technology

Digital Edge Awards

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The Newspaper Association of America’s New Media Federation (one of the top two onlinetechnology journalism ogranizations focused on the newspaper business) has announced their 2006 awards nominees – and two of my old companies – The Savannah Morning News and The Augusta Chronicle received the ol’ hat tip in the Best Overall News Site (50k-99k circulation).
Also receiving kudos for innovative storytelling in the 50k-100k category is a multimedia project photographed by Josh Meltzer for the Roanoke News, where Josh and my good friend Natalee Waters are photojournalists. Augusta also gets a nomination for their ‘Spotted‘ site – a slick take on user-generated photo-blogging their parent company, Morris Communications, has syndicated to several of their newspapers.

Also nominated is the Chronicle’s Masters web site. I launched this back in 1996 in a joint effort with Sports Illustrated magazine. In 1997, we took the “Digital Edge Award”, recognizing the most innovative web site in the newspaper industry, besting papers of all sizes including the New York Times which took the number two spot that year. Morris has a great history of breaking new boundaries in the online news business, and it looks like this continues today. Great to see my old cohorts keeping up the good work!

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Television

Happy Happy Joy Joy

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Flickr Photo

I’m happy to announce that the Trotz household has finally entered the HDTV-age. Since I’ve been working for a broadcast company heavily involved in HD technologies for the last several years, I’ve been eager to experience this at home. After much research, agonizing, and negotiations with my lovely wife, we purchased a Sony KDS-R50XBR1 Grand Wega SXRD rear projection television last weekend. We talked about buying the 60″ version – Best Buy was selling both the 50 and 60 for the same price – but Amy knew that the 60″ would be waaaay to big for our living room.

I finally cancelled my DirecTV service last week – the constant outages and costs to upgrade to support HD (a new dish for $300, a new HD-DVR for $500-1000, new boxes for my other two rooms ($250+)). So we’ve been enjoying free over-the-air HD. It’s kinda sick that there is such a beautiful TV signal just floating in the air for anyone to pickup. I’m looking forward to today’s visit from the Comcast guy however – they should be bringing Motorola’s latest and greatest – the 6412 dual-tuner DVR. That baby has all sorts of features I’m eager to check out, including the ability to output recorded HD content over it’s Firewire ports to a Mac.I can finally get back to seeing how our own networks look, especially the Law and Order HD channel. Oops, I mean TNT!

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sam

Sammy Update

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The little guy just continues to amaze. As of last week, we’ve officially entered the world of Cheerios and other solid foods, and boy is he enjoying them! It’s been great to watch as he can amuse himself for 30 minutes at a time eating them one-by-one, and he’s also been getting into bits of chicken, bannana – whatever we put in front of him, really. Sam and I are spending lots of time bonding this month since Amy is playing umpteen Nutcrackers at the Fox Theater, so this has been great fun. New pictures coming soon.

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Photography, technology

Don’t ‘diss a blogger

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Thomas Hawk documents his experience with a Brooklyn discount photo store (PriceRitePhoto.com) as he tried to purchase a new Canon EOS 5D. Like all the lore suggests, the price was just too good to be true, and the retailer threatened Mr. Hawk after learning that he was going to blog his experience after the seller refused to fulfill the deal unless he purchased all sorts of high-markup accessories. Long story short – Yahoo! Shopping delisted the company, Digg.com users nearly took the company’s server down, and they ended up being pulled from most of the major comparison shopping sites following the brouhaha. I’ve experienced this on occasion before myself, though not quite to this degree. Seller beware!

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Photos, musings and miscellany – New and Improved!