Front Page Printed Pages of the Internet Just before taking stage at SXSW to talk his crowdfunded Internet 2012 tour, Alexis Ohanian emailed out a link to his new book, Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed.
Since you asked, Mr. Ohanian, we dig the cover, but “without their permission,” sounds a little iffy in the context of Reddit’s Creepshot scandal, no? Read More
At the New York Times, a trend is not a trend until it happens to a New York Times columnist.
For roughly a year now–almost six months since I wrote a wildly popular column about it for The Observer–Facebook has been pushing an utterly duplicitous and embarrassing business model.
The scheme: Facebook Read More
Yesterday night, Vine, the video-clip sharing app Twitter acquired back in October, held its launch party at Marquee. Yes, that Marquee. DJs spun above a lighted sign with the hashtag “#party,” and users obliged by Vine-ing the experience.
There was the meta-Vine of people Vine-ing at the Vine launch. And, because Read More
Google announced a campaign this morning that would allow non-developers to score a pair of Google Glass by tweeting a missive about what you’d do with the specs along with the hashtag #ifihadglass. The whole thing quickly devolved into a bunch of bad Twitter jokes. But techies, it seems, are pretty desperate to get their hands on Glass. Read More
Between Nick Bilton’s business section cover story and the Wall Street Journal‘s Foxconn follow-up, it was hard to miss this weekend’s agitprop about the inevitable iWatch. According to Dan Lyons, that’s exactly how Apple intended it. That stock slide isn’t going to manipulate itself!
Mr. Lyons traced the start of Apple’s whisper (in a reporter’s ear) campaign back to TechCrunch blogger, investor, and Apple stock holder MG Siegler, who called the time it takes to pull an all-serving computer out of his own pocket ”insane.” That was followed by an impromptu treatise on the iWatch’s ability to “fill a gaping hole in the Apple ecosystem” from Cupertino’s former interface designer. Read More
News of the first annual Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day swept across the web this morning following an article penned by one of the event’s founders, gaming and social media reporter Leigh Alexander. “From booth babes to harassment, snide comments to double standards, women have often had a hard time feeling comfortable around the tech industry,” she wrote. In order to demonstrate ”the absurdity of objectifying people you claim to agree with or support intellectually,” she’s encouraging female tech writers to give gendered compliments or make sexist proclamations to men about their work.
Though the actual Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day isn’t until February 1st, Betabeat–comprised primarily of female writers–could hardly contain ourselves. Here are 25 gendered comments for 25 of our favorite male tech writers. Read More
Early this morning, a pro-WikiLeaks op-ed purporting to be penned by former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller cropped up online. It was a stunningly convincing piece of web fraud, its design practically identical to the New York Times‘s own homepage, with every link leading to an actual Times article or section. The only hint that it wasn’t real was the URL: instead of showing as nytimes.com/pages/opinion, it read “opinion-nytimes.com.” It’s a tiny difference, but a monumentally important one.
The article itself, which staunchly defends WikiLeaks and the importance of qualifying it under the First Amendment, is certainly stylistically similar to the real writings of Mr. Keller. Some of the wording is rather clunky, but that seems to lend the piece the impression that its message was so dire that it was written in an emotional hurry. The faux article tries so hard to be convincing that it even borrows wording from an email Mr. Keller wrote recently to GigaOm about WikiLeaks. Read More
Everything is square at Square’s San Francisco headquarters, reports Nick Bilton at Bits, including the bowls and the tables and the rooms and the people. “If Willy Wonka built a financial institution, instead of a chocolate factory, it would look something like Square,” Mr. Bilton writes. The company’s office is open-air and glass, with nowhere to hide; a design that is meant to encourage trust and transparency among employees at a company eager to establish its brand as a trustworthy financial institution. ”Employees are even referred to as Squares,” Mr. Bilton writes. Guess it’s better than being called a twit?
Transparent, square, and white. Yep, sounds like bankers.
Wonder what Saul Hansell, founding editor one of the founding bloggers at the The New York Times Bits blog who subsequently went to AOL, then Huffington Post, and now betaworks, is feeling now? The Times tech blog is blossoming into a bi-coastal blog empire with writers in Seattle, San Francisco and New York, and just announced expanded coverage including a weekly column and daily newsletter and simplified, uber-webby, un-Timesy new logo.
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