News/Journalism, Work

My day job

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Well, I talked to my boss and got the green light to post about work-related things. I doubt I will need to worry about it, but seeing that this is my personal space, I will still disclaim that my comments are entirely personal and do not represent the views of my employer. There.

So, in case you didn’t know already, my job is the web designer for Minnesota Public Radio. (Wikipedia has a pretty nice entry if you’re unfamiliar.) MPR is foremost a network of radio stations based on three services: news, classical music, and alternative/eclectic music… but it’s really much more than that. MPR has quite a robust offering of news and features apart from the radio content — much more so than most radio stations (public or not) — and it is very akin to working at a newspaper company (or so I’m told).

We actually recently did a redesign of the site just a few weeks ago, and are pushing out things in manageable chunks. Today, for example, we pushed out the new design to our weblogs. (My “other job” is as a contributor to one of said weblogs, The Bleacher Bums, which is all about baseball, which is a big deal right now if you live in Minnesota.) Most of what I do has to do with the presentation of the news content, creating interactive elements (sometimes complementary, sometimes entirely web-specific) and crafting the numerous sections, projects, and general interactions of the site.

The news aspect is only one part, which is part of why it’s such an interesting place to work. I also do work with American Public Media, which is the brand under which MPR produces and distributes public radio programming for other stations around the world. I’ve designed a handful of sites such as Saint Paul Sunday, Pipedreams, and American Mavericks (which won a Peabody, by the way) and been a part of a lot of interesting projects.

So there’s news, there’s music, and there’s ideas, design and presentation. I’m a huge fan of all of those things. If you are too, check out my bookmarks and future posts on this weblog.

Anything in specific you’d like me to talk about?

Ideas

Disco Volante

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I think I just found a great shirt idea, my next Halloween costume, or perhaps both. A crew t-shirt from the M.Y. Disco-Volante, the high-tech boat used by Emilio Largo for Operation Thunderball. They’re very classic, straight-forward, and sleek. Some examples:

The helpful crew lifting James Bond out of the water.

Another kind gesture… bringing champagne!

And perhaps what they’re best for: getting punched!

Uncategorized

Snakes on a motherfucking plane

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I’m sure you all have heard of “Snakes on a Plane”, right? Best movie concept ever. This screenwriter told an excellent story about being offered to help work on the script, including these two paragraphs which completely made my day/week/month:

Now out of both loyalty to the sacred bond between studio and screenwriter and also a serious desire to keep getting hired in this town, I will not give away any of the plot details of SNAKES ON A PLANE. But know this. As the great Sam Jackson would say: There are motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane.

What else do you need to know? How the snakes get on the plane, what the snakes do once they’re on the plane, who puts the snakes on the plane, who is trying to get the snakes off the plane…This is not for you to ponder. There are snakes on the plane. End of fucking story.

Ideas

Morning weather forecast device

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A recent television commercial jogged my memory about a desired device that I had thought about in the past. I have no idea what the commercial is for, but near the beginning of it a man gets out of bed in his futuristic home, and while he is doing his morning routine in the bathroom mirror, a weather forecast is playing in the mirror. Although I desire a weather forecast at other times, getting dressed is easily the most important time. In fact, there is a web site whose entire premise is that the weather dictates your clothing choices. Pure genius.

What I want is that futuristic man’s weather mirror, but in today’s world. I know it’s either a) out there already in some sort of weather geek’s catalog, or b) hackable using wireless technology and some sort of computer programs and device. Most simple home weather forecast devices on the market estimate the conditions based on the current conditions when you set it up, and then the changing temperature and barometric pressure. I want my device to be a much simpler device, much like the getting the weather from television. It’s figured out and distilled for me, and given to me in the simplest form possible.

All I want to do is wake up, go to my dresser, and see the following:

  • The temperature and conditions right now
  • The temperature and conditions at intervals later in the day
  • The most minimal amount of data I need to survive: temp, conditions and wind
  • Nothing scientific (no barometric pressure, moon phase, etc)
  • No clock (who doesn’t know what time it is?)

