The morning after I released my own Pinboard extension for Safari 5, I found that Jake Ross had been working on one. While we had some minor feature differences, Jake went the extra step of putting his code on GitHub. I’m a big fan of open sourcing code like this in the early days so that others can learn and quickly roll-out their own modifications to Safari 5.
I forked Jake’s code on GitHub and rolled in the one feature I worked out the he hadn’t, using the current text selection as the bookmark description. Jake has now merged those changes into his own repo and I’ll by moving my own efforts into his project going forward. Jake’s got some good ideas for going beyond the bookmarklet functionality, so I’d like to see what our two heads can come up with.
I’ve got some other extension ideas, so I’ll continue to release them here, but expect some changes to my Add URL to Pinboard project page in the near future as I switch the focus to the combined GitHub effort.
I’m a big fan of the Pinboard bookmarking service. It features the right blend of UI simplicity and features while also not going overboard on the social networking aspects. It also has this bitchin’ feature to tie a URL to a physical location that I’ve wanted to build myself for roughly two years… except Maciej actually did the work instead of dreaming about it.
For a while I merely mirrored my internet curation efforts on Delicious over to my account on the Pinboard service. Recently though, I’ve moved over to Pinboard entirely and when coupled with the recent announcement of extension support in Safari 5, this seemed like a great time to use a that focused energy to create an extension.
If you’re interested, please read more about the Add URL to Pinboard extension, install, and let me know if you have any problems or feature requests.
If you’re the folks at Pinboard and prefer I not do this (or prefer I do it in a different way), just yell at me and let me know what you’d like me to do.
Cliff Mass, a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington, has a great “weather” blog. I put weather in quotes because his blog touches on so many cool subjects. The way he approaches his blog posts is impressive: great sourcing combined with energetic story telling about science.
Today he’s got a post on the potential long-term climate impacts of the Iceland volcano eruption (there’s none). Last Thursday he took a look at the same subject by comparing the current event to past volcano eruptions.
Earlier this month he also examined how TV Weathermen have been covering climate change. His follow-up to reader comments is worth reading as well. In these two posts he’s dinging weathermen for failing to present the uncertainty of the effects of climate change and the long-term picture. Cliff believes most TV weathermen don’t have the background to present what facts there are in an objective manner to a broad audience.
I’d go even further than Cliff: most syndicated print or TV journalists seemingly don’t have the education or tools to present any subject objectively nor do they take the initiative to gather all the facts. Most of the reporting I see on TV seems to be, to steal a weather term, “nowcasting”. There’s little insight presented into current, past, or future trends based on data. What data is presented is poorly sourced or hastily compiled into a chart without any context for what is being compared. A lot of AP-style print reporting feels the same way.
It is possible that Columbia University’s School of Journalism has identified the problem and their solution is to blend the study of computer science with journalism to create data “ninjas”.
What I see is a relatively minor “microlocal” blog, typically about quirky the Northwest weather patterns, covering climate change better than any major news outlet. Not only that, the style used in Cliff’s blog is a recipe for success in effectively reporting on just about any topic you can imagine. We often hear of the failure of old media vs. new media, but we rarely are given gift-wrapped examples where the gaps in what is wrong are so completely obvious.