DAN

Thanks to a methodical and haunting piece of journalism in The Morning Call, a newspaper published in Allentown, Pennsylvania, I now know why the boxes reach me so fast and the prices are so low. And what the story revealed about Amazon could be said of the country, too: that on the road to high and glorious things, it somehow let go of decency.

This piece in the New York Times by Anand Giridharadas takes a stab at how we as consumers have fueled a lack of decency for we as workers.

The trouble I find is that globalization has created the need for the U.S. to be competitive with nations whose decency for themselves hasn't been there in quite some time. And I'm not sure this trend can be reversed, since most of us are impacted by how long it takes for the product we ordered to get delivered to us. Yet few of us (for now) are as impacted by how getting that done can be seriously inhumane.

Gizmodo reported on some fun stuff in news technology:

The New York Times Company's Research and Development Lab studies novel ways to deliver news to people. Their latest creation is a bathroom mirror that uses Microsoft Kinect to detect motion and deliver a stream of news while you comb your hair or put on your makeup.

I think the R&D lab at the New York Times Co. has too much time and money on its hands. And yes, that comment is fueled by envy.

Andy Rutledge wrote a sweeping piece deservedly condemning the current design approach to " digital news" and its business model. Here's a glimpse of his point:

Quality news requires quality presentation, free from the ridiculous array of experience-destroying marketing. Payment for the PRODUCT allows for this to happen. Experience-destroying penalties for getting the product for free create a broken system while at the same time destroying the value proposition for payment.

Though I find empirical evidence lacking for his suggestion that the model is purely subscription driven, I do hear what he's saying. I also believe that the current state of news design sucks horribly. Even the big boys look crappy. But simply suggesting that paywalls should be erected and the sites need to be clean and virtually ad-free sounds really good to me, but isn't a business reality right now — even though the news industry has nobody to blame but itself for getting into this "free news for all" predicament.

Nevertheless, Andy's redux site example for nytimes.com is pretty awesome.

Here's 22 months of screen captures of the nytimes.com home page.

News.me appears to include the links that people you follow on Twitter have posted directly, like Flipboard, with ranking and filtering to only show the most popular or relevant stories. It also lets you browse other News.me users and see what the service is recommending to them.

I just downloaded News.me for my iPad. And, Elauwit is looking into a licensing deal with the service, too. I'm certainly intrigued.

And, as Marco Arment notes, "The best part... is that this is a brand new market, created entirely by the iPad, that significantly benefits everyone involved: readers can easily find more content from a wider variety of publishers, publishers get more readers and a potential alternative to advertising revenue, and the market is so large that there’s plenty of space for many services to successfully connect them."

What I think is missing in the discussion is the free daily email service. I signed up for that, too. And I'm excited to see what it looks like. (I start getting it tomorrow.) But it seems as though News.me is going to pay attention to the folks I follow on Twitter and then use an algorithm to curate the most relevant items into a daily email for me.

I think that email is going to be an awesome way for me to see things I otherwise would have missed, but certainly have interest in. So, words borrowed from Marco, this email service, too, is a major win: I get FREE exposure to news I would have missed and the publishers get some additional traffic and attention.