Ryan Sholin

Category: Technology

  • Placeblogger: More human than ever

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Check out the redesigned Placeblogger a 2007 Knight News Challenge winner. The aggregation-by-location niche seems to be blowing up lately, especially as startups try to hitch their maps to the iPhone’s wagon, but Placeblogger feels like real live humans are writing blog posts in real live places.  I like that. via the Knight Foundation Blog.…

  • IdeaLab: Microblogging tools for your newsroom

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Over at IdeaLab, I’ve posted a rundown of some of the internal Twitter for Enterprise type services that are out there at the moment, from the Prologue theme for WordPress (free!) to Backpack Journal from 37signals (not free!). Plus, there’s a bit about the feature inspiration I picked up yesterday at blip.fm. The evolving list…

  • IdeaLab: DIY Django development at ReportingOn

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Over at IdeaLab, I’ve posted a bit of background on why I ended up building ReportingOn in Django instead of Drupal.  Frankly, to the users of the site, it shouldn’t matter which platform I chose, but to me, and to the future of the project as an open source basis for news organizations, I think…

  • Unscheduled downtime

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    Ryan Sholin
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    “Sometimes, you eat the bar. And sometimes, the bar eats you.” And sometimes, something blows up at a data center in Houston and your cool new Web host has all its servers shut down for 36 hours while fires are quite literally put out and power is restored. I imagine things might be up and…

  • 5 important things that happened in the last 10 days

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    Ryan Sholin
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    In no particular order, with little commentary, and limited accuracy on that whole “10 days” concept: Google Friend Connect: Just the tip of the iceberg. YouTube Citizen News: Aggregate, aggregate, aggregate. Disqus + Seesmic Video Comments: Say it, don’t spray it? MySpace and Facebook data availability: Bring your profile to the party. 3G iPhone coming…

  • Server shuffle

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    Ryan Sholin
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    I’ve moved this here blog and most everything else at ryansholin.com, reportingon.com, and a domain to be named later off to WebFaction ‘s servers. So far, so good. WebFaction support is already impressive, hitting me up with detailed instructions on how to easily import my WordPress database using ssh.  (Yes, I used the command line. …

  • The difference between Facebook friends and Twitter friends

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    Ryan Sholin
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    I’ll add you as a Facebook friend just because we went to elementary school together, even if we don’t really have anything to talk about anymore. I’ll add you as a Twitter friend just because we have something to talk about, even if I have no idea where you went to elementary school.

  • Twitter take-up Tuesday brought me Clarence

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    Ryan Sholin
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    I’m not going to go into much detail or analysis of what happened to Twitter today, other to point out that this blog post by Jeremiah Owyang started it and became a hub for at least 300 people to connect to each other, and thus to each other’s networks. “Quite simply, my whole hustle is…

  • The word Kindle makes me think of burning books

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    Ryan Sholin
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    All branding aside, the oncoming launch of Amazon’s e-paper device essentially begins the practical discussion about e-paper in earnest. Books are a neat trick, but I’m pretty exclusively thinking in terms of the future of newspapers here. Things to pay attention to: EVDO: This device has ubiquitous Internet access when in cell range. That’s good.…

  • Obligatory Twitterquake post

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    Ryan Sholin
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    So last night, around 8 p.m. California time, a rather large truck was idling in front of our building. That was what it felt like at first, then the wife and I looked at each other and said the magic word: “Earthquake.” Whoa. We scrambled for a few seconds, made some moves to grab the…