David Pogue of nytimes.com has a reminder about the fallibility of current data storage systems in this interview with Dag Spicer of the Computer History Museum.
To quote Spicer: “If Moses had gotten the Ten Commandments on a floppy disk, it would never have made it to today.”
Bottom line: paper seems to be one of the better methods for archival storage. That data you laboriously transferred onto CDs and DVDs may only last a few years.
Ironically, back when I was studying Computer Science at university, we did use paper storage media: perforated tape and punch cards. Not that any of my assignments were worth saving.
I love this data visualization, which anyone from Toronto will immediately recognize as a map of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) routes.
As the clock moves through 24 hours, it’s fun to see how the TTC comes to life, with the buses and streetcars getting thicker on the roads as day breaks and the first trains moving through the tunnels at 5.30am.
Congratulations Keiran Huggins and Kevin Branigan of myttc.ca.
For the much clearer HD version of the above video, plus the Saturday and Sunday versions, visit Kieran’s page on Vimeo.
OffTheBus was an alternative journalism project designed to cover last year’s US presidential campaign in a way that conventional journalists could not.
Based at huffingtonpost.com, OffTheBus recruited 12,000 citizen journalists, guided by a handful of professional editors.
Sometimes the amateurs were able to venture into events that were officially closed to the media. And that’s where they hit paydirt when Mayhill Fowler captured Barack Obama’s headline-making comments about rural Pennsylvania voters clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy for people who aren’t like them.”
In the latest Columbia Journalism Review, Amanda Michel, director of OffTheBus, reviews the project’s evolution and the challenges of creating a credible, citizen-powered, chronicle of the campaign:
The ideal of a citizen journalist bequeathed to us by new-media evangelists both inspired and got in the way. Incoming writers had great expectations, like beating The Associated Press to a scoop. They raced to put out copy only to realize the story already sat on HuffPost’s homepage. Ultimately, many more felt comfortable being impressionistic, profiling their and their friends’ experiences around the campaign. They resisted hard leads. We risked becoming the Monet School of Journalism. This forced us to redouble our efforts to nudge and teach writers how to produce the sort of reliably reported coverage we desired. We had to create and sustain a strong reporting culture, and that meant slower growth to start, and lots of editing.
Opinions are a dime a dozen. Facts are usually more difficult, and expensive, to come by.
The comments have been snarky, but it’s been a great couple of weeks for raising awareness of Twitter.
Jon Stewart on the Daily Show lampooned US lawmakers who thought twittering was more important than paying attention to President Obama’s State of the Union speech (above).
And Doonesbury’s ace reporter Roland Hedley faced the Twitter equivalent of writer’s block, trying - not too successfully - to think of something worth tweeting.
