Inspired by the events of the past week, here’s a handy guide for anyone looking to figure out what exactly is going on during a breaking news event. When you first hear about a big story in progress, run to your television. Make sure it’s securely turned off.
Next, pull out your phone, delete your Twitter app, shut off your email, and perhaps cancel your service plan. Unplug your PC.
Now go outside and take a walk for an hour or two. Maybe find a park and sit on a bench, reading an old novel. Winter is just half a year away—have you started cleaning out your rain gutters? This might be a good time to start. Whatever you do, remember to stay hydrated. Have a sensible dinner. Get a good night’s rest. In the morning, don’t rush out of bed. Take in the birdsong. Brew a pot of coffee.Finally, load up your favorite newspaper’s home page. Spend about 10 minutes reading a couple of in-depth news stories about the events of the day. And that’s it: You’ve now caught up with all your friends who spent the past day and a half going out of their minds following cable and Twitter. In fact, you’re now better informed than they are, because during your self-imposed exile from the news, you didn’t stumble into the many cul-de-sacs and dark alleys of misinformation that consumed their lives. You’re less frazzled, better rested, and your rain gutters are clear.
“Breaking News Is Broken“, Farhad Manjoo in Slate
Things posted about article
(…) It turns out Dark Night Of The Soul is an album and the songs were written by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse (Mark Linkous), though the myriad singers featured on each track also had a big hand in composing and producing the work. The album was initially going to be packaged with a book of photos taken by David Lynch. But now there’s word that the music may never be officially released at all.
An unnamed spokesperson for Danger Mouse says that “due to an ongoing dispute with EMI” the book of photographs will “now come with a blank, recordable CD-R. All copies will be clearly labeled: ‘For legal reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.'” While offering no specifics, EMI has acknowledged the legal dispute with Danger Mouse and released a statement saying, “Danger Mouse is a brilliant, talented artist for whom we have enormous respect. We continue to make every effort to resolve this situation and we are talking to Brian Burton (Danger Mouse) directly. Meanwhile, we need to reserve our rights.”
You can order the book, sans music, from the official Dark Night Of The Soul Web site. In the meantime, you can hear the entire album here on NPR Music as an Exclusive First Listen.
Danger Mouse And Sparklehorse Team Up With David Lynch – NPR
I am listening it right now and it sounds good so far, well it was expected with, J. Casablancas, Iggy Pop, James Mercer, Vic Chesnutt…
This month there is on Monocle an article about airport wayfinding title “This is the way” with Paul Mijksenaar, navigational sign designer. After reading the article I went to his website in search for more information and found this article titled “Sign of the times”.
A breakdown of factors within this category shows that customer satisfaction depends, fairly equally, on the ‘findability’ of gates (on time), airport facilities such as restrooms and restaurants and ground transportation services.
Aaron Wall, the author of the SEOBook, explains us why we should not use dates in the URLs, one more change for this blog.
Everything you do has a chance to provide a clean or dirty signal of relevancy to search engines and searchers.
While a date in the URL may provide a signal of relevancy to some searchers looking for archived information, many people who are explicitly looking for old information will likely put a date in their search query, which will match page text even if the date is not in the URL. Other searchers have a good possibility of rediscovering the information they read in the past with the help of search personalization algorithms. But most queries are not for old stuff. And that makes me believe that using the date in the URL causes more harm than good.
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