A year ago today the Guadalajara Reporter launched a completely new site that was developed by me. Â So I thought that it might be a good time to talk about what this last year has brought to the site, what I think about working on a newspaper website, and what I think about the future newspapers in general.
I just ran accross a very interesting study called the “Connectivity Scorecard” about the reltive connectedness of different countries. Normally these kind of studies talk about averge speed of connections and percentage of people with high-speed internet connections, but this study takes a much more holistic approach to the idea of connectivity and talks about 6 different components:
The great thing about this methodology is that it adds many different dimensions to the idea of connectivity by expanding both the sectors looked at and the going beyond mere infrastructure. This rings true to me because it allows a country like Mexico to score highly on Consumer Usage & Skills while still ranking the country fairly poorly on Consumer Infrastructure. Â Mexico has lots of internet users in internet cafes and similiar locations, but fairly poor penetration of broadband internet to the home. Â It also alows the US to rank very highly in the study despite the relitevely poor Consumer Infrastructure score.
The only issues I have with this study is in the interface and design of the report. Â Here are the issues I noticed:
Country color: Â I can find no rhyme or reason behind the color chosen for each country. Â At first I though it might have something to do with their ranking on the chart, but that didn’t seem to fit. Â Then I thought it was a regional designation, but that also doesn’t work. Â I really can’t tell why the countries are in a particular color.
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No way to compare two countries: This seems like an obvious shortcoming especially given the wornderful radar charts used to display the varias components of the score. Â It would be nice to be able to choose 2 or more countries and see their relative scores on a radar chart or in a table. Â This would allow quick comparisons to understand why, for example, the US got a score of 7.71 and Sweden got a score of 7.47.I’m probably in good nerdy company when I think back to my dreams of the future and see self-driving robot cars cruising down the freeways at breakneck speeds, bumpers only inches apart while relaxed passengers sip coffee and read their electronic newspapers. Â It seems like an idea that’s always 20 years away, but if Brad Templeton is right, they’ll be here much sooner. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week I went to a training provided by my company about Project Management. One of the best parts about the training was the instructor. He told some very amusing anecdotes about projects he had worked on in the past and where they went right and went wrong.
One of the stories he told was about a project a major technology company (but not my employer) did for the Mexican federal government in the late ’80s or early ’90s. The major technology company was hired to provide a computer system to completely overhaul the federal voting records and make all the records digital. This involved a lot of data entry at the central offices in Mexico City and registration of voters in regional centers. This was an important contract for the major technology company because it represented one of the first developing countries to have digital voting records and a successful completion of the project could mean many future contracts with other governments.
I wrote my first post for “The Apple Blog” today entitled Will Apple use the “Media Download” Patent?.
Could Apple start receiving a portion of every music download from every online music store, even Microsoft’s new Zune Marketplace?
