Staying Informed Without Drowning in Data By JENNA WORTHAM

December 18, 2008
Basics
Staying Informed Without Drowning in Data By JENNA WORTHAM

I'M a reporter and I write about the Internet. I write about its culture, its latest developments and the people and companies involved. You may think this means I spend a lot of time watching videos of advice-dispensing ninjas and funny photographs of cats but that, sadly, is not the case.

What I do spend a lot of time doing is scouring the Internet for information and news. This is great because the Internet makes this easier than ever. This is also a huge pain because the Internet makes this easier than ever. There's a never-ending sea of news sources, and if I just plunge in headfirst, I'll probably get overwhelmed in minutes. And yet to be ahead of the news, I can't just read the big, mainstream publications — I have to dig deeper and find more specialized sites and blogs that are often closer to the action.

The key is to manage the information overflow. This can be done through sites and services that filter and curate the online news-scape into something I can actually digest. With a little time spent exploring and tailoring these sites, you too can get better, deeper information on subjects you care about — and it won't take you days to sort through it all.

With millions of Web sites and blogs, there's no shortage of news, so some filtering is required. Social news sites are one place to begin the culling. They rely on the wisdom of the crowds to determine which headlines are newsworthy by seeing which headlines are being read most. The community of users at sites like Digg, Reddit, Propeller and Delicious rank stories in order of importance, creating a list of stories you can refer to at will.

But why skim through the top articles on just one social news site when you can track what's bubbling up across the majority of those sites? NewzNozzl pulls top news stories from the above-mentioned social bookmarking sites as well as Mixx, Propeller and Newsvine to create a prefiltered flow of hot news items. Like Digg and its social bookmarking brethren, NewzNozzl welcomes interested parties to join the service to vote and share stories within the site.

There are pitfalls to relying on a vast community of users. They may prefer to popularize more sensational news headlines like "Former Miss America Pops Out Her Tooth" and "The 6 Deadliest Creatures (That Can Fit in Your Shoe)." If that isn't quite what you're looking for, try sites like Addictomatic, Yahoo Buzz or BuzzTracker. These sites eschew the system of ranking user-submitted stories by popular votes and instead, rely on stories collected from a preapproved list of publishers.

BuzzTracker, for example, follows more than 100,000 different news sources as diverse as Boing Boing and The Washington Post, and presents its daily list of offerings in an accessible layout. Addictomatic delivers a compact snapshot of the news from a host of sources. For example, a quick search for the comedian Tina Fey returns top Google News searches, YouTube videos and Flickr photos compiled onto a single page.

If you're feeling particularly adventurous, hop over to one of my personal favorites, BuzzFeed, a site that employs both paid staff and volunteers to create a user-generated hot list of newsworthy items. Browsing the site can be a little risky, as submissions run the gamut from breaking political news to stills from celebrity sex tapes, but BuzzFeed has rewarded me with gems like the Lasagna Cat (vintage Garfield comic strips re-enacted as live-action Web shorts) and newly born Internet memes (like Disaster Girl).

For a more tailored approach, RSS subscribers like Google Reader, FeedDemon and Bloglines have long offered ways to collect content from blogs and news sites and put them into a simple combined list of stories that you can check in on periodically. But there's a major pitfall to using RSS feeds: Given the vast smorgasbord of news feeds at your disposal, it's easy to overindulge on news subscriptions. Too many feeds can cause your number of subscriptions to become bloated and unmanageable. (At last glance, my RSS reader has more than 30,000 unread items from 500 different feeds, sorted into a dozen or so different folders.)

Here's where RSS tools can come in handy. RSS filters like ReadBurner and RSSMeme are applications that pick out the most popular links from RSS aggregating sites like Google Reader. They work similarly to Digg, but rather than tally the popularity of an article by votes, they generate lists based on the number of times a particular article has been shared across certain RSS subscribers.

The content streaming down these sites throughout the day tends to be a hodgepodge of random articles and breaking news. Recently, sprinkled in among reports of President Bush's near miss with a pair of size 10 shoes were the equally eye-grabbing headlines "Ms Pacman Tattoo" and "Video Game Design Between 1990-2008." Guaranteed procrastination aids, perhaps, but entertaining nonetheless. And the mixed bag of headlines doubles as a fascinating overview of the news climate — a cross-section of what's capturing the interest of hundreds of Web surfers at any given moment.

