Bad Nomenclature - Latest Comments

Re: TryChooser

pbiggar — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:03:15 -0000

Those are great suggestions. I'm only actively working on things that make my life easier, but I'd happily take code to do these things. I'd be delighted if you'd file these issues on github (and optionally implement them :))!

- [All, None, Some] is a great idea
- Not pushing: volkmar made a pull request for this, which needs a tiny change (being called "pretend' instead of "dry-run"). See https://github.com/pbiggar/try...
- this is really easy to fix. I might do that if nobody beats me to it. (If you were interested in doing this, it would be a nice easy first step).

Re: TryChooser

Felipe Gomes — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 16:46:12 -0000

That is a great extension. A few suggestions to make it better:
- I would change the two-step process when you want "some" to something requiring 1 choice. E.g.:
"Unit tests?" [All, None, Some]
or [Yes, No, Some] if you want to keep y/n

- I'd love an option where it just created the cset but doesn't actually push.. I want to be able to run hg outgoing and keep the cset around for future uses

- try: -a is deprecated and doesn't run the full suite anymore.. see this on trybuilder, the correct syntax now for everything is try: -b do -p all -u all -t all

Re: TryChooser

pbiggar — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:15:59 -0000

If you don't have mq enabled, it will just print the trychooser line.

We could make it so that it pushes even if mq is not enabled, with a similar UI. I'd be delighted to incorporate a patch for that :)

Re: TryChooser

Smaug — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 15:53:27 -0000

Does the extension require using mq?

Re: CC-lists and openness

Karl — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 00:09:00 -0000

In W3C reality, it is called the *-archive mailing-list. It is very practical. It helps also with communications on the outside, when you want to keep a Web record with a permanent URI for future references about a mail you just sent.

you could have indeed thematic archives, or a a general archive mailing-list, I would recommend two at least, one which is "private" and related to the social contract of the group and one which is open to the public when it is about public communications.

Re: CC-lists and openness

SteveFink — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:38:50 -0000

pbiggar++

I like it. Well, ok, I like the pbiggar-public incarnation of the idea.

The problem with pbiggar at mozilla.com being public is that you are deciding on the sender's behalf that the message should be public. Which isn't nice. At all. Especially for people who haven't emailed you before and aren't aware yet.

One concern would be requiring correspondents to keep track of one more email address for you. That's unnecessary for pbiggar-public at mozilla.com or pbiggar+public at mozilla.com or (I think I prefer this) pbiggar at public.mozilla.com. But a lot of people use other email addresses. I have both sfink at mozilla.com and sphink at gmail.com, for example, and I use both for different segments of my Mozilla-related mail. I also use Thunderbird as a mail filter on my gmail account (it sorta works), so I *could* set it up to work (well, public.gmail.com won't), but I think this would need a common mechanism to work.

Just handling mozilla.com addresses would be enough for this to be useful, I think. There could be a fallback CC for other addresses.

One missing piece -- if I send to pbiggar-public, which CC list does it go to? Or more to the point, if I send to bz-public or damons-public, where does it go? Is there a mapping of user -> set of CC lists?

It might be useful to also post initial thread subject lines to the relevant IRC channel as well. Or a CC version of the IRC channel.

And we'd have to establish conventions about when it's ok for a third-party observer to start participating in the conversation -- read-only access to these sorts of conversations is one thing, but if I wouldn't use it if people felt free to start chipping in and starting flamewars on them.

I'd be ok with a policy where you never interject into someone else's conversation, but you're always free to start a new thread quoting anything in that conversation.

(Side note: I used " at " everywhere in this post in place of the at-sign not for spam protection, but because the commenting software is doing something truly horrible and evil where it tries to make special links or something when it sees an at sign. And they're hard to get rid of. Even if you're nowhere near, the magic-at handler seems to take control of the enter key. Kill kill die die die.)

Re: Summary of Contributor Engagement threads on dev-planning

Max Kanat-Alexander — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 22:03:29 -0000

Cool! You might also be interested in the community research I did for the Bugzilla Project:

http://www.codesimplicity.com/...

