Not safe for work: so, what happens when Google’s parents go away for the weekend? That Snopes girl is such a buzzkill.
It probably won’t mean much if you’re not a web geek, but it’s pretty funny if you are.
If you read this on the site, you might notice that I’ve moved a little of the furniture around, dusted the shelves and repainted the walls. Let me know what you think.
Also, if you haven’t had a chance, you should check out my newly re-prettified travelogues and galleries: Tanzania, New Zealand, A Night in the Monster Seats and a day at the Franklin Park Zoo.
I have a couple of other pieces in the works. I hope to have them out by the end of the year.
I’ve been playing around with Facebook a little bit — see Jason Butler Facebook — and it’s fun to see how far a lot of the ideas we were implementing at PlanetAll have made it into the mainstream.
I downloaded the developer API, and I’m going to start thinking a little more deeply about how to integrate the social graph into the various projects I’m working on. I wonder if there are interesting ways to map journalism to relationships. Hmm….
Jay Brewer get a nice mention in a Globe article about blogging for dollars. Congratulations, Jay!
Odd: Justin.tv.
Justin has a webcam over his ear. And he never takes it off. Ever. It’s always transmitting whatever is happening in his life. It’s really weird (and a little creepy), but compelling nonetheless. It’s like being dropped into Being John Malkovich.
Wow, so an hour or so after posting my last post, I find out that Tabblo has been acquired by Hewlett-Packard.
Massive congratulations to Antonio, John, Dan, Liesel (all ex-Abuzzers) and everyone else on the Tabblo team.
Tabblo just launched a super-simple way to make a photo cube. I just went and did it, and it took 45 seconds to create and print out the sheet. Incredibly easy. Incredibly cool. Take a look at my quick photocube (.pdf).
More product information from Tabblo. Antonio’s launch announcement.
Our Tom may have gotten himself into a little more trouble.
My search dashboard lit up with Brady searches this morning. My team writes the content spotlights (the “Our picks” at the top of some search results), so we needed to figure out what links would be most useful for folks. For this one, we pulled the original Brazilian site that broke the rumor. Unfortunately, none of us speak Portuguese, so we ran it through Google’s automated translator.
I’m not sure Google’s automated translator is all that accurate:
It will be that it would from there come the so great discomfort with the pregnancy of former-namorada of Tom the Brady, current boyfriend of Gisele?
The next Boston BarCamp is coming up in a couple of weeks (3/18-19). I learned a lot at last year’s BarCamp, and I hope another Saturday invested will be worthwhile.
I love listening to hardcore web folks enthuse about their work, especially those working on projects on their own. Maybe I’ll talk a little bit about the joys of local search. Regardless, I’m glad we were able to kick in a few bucks to sponsor.
p.s., if you are one of those hardcore web folks, we’re always hiring — drop me a line 
AirTran Airways asked a Worcester couple to strap in their screaming three-year-old child into her seat. They refused, and the family was taken off the flight, undoubtedly to the delight of the rest of the passengers. Consumerist adds some interesting commentary.
I think I’m with the majority of the Consumerist commenters in agreeing that AirTran did the right thing. Although I certainly sympathize with the beleaguered parents, I think if I couldn’t get Sadie in her seat and strapped in for a takeoff we’d already delayed for fifteen minutes, I would have slinked off the flight in shame. I don’t think the rest of the world has a duty to suffer along with my problems.
Here’s a pretty insightful argument for how even applications that aren’t trying to be best in the world — internal business applications, for example — are being compared to the interactive design of Google. Developers (and websites) who’ve sailed along might be in for a rude awakening; Internet users’ expectations are rising, and Google is driving it.
The “leading edge” interface and ideas employed by Google, Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo! are suffusing our culture to become the standard user interface of web applications. And programming the standard user interface is a basic job requirement. Learn to love it.
Apple announced the new iPhone today. Good-bye Treo!
