1. a good summary of what happens to your database app over time
2. Oooooooh: JQuery Sparklines
3. Also, if you think you’re pretty good [at converting hex vals to colors], try this
4. Ooof — Chicago’s WGN news team gets the continent wrong in its #worldcup coverage
5. http://five.sentenc.es is “a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be five sentences or less.”
6. Is Structured Data like Text or like Code?
7. Here are 3 shell scripts to catch passive voice, weasel words and more
8. News organizations should think about cooperating not just on stories but on taxonomies
9. The @WSJ wrote a fascinating (well, to me) piece about who’s making $$$ scraping data on the web
10. I sent this out to the folk on HackerNews: What would you do with a newspaper-dot-com’s built-in audience?
11. @michelleminkoff wrote a quality post on structured data and news
12. A Jeff Jarvis post from 2005, “Journalism 2010″
13. Here’s a @HackerNews thread talking about the various tools to build charts with javascript and markup
14. Analyzing data is the future for journalists, says @timberners_lee
15. Best practice for journalists blogging and/or responding to comments on guardian.co.uk
16. text snippets on the command line! BOOM!

See 2011′s list of links here.

• isrssdeadyet.com
• Here’s a list of large, public datasets:
• Eight percent of internet users account for 85% of all display ad clicks
• “Journalism” is barely mentioned in Exploratory Committee recommendation on future of journalism ed at U. of Colorado
• “It’ll never work”: a collection of failed predictions
• https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=recursion
• A useful and comprehensive guide from #Poynter on improving site comments
• Matt Waite on the state of newspaper.com innovation: “I.m disappointed.”
• New: Data Science Toolkit
• …finding a market price of corruption in India
• Wish you could turn off javascript on just one or two sites? You can, with YesScript, a firefox plugin
• PhillyHistory app augments reality with historic photos
• 4 tips for creating data-based maps
• Someone did a study about trolling, and came to a few conclusions
• Real Names. Policies Are an Abuse of Power
• [graph] Through-speed of traffic on San Francisco area streets vs. popularity with Flickr and Twitter users
• Ever wanted to generate a text list of a couple hundred valid URLs from your site?
• A your-mom joke for webgeeks
• “Unlike poseur programs, this one traces its lineage directly back to September 1969.”
• How U.S. newsrooms are getting whiter
• Infographics / advertisements of the 1920s, from London’s Transport Museum

See 2010′s list of @joemurph links here.

Study: Real News Comes From Newspapers

The next day, the headline read:

Study Finds That Papers Lead in Providing New Information

You may know about this project I’m working on called Read Ranker — it’s a piece of functionality that turns reading denverpost.com articles into a game — a game where you compete against all the other readers on the site to see who has read the most.

It keeps track of the number of articles (in this draft it’s just articles in the sports section) you’ve read, and lets you know how you compare to the other people on the site right now. As in, there’s a chunk on the website that says “You’ve read 23% of today’s sports articles, which ranks you 782 out of today’s 1,500 readers.”

I’m pushing this live to everyone Thursday. Then, next week, if it goes well, I’ll move it from the sports section into every section.

If you want to take a look at it today here’s the special link that will activate it for you.

-Joe

p.s. If you’ve got better ideas for a name than “Read Ranker,” send it my way.

We’re beginning a test today that will “pause” the reader commenting function on our website. All comments previously posted will be erased and nobody will have the ability to post new comments on stories.

I’m all for experimentation. Telling your loyal commenters that you’ve erased all their previous comments is a sure way to erase that loyalty, however. I don’t know if the Greeley Tribune really did erase all old comments, or, should the Tribune re-activate article comments, if those previous comments would return. That seems worth explaining.

These are the highlights:

1. (CHAI|TE?E?A?)[ -]?B.*(A|U).*G.*G?(E.*R|I.*N.*G?|E.*D)?.*S?
2. d(i|1|\|)ck(less|head|wad|weed)?
3. (m(o|u)th(a|er))?(F|PH)[aeiouv\-\.\*':@]+.*C?.*K(E?R?S?|I?N?G?|FACE|HEAD)
4. (jack|bad|dumb|fat)?(a|@).*[\$sz8x].*[\$sz8x].*e?.*(\$|s|z)?
5. (dip|dog|chicken)?[\$s]?.*h.*[i\|1!-@a]+.*t(ty|t|head|eating)?s?

For the full interview with Miss Colorado, click the link.

The Los Angeles Times reported recently that an estimated 30 reporters had been killed or had gone missing since a government effort began in 2006 to break up the powerful criminal groups. The article followed an extraordinary editorial in a newspaper in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, that appealed to the drug lords to tell it what news they don’t want published. The front-page plea followed the killing of second journalist on the paper’s staff.

From Difference between our news media and others’: 45 words

“I got an awesome message — a woman at a hotel room in Arvada, her alarm clock broke and she called because she wanted to know if it was Thursday or Friday. She left a voicemail, and included her phone number.”

Emailing passwords is a bad idea for (at least) two reasons:

1. It means it’s likely the system storing the passwords does not encrypt the passwords, and encrypting passwords that you store is something they teach you in Web App Development 101.
2. That email I got with my username and password went through the internet’s tubes, and at any point along those tubes it could be sniffed, captured and used for malicious purposes.

Here’s the email Doteasy sent me:

DOTEASY MEMBER REQUEST
—————————————————————–
As requested at Jul 05, 2010 21:28:11,
the login info for your Doteasy Hosting account is shown as follows.

Domain…..: flight-club.org
Member ID..: flightclub
Password…: [my actual password]

Thank you.

Doteasy Support
‘Join the hosting revolution!’