-Max

Re: Summary of Contributor Engagement threads on dev-planning

Mitch — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 12:37:03 -0000

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

beckyblanton — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 21:06:21 -0000

You say: "Art/science is a false dichotomy, as is left-/right-brained. To think that journalism can only come from inside to box is ludicrous. People have many skills besides the one in which they are trained, and you certainly believe this or you wouldn't suggest that journalists, whose primary skill is not innovation, can innovate. Please don't believe that anyone can think themselves out of this wasteland. It requires not only innovation and the right creative force (for want of a better term), but also rapid iteration, and lots of different companies trying. "

You really have been living under a rock.

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

pbiggar — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 20:59:00 -0000

I did apologize, on the mailing list that the we and the journalists used to communicate. Nathan also did that when he announced that we shut down. This piece wasn't about apology, it was about the lessons to be gotten from it.

Paying writers would have changed the dynamic of our relationship. We weren't buying content, and we weren't hiring journalists. We were providing a service to them, and aiming to take a cut of their profits online as our income.

We didn't just invent this idea. We spoke to dozens of journalists, and the product was based entirely on what they told us. We spoke to some people at Knight (not in an official capacity); I don't want to put words in their mouths, but they obviously didn't tell us we were doing the wrong thing or we would have changed what we were doing.

Our intent was plain. We wanted to make a successful company making a successful product. We could only have done that through making successful journalists. Our funders we mentioned in this piece several times: YCombinator. I'm sure they'd be delighted to invest in real journalists, and the application process is open for a few more days I believe. YCombinator's motto is 'make something people want', and that's what we were doing.

I'm afraid your final paragraph simply makes no sense. Art/science is a false dichotomy, as is left-/right-brained. To think that journalism can only come from inside to box is ludicrous. People have many skills besides the one in which they are trained, and you certainly believe this or you wouldn't suggest that journalists, whose primary skill is not innovation, can innovate. Please don't believe that anyone can think themselves out of this wasteland. It requires not only innovation and the right creative force (for want of a better term), but also rapid iteration, and lots of different companies trying.

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

pbiggar — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 20:34:29 -0000

A good read, though I disagree in many places. I've responded on Christopher's blog.

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

pbiggar — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 20:33:42 -0000

I don't think the platform is developed enough to be helpful to others. As I said in the piece, better to go with WordPress. I'm a big fan of open source, but I don't think open sourcing this would be helpful to anyone.

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

beckyblanton — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:44:49 -0000

Reread your post. You seem totally confused about why journalists were opposed to so much you were doing. You didn't deliver on promises, you said you wasted their content. NO WHERE in this entire blog have you recognized, apologized to or addressed the hard work the journalists put in. You're saying one thing, doing another. You're not walking the talk. Your intent "we were not trying to take advantage of anyone," isn't what matters. What you actually did - "waste content, not deliver" is what people remember. You say you wanted to "make successes of journalists," yet you didn't want to do any promotion, found promotion "a huge time suck" and talk about finding a way to get the most out of people for YOUR advantage, not theirs. For a site that was supposedly all about journalists, this is all about you. My suggestion is you write another blog, NAME EVERY ONE who contributed a piece of writing to Newstilt, LINK to that site, THANK EVERYONE profusely and seriously READ what they wrote and make a comment about it. You have yet to appreciate what anyone has done. No wonder they think you're another Demand Media - or worse. How can you afford to hire mentors, but not pay writers?!

It's like you're not even thinking through what you're thinking about! Did you even ask anyone from Poynter, or Knight-Ridder, or ANY organization to critique your plan and give you feedback before you launched this?

I'm not convinced of your intent and neither is anyone else. We all want to know who funded this ill-conceived venture because he's obviously got more money than God and is not worried about throwing it away. The class of 19 journalists (including Pulitzer winners) from Poynter's entrepreneurial seminar last August would love to get funding for any of our serious, well-thought out projects and business plans whose due diligence has been done, and that are backed by long-term, award winning, dedicated passionate journalists who ARE passionate about making a difference in the world, and not just in our bank accounts.

Please stick to coding. Journalism is an art, not a science. It requires right-brain thinkers to succeed. Left-brained bean counters are a dime a dozen, but innovation, the ability to spot trends, understand readers, craft stories etc. is something only a true journalist can do. The reason journalism is an untapped wasteland is because the right creative force (like those in my class at Poynter) just haven't hit the radar yet. It's coming though.

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

pbiggar — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:19:33 -0000

Of course we cared for journalists - they were our customers. Everything we did was for them. Certainly we got it wrong, but we were not trying to take advantage of anyone. We were in it because we had started a company to make a related product, and we listened to people's problems.

