stevenberlinjohnson.com

Outside.in and Feedburner

One of the things we've been wrestling with from the very beginning with outside.in is how to get contributions from blogs or media outlets that only occasionally write about local issues. We're already automatically indexing content from full-time placebloggers -- people who write consistently about their communities -- but it's a trickier issue for bloggers like me who write about their neighborhood (or other neighborhoods) once every ten posts or so. We want to be able to capture those posts, without having to capture the other nine posts that aren't relevant to a location. From the beginning, we've had tools that let people suggest specific stories to outside.in using our suggest story tool and bookmarklet, but today we've just rolled out a very cool alternative: a Feedburner "geotag this post" flare. You can see it working here on my blog already. If a post hasn't been geo-tagged yet, you'll see a little invitation to "geo-tag this post." Once the post has been tagged though, the flare identifies the zip code and gives you a preview of how many posts we have for that zip code at outside.in. And then you can click on the link and go straight to a neighborhood overview page for that zip. (See my Rushkoff post for an example.)
If you're already using Feedburner, it's trivial to add the outside.in flare to your blog. Fred Wilson has a good overview of how you add flare generally, as well as this post that explains why he's excited about the outside.in version.

I meant to post this earlier, but I'm finally getting around to it now: Ghost Map was picked as one of Entertainment Weekly's ten best non-fiction books of the year:

Part 1 of Johnson's historical reconstruction is a minutely detailed account of London's cholera epidemic of 1854 and an eccentric physician's effort to map the outbreak and track its source. Part 2 is a thought-provoking celebration of cities and a meditation on the spread of ideas. The result: a riveting work that makes you give thanks for modern plumbing — and rethink your pessimism about urban sprawl.

Apparently we also made best-of-the-year lists at Library Journal, Playboy, and a few others I think, plus the NY Times Notable Books list. So that's all very cool.

Generally rave review of the "The iPhone User Experience" from Tog, including this very astute criticism:

What is startling is the apparent hard separation of email, SMS, and voicemail.  What I would want is a single list, defaulting to the newest and unread/unheard first.  I don’t care about the medium, and neither should iPhone. Of all the iPhone features, this is the one that seems to have completely missed the target.  It would be like Blackberry having three lists:  One for mail with more than 100 characters, one for mail with fewer than 100 characters, and one for mail sent from more than 3000 miles away.  What sense would that make?  What Apple has done, when you think about it, is just as random in terms of the user. I should be able to read a voicemail in my list, using speech-to-text, highlighting any word that isn’t clear to hear the original.  I should then be able to write an instant message, having it route via Instant Message or SMS, whichever is available and cheapest.  Having then discovered the person is not responding, I should be able to convert the message into an email, recognizing, since I know the person has Yahoo mail, it will be pushed and get his attention. I should not have to visit three different places on my phone every few minutes to see what is happening.

The iPhone

I don't think I have ever felt such an overwhelming desire to own -- no, just to touch -- a product in my life. It really looks extraordinary. All I can think of is this ludicrous quote from the Palm CEO from a few weeks back:

Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company -- including the wildly popular Apple Computer -- could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector. ``We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,'' he said. ``PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.''

Yeah, right.

Added 1/11/07: A few more thoughts after a day or two to reflect. Fred Wilson writes in the comments here: "i think the lack of a keyboard will render it useless to those of us who have gotten used to a treo or a blackberry." That may well be true -- I'm not a Treo or Blackberry user, so I don't really have an issue with this. It does seem to me that the decision to go with a touchscreen was ultimately a smart one, because it buys them so much space and flexibility on the screen, and I can imagine a scenario where all the benefits that come from that would outweigh the slower typing time, at least for some Treo and Blackberry users. It reminds me a little of adjusting to the lower bit-rate audio quality of the iTunes store music selection. I used to go out of my way to buy albums I knew I was going to really love on CD for the better audio, but eventually the speed and convenience of just clicking on a "buy this album" button won out. I haven't bought a CD in at least a year, I'd say.

Of course there's another option here. I was talking to a good friend last night who is a Treo fan, and he was raving about the iPhone, and I brought up Fred's reservations, and he said: "Oh, it's already clear what I'm going to do. I'm going to have a Treo *and* and iPhone."

I think the core point is here that there is just a giant unknown lurking in the multitouch interface. I was thinking yesterday that the last time I felt so overwhelmed with a desire to have a product it was with the Newton -- something about the idea of writing on the screen and having it recognize your handwriting just seemed so insanely magical that I became obsessed with it. And then, well, it actually didn't work very well once I got my hands on it. Clearly Jobs thinks they've made a major breakthrough with this -- that it's the kind of thing that once you've tried it, you can't go back. Philosophically, I'm with him: you put the complexity on the screen, and make the input device as simple as possible. But the proof is in the touching.

