Dylan Tweney

Sometimes words or phrases are so fetching that I just can’t get them out of my head without finding a way to use them myself. I felt that way about “tiny exoplanet,” a phrase being bandied about by the Wired Science crew today, so I wrote a song about it. No music yet. That will […]

1983: Lotus Development Corporation begins selling its spreadsheet application for Microsoft DOS, called 1-2-3. 1-2-3 was not the first spreadsheet application — it was preceded by VisiCalc. But 1-2-3 quickly became the most popular, helping to boost sales of IBM PCs and PC clones, all of which ran

Here’s a snapshot of what I’ve been working on the past two years. Page views on Wired’s Gadget Lab blog, 2007-2008: In the past year, our monthly traffic has increased more than 3x. Gadget Lab is currently the #20 blog in Technorati’s index of the top-ranked blogs worldwide: Gadget Lab Technorati p

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

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 oppo

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 Engelba

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 peopl

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

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 k

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, MyBarackOb

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 a