It also might be handy to have a configuration program as well, so that I might be able to change what information I see on the device, or perhaps changing the intervals, or perhaps even setting specific times that I want the forecast for (like if I know I’m going out at 10pm, I would want to know what it will be like outside.)

One way to execute this idea might be creating a program that grabs the weather from the Internet, parses it, and spits it out over wireless to this small device. Perhaps this device is a PDA? Who knows?

Any ideas or examples or existing products out there, anyone?

(If it helps, I have an old Handspring Visor and a (very, very) old Apple Newton.)

Music

A fresh start

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So, after three years of using Audioscrobbler, I decided (and acted) on a whim to reset my stats on my account at last.fm. It kind of hurts to see all that “work” go away, but it was to the point that it wasn’t moving fast enough for me (I check it a lot), and now that I have my music ratings and taggings in a better place than before, I felt it will be much more accurate than in the past. My biggest pet peeve, which Last.fm can’t really help much, is how artists with more songs recorded get higher rankings than artists who have fewer songs in existance but are more favored. Hopefully with the right ranking system and party shuffle, things should even out.

I was presently surprised to see at least 3 users in my “neighbours” list who used to be there before, when I had 20+ thousand songs in my profile; a fine testament to the last.fm system and algorithms.

Ideas

Dear Google Maps

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Please create a feature which allows me to map out alternative routes for directions. In particular, I would like to:

  • Filter out the use of freeways. I would like to use your mapping software to get directions for riding my bicycle or scooter (or perhaps even walking), which means no highways or freeways.
  • Filter by speed limit. If I am riding a small scooter, I may not want to (or be able to) go over a particular speed. If I am walking or bicycling, I would like to take a route that does not have cars whizzing by at uncomfortable speeds.
  • Select or deselect particular streets, or stretches of streets. There are plenty of reasons I might want to avoid particular streets or areas, such as road construction, scenic detours, bad neighborhoods, preferred routes/streets, etc.
  • Save routes and route preferences. I prefer going one particular way different from how you suggest. If you could remember that, it would be awesome. I could see saving these “hacked” routes as particularly useful information, both for myself and others. I imagine seeing how other people get around to places might benefit me. (For example, I would like to save a list of “ways to get home from work”. Depending on traffic and “feel”, sometimes I take the freeway, sometimes I take one of several side street routes. Saving those alone would be great. Now if other people could see these, and I could see other people’s “ways to get home” from the same location/area, that would be amazing.)

Thank you for your time. Love, Ben.

News/Journalism, Web Design, Work

Well-designed news sites

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Over time I have bookmarked news media sites that I find particularly well-designed. In particular I like to have the home page be the largest factor because of all that it usually has to cover, but I am also interested in well-designed “common” pages, such as a simple news article or collection/index of news articles. I am posting them for posterity’s sake, but also to hopefully garner some suggestions from the audience on sites that I am missing out on. These could be television, newspaper, radio, strictly online, or perhaps even something loosely based on any one of those. Here they are, in no particular order:

  • BBC

    I actually liked their previous iterations better, but this home page is still an exercise in clarity and simplicity, given the scope of the organization. I wish more people could sell designs like this to similarly-sized companies.

  • Bayersicher Rundfunk

    Nothing particularly breathtaking, but definitely organized and fairly uncluttered given the circumstances.

  • Australian Broadcasting Corporation

    An excellent example of an organized bevy of text links. Could use some design polish, but it is very skimmable (is that a word?)

  • Chicago Public Radio

    Nothing spectacular here, but a decent sense of design and restraint (although possibly because the rest of the site is fairly shallow.)

  • Deutsche Welle

    The top navigation, map, and graphical arc are a poor use of real estate, but the rest of the page is templated and fairly well kept. This site would probably go downhill real fast if it had banner ads.

  • dradio.de

    I love the boxed grid system, the simplicity of the navigation, and the choice of HTML over graphics in alot of places. Although some might argue the grayscale color scheme is a bit boring, I like how they use blue/red combo to both make the radio services stand out from the gray, and also connect the radio services from the top navigation to the right content column. A terribly clean gridded design.

