Really since the introduction of the iPhone, but particularly after the advent iPad, this concept of “apps as content” has gained a lot of currency, and now every media company in the world feels compelled to be in the business of developing native software as a distribution channel. Despite the press’s tendency to portray this trend as futuristic, I actually think of it as a bit retrograde—particularly since we’ve actually been evolving an incredibly sophisticated medium for content presentation and distribution for over 15 years now: the web.

—

This is but one of many choice quotes from an excellent interview Pixel Union did with the brilliant (not to mention handsome and multi-faceted!) Buzz Andersen.

What’s great about Buzz isn’t just that he’s smart but also incredibly thoughtful, something all too rare in otherwise intelligent people. Love that guy.

Osprey, for tracking real-time Twitter conversations

My pal Bill Couch (who is awesome) has a great writeup on what looks like an incredible and very promising use of Twitter – curated, real-time conversation tracking.

I’ve seen plenty of event-based tweet curation but nothing that’s excited me as much as this. Every newsroom in the country should be begging Bill to open source this before the presidential debates fire up.

jayrosen:

Actually Governor Romney, what you just said is completely incorrect… This is NPR.

NPR has a new ethics handbook, which came out February 24th. Here’s the key part:

We report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are  fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports.

Fair to the truth. Pretty cool. It’s already started to have an effect. This is from an NPR report on Feb. 27th about auto bailouts and the Republican candidates.

NPR REPORTER: Mitt Romney, son of former American Motors CEO George Romney, criticized President Barack Obama’s handling of the bailout.

MITT ROMNEY: Instead of going through the normal managed bankruptcy process, he made sure the bankruptcy process ended up with the UAW taking the lion’s share of the equity in the business.

NPR REPORTER: Actually, the U.S. Treasury got most of GM’s equity. 

Such a simple word: “Actually….” And now it has a chance to become standard practice at NPR.

For more on this, see my post: NPR Tries to Get its Pressthink Right

(Photo by Matthew Reichbach. Creative Commons License.)

This is great

Agenda for the 2012 Facebook Marketing Conference

Sure does seem like Facebook is putting a lot of effort into selling their users

NICAR 12 Brings the Love – and the Code

Dan Sinker on some of the interesting projects presented at NICAR this year. Lots of good looking code in there.

Mingus' magnum opus ‘Epitaph’ in concert

Neven, the only other Charles Mingus fan I know under the age of 50, brought this to my attention. It’s fantastic.

Facebook (and others) were bypassing IE’s third-party cookie control in a way similar to Google

The story here is a bit more nuanced, though. It turns out that IE was relying on an outdated standard (P3P headers) to control third-party cookie access. In fact, hundreds of sites set invalid P3P headers because most modern browsers don’t properly support them.

Seems like this is more an issue of Microsoft trying to jump on a bandwagon bashing Google (while conveniently omitting an offender like Facebook, with whom Microsoft has a cozy partnership) than Google being evil.

How Google and other online advertisers subverted Safari’s third-party cookie blocking

By Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford grad student. A good, technical description of exactly how four big ad networks, including Google, intentionally circumvented Apple’s built in privacy protections.

The Wall Street Journal has more of a layman’s overview, including a priceless bit at the end about the team that actually fixed the code in WebKit.

This is Not a Conspiracy Theory

Kirby “Everything is a Remix” Ferguson is working on a new project, this one about “where we are right now politically”. The scope sounds massive and interesting and I have zero doubt that Kirby will do an excellent job. Worth a few ducats.

Defunding transit is how you smack down urbanites, environmentalists, and people of color, all in one fell swoop. It’s how you telegraph a disdain for all things European. It’s how you show solidarity with swing-state suburbanites who don’t understand why their taxes are going toward subways they don’t even use. And it’s how you subtly reassure your base that you’re not concerned about the very poor.

—The Tea Party has declared an idiotic war on mass transit.