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Riding the New Silk Road
- rlt3 13y agoThe presentation for this was incredible.
- kken 13y agoI agree.
- ninjazee124 13y agoAgree! I had to peak at their JS source to see how it was done! Pretty impressive.
- adamnemecek 13y agoThis is the first time I've seen gif-like videos used in a news article.
- farnsworth 13y agoAnother step closer to Harry Potter style living portraits in the news. Some day we'll be good enough at building a 3D scene from a video or a bunch of 2D pictures that we'll be able to animate the scene and the people in various random ways rather than just looping a video clip.
- tomphoolery 13y agoThe Onion is gonna get really interesting once that's all developed.
- easy_rider 13y agoI do feel it's a bit distracting from the content for me; not every picture is gif-like, and I found myself scrolling to animated ones. I'd like to know how 'average' people would like the content presentation, from a reader standpoint, not a hacker standpoint.
- rogerchucker 13y agoThe gif made the experience even better for me.
- CamperBob2 13y agoI thought it was pretty tastefully done. It could certainly be abused as an effect, but overall I think this is what 'newspapers' are going to look like in the decades to come.
- gerow 13y agoHuh, for some reason the gifs don't play back Chromium for me (within Ubuntu, at least) but do work from Firefox.
- adamnemecek 13y agoThey are not actually gifs, they are html video tags.
- xal 13y agoWow, the new york times is doing some incredible work. They are really moving the web forward.
- straight_talk_2 13y agoI believe they were RoR early adopters and one of their guys is a leading contributor to ClojureScript.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- creativityhurts 13y agoNot to mention CoffeeScript and Backbone.
- Maxious 13y agoNot to mention d3.
- josephpmay 13y agoThis may look great on the desktop, but its pretty horrible on mobile.
- mynameisvlad 13y agoMaybe because it wasn't meant to be read from a mobile device? Not everything needs to be mobile.
- crgt 13y agoPoint taken, but... "In the US, 67% of mobile internet users surveyed by Decision Fuel and On Device Research in November 2012 said they mostly or only used mobile, as opposed to the desktop, to go online and surf the web." Read more at http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Do-Internet-Users-Divvy-Up-Their-Desktop-Mobile-Web-Time/1009841#z3DGsDCzJOCmS5PO.99 http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Do-Internet-Users-Divvy... If your goal is to connect with people, then ignoring the mobile experience for the sake of optimizing the web experience may be to miss the mark...
- mynameisvlad 13y agoBy your own source, news and media is only 5% (/4% as part of the table below it) of mobile use. This would fall into that category. Furthermore, I get the impression that their definition of "mostly or only" means more than 50%, which is not the most helpful. It'd be more helpful to do a category-based breakdown for that, which will probably see desktop usage being higher than mobile for news/media.
- crgt 13y agoRight - so, the stats say that there are a lot of people using mobile devices to surf the web, many of whom are using mobile almost exclusively. A fraction of the time those users spend on the web is spent on news sites. Does the fact that those mobile web users split their time across different destinations really lead you to believe it's not worth optimizing for them?
- zrail 13y agoI want more! Why is it just one section!?
- kiba 13y agoDid anybody thought of the black market site "silk road" rather than the actual Silk Road before clicking on the link?
- sehr 13y agoTo be fair though, it's been the only silk road in the news for the past few years.
- easy_rider 13y agoI'd like to think I knew what the "real" Silk Road is, but I'm afraid that I would not answer this question correctly in quiz setting.
- marcusramberg 13y agoWho is Marco Polo?
- bross 13y agoSome guy they yell about in swimming pools.
- drcode 13y agoGood, maybe this "name clash" will prevent the illicit silk road from getting so much MSM attention (I say this because I think bitcoin has a lot to of very positivie things to offer and SR distracts from this.)
- dwaltrip 13y agoThe War on Drugs is a misguided failure
- lnanek2 13y agoHaha, yes. This wasn't the new one at all. Badly titled article, although it did get me to read when I wouldn't have otherwise.
- cm2012 13y agoWow, I really wanted that to continue the path all the way to Europe. Really just a treat to use. The smoothness of the "gif-like" images just smashes typical video in my mind.