June seems like so far away…
Maps of War has some incredibly interesting map-based visualizations, including an overlay of the various empires ruling the middle east and war-dead by political party.
I’m normally not a huge fan of animation on web sites, but these are very effective examples of data visualization.
I’ve had a couple of folks ask me about my podcast-listening habits, so here are the ones I listen to each day (and highly recommend).
The podcast links will open up in iTunes, for ease of subscribing.
Now that I’m responsible for search at Boston.com, I need to keep on top of the industry. WebMasterRadio.FM has put together an excellent group of weekly radio shows/podcasts covering the field. These are all “inside baseball,” but they are excellent listening if you’re in the business.
The Daily Searchcast
Danny Sullivan’s daily podcast, reviewing all the search-engine news. He covers anything and everything having to do with Google, Yahoo, MSN and the rest.
Net Income
Jeremy Shoemaker’s radio show about all the different ways to monetize your site, including PPC, affiliates, sponsorships and others means. Targeted to small- and medium-sized sites.
SEO Rockstars
“Jammin’ and Spammin’” with a couple of the leading gray-hat SEO practitioners. Hit or miss, but often entertaining.
First and Fifteen
ESPN’s daily football recap.
Baseball Today
ESPN’s daily baseball recap
Slate Podcast
Smart daily podcast, generally reading one of the stories from the day. A special treat is the Friday Gabfest, a roundtable coming out of Washington.
NYT columnist podcasts
Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman.
The New York Times Book Review
Surprisingly entertaining weekly wrap-up of the Times Book Review, often including author interviews. Very entertaining.
Beat the Press
This is a weekly podcast of the Channel 2 Greater Boston show. It’s inside baseball for Boston media news, probably not all the interesting for folks not in the business.
Boston Globe’s Page One podcast.
This is our own summary of the Globe’s front page.
David Pogue
New York Times technology columnist David Pogue reads his weekly column.
American Public Media’s Future Tense
A daily public radio story about technology.
Jim Cramer’s Real Money
Podcast of Jim Cramer’s daily radio show. I’m entirely in mutual funds, but this is still highly entertaining radio.
NPR Business Story of the Day
Top business story of the day from NPR.
On Words, with John Ciardi
This is my little hidden pleasure. The late John Ciardi used to do “On Words” segments for NPR, discussing etymology of English words and expressions.
Dear Internet:
I want to find someone who can plow our driveway (in Holliston) this winter. Google has been useless for this task.
Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks,
Jason
I’ve received some nice comments on my little elephant photos site, so I’ve decided to whip up a couple of more microsites to feature my photography. Today, I’ll point you over to my Niagara Falls photos I took on my honeymoon in 2004.
I put my best seven (out of 50 or so) up there, including a couple of nice ones with rainbows. Check them out, and let me know what you think!
Not a normal day for Antonio and friends: Sprinkler explodes in Tabblo’s offices. I feel bad for them; this will disrupt business for days, if not weeks.
But, I must give them huge kudos for having the presence of mind to record what was happening and make it into a Tabblo. Tabblo (the product) helps people tell stories; Tabblo (the team) used it to tell their own.
Best dog-food eating I’ve seen in a while.
A weblog asks Web 2.0 leaders pointed questions about business models and such.
Question 5: Do you have a marketing plan that extends beyond Digg, TechCrunch, Delicious, and Technorati?…
Rapleaf: we’ve never heard of Digg, Delicious, and Technorati – can you send me their domain names? We’re still focused on Geocities and PlanetAll.
Good enough for me: here’s some link-love for Rapleaf.
Last laugh? PlanetAll and Geocities fetched hundreds of millions of dollars when acquired by Amazon and Yahoo respectively.
Here’s my shill for the week
We just launched a new blog covering MetroWest, complementing the west section of the Globe. The reporters post updates throughout the week. It’s organized by town, so you can see all the Holliston posts if you’d like.
