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Culture
Gnomedex 9.0: Tech Conference Looks Deeper at Social Media
SEATTLE -- I am here attending the geekfest of geekfests called Gnomedex. Its name is a play on the old tech conference Comdex, which ironically doesn't exist anymore. Coming here is a throwback to my time as a pure tech journalist going to conferences such as Macworld and the Consumer Electronics Show. But what's interesting is that even in...
more »NewspaperShift
I am delighted to have the opportunity to be the new "print correspondent" for MediaShift. Every two weeks or so I will be reporting, discussing, opining and answering comments about how new print technology can help untangle some of the problems facing newspaper companies and the future of journalism. Newspaper companies are looking for ways to profit in a new...
more »Education
Experimentation (Not Stagnation) Should Flourish at J-Schools
Some journalism academics may be even more scared of new technology and more resistant to change than the worst print "dinosaurs" working in media today. But Web 2.0 has made getting online so simple that there are no more excuses for being disconnected. While some reporters see journalism education as a potential refuge from the rapid pace of change in...
more »Embedded Report
Journalism Grads Need Basic Skills Plus Openness, Flexibility
At journalism schools, professors like myself are trying to figure out what we should be teaching students so they can succeed in the newsrooms of today and tomorrow. At the recent Online News Association annual conference in Washington DC, I posed that question to some of the brightest minds in the media, from editors to professors to entrepreneurs. The advice...
more »Guides
The iPhone is the first cell phone offered by Apple Computer, combining its popular iPod MP3 player with a multi-touch-screen smartphone with web browsing. Apple CEO Steve Jobs played the tech world's wizard as he unveiled the iPhone on January 9, 2007 at the Macworld conference, where people lined up to gape at an early version of the phone behind glass.
more »Philosophy
A Moment of Unplugged Zen Poolside
The sun is beating down on me through hazy clouds and cool breeze. I'm sitting in a metal pool chair, perched at the edge of the water, with my feet dangling in. There's a fake palm tree nearby, giving me some shade and a spray of water to cool me.
The scene is far from quiet, as this is a sprawling kids swim park, with children of all ages swarming about, climbing stairs and coming down slides. Water is spurting all around, from water guns attached to turrets, from PVC pipes that open with the tug of ropes, from a very large bucket that sits atop the slide and pours out over everyone from time to time. As I watch my son and his cousins go up the stairs and down the slide, up the stairs and down the slide, up the stairs and down the slide, I slowly reach a state of quiet solitude.
more »NewspaperShift
Post-Mortem on the Multimedia Boot Camp
For five and a half days, a group of mostly newspaper journalists (with a few broadcasters and non-profit folks thrown in) took an intensive boot camp multimedia training at UC Berkeley through the Knight Digital Media Center. The idea was to learn as much as possible about shooting and editing video, capturing and editing audio, building Flash animations, doing...
more »PhotoShift
Cheap Editing Tools a Boon for Media Makers
Video, photo and music editing used to be only accessible through complicated and expensive hardware, and software programs such as Avid for video, Photoshop for images and ProTools for audio. But now a vast array of online tools and cheaper software are letting amateurs and pros polish up their work without spending any money. In addition to being free,...
more »Weblogs
Blog Pundits Certain About Steve Jobs' Keynote
After the stunningly bad predictions by pollsters, pundits, commentators and anyone who graced a cable TV news studio before the New Hampshire Democratic primary, we decided to turn a fake news source, the fictional Online News Network (ONN), to tell us what Apple CEO Steve Jobs will tell everyone in his much anticipated speech tomorrow morning. The following is...
more »Philosophy
Converged Devices Doesn't Mean Fewer Devices
In the last blog post, I looked at the 14 messages of new media, one of which was convergence. In today's blog post, I'd like to focus on convergence and hybrid technologies, which characterize today's new media. Let's begin by exploiting a McLuhan technique known as the laws of media, in which we identify what a new medium enhances, obsolesces, retrieves and reverses into Hybrid technologies enhance convenience, obsolesce many individual devices, retrieve the Swiss Army knife, and reverse into clutter.
more »Digging Deeper
Widgets, also known as gadgets or mini-applications, are small software programs or HTML code that people can embed onto social networking pages, blogs or computer desktops. Examples include the iLike music widget for Facebook, the MyBlogLog widget to see a blogger's current audience, and the NPR Addict widget to hear favorite radio shows streamed from your desktop. There are even widgets for mobile phones, including Apple's iPhone.
more »Digging Deeper
Sunlight Foundation Mixes Tech, Citizen Journalism to Open Congress
When people talk about corporate cutbacks in mainstream journalism organizations, there's almost a fervor about how our very democracy is in jeopardy because of the failings of Big Media in holding our government accountable. What such critiques fail to consider is that as citizens we can and will hold our government accountable, with or without the media apparatus. One...
more »We Media 2007
How Technology Can Help a Conference Succeed
I am back from the We Media conference in Miami, but I am not done reporting on what took place there, and how the conference helped clarify the role of "we media" or citizen media in society. While I spent the last couple blog posts savaging the parts of the conference that got under my skin -- most notably an underlying theme of Big Media showing they "got it" -- it's also worth writing about the good parts of the conference. (As a former writer of humorous satire, including a newsletter called "3-Minute Roast" and a CNET column called "Skewer," I obviously gravitate toward the negative before the positive.)
more »Your Take
Has the promise of converged devices been fulfilled, and do you want that?
For so many years, we've heard about the promise of convergence, the idea that various technological platforms and features will be built into multi-functional devices. So you'd have the cell phone and personal digital assistant in one handheld device. You'd have Internet surfing on your TV or you could watch TV on your computer. And while we've had the first and maybe even second generations of such converged devices as WebTV and the Treo, the third generation was in full display at the recent CES and MacWorld expos. Dan Fost of the San Francisco Chronicle boldly stated that "the long-awaited promise of digital convergence was fulfilled" at those shows. Do you agree that digital convergence is finally here? Do you think these devices are helping us to do more with less? And do you even want convergence to happen or do you prefer to have more devices that do one thing really well? Share your thoughts in the comments below and I'll include the best responses in the next Your Take Roundup.
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