friends and family, brothers and sisters, and tribes.

2013-04-23T01:23:32Z

It seems fitting that as a sit down to write this reflection, two days before I turn forty, that I’m bundled up at a friend’s apartment in Vancouver struggling to fight off a cold.

I am away from my bio-family, who are mostly in Toronto, but I don’t feel alone at all. Quite the opposite: I feel embraced and supported by an extended family just about everywhere I go, be it Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, New York, London, Brighton, Berlin, Adelaide, or Oaxaca. This other family is my tribe, a term I adopted from a great article in the New York Times more than ten years ago, and a term that fit more than ever with my lifestyle and beliefs.

I live with very few regrets in life, and I get that confident perspective from my mother. My mother is an inspiration: she has a been a race-car driver, fought her way into a men-only business club before that was a thing to do, succeeded as an entrepreneur more than once, excelled as a corporate executive, and completed a marathon just a year after a major health setback. There is only one regret that I’ve heard her mention with any frequency and that is that she didn’t provide me with a sibling.

But my life is rich with siblings. I feel like I have an abundance of brothers and sisters; people I can play with, grow with, dance with, and share my inner-most thoughts with. It is the strength of those relationships that gives me the confidence to follow my dreams.

Nonetheless, I realize that I must strive to not take these relationships for granted, because I suspect that it is all too easy to let these friendships slip away in the hustle-and-bustle of lives now full with careers, marriages, children, homes, and so on. I am certain that truly great friendships are built. It’s rare that one has been simply handed to me on a silver platter. Neglected, without a doubt, they will start to fade.

This past weekend I read a profoundly simple recipe called My Code of Friendship, written as part of a project called Lifeboat that was, serendipitously enough, produced by people I know through Web of Change. Web of Change was a spark that changed the direction of my life, and also ignited many great and lasting friendships that I still have to this day. So it should have been no surprise to me that people from that network would have created “a movement of people rediscovering great friendships.”

I realize now, reflecting on the ideas behind the Lifeboat project, that having a brothers and sisters, an extended family, a tribe, is not an accident.

Going forward, I want to strive to:

Continue to work on building truly great friendships: both old and new
Explore with friends how I can help them to feel at ease: there should be no pressure or guilt in great friendships
And to always remember that — if I’m typing a message into a tiny box on a screen to feel connected — I should probably just pick up the phone.

Finally, I would add to the code: take a long view. Part of what makes it possible for me to embrace “slow” is the confidence that the world is going to be here for a long, long time. Projects like the Clock of the Long Now are a great reminder that friendships can be like that too: they can exhibit longevity and evolvability, as long as you give them the room to do so.

Reflections on 40: Exercise, the body and the mind.

2013-04-21T21:27:38Z

I had a not uncommon e-mail exchange with a long-time work colleague and friend the other day that went like this:

Friend: Thanks for flagging all this stuff Phillip. I need to take a reading break to get through it all. When do you find time to actually do your work?!

Me: Reading work-related information *is* work!

To some, I must be a paradox: I spend winters in Mexico, write about being a slacker, and “work” as little as possible to make ends meet; however, at the same time, I’m always busy with personal projects and keeping up on all of my current obsessions, most of which overlap with my line of work.

I remember something that Madeline Stanionis, founder of Watershed, once said to me while we were camped out several hours north of Vancouver at a gathering on one of the gulf islands: “I eat, breath, and sleep online fundraising.” I thought to myself, here is this super-cool individual (colourful dreadlocks and all), probably the most sought-after online fundraiser in the US, and — even though she’s completely obsessed with online fundraising — she still makes time to teach others, have a great relationship, enjoy her pet, and — eventually — to open a B&B on the Mendocino coast.

While I gave up ambitions to grow a company what seems like ages ago, I never gave up on the idea of being passionately obsessed with my work and living a balanced life that included learning new skills outside of my comfort zone, and making time for friends, family, and my health. It took a while to get there, but I feel like I’ve mostly made it.

The recipe wasn’t all that complicated. It looks like this:

I try to achieve six hours of “focused productive time” each day, Monday to Friday. Most days, that’s 11AM-7PM. Some days that time is decimated to paid client work, other days it’s dedicated to personal projects or learning new skills. That varies week-to-week, but I try to strike a 60-40 balance and usually manage to hit 80-20 even if I have a lot of client work on the go. That means that I strive for two days a week of productive time invested in personal development that is not weekend days.
8-11AM, I exercise my body and my mind. Like meditation, I try to work out everyday. I alternate running with simple exercises that I can do wherever I am: push-ups, sit-ups, squats, and skipping rope. Meditation and body exercise are done by 9, so I’ve got two hours to make breakfast and prepare for the day.
Between 9-11AM, or thereabouts, I invest roughly 90 minutes in obsession-related reading. This is the stuff that riles me up, so it’s not good pre-bedtime reading. I have a simple strategy that relies on the now-endangered technology called RSS (otherwise known as news feeds): for a very small number of sites and columnists, I use IFTTT to send new articles directly to my Instapaper account. In the morning, I open Instapaper on my iPad and read it as one would the morning newspaper. Typically I have anywhere from 5-15 new articles in the queue. Some I delete immediately without reading, some I scan, some I devour every word of and share with colleagues.
At 11AM (or a bit earlier if I’m heading “into the office,” wherever that may be), I close the iPad and move on with my day, comfortable in the knowledge that I’m working out my mind, everyday, and also that I’m limiting my obsession-related reading time to roughly 7 or 8 hours a week. Some days I write instead of reading. Some days I read at lunch. I’m flexible and intentionally not obsessed with monitoring the time. The key is to flex the mind’s muscle in a variety of ways each day.
I try to take a 1-hour lunch each day. Most days I succeed. I endeavour to use that time to focus on enjoying my food, and giving my work-mind a rest.
At 6PM, I start to wrap-up my day. I close the loop on pressing e-mails and phone calls, and then I open up a document in Evernote and give it the title of today’s date and make note of what I completed today, and what I’d like to focus on tomorrow. I once read “if you sit down at your desk in the morning without already knowing what you’re going to work on, you should just make a plan and start over the next day,” and I’ve roughly stuck to that idea ever since: finish the day with a plan for tomorrow. I do that as part of my “focused productive time” to avoid getting distracted by post-work activities.
7PM marks the end of my “work day,” and I move on to personal pursuits. Confidant that I have already closed the loops on the most pressing items and have a plan for tomorrow that I can review in the morning, my mind can quickly find ease and “let go when my work is done.”

Evenings are less structured. I like to cook, read books, visit with friends, and (probably with too much frequency) obsess with little personal projects, but I try to give myself that time off. The only structure is trying to fit in an hour of reading before bed, and it’s usually something light, like a novel.

I’m hitting that age now where many of my close friends have families that include multiple children, and I recognize that nurturing young minds as well as staying present in a caring partnership must present a whole different level of time-management challenges that I have yet to experience. But I’m pretty confident (in my ignorance, admittedly) that making time to exercise your mind, not just your body, everyday, with reading, writing, contemplating, and learning or exploring, will have a payoff that outweighs the initial time investment.

That’s my recipe. Your mileage may vary. Fork and improve it.

Reflections on 40: Meditate & destroy, Everyday.

2013-04-20T20:48:58Z

My “guy tribe” is awesome.

