Rough Drafts

My feature story for PC World‘s May issue is online, and it’s a doozy. This story has capsule reviews of 101 completely free programs and web-based services. I worked my tail off to write this story, and I’m proud of the result: There’s a lot of great stuff in there. Many props to my editors […]

Andrew Orlowski dishes more dirt on the Nature comparison of Wikipedia vs. Britannica: Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study | The Register “Nature sent only misleading fragments of some Britannica articles to the reviewers, sent extracts of the children’s version and Britannica’s “book of the year” to

This morning, the WSJ ran a story on the Encyclopedia Britannica’s efforts to defend itself against assertions that it’s no more accurate than Wikipedia: WSJ.com – In a War of Words, Famed Encyclopedia Defends Its Turf Here’s the Nature study on Wikipedia vs Encyclopedia Britannica that kicked the w

Ten years ago I wrapped up my studies for an MA in religious studies, and walked out of the academic world. I had spent the previous two years of graduate study (plus much of my undergraduate career) trying to make sense of what people believe, how they organize the world around themselves, and how

Is your first thought when you see this picture, “someone better take those precious replica lightsabers out of the hands of those reckless juveniles”? If your email address starts with “starwarsaddictors” it is.

Scot Hacker posts a picture at he took at SXSW of a dude with a Creative Commons logo shaved into the back of his head. Scot asked the guy for permission to take the picture, and the guy said sure, just so long as you publish your photo with a CC license. It was polite […]

Happiness has a manifesto?! It seems to involve spending time on the BBC web site and watching BBC comedies, which is not surprising given that the manifesto comes from the BBC. Has anyone ever put the words “BBC” and “happiness” in a sentence together before now? Actually the tips are not bad advic

Note: I started writing this post last Fall. Then, all this house construction happened, we got rained out of our home and had to move, and I kind of lost track of the post. It’s been sitting around in my “Drafts” folder since then. Rather than delete it, I decided to finish and publish it […]

Not much. She is the author/screenwriter of Bewitched and Sleepless in Seattle, after all, not an Internet expert. But for some reason, being a popular screenwriter of romantic comedies is enough to get you invited to internet conferences, and so there she was, looking around at a bunch of geeks las

If you’re trying to find me today, you’ll have to wait. I’ve been called for jury duty and I’m spending the day in the cell- and wifi-free basement of the San Mateo County Hall of Justice. There is a wifi network in the jury room, but it won’t give anyone an IP address. I’m going […]

Five hot science and technology stories this week. 1. User-created content. Brush aside the Web 2.0 an “attention economy” hype from ETech and SXSW. What really gets new media companies excited is the idea of user-created content–text, audio, and especially video that ordinary Janes and Joes create

Here’s a great, world-changing idea: Give people camcorders. Let them make movies of human rights violations. Show the videos to the world. Founded in 1992 by Peter Gabriel, this organization is already making waves–for instance, videos showing abuses in the juvenile justice system in California wer