Posts from ‘January, 2008’

Mark Glaser at PBS has an excellent piece on this topic here.

Here’s a column I did for PR Week magazine: A cliche of business holds that good ideas are a dime a dozen; it’s hard work and investment capital that turn them into businesses. As with most cliches, this one has a solid foundation of truth. But something has changed, and it has profound meaning for […]

Walt and Kara at AllThingsD.com just posted a piece I wrote for them, “Waiting for the MacBook Air Pro” — which begins as follows: Having seen Apple’s MacBook Air notebook computer up close, I’m as dazzled as everyone else who’s had a chance to examine this delicious piece of industrial design. Dazzled doesn’t translate to […]

Nice. Consumer Reports and the Center for Media and Democracy have created Full Frontal Scrutiny to focus public attention on the people and organizations who function in our society as hidden persuaders. You’ll find them at work posting to blogs, speaking before city councils, quoted in newspapers and published on the editorial page, even sponsoring […]

UPDATED Demo is probably the longest lasting of the tech conferences, justly so. Each year a host of companies — 77 this time — demonstrate their products on a stage in front of several hundred technology folks including venture capitalists and other investors. There are occasional triumphs. I was in the audience at this gathering […]

Adrian Holovaty and his team at EveryBlock (subtitle: “A News Feed for Your Block”) have launched in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. This is a solid start to a project that has enormous potential. Congrats to all…

There are plenty of reasons to wonder about citizen media’s business model. One, which I’ve talked about many times here and elsewhere, is the tendency of site owners to rely on free labor. The method goes roughly this way: “You do all the work and we’ll take all the money, thank you very much.” People […]

Look at the covers of Time Magazine’s current edition: The rest of the planet gets a pointer to a thoughtful series of articles about globalization and mega-cities that have changed with the social and economic times. Americans get romance. (To be fair, the article is quite good.) Because, apparently, we are too shallow to buy […]

I’m on my way to the DLD Conference — it stands for Digital Life, Design — in Munich. The gathering is held each year by the folks at Hubert Burda Media, one of the most forward-looking media companies on the planet. The conference is always fascinating, and this one has the look of an especially […]

The New York Sun, often an entertaining read, published a commentary by one Conrad Black, identifying him in the tag line in this way: Lord Black is the author of “Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full” and “Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom.” True, I guess, but of course it’s missing the most salient […]