Holovaty.com

Work with me at washingtonpost.com

Attention, Web developers! We're hiring somebody to work with me at washingtonpost.com.

We're looking for somebody who is really good at making dynamic Web applications, on deadline. You're a great candidate if:

You have significant experience building database-driven Web sites.
You pick up new technologies very quickly, enjoy learning new things and enjoy opportunities to apply your new knowledge.
You're great at cleaning digital information -- parsing data feeds, screen scraping, etc.
You enjoy automating things to save people time.
You have experience using Django. Ruby on Rails experience is fine, too, if you're willing to unlearn all that black magic. ;-)
You have a solid understanding of relational databases and experience with open-source databases, particularly PostgreSQL. (MySQL experience is fine, too.)
You are experienced using (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ajax...yadda yadda yadda.

You get bonus points if:

You've contributed to open-source projects.
You've launched a side project (or two) on the Web.
You have a weblog.
You have journalism experience.
You are passionate about improving the world through information.

In no particular order, here are some examples of the types of sites you'll be building:

It's a mix of short-deadline projects, long-term projects and general site improvements. There's enough variety to keep it interesting. In most cases, you'll be expected to build a site in a matter of hours or days, not weeks or months. It's an exciting, fast-paced environment.

Why should you take this job?

Fun and freedom -- Building Web apps with Django is fun, and you'll have significant say in what your apps should do and how they should work. You won't be a cog in the wheel; in many cases, the development team will be you, or you and I. No requirements documents, if I can help it.
Visibility -- Your work will be seen by hundreds of thousands of people -- maybe more -- around the world.
Cool tools -- You get to use open-source technologies such as Python, Django and PostgreSQL, and get paid for it.
Great people -- Since Day One, I've been continually impressed with the talent and dedication of Washington Post employees. This is the cream of the crop.
Great company -- C'mon, it's the Washington Post, one of the most highly reputable news organizations in the world. The Post is, hands down, the most innovative large newspaper company around. You won't find our killer combination -- dedication to quality journalism and willingness to innovate -- at any other company of our size in this industry.

Journalism experience is not required. A formal computer-science background is not required. I'm much more interested in seeing your work than reading bullets on a resume.

Also, you don't necessarily have to be a designer. Our design team makes things look good.

The job is located in the Washington, D.C., area -- technically, Arlington, Virginia. The washingtonpost.com office is near the Court House Metro stop on the Orange Line.

If you think you're a good fit, contact me. Send some links to work you've done, along with a resume.

Site-specific browser extension: All Music Guide

Lots of people are talking about All Music Guide's for-the-worse redesign. Here's an initial attempt at fixing it -- routing around the damage, so to speak.

I've written an extension for Mozilla Firefox that, when installed, alters the display and functionality of allmusic.com. Specifically, it does the following:

It cleans up the horrible JavaScript-only links sitewide, thus enabling 21st-century browsing techniques such as tabbed browsing and opening links in new windows.
It hides the annoying Flash spinner thing atop each page.
It changes the functionality of the "Read more..." links on band and album detail pages. On the old AMG, band and album pages contained full reviews. Now, they feature only the first few sentences, with a link to "Read more..." on a separate page. The extension changes the functionality of that "Read more..." link so that, instead of taking you to a new page, clicking the link will dynamically load the full band/album review and insert it inline.

(If you have any ideas about what else the extension could do, please post a comment here or contact me. One idea I've had since I wrote it yesterday is to expand the length of the "Song title" table cell on album pages.)

To install the extension, just click the following link while using Mozilla Firefox 0.9+. It might work in 0.8, but I haven't tested it.

All Music Guide Corrector 0.1

Then, restart your browser, and you're all set. Pretty easy, eh? You can uninstall it later in Firefox's handy extension manager.

A few tiny bugs exist -- namely that the extension makes the allmusic.com home-page link colors a bit funky -- but it's intended as a proof-of-concept more than anything else. To my knowledge, using browser extensions to "fix" Web sites, or add extra functionality, is unexplored territory.

There's a huge potential here. Site-specific Firefox extensions are an elegant, one-click-install solution to the problem of, well, lousy Web interfaces -- a problem Web users have had to shut up and deal with for as long as the Web has been around.

Let's do more of these things.

UPDATE, Oct. 15 -- I've updated the extension to work with Firefox Version 1.0 Preview Release. Thanks to everybody for the continued comments.

Topix.net service policy: Hypocrisy in action

First, I was intrigued by Topix.net, an automated site whose robots screen-scrape thousands of American news sites and categorize the content for easy browsing by topic. It is innovative and useful, and the folks who put it together, alumni of the Open Directory Project, really know their stuff.

But I happened upon the site's Terms of Service and was appalled by its hypocrisy and cheekiness. It left such a bad taste in my mouth that I can't bring myself to say anything else nice about the service.

Let's take a look at the "Use of the Service" section of that page.

You may only display the content of the Service for your own personal use (i.e., non-commercial use) and may not otherwise copy, reproduce, alter, modify, create derivative works, or publicly display any content.

Note: Topix.net copies, reproduces and publicly displays content from more than 3,000 other Web sites.

