This is my last week @Poynter, and I spent part of the day clearing off my work MacBook Pro to hand in.

The process is typically a major pain. Words docs, spreadsheets, presentations, photos, music, and email all need to be found and saved onto external hard drives or thumb drives and reconstructed on a new machine. I still have Zip disks, CD-ROMs, DVDs and even a Syquest disk laying around from previous migrations.

But this time: painless.

Most of my working documents are in DropBox. All of my email and calendars (personal and work) are stored in various Google Apps accounts. The majority of my news reading is done via RSS feeds stored in Google Reader. Firefox is syncing my bookmarks (somewhere) but I use Delicious and Instapaper in most cases anyway. All of my notes and to-dos are in Evernote. Almost every photo I have taken in the past year is still on my iPhone – a few are on Facebook, Flickr and Instagram. When traveling I watch movies on Netflix and TV via Slingbox. And, Twitter is what it is.

In fact music is the only real cloud hold-out for the moment, though I have that backed-up to Amazon’s Cloud Drive and an external drive at home just in case.

Scanning the laptop – the only files actually saved locally are applications and random downloads that could be deleted. The entire process took about 20 minutes, and I can walk away fairly confident I am not leaving behind anything I am going to need later.

And – bonus points – most of the apps I use on the laptop have iPhone/iPad equivalents. So despite being without a computer for the next few days I am barely going to notice. Actually, I would be much more distressed if I lost my phone for the weekend.

Sure Amazon’s cloud crashed for three days last week. So far – the risk is worth it.

That punchline comes to mind as we are in fact moving south this summer – all the way from New Hampshire to Boston. South of Boston even.

My fellowship at Poynter ends April 28, and on May 2 I will start at the Boston Globe / Boston.com as a Senior Product Manager (Yep, I buried the lede there) helping develop and support new mobile products.

Needless to say I am excited about the new job – phones and tablets are where the action is going to be for the next few years. And, I am incredibly indebted to Poynter (especially Julie, Steve, Mallary and Regina) for helping me think and write about mobile and social these past months.

I will be commuting for most of the summer – it is about an hour in good traffic. We hope to sell our place in N.H. and move to Mass. sometime before September. That part of the process can’t come soon enough – I spent the weekend painting and putting new tile in the upstairs bathroom. Why is it we never really get around to fixing a place up until we are selling it?

On a related note – anyone want a piano? No way am I moving that again.

Typical enough – but what was interesting was watching the traffic (via bit.ly):

I have noted on the chart the timing of each re-tweet (red) and, perhaps more importantly, the actual conversions of clicks to survey responses (green). In the first hour the survey received five re-tweets, 110 referrals from Twitter, and four people actually completed the survey.

You can check out the raw data here http://bit.ly/info/oju

Apparently there are some crossed lines at AP. It is a big company so not a surprise that mistakes happen. But, they look pretty silly when a regional AP rep asks an affiliate radio station to remove similar videos from their site. Especially when the videos were embedded from the official AP YouTube Channel.

Does AP know how its YouTube channel works? (CNet News)

I am working on a small research project that hopefully will turn into a case study and presentation at Poynter later this summer. The working title is: ’10 Things You Can do for Free Today.’

The project involves identifying 15 – 20 of the top ‘free’ tools being used on newspaper Web sites and then building short case study for each focused on ease of installation, use, successes and best practices. The tools most commonly mentioned so far range from Coveritlive to Qik.

If you are interested in helping out just answer a few quick questions here: Web Tools Survey

Thanks!

Great quote and great presentation from Chuck:

I am at a workshop at Poynter this week learning about change management and coaching/training techniques. Just for a plug for the sponsor – the event is called the McCormick Change Leadership Fellowship.

The group is working today and tomorrow on developing hour long teaching modules that could potentially be used in the future at Poynter or other journalism events and conferences. We will not be building a full presentation this week, merely creating an outline and tools that we will use during the session.

This is where I need help. My session is tentatively titled: “10 Things You Can do for Free Today.” The focus will be on finding, implementing and using free software and services available on the Web to provide internal and external tools and features for use at your paper and Web site.

As part of the session I would like to provide a mini case study from different newspapers using each of the free tools and Web services. We use most of the at the Telegraph – but having a broader cross-sample to talk about would be much more valuable to attendees – and keep me from just rambling on about myself for an hour.

So – the list of possible services is below. If you are using any of them and would be willing to submit to a short email or phone interview and share some best practices and results around these products – let me know in the comments and/or by email: damon(at)kiesow.net I am also looking for any suggestions on services or categories of services that I have not gotten on the list yet.

