Archive for the ‘technology’ Category
Posted by andreaitis on March 27, 2009
Another illusion shattered. All those celebs twittering? Well, some of them are Cyrano de Twitters. I can’t wait for the outcry from authentic star twitterers who will look down upon those outsourcing their twittering.
And, no matter what, please don’t tell me the_real_shaq is not the real Shaq. Surely a fake Shaq couldn’t Twitter like that.
Britney Spears recently advertised for someone to help, among other things, create content for Twitter and Facebook. Kanye West recently told New York magazine that he has hired two people to update his blog. “It’s just like how a designer would work,” he said.
It is not only celebrities who are forced to look to a team to produce real-time commentary on daily activities; politicians like Ron Paul have assigned staff members to create Twitter posts and Facebook personas. Candidate Barack Obama, as well as President Obama, has a social-networking team to keep his Twitter feed tweeting.
The famous, of course, have turned to ghostwriters for autobiographies and other acts of self-aggrandizement. But the idea of having someone else write continual updates of one’s daily life seems slightly absurd.
via When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May Be Lurking – NYTimes.com.
Posted in technology | Tagged: britney spears, Celebrities, Shaq, Twitter | 4 Comments »
Posted by andreaitis on March 26, 2009
Now we know things are really, seriously bad.
Make it official: Google’s not immune from the bad economy and plummeting ad market. We’ve been hearing for weeks that Google would have layoffs. Google is cutting 200 employees today, the company now confirms.
via Confirmed: Google to Lay Off 200 Employees.
Posted in technology | Tagged: google, layoffs | Leave a Comment »
Posted by andreaitis on March 26, 2009
Posted in technology | Tagged: Twitter | Leave a Comment »
Posted by andreaitis on March 25, 2009
A crafty editor made a tin foil snuggie for his iPhone to stop the dreaded buzzing. Now, if only we can find a solution for people who insist on chattering incessantly in public restrooms. No matter what they’re doing, no matter who else is around. Must be a LOT of world-changing life and death situations because, otherwise, they’d obviously say “I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”
Miss Manners, have we learned nothing from you all these years?
The buzzing is caused by an increasingly common gremlin: radio wave interference. In our case it happens when our cellphones get too close to our desk phones, which we’re using to talk to one another.
One day recently, David came to work with tin foil and folded it around his iPhone. Lo and behold, we could talk without David having to scramble to move his iPhone away from the desk phone when the buzzing started.
via Stopping That Dreaded Cellphone Buzz – Gadgetwise Blog – NYTimes.com.
Posted in technology | Tagged: Cell phones, etiquette, Public, Restrooms | Leave a Comment »
Posted by andreaitis on March 20, 2009
Call it a browserout.
Listen up, Microsoft: We’re mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it anymore! I can barely find enough time to whine about IE7 issues, let alone IE6. There are pros and cons, of course…but this is a direct shot in the browser war. Will IE6 go down?
Ultimately, the long tail of obsolete browser usage is nothing new: it’s just the level of standards in the rest of the current leading pack that causes frustration when IE6 looms into view. “IE6 is the new Netscape 4,” reasons Jeff Zeldman, one of the main guys responsible in the 1990s for beating browser makers with the standards stick until they started to play ball. He considers that in a perfect world, designing with web standards means not needing to exclude any browser or device. “But in practice, the hacks needed to support IE6 vis-a-vis display and behaviour are increasingly viewed as excess freight. Like Netscape 4 in 2000, IE6 is perceived to be holding back the web. How much longer we prop up this ageing browser must be decided on a case-by-case basis. Not every site can afford to dump it today, but the writing’s on the wall.”
via Bring Down IE 6: Calling time on IE6.
Posted in technology | Tagged: IE6, Internet Explorer, microsoft | 1 Comment »
Posted by andreaitis on March 20, 2009
San Francisco Gate columnist Mark Morford sums up the recent future-of-news thinking from the geek gurus. His conclusion, like theirs: no one really knows what will be. But he imagines the perfect media mashup. Here’s to having it all.
Maybe the emerging media model — if “model” is, in fact, the right word and not, say, “mind-numbingly fickle and infuriating hellspawn Charybdis noisemaker” — will have it all: the best aspects of experimental social networking (Shirky), a rich variety of voices (Winer), journalistic expertise where you need it most (Johnson), lots of solid credibility surrounding an inspired social narrative (um, me), a glorious new gadget to read it all on (Apple) — and, most importantly of all, huge numbers of active, engaged readers and communities willing pay for it all.
via Die, newspaper, die? / The geek gurus all weigh in on the end of dead-tree media. Are they wrong?.
