The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.

- Hunter S. Thompson

I have an idea for a news web site (or television program or newspaper or whatever): I want to get my news relative to everything that’s going on in the world. I want to get my news in relation to “the big picture”. What does that mean? It means taking into account all the things that are going on the world today, and organizing things based on what the real important things are.

Take a look at what the news media is giving you. For example today, December 18, 2006, the “top news stories” include things such as Kate Moss getting out of rehab, an NBA brawl, and various small (yet still tragic) events that affect very few people. Do any of these really matter? To me, no. I don’t mean to say that I don’t care, but that there are greater things to care about, and I (and I would assume others) don’t know enough about them because these other items take up the remaining consciousness of the audience.

I want an editor (or hive-mind, whatever) to

1. group the news into buckets (ala Buzzfeed)
2. ask the question of each bucket, “Does this really matter in the big scheme of things?”

3. place them in order accordingly

The hope for my news goes like this: if there’s a war going on, it should be the top story every single day. It should be the top story until it stops, and even then some more afterwards. It’s the most important and potentially life- and world- changing event going on, so I want to know about it.

It seems nowadays the most important issues in the world are the elephant in the room that only get a passing mention. Everyone knows they’re out there, but somehow smaller and fresher news takes their place even though they really don’t matter to an overwhelming majority of the audience. I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for all of the “news” that happens every day, but it could at least be placed in its rightful order compared to everything else that’s going on.

When I get some time, I will put something together to illustrate this idea further, but I’d like to hear your thoughts on the subject.

My first job, working as a groundskeeper at a college in St. Paul.

Later I worked at a local hardware store. Once again, there is a baseball field and college in the vicinity.

This is in Bloomington, MN near the Mall of America. Note the recurring theme of yet another baseball field at the top of the picture.

Here is a fancy suburban Minneapolis office park. I worked at the building on the left, then ended up working at the building on the right side of the street several years later.

This interesting shape is at an office park near the Oakland airport in Alameda, CA. It was right near the water, which explains the weird brown stuff and water in the bottom left. Another recurring theme: a football field, which is the practice facility of the Oakland Raiders.

Embarcadero Center on the water’s edge of downtown San Francisco.

A warehouse space in Minneapolis on the edge of downtown. Not quite the Warehouse District, but close enough.

I worked at the fairly nondescript building at the end of this T-intersection in Edina, MN. The weirdly shaped building is a library and government center, but is entirely less exciting architecturally than the shape suggests.

In St. Louis Park, MN, I worked in the lower of the two buildings with the wedges on top and the white parking ramps to the left. Further to the left was a large pharmaceuticals distribution warehouse and abandoned tennis courts.

This is as far away as I ever worked from my house. This was in Eden Prairie, MN, and across the street from yet another professional football team’s (Minnesota Vikings) practice facility.

This was in St. Paul, MN where I worked in the fairly simple square block in the center. I actually started in the building right below it, but it was torn down and an expansion of about the same size was built and attached to the existing square building. While the newer building was being built, I worked in the tall building on the right, which is the Wells Fargo Tower. You can actually even see my parking spot to the left of my building!

This is in Redmond, WA, as part of the largest and most well-known campus in Redmond. I work in the H-shaped building (#25 out of hundreds, none of which are more than a few stories high, probably due to some city codes put in place to not block rich people’s views) in the north central area of the picture.

It seems rather ridiculous to me that this is the only way to find a mailbox near my house. It seems like an obvious tool for the USPS, but even moreso for map sites looking for more useful connections to places and utilities in someone’s neighborhood that might give them an edge over a competitor (I’m looking at you, Google and Yahoo).

In my continuing quest to tag my music with metadata to create better playlists, I tried adding beats per minute (BPM) data into my mp3s. Seeing that I have more than 15k songs, I knew I was going to have to find a program that would do it automatically, so I looked around and chose beaTunes. Using the default mix of quality vs. speed, it took at least 36 hours of processing time to do my entire library.

While beaTunes other major feature is the ability to create mixes and song suggestions based on that BPM data, my point was to see if it would be useful in iTunes because that is my preferred application. Through some preliminary testing, I’m not finding that much good out of it. Creating a playlist strictly by BPM, I’m finding that a mix of incorrect BPM analysis (songs tagged at 80 BPM are really probably 160 BPM) and genre hopping (going from rap to rock to soul to metal) is causing the experience to not be as amazing as I had hoped.