An impresario, a storyteller, a doctor, a traveller, a hacker, a photographer, a mathematician, a teacher, a union leader, a father, a serial entrepreneur, a programmer, an engineer, a designer, and a writer, among others. This diverse group has taught me more in the last few years than any school, course, workshop, conference, or retreat. They’ve taught me how to let go when my work is done, how to dance like nobody is watching, how to recover from a hangover in style, how to make playing frisbee look cool, and how to enjoy music like a DeeJay.

But the lesson I’ve really taken to heart is: Everyday.

Whatever you find hard to do, whatever needs to be done in the moment, whatever that thing is that gets moved to the end of the list in life: just fscking do it, and do it everyday.

It’s a pretty simple motto for life. It’s easy to apply. The outcomes are impressive and quick. Exercise? Everyday. Write? Everyday. Be kind? Everyday. Be humble? Everyday.

A few weeks ago, I started some directed personal experimentation, in the hopes of creating some space in my life for conscious reflection and contemplation on the last forty years. One of those experiments was meditation, Everyday.

I haven’t meditated regularly since my mid-twenties, and I have my guy tribe to thank for re-connecting me to the practice. Whether it’s Jeff who’s demonstrating just how deep one can take it and offering his home, his heart, and his mind to all comers, or Mark who pulled me reluctantly onto the beach at 7AM to meditate as the sun rose over the ocean in southern Mexico, each of my guys has inspired me with their own commitment to pushing themselves further.

I found it easiest to re-introduce meditation in three ways: a traditional “sit” after waking in the morning, as well as using breathing and contemplation exercises while I’m cooking and, more effectively, while I hand wash the dishes.

The most profound impact has been the “lightness” of my days these last few weeks. Starting the morning with meditation has insulated my mind from a jarring barrage of information, or an avalanche of caffeine, or both simultaneously. For me, this results in much less anxiety as I prepare myself to be productive for the rest of the day.

The evening meditations, cooking and cleaning-up, help me shift away from feeling like I need to be productive all the time, which encourages me to engage other motivations, like inquisitiveness and contemplation. Leaving my laptop at work also helps.

Over the years, I’ve tried to persuade many of the busy, committed, change-makers in my life that slowing down is key to doing great work. I don’t personally believe it’s possible for any individual to create a lasting change in the world around them, unless they can create lasting change in the world within them.

Not making time for oneself is a classic pattern for those who are trying to make the world a better place. However, in my experience — simply by focusing inward on improving the self — the outer is also improved: inner work permeates how one relates to the world and to one’s colleagues and friends, and it presents itself in one’s attitude. I can be as simple as a smile on the street, given to a stranger, that changes their day and yours.

These last few weeks, by making some time (everyday!) for meditation and contemplation, whatever the form — sitting, cooking, or cleaning — has helped to “destroy” (stealing from “dharma punk” Noah Levine) negative patterns, e.g., starting the day with too much intensity, or taking my work-mind home with me. I believe more deeply now than ever that, with time, this practice will improve my work, my friendships, my relationships, and — eventually — the world around me.

Check-in with me in forty years for the outcome.

Reflections on 40: Getting there is easy, just avoid dying and don't drink too much

2013-04-19T18:02:37Z

In six days, I will be forty.

It’s all a bit anticlimactic, because I’ve already lived — survived in style, in fact — the fortieth year of my life, and April 25th just marks the conclusion.

My stepfather used to tell me with annoying frequency “you’ll be dead before you’re thirty,” and I’m gloating now, already having outlived that estimate by twenty-five percent, knowing that he must be turning over in his grave knowing this (his fate having been a heart-attack just a few months into his retirement).

I am alive.

More than that, I can look myself in the eye and say, “if I died tomorrow, I would die happy.” I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything. I live a blessed life and I have very, very few regrets.

Having managed to actively avoid death this long, I thought I would turn my attention to other ambitions, like some directed personal exploration and experimentation. You know, um, trying new shit and “living on my learning edge,” as my west-coast friends would say.

One of the experiments was giving up alcohol for a few weeks. Not an earth-shaking sacrifice I admit, more so because I’m a light drinker (or at least that’s my take on it), but it has been five years, possibly more, since I put the drink on hiatus for any significant length of time.

The idea behind these experiments was to open up some greater opportunities for deeper reflection, contemplation even, on these last forty years of existence. I had a hunch that not drinking might help.

More than just removing a convenient distraction in life, it peeled back layers of crazy shit and forced me to stare down a number of complicated sides of myself that I wasn’t even aware of.

For example, I think of myself as someone that loves to dine out alone: sitting at a bar and reading a book (so cliché, I know!). I realize now, however, that the glass of wine is my companion in this situation and that I’m not “alone” at all. Remove the wine, and I’d much rather eat at home. The list goes on, because — as one realizes very quickly in such an undertaking — much of the fabric of our lives is woven together by two things: working together and drinking together.

Of all the layers that got peeled back during the last three-and-a-half weeks, the most significant and surprising was the barrier between my mind and my heart.

Those who’ve known me for a while probably experience me to be a fairly cool person (not cool like “hip,” but distant). I often think I have a “narrow emotional range,” I’m usually happy, rarely unhappy, rarely ecstatic, just nicely happy a majority of the time. I have always attributed this characteristic to a thin connection between mind and heart.

Take away the glass of wine with dinner, or the post-work beer, and — after a couple of weeks — that connection between my mind and my heart transformed from a trickling stream into a giant bursting-at-the-seams river, the kind that threatens to sweep you away if there’s too much rain. Not for many, many years have I experienced the type of emotion that actually grips me, forces itself to be acknowledged in the moment, and requires thoughtful attention — certainly not while simply sitting there having dinner by myself.

This was a surprise to me. Thankfully, a pleasant surprise.

Getting to re-know myself over the last few weeks has been eye-opening. I’ve been able to recognize how important my connections to other people are, and how profoundly powerful and informative the connection is between the mind and the heart is, when eventually pried open.

So, in summary, getting to forty is relatively easy: just avoid dying and don’t drink too much.

The need for speed: Why top news sites are so slow, and how you can get in the fast lane.

2013-03-22T14:34:23Z

Cross-posted from PBS MediaShift Idea Lab.

I present your winner (or loser?) for slowest loading feature article, the Chicago Tribune, at 16.68 seconds, almost 6 megabytes of data, and with more than 300 requests for resources to display the page in question. In fact, the Tribune was the slowest out of the 15 sites tested three out of five times.

How can this be? The Chicago Tribune, ranked as one of the most trafficked U.S. news sites, is also one of the slowest sites on the Internet (well, not quite, but in the context of these tests is really, honestly, objectively, “dog slow”). I reached out to several people at the Tribune for comment on this story, but did not hear back before publication.

At a time when even the mainstream media is reporting that “bloated web pages are costly for smartphone users” and when Google has made it clear that slow pages impact a page’s rank and that it takes speed into account in its search rankings, how is it that some of the Internet’s most-visited news sites can get away with thumbing their nose at the need for speed?

The Tribune is not alone in their sluggish response to this issue. This chart shows how the other “Top 10 global news sites by traffic” measure up (based on tests of feature articles):

(Test results courtesy of GTmetrix. Data from all of the tests is here.)

Why speed is still important, in a nutshell

I called Alex Krohn, founder of Vancouver, B.C.-based hosting company Gossamer Threads, the company that created the GTmetrix performance testing tool, to ask if speed still is still important in this age (and on this continent) of abundant, cheap, and fast high-speed broadband Internet. Specifically, I wanted to know, is it still as relevant today as it was in 2007?