LinkRiver is another spin on an RSS filter, but this particular service concentrates your content and bookmarks from a variety of RSS subscriptions — Google Reader, Delicious, Yahoo! Bookmarks — into a single, steady stream of links. More interestingly, LinkRiver lets you read what other people are reading. And not just a faceless community of users, either — LinkRiver lets you browse the pooled content of its members or home in on specific contributors, which include tech bloggers like Robert Scoble; entrepreneurs like Evan Williams, founder of the microblogging platform Twitter; and Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape.

Alternatively, you can isolate a handful of your own RSS feeds and transform that data into a format that resembles a newspaper. Tabbloid, created by Hewlett-Packard, rounds up as few or as many news feeds as you like and cobbles them together into a makeshift newsletter or tabloid format, then delivers it in PDF format via e-mail at the desired frequency, either daily or weekly. Feedbooks, an e-Book platform, also offers a version of a digitized newsstand that can be delivered to a laptop or mobile device not only in PDF but also in formats compatible with a Cybook or a Sony Reader.

Finally, don't fear Twitter. Don't worry about learning how to friend and follow on the service — you can transform Twitter into a useful and relatively unobtrusive news ticker. Start by downloading a desktop application like Twirl and subscribing to various news feeds — The New York Times, CNN, The Huffington Post, National Public Radio, to name a few.

Or seek out companies you could use updates on — a recent update on JetBlue, for example, read "Did you know we can fit 5 surfboards in our E-190 aircraft? Orlando to San Jose, Costa Rica, starts March 26." A recent tweet from Starbucks's headquarters in Seattle offered information on drink ingredients and holiday store hours.

But before you get too Twitter-happy, a word of caution: Anyone can create a Twitter account with no identity verification, so take some accounts — like certain celebrity streams — with a big grain of salt. You can often check the veracity with a blog post on a company Web site confirming its existence. After all, if you're going to limit the information you get online, you're going to want to make sure the information you get is right.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/technology/personaltech/18basics.html?sq=Drowning%20in%20Data&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print

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David Pogue’s Gadget List of 2008

August 7, 2008, 4:22 pm
David Pogue’s Gadget List of 2008

Two years ago, totally strapped for a column idea, I resorted to raiding my own e-mail Inbox. There I found a reader request:

“I would love to see a feature where you list what you personally use. Call it Pogue’s List or something. It would be great to see what someone as plugged in as you uses personally. Everything tech — watch, laptop, TV, car, digital camera, film camera, like that.”

What’s really surprising to me is how many readers have written to request an update of that list, especially lately.

Actually, the time is probably right. This year alone, I’ve bought several of the products that I reviewed in my column. So here it is: Pogue’s List 2008.

* Camera. When the picture counts, I grab our Nikon D80 and its Amazing 11X Image-Stabilized Lens (Nikon’s 18-200mm zoomer, which cost almost as much as the camera). It’s a fast, loaded, prosumer digital S.L.R. that takes jaw-droppingly beautiful pictures. (I sold my old D50 to my sister.)

But the Nikon is big and bulky, so my wife carries a Canon SD700 IS shirt-pocket camera; it’s also a rockin’ machine. It has image stabilization, it’s fast (processing and focusing), it takes really great movies and the pictures are superb for a little cam. Unfortunately, its autofocus just died this week. So I’m pretty sure I’m going to replace it with the Canon SD890 (5X optical zoom–unheard-of in pocket cams) or the SD950 (which has a 0.6-inch sensor, much larger and therefore better than the usual 0.3-inch or 0.4-inch sensor in pocket cams).

* Camcorder. No question here: Canon HV30. It’s a hi-def tape camcorder that doesn’t kid around with image quality; when they say high definition, they mean it. And it’s got everything: top-loading tape door, mike jack, headphone jack.

To me, all those non-tape camcorders (hard drives, DVDs, memory cards, etc.) have two huge drawbacks. First, all of them–ALL of them–compromise image quality, even the ones that claim to be hi-def, because they have to compress the image to fit the limited storage.

Second, I don’t understand where people think they’re going to store all their movies. Once the hard drive or memory card gets full, you have to empty it onto your computer’s hard drive. And then what?