We would only have been successful by making successes of journalists. To be able to run NewsTilt successfully, at least 20 journalists would have to be making a full living from it. To be able to get rich, we would have needed at least 1000 customers making a living. That's not exactly taking advantage.

The "hungry inexperienced journalists" was an idea, and not one fully fleshed out. Perhaps it would not have been in their best interests, in which case we would have changed what we did. Change is what young companies do ("pivot" in the startup vernacular) so if we found they lacked mentorship we would have solved that, perhaps by hiring mentors.

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

yvesman — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 11:49:55 -0000

Thank you for this fantastic list. You probably know of or have heard of the books by the guys who made Rails. Getting Real and ReWork. A lot of what you said resonates with those books.

Stay positive and I look forward to your next venture.

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

EastLondonLines — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 03:53:25 -0000

You biggest flaw was not actually understanding who your customers were. The customers were never the journalists. Getting it right for them was certainly important but they are actually part of your work force. Your customers are your audience. If you didn't start off by working out who you were talking to you didn't stand a chance.

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

beckyblanton — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 19:06:51 -0000

I'm a journalist and after reading the way you treated the journalists on this project - I can't tell you how truly glad I am you failed so miserably. You can't see how many truly horrid, clueless mistakes you made obviously or you would never have written this blog. You respected no one. You didn't appreciate what you had. You didn't worry at all obviously about what was in it for the journalists. You admit you didn't care about journalism to begin with - so what were you in it for? Sounds like you wanted a get rich quick scheme and thought it would be so easy. We get enough disrespect and shit from the existing media companies and sure don't need someone else expecting us to use our years of hard won writing skills to make your fortunes. If you'd attracted "hungry inexperienced journalists you would have (1) burned them out (2) not attracted anyone and even turned readers away because they ARE young and inexperienced and can't write, and you had NO F'ing clue how to work with them. Not only that, you couldn't offer them feedback or mentoring since you really don't care about journalism so you didn't care about them (3) All you would have done was prolong the failure. People aren't slaves. You obviously don't respect journalists or the process and hard work it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur or a newsman. You don't even understand how bad this whole post makes you look. My prediction? You'll never succeed as an entrepreneur building a journalism base from scratch up. You don't have the skills. Good thing you have a job being someone else's monkey.

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

Grassroots — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 16:06:59 -0000

really nice post, thanks we are using it to learn how to do our new project visionOntv

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

pbiggar — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 15:45:43 -0000

> It's that kind of facepalm-inducing hubris that doomed your venture from the start. And in spite of squandering your investors' money, you apparently you haven't learned a thing.

Try to tone down the hyperbole if you wish to be taken seriously.

> Let's put your logic to use: Let's have journalists write the next big AJAX library.

If you apply your analogy to our situation, we come to a place where due to bad writing on behalf of journalists, we put computer programmers to the task. Which is not what we did.

> If you think journalists are what's killing journalism, you're even more poorly informed and equipped than you've already demonstrated.

Journalism is neither being killed nor saved by journalists. It's being killed by its revenue models vanishing. Advertising was killed by craigslist, customers refuse to pay for content (and could not pay enough to prop up the current news institutions), and news competes with lots of other content for people's attention and money.

Journalists have absolutely no idea how to save it, and neither does anyone else. Having spent my entire time at NewsLabs talking to journalists, I have seen no evidence that their salvation will come from inside. In fact, only a small minority really seem to understand their problems, with the majority trying to cling to their old business models, blaming craiglist and google for their woes.

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

Reaperducer — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 13:35:45 -0000

It's that kind of facepalm-inducing hubris that doomed your venture from the start. And in spite of squandering your investors' money, you apparently you haven't learned a thing.

Let's put your logic to use: Let's have journalists write the next big AJAX library. After all, they live outside the existing dot-com bubble, so they must know what's best, right? You have no idea the kinds of "transformational changes" an industry you've never worked in needs.

If you think journalists are what's killing journalism, you're even more poorly informed and equipped than you've already demonstrated.

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

smcnally — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 12:31:43 -0000

Understood -

But how many more "5-minute" things can you get done when you start from a platform that's already handling the nuts and bolts effectively?

There's plenty of game left to make the nuts & bolts work, look and feel the way you want them to -

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

smcnally — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 11:17:05 -0000

Yes - I've been working with Forbes since the acquisition.

