Dino Baskovic Can’t Lose

I hate when Google gets bad press, even if it's from an obscure group of web geeks.

Sure, this dirt isn't nearly as tawdry as a Gmail outage, Chinese firewalls or the roller coaster ride that is Google's stock price.  But speaking as a recovering web geek myself: oh, it's bad, baby...

It seems that the jQuery project has decided to drop Google Groups as its de facto discussion board and mailing list for over 20,000 web developers worldwide.  For the uninitiated, jQuery is a "a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development."*  In layman's terms, jQuery is a way to make web sites to act like Flash without actually using Flash, a browser technology that makes web sites look and act pretty but has a vexed history of bad browser behavior.

John Resig, jQuery's creator and lead developer, broke the news on his blog this week, leaving web designers to wonder "Now what?" while the rest of the world thinks "So what?"  Wired's Webmonkey blog and Slashdot (yes, good ol' Slashdot) also weigh in on the war of words.  In a nutshell, Resig is displeased with Google Groups' inability to stave off spam:

As far as I'm concerned, Google Groups is dead.... This post isn't so much about the usefulness of mailing lists as a discussion medium, it's the complete failure of Google Groups as an adequate purveyor of public discussion software. For the jQuery project we're already in the process of moving the full discussion area to a forum that we control.... There is one area in which Google Groups continues to shine: Private, or restricted, mailing list discussions. However any attempts at using it for a public discussion medium are completely futile.... The primary problem with Google Groups boils down to a systemic failure to contain and manage spam. Only a bottom-up overhaul of the Google Groups system would be able to fix the problems that every Google Group faces.

The comment threads are flaming hot on jQuery's abandoning ship -- one of the largest on Google Groups.  And while Google is yet to respond formally, I eagerly await their next move.  Ironically, Google employs jQuery across a number of its web properties, namely Google Code and -- you guessed it -- Google Groups.  Personally, I relied more on the jQuery documentation wiki than boards and lists, but that's just me.

Back when I designed web sites for sport, I grooved on jQuery's logic and efficiency.  Community support was weak at first but gained groundswell quickly.  Competing JavaScript frameworks like Prototype, MooTools and Yahoo! UI worked more like Flash and were simpler to learn, but jQuery was so damn clean and the robust UI libraries evolved so well that I couldn't resist adopting it like a puppy.  Tens of thousands of web developers now roll with it, and even marquee sites like Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter and Bank of America infuse jQuery.

Casual web users won't care, and why should they?  Unless you code for a living, this is pretty dull stuff and overshadowed by the wealth of positive coverage in recent days resulting from Google Wave (myself, i'm still not sold), Google Voice (the FCC is really not sold) and Google Maps turn-by-turn navigation ("sold," to the chagrin of Garmin and TomTom).  The issue of jQuery developers getting spammed on Google Groups whenever they can't chain together an AJAX event handler is pretty much a non-issue to everyday folk and a dead letter to mainstream media.

Of course, if the world's biggest search engine can't appease the very crowd of said geeks that continues to make Google -- heck, the entire web -- the success story that it is, then maybe it's worth a second glance.  After all, you never know when a Facebook or a Bing might one day woo those developers with: "Aww, Google gotcha down?  We understand how busy they can be.  Care to step into our spam-free kitchen?"

* From the jQuery.com home page.

What just happened?  Did Microsoft do something right for a change?  Something, dare I say, cool?

According to Fast Company, Microsoft just released a new dashboard codenamed "LookingGlass" that tracks a company's social media cred.  It's still in beta and will only be available to paying customers -- at least initially.  FC pegs it as a better PR tool than Seth Godin's latest contraption which has a few eyes rolling in my line of biz, but that's another post altogether...

LookingGlass isn't entirely unexpected but nonetheless a nice surprise.  It comes from Redmond's own labcoats and helps to bridge a gap between self-proclaimed web gurus (like me) and PR flacks trying to make a buck in a Web 2.0 world (like me).  That, and Microsoft can't let the upstarts and whippersnappers have all the fun.

