Stupid News

What's with news outlets not getting with the technological big picture? I went over to the Washington Post homepage today to look for that 20,000-word series on how evil Dick Cheney is. (Answer: Very Fucking Evil.) I used the WP's internal search and typed "dick cheney angler." (Angler is his Secret Service codename and the title of the series.) Surprise surprise, the series, which is probably the biggest and most important thing the Post will do all year, didn't show up in the first ten results. You get a lot of related blog posts, interview transcripts, and sidebars, but not the piece itself. I eventually went to Google and typed in the same thing. The first result was the one I was looking for.

I've complained, in private and on this blog, about the awfulness of Newsweek's website. News outlets everywhere are purposefully, almost willfully losing readers and site hits by employing sloppy user interface. How hard is it to get search, that most basic of web features, right?


Related: Check out this amazing video from the TED conference, which demonstrates new image management software. This is how we'll be reading newspapers online very soon, I predict. It'll probably take over interface in general. Couple that with iPhone touchscreen technology, and soon we'll have whole walls that are touch-sensitive computer screens. Rad!

Finally, my new time-waster at work is reading future obits. It's common practice in journalism to write obits ahead of time for notables that are likely to croak soon. We've already got ones in the system for Osama bin Laden and Fidel Castro. The one about Fidel is particularly interesting, since the writer goes so far as to predict the medium of announcement ("...we heard this morning from the state-run news service...").

I'm very interested in the impact of the internet and Google on human memory. If we have all the world's information at our fingertips, does that mean it no longer needs to be in our brain grooves? If you see any research or writing related to this idea, let me know.

In Ithaca this weekend, Alisa and I saw two impressive waterfalls (Ithaca is Gorges!) and met a Frenchman that, over the course of a glass of wine or two, claimed to have the power of hypnosis and to be able to beat me up in a bar fight. We also ate a phenomenal strawberry salad.

Meanwhile, also at the dinnertime reception for Consumer Campers, Brian Wansink played the didjeridoo.


Also, if you want to see my most recent article in Newsweek, go here.