Source: dangerismycat / Flickr

The New York Times crossword puzzle editor and a reader debate the definition of “illin’.” Hilarity ensues.

Source: ralph and jenny / Flickr

I’m here to debunk what I see as some bullshit:

Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce released a study today that reveals the unemployment rates and salaries for nearly every type of college major — and includes these numbers for recent grads, those with experience, and those with a graduate degree (via Washington Post).

– Aimee Groth for Business Insider

For starters — nothing against Aimee Groth — the headline (“Seriously, If You Pick The Wrong Major Then Prepare To Be Unemployed”) is very SEO friendly and it made me click, but it’s also so duh that it could be posted at any time, during any economic cycle. Additionally, there will be boom and bust times for almost every major and industry, and just because you major in something that’s lucrative now doesn’t mean it’s still going to be that way throughout your career — just ask all the journalists who were expecting to retire sometime during the past five years.

Most of all, though, understand this: Employers only care about what you’ve done because it’s one of the only indicators of what you’ll do for them. Unless you’re a doctor, lawyer or engineer, no one in the real world gives a shit what your major was. Grades don’t even matter that much.*

Basically, if you’re in college, facing graduation and you want to avoid the unemployment line, do stuff. It’s incredibly tough to get a job in some industries right now, and if your only pitch is “I love my major, and I got a 3.8 grade point average in my major, and I want to change the world with my major,” you’re going to have a hard time. But if you can tell an employer about specific things you’ve done and how those things relate to the job you’re seeking, your major will just be the ticket that gets your resume on a recruiter’s desk.

Do more internships than necessary. Join a lot of extracurricular clubs. Meet people. Add value to yourself.

If you can do all that, you’ll be OK.

UPDATE: Slate has a nice little graphic showing just how much owning a college degree matters in a weak job market.

*Don’t be a dipshit, though — get good grades.

Source: kjkrakowiak / Flickr

Hey, you know what I hate? It’s that goddamn email. All those buttons, and fonts, and — what’s an emoticon? — and AAAAAAAARRGGGGGGGGGHHH!!! When I need to talk to someone, I just pick up my telephone and rotate the dial all the way over to the left for people who have a zero in their number. Kids these days.

Anyway, that’s the gist of Pueblo (Colorado) Chieftain Managing Editor Steve Henson’s first column of the New Year, only he’s talking about Twitter.

In a related story, would someone please register @FakeSteveHenson?

via Romenesko

Holy distractions.

Now look at the same page through the Evernote Clearly plugin for Chrome:

Much better.

I’ve been testing out this nifty little app all week. When I’ve remembered to use it, it’s been fantastic, particularly for proofreading and for reading long-form posts.

That qualifier — “when I’ve remembered to use it” — is the catch with Evernote Clearly. It’s not the type of plugin you might find yourself prone to thinking of right away in the way that you might want to save a link and immediately move your cursor toward your Delicious (yeah, I still use Delicious) icon.

Nevertheless, I think this is a great app, and I hope it’s popular enough to at least stick around, if not flourish. I don’t know that websites are getting more cluttered, but there certainly isn’t a trend toward sites becoming less cluttered. Also, I’m getting older and my eyesight is getting crappier. I think I’m even going to take some inspiration from the app as I rethink the design of this site. You could be reading a much simpler paulbalcerak.com in the future.

Go download it and tell me what you think.

I clicked on one of Jake Tapper’s posts today and saw that he has an interesting way of linking http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/obama-campaign-pounces-on-matt-romney-joke-as-evidence-father-pandering-to-dead-ender-fringe-extremists/, kind of like how I just did in that sentence there.

Personally, I’m not bothered by the style and thought it was kind of interesting. Instead of having some linked text, which hopefully gives me some idea of what I’m clicking over to (and ideally some title text to actually tell me the name of the link), I get full URLs, which in Tapper’s post are sort of descriptive. Not everyone agrees with me.

I can’t tell if this is Tapper’s personal style — I don’t read his blog regularly enough — or just something he did in this one case. It certainly doesn’t appear to be ABC News’ style, as evidenced by this post on the same blog from Devin Dwyer.

I know I’ve gone on a rant about how people should link before, and I don’t think I’m changing the link-in-text style that I have going across most of my posts, but I thought it was interesting and kind of refreshing to see it done differently.