And, true, not all of our journalists moved with us. True/Slant was their site, they wrote about their own topics (with guidance as requested and needed). So there were many topics - many slants - not all of which made sense for Forbes' narrower needs.

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

pbiggar — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 10:59:55 -0000

> That's less generous as it's laying blame on others rather than on your communication with and management of those others. This is something "geeks," and others, can often miss.

Looking at it now, I can see why it sounds like we're blaming the journalists, but that was not the intent. It was our fault for getting the wrong kind of people. I think True/Slant did much better in the regard.

> With regard to True/Slant (where I was CTO) "shutting down under unfavorable circumstances," we were acquired by Forbes.

As I understand it, Forbes acquired it and shut it down. You mention several people have done well out of it, but I recall 265 journalists, which I presume is a lot more than 'several'. I don't know why it sold, but shutting down the product is clearly "unfavourable circumstances". I presume that after taking a large amount of VC, it wasn't purely a talent acquisition. I could be wrong of course, and I'm sure you can't speak of the terms in public, so it's difficult to figure out whether it's closing was positive overall.

What are you doing next? Are you at Forbes?

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

smcnally — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 10:32:00 -0000

Thanks for all the detail, Paul. It's generous to share it all like this.

You and I touched on some of these same things on Hacker News and Reddit.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1260476

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bwrew/iama_founder_of_newstilt_a_y_combinator_startup/c0oza6h?context=3

Building vs "buying" was a tough decision that forced a lot of others, I'm sure. Even if not Wordpress, there are other CMS frameworks out there that likely could have saved you significant time and allowed you to focus resources elsewhere.

I'm surprised you're not catching more heat for this:

"I think it’s important to say that we really failed because of a lack of content. But that was a symptom of having journalists who just didn’t want to succeed enough. "

That's less generous as it's laying blame on others rather than on your communication with and management of those others. This is something "geeks," and others, can often miss.

With regard to True/Slant (where I was CTO) "shutting down under unfavorable circumstances," we were acquired by Forbes. The platform we built for trueslant.com is now running blogs.forbes.com. We're rebuilding the rest of the forbes.com network with much of the same DNA. Our founder now owns content and product across Forbes digital, print and video. Several True/Slant Contributors are working with us. Several others built their brands enough to get good gigs elsewhere.

That may not be as favorable as continuing as an independent entity, but it's been very good so far.

I hope and expect that continues, and I wish you the best of luck in your current and future work.

Re: Why we shut NewsTilt down

Frank Biggar — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 04:12:46 -0000

Interesting article, Paul, and very generous - some might even say generous to a fault (more on that later). Some questions occur to me, which you might or might not care to think about before you try again.

1) What made (and seemingly still makes) you think that Facebook stops people posting anonymous comments? Unless things have changed very recently, it's dead easy to create a new e-mail account under a fake name on Yahoo, and then a new Facebook account to go with it (if you don't believe me, it should only take you a few minutes to try).

2) Does the answer to question 1 suggest your set-up had difficulty with acquiring correct info, and/or with correcting misinformation?

3) If you wanted to get your start-up employee to work Sundays, did you consider giving him shares or share options? (If you did, your article doesn't mention it)

4) Are you psychologically in denial, unwilling to admit to yourself that you're a techie (or geek, as you put it) but NOT a natural businessman, and that if there is a next time, maybe your co-founder should be a businessperson and not a fellow geek as he was this time? The combination often works well - at the start of Apple, Steve Wozniak was the geek, and Steve Jobs was the businessman. Woz is not as rich as Jobs, but he was still worth $200 million last time I heard (quite a few years ago). And Rolls was a businessman, but Royce was a geek (well, an engineer actually, as geeks hadn't yet been invented), and his name and fame is just as immortal as that of Rolls. I'm just going by your apparent lack of any attempt to acquire business qualifications, your lack of fun in your first setup, and your generous (arguably to a fault, at least for a businessman) free give-away in this article of all your hard-won lessons to possible future competitors.

I could of course easily be completely wrong about you in that last question, so the only piece of explicit advice I'll offer (as distinct from advice arguably implicit in my questions) is that you'd probaby be well-advised to feel totally free to ignore any or all advice coming from idiots like me, as we probably know almost nothing of what we're talking about :-)

Good luck in the new job.

Cheers,

Frank