TechFlash Founders Leave, Launch GeekWire

For years we’ve covered the adventures of entrepreneurs large and small, successful and not-so-much — living vicariously through their attempts to build meaningful technology products and businesses. We’ve learned a lot along the way. And now we’re getting ready to experience the entrepreneurial life ourselves, launching an honest-to-goodness startup of our own.

via Welcome to GeekWire, from John Cook and Todd Bishop – GeekWire.

Well, crap, this is kind of crazy. No offense to the PSBJ, but whoever’s taking over for Bishop and Cook has some huge shoes to fill.

AP: High Court Backs Washington State Man In Open Records Case

The [Supreme] [C]ourt, by an 8-1 vote, threw out an appeals court ruling that backed the Navy’s decision to withhold maps showing the extent of damage expected from an explosion at the ammunition dump near Port Townsend in Western Washington. [...]

The case before the court revolved around competing ideas of public safety. The government said that releasing the maps could allow someone to identify the precise location of the munitions that are stored at its base on Indian Island.

But Glen Milner, a longtime community activist, said that the people who live near the base have valid reasons for wanting to know whether they would be endangered by an explosion. An explosion at the Navy’s Port Chicago ammunition depot during World War II killed 320 people.

via High Court Backs Washington State Man In Open Records Case – Most Popular News Story – KIRO Seattle

Dissenting: Justice Breyer. Glad the Supreme Court is finding common ground on the “duh” stuff like this.

test

Just testing something…don’t mind me.

What Are Your Plans For Your Blog In 2011?

Source: p0ps Harlow's Flickr page

Copyblogger’s 5 Content Steps to Take For the New Year made me think about the long-delayed moves I’ve been wanting to make to this blog that I hope to finally make in 2011. Maybe if I spell them out here, that’ll keep me motivated to follow through:

• Migrate over to WordPress.org. I’ve wanted to move this site to its own host and take advantage of all the customization available with hosting my own site for a long time. What’s stopped me? Time and level of difficulty. But I’m ready to just say to hell with it, throw down the money and learn, the hard way, how to customize my site. If it looks crappy for a while…oh well. I’m all about transparency and learning out in the open.
• Come up with a new name and brand for my blog. I’ll always keep paulbalcerak.com as an online business card, but I’ve wanted to move the blog over to its own identity, independent of me. For one thing, “Balcerak” isn’t an easy name to spell and for another, it’s too easy with a name like mine to own my search engine rank. I want to get out there and try to compete for SEO in a niche. (More on the name I came up with in a future post.)
• Blog more often. I say this one all the time, but I’ve been trying it more in recent weeks. I’ve realized that the blog I want — one that’s updated constantly with always-original content — isn’t feasible and I may need to stick to just occasional fully-original posts while piggybacking on others’ posts for daily updates (like this post).

What plans do you have for your blog in 2011? Better yet: How are you planning on sticking to those plans? Let me know in the comments.

WikiLeaks Is Quite Possibly The Smoke Monster

Kathy Gill has some really great quotes from @BruceS (whose Twitter account is private) on the WikiLeaks/Julian Assange phenomenon, including:

Saints, martyrs, dissidents and freaks are always wild-cards, but sometimes they’re the only ones who can clear the general air.

@BruceS on Wikileaks, Assange & Diplomacy … “Hope” He’s What He Thinks He Is – Kathy Gill’s posterous.

That and other quotes from Bruce sort of sum up how I feel about WikiLeaks: I can’t really decide if it’s “good” or “bad;” I just know what it does and that some of what it does is good.

Which is sort of what I was saying when I said Facebook was like The Smoke Monster a little while back. (OK, now that LOST is over, we can pretty much all agree that the Smoke Monster was intended to be the bad guy, but we can also agree that it did a few good things and wasn’t entirely bad.)

Smoke Monsters aren’t ideal, but when they’re all you’ve got, sometimes you just have to make use of them as carefully as possible. Has WikiLeaks done anything bad? I haven’t seen any conclusive evidence, though I can see where Julian Assange and his organization make international actors nervous. Has WikiLeaks done anything good? I would argue yes.

At the same time, I’m still just as conflicted as Clay Shirky:

I am conflicted about the right balance between the visibility required for counter-democracy and the need for private speech among international actors. Here’s what I’m not conflicted about: When authorities can’t get what they want by working within the law, the right answer is not to work outside the law. The right answer is that they can’t get what they want.

Also, as Shirky mentions, WikiLeaks may only be “good” for a limited amount of time. In other words, if WikiLeaks is what’s needed to reset the balance of government secrecy vs. the public’s need to know, then so it is. But once we let the Smoke Monster out of the bottle, how do we get it back in? And that’s the thing: we can’t; or, at least, it’s insanely difficult to do so.

10 Things To Keep At Your Desk To Stay Productive | GenPink

I’m a busy guy (as evidenced by short posts like this one) and it’s hard sometimes for me to stay productive. What helps is having everything I need at my disposal in the place I spent most of my time: my desk.