“Speed is still a critical factor,” said Krohn. “In fact, it’s getting more important, not less important as time goes on. For example, we understand that people’s attention spans and patience are shrinking. Meanwhile, Google is making lots of changes with things like instant search and autocomplete to make that interaction with the user more real-time, and with less delays.”

“There is a lot of data and analytics on on how speed impacts shopping sites; the faster the page loads, the more likely the user is to continue along in the process and eventually make purchases. Delays risk losing that visitor,” Krohn continued. “Five or six years ago, people would happily wait five or more seconds for something to load. Nowadays, if it doesn’t come up within a couple of seconds — especially if the person is arriving from search results — people will hit the back button and try the next result.”

I also asked Irakli Nadareishvili, Director of Engineering/Digital Media, at NPR about speed, given that NPR was the real winner here, consistently delivering a page load time for feature articles well under three seconds. Nadareishvili said “NPR’s software design is based on a set of architectural principles […] One of the main principles is: Speed is a Feature. Our tech team has been investing heavy effort in getting great page load-times.”

So, if speed is getting more important, why are so many top news sites around the globe so damn slow?

Widgets, buttons, and badges, oh my

I had a hunch it might be widgets, buttons and badges. The Web is now awash in third-party services — Facebook, Google+, Twitter, just to name a few — that all provide their own handy little code snippet for you to embed on your site. Each of these little code snippets is time-saving for the developer implementing it, but potentially time-consuming for the end user. Could widgets be to blame? I asked Krohn that question too.

“Each one of these adds a ‘hit’ to the site, in terms of the resources required and the total time to load everything. If you do it in a way that’s smart and doesn’t slow things down for the user, then it can be a good thing. However, if you do it wrong, it can impact the speed of the site,” Krohn said. He went on to explain, “It’s important to have a good understanding of the numbers and what they mean. So, for example, a ‘15-second page load time’ doesn’t necessarily mean the user is staring at a blank screen that whole time, and using a lot of resources may be OK if the user gets what they want out of the site within the first couple of seconds.”

This specific question was one of the reasons that GTmetrix added video analysis to its performance testing toolkit; turning it on provides a real-time video capture of a Web page as it loads as users would see it in their browser. Curious, as always, I tried it on the Chicago Tribune (a site that loads more than 300 resources on an average article):

A quick review of the timeline for how long it takes resources to load on that page does indicate that both the Facebook and Twitter widgets are causing some delays, as well as a handful of surprisingly slow requests for resources on the Tribune’s own site. But widgets and buttons alone were not enough to be the sole culprit here.

That said, using performance tools like this to analyze your own site could help to uncover similar speed bottlenecks or opportunities for performance improvements. Another option is to explore ways to only load those widgets when the user request them, like SocialCount developed by the Filament Group.

Mobile optimized sites vs. responsive Web design

My next thought was that perhaps the Chicago Tribune and others are only slow on my desktop computer, and they’re investing their energy in improving the speed of the experience they deliver to mobile users, where it really matters.

I ran this possibility by Krohn also and he said: “Optimizing for mobile users is important, and delivering a mobile-optimized experience is certainly a good thing. Nonetheless, you need to optimize for both because different devices have different priorities.” He went on to explain that “it may be acceptable to deliver 2-3 megabytes of data to a desktop user (while that might not be acceptable for mobile users), but you would still want to do that in an intelligent ‘non-blocking’ way so that a user is not staring at a blank screen while that data loads.”

This consideration is becoming even more important as mobile traffic increases globally, and as more and more news sites turn to responsive Web design as a way to address the needs of users regardless of device, as the Boston Globe has recently done, and as the New York Times is planning to do in an upcoming redesign.

Although concepts like responsive and “mobile first” Web design aim to put the mobile experience — the currently slower network connection — at the center of the design process, there are still a lot of details to work out in terms of only delivering the resources that the device needs, and not a desktop-centric resource simply squished to look good on a smaller screen. Initiatives like responsive images are a push in that direction, but for sites that have very large amounts of mobile traffic, it is still worth exploring other ways of delivering a smaller amount of data across the network.

Page Speed vs. YSlow

OK, so where do you start training to compete against sites like NPR, USA Today, and CNN in the amazing race to be the fastest news site online? It’s actually quite easy, and there are several tools built right into your Web browser that can help.

Two options for investigating your site’s performance (and I always recommend testing article pages, prior to testing index pages or front pages, as they often receive the most traffic) are Google’s Page Speed tool and Yahoo’s YSlow. Both are available as extensions for Firefox and Google Chrome so that you can run them at the click of a button while looking at your article page.

Using a Web-based performance testing tool like GTmetrix has the advantage of storing results over time, setting up alerts, being able to test from different locations around the world, and recording a video of what the user is experiencing as the page loads (as well as a nifty developer API, for automating the tests, like I’ve done for this column).

Getting a clear picture of how the page is loading, what order resources are loading in, and which requests are adding a lot of time to the page load can provide a lot of insight into where to start with your optimizations. All three tools mentioned above will provide you with some clear starting points, and indicate how important each is toward improving the user’s experience.

The most important considerations

There are more than 60 recommendations if you combine advice from both Page Speed and YSlow, which can feel overwhelming at first. So I asked Krohn to boil it down for us and to suggest the top three low-effort, high-impact site optimizations:

Optimizing images: “Put into your workflow the process of getting your images optimized” through a service like Smush.it, Krohn said. “Make sure you’re sending the user an image that is as small as possible.” As well, you should be specifying image dimensions everywhere possible (less computing for the browser) and combining images into sprites where it makes sense.
Enable gzip compression: “There are still a large number of sites that don’t use gzip compression. What that means is that the server is sending information to the user uncompressed. It could be 150kb of HTML, but that compresses incredibly well. Turning gzip on will get the initial page to the user orders of magnitude faster and is widely supported by browsers,” he said. You should be able to ask your Web host to do this for you, or to enable it yourself in your Web server software quite easily.
Caching: “Coming up with a good cache-control policy and headers to let your users’ Web browsers know what they can and can’t store locally,” Krohn said. “A lot of the time your JavaScript, images, and CSS can all be cached for a lengthy amount of time. And that applies not only in the browser, but also country and corporate level proxies will often cache that data too, which means that it reaches users faster.” For more on straightforward and inexpensive caching, see the next section.

I’d add to that list the recommendations that I’ve seen good results from in my own work:

Defer loading and parsing of JavaScript: Google tells us that “deferring loading of JavaScript functions that are not called at startup reduces the initial download size, allowing other resources to be downloaded in parallel, and speeding up execution and rendering time” and that “in order to load a page, the browser must parse the contents of all script tags, which adds additional time to the page load.” Most contemporary boilerplate HTML templates, such as the HTML5 Boilerplate, move JavaScript to the bottom of the page for this reason.
Minify everything: Along with services like Smush.it, there are many free tools that will help you compress other resources like stylesheets and JavaScript, like YUI Compressor and Google’s Closure Compiler. Many of these compressors and minify-ers integrate with contemporary Web development workflow tools like Grunt, making it a snap to work on uncompressed files and then have the resources compressed when deployed to a production environment.

