Time Warner is recruiting its subscribers in its battle over programmers fees. Will it make a difference? Likely not, except fees will probably increase. Hot Hardware.
Archive for: November, 2009
Nov. 27, the new “V”
The remake of the 1980s miniseries, V, is quite good. I discuss on TV Tyrant.
Nov. 27, #FollowFriday
This being Thanksgiving weekend and all, I thought I’d do a Follow Friday this week on people I’m thankful to have met met solely due to Twitter.
I have to admit, I had my doubts about Twitter before I started using it regularly. I was tripped up by the “what are you doing?” prompt and couldn’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would care what I was doing. Hell, I barely cared.
But as I started following interesting people and reading what they had to say and share, I began to realize how useful – and cool – Twitter actually was. There are a few folks I’ve met through Twitter whom I otherwise never would have had the good fortune to run across. I hope I someday get to meet them all in person.
• AYoungOne: Anna Young and I spent months debating when to get an iPhone. Should we wait for the 3GS? Should we just take the plunge? What apps should we try? Despite the fact that she’s a USC Trojan (I still haven’t gotten over the 1996 Rose Bowl, sorry!), I love our chats, even if they have nothing to do with the iPhone. For the record, I waited and got the 3GS, she didn’t.
• Kcecelia: Katherine C. James has accepted my … enjoyment of bacon and run with it. She is as likely to @ me with a photo of something relating to The Other White Meat as she is to discuss her Duwamish roots (an American Indian tribe) in Seattle. Talk about a diverse Twitter stream. She’s lots of fun to talk to and just good people.
• PaulZink: I couldn’t tell you how I got to chatting with Paul Zink; I can’t rightly remember. But I do know that every time I see an @ reply from him, I know it’ll be on target, amusing or both. He has a wry sense of humor and changes his avatar with a frequency that can only be called “often.” He is basically a pinko commie, so don’t follow him if you use the #tcot hashtag a lot.
• MWTapp: Michael Tapp. He used to be @ragebotsdigg, but in a fit of sanity one day decided to change it to his name. I got to chatting with him one night when #HarryPotter was trending. We endeavored to get #HarryPotterHate trending, but apparently we were in an extreme minority. Part of the problem, I suppose, is that neither of us actually hated Harry Potter, either. We just really couldn’t give a crap about the young wizard and his misadventures. We just wanted to get it trending for the heck of it.
That’s it for my Follow Friday this week. There are some other folks I’ve met specifically through Twitter, but I’ve either already #FF’d them previously or I have other connections to them, so I thought I’d end here.
As always, please let me know in the comments section if you think there are other people I should be following. Always interested in finding new, cool people to check out.
Nov. 25, Thanksgiving traditions & Kindle power
What are your Thanksgiving traditions? I discuss in a vlog on iMommyTalk.
Battery power for Kindles will get a huge boost when using wireless – even previously purchased Kindles. Hot Hardware.
Nov. 20, children and chores
My Question of the Day on iMommyTalk.com was about how much you let your young children get involved in household chores.
Nov. 18, Bad corporate decisions
My first article for TopTenz.net was about bad – REALLY bad – corporate decision-making.
Nov. 15, Walter Bishop idol worship
Fringe‘s Walter Bishop is the best character ever on television. Really. TVTyrant.com.
Nov. 13, #FollowFriday
I attended an interesting conference at CUNY (that’s City University of New York) this week and got to meet some interesting folks focused on hyperlocal journalism on the web. As someone tweeted during the conference, it was nice to be around a group of journalists (old-school and new) who wanted to find solutions rather than just pointing fingers and complaining about everything.
Trust me, I worked in newsrooms for 20 years and journos LOVE to complain. The fact that there were this many journalists in a room and there were actually people discussing solutions and not just bitching about problems is no small thing.
There were a couple people there who I’ve known for quite some time online but had never met in person, as well as a former colleague and a couple of folks I met for the first time, so I thought I’d do another themed Follow Friday post, “I have met these people IRL.”
• DigiDave: I’ve followed David Cohn online for a year or more now, since around the time he won a Knight Foundation grant for his Spot.Us project – crowdfunded journalism. The project got its first piece published in the New York Times in the past week, no mean feat, and is about ready to launch its second iteration, in Los Angeles (the project started in San Francisco). Dave’s pretty active on lots of social media sites, and our commonality as journalists brought us into the same orbit now and again. He’s really on the forefront of the journalism revolution and is one to watch.
• StandupKid: I’m not sure how I stumbled across Mark Joyella. I think we had some mutual friends and I saw his tweets about the journalism industry, as it implodes around us. But we’ve followed and retweeted each other for months now and it was only a matter of time, I suppose, before we crossed paths in real life, seeing as we’re both in the NYC metro area. So when I saw him tweeting from the CUNY conference, I knew we had to meet up. He’s from the broadcast side of things and is as cynical about the broadcast side of the industry as I am about the newspaper side. He’s always sharing interesting links and observations, definitely worth a look.
• TurkeyMonkey: I still don’t completely know why this is Ted Mann’s online identity, but it definitely is memorable. Ted and I worked together for a while at The Journal News/LoHud.com, before he went off to become Digital Development Director for Gannett New Jersey. One of the few people from the print side of things who got the digital side, he’s unleashed his ideas for hyperlocal journalism on the family of Gannett newspapers in New Jersey. And I now know about SeeClickFix.com because of him.
• SeeClickFix: You know that pothole down the street from you, the one that’s almost destroyed the front axle in your car every day for the past year? If you report it on SeeClickFix, it might actually get fixed. Seriously, you report the problem, people vote on the importance of it being solved – graffiti, potholes, broken signs or traffic signals, whatever – and, apparently, the powers that be pay attention. Cool beans. Met the CEO, Ben Berkowitz, at CUNY.