In my May 15th blog entry, “Privacy, Facebook and the Future of Publishing,” I looked at the recent brouhaha (haven’t used that word in awhile) over Facebook’s info-grab from its “more than 400 million active users” (as Facebook crows on its depressing stats page). Today Facebook Inc.’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, published an [...]
What are the two worst things about the comments sections in online news outlets for articles and (even worse) for blogs or other opinion pieces?
The first is that contentious topics draw so many comments that you would need a day or two to read them (assuming you would want to). The lead article on The Huffington [...]
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It’s Sunday, so a good day to keep blog entries light and fun. I should save serious for weekdays.
I bought the June 2010 issue of ConsumerReports the other day. The inside back cover has a regular offering called Selling It: Goofs, Glitches, Gotchas featuring humorous reader-submitted illustrations of products and promotions that perhaps never should [...]
Missed this gem by Canadian comedian Rick Moranis in Friday’s New York Times.
The issue of privacy, confidentiality, identity theft and…what else am I forgetting…has been haunting the public since long before the web. The web’s capacity to amass truly vast amounts of identifiable personal information, both on a voluntary basis and on a surreptitious one, has greatly heightened concern about these issues. A number of stupid, careless and [...]
My friend Bob McArthur recently wrote to me, “Am nearing the end of Chris Hedges Empire of Illusion…a dark and angry book about the rotting from within of North American culture.” Later he sent an excerpt, which itself contained an excerpt from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show [...]
Scribd is the largest social publishing company in the world. It has more than 50 million readers each month. Tens of millions of documents have been published on the site, containing over 100 billion words. Until today those tens of millions of documents have been published using Adobe’s Flash. Starting today, they will be published [...]
In a post last week on Mashable, Stan Schroeder reminds us that the first video uploaded to YouTube was on April 23, 2005. “The video is titled ‘Me at the zoo,’ he noted. “It was shot by Yakov Lapitsky and it’s only 19 seconds long, showing one of YouTube’s founders, Jawed Karim, at the San [...]
Please read my previous post to catch up on the story thus far. Last Thursday Steve Jobs lobbed the big grenade with a major public attack on Adobe’s Flash. On Friday Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan replied via a 15-minute video interview with Alan Murray at the Wall Street Journal. Shantanu is gracious and assured, even [...]