- chime 13y agoThey're called http://www.reddit.com/r/cinemagraphs http://www.reddit.com/r/cinemagraphs
- cm2012 13y agoThanks for that
- modfodder 13y agoActually, they're just really nice high quality animated gifs (someone below analyzing the source states that they are actually video, which is possible). A cinemagraph is a still photo that has one (or few) moving parts of the image, typically in a near seamless loop. A cinemagraph is a bit more involved to create than a gif, requiring at least some basic compositing.
- aw3c2 13y agoThey are webm videos, really nice.
- look_lookatme 13y agoI'm being served h264 encoded HTML5 video embeds: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-road/assets/media/loading_970.mp4 http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-ro... The file size is 874k. If it were an animated gif of similar quality, the file size would be massive.
- chenster 13y agoWow, won't it be awesome if there's also background sound??
- 13y ago
- cocoflunchy 13y agoIt's great to try new formats, but the experience is completely broken on my now-slightly-aging Windows laptop. I wish web developer/designers would test their pages on regular hardware instead of 27" iMacs or rMPB... The scrolling is horribly lagging, and the gifs/videos are all black: http://prntscr.com/1gq4he http://prntscr.com/1gq4he http://prntscr.com/1gq5b6 http://prntscr.com/1gq5b6
- emilyst 13y agoI have to wonder, which browser?
- cocoflunchy 13y agoChrome latest... Maybe something's wrong with my computer?
- veemjeem 13y agoWorks great fine over here on my 4 year old windows machine. Maybe it's time to do the annual windows reinstall...
- Cthulhu_ 13y agoWhat annual Windows reinstall? As far as I'm concerned, that's a thing from a decade ago. I haven't done a Windows reinstall (or even had a virus scanner) in years without any hitches.
- nemothekid 13y agoLooks like a problem with your graphics card driver.
- rsingel 13y agoI watched on a 5 year old Mac in Chrome. Looked great to me.
- 13y ago
- dclusin 13y agoIt seems to me like we're finally witnessing the birth of a 21st century news paper. The New York times has always been well regarded for it's journalism. Now we're starting to see what can be accomplished when a credible journalism outfit is complemented by equally credible digital designers.
- RockyMcNuts 13y agoThe actually appointed a 'Snowfaller in Chief' http://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2013/07/12/new-york-times-appoints-sifton.html http://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2013/07/12/new-york-...
- sliverstorm 13y agoThank god. IMO the "Snow fall" article was the best thing I've seen come out of journalism in many years.
- nathos 13y agolink to the "Snow Fall" article: http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/ http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/
- nl 13y agoWow.. WOW. That's how written news should be done.
- robflynn 13y agoThis also reminds me of something similar at The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/may/26/firestorm-bushfire-dunalley-holmes-family http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/may/26/fire... I thought it was very well done.
- Cthulhu_ 13y agoAnd yet, I can't see this being developed into something regular; I mean, artfully done as this is, eventually they're going to want to make money.
- Ellipsis753 13y agoI actually disliked this page design. The image and text always faded to black before it went off the top of the screen. I am in the habit of moving text to the top of the screen to read it. It kept vanishing as I did so meaning I'd have to move the text I wanted to read down to the middle of the screen. Did this not happen to anyone else?
- caretcaret 13y agoYou're meant to read the text alongside its picture, and the text is viewable when the picture is on screen.
- Ellipsis753 13y agoThat makes sense but it's just not how I read. I just kind of skim through while scrolling the whole time. I find this page really difficult to read which is kind of annoying. Still if it's good for 99% of people then fair enough. I do like the little lines linking to locations on the right.
- ansimionescu 13y agoI hate being forced into consuming content in a specific way, but this page was very well done.
- jstanley 13y agoI had a similar problem. My screen is too tall to be able to get the bottom picture to fade in properly.
- btilly 13y agoTime to trot out trivia. As the article points out, the Silk Road faded in importance in the 1400s. But it doesn't say why. There were three major reasons why it faded. The first was the final fall of Constantinople in 1453, ending the last remnant of the original Roman Empire. This made trade with Europe harder. The second was the development, initially by the Portuguese but followed by others, of direct sea routes to India, and then China, which bypassed the much more expensive land routes. The third was the opening up of the Americas as potential sources of commodities. The result was a long-term economic and military decline of areas like the Middle East. The extent of which was not realized by the West until Napoleon conquered Egypt.
