An economic crisis changes the way you think about gadgets. Is a $400 game console bundle really what you want to be spending your hard-earned money on, considering that you could be out of a job in six months?
Maybe not — though we’re sympathetic to the idea that the recently unemployed might need to [...]

I’m quoted in Folio magazine’s annual survey of editors and publishers, making an uncharacteristically wild-eyed prediction about how great things are going to be in 2009:

In 2009, we’ll see even more magazine startups, as entrepreneurs with funding (or un-maxed-out credit cards) seize the twin opportunities of cheap journalistic labor and lower competitive barriers to start [...]

1968: Computer scientist Douglas Engelbart kicks off the personal computer revolution with a product demonstration that is so amazing it inspires a generation of technologists. It will become known as “the mother of all demos.”
The presentation included the debut of the computer mouse, which Engelbart used to control an onscreen pointer in exactly the same [...]

Link: Gallery: 40 Years of Mighty Mice
Link broken? Try the Wayback Machine.

Forty years ago Tuesday, a Silicon Valley engineer named Douglas Engelbart made a presentation so influential that computer scientists now call it "the mother of all demos." More than a mere product demo, it was a down payment on an ambitious idea: that networked computers could help groups of people work together more effectively, raising [...]

1894: Norbert Wiener is born in Columbia, Missouri. A child prodigy, he goes on to become one of the 20th century’s most famous mathematicians and the founder of the discipline of cybernetics, the study of self-regulating systems.
Norbert’s father, Leo Wiener, was a lecturer (and later professor) of Slavic languages at Harvard University, where the family [...]

As the publishing industry collapses, it’s becoming clear that both journalists and public relations people need to change the way they work.
Amazingly, it’s still possible to find journalists throwing hissy fits about email blasts or blacklisting PR people for showing insufficient deference. This kind of behavior might have been understandable a few years ago when [...]

If anyone doubted the power and importance of online social networks, the election of Barack Obama should have put that to rest.
Much has been made of the Obama campaign’s use of the internet as an organizing, fundraising and marketing tool. The core of that strategy was a social network, MyBarackObama.com, which probably now qualifies [...]

Imagine that news stories and blog posts could be tied to a geographic area. If lots of news publishers and bloggers did this, you could:

Search Google News for stories from a specific neighborhood, like “Hyde Park in Chicago,” or a general region, like “within 50 miles of Three Mile Island.”
Find all the blog posts about [...]