Posted in journalism, technology | Tagged: Clay Shirky, dave winer, media, news, Steven Johnson | Leave a Comment »
Posted by andreaitis on March 19, 2009
Dave Winer was at the forefront of blogs, RSS and podcasting. His take on the state of journalism is a bit different because his perspective is inside out, but the inside is from the tech side rather than the print side. So, to his point, we are not at the beginning of the Journalism transformation. Technology has been leading us here for quite some time. And where will we go? It’s kind of like porn: we’ll know it when we see it.
In 1994 we didn’t know what the new journalism would look like, and we still don’t, but we knew some essential elements, perhaps the essential element — the sources go direct. It’s the thing the Internet does to all intermediaries, it disses them. It happened to travel agents, realtors, classified ads, all kinds of shopping, and it’s happened to news too. Permalink to this paragraph
As with everything new, to see it you have to jump out of your skin and look at the situation from the new body, not the old one. Imagine what news would look like once the limits of the past are erased by the technology of the new. It’s been knowable for many years, but some didn’t want to look. But if you did look, as millions, if you weren’t one of the gatekeepers; rather you were one of the people they gates were meant to keep out — there was no problem seeing how it would shape up. Now we’re there, we’re not at the beginning, we’re already far along.
via The reboot of journalism (Scripting News).
Posted in journalism, technology | Tagged: dave winer, journalism, media | Leave a Comment »
Posted by andreaitis on March 19, 2009
Yes, that’s judgmental. Especially considering I haven’t even tried Microsoft’s latest browser upgrade. But, seriously, have you used IE7?
A friend said to me just yesterday: “Internet Explorer is the bane of every CSS developer’s existence.”
So many people using it just because it’s a convenient default browser does not a good product make.
So, with trepidation (and some cautious notes from Walt Mossberg) I will test it out and report back.
IE8 is more stable than IE7, more compatible with industrywide Web standards, and packed with new features that improve navigation, search, ease of use, privacy and security.
Some of these features can’t be matched out of the box by its main rival browsers. For instance, related tabs are color-coded, the search field can show images along with text, you can get instant fly-out maps of place names in Web pages, and you can easily hide your tracks online from the prying eyes of advertisers.
But, in my tests, IE8 wasn’t as fast as Firefox, or two other notable browsers — the Windows version of Apple’s (AAPL) new Safari 4 and Google’s (GOOG) Chrome. IE8 loaded a variety of pages I tested more slowly than any of the other browsers, and it grew sluggish when juggling a large number of Web pages opened simultaneously in tabs
Microsoft Ups Ante With New Browser | Walt Mossberg | Personal Technology | AllThingsD
Posted in technology | Tagged: browser, IE8, Internet Explorer, microsoft | Leave a Comment »
Posted by andreaitis on March 12, 2009
Hulu launched a year ago to critical acclaim. Well, first it was surprise that NBC and Fox could actually launch a joint project at all, and then it was shock that the joint project was actually pretty good, and then came the critical acclaim. Now they’re adding social features, and taking a run at YouTube’s domination station. To quote Jeff Jarvis: WWGD?
Now, though, users can add each other as friends, use their Facebook and Gmail (via OAuth) credentials to find new friends, recommend shows to each other, and leave messages on Facebook-like walls. The features are an important addition to a site that is primarily focused on mainstream content, especially since one of Hulu’s few long-time criticisms since its inception was a lack of social interaction. Now, the site is poised to give TV.com and YouTube, both giants in terms of video-related communities, a run for their money.
Hulu unveils social tools, aims for Internet TV domination – Ars Technica
Posted in technology, video | Tagged: Hulu, youtube | Leave a Comment »
Posted by andreaitis on March 12, 2009
Shooting up the charts…number one with a bullet.
He’s a journalist and musician who wrote and recorded a first-person song, “Copy Editor’s Lament,” about a copy editor being laid off.
“AP Stylebook is my bible/Helped me stop a suit for libel/But nothing ensures my survival now/And I don’t know what I’ll do/After I’m through/Killing my last adjective,” he sings.
Poynter Online – Centerpieces
Posted in Newspapers, technology | Tagged: copy editor, post dispatch, song | Leave a Comment »
de.tech.ting 