Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.
Anybody who has read Penn & Teller’s “Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends” won’t be surprised to learn that the comedian-illusionist duo has come up with a new foolproof trick that anyone can do with their iPhone.
Though still pending approval by Apple, Penn Jillette was in San Francisco at the TechCrunch 50 conference, talking up Penn and Teller’s new card-trick app, in which they appear to be able to guess cards remotely.
As school starts again, there’s so much more for a parent to nag about. Homework. Bedtime. Lost hours on Facebook and Xbox.
The 140-character limit of Twitter posts was guided by the 160-character limit established by the developers of SMS.
People are increasingly using their mobile phones for tasks previously performed by a computer. So it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that cyber bad guys are turning their attention to the devices.
The majority of people who send text messages on Twitter are male, according to a study released by Nielsen Mobile, a mobile market research company.
URL shortening services have been around for a number of years. Their original purpose was to prevent cumbersome URLs from getting fragmented by broken email clients that felt the need to wrap everything to an 80 column screen. But it’s 2009 now, and this problem no longer exists. Instead it’s been replaced by the SMS-oriented 140 character constraints of sites like Twitter.
Yesterday, New York-based start-up incubator Betaworks raised $2 million in funding for its URL-shortener project, Bit.ly, and spun it out as an independent company.
No corner of modern American life is untouched by technology. And no technology is more transformative than the Internet. The simple reason for this is that the Internet is, at bottom, a communications network, and communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world.
Pam Zingeser’s youngest daughter Julie texts at home, at school, in the car while her mother is driving. She texts during homework, after pompon practice and as she walks the family dog. She takes her cellphone with her to bed. In one busy month, Pam finds, her youngest daughter sent and received 6,473 text messages. For Pam Zingeser, the big issue is not cost but the effects of so much messaging.
Hate on the kiddies and their SMS speak all you want, but text messaging is taking off among the masses. AT&T has released data from two studies it recently commissioned, showing that both families and romantic partners are using SMS more and more to communicate.
This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."
We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.
The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.
That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.
So here is exactly what we do: Read more »
Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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