Friday reading #13

I wonder if the 13th edition of “Friday reading” needs to be unlucky in some way? Anyway, on the day that the Olympic opening ceremony takes place in my hometown, and that I’m doing some mentoring at Design Jam London #5, here are a bunch of links to interesting things and long reads from the river of the intertubes that I’ve been wallowing in this week. Journalism, digital things, and a bit of cycling. You know the drill.

Friday reading

“Dissolving that Print Mentality” - Thomas Baekdal
“Whenever a media company contacts me about what they should do to embrace the connected world, the first thing I always look at is what they do today. If their product is format-first, content second, with pictures being separated from the articles, I know that I'm heading into a world of pain. I know that I cannot just tell them what they need to do next, because I'm dealing with a media company full of apologists. They are still impressed by the dancing bear. They still believe that the limitations of print is a visual advantage that makes their product better. Without getting rid if the dancing bear, there is no way that we can move forward. I first need to convince them that the print model is actually whats keeping them back.”
Read the full article

“Kicking off a journalism career during a reporting revolution” - Megan Specia, Storyful
“This post is not about the swan song of a great paper, but about the coming of age of a new form of journalism. In the wake of the stagnation of traditional news has come a boom in new ways of both gathering and consuming our news stories. Fear not young journos, this is the age of social media, and this is your time to shine.”
Read the full article

“Leaving the Guardian, creativity vs mild depression, the quantified self and running.” - Dan Catt
“It’s hard to pin down exactly what ‘done like that’ is, which was in itself a problem. The best I can explain is it’s to do with flow and the phrase ‘to be of the internet, not on the internet’. A lot of the ways of working at Flickr and that scene in general was all about just being (how zen). The work environment was the network, no matter where you went, be it coffee shop or office you were always connected. At Flickr our tools of communication was often Flickr itself, you can see that the same is true of WordPress and Twitter and so on. Working at The Guardian needed to become of the internet not just on the internet.”
Read the full article

“The Dos and Don’ts of Discovering” - Nicola Hughes
Tips on making “Hack Days for all”
Read the full article

“Source” - Erin Kissane et al...
“In the spirit of working in the open, we're previewing Source from our dev server as we wrap up coding and content structuring for the initial official release of the site. Over the next few weeks, you'll begin to see longer-form articles and tutorials from news app developers and data journalists, along with some new editorial features.”
Read the full article

“Valve’s Gabe Newell on the Future of Games, Wearable Computers, Windows 8 and More” - Tricia Duryee, All Things D
“We think touch is short-term. The mouse and keyboard were stable for 25 years, but I think touch will be stable for 10 years. Post-touch will be stable for a really long time, longer than 25 years. Post touch, depending on how sci-fi you want to get, is a couple of different technologies combined together.”
Read the full article

“The MakerBot Mixtape” - Rusty Blazenhoff, Laughing Squid
“The MakerBot Mixtape is a project by MakerBot that creates a 3D printed ‘cassette tape’ (it just looks retro, it’s actually a digital device) to share music.” What. The. Actual. Future.
Marvel that this thing could possibly exist

“l’Étape du Tour – Act I” - Tim Boddy
“Over the next 10 minutes or so I’m pretty devastated, thinking this could very well be end game territory – an awful, black feeling in the pit of my energy-gel-coated gut. Even if I manage to reach the mechanic stop, there’s nothing they could do to fix this I realise; replacing a gear shifter is no quick fix at all. It boils down to this: If I’m going to complete this, I’m going to have to do over half the course with only two gears.”
Read the full account of a day spent (painfully) trying to emulate cycling pros