If you want to keep track of Holliston news, you should also subscribe to the Google News search for Holliston. Along the left-hand side, you can click “news alerts” to get emails, or click “RSS” to subscribe to the RSS feed.
Technorati Tags: Holliston
Over the past few years, I’ve manage to accumulate several decent pictures of elephants, from Tanzania and Thailand. I wanted to try out a couple of things, so I set up a separate little mini-site to highlight the pictures.
Check out my elephant photos.
I always knew this in my heart, but it’s nice to see it confirmed by science.
Antonio mentioned that Sadie and the Cheerios might work well as a Tabblo. Let’s take a look:
Click through on the image for the full-size Tabblo.
I’m working on writing a gallery-o-matic for this site, an easy way to roll up some of my pictures. Here’s a start: A night in the Monster Seats.
Here’s another one: Animals from the Franklin Park Zoo.
Once I have this fully debugged, I should be able to put up a lot more galleries over the next few weeks. Woo hoo!
This is a nice colloraboration: We at Boston.com have included “Save to del.icio.us” links on all our stories. I hope our customers will find this useful.
If you ever want to read my mind a little, you should check out my del.icio.us bookmarks.
Here is an insightful tale of a conservative blogger’s visit to the Globe, well worth the several minutes to read.
I learned some appreciation for the Globe’s esprit and for that of the whole newspaper business – a business that worries deeply about disruptive competition from the Internet in ways that remind me of the automobile business during my youth in Detroit, when today’s automotive climate of heavy government regulation and global competition was just beginning. The newspaper business has real concerns about competitors from the Internet. Yet the Globe and newspapers have at least two sustainable advantages. First, they deliver their product daily to my doorstep before breakfast in a form that, while venerable, is quite satisfying and will remain so. Second, they can marshal a relatively large group of talented people to create their product. If they do their reporting jobs well, they may even be able to support an insular Op Ed board that seems to believe their target market is the Harvard faculty, and others who react with hostility when ideologically challenged.
It’s interesting. I walk through the lobby several times a week and I’ve never really noticed the stone map of New England. I’ll have to check it out next time I’m over on Morrissey.
Friend and fellow ex-Abuzzer Antonio Rodriguez’s company Tabblo is profiled in the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.).
We’ve been playing with Tabblo for the past week, arranging digital shots into collages — some with text descriptions and some without. Katie made a tabblo of pictures from a friend’s graduation party, and Walt made one of photos from the Journal’s recent “D: All Things Digital” technology conference.
We used various background colors, photo sizes, style arrangements and image effects, and got results that required very little effort on our part yet still looked professional and polished. An 11×17-inch Tabblo poster that we ordered turned out to be an attractive keepsake that displayed a bunch of photos all at once, eliminating the need to leaf through stacks of prints or scroll through hundreds of digital files.
This is a massive coup. Few startups get the Mossberg treatment.
Congratulations, Antonio!
(Previously: Tabblo launches.)
Friend and fellow ex-Abuzzer Jay Brewer is profiled in the Wall Street Journal, talking about his success in building out the Blogpire.
[S]ix months after he launched singleservecoffee.com, traffic and revenue had both more than quadrupled, Mr. Brewer says. He realized he could make the blogs a full-time job, but he had to make sure the performance in that fourth quarter of 2004 was not a fluke. He set up a forecast for the first quarter of 2005 for the blogs to maintain half the traffic they had in the fourth quarter, with the notion that if the sites met or exceeded his expectations he would quit his job. He began looking for more writers for each blog, while rolling out more at the same time.
By March 2005, Blogpire had outperformed his forecasts, he says, and he quit his job.
Congratulations, Jay!
(Previously: Jay’s week of Internet Fame.)
I don’t normally envy others’ success, but this is one damn fine AdSense check.
This is an interesting article with Adrian Holovaty of the Washington Post about the intersection of programming and journalism, an intersection I often find myself exploring.
