A nicely done feature on the closure of the last player-piano roll manufacturer. One machine dates back to the 1880s when it was used to make shoes, and for the past 100 years has made the tabs with brass eyelets used to hook the roll into a piano. There are also aging machines to perforate…
A former student writes: I need to find a simple book that sort of explains the trends of Web 2.0. Nothing too techy, but something that would talk about what makes it special, what people are doing with 2.0, and the best ways to utilize its philosophies. Basically, my company is moving towards plenty of…
Let’s face it–each new stage in life brings dramatic changes that are difficult to anticipate. No matter how smart you can be in college, you will still get surprised by the working world. I faced these surprises myself. I thought the working world would be hard since it lacked the freedom I had at Stanford. I was wrong.…
Should local papers get a slice of the bail-out pie? Nicastro and fellow legislators want the papers to survive, and petitioned the state government to do something about it. “The media is a vitally important part of America,” he said, particularly local papers that cover news ignored by big papers and television and radio stations.…
From the LA times, a reminder to get all those family videos onto disc. I talked my father into buying a Betamax way back when. The tapes were smaller, and the quality was better, but the format didn’t stick. Now it’s VHS’s turn. After three decades of steady if unspectacular service, the spinning wheels of…
I read on Metafilter that publicists for the upcoming movie Coraline have sent beautiful hand-crafted boxes to 50 bloggers. I just finished reading the Neil Gaiman / Dave McKean book (not quite as good as their The Wolves in the Walls, but creepily delightful nonetheless) to my kids last week, so I was curious. Absolutely…
This came up in my feed reader today. Like me, this gamer prefers stories to mindless shoot-em-ups, and laments the current state of commercial gaming. There’s a lot of hipocrysy in the minds of many gamers today. Almost every gamer I talk to tells me they want games with depth, carefully written storylines, and maginificent…
Crapwrap, for a personal touch. Bored of perfectly folded paper and exquisitely tied ribbon? Fancy adding a more ‘personal’ touch this year? Then why not have your Christmas presents CrapWrapped™ at Firebox. This exclusive, uniquely shoddy gift wrapping option involves us wrapping your pressies in a slapdash fashion.
The Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News (both owned by the same corporation) have announced another nail in the coffin of print journalism. Home delivery will be available on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. Subscribers will have access to an electronic “e-edition” seven days a week as part of their subscription. This “e-edition” allows you…
For decades, TV journalists have worked in teams, with the lines of responsibility regulated by union rules or simple tradition. Stories were covered by a crew consisting of a camera operator and a correspondent (and further back, by a sound or lighting technician); their work was overseen by a producer and their footage assembled into…
Philipp Lenssen at “Google Blogoscoped” spotted a change in Google’s panorama map interface, and asked me to weigh in. Since a recent Google Maps Street View update, Google shows the wording “Report a concern” at the footer of their panorama photos (in older versions, a text for this elsewhere was reading “Report inappropriate image” –…
Increasingly, creative types are harnessing what I’ve begun to call “the T-shirt economy”–paying for bits by selling atoms. Charging for content online is hard, often impossible. Even 10 cents for a download of something like Red vs. Blue might drive away the fans. So instead of fighting this dynamic, today’s smart artists are simply adapting…
“Anchors and journalists have become part of self-reverential celebrity culture. Everything goes back to ‘me.’ It’s driven somewhat by technological and economical change. Still, I haven’t seen them pulled kicking and screaming into this,” said Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University. “Anchors can be bigger stars…
More and more users are spending more and more time on social networking sites, but the study found they aren’t very responsive to ads there: Clickthrough rates were reported to be far lower than at other sites. On the web in general, nearly 80 percent of users clicked on at least one ad in the…
“The message behind every movie and book, behind every theme park and T-shirt is that our children’s world needs Disney,” he says. “So they absolutely must go to see the next Disney movie, which we’ll also want to give them on DVD as a birthday present. “They will be happier if they live the full…
My AT&T long-distance calling card ran out of minutes, so I decided to try to renew it. I checked the website and saw these terms: Minute value applies to state-to-state calling only. A surcharge not to exceed 10 minutes applies to U.S. pay phone calls, a portion of which compensates pay phone providers. One minute…
Via a thought-provoking Metafilter item: The only way to save journalism is to develop a new model that finds profit in truth, vigilance, and social responsibility. The old model was beautifully simple. A newspaper publisher in a monopoly market in the twentieth century was like those counts of Savoy who built a castle on the…
How long has this been around? I just noticed it. Google’s user interface is so streamlined that any change at all is noteworthy. I haven’t had the chance to play with it. I’m not sure how much I want my own biases to affect Google’s search results, so I’m going to have to read up…
Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams. We’d encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms. I never did get around to sampling Lively, since the initial reviews I…
Motringate? Mommygate? An ad on the Motrin home page, aimed at moms who carry their babies in slings, has upset hordes of mom-bloggers who use the social networking service Twitter. The best analysis I’ve seen so far is by Joyce Schwartz (known for coming up with the idea of putting missing kids on milk cartons),…