A piece in today’s Guardian attracted my attention–“SideWiki Changes Everything”—as I thought, perhaps, it might shed new light on Google’s browser sidebar that allows anyone to add comments to a website whether or not the website owner wants them to. The piece calls the evolution of SideWiki a “seminal moment”. The column itself, however, is … Read more
I’ve written before about how traditional media appears to be debasing itself in a desperate bid for eyeballs. That example was the IHT. This time it’s the WSJ (I declare an interest: I’m a former staffer and still undertake projects for them.) Yesterday’s online Journal has a piece by one Mark Penn, opining about blogs: … Read more
I was amused, and somewhat perplexed, to read on BuzzMachine yesterday about a bizarre splog—spam blog to the rest of us—which copies text and then converts it to synonyms. Jeff explains: New splog tricks In my ego searches, I just saw a splog that copied text of mine but ran it through ridiculous almost-synonym replacements. … Read more
The Wall Street Journal’s holiday gift guide is out. My contributions, some of which would be familiar to regular readers: Sleeptracker Pro $179. A successor to the Sleeptracker which I wrote about a couple of years ago (Sandman’s Little Helpers, Jan 13, 2006), the Pro is a watch which monitors your sleep patterns — more … Read more
As most of you who follow this kind of thing, the overseas editions of the Wall Street Journal are switching to a new format. This includes The Asian Wall Street Journal, my immediate paymaster and primary home to the Loose Wire column. More news as I hear it.