Web/Tech

Come to think of it, it's been so long ago that I can't even remember when:

"When Is the Last Time I Wrote a Letter?"

I could have gone all year without reading this:

Not that it's anything we think the New York Times Company should do, but we thought it was worth pointing out that it costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead.

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Some common sense from a guest columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Obama will need all the help he can get in managing the presidential workload. It hardly seems in the public interest to deprive him of communications devices and productivity tools that millions of Americans take for granted in their own lives. Does Obama really have to give up his beloved BlackBerry? I think not.

Not that I want my president to be spending countless hours obsessively e-mailing with his BlackBerry, but this has always bothered me:

For security reasons Barack Obama was initially told he would need to give up his mobile.

Or maybe not. Apparently the president-elect is feeling a bit too constricted inside the presidential bubble, which is understandably tightly controlled by the Secret Service.

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I'd don't know why it's so stress-relieving to whack a penguin, but it is -- very soothing. Careful, it's very addictive. (Click the yeti to get him ready, then click again when the penguin seems to be in the strike zone.) Play them all! (I especially like the golf version called Faliming Drive.)

The Indiana Debate Commission is giving itself a well-deserved pat on the back for the three gubernatorial debates it sponsored this year. For a first-time effort, it went remarkably smoothly, in large part because of the cooperation recieved from the candidates. I found this interesting:

A total of 2,868 people attended the hour-long debates around Indiana, while 2,826 visited the debates that were posted and archived online.

Holy cow:

 YouTube is by far the world's biggest stage for online video. But in some ways Hulu is stealing the show.

With critical plaudits and advertising dollars flowing to Hulu, the popular online hub for television shows and feature films, YouTube finds itself in the unanticipated position of playing catch-up.

I love this sentence from the piece about the Internet generation being lousy jurors: "Orality is the crucial ingredient of the adversarial system." Really rolls off the tongue. Anyway:

In a speech, Lord Judge of Draycote, the Lord Chief Justice, said it might be better to present information for young jurors on screens because that is how they were used to digesting information.

This Editor & Publisher article makes it sound like The Associated Press is going through a small rough patch. I think it's bigger than that -- technology is passing by the whole model AP uses:

Now, THIS is cool:

Researchers have demonstrated a flexible television screen which could result in people folding up their computer and putting it in their pocket.

The design could be used for television and posters, as well as computers, while it could also pave the way for the development of newspaper display technology which would allow readers to upload daily news to an easy-to-carry display contraption.