- davidw 13y ago> long-term economic and military decline of areas like the Middle East It put in motion the long-term decline of the Venetian Republic, as well, which made most of its money trading with the middle east. Interestingly enough, this also led the Venetians to focus a bit more on their land conquests in northern Italy, so there are some areas that received more attention at that point: swamps drained, villas built, and so on, which made sense, with trade drying up. My wife comes from a town that really came into being in the 1600's, which, for Italy, is fairly late, all things considered. Prior to that the area was a malarial swamp that was not of much interest to people.
- straight_talk_2 13y agoSome of my grand-grand-...-parents moved from Venice to England around that time, together with many other families.
- omegant 13y agoAwesome, how are you able to know that, is there any clear branch of your family that is traceable to that time or just by locating your last name´s origin?
- mmanfrin 13y agoThe decline of Venice has less to do with the decline of the Middle East and more to do with the rise of the Ottomans -- whose conquest of Constantinople shuttered a 2-century long dominion of the Bospherous (and the substantial trade thereof) by Venice. Additionally, Mongol incursions at the north end of the Black Sea made the increasingly-expensive trade with the Ottomans very expensive. On top of all that, the agitation of the Christian West to the Islamic East put Venice in a very tough situation -- one that engendered hatred from both sides and filed down the richness of that international trade they had labored centuries to build.
- niico 13y agoWow, now thats taking journalism to a whole other level.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoI thought this route was financially impossible. Looks like I'm proven wrong.
- jowiar 13y agoThis is a pretty sweet/different use of D3. If you poke through the source, you end up with this file: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-road/c7c8fdcb0190b05ef1c7d5efe8c5b6de20a96e52/data/slides.tsv http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-ro... In addition, d3's scales are used to set up the variable-rate scrolling (see kazak.interaction.scroll function).
- hippich 13y agoI see mentions of security, but from pictures it is just few men without any (visible) weapon most of the time. Even given these men, i believe on a so long distance, there are many desert places, where nobody is present. Question - how such a valuable shipments protected against someone, who will try to disconnect few cars, crack open 'em and steal all these laptops on trucks?
- Cthulhu_ 13y agoWell, with security forces, of course. I'm also pretty sure that, outside of required stops for customs offices, these trains will just keep on going. And third, that crime and hijacking isn't actually as big a risk or common happening as people may think.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoKazakh steppes are not your wild west and laptops are not gold bars. First, local populace isn't used to enterpreneural crime with complex schemes. They can surely steal a few devices out of unsealed container, but huge planned robberies involving material goods is not something I've heard of. Imagine you disconnected a few cars, they stand on one-track rails in the middle of steppe with no roads or buildings to be seen anywhere. What do you do with them? And even if you figure out how to make them disappear, what's your recipe for getting laptops (that are swiftly losing resale value) out of the country? By rail? :) If course you can try leveraging corrupt Kazakh government, but this time it won't work because you just kicked their puppy, the country's future. Time will come for wild train robberies if the traffic is indeed to reach millions of containers annually, but right now it's like trying to steal Mona Lisa during the open hours. And guards, I bet they protect the train from stupid random incidents (camels, drunk tractor drivers, etc).
- jamesdelaneyie 13y agoThat soviet train tracking system looks beautiful. Wouldn't mind that on the wall of my office.
- damian2000 13y agoPretty old school, and the fact it still works after 20+ years says something... they must have good maintenance engineers working there.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoThey have maintenance engineers who have no choice but to keep it working because nobody is going to replace it :)
- guard-of-terra 13y agoPre-computer, pre-plastic industrial interfaces generally look beautiful. You can see actual graphic design that went in. See for example http://www.tema.ru/travel/dubna.2009/ http://www.tema.ru/travel/dubna.2009/ near the bottom of page.
- haberman 13y agoWow, the presentation of the photos really made an impression on me -- it's just like Harry Potter. It's amazing that even after almost 10 years of YouTube, having video presented to you in a slightly different way can give you a feeling that you're experiencing the future.
- mmanfrin 13y agoIt's strange to think that within a decade we will probably have electronics to a point where we'll read moving-picture stories like this on paper-like devices -- straight out of Harry Potter.
- kabdib 13y agoAre you being snarky? They were randomly greyed out and then just black for me.
