Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)
Oh, those clever birds at Twitter. When the microblogging service announced recent changes to its terms of service, its executives knew exactly how to spin the news.
Some of my critics have noted that I’ve been writing a lot lately about the pros and cons of developments that so far exist only in science fiction, such as warp drives for spacecraft and head transplantation. Why don’t you write about something that actually might happen?, they chide me. My response: Let’s see if you like this week’s topic better. Should we be better prepared for a flesh-eating zombie attack?
Few could imagine a more chilling tale of depravity than the story that has emerged over the last few days concerning the kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard.
President Barack Obama again took to the Web to spread his message, launching a new section of the White House’s site Monday to counteract some of the criticism of his plans for a national health-care system.
Twitter Inc., the fast-growing microblogging service, was inaccessible Thursday morning, struck by a “denial-of-service” attack, the company said on its status blog.
“We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly,” the company said in a blog post shortly before 11 a.m. EDT, Thursday.
When I read the news on TechCrunch that Valleywag’s longtime editor, Owen Thomas, was leaving the gossip site, I wondered whether there was a bit of schadenfreude in this reporting.
Even a few years ago the word “blog” inspired that peculiar mix of derision and dismissal that seems to haunt new media innovations long after they’re proven. A blogger was a lonely, pajama-clad person in a dark room, typing out banal musings he mistook for interesting ones, to be read by a handful of friends or strangers if they were read at all.
A discussion that began on a journalist’s personal blog has sparked a wider debate on ethics in the age of social media as the lines between journalists’ professional work and their personal activities blur.
I’m not entirely sure that MySpace co-founder Chis DeWolfe enjoyed our encounter at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. I spent half an hour suggesting that MySpace just wasn’t cool anymore. To his credit, he didn’t lose his cool–just kept on insisting I was wrong to suggest that he’d been left standing by Facebook.
Los Angeles has long been known as a one-industry town–the movies. And so it came as no great surprise when two of my closest friends announced their intention to get their German shepherd, Heidi, into show business. Heidi soon became the star of her own Los Angeles Times blog.
The newspaper is dead. You can read all about it online, blog by blog, where the digital gloom over the death of an industry often veils, if thinly, a pallid glee. The Newspaper Death Watch, a Web site, even has a column titled “R.I.P.” Or, hold on, maybe the newspaper isn’t quite dead yet. At its funeral, wild-eyed mourners spy signs of life. The newspaper stirs!
Kanye West’s Twitter, a catalyst in the iTunes sales war between the rapper and “Comedy Central” host Stephen Colbert, allegedly isn’t even West’s own Twitter account. Taking to his blog this weekend, West posted, “I don’t know anything about this…This is not me!!!”
For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before.
Aug. 12 began as a hot morning in Aylesford, Kent, England, only to be followed by a powerful thunderstorm in the afternoon. Meanwhile, the blackberries were beginning to redden. Aug. 12, 1938, that is. The observations were made by George Orwell, whose copious diaries are now being published every day in blog form, exactly 70 years after they were made.
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