Disqus - Latest Comments for AramZS

Re: US verizon

AramZS — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 04:21:21 -0000

Down in Queens NY

Re: Happy Monday From The Heavily Delayed Overcrowded No Good L Train

AramZS — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 10:06:40 -0000

The 7 train was also experiencing some significant delays that the MTA didn't feel they needed to announce or note in any way.

Re: What if journalists weren’t controlled by tech? A conversation with Dave Winer.

AramZS — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 15:43:46 -0000

I'm surprised, for the last question, I would have answered Dave Winer's own EC2 for Poets - http://ec2.forpoets.org/ - Which is a great first step tutorial for understanding how to put up a server in the cloud. Not a lot of people use the type of server it walks you through setting up, but the process is still very useful for beginners to get over their initial fear of 'OMG the CLOUD!??!'

Re: Clicks, likes, and comments: A hacker looks into Facebook’s News Feed

AramZS — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 15:34:26 -0000

Hi Wes! Thank's for reading. Yeah, there may be some sense of relativity in timing, so that if you post two articles in quick succession one gets favored. That's definitely something worth playing around to try and figure out.

Re: On the WordPress Content Modeling Problem

AramZS — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 13:38:53 -0000

I feel like your average user who needs this type of functionality can create it with categories and sub categories and the one who doesn't feel fulfilled by that functionality can go out and find a plugin that make the process of creating CPTs and custom taxonomies easy. Like: https://wordpress.org/plugi... . The real problem is that CPTs are handled as discrete display units with potentially different templates, you're going to need a dev to make those, one way or another.

Re: FOLD wants to keep you from tumbling down link rabbit holes

AramZS — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 12:38:33 -0000

But I like falling down the rabbit hole! As does almost everyone else I know who reads things on the internet. I think this is one of those journalism ideas which confuse 'things that keep readers on-site for more ad-dollars' with 'things readers want'.

I really don't have a problem with the 1st, but lets call it as it is.

Re: Is Hollywood to blame? Or journalism? A battle on Twitter

AramZS — Wed, 28 May 2014 10:35:29 -0000

This isn't really a useful post, is it? You're highlighting a bunch of things others said, some pretty nasty and some who would have had no platform if you hadn't selected them for inclusion. And the headline makes no sense. No one is even implying journalism is to blame for the things that Hornaday is talking about. If you are, then there needs to be a lot more context. If you are not, than that headline is pretty misleading.

Re: Some news orgs are killing comments, but not just because their commenters are terrible at being humans

AramZS — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 14:15:37 -0000

"best to have one single thing that you’re asking your user to do. If that thing is 'share this on social media,' a comment box can be a distraction."

Unless you let them send their comments to social media platforms when they comment.

Re: ‘Ready to Eat’ Academic Infrastructure

AramZS — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 11:28:51 -0000

I'm a big fan of Bitnami's open server images for this sort of thing. They have AMIs but also their own cloud system and compatibility with other systems. The packages can be installed pretty much anywhere and as a bonus they are set up to allow for local servers, which is nice when you are developing and testing a project.

They don't have all the awesome academic tools that Academic AMIs seems to have though.

Re: Hacking in the newsroom? What journalists should know about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

AramZS — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 15:08:44 -0000

IT folks have known basically since its formation that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is a mess. It was rushed into service as a reactionary measure to combat crimes whose province and actions were unclear by legislators with little to no knowledge of the mechanics of the actual crimes.

Many companies use it as a blunt instrument and because using the internet (or even a cellphone these days) pretty much guarantees you will be passing through computers in other states, it's a great way for prosecutors to jump up state crimes to the federal level.

Like most of the US's computer-focused laws, it is a mess.

Re: The plague of uniform rectangles with text overlays spreads further, risks becoming news-web-wide contagion

AramZS — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 14:48:02 -0000

Haha. I think that it's more that everyone in journalism and academia uses Apple products whenever possible. (At any given journalism event there's a 50/50 chance I'm the only one in attendance with a PC.) Win8's sales haven't been spectacular, but it is doing ok.

I'm a pretty big fan of Win8 because of how that design both accommodates various screen formats and applies a significant level of information density without being overwhelming. I'm not sure that all of these journalism outlets' designs fulfill the 'not overwhelming' part of the equation.

Re: The plague of uniform rectangles with text overlays spreads further, risks becoming news-web-wide contagion

AramZS — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 15:12:12 -0000

It's also pretty much the entire design metaphor behind Windows 8's look, a good argument for it being done to make responsiveness easy and smooth.

Re: Are publishers overselling social traffic at the expense of search? A dialogue with Danny Sullivan

AramZS — Sat, 15 Feb 2014 10:20:06 -0000

Like I said above, optimizing for social is just another type of gaming the system, and the results aren't necessarily good: "We've found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading." http://www.theverge.com/201...