You don’t have to lay out serious cash for a cache

As suggested, putting a long cache lifetime on routinely accessed, infrequently updated, resources like JavaScript libraries, CSS frameworks, user interface images, and so on is a great, low-effort, way to speed up your page load time for frequent visitors to your site. While that may sound tricky at first, it’s actually pretty straightforward:

Start by separating your static assets from the rest of your Web site. This is often done by moving them to a separate domain like static.mydomain.com.
Next, keep in mind that, for caching purposes, one and only one URL should point to one version of each resource. So, for example, you may start with a resource like static.mydomain.com/v1/js/script.js and when you deploy a new version of that resource, you will increment the version number in the URL, e.g.: static.mydomain.com/v2/js/script.js You can choose how and where to implement the version number, according to how you manage your resources. While using query strings — e.g., static.mydomain.com/js/script.js?v1 — can work, it’s not considered as effective.
The last step is to ask your Web hosting company to set a long cache policy and headers for resources served from static.mydomain.com (or to do that yourself, if you manage your system). A year is not too long, if you’ve got a good system for incrementing your versioned URLs as described above.

News App teams at NPR and ProPublica have also started to increasingly “bake out” their data-heavy, but infrequently changing, news apps — which means, instead of serving those applications as a live Web application with a data connection, the application is served as a large collection of static files. Serving static files is typically one of the things that most Web servers like Apache or Nginx are really good at (without much optimization), hence those news apps become very responsive.

Another option is using an HTTP accelerator, like Varnish Cache, as recommended by Scott Klein in his post about ProPublica’s “News App Tech” and Jeff Reifman in his series on setting up Wordpress on Amazon.

All of the above are no-cost ways to do caching with your existing technology and a bit of elbow grease. No content delivery network or cloud hosting magic required.

Staying on top of your performance

If you’ve stuck with me this far, I’m impressed! And you must be obsessed with speed as much as I am. One final thing to remember is that even the news sites I’ve analyzed for this article were probably fast at one point in their existence. Performance optimization is the kind of thing that, unfortunately, gets done somewhat irregularly. Ideally it would be an ongoing concern and a part of the process for a site’s development, but that’s rarely the reality: Sites evolve, get slower, and it isn’t until someone takes an interest and leads a charge that things speed up again.

You can help avoid that cycle for your site by making speed and performance one of things you test regularly, and even build into your development and analytics process. Here are three tools to get you started:

GTmetrix’s alerts: The free version of GTmetrx lets you monitor up to five URLs, and run up to 20 reports a day.
Google Analytics: The free analytics tool makes it easy to set up a dashboard that focuses on site speed. Many other analytics tools also have this capability. Set up the report and set it to be e-mailed to you regularly (and then read it! And then look for problems!)
Chartbeat: Chartbeat and many similar “real time” traffic analytics tools have alerts for site speed problems. This can often help uncover issues that only occur under unusual circumstances, like a traffic spike, and can pinpoint real opportunities for performance when you need it most.

Last, but not least, don’t forget to test those alternate experiences of your site’s content, e.g., mobile optimized, iPad editions, and standalone “news apps” and micro-sites.

This is part of an ongoing series on the technology behind popular news brands: the who, what, when, where, and why of news operations and their online decisions. If you have ideas for future columns, please contact me on Twitter or leave a comment over at PBS MediaShift Idea Lab

Consistency and simplicity are keys to better databases (and spreadsheets) for journalists

2013-02-22T16:58:24Z

This post originally appeared on PBS MediaShift Idea Lab

I'm working on a fun little project at the moment that involves pulling data out of a Google Spreadsheet that is being curated by a team of journalists. The interesting thing about this project is that it so clearly illustrates the difference in thinking between people who regularly work with databases (herein called programmers) and those who use them less frequently (herein called journalists). In this particular case, the spreadsheet was initially developed by a more technically inclined editor, but -- nonetheless -- it exhibits some humorous and illustrative shortcomings, which we'll explore here.

What is a column, what is a row

In one of the earliest books that I read on databases design (and still a personal favorite), "Database Design for Mere Mortals," under the heading of "Objectives of good design," it says:

Each table in the database represents a single subject, is composed of relatively distinct fields, keeps redundant data to an absolute minimum, and is identified throughout the database by a field with unique values.

In fact, most day-to-day use of SQL-type databases utilizes terminology that matches a spreadsheet quite nicely, specifically: tables, rows, and columns (or, as C.J. Date would insist in his excellent book, "Database in Depth: Relational Theory for Practitioners": relations, tuples, and attributes).

Thus, we can think of a Google Spreadsheet as a simple database of sorts that describes a single domain, for example, an upcoming election. Within the spreadsheet there are worksheets (those little tabs along the bottom that I encourage you to use!), and each worksheet represents a table that describes "only one kind of thing, an entity, with its (non-repeating) attributes. A common way to name each table is with a plural noun name, e.g., Customers, Products, Aircraft, etc."

So, extending that logic to our example domain, an upcoming election, in our Google Spreadsheet we might want to have:

worksheets for the various "subjects" that are often part of an election, like Districts, Candidates, Incumbents, and so on.

In each of these worksheets, the columns would represent attributes of that type of thing: For example, a Candidates worksheet might have a column for party affiliation, website, and so on.

Each row would represent one instance of that type of thing, a candidate, and would contain all of the various attributes that relate to that one candidate.

My sense is that most journalists who've worked with a spreadsheet -- knowingly, or unconsciously -- kind of "get" the concepts presented above. However, where the conceptual meets the practical, there can be some bumpy landings.

It's all in the name

The bumpy landing that I experience most often, and most viscerally, is the seemingly innocuous worksheet column called "Name." How often have I stared in dismay, dumbfounded even, and grumbled to myself "You didn't really put all of that into one column, did you!?"

Names are surprisingly tricky things, programatically, because they're made up of several component parts like the first name, middle name, and last name, not to mention the honorific, suffix, and so on. And, in today's multicultural world, even these distinctions are not always straightforward or obvious.

Take for example a name like "Jenny Wai Ching Kwan." What is the first, middle, and last name? For a computer program, names like that can be difficult to guess (or to "parse") from the individual words. This is where the editorial judgment trumps robot journalism: A subject matter expert needs to break that name up into its component parts so that it's easy to work with.

Thus, as a rule of thumb, it's often best not to exclusively use "Name" as a column in your worksheet, and instead to separate that into "First name" and "Last name," and -- if you need more information about the name -- create more columns.

Another common challenge with names is that they can be represented in all kinds of short forms -- for example, Caitlin/Kate/Katie, Michael/Mike, Robert/Bob, and so on. Back to our running example, an election, even though a candidate might prefer to be called Kate and might publicly promote herself as Kate in her material or on her website and so on, that doesn't mean you should enter "Kate" in the "First name" column for her row in the worksheet. Why not? Well, technically speaking, that's not her proper name -- the one most likely used on the government website, and in other online databases and data sources -- and that could mean missed opportunities.

Just one quick example: If you happen to have a fantastic Open Data non-profit in your country and they happen to provide a great data source for accessing basic information about elected representatives, like photos, contact information, and so on, you might want to use that service instead of collecting the information yourself because it would save a lot of time. However, being good open data citizens, this data service has used the proper names for each representative because that's how it was presented on the government website where the data was pulled from.

So, in your worksheet you have "Kate" and you do a lookup for "Kate Smith," and sadly the fantastic Web service responds with "No results." Why? Well, because the lookup you needed to use was "Caitlin Smith." Enough said about that. If you want to use preferred names or nicknames in your worksheet, then -- that's right, you guessed it! -- create more columns.