  • Schweizer Radio DRS

    An excellent grid system on several pages. I particularly like the display of the radio services across the middle. Although I’m not a fan of color-coding every section of a web sites, they at least handle it well by termpering everything with alot of gray. The news stories need some help, and those photos in the bottom right of people with headphones frighten me.

  • Inc.com

    For all the ads and ad-like content on the homepage, I can still skim fairly well. The icon system and font size/color variety help alot with that. I love that header bar. Great design on the home and story pages, especially with way too many ads.

  • International Herald Tribune

    The poster child for out-of-the-box news story thinking. The clippings feature and the customizable three-column pageable story text have been around for years, and people are still trying to copy it. Amazing stuff. Clean, simple, excellent grid system. I don’t think I’m alone in this, but I totally love the serif headline with sans text. I’m also a sucker for horizontal line backgrounds, good icon sets, and (if you hadn’t noticed it yet) grayscale color themes.

  • Lawrence Journal-World

    The poster child for news site innovation in (at least) the U.S., along with it’s sister site lawrence.com. Decent grid system and color scheme, but I also wish they would use HTML more often, like for the “services” block, and for all the section headers on the page like “latest stories” and “local sports”. (By the way, what the hell are “top ads”? Who are you kidding?) I like the potential of the very large graphical news block at the top, but I’ve never seen it executed to much effect. The photos and accompanying display font text are lacking. Can’t get enough of the dynamic weather graphic.

  • MDR (Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk)

    I absolutely love the cropped horizontal photo space on the home page. The simple navigation, grid, and color scheme aren’t half bad either. I like the balance of HTML text/navigation and graphics/photos.

  • NDR (Norddeutsche Rundfunk)

    I’m a big fan of the top navigation bar with the logo, photos, sharp colors, and subtle rollover links. Great grid, good typography. The double-wide photo space on the first story in a list is a nice touch.

  • WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk)

    Lots of spacing, big text, and thumbnails. The icon system could use a little work, but at least they have one. A very clean design, with a good balance of text and graphics.

I will add more comments to the rest of these as I get more time…

Please add suggestions in the comments!

Music

Musical baton passing

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Dan Hill passed me the
Musical Baton, so I feel obliged, even though I may have just been a sloppy second choice for him. Thanks, Dan.

Total volume of music on my computer

7,360 songs taking up 23.66GB of space. According to iTunes this covers 382 artists, and could last me 16.5 days of continuous listening. Everything is meticulously tagged through Musicbrainz, and rated by hand, so I know these statistics to be terribly accurate.

The last CD I bought

Jonathan Fire*Eater – Tremble Under Boom Lights, purchased used at Amazon. You can always see all my music, because I keep track of such this on the music page of my Web site.

Song playing right now

“You’re Right, I’m Wrong” by Thee Headcoatees, from the album Punk Girls. You can always see every song I’m playing, because I keep track of such things on Audioscrobbler.

Five songs I listen to alot, or that mean a lot to me

I could spend the rest of my life trying to figure out 5 songs that mean a lot to me, so instead I will take the easy, literal route and just look at my iTunes playcount and tell you them in order:

  1. Converge – Forsaken (album)
  2. Cursive – When Summer’s Over Will We Dream of Spring (album)
  3. Descendents – Catalina (album)
  4. Excuse 17 – Carson (album)
  5. Born Against – Sendero (album)

Like I said, not necessarily the greatest songs, but it’s all weighted through ratings and party shuffle and iTunes’ (seemingly non-random) randomness… although Catalina has a special place in my heart. (This song made we want to learn how to play guitar. I brought this song on tape with my acoustic guitar to my first day to my teacher (who by coincidence was Bob Mould’s first guitar teacher), and we ended up going through and writing out this punk song in dorky acoustic chord tablature.)

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton

I will (try to) pass it on to George Hotelling, Alf Eaton, Irdial Discs, juniorbonner, and Paul Hammond…all of which are in my Audioscrobbler network.

Some blog about some stuff.