Photo: Profound Whatever on Flickr

Source: joshwept / Flickr

As a Tumblr Editor, you will:

• “Plan and execute new blogs, segments, features, and other products in multiple media (video, audio, text) to highlight creators on Tumblr”
• “Work with Tumblr bloggers to source information about emerging creators and content”
• “Find the best, most interesting creative expression on Tumblr and present it to Tumblr readers and the world”
• “Devise metrics for measuring performance of all editorial products and staff”
• “Develop Tumblr’s unique voice”

The job is full-time in New York City. If you get the job after finding it on my site, I’ll need you to reblog me at some point.

via Matthew Keys

Source: iUnique FX / Flickr

These were the 2.011 most-popular posts on my blog in 2011:

Publish 2 May Have Just Solved The Web-Print Publishing Problem

No on TwitPic and yFrog

Ste

As a bonus, here are the following 8.989 most-popular posts this year, to make an even 11:

p-By-Step: How To Take Great Instagram Photos

Audience Responsibility In Relation To Weather Reports

What’s On Your iPhone Home Page?

What Canlis’ Valet Parking Can Teach You About Social Media

What Steve Jobs’ Personal Style Can Teach Us About Branding

Protip For Journalists: Find Something More Important Than Journalism

I Think The New York Times Paywall Just Appeared

Here’s Who Really Owns Your Photos

The Importance Of Fiction

Thanks to all of you who regularly visit this site. I really appreciate having people to write for, and I’m looking forward to writing more in 2012.

Adapted from team.bates' photo on Flickr

Apparently we’re still having this discussion. I mean, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but on the other hand, we’re really still having this discussion.

Mathew Ingram, for GigaOM:

There have been plenty of accusations in the past year about the Huffington Post “over-aggregating” stories from other news outlets, including a case involving the Chicago Reader. But one of the problems with those kinds of charges is that no one can agree on what over-aggregation is, or whether it even exists. If an outlet — or even another newspaper — quotes facts and includes attribution and a link, as well as more information on the topic, how is that an offence? The short answer is that there is no offence, except to the pride of the original outlet, and possibly to their view of how the world should work.

In other words, all these people who say HuffPo (et al) is stealing would also love to be linked to by HuffPo, just in the way that they want to be linked to.

It’s no surprise at all that this all revolves around money. “Our reporters did all this hard work, and you just repeated it and linked to it,” is the general argument. It’s a stupid argument because that’s been happening for years, just on TV instead of the web. No one cared for a long time because until recently, the newspaper industry was making a ton of money.

Mathew’s solution for newspaper websites that are still complaining is basically “shut up and start linking on your own, and do it better than HuffPo.” I think that’s a perfectly acceptable solution and I don’t get why it’s so hard. I’ve been talking about this for years. It seems like the only barriers to implementing a link journalism strategy are pride, like Mathew mentioned, and perhaps more depressingly, a stubborn refusal to learn and change with the times.

But whatever. The fact is, if you’re trying to run an arcade in an XBox 360 world, you’re gonna get your ass kicked. All the yelling and screaming about how unfair it is in the world won’t help that.

Personally, I’m disappointed to see newspapers fail to grasp this concept, though I won’t be surprised if they shut down. And ultimately, I really don’t care. The true assets are the reporters at these publications, so if they can make free time to develop their digital skills, there will at least be less of a loss when whoever they work for closes up shop.

Photo: team.bates on Flickr (with additional editing)

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Twenty-three years ago today, a bomb destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and killed 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 people on the ground.

I was four at the time.

I don’t remember anything about the bombing, though I’m sure I saw at least some TV coverage. Morgan Palmer has collected a handful of breaking news clips from the time that show what parts of the world first saw when they learned of the crash. Also included is a clip from KIRO 7, with some of the first images of the crash site.

Source: AJC1 / Flickr

Has anyone been noticing an abnormal amount of Twitter spam during the last two days? Both my personal account (@paulbalcerak) and work account (@KIRO7Seattle) have been getting spammed incessantly, leading me to click the (futile?) “report [username] for spam” button more frequently than usual.

I don’t know if this is just a new holiday tradition or related in some weird way to someone hacking Lady Gaga’s account the other day and tricking about 7,000 of her followers, but if you know anything about it, I’d love a heads up.