Things have gotten very interesting in my old town recently. According to
WickedLocal/Medford, the introduction of comments to their opinion and letters pages degraded into, um, uncivil discourse. So they shut down
and removed the comments from the offending pages. This was all explained in an
editorial in Thursday's edition.
Recently, the Transcript opened up its online content to let readers leave feedback on stories or open up a dialogue
about the news that’s pertinent to their community. We were excited by the idea of giving our readers yet another opportunity
to “talk back” about the issues that concern them about their city and their lives. But that’s not what’s been happening.
The editorial then goes on to explain that there's been 'vicious name-calling' and that the families of the targets
of these comments shouldn't be subjected to this. Which leads to...
And so we decided that while we welcome commentary from the community on our feedback forums, we can’t allow what we
perceive to be an abuse of said forums by individuals who cannot seem to hold a civilized dialogue — and the Mattatal commentary,
along with one aimed at problems at TV3, were shut down. It is never an easy decision for an entity that believes so strongly
in free speech to close a discussion forum. However, when said forum actually squelches constructive criticism in favor of
bullying then we must take the only steps available to us and shut it down.
By the way and just for the record, I don't think there's anything in the First Amendment about civility. And the comments
were removed, so I can't repost them here. But one comment was copied into another forum and still remains - it goes like
this:
get a clue....2007-11-23T00:13:09
mayor mike cutting ribbons......do you people have a clue---tell me who was
a better mayor for medford than mike mcglynn? Marilyn porreca, paul donato, dave skerry, eugene grant? You people are all
a-holes who have nothing better to do than to bitch and moan....run for for office...silent majority my ***--weak fools who
want to throw stones and hide. no balls no guts NO CLUE
nice job Mayor Mike---I am with you to the wall
I really didn't find this that bad. I mean, sure, it's not civil, but the person does make a valid point. I have
to believe there was worse than this and that not as many people saw it since the comments were removed.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have posted to the comments section as well and I'll get to that in a moment.
What was remarkable about this event was the outpouring of communication that happened with those comments forums. When they
were shut down, the reaction was pretty negative. There is a feeling, I think, that these forums were some of the first open
dialogs, messy or not, that Medford has had over some controversial issues. But as soon as they got messy, they got shut down.
My bit in this is that I have offered to put up a website/blog with comments to provide a truly unfiltered forum
on Medford topics. I have been frustrated for a long time that my hosting solution doesn't offer features like this. In the
last several weeks, I have been building a sophisticated portal insfrastructure for my site and so I have an opportunity to
use this to provide a resource back to Medford. If you are interested in helping, support the idea, hate it, or just want
to be uncivil, send me
feedback.
Adobe released version
1.3 of
Lightroom over the weekend. I installed mine on Sunday or Monday. Mostly, the description of the update won't inspire you to rush and
install it. But you should, because there are a number of interesting updates. Here's the list of changes from the README:
- Performance improvements when writing XMP metadata
- Fixed a printing bug
- Correction to camera RAW to fix edge transition artifact problem
- Additional support for RAW formats
- Import now offers 1:1 preview rendering option
- Improved export dialog layout
- Release of a Lightroom Export Plug-In SDK
I have also noticed that there is a new 'floater'. When you select and drag an image in the center pane, a floating preview
follows the mouse. Nice touch. But wait a minute, let me back up a second.
The surprise? The Lightroom Plug-In SDK. What's that all about?
Well, it turns out that Adobe must want to stimulate integration between Lightroom and various service providers. Much
of the 1.3 SDK release is about exports. Here's the short list of features in the SDK:
- Creating an Export Service Provider. See the Flickr and FTP samples.
- Customizing the Export dialog
- Creating custom dialogs
The idea here (I think) is that by creating the SDK, the developer community will start writing 'tweeners for popular social
networking and photo sharing sites. I guess I'm less interested in that one than the other two. Why? Simply put, getting the
images in place on the service provider has not been much of a problem for me. I have a much larger problem in configuring
the export in the first place. Let me digress for a moment and give you an example.
When I export from Lightroom, I specify a set of maximum horizontal and vertical dimensions for the exported files. This
sounds like the Right thing to do. But actually, it's not. The photo sizes need additional rules because they have different
aspect ratios. It's quite common for me to have a 4x6, 4x4, 5x7 and more mixed up in the same collection. If I size them to
800 pixels across, the 4x6 is quite nicely sized. But the 4x4 is now huge at 800x800 pixels. I don't want it that big - I
want it sized in relation to the other photographs.
I suspect this is not an uncommon situation, leading Adobe to focus on exports for the first SDK release. There is also
a bit about creating custom dialogs. The SDK spends a fair amount of time talking about how to create controls and hook them
up to code so you can make effective interfaces. So you can create a new menu item within the application (for example) and
have it obtain a fairly sophisticated set of input from the user.
In order to make all this work, though, you have to be a programmer. And it's not simple stuff, either. The integration
language is lua - an object oriented scripting language that is somewhat obscure. Or was. Now that it's the integration language for Lightroom,
perhaps it gets a boost.
Anyway, all this is quite exciting. I didn't realize Adobe had plans for that kind of extension of Lightroom, although
it makes sense now in hindsight. Pull up a chair, it's going to be really fun watching this technology evolve.
