NYTimes: photo slider makes me do cartwheels

AAAAUGH!! NYTimes does it again. Look at this incredible thingy: a slider on a photo allowing readers to compare two photos. No arrows, no links. It's all inside one picture window. It's like a child's toy. I bow down to the creatives behind all the cool bells and whistles they keep coming up with. I want the NYTimes to design my house. One teeny request: make these cool things embeddable.

New York Times interactive piece rocks

You have to take a look at this interactive piece done by the NYTimes showing what's happened to each house in one neighborhood in Nee Orleans since the rebuilding efforts began. I know the subject matter is somber but I really want to point out how smart I think this piece is. The map puts the houses in spatial context and the roll-over tells you what's happened to each house.

NYTimes: watch Obama speech by topic

Watch Obama's speech BY TOPIC: taxes, energy, education, healthcare, and so on, through the NYTimes viewer. I think this is amazing. Kudoes to NYTimes.

Viral marketing "article"

This New York Times article on Viral Marketing in politics says it can be unpredictable and sometimes need supplemental help from traditional marketing. Wow. I feel enlightened.

Readspeaker turns blogs into podcasts

I came across the blog service Readspeaker on David Weinberger's blog and have to talk about it. I had this idea myself when I was working at Mindcomet. It creates a podcast feed from the text on a blog using tect-to-speech.

Love this.

My idea was for newspapers. Now that I know more about rss, I'd revise my original idea and post it as such:

On the New York Times podcast page, there could be podcast feeds for each section of the printed newspaper. (My original idea went with the notion that people went to nytimes.com and clicked around, so the buttons labeled "mp3" would be located beside each headline. This auto-generation would prevent The New York Times from spending a dime on paying people to podcast their stories if they ever wanted to do that.

I wish they did.

For example, I listen to cnet.com's podcast "Buzz Out Loud." I do not visit the site regularly. Why? I like to listen to my news, not read it. If cnet had their news rss available as podcasts, I'd listen. Therefor, I'd be "reading" the content on their site without having to go through the trouble (and time) of reading. And cnet.com could put advertising on these podcasts automatically using one of those services that does that stuff.