- brentm 13y agoAgreed. I personally find very short high quality video with no sound to be more pleasurable to view than short videos with sound. The first few times I used Vine I had my phone on vibrate and thought it was so smart of them to not include sound. Of course Having sound is nice sometimes but when you're browsing a bunch of short videos I think the sound kind of ruins it. Not to mention it's harder to produce a quality 6 second video if you need to account for what the viewers are going to be hearing too.
- D9u 13y agoThis reminds me of the book "Danziger's Travels." http://www.nickdanziger.com/index/books/danzigers-travels/ http://www.nickdanziger.com/index/books/danzigers-travels/
- DaniFong 13y agoAmazing!
- Fice 13y agoGreat use of HTML5 video! These clips are in WebM, what is shown in browsers that don't support it?
- arjie 13y agoThey have MP4 as well.
- Fice 13y agoFirefox DOM Inspector showed that each <video> tag has one src attribute pointing to webm file while I expected to see separate <source> subtags for webm and mp4. It turns out that the video tags and other content are inserted by JavaScript.
- mitchty 13y agoExactly what you'd expect: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-road/assets/media/tank_970.mp4 http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-ro...
- dmazin 13y agoThis is pretty much how the future of photojournalism was imagined. The only difference is that it's not on magical video paper, which isn't that far away anyway.
- EGreg 13y agoI thought they were writing an article on the Tor-hidden network that is home to tons of black market transactions
- dirktheman 13y agoI was suspecting a story, well, the other Silk Road. I was pleasantly surprised by both the journalistic value of the piece and the excellent presentation. I'm on an iPad, and the images and scrolling map worked flawlessly. Superb!
- joshfraser 13y agoI appreciated the keyboard shortcuts to jump through the pictures. Loved the attention to detail here.
- cclogg 13y agoIt's interesting seeing all of the random things that North American companies do around the world that we (in general) have no idea about.
- pmorici 13y agoIt's a nice design but the article seems like a puff piece to me. Is this really the future of newspapers? Nice graphics combined with a folksy story about transportation trends in the shipping industry?
- moocowduckquack 13y agoWell, a puff piece on an interesting detail of the transport industry combined with illustrations could have featured in a major newspaper at any point in the past hundred years, so is more of a continuation than anything else.
- WasimBhai 13y agoPakistan and China are also planning a railway network between China's eastern provinces and sea port in Karachi. Coupled with the above, this can create rail routes between the Europe, east and the far east, i.e., India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore. Amazing.
- runn1ng 13y ago...and I was expecting an article about buying drugs through BitCoins. Oh well.
- lnanek2 13y agoGood job NYTimes designing another high quality story site. This is what the coder community should have made instead of an exact clone of the last one that caused so much trouble.
- pcl 13y ago7000 miles in 18 days is 16 miles per hour on average. The article mentions that the trains move at 50mph, but doesn't say if that's the max speed. But regardless, even if we assume 40mph average, that's a lot of time sitting around not moving at all. I wonder where that time is spent, and how much more of it can be removed from the process. It's presumably largely customs checks, which seems like a straightforward problem to optimize.
- Sanddancer 13y agoThe gauge breaks are probably a rather significant part of that. Having to offload the cargo, move it to a different set of tracks, load it back up, and then repeat at the other end of the broad gauge tracks adds up to a rather large amount of time. I imagine you could probably shave off at least a day or two if you didn't have to deal with that part of the issue. Furthermore, there are almost certainly a number of places where you'll have to decouple and recouple the cars to a new locomotive when you cross country borders for various nationalistic and tractive reasons. Finally, you have to factor in time spent during crew breaks, crew changes, fueling the train, etc. To speed things up, you'd need to convince the former soviet republics that going to standard gauge is a good investment for increasing trade in and through their countries. Additionally, you'd need to convince various nations to sign trackage rights and operation rights agreements so you don't need to change locomotives at every border. After all that, then you can start worrying about customs agreements, which would not be that significant of a delay compared to all the other logistics of transporting things over long stretches of rail. It's just time consuming almost by definition.
- NKCSS 13y agoToo bad the video's are very glitchy here on Chrome; black screens, having to scroll up and down various times before something loads; the snow article a while back was a lot better technically.
- ww520 13y agoOT: Nice article and nice pictures, but hijacking the up/down arrow keys is a really bad UI design. You don't know what are all the screen sizes out there and changing the behavior of the up/down arrow keys make viewing the pictures very frustrating on a smaller screen computers.