Michael Donohoe’s excellent Och’s extension for Chrome really shows just how powerful excellent photography can be.

I love a good party. I am in this to make party. But I think we might be getting a bit confused about what it means to launch a product or start a company, and what it means to be on a reality game show.

I am still excited, and I still marvel at what a weird thing we have all built together. I worry about how all of this money seems to corrupt it, turning a festival originally about independent creators into a branded hellscape of VIP-only, RSVP-only partypocalypse.

—Ben Brown on what’s wrong with SxSW

everythinginthesky:

Papermill is an Instapaper client for Android that I’ve been working on for the last few months. It’s now live on Google Play. I’m pretty excited about it and I’m really looking forward to making it even better.

Android needs more like this.

Ryan is one of those rare breeds of ridiculously smart coder with a great sense of design. And he’s just a helluva great guy to boot. What I’m saying is I hate him.

Man. White people are crazy.

I don’t get it. I’ve been doing this for 30-40 years. Why all of a sudden now?

—

Marilyn Hagerty, octogenarian food columnist for the Grand Forks Herald and viral internet celebrity.

On Wednesday, Hagerty wrote a review of Grand Forks’ newest restaurant, a “long-awaited” Olive Garden. Her review has had hundreds of thousands of hits in about two days, on a site where stories tend to traffic in the thousands.

Really since the introduction of the iPhone, but particularly after the advent iPad, this concept of “apps as content” has gained a lot of currency, and now every media company in the world feels compelled to be in the business of developing native software as a distribution channel. Despite the press’s tendency to portray this trend as futuristic, I actually think of it as a bit retrograde—particularly since we’ve actually been evolving an incredibly sophisticated medium for content presentation and distribution for over 15 years now: the web.

—

This is but one of many choice quotes from an excellent interview Pixel Union did with the brilliant (not to mention handsome and multi-faceted!) Buzz Andersen.

What’s great about Buzz isn’t just that he’s smart but also incredibly thoughtful, something all too rare in otherwise intelligent people. Love that guy.

Osprey, for tracking real-time Twitter conversations

My pal Bill Couch (who is awesome) has a great writeup on what looks like an incredible and very promising use of Twitter – curated, real-time conversation tracking.

I’ve seen plenty of event-based tweet curation but nothing that’s excited me as much as this. Every newsroom in the country should be begging Bill to open source this before the presidential debates fire up.

jayrosen:

Actually Governor Romney, what you just said is completely incorrect… This is NPR.

NPR has a new ethics handbook, which came out February 24th. Here’s the key part:

We report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are  fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports.

Fair to the truth. Pretty cool. It’s already started to have an effect. This is from an NPR report on Feb. 27th about auto bailouts and the Republican candidates.

NPR REPORTER: Mitt Romney, son of former American Motors CEO George Romney, criticized President Barack Obama’s handling of the bailout.

MITT ROMNEY: Instead of going through the normal managed bankruptcy process, he made sure the bankruptcy process ended up with the UAW taking the lion’s share of the equity in the business.

NPR REPORTER: Actually, the U.S. Treasury got most of GM’s equity. 

Such a simple word: “Actually….” And now it has a chance to become standard practice at NPR.

For more on this, see my post: NPR Tries to Get its Pressthink Right

(Photo by Matthew Reichbach. Creative Commons License.)

This is great

Agenda for the 2012 Facebook Marketing Conference

Sure does seem like Facebook is putting a lot of effort into selling their users

NICAR 12 Brings the Love – and the Code

Dan Sinker on some of the interesting projects presented at NICAR this year. Lots of good looking code in there.