Photo by Josh Trujillo

It was a great idea to tie a bunch of balloons to Edith Macefield’s house as a promotion for the Pixar movie “Up“. Edith’s house is the perfect real-life representation of the decades-old image that inspired Up, the tiny little house surround by huge skyscrapers. So why not tie up the balloons and try to bring the movie to life?

Two reasons, apparently. First, you’re never going to get enough balloons to match the cartoonishly exaggerated amount from the movie. So it’s going to look weak by comparison no matter what. And second, real life has wind, and real balloons pop when they hit things, leading to half the balloons being popped, which only brought more attention to the first reason.

So, good idea, bad execution. Like so many things in life.

photo by Flickr user manthropologist

The globe on top of the Seattle P-I offices was a hot topic earlier this year. When it was announced that the newspaper would be shutting down, it seemed like more people were concerned about the future of the globe than of the newspaper itself. In the end the P-I decided to live on as a web-only publication and keep its headquarters, so the globe was granted a reprieve. But that’s not necessarily the end of the story. The new P-I could still end up failing at its new mission, or decide to move into offices with lower overhead, and the globe’s fate would suddenly be right back where it was in February.

That’s why the globe has been added to the 2009 list of the state’s Most Endangered Historic Properties, put out by the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation. Being on a list like this doesn’t really mean much. I can think of a few structures on Nevada’s list that are gone regardless. But it raises awareness and keeps the conversation going, and at the very least it lets the parent company of the P-I know that we the people like having the globe around, and would appreciate if they put some effort into making it stay around.

So who knows. The globe could be on top of that building for 20 more years, or it could be scrapped next week, or it could be donated to MOHAI sometime in the next 2-5 years. It’s all possible, but hopefully they get the message that Option #2 is the one we don’t want.

Today is the 29th anniversary of the Mt. St. Helens eruption.

Photo by Flickr user josephsongcophoto

Hat tip to CHS Capitol Hill Seattle Blog for pointing to this Flickr photo set, where Joseph Songco has been posting before-and-after pictures of all the demolition going on for the Capitol Hill light rail station.

Remember last week, when Chuck Taylor detailed all the problems he had on his simple bus ride across town? And how several people said he should have ridden a bike instead? Well, the next day he did ride his bike. And got hit by a car. Poor guy just can’t win!

Jess at Vintage Seattle doesn’t just showcase historic photos, he also showcases historic houses from time to time. Like this mansion on Capitol Hill which has been mostly abandoned for the last 20 years, where the new owner invited him in to take a look before restoration work begins (Part 1, Part 2). So many of these stories have bad endings. like the Carmack House, so it’s good to have a happy ending about a house getting fixed up instead of torn down for a rebuild.

Chuck Taylor expains, in great detail, why if you actually want to get anywhere in town, on any kind of a schedule, you don’t take the bus.

By this point I’m pretty resigned to the fact I won’t make the ferry and try to relax. My stop on Third Avenue, the six blocks up the hill from the ferry dock, will be the fifth one the bus makes downtown. This will, of course, take forever. And I do miss the boat, probably by about 10 minutes. I call my friends and head for the bar. The next boat is in 55 minutes, at 4:40. I arrive on Bainbridge Island at 5:15 p.m. Elapsed time from home: not quite three hours. Miles traveled, including the ferry: about 14.

I could have swum it faster.

A commenter made the point: this is why you ride a bike.

I’ve stumbled across another new Seattle online news source, the Seattle Courant. This one seems to have been started in February or January of this year, so it predates the P-I going online-only and the creation of the PostGlobe, but it’s still pretty new. From their about page:

The Seattle Courant represents the next-generation of independently owned local daily newspapers.

The future of daily newspapers, serving a local market such as Seattle, will be news organizations that are small and more focused than newspapers of the past.

According to Courant founder, Keith Vance, advancements in technology have greatly reduced the cost of production, giving the opportunity for many more voices to be heard.

While many of these new voices are taking on the tone and character of blogging, or citizen journalism, Vance believes that there’s still a place for traditional journalism, if properly focused, and so he started the Courant in 2009.

The focus of this newspaper will be Seattle. More specifically, Vance said the Courant will spend much of its energy covering local Seattle politics. But the stories won’t all be about the city council, the mayor, school boards, or what the legislature is up to in Olympia, the food and culture sections offer something from the lighter side of life.

This is excellent. I keep saying we need some big successes in online-only news to validate the model, and to show everyone it shouldn’t be thought of as a last-ditch effort to save your company–like it was with the P-I–but rather a viable way of doing business. Seattle is becoming a wonderful breeding ground for these efforts, and though I suspect we’ll see some failures (of the model at least, like Crosscut going nonprofit), I’d also say the odds are in favor of a couple of them becoming smashingly successful.

The only problem I see with so many new ventures coming online is the danger of segmenting the advertising market, so that each site is getting a smaller piece of a smaller pie. But that just means the advertisers need to be educated about the value of online advertising, so those ad rates start going up.

Capitol Hill Seattle is still offering a selection of their weekly stories for download in a “print version“, something I noticed a couple of months ago. I thought it was brilliant back then, and still is. And it’s even better now because they’re improving the weird formatting issues that some of those early editions had, and making it look more like what you’d expect a “newspaper” to look like.

The idea of this print version is that it’s a PDF you download and print out, then when you’re done reading it you leave it behind in your favorite deli or coffeehouse for someone else to pick up. It’s an innovative way to advertise the website, for one thing, but it also makes concrete the idea that news and stories are things to be shared, to pass on to others. Plus towns across America have been full of these weird little weekly papers and newsletters for decades, so it’s not like the concept will be completely foreign to somebody picking up one of them.

It’s also a good example of standing the old news cycle on its head, which is another drum I’ve been beating for a few years. For so long newspapers have treated their morning print run as the only thing that matters to them, and the website is just a second-class object. My local paper in Carson City updates their website at 4am every day, with the stories that are in the paper that’s simultaneously being loaded into delivery vehicles. It’s like they’re afraid of the website scooping the paper, afraid of them scooping themselves. Instead these stories should go online as they’re finalized in the system. As soon as a story is “done” it goes online, then appears in the paper 12 hours later. There may be some old school news outlets doing things this way, but they’re surely in the minority.

It’s different for net-native sources like Capitol Hill Seattle. They live on the web, and that’s their main product. But they also realize that sometimes people do like to hold news in their hand, a physical object that you can roll up under your arm, or drop in the gutter, or read in the rain. So they put out this print edition, and instead of spending untold dollars on printing it themselves they ask their enthusiastic readers to do it for them. I’m sure if I lived on Capitol Hill and had some regular haunts I visited, I probably would print off a few copies every week and leave them behind. Why not?

And it also helps that the stories you find online are ones that you’d never see in a “real” paper, like the UFO chase that ended with finding a well-used kite or the varied opinions on the new white LED streetlights that have been appearing on the hill. Stuff that reminds you this is a real neighborhood where people live and play, and that makes it more personal than any newspaper. Get some of the local business to put ads in that PDF, and suddenly you’ve got a business.