A little consistency please

So, at this point, hopefully it has hit home that it's really helpful to have each distinct "bit" of information in it's own field, and each field under a column that clearly identifies that bit of information as one single attribute of the subject. That said, should you choose to ignore this guideline -- which no doubt you will at some point -- there is one other guideline that can help to mitigate the potential problem: consistency.

For example, if for some unknown reason, it was agreed upon to put three distinct bits of information into one field under one column heading, it should be entered the same way -- exactly -- every time it's entered. So, continuing with our running example of an election, maybe you've decided to list all of the candidate's social media links in one column (why you would do this, I have no idea!) like so:

    @somecandidate,
    candidatewebsite.com,
    facebook.com/somecandidate,
    instagram.com/somecandidate

On it's own, that field or cell would actually be fairly easy to work with, because the individual items are ordered (Twitter, website, Facebook, Instagram) and separated by a comma. Phew!

However, if the next cell looks like this, which it often does, things start getting a bit more complicated:

   @someothercandidate,
   othercandidatewebsite.com
   instagram.com/someothercandidate

At first glance, that might look pretty much the same, but it's not consistent with the first. For starters, one of the links is not present (Facebook), which means that the order of the information is not something that can be relied on. Second, the comma is no longer consistently used to separate the distinct parts.

Now your poor overworked programmer has a lot of edge cases to sort through to turn this into meaningful data that can be presented to your readers. At this point, no doubt, any lazy programmer is simply going to add some columns to your spreadsheet and ask you to separate the data (which, per above, you should have done in the first place). Or, because programmers love a good challenge, she will develop some complex logic to deal with all of the various ways that data could be entered in that column (and your project will launch late).

OK, so there's a simple lesson here: One column should contain just one piece of information (a single attribute of the subject at hand), and keep it really, really consistent. (For example, in Google Spreadsheets, you can use the comments feature to leave formatting guidance on the column headings).

Don't overwork the data

OK, those considerations out of the way, let's move on to working with the data, i.e., calculations, sorting, and so on. Looking at the inspiration for this post and our running example, our basic infrastructure is a Google Spreadsheet and a "Web application" that will display the data to users in a friendly format. Here our much-maligned journalist has not one, but two, tools in the mix for doing data manipulation: the ever-powerful spreadsheet and the even-more-powerful programmer. For this reason, there really is no (good) reason to try to do these manipulations manually.

So, continuing with our example of an election, the spreadsheet might contain a worksheet for a previous election, and that worksheet might have columns for district, candidate, party, and votes received. With that information, it's very, very easy to determine who the "winner" of a given race was, and who was in second, third, fourth place, and so on.

It's also easy to determine the total number of votes (assuming that there's a row for each and every one of the candidates who ran and not just the first five or something) and to indicate the percentage of the total votes that each candidate won. However, if you don't want to list all 10 candidates who ran, you'll also need to store the total number of votes cast, somewhere, so that an accurate calculation can be made.

In general, I'd suggest just including a row for each candidate that ran -- then your data is 100% complete and you can avoid the question of where to put the "Total votes counted in this district" information. If you need to include it, because you only want to research the top five candidates, it's probably best to add a column for "Total votes counted in this district" and add that number to every row, according to what election the row is referring to. This introduces some redundancy in the data, which is a trade-off for less data entry.

So, just to be clear, there's really no need to manually indicate in the spreadsheet with columns like "XYZ Election Winner Name" and "XYZ Election Winner Runner Up." This can, and probably should, be done either by using functions in your spreadsheet (which enables you to check your data entry vs. the official record), or in the Web application that presents the data (again, letting you double-check the numbers and helping to catch data entry problems).

SUMing it all up

That was a lot of information to digest, no doubt, so let's conclude this with a quick review:

Spreadsheets map to databases quite nicely (when used efficiently): They have the equivalent of tables, columns, and rows that can describe a subject like people, places, or things.
Worksheets, collectively, can describe a broader knowledge domain, like an election, or a parliamentary session, or city contracts.
Using these efficiently means keeping each distinct "bit" of data in its own field, under a descriptive column heading.
When in doubt, create a new column.
Be consistent. If the data is being entered by more than one person, then use built-in features like comments to provide guidance on the format that should be used.
Names of people and places should be as accurate, and proper, as possible. (Think about the data sources you might be referencing and cross-check the entry with that source.)
Keep the data clean, concise, and descriptive, and leave the sorting, joining, calculating and manipulation for later.

No doubt you -- as a journalist, or a programmer -- have some of your own tip, tricks, and pet peeves when working with spreadsheets. I hope that you'll take a moment to share the love (or the pain) here in the comments, or on Twitter.

P.S. Do you have a great example of a Google Spreadsheet-powered Web app? Please drop a link in the comments!

This post originally appeared on PBS MediaShift Idea Lab, please post any comments on the original post!

Investigating the Technology Underlying Top News Organizations

2013-02-07T15:36:39Z

Cross-posted from PBS MediaShift Idea Lab

“We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die” — Umberto Eco

Ever since PBS MediaShift contacted me about contributing to their Idea Lab site again (past posts here), I’ve been taking the opportunity to ponder a new “beat” of sorts, one that would be both interesting to read, and also a contribution in some way to the larger conversation about shifts that are underway in news, media, and technology.

What I’ve decided to try is an experiment: a structured investigation into the technology behind some of the Web operations that are generally considered to be “top news organizations,” something that I’ve been following casually for quite a while. The experiment is to see if I can bring some thoroughness to this line of investigation, and not simply cherry-pick the good technology stories that advance my own views. (It’s easy to discover that I’m a shameless promoter of open-source software and open access.)

This will also be an investigation to explore the who, what, when, where, and why of news operations that are putting their money where their mouth is (or not). For example, do they claim to be in support of user privacy but continue to quietly collect and share users’ information? Do they promote their use of open-source stacks for news application development but run proprietary software to handle day-to-day workflow and content management needs, and — more generally — where do these news organizations fall on a range of technology choices like Web and e-mail service providers, analytics tools, commenting systems, and so on? Hopefully, the answers we find will be informative and useful to other news operations that are facing the same questions.

The first order of business, then, is to come up with an initial set of data to work with. A list of news organizations’ Web sites, if you will, that we can peer into and glean some information.

Building a list (or two)

As a starting point, I looked at lists of top news sites by traffic on the Guardian UK as well as the 2012 report from the Nielsen Group on “Top U.S. Web brands and news Web sites.”

I also scanned a few other lists, which added sites like Mail Online, and then I removed aggregators and sites without much original content, specifically Yahoo News, Google News, Drudge Report, and Reddit.

The final list I plan to work with for “top news sites” is the following:

I also thought it would be fun to track some niche lists — here are a couple that came immediately to mind:

The Open News partner news organizations:

Al Jazeera English
BBC
Boston Globe/Boston.com
Guardian UK
Zeit Online
New York Times
Spiegel Online
ProPublica
La Nacion

And a “Semi-comprehensive list of newsrooms doing news applications”:

Associated Press
Chicago Tribune
Cincinnati Enquirer
CQ-Roll Call Group
Dallas Morning News
Los Angeles Times
New York Times
ProPublica
St. Petersburg Times
The Texas Tribune
Washington Post
MSNBC.com

I have a few ideas for other collections of news sites to look at, e.g., Canadian news sites (because I’m a Canuck), online-only news operations (a personal passion), and perhaps the independent newsrooms that make up The Media Consortium membership.

If you have some ideas for other list of news operations and news Web sites to investigate, please drop me a line (Twitter, or the comments here work nicely) or — better yet — just edit the list in Google Spreadsheets directly.