1. Disqus.com/Intense Debate (comments)
2. Coveritlive.com (live chat/blog)
3. PHPbb (open source forums)
4. WordPress (blog)
5. Mogulus/Ustream (live video)
6. Qik.com (live cell phone video)
7. OpenX (ad serving)
8. Twitter (SMS)
9. Google Analytics/GoogleMaps/Google Docs
10. EditGrid (collaborative web-based data)

I know there are hundreds/thousands of others out there – I am most familiar with those in terms of good journalism uses at newspapers.

Thanks!

Damon

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Dear Editor Xxx

We are a vendor to some of your competitors… When I finally reached Editor Zzzz today, he hung up the phone on me immediately after I asked him to spend 60 seconds to see what we provide…

We talk to many newspapers… when we get replies like the one I received from Zzzz, it is usually a sign that the paper is either going out of business… (or the employee)… just doesnt care about the paper.

We would like to show you our product, and I want to know if we can do that by somehow avoiding Zzzz.

So hypothetically, if a vendor were to call you on New Year’s Eve, during a blizzard when there are three people left in the newsroom and try to sell you a product you do not want, how receptive might you be? Hypothetically just receptive enough to be polite, and then increasingly less so as they decline to take ‘no’ for an answer. And then, much, much less so after they immediately send the above email to your boss.

Happy New Year!

They say all politics are local, and even on the Web, most business is as well. So in this case there may be a disconnect between the open ideals of the Internet and the cold reality of Website publishers trying to compete with giants such as Boston.com. To put it another way – it is easy to be high minded about such things until it is your ox being gored.

The ‘what are they thinking’ perspective is ably represented by Jeff Jarvis and Mark Potts:
When did Gatehouse become clueless
Gatehousegate

The other side of the story (What they ARE thinking) is so far represented only by the GateHouse complaint.

As someone who competes for online readers in the broader Boston market I can understand GateHouse’s concern. But – I think/hope this might be a technological and design problem, not a legal one in the end.

After all, Boston.com is basically doing what most Websites do – they are aggregating content and linking to original sources. So, it is hard to imagine GateHouse winning outright with this complaint. And, if they did it is hard to imagine the case law thus created would be 100% beneficial to anyone. Let’s all hope they get some mediation and a settlement.

As to the merits, on a first read the trademark dilution complaint appears most on target (to a non-lawyer anyway.) The design of the Boston.com Newton page seems to imply that WickedLocal.com – mixed in with Globe stories and blogs – is just another NYT property. A quick fix there might be to simply separate Globe and ‘other’ content into different news lists with different headers. Just make it clear what Boston.com owns and what they don’t. That is the design solution.

A larger problem (at least for a smaller media property competing in the Boston market) is Google juice. This is where we need a tech solution.

Many small papers have an ongoing complaint that any Web-first breaking news they publish shows up quickly on larger regional Web sites via sharing with AP. The issue is not that AP picks up Web stories, nor that Boston.com (among others) feeds them to their site. The problem is that Google gives big Web sites preference in their search rankings, regardless of whether or not they are the original source for the content.

This happens on a weekly basis when a murder or natural disaster story hits our Web site.  If we publish at 9:00 a.m. it gets to AP by 9:30 a.m. and before 10:00 a.m. Google News has Boston.com, WCAX.com, BostonHerald.com and etc at the top of the search results – while our original and ongoing reporting is in the middle or bottom of the page.

Imagine this same scenario for WickedLocal. If “Your Town” eventually expands to 125 communities who is going to get the search traffic for Newton TAB stories? One would assume Boston.com will get a high rank – and a potentially lopsided share of those first clicks. To be fair I don’t see a strong indication of this effect yet but check out this search result and you can see the beginning of it. So, if 100 readers click to Boston.com and 30 click through to the WickedLocal story is that good? And, is that a gain of 30 for GateHouse or a loss of 70?

So – the ‘simple’ tech solution: Newspaper.coms, the Associated Press and Google need to get together and agree on some ground rules. Newspapers would add metadata to links and external feeds indicating a URL for the original source material. AP would transmit this info with their wire stories and Google would respect that metadata when crunching their Google News algorithms. This would allow everyone to link and excerpt to their heart’s content – but it would NOT reward aggregators with improved search engine rankings built on top of someone else’s content. It would basically be a sort of reverse ‘nofollow’ tag for news stories – that gives credit where due.

AP already has a partnership with Google that is aimed at reducing duplicate wire stories in the index – would it really be too difficult to make this same concept serve individual newspapers? Technologically probably not, politically who knows?

UPDATE: Some more commentary from the blogosphere:
GateHouse Lawsuit vs. New York Times Co. has Dire Implications
A Danger to Journalism
GateHouse: O hai, internetz — we r fail
Gatehouse sues NYTCo over aggregation: But do they have a point?
Globe vs. Gatehouse Part I
Peeking inside Pandora’s Box
GateHouse v NY Times Co.: Not So Simple After All