Archive for the 'Social Media' Category

Blogging Hiatus. Find Me on Twitter.

July 26, 2011

11/24/11 Update: It’s mostly back to Twitter for me. I’ll probably redesign this site sometime in the next year, but for the most part will not be actively blogging.

I am a bit irritated by the newly aggressive ad placement by WordPress.com. I have no control over that and would prefer no ads whatsoever, but WordPress charges for that. I will probably explore other hosting options if I do revive the site.

In the interim, I am more likely to share longer-form content on Google+. Go to my and put me in one of your circles for that stuff. You can also subscribe to my occasional public updates on Facebook, though I reserve friending for actual acquaintances.

Thanks for visiting.

The Public Editor Joins the Cocktail Party

March 13, 2011

Arthur S. Brisbane, the public editor of The New York Times, turned his attention this week to the newsroom’s use of Twitter. He quoted from an e-mail interview with me, which I am posting in full here, with a few tweaks and links.
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‘What Is This Thing Called the Web?’

January 22, 2011

Fifteen years ago today, on Jan. 22, 1996, The New York Times — which already had a news service behind a paywall on AOL — started its free Web site, jolting newspaper publishers and editors across the land to follow suit. A happy birthday tweet prompted me to go on a memory-jogging journey with the Wayback Machine looking for another newspaper site born that month. Back then, I was working for The York Daily Record in southcentral Pennsylvania. The existential headline on this blog post is from an article I wrote for that paper in December 1995, part of a five-day series explaining the Internet. (I had been a computer dabbler since I was a teenager.)

The article is reprinted below, with permission (My favorite line: “Some people believe the Web or some future souped-up version of it will transform society. Others think the accent in ‘hypertext’ should be on ‘hype.’”) The series was later archived on the paper’s rudimentary Web site (logo at above left), a precursor to the now-thriving YDR.com. That site was pushed into the world a bit early, thanks to some bad weather.
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Tweetgeist for Early December

December 11, 2010

Nixon was the president of my childhood. This explains something about my view of authority. http://nyti.ms/hvIyoKSat Dec 11 19:29:34 via Echofon Read the rest of this entry »

Embed Tweet Test, With Blackbird Bookmarklet

December 11, 2010

I’m experimenting with ways to turn Twitter updates into blog posts. This bookmarklet from Publitweet works pretty well. I don’t think it plays well with my particular WordPress template, as there is some stray background HTML code I have to delete, but the final effect is what I’m looking for. The bookmarklet is an express version of Twitter’s Blackbird Pie tool, pioneered by @robinsloan, one of the many cool Twitter folks I’ve gotten to know in the past year or two. I am using it in the latest version of Firefox.

Readers Crave Certainty, but Life Is Complicated RT @johnmcquaid The existential paralysis of NYT headlines http://j.mp/gv6XaYSat Dec 11 03:39:33 via Twitterrific

A Ride to Kaffe 1668 for Los Volcanes

July 18, 2010

One July weekend, I had the opportunity to combine two of my favorite activities — riding my bike through Manhattan and visiting new coffee shops.

My family was traveling elsewhere, and New York had not yet fallen into the drippy hot torpor that has marked recent days. I rode down the west side a bit, diverted to to the Hudson River trail, then passed through TriBeCa, Chinatown, SoHo and my old East Village stomping grounds before chugging up the East Side — a loop of sorts.

I made a pass by La Colombe Torrefaction, but I had already tried beans from there via B. Koffie, so I decided to check out Kaffe 1668, one of the shops highlighted in The Times a couple of months ago.
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First Week With the Apple iPad

April 11, 2010

Updated April 21, 2010.
The world probably doesn’t really need another iPad review, does it?

There’s a glut out of them out there.

And I’m not a tech reviewer. I’m a gadget nut, so feel free to discount my enthusiasm by the appropriate percentage. After all, I did pre-order this thing sight unseen so it could be delivered on Day One.

So this post will be impressionistic, just some notes on my first week with the device.

First: It’s fast. Snappy. It makes the iPhone and the iPod Touch seem slow. It makes a Macbook seem slow.

Second: The battery life is amazing. You don’t even think about the battery. I plug it it in every night, and have used it heavily many days. It has never dropped below 50 percent.

Remarkable for an Apple product: It doesn’t get hot — unlike my Macbook Air, or my iPhone, which can get uncomfortable to the touch and sluggish with heavy use. I have often thought that Steve Jobs was trying to brand me with his products. No more.
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Considering the iPad as a Kindle Replacement

February 1, 2010

Image Copyright 2010 Apple Inc.You’ve seen the new toy. You’ve seen the experts debate: Will the Apple iPad “save” newspapers, journalism, book publishing? Will it kill the Amazon Kindle? Is this the death of the laptop, and the PC as we know it? Has Apple just signaled the death of the ultraportable MacBook Air? Will it replace smartphones like the iPhone or Nexus One? Has Apple just pwned another media marketplace — sorry Amazon, Google, Microsoft? Goodbye, netbooks? Farewell, computers?

Blah, blah, blah. Nobody knows the future, so such pronouncements are justifiably viewed as so much hype.
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An Opinion About Blue Batak

September 28, 2009

IMG_0116It is a little known fact that coffee improves your objectivity as a journalist. O.K., I’m kidding.

I don’t believe in “objectivity” and usually avoid the word. It sounds like an impossible God-like standard. Most people who use that term are setting up a straw man. I prefer terms like balance, neutrality, fairness. And conventional newspaper journalism can certainly reach conclusions, so long as they are supported by evidence, and qualified.

This just happens to be a topic on my mind and in my Twitter stream. The fairness/objectivity debate is in the air.

I work for a news organization that promises fairness and ethics. Like Buddhist enlightenment and perfection in general, they may not be attainable. The value to the reader comes from aiming for the worthy goal, without fear or favor, bias or prejudice. Even the best newspapers print corrections every day, but they still set accuracy as the standard. We don’t give up because perfect accuracy is unattainable.
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Third-Party iPhone Apps I Actually Still Use

September 9, 2009

IMG_0068 More often than I care to recall, I have impulsively downloaded a fancy new iPhone application, only to have it languish on my phone. That was the inspiration for the first “list of iPhone apps I actually use” last year, after the iTunes store started selling third-party applications.

Since then, the number of new applications has grown rapidly. Now there’s a cottage industry of lists, blogs and podcasts devoted to reviewing applications. Here’s a recent Techcrunch list of the “best” apps, which notes the store had 300 new apps rolling out every day. Here’s a similar post at Gizmodo, which put the total number of apps at more than 74,000. Many of the lists that try to sort out the best applications seem to focus more on flash than substance.

In August, I finally renewed my AT&T contract and upgraded to the iPhone 3GS. It seemed like the right time to reconsider the programs I had loaded onto my phone. Did I actually use them?

Here’s my revised list:
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