The way I see it, there are three basic tasks that journalists do:
1. Gathering information. This involves talking to sources, examining documents, taking photographs, etc. It’s reporting.
2. Distilling information. This involves applying editorial judgment to decide what parts of the gathered information are important and relevant.
3. Presenting information. This involves shaping the distilled information into a format that is accessible to the readership. Some examples: writing style (inverted pyramid, etc.), photo color-correction, newspaper page design.
“Doing journalism through computer programming” is just a different way of accomplishing these goals. Namely, the technique favors automation wherever possible.
I’ll be at BarCampBoston this weekend. It looks like it should be a fun gathering, and I look forward to learning from my fellow campers and sharing my own experiences (for what they’re worth…).
If you’re going to be there, drop me a line and we’ll try to sync up.
Technorati Tags: BarCampBoston
Wow, such a fun link from Boing Boing: a reel of 70s toy commercials on YouTube.
These toys look like so much fun.
Antonio Rodriguez and team launched Tabblo this morning. It’s a great tool for putting together combinations of pictures and words to tell a story.
I’ve built my first Tabblo. It’s pretty easy….
I look forward to playing with it more tonight. It’s great to see local Boston startups doing interesting things.
If you haven’t already incorporated Wikipedia into your daily workflow, you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s 9:20am, and as I’m reviewing some financials from the mothership, I’ve already used it to look up two different terms of art for which I didn’t know the precise meaning, EBITDA and CAGR.
It is really quite handy to have all the world’s knowledge freely available at your fingertips.
As you know, we watch The Colbert Report each night. Last night, Colbert hosted the White House Correspondent’s dinner; today, the blogosphere is all atwitter.
Colbert ripped the President to shreds, playing one long extended game of the emperor’s new clothes, with some pretty funny lines.
[Talking to Jesse Jackson is] like boxing a glacier. Enjoy that metaphor, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is.
Some people are upset at Colbert’s disrespect. They aren’t challenging his premises, just his taste in making comments so near the President. Which may be reasonable, given comments like this:
I haven’t. I stand by [President Bush]. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, has he stood on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.
Here’s the transcript. Here are video links, to part one, two, three. You should watch the whole thing, not because it’s brilliant comedy — some places are pretty flat, not helped by a hostile audience — but because sometimes the court jester is the only one who’ll speak bluntly.
I suppose this qualifies as my embarrassing disclosure of the day. Here are a couple of videos I found this morning, videos that brought me back to the mid-eighties, when I knew everything about professional wrestling.
Hulk Hogan wins the WWF championship from The Iron Sheik
From January 1984.
Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant vs. Big John Studd and King Kong Bundy
From January 1985’s Saturday Night’s Main Event.
Also, the WWE store has a Hulk Hogan anthology that looks pretty impressive. Check it out.
For even more fun, check out the Wikipedia entries for these folks for these men. Sadly, many of them are dead.
Hulk Hogan
The Iron Sheik
Andre the Giant
King Kong Bundy
Big John Studd
If you’ve never tried it, you should check out YouTube and do a couple of searches. You will be able to find all sorts of interesting things.
I’m waiting anxiously for the new Tufte book to come out. If you don’t already have them, you should go get the Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations. They will change how you think about and present data.
In the meantime, here’s a Tuftian map visualization project called WorldMapper, where they allocate space by all sorts of different factors, including things like:
Land mass - This is the normal map of the world, though it may look odd if you’re used to the Euro-centric Mercator projection.
Population in 1 AD - “The territories that now encompass the Ganges, Tigris, Yangtze, Nile and Po rivers were the most populous.”
Population in 2050 - “62% of the people will live in Africa, Southern Asia and Eastern Asia - numerically this is the same as if all the world’s current population lived just in these regions.”
Net out-tourism - Fun fact: Germans leave Germany five times as often as non-Germans visit Germany.
Aircraft flights - America dominates.
