An interesting phenomenon explored: Why have journalists, who spent so much time and energy bashing blogs, been so taken with Twitter?
I find the question especially interesting because Twitter seems to have all the bad aspects of blogging and none of its strengths. Smith offers two reasons why he tweets so much despite being paid to blog: Twitter is faster and it is now the dominant medium of online political “conversation”.
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Many people have noticed that the normal rules of etiquette don't seem to apply online. The language is rougher, the spirit meaner, the rules for civility a whole lot looser. It appears that this tendency is only going to get stronger in the future:
I'm not sure if this is a vauable innovation in the political process or a further coarsening of our public life, but it is at least mighty interesting:
Democrats and Republicans in Allen County have unveiled new attack websites targeting the opposition's candidate in the Fort Wayne Mayor's race.
The Republican Party of Allen County created this site: www.therealtomhenry.com
Indiana legislators could soon be using iPads for their legislative work hoping to save on paper.
A legislative study committee members will use iPads given to them by the state Legislative Services Agency and work with them the next two months as part of a test run. The members must provide feedback daily using a suvey the LSA created.
Well, this is better than using them to line birdcases or wrap fishes:
The Internet is delivering a slow death to newspapers, but many of us still have piles of the stuff around the house that a microbe called TU-103 will convert to butanol, a biofuel that is nearly as energy dense as unleaded gasoline.
With the greater availability of cheap recording devices and the growth of the "citizen journalist" movement, there are more and more clashes between authorities and those trying to document their activities.
With Steve Jobs' retirement announcement, a lot is being said about his tremendous successes. But he had a lot of spectacular failures, too, like the Apple I and Lisa. We could learn something by concentrating on those:
Juxtaposition of the day. Saw this piece in The New York Times about why there are no Big Ideas anymore:
We live in the much vaunted Age of Information. Courtesy of the Internet, we seem to have immediate access to anything that anyone could ever want to know. We are certainly the most informed generation in history, at least quantitatively. There are trillions upon trillions of bytes out there in the ether — so much to gather and to think about.
Well, good for him:
Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end street, an Internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an endangered species: the printed word.
Well, I've been hooked both on both cigarettes and the Internet, and this sounds like total and absolute crap to me:
The majority of people feel upset and lonely when they are deprived of access to the internet, according to consumer research.
A new study has revealed that 53 per cent feel upset when denied access and 40 per cent feel lonely if they are unable to go online.
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