Where we go from here

I’ve asked the folks at BuiltWith — a Web site profiler, competitive analysis, and business intelligence tool — to help provide the basic information for this series. They’ve generously agreed to provide access to their API for the purpose of this column. Using BuiltWith, we’ll have a look at the collections of sites above, explore what technology stacks they are using, and start digging for trends or interesting outliers.

From there, I hope to jump off and dig into the initiatives that aren’t so easily compared such as the technology underlying these news organizations’ mobile and tablet strategies, technical approaches to pay walls, authentication and identity management, and how each organization engages with readers, and so on.

Much of this information is outside the reach of simple profiling tools, so — when I hit those limits — I’ll do something very unnatural for a technically inclined person: I will pick up the phone and start asking questions. All that to say, when the phone rings and it’s me on the other end of the line, I hope you’ll take a moment to field my inquiries.

If there are specific questions that you have for your own news operations, which might be influenced by knowing how other organizations are approaching a specific technical challenge, please drop me a line or leave a comment below. I’d be encouraged to have some reader input on what questions are the most interesting to answer.

Here we go.

Cross-posted from PBS MediaShift Idea Lab. Have comments? Please post them on the original post

Mexico: The case of the missing lock box

2013-01-24T16:14:51Z

There comes a moment, as I suspect it happens for most people who travel or live abroad, when it really hits you that you’re living in an entirely different country, a country with a history and cultural references completely different from the ones you know well.

This happened for me two weeks ago, and it’s a really funny story (in hindsight).

It all started on the first official day of my vacation. I was at the beach and I’d just gotten up, finished breakfast, and was settling into the hammock for some reading before heading out into the waves. My phone buzzes and I’m thinking “Damn, I didn’t think I had any reception here! Serves me right for booking a hotel on a hill.” I look at the phone and it’s my next door neighbor, Hayley, sending me a text message. It says, ominously, “Hola. Could you please call me now.” I’m convinced she’s contacted the wrong person, so I write back “Me? This is Phillip.” To which she responds: “Yup.”

Uh-oh.

So I call Hayley to find out what’s up and she says “Your lock box is gone.”

I’m floored.

You see, just a few days earlier I’d received a delivery from Toronto of an Abus lock box for storing keys to your apartment outside, so that people can get in, i.e., real estate agents, cleaners, etc. They grow on trees in Toronto, literally: in front of almost any condominium you’ll find something covered with twenty or thirty of them, a fence or a post or what-have-you. Logistically, they make so much sense! You just put your keys in there, lock it, and the person who needs access just comes and enters the combo and voilà! they’ve got your keys — no awkward and clumsy drop-off at a friends’ required.

This was just what I needed in Oaxaca, I thought, because I’m often heading out of town and having friends stay at my place while I’m away. The only tricky part is the key exchange, because incoming guests usually don’t have a local phone to use to coordinate with me or my friends for the key pick-up, which leaves us waiting for their arrival — and, like most travel, there are typically delays and confusion and so on. The lock box was my answer! I would simply provide guests with the combination and then lock this sturdy bugger to the iron bars that cover one of the street-facing windows near the front door.

That was my plan. Some of my local friends thought that I was being naive. They couldn’t put their finger on why, exactly, but they were sure it was naive.

Anyway, I was certain it would work. So, on Monday morning before heading to the beach, I attached the Abus lock box with a complete set of my keys to the iron bars outside the apartment. Then, off I went…

Back to Hayley’s phone call the next day. So, my friend Mara has come to pick-up the keys to stay in my apartment and low-and-behold the lock box is gone. Vanished. No one has any idea where it went. No one heard a thing. This is particularly strange, because it’s a really, really sturdy little piece of metal and it would take some serious pounding to get it off the iron bars, or some of those seriously large bold cutters. What the hell happened in those twenty-four hours? Should we change the locks pronto?

Hours later, I get the first update. My good friend Rodrigo, a local graphic designer, has been recruited to help solve the mystery. First call is to my landlady, a holistic medicine doctor, who is confused by his call and says, basically, “I have a set of keys, I can bring them over.” Rodrigo clarifies the situation: they don’t need keys, but they’re worried about the missing keys, and should they change the locks? The story then starts falling into place, as my landlady shares that she had the lock box removed on Monday night.

Phew! At least we don’t need to rush to change the locks… well, maybe. We decided to wait until my return to make that decision.

When I get back, I run into my landlady outside my apartment and we sit down for a chat. I’m really disappointed by the unnecessary destruction of a $60 lock box; more than anything, it’s probably my pride that is wounded at the failure of my great idea. But I am still curious why the lock box was removed without consulting me or my neighbor! So I ask, and the conversation goes something like this (paraphrasing, as it was in Spanish):

Me: I’m curious why you didn’t call me, or Hayley, to ask what the box was?

Landlady: Why didn’t you tell me you were putting it there?

Me: You’re right, I should have e-mailed you. I was in a rush that morning and I didn’t think about it. Still, I’m curious why you would have it cut off without asking me or Hayley about it?

LL: Well, when I arrived on Monday night there was quite a spectacle underway.

Me: Spectacle?

LL: Ten neighbors had gathered in front of the apartment, including the president of the neighborhood association. They had gathered to discuss this box hanging from the front window. They had wrapped it in black cloth and were having a lively debate about what it was. Just then a pick-up truck full of municipal police pulled up, brandishing machine guns, to disperse them. That’s when I arrived: the police were trying to tell the neighbors to go home and the neighbors were arguing about this box.

Me: You’re kidding, right? What did they think it was? A bomb?

LL: Well, yes, a bomb was one of the options being discussed. The reason they had wrapped it in cloth was because they thought it was a hidden camera.

Me: A hidden camera!? Filming who? The ladies who make quesadillas in front of the house?

LL: Well, yes, the quesadilla ladies thought it might be filming them, which they didn’t like one bit, but also they thought it might be filming the priest who runs the church across the street. You know, he’s “political.”

Me: (“Political?” I don’t even want to ask…)

LL: So, when I arrived, I went to get your other neighbor, Guillermo, because of all of the police. Because of the commotion, the police recommended that they remove the box, and I agreed. Moments later they pulled a huge bolt cutter out of the pick-up truck and click off it came.

Just like that. Robbed of my lock box and a great idea! By the police no less. It did make my ponder: who am I more afraid of having keys to my apartment, some random thief, or the local cops? Sigh.

Almost two weeks later, and I’m still waiting for word from the police on the lock box; they won’t admit or deny that they have it.

No sign of my pride either. It has been terminally wounded on this account.

Oh well, chalk this one up to a lesson in cultural differences I guess.

Onward!

Why I support independent media, and why you should too.

2013-01-08T15:30:49Z

I was just sent this PDF from the November/December 2012 issue of Briarpatch Magazine where I was profiled for being a monthly donor.

I’ve re-posted the text from the PDF below, because it’s probably the best pitch I can give you to support Briarpatch, or a magazine like Briarpatch in your community, or — failing that — to support independent media in general.

(If you in the US, might I recommend Democracy Now?).

Currently based in Oaxaca, one of the political, cultural, and culinary centres of Mexico, this itinerant digital media maestro is a mover in more ways than one. By day, Phillip Smith is a digital publishing consultant who works with innovative news organizations like The Tyee. By night, he’s a digital activist experimenting with creative ways to get people active.