I have a drawer containing 200 MiniDV tapes, documenting the lives of our three kids. I’d need NINE 300-gig hard drives to store all that. And what are you going to do when the drive dies?

* Cellphone. I occasionally grumble about Verizon, but never about its network; the signal stands head and shoulders above the other companies.

I’ve been a longtime fan of LG’s Verizon phones. When my 8100 died, I treated myself to the 8700, a silver, brushed-metal, superthin flip phone; it was the best-looking phone in the store.

As I wrote last October: “The sound quality amazing. The screen is brilliant. And I took some sample shots with the 2-megapixel camera and found it even better than my own LG.”

Unfortunately, “the darned thing is so thin and slick, it’s hard to hold; a rigid thin slab is not actually very easy to hold in your round, fleshy palm.” Oh, and this phone erased the magnetic strip on two hotel-room key cards before I got smart and started keeping them in different pockets.

I concluded: “If I had to it over again, I would not have bought this expensive, classy, impractical two-seater roadster. I’d have bought the Toyota Camry that my wife did: the LG8300. It’s a nearly perfect cellphone.”

(Why don’t I own an iPhone? Because AT&T has feeble coverage where I live, and because I’m on a two-year Verizon family plan.)

* Computer. I live on a MacBook Air. In the five months I’ve owned it, I’ve missed having the built-in DVD drive once; missed having FireWire about six times; missed the speed of a more serious machine about 20 times.

But I still consider those small sacrifices for the pleasure I get out of this machine the rest of the time. I use it like a glorified Palm Pilot. You pick it up with one hand. It turns on instantaneously. I’ve even read through e-mail while standing in the X-ray line at the airport.

I also just bought a Dell Inspiron 530s (total, delivered and taxed: $497). It’s a tiny little box that you can lay horizontally under your monitor, which is exactly how I have it. My favorite feature is the front panel: memory-card slots, USB, audio in, headphones, and so on. I’m constantly plugging and unplugging stuff, so it makes total sense.

I really shouldn’t reward Dell with any more business, considering how furious I am to this day about the design of my previous machine, a Dell Dimension 4550 tower. It had front-panel USB jacks, too, but they were hidden behind a door that was hinged at the top and only opened about two inches. You had to crawl on the floor with a flashlight every time wanted to plug something in. I sure hope that designer has found some other career.

* Mobile Internet. This is the greatest splurge, and the greatest convenience, in my entire portfolio: a Sierra Compass 597 cellular modem from Sprint. It’s a tiny, 2.5-inch stick of plastic that slides into the MacBook Air’s USB slot and gets me online at impressively high speeds.

The service costs $60 a month, which I find slightly outrageous–it’s clearly designed to gouge corporate drones on expense accounts.

But I have to tell you, in my travels, I’ve seen every kind of Wi-Fi hot spot under the sun. And Sprint’s cellular Internet beats the nation’s network of increasingly flaky hot spots any day of the week; in many a hotel room, it’s turned out to be much faster than Wi-Fi. Not to mention that it gets me online anywhere, even in the 99.9 percent of America where there is no Wi-Fi signal.

I’ve never found a dead spot, and the software is much slicker (and requires less time to connect) than the equivalent modems from Verizon.

* Movies. I bought the Vudu box this year ($300). Its hard drive contains the first 30 seconds of 5,000 movies. When you pick one to watch, it starts playing immediately–and the next section of movie downloads in the background. Great quality, huge selection, elegant software.

The best part: no monthly fees. Movies cost $2 to $4 to rent, or $15 to $20 to buy, meaning that they stay on your Vudu hard drive forever. So when life gets busy, I don’t pay anything.

The service keeps improving since I reviewed this thing last September. More hi-def movies, more TV shows, better features.

I canceled my HBO and Showtime subscriptions–something like $240 a year–which made very little economic sense for us. If I’m lucky, I have time for two or three movies in a month, so it’s much more economical to pay as I go.

* Car. Toyota Prius. Wow, what a great car. In April, I tried to buy a second Prius–and was told there’s a 10-month wait. Thanks a lot, gas crisis.