Re: Are publishers overselling social traffic at the expense of search? A dialogue with Danny Sullivan

AramZS — Sat, 15 Feb 2014 10:16:36 -0000

I think professional journalists can totally learn new styles and adapt to the type of coherency that works better on the web than in print. Things like headings, basic HTML techniques, basic SEO stuff, all that can make it more readable, better for users.

Re: Are publishers overselling social traffic at the expense of search? A dialogue with Danny Sullivan

AramZS — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 17:32:57 -0000

Great article, here's the thing:

SEO training need not be boring. Having run what I think, hope and have been told is interesting and amusing SEO training sessions, the trick for training journalists in SEO is understanding that journalists (if they're any good) are about one thing: telling good stories to as many humans as possible.

Any SEO training should therefore be about that, how to write on the internet so that more people read your story and can understand what you're talking about. That's good SEO, storytelling and journalism and it is what journalists understand and want. No one wants to learn how to write better for machines.

The same is really true when it comes to optimizing for social, successful stories are about writing well for humans in the context of each platform (different headlines or sharelines per-platform are a good reflection of this). The exception is when they're gaming the system, in which case the heavier optimized stories you see are usually just as much about manipulating the systems they appear on as doing any sort of good journalism.

Re: First Look Media publishes its first stories

AramZS — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 13:28:57 -0000

Looks like the site is plagued with 503s right now. Either they were very badly prepared for high traffic or traffic is off-the-charts higher than they expected.

I can't read the journalism right now, though the design of the site is somewhat uninspiring. The people on board give me high hopes for FLM. Hopefully they're proven out.

Re: The New York Times’ R&D Lab is building a quantified-self, semantic-analysis tool to track web browsing

AramZS — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 15:50:30 -0000

Sounds like a very cool tool to me. Sort of like a more active StumbleUpon. As for sharing browser tabs, if you use OneTab, you can just compress your tabs at the end of the day and share them, it's pretty cool.

Re: Is It Time to Put the Days of the Wild West Behind Us?

AramZS — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 12:23:26 -0000

Certification is mostly BS, including those listed. Beyond that the big difference with WP is that it is an open system. If you're good at it your work should be on display with open source code. People can judge your quality based on that.

Re: So, you want a job in policy?

AramZS — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 11:33:50 -0000

If you don't value your own work as having worth, than who the hell will? That's why unpaid internships are BS.

Re: No, the Student Loan Crisis Is Not a Bubble

AramZS — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 10:49:45 -0000

You're not getting my point on either item. If the burden to the holder of the loan becomes extraordinarily excessive and they can't turn to bankruptcy they will seek other ways out, they'll just disappear, the same way home owners did during the height of the housing crisis.

Re: No, the Student Loan Crisis Is Not a Bubble

AramZS — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 09:28:20 -0000

Right, you mean just like how the government guaranteed home owners? All the loan collectors in the world will not be enough if the amount owed on interest alone exceeds the ability of the student to pay. Once your student loan is essentially upside-down, people start taking a loss on all ends.

Re: How to Archive Your Favorite Tweets

AramZS — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 09:52:47 -0000

Well, you can just pull everything in via ThinkUp, which is nice. http://pinboard.in also will archive your old Twitter favorites (I think) and new favorites (I'm sure) as bookmarks with any hashtags as tags, which is a useful feature.

Re: No, the Student Loan Crisis Is Not a Bubble

AramZS — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 15:18:06 -0000

Thanks for explaining that the student loan system is Too Big To Fail. That argument has never failed, right? Also, can't let the *enormous* assumption here pass that bankruptcy is the only way out of loans, because no one has ever run out on a loan before.

Just because it is harder to run out on a student loan than a house loan doesn't make it impossible. This is the same type of BS that was said about the housing market: 'oh well, no one will run out on their housing loans because people don't do that, it would be irresponsible.'

Re: Who saved Old Reader?

AramZS — Sun, 11 Aug 2013 21:22:56 -0000

That's very true. Neither really get it, but you're right, Circa might.

Re: Who saved Old Reader?

AramZS — Mon, 05 Aug 2013 10:36:38 -0000

Circa is all about specific content, so I'm not sure it would make sense for them either. I'd hope that both WSJ and NYT would learn from The Washington Post, whose attempt to create a reader product wasn't very successful. I'd think that organizations like that, because of the specific content they make, and (perhaps rightly so) wouldn't see the value in becoming the custodian of such a product because that's not really what they are about. A content network like Gawker or a social site like Facebook would make a lot more sense. Or a competing RSS product who wants to incorporate their tech and expertise like Feedly maybe? Flipboard doesn't really feel like the company for it though.