Powells.com Interview

Ghost Map is currently the #1 book on Powells.com, in large part because they're running a very long interview with me that manages to cover pretty much my entire career and most of my obsessions. Some of it will be repetitive if you've been following the blog, but it's a great overview of where my head has been at (if that doesn't scare you off)including some material about the novel and cultural change that I haven't written much about:

Flaubert and Dickens take two very different approaches. Dickens invokes a magical side: "And then it turned out that this person was that person's long-lost cousin, who was the heir to..." You can see how the strain of trying to connect all these lives breaks down in the realism.

Flaubert's approach... You get a feeling when you read A Sentimental Education that it's kind of random. The plot is built out of chance encounters on the street that lead you in a not particularly clear direction. In Dickens those chance encounters reveal a secret heritage or a long-lost connection; Sentimental Education is more like a billiard table where you throw the balls out and they go off in different directions. They're both powerful ways of seeing the city in narrative form, just different strategies.

On Leaving Brooklyn

[Note: My friend and neighbor Doug Rushkoff was mugged on Christmas eve here in Park Slope (a fact I learned about, as it happens, via outside.in, which is pretty bizarre in itself.) The event triggered a long thread both at Doug's blog and his wife's blog at Babble about leaving Brooklyn. I thought I'd post my contribution to my blog since it gets to many of the issues we talk about here regularly...]

Doug (and Barbara)

I've said it before in private to Doug, but I'll start by saying it publicly: I'm so sorry you had to go through this ordeal, and you've both done an amazing job trying to work through all these issues in public. It's precisely the kind of conversation that should be happening in venues like this, because it's all about the clash between our public and private lives.

You guys sound like you've already made up your mind to leave, which is completely understandable, and some of the towns you're talking about are wonderful places to live. But I wanted to make the case for Brooklyn, if only because some of the reasons you cite for leaving are central to why we've decided to raise our kids here. If we can't persuade you not to leave, maybe we can persuade you that Brooklyn is not "a crock."

First, the crime issue. There's no question that Park Slope -- and Brooklyn more generally -- is more dangerous than living in a small town upstate, though of course you're likely to be more endangered by the extra driving you'd do in a small town, even one where you can walk to the downtown. But if you're going to live in an economically diverse urban area, you're not likely to find a safer place to live than Park Slope. In one of your posts, you said: "Getting a knife pushed into your ribcage now and again is just part of the price we pay to live in a city, and New York is supposedly one of the safer of the bunch." That's seriously understating the current crime scene here: it is THE safest city in the country, by a fair margin. You cited an NPR report about a recent surge in violent crime in the Northeast, but in fact, once again NY bucked the national trend: crime here was down 5 percent in 2006.

Barbara talked on her blog about feeling much safer in the east village in the 1980s. If you look at the precinct data on the NYPD site, you can see that the there were literally FIVE times as many crimes committed in the east village in 1990 than in the Park Slope precinct in 2005, even though the east village has only about 20% more people in the precinct. (Exact numbers: 5,991 crimes in the east village in 1990 vs. 1,138 in the Slope in 2005.) Interestingly, the east village in 2005 had slightly more crime per capita than Park Slope.

As I said, there are obviously places to live that have lower crime rates. But none of those places has anywhere near the economic and cultural diversity that Brooklyn has (at least in the U.S.) Which leads to the gentrification problem you raised as well. And this is the more complicated point I think -- one we discussed at that Gowanus event last year.

Let's start with the fact that the overall wealth distribution problem in the U.S. is not a problem neighborhoods can solve. There are going to be rich people, for better or for worse, and while I think we both agree that the high-low wage ratios in this country are seriously out of whack, that's a whole other question. The question for us is: given that there are going to be rich people, where should they go? Is it better to have them all leave the cities for the suburbs the way they did in the sixties and seventies and live in gated isolation from everyone else? Or is better for them to live -- they way they do even in the fanciest blocks of the North Slope -- within walking distance of housing projects in two directions, and pressed up against a public park that is shared by an amazingly diverse population from every major ethnic/religious/economic group imaginable. Yes, when movie stars and famous writers and people like you and me move into the neighborhood, prices go up and some folks get squeezed out. That's not reason to give up on figuring out ways to preserve economic diversity in city neighborhoods. But I'd rather have the movie stars and bankers taking their kids to the 9th street playground on a summer weekend than having them play in their private backyard pool in Westchester.

And this is why I think Brooklyn is such an extraordinary place right now. Take a walk from the North Slope across Grand Army, then down Eastern Parkway. Where else in the country can you go from the houses of world-famous authors and movie stars to Hasidic Jews and working-class African-Americans all in the space of about twenty blocks? And all with the lowest crime rate of any big city in the country.

Yes, I suppose if the current trends continue it could all look like the Upper East Side in thirty years. But that's not what it looks like now, by any measure.

Placeblogger Launches

Lisa Williams launched her excellent Placeblogger service yesterday, backed by two of my favorite writers on hyperlocal/citizen journalism issues: Jay Rosen and Dan Gillmor. It's another endorsement of the hyperlocal model, and it complements what we're up to at outside.in very nicely: Placeblogger is more focused on the bloggers themselves, while we're more concerned with the local information, whether it comes from bloggers or some other source. Congrats, Lisa!