What Happens When a Town Loses Its Newspaper?

The way it looks today, the newspapers are going the way of the telegraph. As a
daily reader of the Akron Beacon Journal I'm somewhat divided about this fact. 
We need independent and accountable reporting in our cities to keep tabs on the
mob. And by mob I mean the organized crime syndicate we call government.

The Internet is certainly responsible for taking a big bite out of newspaper
circulation, but is this bad? Both printed paper and the Internet are mediums
of communication. One medium requires big printing plants, trucks, drivers,
printers and a whole bunch of dead trees. The other computers, electricity and
some wire that serves other purposes as well. Here is a quick review of these
two delivery systems.

Online Advantages:
* Online is significantly more eco-friendly than print.
* Online stories can appear in seconds, print can take up to 24 hours.
* Readers can publish editorials with print, but online offers ongoing dialogs
on a specific topic.
* Online can contain instant links to related video and audio.
* You can instantly look up a word or name that you don't recognize.
* You can read stories written by someone in Australia as easily as your home
town.

Newsprint Advantages:
* you can read the newspaper anywhere you go, in a restaurant for example.
* Newspapers can be saved for archival purposes.
* You can use newsprint as a drop cloth or bird cage liner.
* Newspaper is good for staring wood fires.

Print clearly has the comedic advantage here, but it's actually the portability
factor that makes print still relevant to me.

Overall the writing is on the wall. Newspapers are on the way out, but not the
purpose they serve. We absolutely need local news reporting, particularly
investigative reporting of government. But still, what will I read at the
dinner table?

Here is a new media story from and old media source:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1886826,00.html

Saturdays meeting of Web Development SIG was full of info about using and managing web-based social networking tools to help promote your business.  Marc Majers claims that at his  job at the  Cleveland Institute of Art he spends approximately two hours a day working managing his content.  

What was most usefull to me (althought I have not yet tried them out) was the availability of three meta tools that allow you to manage all the resources from a central site.

Ping.fm

Power.com

hellotxt.com

More after I've had a chance to try them out, Mark seemed found of hellotext.com.

Twitter has now moved from a person-to-person contact tool to one that businesses use to publish updates to potential customers.  The important thing to remember is, that unlike email with it's huge spam problem,  anyone who abuses the people on their follow list will soon find that no one is listening.  As a business owner you had better limit your tweets and really offer something of value when you post.

Maintianing consistant periodic contact is important, otherwise you will be de-listed from the networking sites.  Two attendess also identified themselves at marketers and seemed to perk up most with regard to Twitter.    I've recently started using a new Twitter client called blu myself, but Tweetdeck seems like it would be best for maintaining huge lists of subscribed accounts. 

Like all marketing methods you have to experment to find what provides the best bang for the buck; or maybe it's just the best bang for the keystroke.

Access for the Masses

The other day a developer friend mentioned that the Access 2007 runtime is available as a free download. The last time I looked into the runtime (2003 version) it was packaged as a Visual Studio add-on and was rather pricey. The new wizard-based package builder was was simple to install and the entire process of making a deployable Access application was super-easy taking only a few minutes to create. Not all of the latest changes to Access have been to my liking, but Microsoft got this part right.

An extra 32 bits

Two years ago I got a brand new dual core machine with 4 gig of ram to run Vista. Right out of the box Dell had installed software that would throw an error during boot up. Needless to day that is not what I was hoping to see on a brand new machine. My only big beef with Vista has been the Karo-syrup-like performance. Recently after joining a new domain, the sidebar stopped working altogether. This prompted a clean installation of Vista - this time with a 64 bit version. Wow, this is the machine I thought I was buying. Everything snaps just like a fresh version of XP. Nice.

House of Blues Lives up to it's name

The HOB was full of white twenty somethings tonight to see the comedy troupe Stella. Someone commented that they seemed to be improvising their material. Boy I sure hope so. If they spent fifteen minutes in preparation, how will they ever recover all that wasted time?

To follow up on the relationship post, here is the final result:

I ended up with a very simple design that just allows roles to be defined for each person in a relationship. Since it would be impossible to define every one of these in advance, new [Role] list items can be keyed into the combo box and it will then be appended to the [Roles] table.

The table looks something like this:

My very earliest surviving project was what started out as a simple address book of my personal contacts. Originally an Appleworks file, the data has evolved and still lives inside an Access application. For quite a while I've thought that it would be great to link individuals by pairs of relationships.

So far all I have set up is a table to define these relationships.

Definition Converse Category
-------------------------------------------------
Brother Brother Personal
Landlord Tenant Professional
Parent Child Personal
Doctor Patient Professional
Spouse Spouse Personal
Husband Wife Personal
Wife Husband Personal
...

Each of these will link two "people" records. Some of these are reversable (Spouse) others are directional.

More to follow...