How would you describe yourself to Briarpatch readers?
Roughly six feet tall, pushing 40, and almost always wearing a hipster beard and a jaunty hat.

What is the most important issue facing Canadians?
The lack of support for a vibrant independent media sector. Corporate media consolidation, plus a lack of support for independent alternatives, confines many Canadians to an information prison that is almost impossible to break.

What do you like best about Briarpatch?
I can sit down on the couch with Briarpatch and enjoy it from front to back. That readability comes from a commitment to quality writing and journalism that I’ve not experienced in many other Canadian magazines.

What do you like least about Briarpatch?
Having seen the inside of the vegan sausage factory that is the Briarpatch headquarters, one can only be left with a sense of awe at how such a consistently great publication can be produced with such a small staff and budget. What I like least about Briarpatch is that it has to exist in an environment of scarcity and not abundance.

How would you describe Briarpatch to a friend?
I don’t bother trying to describe Briarpatch to friends; I simply subscribe them at holiday gift-giving time

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
Supporting Briarpatch is effortless and painless. How much does the average Canadian spend on corporate media? All Canadians should think about investing at least as much with independent media each month - how can we expect things to change, if we don’t invest in alternatives?

The Reinvention of Nearly Everything

2013-01-02T15:31:23Z

Cross-posted from The Tyee

You may not have noticed it, but we're in the middle of a renaissance. There's a global movement underway to question the very foundations that we have built modern society on.

This movement wants to re-think almost everything we know through the lens of what's possible today. It will start with something as innocent as a new lightbulb, and might -- just possibly -- change the course of everything else in the process.

In the recent past, if you wanted to learn something new you were probably told to go to school. Of course, there's no guarantee the registrar will let you in.

You were thinking of starting a new business? Go to the bank, they would advise. Of course, there's no guarantee the bank manager will like your business plan and give you the loan you need.

Want to save the world, or house the homeless? Go to a big charity and try to convince them of your plan. Good luck with that.

This is the way things have been done before.

This is not the way things will be done in the future. Not for everything, at least.

To understand this story of the future, you have to understand the story of the past. It starts in a familiar but unlikely place: online video and, yes, TED Talks.

This renaissance will be streamed and curated

As movements usually do, this one began with engaged people doing smart stuff: talking about ideas, developing prototypes and demonstrations, trying to get their message out to the like-minded. Only, this time, there was one major difference: the gatekeepers at the doors of mass communication disappeared.

Successful video distribution sites like YouTube and Vimeo made it possible for people to broadcast their ideas instantly to a huge global audience. Never before in human history have ideas moved so quickly. Sure, there have long been champions of "open data" and "open knowledge," but the key here is video. Today you can sit down in front of your computer, look into the camera, and speak to the world.

This much you probably already know.

However, when anyone can broadcast themselves, inevitably, everyone does. This led to a signal-versus-noise challenge: highly-useable broadcast technology, no gatekeepers, huge audience, but no equivalent of a "TV Guide" for good ideas. The seminal moment -- connecting ideas to idea-seeking audience -- came in 2006 when the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference decided to "open" the TED experience to anyone, by posting the talks online.

Instantly successful in finding a hungry audience, the TED conference expanded the pool of ideas by opening their process even further in 2009 with the TEDx series of events, which are produced locally in more than 130 countries around the world. Once a very exclusive event -- costing several thousand dollars to attend -- and with very limited speaking opportunities, the TED movement is now a global knowledge-exchanging network that has taught us the power of ideas, delivered quickly, in a compelling format.

For many, it was a groundbreaking moment for the Internet. Presenting ideas would never be the same again. We have levelled up.

But ideas alone don't change the world...

Hackers and makers come of age

At the same time that these big ideas were crossing the globe instantly and finding their audience, the Internet was becoming massively efficient at bringing together the kinds of people who like to build things, physical things, just as much, if not more, than talk ideas. Let's call those people "makers" and "hackers."

As Wayne Macphail said in The Tyee not long ago: "Maker Culture? That's coders, fabricators, foodies, artists, educators, activists, citizen and even scientists grabbing the do-it-yourself ethic with both hands and changing our world in the process."

What makes these DIYers different than, say, the hobbyists of the past, is, as Macphail continued, "They're making a point of sharing what they've learned, what they've made, and why. Often, for free."

"Makers are responding directly, locally to globalization, commercialization, copyright and central command and control."

The breakthrough moment for the maker-hacker movement was the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster of 2011.

After an earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, the power plant began leaking radiation. Nearby residents were frightened and the government was not releasing much information about radiation levels. On top of all of this, the commercial supply of Geiger counters had dried up, making it difficult for concerned citizens to do their own measurements.

Three friends, located in different cities around the world, connected instantly by Skype, turned a conversation into an idea, an idea into a plan, a plan into prototypes, and -- with the help of more than 600 "venture collectivists" who invested almost $40,000 in 30 days through the project-based fundraising website Kickstarter, a website that puts a video pitch at the heart of any funding appeal -- were able to activate a global network of makers (Hackerspaces and FabLabs, to be specific) to produce radically improved Geiger counters that were then delivered to a network of on-the-ground activists in Japan who began mapping the country's radiation levels and releasing the data openly, publicly and in real time.

Fukushima was the coming of age story for a movement of hackers that refused to wait for permission to fix something they saw as a pressing problem: passionate people committed to using their ability to rapidly build things -- software, hardware, and networks -- to respond to the growing challenges facing the earth and its inhabitants.

The conspiracy of radical positivity

Thomas Homer Dixon argued in The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization that humanity does not have to worry about climate change, peak oil, or regional political instability in isolation, but -- instead -- should prepare for the likelihood that they will all conspire and happen at once. On the flip side, this is exactly what's happening in the world of people trying to change the world for the better: not just "open ideas," or rapid iteration and innovation, or massive collaboration, or the application of the "hacker ethic," but all of it at once. While everything is getting exponentially worse, there's also the potential for things to get exponentially and radically better.

It's a positive feedback loop at the same scale in which we talk about the warming of the oceans: the rapid innovation in core technologies -- smaller, faster, components -- which then fuel new innovations in other areas (Steven Johnson, in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, called these "adjacent possibles"). Those innovations in turn contribute to new ways of thinking about pre-existing problems. Those ideas iterate rapidly over the Internet. Sites like TED.com work to curate and promote those ideas; sites like Kickstarter use video to improve the ideas and build a community around them, and sites like Instructables work to disseminate them back out to a growing global community of DIY enthusiasts and hackers, who then feed the results back again via the Internet. All in the blink of an eye.

The result is potentially world-changing technological outcomes. For example, new hardware like the incredibly small and inexpensive Arduino "open-source electronics prototyping platform" or the Raspberry Pi, a palm-sized Linux-powered computer, are being used to inexpensively prototype new products, and to rapidly experiment with new ideas. Similar advances in technology are making it possible for inventors in 2012 to radically re-think the lightbulb. This approach -- ideas to prototype, prototype to community-funding -- is being used to push the limits of what we've believed possible, and literally bring the future to today with projects like Formlab's "Form 1," a (relatively) affordable desktop 3D printer.

Rocket boosters on a ladybug

This positive feedback loop keeps reverberating, from ideas to things, and from improved things back to improved ideas. People all over the planet are seeking to take small ideas to a massive audience, or to make massive ideas smaller, more understandable, and -- ultimately -- more useful.

