Rough Drafts

Xian approvingly quotes this lucid comment by Peterme, regarding this week’s Berkeley J-school panel on weblogs: “In these kinds of discussions, the question, “Are weblogs journalism?” inevitably comes up, demonstrating how people confuse form and content. Weblogs are a form (not a medium… the Web i

“There was a loop with journalists, businesses, advertisers, readers,” says John Battelle. “Magazines in the late ’90s were not rewarded for doing negative stories. Everybody’s stock portfolios were going up, and what sold magazines were positive stories about the geniuses that were making everybody

Side by side illustrations of covers from Vanity Fair, Vogue, Playboy, and even Good Housekeeping prove the point: magazine covers ain’t what they used to be. (thanks, BoingBoing)

Sergey Brin, one of Google’s founders, tends to stay out of the limelight. That’s why I was so interested to see Jon Udell’s summary of Brin’s talk at the InfoWorld Web Services conference. Udell asked Brin about RDF and the semantic web — here’s what he said: “Look, putting angle brackets around th

I wrote a feature for CIO Magazine about intrusion detection systems. (alternative URL from the tweney.com archive)

eWeek reported earlier this month on a new library built, with HP’s help, in Cerritos, Calif. It’s loaded with Internet connections, places to set up your laptop, info kiosks, and “intelligent building” features. “We wanted to create a library everyone would enjoy as a gathering place for the commun

I’ve moved things around on my site, so everything that was formerly www.tweney.com is now dylan.tweney.com — including this weblog (whose new address is https://dylan.tweney.com/weblog). Please update your bookmarks & XML syndication links. NOTE: I believe that webmasters should do everything in th

posthoc, Susan MacTavish Best’s outstanding San Francisco guide, is back — and now it’s a weblog. SMB and friends have been posting restaurant reviews and other SF related goodies for a few months now. Down to earth, opinionated, entertaining reviews of where to eat, drink, relax, have fun: All grea

Now you’re talking, Walt: Mossberg reviews Roomba, a robotic vacuum cleaner (subscription required). This little guy, shaped like a UFO, rolls around on your floor in random patterns, bouncing off of obstacles, vacuuming as it goes. There are some drawbacks: Bits of string and such can choke it, and

Who wants to hire a weblogger? I have no idea. But just because I don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. That’s why there’s Weblogs4Hire, a site where you can, well, hire webloggers.

There’s a very thoughtful debate between Scot Hacker and Sean Graham about the significance of weblogs. My horribly reductive summary: Graham says, what’s the big deal? Weblogs are not significantly different from other forms of media. Hacker argues that actually, there’s a lot that’s new: “Self-pub

Printing tip: If you’re recycling paper by printing on the backs of old press releases, white papers, other printouts, etc — make sure you separate any stapled pages before running them through your laser printer.