For example, you may not do any of the following: use the Service to sell a product or service; use the Service to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales;

Note: Topix.net displays advertising on almost every page of its site. One might say it uses other sites' content to increase traffic to its Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales.

take the results from the Service and reformat and display them, or mirror any portion of the results on your Web site; or use the Service as part of a "meta-search" offering.

Note: Topix.net takes headlines and paragraphs from news sites and reformats and displays them -- often verbatim. It might be seen as a "meta-search" offering.

You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service.

Note: Topix.net's fundamental operation is predicated on using robots/spiders to monitor and copy content from outside sites.

From point three on the same page: "The results that appear from Topix.net's indices are indexed by Topix.net's automated machinery and computers".

From point seven on the same page: "Topix.net's indices consist of information that has been identified, indexed and compiled through an automated process with no advance review by human beings."

I admire the Topix.net proprietors for their gall. But their hypocrisy is undeniably crass.

Participatory journalism in an unlikely -- or likely? -- place

You know, there really is something to this participatory journalism thing.

I turned on the Super Bowl for a few minutes Sunday night. (Not because I wanted to watch the wretched thing. My wife had asked me to tape the subsequent show, so I wanted to see how much time was left.) Turns out it was halftime, and Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson were performing the type of music I normally go out of my way to avoid.

Well, we all know what happened during that performance. And I saw it -- live. Er, I thought I saw it. I wasn't sure. The camera cut away so quickly that I couldn't really tell what'd happened.

So I did what any self-respecting Internet-junkie would do: I flipped open my laptop and hit the Web.

CNN had nothing. MSNBC had nothing. Neither did the New York Times, Washington Post or Chicago Tribune. Google News didn't say anything about it, either. I checked a bunch of other big-media sites but couldn't find any coverage.

I began to think I'd just been delusional. Then I checked Fark.

Fark.com -- a deranged mix of quirky news-article links, hilarious Photoshop antics, incestuous user comments, and a healthy dose of porn -- had the story. In my estimation, it'd been less than 15 minutes since the halftime show ended -- and Farkers were already talking about it.

The thing is, despite Fark's classically low signal-to-noise ratio, it wasn't all prepubescent blather. I daresay some of it was participatory journalism in action.

Read the archived comment thread to see the story unfold. There were first-person accounts of watching the event. There was background information. There was analysis and piecing-together of the facts. And, most importantly, there was an effort to distribute any and all raw information about the incident, mostly in the form of high-resolution TV-screen-grabs and video.

It was clear that all of this was fueled by a desire to get to the bottom of the story -- a desire not unlike that of a professional reporter.

Could this have been a glimpse of the future? Could a much more traditional news story be covered in the same way, given the right mix of a dedicated audience and enabling technology?

Yes, much of this interest was on a prurient level, and most people probably wouldn't share the same excitement about, say, a school board meeting. But who's to say there isn't a core niche devoted to, and willing to contribute to, every feasible news story?

Yes, nudity is taboo in the United States, and media have community standards to uphold. But shouldn't mature adult readers have access to it when it's newsworthy, as long as it's opt-in?

Yes, probably not a single one of the Fark contributors was actually at the Super Bowl, and all of their facts were collected from "mainstream" sources such as the CBS television broadcast. So what? Even two days later, this is STILL coverage you can't find at any big-media site. And who's to say a photo-phone-toting Super Bowl attendee couldn't have contributed?

Yes, traditional media outlets couldn't have posted a lot of those photos and video because of licensing, syndication privileges and all that. Ahh, maybe this is a limitation of traditional media?

UPDATE: It's come full circle.

Transcripts add to a story if handled fairly

JD Lasica has posted a fine weblog entry whose title asks: Are emails private? And should bloggers scoop their interviewers?

The questions stem from a recent development that I've indirectly been a part of: OJR columnist Mark Glaser has said he's a bit frustrated that bloggers whom he has interviewed have posted interview transcripts to their blogs before Mark's final articles are published. In essence, the bloggers "scoop" the reporter himself -- which might be unethical, or at least in bad faith.

JD's article raises more than a few interesting questions: Is the reporter doing his subjects a favor by quoting them, or vice versa? And is it ever acceptable for an interview subject to post a transcript? On what terms?

This is a fascinating issue. For the record, I was one of the folks Mark interviewed for his latest article, although I didn't post the transcript until yesterday night, after his column was released. (It was another source for the same column who pre-posted.) I did it mostly for the benefit of people who wanted more information about the topic at hand. And since he only ended up using a paragraph of my response, I didn't want my other interview responses to go to waste. Plus, I believed I had the right to post my very own opinions to my Web site.

I probably wouldn't have posted it before the story, out of respect for Mark. And if he'd asked me not to Web-post my comments at all, well, I probably would have obliged, only to kick myself later. (Don't I own my own words?)

But I must say that, as a reader with a strong interest in the topic, I really enjoyed looking through the interview transcripts posted by the other folks. Without question, those transcripts add to the story. And that's not to say that Mark's column wasn't excellent; a well-crafted, smartly-edited article is a better way to present the story than a bunch of transcripts, which in and of themselves are supplementary at best. I only wish the full transcripts were linked-to from the column itself.

I look forward to the day when it's standard practice for news organizations to Web-post full interviews themselves.