At one end of this spectrum are initiatives like the Khan Academy. Started as a small idea to teach math over the Internet, the Khan Academy is now a massively ambitious project to provide "a free world-class education for anyone anywhere." Take an idea like this, mix in a global audience via a video sharing site like YouTube, then stir in a sizeable financial grant from Google, and you've basically put rocket boosters on a ladybug. The world has not seen this kind of rapid, anarchistic, exponential innovation before, and we've yet to really understand the impact this could have on our society.

At the other end of the spectrum is creative destruction: take the world as it is today -- with all of our advances in knowledge, science, and a globally connected neural network known as the Internet -- and use it as a sledge hammer to knock down the pillars that we've built our modern-day society on. While some may seek to reinvent something as simple, yet revolutionary, as the lightbulb, others are more radical in their ambitions -- they want to change the fundamental way that people think about the world around them.

Bret Victor is one of these radicals. Educated at Berkeley and Caltech, he quickly blazed a path to Apple where he "designed the initial user interface concepts for iPad, iPod Nano, and half a dozen experimental hardware platforms." No slouch (and clearly a bit of an overachiever), Mr. Victor has set out on a lifelong journey to bend to world to his own ideas of how it should work: his Zen-like motto "There is only a vision of how mankind should be, and the relentless resolve to make it so. The rest is details."

His latest journey is to "kill math" as we know it. What started as a passion for pushing the envelope in user interfaces -- the way people interact with complex systems -- has become an obsession with how interfaces can open up completely new opportunities for creative expression. For example, in computer programming a programmer will routinely type numeric values into their program and then run the program to verify the results, and if the results are not quite right, the programmer will go back and adjust the numbers and run the program again. This is how programming has been done for decades, but Mr. Victor sees this process as a creativity-limiting constraint that is an artifact of from the early days of computing, and he wants to destroy it.

The alternative that he presents is an experience of programming that is "alive," where the program runs as the programmer writes it, where the result is visible directly and immediately, and where the program is infinitely malleable and adjustable in very tactile ways. Pull a slider here, and your program adjusts a certain way; turn a dial there, and your program evolves in a way you might not have thought of before. The best part is that you can see the program evolve before your eyes. It's the land of the happy, and potentially ground-breaking, accident.

What kind of impact would this have on science? On medicine? On engineering? Potentially, the impact could be as large as providing a world-class education to everyone, anywhere. One thing is certain, however, and that is that we live in a unique time of human history where the pursuit of new ideas and novel inventions is possible, and has also been radically democratized and exponentially accelerated.

Of course, there's probably a downside. Crazy ideas like shooting reflectors into space to stop global warming or iron pellets into the ocean show that not every idea is a good one. But, if this rate of innovation continues, and with a sprinkle of good luck, we might just wake up to a radically different world this new year's day.

Cross-posted from The Tyee

Beautiful Trouble descends on Oaxaca (again)

2012-12-06T17:20:35Z

It’s been a few weeks since my last Beautiful Trouble update, and — much to my own surprise — quite a bit has happened since then.

This week, we brought current core team together in Oaxaca, Mexico for a work sprint. Andrew Boyd, Dave O Mitchell, Mara Ranville, and yours truly spent this past Tuesday huddled in front of laptops, then — much later — mezcales. This Friday we’ll be joined remotely by our training program lead, Matt Smucker, and our visualization expert, Marian Dörk, thanks to the powers of the Internet.

Some of the outcomes of this sprint won’t be announced for a few week’s time, but what I can share is that we’ll be moving forward in the new year with:

More Web-centric initiatives, with the intention to continue to grow audience for the online material, and to open up the opportunity for our growing community to contribute modules.
On that note, we have more than 300 modules that are currently in a “draft” state that we want to see moving forward.
A big push forward, thanks to Matt Smucker, on our training programs and speakers bureau. Beautiful Trouble has been used for trainings in Canada, the US, and as far away as Thailand, and we expect to see that grow in 2013, in collaboration with our network of more than sixty contributing creative activism experts. If you’re organizing a training and would like to bring Beautiful Trouble into the mix, please drop us a note.
The public release, possibly accompanied by a small contest of sorts, of the Beautiful Trouble API. The API is currently live, build on the Wordpress JSON API plug-in, so all the basic endpoints described by that plugin work, as well as a couple extras like all modules and all contributors.

Last but not least, we’ll be embarking on another journey to secure funding. We’ll use this funding to continue to get physical copies of Beautiful Trouble into the hands of activists around the world, to expand our training work to more groups, and — with the help of our community of contributors, supporters, and readers — to continue to grow the library of modules (tactics, theories, principles, practitioners, and case studies) that makes Beautiful Trouble what it is.

If you want to get involved with Beautiful Trouble, now’s the time, please send us a quick hello.

Slacker lesson No. 2: Work with truly fscking great designers

2012-11-30T19:17:12Z

Lately I’ve been pretty lucky in terms of working with talented designers: most recently, working with Alex Grunenfelder at The Tyee on Style Tiles for a new project, and Cristian Fleming from The Public Society on Beautiful Trouble. Working with people like this, I viscerally understand the difference between a good designer, and a truly great designer.

I’m fortunate to have had the opportunity to collaborate with some pretty amazing graphic designers over the years, but it’s been rare for me to work with a designer who really, really gets the Web too. Thus, another memorable highlight was working with Andy Clarke on the New Internationalist re-design in 2009. We had some fun back-and-forth discussions about CSS frameworks as he blogged the whole exercise. It’s fun to keep bumping into Andy’s name, on projects like 320 and up.

A few weeks ago I started working with a new designer, Adrienne Conley, who’s part of the super-impressive volunteer team supporting the Ryan Meili campaign for leadership of the Saskatchewan NDP.

The task for us was to create an Obama-esque splash page for Ryan’s campaign site that focused on collecting visitor’s e-mail addresses into Nation Builder for follow-up.

A quick look at the analytics showed that a growing number of visitors were arriving at the site on a variety of mobile devices: smartphones, tablets, Blackberrys, and so on. So we decided early on to develop a responsive splash page that would work across screen sizes.

Instead of the Style Tiles approach that we experimented with recently at The Tyee, Adrienne provided me with simple designs at two reference sizes — 1200 x 800px (shown above) and 320 x 480px — and stuck to Web- and mobile-friendly typography (Tahoma and Arial in this case).

The designs that Adrienne delivered were perfect: both eye-pleasing and modular, and with enough visual freedom that I could improvise at all of the various breakpoints. The result, should you want to try it out, is here.

What I really got me stoked about this little project was the opportunity to develop my own personal boilerplate CSS for the common mobile breakpoints. On projects like Beautiful Trouble and Occupy America, I was developing on top of Twitter’s Bootstrap framework for speed and convenience. However, for a simple splash page, using something like Bootstrap would have been overkill. Starting from scratch with the HTML5 boiler plate for the page structure and a blank CSS file really gave me a chance to start mobile first and then build the page up to the large screen sizes (in this case, by picking and choosing what I wanted from Boostrap’s responsive tools).

Things have come a long way, given that I probably started experimenting in earnest with responsive Web design ideas in February 2011 when I stumbled on Joni Korpi’s Less Framework; a year-and-a-half later, I’m pulled between two ends of a very-distant spectrum: at one end is the idea that the future of a responsive Web lays in Typography, at the other end lies a global network of device labs. Both are appealing for entirely different reasons.

But, at the end of the day — responsive or not — working with a truly fscking great designer makes makes it that much easier to slack off and noodle the bigger questions in life (“Typography?” “Device Lab?” …).