The news media is dead.
The internet is the smoking gun, and the people are the bullets. Watching the nightly news used to involve talking heads who we believed in and trusted. The anchors were bringing us news from around the world, straight to that magical television set, information we couldn’t get anywhere else, and they did it with class and style. For a good part of the last century, news was revolutionary, CNN’s 24 hour channel was mindblowing and new. Today, it’s nowhere near interesting anymore.

A microphone! as seen on TV! Today’s anchors are pitiful renditions of the giants that came before them. Carefully planned out formulas dictate what to cover when, they lure the viewer into watching just enough for the ad spots to pay out. Coverage is relegated to the tragic, the shocking, and the superficial. The only lifeline that has kept the news media relevant is our implicit trust in the fact checking that we think happens, even when they fall short. The “political news” arena has done such a poor job, a healthy percentage of twenty and thirty-somethings get their news from a late night “fake news” satirist on Comedy Central.

The nail that seems to be pounding itself into the coffins that they’ve neatly arranged for themselves, is micro-blogging. In the shortest time span, services like Twitter and Facebook have convinced the anchors that rather than deliver the news, they should be delivering us our words back, but this time, on television! Maybe, just maybe, if I say something interesting enough on their Twitter or Facebook pages, Brian Williams will say my username and tweet on the big screen! Good night and good luck indeed.

Let’s check twitter to see what’s happening in the world The landscape is changing fast, and old media isn’t adapting, they’re throwing it against the wall in hopes that a model for the new way will stick. While sad, it is very exciting, a revolution is upon us. A democracy to the news and delivery of information is a big gap that needs filling, the internet and technology have been laying the groundwork for making that a reality. A shining example of this was the Iranian elections, a flood of information coming through the twitterverse about an actual news event, and CNN and others are covering granny having to buy a converter box for her old set!

All good things, must come to an end. Today there are 1,001 entrepreneurs building the revolution that will one day, replace for good how we consume our current events. It probably won’t happen tomorrow, but it will happen. Just as the music and movie industry and the newspaper in a coma on life support, they don’t look the same, and they never will again.

¡VIVA LA REVOLUCION!

With our pastebin MysticPaste.com, one of the biggest roadblocks to a clean-looking UI, is keeping it uncluttered while offering the functionality needed. Apple and a majority of the software released for their operating system seems to “get it”. Sensible defaults and all that are important in keeping it simple.

At Mystic we’ve used our little pastebin experiment to teach on building code with Apache Wicket. We plan to continue this tradition in the near future talking about some of the new items in MysticPaste.com’s feature list:

• Raw Text (for copy and paste)
• Using the JavaScript-based SyntaxHighlighter and tossing JaSHi. Show me a Java-based syntax highlighter with as clean an interface and respectable highlighting, and I'd prefer it. Searches returned nothing though.
• Send to Twitter - follow us @mysticpaste and let more people know about your paste and get solutions
• Comments - each paste can have any number of comments attached to it. the owner of a paste could comment on what problem he's encountering, and get multiple comments about solutions. Email address is never shared anywhere.
• Line Number Highlighting - if you'd like to highlight certain lines in your paste just add another parameter, comma-separated, with the line numbers (e.g. /view/10/4,5,10 or /view/10/4-10,15-20)
• Abuse Reporting - it happens all the time, spam fills a pastebin, we've added a few measures to combat this nuisance along with a "Report Abuse" function which takes the paste out of the history
• Code Refactoring - nothing to do with the UI, but there have been a few changes and enhancements under the hood.

With all of that in mind, we think those are pretty great updates to an already fantastic tool. What would you like to see in the pastebin next? image support? diff support? durations to keep a post? something else?

Being the proud owner of a new iPhone 3GS, I thought it prudent to sell off my old 3G, which Apple replaced for me about two weeks ago. The activity usually involves a trip to CraigsList or eBay, depending on how I’d like to handle the product and purchase. Lately, it’s been so much easier to deal with local folks, so I opted for Craigslist.

After a quick 4 pictures, and a description of the particulars, I posted it this morning. While I was busy being social with the family, more than 20 folks emailed me about the “ad” in a space of 3 hours. A few phone calls and text messages later, a buyer with her tween child (the expert), showed up at a local Starbucks. Exchanges of details, doing the sim card shuffle, lots of eye rolling from the tween, and it looked like we had a deal.

And then, “Do you have change for $100?”. No, no I don’t. And neither did Starbucks. So we went across the parking lot to a fast food chicken joint, to break the $100 bill. Not to be outdone by Starbucks, they initially refused to change it (understandable), so I told the buyer to get a bucket of chicken. Finger lickin’ good!

Good enough for me. Next!