* TiVo. I bit the bullet and bought the Tivo Series 3, the hi-def masterpiece machine (which has, grrr, already been discontinued). Runs like a Swiss watch, has never let us down. Still the best DVR software and features on the planet. Subscribes to my favorite Web videos. When I’m away, I can program it from across the Internet.

Looking over this year’s Pogue List, I can see that, in my middle age, I’ve gotten fancier in my tastes. A few years ago, you wouldn’t have caught me dead with that $60-a-month cellular modem.

But life is short, travel is hard. And at its best, technology makes the most of both.

Ben Brantley's Review of Company/ Saw it on Great Performances last night on PBS

November 30, 2006
THEATER REVIEW 'COMPANY'
A Revival Whose Surface of Tundra Conceals a Volcano
By BEN BRANTLEY
Fire flickers, dangerous and beckoning, beneath the frost of John Doyle’s elegant, unexpectedly stirring revival of “Company,” which opened last night at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. This visually severe, aurally lush reinvention of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s era-defining musical of marriage and its discontents from 1970 is the chicest-looking production on Broadway.
One glance at the symmetry, the starkness, the midnight-black palette that dominates the stage, and you feel like putting on a sweater. It’s surely no coincidence that the clear modules that serve as furniture resemble ice cubes. What could be more appropriate for a musical with a passive, willfully unengaged leading man (wearing black Armani, natch), who is almost never seen without a defensive drink in his hand?
But if Bobby the bachelor, embodied with riveting understatement by Raúl Esparza, at first comes across as a man of ice, it becomes apparent that he is in a steady state of thaw. Given the subliminal intensity that hums through Mr. Esparza’s deadpan presence, you sense that flood warnings should probably be posted.
Mr. Doyle is the inspired British director who last year gave New York the most unsettling, emotionally concentrated production on record of another Sondheim musical, the macabre “Sweeney Todd.” In that show, for which Mr. Doyle won a Tony Award, the cast members doubled as musicians, a device repeated in this “Company.”
This “I-am-my-own-orchestra” approach probably shouldn’t be used ad infinitum. Mr. Doyle applied the same stratagem to Jerry Herman’s “Mack and Mabel” in London last summer to underwhelming effect.
But there’s something about Mr. Sondheim that allows Mr. Doyle to find a new clarity of feeling through melding musicians and performers. It is, after all, the person who controls the music in a Sondheim production — in which there is usually a sophistication gap between the songs and the relatively pedestrian book — who has the best chance of finding the show’s elusive but resonantly human heart.
Mr. Doyle’s “Company,” first staged at the Cincinnati Playhouse earlier this year, isn’t the unconditional triumph that his “Sweeney Todd” was, partly because the show itself is less of a fully integrated piece and partly because much of the acting is weaker. Only a few of the 14 ensemble members — playing the couples who are permanent fixtures in Bobby’s life and his strictly temporary girlfriends — seem at ease dispensing Mr. Furth’s brittle, uptown, shrink-shrunk dialogue.
But they all blossom as musicians and singers of wit and substance. As soloists they’re more than adequate, but it’s their work as a team that sounds new depths in “Company” in ways that get under your skin without your knowing it.
Mr. Doyle and his invaluable music supervisor and orchestrator, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, have shaped “Company” into a sort of oratorio for the church of the lonely. The choral passage that opens the show — a litany of variations on Robert (a k a “Bobby, baby”), the name of the central character, about to celebrate his 35th birthday — is performed in near darkness a cappella, sounding like liturgical chant.
The effect is not flippant. The voices — belonging to “those good and crazy people, my married friends”— seem to echo through Bobby’s head like elements of some beautiful but arcane ritual that he can observe only from a distance. Watching is what Bobby does. His outsider’s status is confirmed with pointed eloquence when it registers that Bobby is the only person onstage who isn’t playing an instrument.
The production gets astonishingly diverse theme- and character-defining mileage out of this discrepancy. Bobby’s failure to pick up an instrument and join the band becomes a natural-born metaphor for his refusal to engage with others. Yes, he sings soulfully. But as the other cast members circle the lone Mr. Esparza, playing their instruments, it is clear they possess talents for connecting that Bobby lacks, fears and longs for.
