Learning to make things changes how we understand and consume those things.

When I started reporting the news as a teenager, I read the newspaper differently. When I learned to play guitar in my ’20s, I listened to songs differently. When I first played around with desktop video editing… Read full post »

As I mentioned, I’m beginning to explore the e-book universe. One thing I’m going to do is post links here as I find them. Hope that’s useful. I’ll be posting soon with a compilation of all the suggestions I received for sources and authorities in this field. Thanks for those!… Read full post »

A miscellany today: Amazon’s Kindle for the Web, WordPress’s new Offsite Redirects feature, and a little complaint about iTunes.

• Kindle for the Web
  Kindle for the Web lets you embed a chunk of a book onto a Web page. I thought it would be a fun thing to experiment
… Read full post »

You know those Facebook phishing hacks — the ones where someone gets control of your account and sends phony messages to your friends? “I’m stuck in London! Send money quick!”

I kept thinking of that phenomenon as I watched The Social Network this weekend. Because what… Read full post »

The Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy and sobering piece this week about how the rise of the e-book is altering the landscape of the publishing industry. It was not, on the surface, a happy picture for authors:

The digital revolution that is disrupting the economic model of the book

… Read full post »

I don’t think I’ve ever taken Technorati’s annual blogger survey before, but the company’s annual reports have usually been a useful source of information, so when I got an email inviting me to respond I took a few minutes to do so.

I began to think something was off… Read full post »

Storify is a new service for building on-the-fly curated “stories” out of disparate elements like Tweets, Flickr photos, Facebook postings and so on. It’s in beta now; I gave it a whirl just now. I’m embedding my first Storify story here.

I couldn’t figure out how to add… Read full post »

You’ve probably heard by now that Mike Arrington has sold TechCrunch to AOL. Congratulations to him and to AOL, which has bought itself some talented people, some good traffic and no doubt some headaches down the road.

This paragraph in Arrington’s explanatory post jumped out at m… Read full post »

Craig Silverman had a fascinating column last week about changes that Slate has made in its corrections policy in the wake of an embarrassing dustup with Politico. Here’s Craig’s pithy summary of this bizarre Escher-esque episode (which I also wrote about at the time):

In July, Slate pub

… Read full post »

As the beleaguring of traditional news organizations continues, newsrooms are actually growing elsewhere. You may have noticed that places like Yahoo, AOL and the Huffington Post are all hiring these days — and they’re hiring, um, actual journalists.

Yesterday we learned that New… Read full post »

This is a long post describing a phenomenon I’ve been observing for a decade and a half. Here is the summary:

You know the blood-brain barrier? It’s what protects your sensitive brain tissues from harmful substances in your bloodstream.

Our media system has its own version of this… Read full post »

“Don’t they fact-check this stuff?”

This is the perennial cry of the outraged reader and the wronged article subject. The latest party to raise the fact-checking howl is the White House, which yesterday went public with its discontent over Forbes’ ludicrously poisonous new cov… Read full post »

One of the great fears about the Web as it becomes our primary source of news is the notion that it rips stories from their moorings and delivers them to us context-free. We’re adrift! In a flood of soundbites! Borne upon a river of bits! Or something like that.

I’ve… Read full post »

For all of you out there in media-land who still think that the iPad represents salvation for old business models and who welcome the App Store as a new platform for distributing content, I recommend a reading of Apple’s new App Store Review Guidelines as helpfully summarized by Daring Firebal… Read full post »

One day, immersing myself in my reading was simple as breathing. The next, it wasn’t. Once I had happily let books consume my days, with my head propped up against my pillow in bed or my body sprawled on the floor with the volume open in front of me. Now I… Read full post »

One of the humble yet essential uses of the link is to help us avoid having to repeat what others have already said. I make no great claim to novelty for my “Defense of Links” series; much of what I said, others had already expressed earlier this year when Carr first… Read full post »

In the 1980s I worked as a theater critic. I spent a lot of time in expensive Broadway theaters and ambitious nonprofit repertory companies. But some of my most memorable experiences were at street theater events by groups like the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theate… Read full post »

This is the third post in a three-part series. The first part was Nick Carr, hypertext and delinkification. The second part was Money changes everything.

Nick Carr, like the rest of the “Web rots our brains” contingent, views links as primarily subtractive and destructive. Links d… Read full post »

Part Three of “In Defense of Links” coming later this week! Some little stuff in between:

• I have begun an experiment in crossposting some of my stuff over at Silicon Alley Insider/Business Insider. Same writing, grabbier headlines! As it is, my posts appear here, and then also at Open
… Read full post »

This is the second post in a three-part series. The first part was In Defense of Links, Part One: Nick Carr, hypertext and delinkification.

The Web is deep in many directions, yet it is also, undeniably, full of distractions. These distractions do not lie at the root of the Web’s… Read full post »

For 15 years, I’ve been doing most of my writing — aside from my two books — on the Web. When I do switch back to writing an article for print, I find myself feeling stymied. I can’t link!

Links have become an essential part of how I write, and also… Read full post »

I don’t normally do guest posts. This is an exception. My friend Bill wrote this earlier this month after Congress’s effort to pass the most minimal energy legislation collapsed. If you haven’t already read it at TomDispatch or Huffington Post or 350.org, here’s another chanc… Read full post »

I had such a great time at South by Southwest last spring talking about blogging that I threw my hat in the ring again for next year.

My idea this time: “The Internet: Threat or Menace? – a guided tour through two decades of tirades, fusillades and rants against the Internet,… Read full post »

An odd moment during the Facebook Places rollout last week has been bugging me ever since.

From Caroline McCarthy’s account at CNet:

Facebook not only wants to be the digital sovereignty toward which all other geolocation apps direct their figurative roads, it also wants to be the Web’s

… Read full post »

I was on vacation for much of the last couple of weeks, so I missed a lot — including the self-immolation of Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Apparently Schlessinger was the last public figure in the U.S. who does not understand the simple rules of courtesy around racial/religious/ethnic slurs. (As an… Read full post »