Also last week, TechCrunch reported the launch of WebSiteSpark, a free software suite for web developers that includes a web server, database engine and other goodies.  Not the first time they've offered trials like Visual Studio gratis, but for good for three years?  Not bad, not bad.  And if that doesn't pique a penguin's interest, then a stripped-down 2-meg download of Microsoft's Web Platform Installer will.  Even the apps are worth a glance: you'd be surprised what a Windows web server can run.

For many years, web pros shunned Microsoft like bad sushi.  Unless your hapless corporate IT department demanded otherwise, you opted for  alternatives ranging from Java to Dreamweaver to Mozilla to MySQL.  Internet Explorer was the reigning heavyweight everybody loved to hate (and hack), and Microsoft was no fan of open source.  Fast forward to now: the market changed and Microsoft had no choice but to follow.  Now the company doles out virtual machines like an open bar, dangling free drinks to web developers that eschewed expensive licensing in the past but are willing to tinker with new toys anytime.  The Developer Toolbar and IE8 Readiness Toolkit were big hits, as was the IE team's shocking revelation that it gives a damn about the web's future after all the incessant bitching... well, you get the idea.

So will a few freebies sway enough indie web designers to matter?  More Silverlight sites than Flash?  Less Google, more Bing?  LookingGlass and a dish of downloads may not be enough to wrestle the web world away from established analytics, frameworks and IDEs but it does prove one thing: Microsoft can still innovate and, in the process, compete.

I'd solicit Megan Taylor for her resume, if that wasn't such an embarrasing thing to ask for these days.  That's what LinkedIn is for.

Ms. Taylor (I don't know her personally, so I'll default to formal) is the the type of candidate that would play well with the other kiddies in my own corporate sandbox.  That being, a PR department that mixes business with social media.  It's hard to find folks that know web, journalism and communications, those that are solid writers, designers and developers and can actually think, well you know, strategically.

Her resume lists the following skillsets:

AP Style and news editing, HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, Flash and ActionScript, beginning PHP, JavaScript, AJAX, content management and online community management, audio/video editing, Adobe applications, Windows, Mac OS, Microsoft Office, Final Cut Pro, fluent in Spanish

I used to laugh heartily at resumes that laundry-listed talents like this, moreso when I would read job postings for triple-majors that "must know three dozen programming languages, usability, information architecture, art and architecture, landscape architecture, gardening, needle-point and can bowl a perfect 300 game."  Then again, a four-year college degree these days is the new high school diploma...

More on Ms. Taylor and why she caught my eye.  She's interned for Quinn and The Miami Herald, as well as blogs for Poynter and PBS.  Not too shabby.  Her latest blog post entitled "In Search of the Perfect Skillset for a Programmer/Journalist" really hits home.  I, too, am one of those oddball, cross-bred communicators that can both code and copywrite while standing on my head.  What a rush.  It's what got me started in PR, doing freelance web and at one time, teaching both.  I owe my (near) success to my chosen career path, and when I'm not knee-deep in budget or crying over my lost Facebook account, I have a moment to myself to blog.

"In Search of" highlights practitioners of what Ms. Taylor refers to as "computer-assisted reporting" or CAR.  In short, CAR is a relatively new concept, seemingly driven by investigative online reporting and the proliferation of citizen journalists who can tweet train wrecks faster than your average multinational media conglomerate.  The post further explains that CAR types (I'll call 'em that) should have a fair amount of front-end design, LAMP stacking and geomapping under their belt, and throw on some Flash and Final Cut Pro to boot.  Oh, and lest we forget: content management, publishing, editing, writing and the basic tenets of credible and ethical journalism.  (I'll assume she implied that last part.)

The upside to CAR, from my point of view, is that you would most likely be the smartest and most capable member of the newsroom/startup/coffee shop.  You know that much.  The downside?  You probably won't get paid that much.  It discourages me to think that an entry-level CAR type, even with glowing references and a stellar portfolio, may only fetch $40K-60K/year.  Maybe less.  Just five year ago, that number would be double.  And we didn't have fancy web frameworks or a plethora of Web 2.0 widgets at our disposal (read: to learn and try not to break).

I'd be curious to learn more about CAR and whether PR types (like me) should be mindful.  Even more intriguing, what your run-of-the-mill CAR type makes in a year, or per blog post, etc.

And Ms. Taylor, if you're reading: love the resume.  How do you feel about Grand Rapids?