Here’s a guest post I did for the blog GenPink (thanks to @elysa for the opportunity):

10 Things To Keep At Your Desk To Stay Productive – GenPink

The Advantage Of Tweeting Overnight (And What To Do If You Can’t)

I talked briefly with lostremote this morning about how KIRO 7 staffs its Twitter account overnight:

Tweeting news when it breaks… overnight – Lost Remote

I’m usually not the guy to Tweet during the wee hours, but I did take the reins a few weeks ago while I was trapped in the office. If you’re the social media person for your newsroom, I wouldn’t recommend staying up late on a regular basis, but as I mentioned in my comment on Cory’s site, being one of only a few Twitterers at 3 a.m. has its advantage in the sense that you’re speaking to people on a very small back-channel. It makes communication all the more personal and intimate, which is key to connecting with people through social media and forming valuable relationships.

If you can’t stay up all night, be strategic about how you do spend your time: Get up early or spend some time with your social presence during the weekend.

Do You Reply To Offensive-Sounding Twitter Account Names?

Source: gesamtbild's Flickr page

Someone (a random person) mentioned to me on Twitter the other day that I should watch who I @ reply after I responded to someone who had a Twitter username that referred to Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a “loser.”

My mention of the account was made from the @KIRO7Seattle account, which is to say, it was from the account of a news brand — no different than The New York Times, for instance, replying to someone named @ObamaIsAFailure.

My attitude was, and is, I don’t really care about people’s politics and I was merely responding to someone who asked a legitimate question (not even having to do with politics, for whatever it’s worth). The comment telling me to “watch it” seemed to insinuate that by @ replying this (apparent) anti-Pelosi-ite, I was somehow endorsing his or her assessment of Speaker Pelosi.

Frankly, that seemed ridiculous to me.

If someone from an account named @SaveTheSpaceShuttle asked me a question and I responded, would anyone care? Probably not. Would anyone think KIRO was endorsing saving NASA’s space shuttle program? Probably not.

At the same time, responding to an account with a truly offensive name — the N-word, an F-word or something else along those lines — gives me pause.

Ultimately, I responded to the “watch it” commenter with this:

“Person at [the Pelosi/"loser"] account asked a legitimate question, we responded. Only way we wouldn’t is if acct. name was esp. egregious.”

(Note: I’m not posting the full conversation or linking to anyone’s Twitter names because these people didn’t ask for any attention over the issue and I see no reason to direct it their way.)

Is my “policy” any good? Is it fair? Does it make sense? What’s your policy for responding to offensive-ish Twitter accounts? I would love to hear your feedback, so please leave a comment.

UPDATE: Are You Having Facebook Pages Problems? This May Be Why

UPDATE 2: I regained access to my News Feed status updates and Facebook Pages as of about 6 p.m. on Tuesday.

UPDATE: I got some help on this from Javier Sandoval, one of my Twitter friends. He said the issues I’m having could be related to an SSL certificate error on Facebook’s end:

Based on Javier’s observations and the fact that I’ve now observed the same issues on two separate computers (on two separate networks), I’m confident this is a Facebook problem. What’s odd is that I haven’t heard anything from the major tech blogs (Mashable, RWW, etc.). I’m going to send them this post to see if I get any response.

Here’s my original post describing my issues:

I’m having a couple Facebook problems right now and am wondering if anyone else is having them, too:

1. I can’t see the Walls of any Facebook Pages — including the ones I admin — when I’m logged in (I can see them fine when I’m logged out).
2. I can’t post status updates from my News Feed.

I’ve tried logging in to Facebook in three different browsers (Chrome, Firefox 3.6 and Internet Explorer 9) and have gotten the same result. I would assume that it’s a localized problem (some sort of caching, CSS, etc. issue) except that I can see the Walls of the Pages just fine when I’m logged out of Facebook.

I’ve tried clearing out my cache, dumping my cookies, etc. and nothing has worked. I’m hoping someone has some suggestion or is at least having the same problem so I don’t have to sit here feeling like I’m taking crazy pills.

I “upgraded” to the new profile layout today, but I don’t know that it has anything to do with the problem I’m having.

I’d post from my phone, but as you can see from the second screenshot below, my posts are showing up as me and not as my Page (meaning that our 2,600 fans aren’t getting my updates in their News Feeds).

Here are a few screenshots — any help would be appreciated:

KIRO 7 Page (which I admin) when logged in:

KIRO 7 Page when logged out:

Status update box missing in News Feed:

Hey, AP: Here’s How To Link Properly

The AP is hopeless and useless when it comes to linking.

Check out this story about a Naval officer in Kitsap charged with assault in its native AP format:

(Note: I’m not picking on The Seattle Times; I just happened to locate this story on their site via a Google search.)

I noticed the same story on the AP wire and corrected how the link was presented before I posted it to kirotv.com:

(Note: Blue, bold text = hyperlink.)

The difference is that the AP’s way of citing websites doesn’t give any meaningful credit to the sites they take information from — that is, those sites receive no link referrals, which would otherwise help boost their search engine rank. Readers are left copy/pasting a link to a home page and then searching around for the original story if they want more information (guess how often people do that). What if a reader access this story a year from now and wants to look at the original report from the referenced site?

One of my favorite things about my new job is that I can correct this, to a certain degree (again: mountain of AP content).

I’ll continue to alter the AP’s linking style when I find AP content that I want to post to kirotv.com’s home page, but it’s far too late in the game for the AP to still be optimizing for print. Presenting HTML-encoded wires should be standard. It’s pretty easy to delete the code (especially when staffs have all day to work on a newspaper); it’s a hell of a lot harder to comb through all of these referenced websites and put the code in.

Just for posterity, here’s the Kitsap Sun’s original report.