(via O’Reilly Radar)
A good editor is hard to find.
That’s why I read the Globe online each morning, why I read the Times, the Journal. The world is a busy place and I have only a few minutes to catch up. I rely on the editors’ judgment to make the best use of my time.
Recently, I’ve been spending more time with the algorithmic editors, specifically del.icio.us/popular, Memeorandum and Reddit. Each of these sites use technical means to determine what’s important; each has its own algorithmic special sauce. They haven’t gotten to the point where I trust them to replace the newspapers, but by harnessing the wisdom of the crowds (at least the wisdom of techie crowds), they provide a useful complement.
Now, I just need to find an algorithmic solution that matches my own varied interests. One of my little projects for 2006 is to write a “Daily Me” program that will scour the web and find things I will want to read. I’ll be able to program it to find exactly what I’m looking for, while also preserving an element of serendipity.
I’ll keep you posted on how it goes…
Very nice! I’ve had this site up for five years now, with my hello-world-ish first post on March 7th, 2001.
Five years ago, I was 28 years old, single, living in Central Square, taking a year off to recover from the dotcom era, about to leave for New Zealand, then Tanzania, then China.
Today, I am 33 years old, married with a beautiful little daughter, living in Holliston, going each day to a responsible job, planning a family vacation to the Cape. My life is pretty good.
The last five years have rocked; I can’t wait to see what the next five years will bring. And I can’t wait to tell you all about it, right here on JPButler.com.
I forgot to mention this when it came out, but we’ve added handy interactive maps to all the movie listings. Kinda neat, and actually pretty useful.
Andy Baio of Waxy.org has been hosting the parody House of Cosbys videos. The lawyers just sent him a nastygram, but he’s fighting it.
I’m not removing House of Cosbys. House of Cosbys is parody, and clearly falls under fair use guidelines. I’m not taking it down, and their legal bullying isn’t going to work. They claim that hosting these videos “violates our client’s rights of publicity as well as other statutory and common laws prohibiting the misappropriation of an individual’s name, voice and likeness and unfair competition.” Sorry, but the First Amendment protects satire and parody of a public figure as free speech. Also, the right of publicity only applies to unauthorized commercial use, and not a work of art or entertainment.
I work in the media and I enjoy getting paid, so I have a healthy respect for copyright, but I’m with Andy on this one.
However, this is different from the CBS example below. CBS is making a dumb marketing decision; Cosby’s lawyers are overextending their rights. (Note, IANAL so I could be entirely wrong, but I believe I am correct).
Very interesting article from Stowe Boyd about advisory capital, the consulting analogue to venture capital.
A consultant is unlikely to want to part with a strategic concept that could make a client into a $100M player, potentially, in exchange for a per diem and the possibility of some downstream consulting, maybe, if you’re lucky. And the best results may not come from a few days of consulting, but a long-term strategic involvement, like venture capitalists typically make in their portfolio companies, the expense of which small companies have historically been unwilling to take on.
What I think is needed is a fusion of the best of both the venture capital and advisory board models. I call this Advisory Capital:
I do a lot of informal consulting to friends and nonprofits; this may be a model that can really support that as a profession.
Technorati Tags: Advisory Capital
I finally got around to dropping a Google search box onto the site. Up in the top right (on the homepage) is the box from which you can search all of JPButler.com, or even all of the web.
Another reason to just go ahead and make JPButler.com your homepage
Yahoo Answers launched this week, bearing a remarkable resemblance to Abuzz. Through the magic of the Wayback Machine, take a look at Abuzz’s early 2001 homepage, and its What’s Hot page.
Yahoo’s tagline? Ask. Answer. Discover.
Abuzz’s tagline? Ask. Answer. Discuss.
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Welcome to Jason Butler's Home on the Web.
During the day, I'm director of search and community products for Boston.com, a division of New York Times Digital. My opinions here are, of course, strictly my own.
