Rough Drafts

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.

WordSpy uncovers such useful neologisms as metrosexual and corporate anorexia. A new word every day, with definitions and a serious attempt to discover the word’s earliest usage. It’s scholarly and fun!

My latest column for Business 2.0 talks about the risks of leaving laptop data without a backup. You do back up your laptop regularly, don’t you? Sure you do. (This is a little late making it onto my blog, but hey, I was busy celebrating my birthday.)

Data Extinction: “Paper documents last for hundreds of years, but more and more of what matters to us is digitally produced, and we can

Jeremy Allaire, cofounder of Allaire and now a Macromedia executive, gives a glimpse of what his company is working on: Client-side tools, based on Flash, that enable real-time collaboration. His demo is a little obscure but seems to be a tool for real-time collaborative database design — i.e. two o

The EFF has new bumper stickers for all you consumer rights / fair use activists out there, with slogans such as “Fair Use Has A Posse” and “MP3 Is Not A Crime.” Nice. (thanks, BoingBoing)

Ray Ozzie: We need to prepare for, and to embrace a whole new generation of system and application software that leverages our computers and networks specifically and tangibly to increase our interpersonal productivity and agility.

One difference between this recession and the last one: This time, it’s ordinary workers who are getting the ax, while the bosses’ jobs are protected. “American workers making less than $50,000 per year have seen their chances of being downsized increase 43 percent in the last two years,” says a pre