Watching the couples carp and bicker in black-out vignettes — practicing karate, experimenting with pot, visiting a discothèque — you may wonder why Bobby would ever be envious of them (which has always been a problem with “Company”). It’s when they make music together that you understand.
Mr. Doyle’s staging repeatedly and ingeniously echoes this isolating difference. Mr. Esparza is often found climbing onto the top of a Steinway or one of those transparent cubes as others crowd him. Sometimes he stands at a skeptical, uneasy remove as different groups serenade him: the married men with the haunting “Sorry-Grateful”; three girlfriends, all playing saxophones as if they were assault weapons, in a scintillating version of “You Could Drive a Person Crazy.”
The seamlessness of these motifs lends a fresh coherence to “Company,” which was originally structured as a cabaret of urban neurosis. Stand-alone crowd pleasers like “Getting Married Today” (performed by a too-grounded-seeming Heather Laws as the skittish Amy) and “Another Hundred People” (warmly sung by Angel Desai) now blend into a general musical fabric of anxiety in search of reassurance.
Even the fabled character number, “The Ladies Who Lunch,” sung by the worldly, much-married Joanne (a fierce Barbara Walsh), feels less like a show-stopping appendage than it usually does. Instead, building to a climactic repeated note that suggests what Edvard Munch’s silent scream might sound like, it becomes the perfect preface to Bobby’s breakthrough breakdown at the end of the show.
If Ms. Walsh doesn’t erase the memory of Elaine Stritch, who created (and will probably always own) the part, she handles her vodka-stinger-flavored dialogue with a vintage Manhattan suaveness, which is more than can be said for many of the others.
Bruce Sabath, though, is touching and credible as Joanne’s patient husband. And Elizabeth Stanley is absolutely delicious as April, the ditzy airline stewardess, who sings “Barcelona” (the best one-night-stand song in musicals).
The sense that ambivalence and confusion are not unique to Bobby is enhanced by the cold, austere glitter of David Gallo’s set and Thomas C. Hase’s superb lighting. But it’s Mr. Esparza who is the top expert on ambivalence here, giving “Company” the most compelling center it has probably ever had. In previous productions, Bobby has registered principally as a wistful window onto other lives.
But Mr. Esparza is anything but a cipher. Though his Bobby can seem as laconic and drolly unresponsive as Bob Newhart, you are always aware that this is a man in pain. As anyone who saw him in “Cabaret” or “The Normal Heart” knows, Mr. Esparza is generally a pyrotechnic actor, sending sparks and smoke all over the place.
In keeping the lid on such volcanic energy, he makes Bobby’s climactic explosion inevitable. Though he sings beautifully throughout — in ways that define his character’s solipsism — he brings transporting ecstasy to the agony of the concluding number, in which Bobby finally joins the band of human life.
For much of Mr. Sondheim’s career, directors have approached his work as if “keep your distance” were woven into the copyright. More recently, a new generation of artists have heard an altogether different directive: “Come closer.” Mr. Doyle and Mr. Esparza make it clear that there are infinite rewards to be had in accepting that challenge.
COMPANY
A Musical Comedy
Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; book by George Furth; directed by John Doyle; musical staging by Mr. Doyle; musical supervision and orchestrations by Mary-Mitchell Campbell; sets by David Gallo; costumes by Ann Hould-Ward; lighting by Thomas C. Hase; sound by Andrew Keister; hair and wig design by David Lawrence; make-up design by Angelina Avallone; associate director, Adam John Hunter; production stage manager, Gary Mickelson; resident music supervisor, Lynne Shankel; general manager, Richard Frankel Productions and Jo Porter; production manager, Juniper Street Productions, Inc. Presented by Marc Routh, Richard Frankel, Tom Viertel, Steven Baruch, Ambassador Theater Group, Tulchin/Bartner Productions, Darren Bagert and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. At the Ethel Barrymore Theater, 243 West 47th Street, (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.
WITH: Raúl Esparza (Robert), Keith Buterbaugh (Harry), Matt Castle (Peter), Robert Cunningham (Paul), Angel Desai (Marta), Kelly Jeanne Grant (Kathy), Kristin Huffman (Sarah), Amy Justman (Susan), Heather Laws (Amy), Leenya Rideout (Jenny), Fred Rose (David), Bruce Sabath (Larry), Elizabeth Stanley (April) and Barbara Walsh (Joanne).
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