Rough Drafts

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

While I was on vacation, a feature story I wrote earlier in the month got published on Wired. It’s about the technological progress in CMOS imaging chips, and why the tech is making it possible, for the first time, to record video on a digital single-lens reflex camera. Photographers are really exci

I’m angry enough about the prospect of a stupidly conceived financial industry bailout that I wrote the following letter to my state Representative, Jackie Speier, as well as Senators Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Barack Obama and John McCain. I would have sent a copy to Rep. Barney Frank as well

Today’s debut of the T-Mobile G1 is the first public appearance of an almost fully-baked consumer "Googlephone" — a phone based on Google’s Android operating system. There’s just one problem: There is no Googlephone. And that’s something Google must fix, and fast, if it wants its mobile operating sy

The mobile industry offers enormous opportunity right now for entrepreneurs who can create excellent user experiences. And doing that doesn’t require a degree in rocket science or access to high-end technology. Startups like Jaiku and Twitter have created huge communities of excited, engaged followe

The sun was rising behind the hills over Crystal Springs reservoir this morning at 6:20am, but you couldn’t see it yet. There was just enough light to brighten the overcast sky and to make the threaded wisps of mist rising off the slate-dark water stand out clearly. But the day hadn’t properly begun

This was one of the more absurd assignments I’ve volunteered for recently: I covered a press conference in Palo Alto today where a trio of men claimed to have found a Bigfoot corpse, and produced blurry photos in an effort to substantiate their claim. What’s worse, my own photos of the press confere

Living online, it’s easy to get overloaded. Tools designed to simplify communication, like Twitter and Facebook, somehow wind up turning into extra inboxes you have to keep an eye on lest you miss something. RSS feeds proliferate and multiply. Channels of communication that once seemed intimate (IM,

O’Reilly’s annual Maker Faire is happening this weekend, May 3 and 4, 2008, in San Mateo. It’s a festival of do-it-yourself (DIY) culture, and is a chance to see just how creative people can get with soldering guns, welders, circuit boards, old bicycle parts and lots of propane. That’s just for star

This is one of the most difficult stories I’ve edited in a long time: How Good People Turn Evil, From Stanford to Abu Ghraib. Kim Zetter did the interview with Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist who is famous/notorious for his 1971 “Stanford prison experiment,” a psychology study in which some students

10. You’re not a real person, and you’re just following me as a way to get me to check out your spammy Twitter page and then click through to your adult dating site. 9. Egregious self-promotion: You post tweets about every single blog post you publish. I already have an RSS newsreader, ok? 8. You […

At Wired, we’ve been experimenting with what we loosely call “open source journalism” in a variety of ways. What we’re learning is that there’s a fairly natural flow from quick blog posts to more fully-cooked news stories, and it works something like this. A reporter finds out about a breaking news