There are times when a few songs really do match up well, but you would still really have to either a) know which songs have a wrong BPM and fix them, or b) really know your library enough to spot obvious mismatches and shuffle things accordingly. With over 15,000 songs I don’t think I can do either, so my options are to either find a better BPM tagger, or go back to not caring.

Any suggestions, or recommendations of other BPM taggers?

Well, that was fun. After seeing some good roundups of election night graphics and a few personal tours by the designers themselves (such as Khoi Vinh of the New York Times and Nathan Borror of the Lawrence Journal-World) I thought I’d share my own rundown of what we did at Minnesota Public Radio for election night results.

First off, the big deal was the special election block on the homepage, which included a live map of the governor’s race and a balance of power for both national and state houses, both of which were updating behind the scenes without having to refresh the page.

The other big thing was the interactive results map, which allows you to see up-to-the-minute results without having to refresh, drill down to specific counties and districts, and even switch the view of the map to see the geographic strengths and weaknesses of specific parties. Notice how I didn’t have to include a screenshot of those? That’s because there’s permalinking to specific zooms and views. There’s also switching back and forth from Flash to HTML versions of the results because of that fact. Here’s a screenshot anyway:

I personally don’t think there’s nothing terribly amazing about our basic results pages, except for the fact that I consider them to be fairly readable, digestible, don’t look like pre-packaged crap from an outside supplier, and just the fact that there are a lot of pages, which allows you to look at however general or specific you want to be.

Another interesting part of our election results was the fact that we gave them to anyone else who wanted them, through our election results widget. Places who used it ranged from personal sites to political bloggers to small town papers to political parties themselves, and the customization ranged anywhere from not having to do much to a fantastic super-customized approach. There were even times were you could get our results faster from somewhere other than our own site, due to our traffic load. This may seem strange, but I think that’s kind of an awesome public service.

In general the night went rather smooth, even while having almost 10x the usual amount of traffic. The data retrieval from the Secretary of State slowed up a bit later in the evening due to a similar kind of media crunch on their end, but data still eked out along the way. I’d love to hear any comments or criticism on anything you see on the site or in the interactive maps, because hey, I hear this kind of thing is happening again in a few years.

I know nobody looks at web sites any more because there’s RSS feeds, but like I mentioned before, I was just using something out the box to start, and felt it my duty as a web designer to create something myself eventually. Plus I got called out for using Hemingway recently, and it actually kinda helped kick me in the ass to do something about it. Thanks, Ben.

If it’s not obvious, the design is based on the concept of declassified documents, and was brought on by the idea of actually starting a blog which would announce newly declassified documents and comb through them for interesting tidbits. I soon realized that I would never be able to put as much time into that as it would take, so I just took the design and put it to this. (By the way, I would still love it if someone made a blog about declassified documents. You’ll get a free design out of the deal if you do!) I already discovered a happy accident as I was making it: I personally love the way the page transforms into a more censored document as you follow the links. It’s also terribly easy to scan for new content because of it.

Anyways, I’m sure this is wrought with CSS and template problems, since I basically made it in a day with little prior knowledge of WordPress templating, but feel free to note your thoughts, suggestions, problems, &c. in the comments.

Remember how I said I was busy at work with election stuff? Here’s something for you: Minnesota Public Radio is providing live, customizable election-night results for your site. You can customize it to display whatever races you want in whatever order you want, display all or just major parties, and even customize the CSS to make it fit seamlessly into your site.

Remember when I was all gung-ho about posting all the time? Well, something always gets in the way… this time it’s the general election on November 7, and I’m busy building things for work. As you might be able to tell from last election, there’s a bunch of data fetching, moving, and displaying that goes on. I’m working on improving some of these, particularly the Flash apps. There will also be something handy for you all coming out real soon.

In reading this article entitled “Newspaper.com visitors up by nearly a third, NAA says”, I didn’t realize that “newspaper.com visitors” was just a way of saying “online newspaper visitors” in a general sense, so I was quite surprised when I got to the real newspaper.com.

At the site, it is not a newspaper conglomerate such as News Corp, Gannett or Knight-Ridder, but instead some fantastic screenshots of “the world’s first international multimedia online newspaper, News In Motion“, which existed from 1993-1996 and was eventually usurped by the web. My guess is that the reason the site is still around is because the domain name is worth a pretty penny, but it’s still nice to see some insight into some older online news thinking with the splash page, ISSN number, and button navigation.