The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy

Civil Comments

May 21st, 2010

Civil Comments

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…

May 16th, 2010

Newspaper Asks Readers to Stop Buying Print Edition

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…

May 15th, 2010

Privacy, Facebook and the Future of Publishing

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…