By Kelly Faircloth 7/10/12 7:00am

Linkages

Hakuna matata, guys! (Photo: flickr.com/jolieodell)

Booting Up: What’s Eric Schmidt Up to These Days? Edition

Now that he’s no longer CEO, how does Eric Schmidt spend his days? Well, he’s become really interested in expanding Google to “wacky countries — you know, countries that have problems.” [Foreign Policy]

The FTC is patient: After a minuscule fine for noncooperation with that StreetView investigation, Google is close to coughing up $22.5 million for tracking Safari users. [Businessweek]

The Pentagon wants some cybersecurity legislation. [Washington Post]

The Atlantic is welcome once more on Reddit, the beehive’s point having been made. [The Daily Dot]

Is poor, beleaguered Microsoft facing Surface manufacturing troubles? [ZDNet]

Meanwhile, the Kindle Fire is slimming down to face its newest foe. [PC World]

By Kelly Faircloth 6/27/12 1:38pm

Survey Says

America! (Photo: flickr.com/cristian_rh7)

Alarming: A Lot of Young Adults Consider the Internet A Moral Influence

It’s election season, which explains the higher-than-usual incidence of poll-pegged stories we’re seeing in our inbox. And hey, guess what? The Internet now has cultural relevance beyond enabling politicians to send citizens pics of their junk.

And so The Atlantic wound up with a couple of interesting little factoids, as part of its massive state-of-the-union study (co-commissioned by the Aspen Institute). The most alarming? Lots of youths are letting the Internet influence their ideas about morality.

From a post summing up the results:  Read More

By Jessica Roy 6/13/12 4:30pm

Spam Wars

(Source: Flickr.com/kinopix)

Reddit: Ban on Businessweek and The Atlantic Is Temporary

Seems like the folks over at Reddit don’t take too kindly to spammers. The Daily Dot reports that at least five news source domains, including some media heavyweights like The Atlantic and Businessweek, have been banned from Reddit. That doesn’t just mean employees at those companies can’t post links–it means that users can’t post links that include atlantic.com or businessweek.com domains. Read More

By Jessica Roy 5/09/12 10:25am

Meme Studies

(knowyourmeme.com)

A Meme is a Mirror, and When You Look Into It You See Yourself

“Are LOLCats Making Us Smarter?” asks a link-baity Atlantic headline that actually has nothing to do with the article it accompanies. The short answer: No, but that didn’t stop the Atlantic from writing a think piece about memes anyway.

As a graduate of NYU’s Gallatin school, where students design their own bizarre, mostly pretentious majors, this reporter is not really surprised that people are now writing dissertations about the cultural impact of LOLCats. After all, hasn’t social media researcher Danah Boyd essentially built an entire career around intellectualizing Internet topics otherwise deemed too 4chan-ish? Read More

By Steve Huff 4/07/12 4:43pm

Antisocial Media

SlaterHearst

The Atlantic’s Social Media Editor Busted For Spamming Reddit

Media outlets should have learned a lesson when Village Voice Media got caught spamming Reddit and basically had to grovel for the Mechagodzilla of link aggregation sites’ forgiveness, but they didn’t. We know this because the Daily Dot ferreted out a new spammer, no less than The Atlantic‘s social media editor, Jared Keller–a.k.a. “SlaterHearst” during his time pimping Atlantic articles to the Redditorati, a.k.a. “redditors.” Mr. Keller’s skullduggery was revealed to Daily Dot by finding him on OK Cupid, where he used the same screen name, describing himself as an “Attempted journalist” and “lover of new ideas.”

As “SlaterHearst,” Mr. Keller was a highly successful redditor until the site banned him last month: Read More

By Steve Huff 2/22/12 4:46pm

Tumblr

tumblr

Tumblr Experts Say Tumblr-Ready Things About Tumblr At Social Media Week

According to Tumblr experts (look for a course in becoming one at your local DeVry soon), Tumblr is something like an unholy hybrid of Twitter and WordPress and quite possibly the future of humanity. Or, more seriously, the future of print.

We exaggerate–but there was a shiny, glittering feel to The Next Web’s report on last Friday’s “Let’s Get Ready to Tumblr: Building community by reimagining and redistributing your content.” The panel was part of Social Media Week and featured Tumblr notables from Buzzfeed, Flavorpill and The Atlantic. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 11/25/11 10:15am

Holidays

update-thumb-615x353-70107

Happy Update Your Parents’ Browser Day!

The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal hit a nerve when he named this Thanksgiving “Update Your Parents’ Browser Day.” Lifehacker threw up a post, “How to Switch Your Parents’ Browser Without Them Knowing,” while TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsias blogged that “Nobody Wants to Feel Obsolete,” which we thought at first was going to be the obligatory incendiary “quitting TechCrunch” post. Readers responded heartily with tales of parental cluelessness; Google’s Matt Cutts described sneakily switching out Chrome for IE6 but leaving it in the same place with the same IE icon. Even Mr.Madrigal’s mom chimed in the comments. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 6/15/11 1:40pm

Number One Fans

Mr. Unappreciated

The Atlantic Thinks Techies Don’t Give Ashton Kutcher Enough Cred

The Atlantic‘s Nicholas Jackson wrote a curious post about Ashton Kutcher yesterday in which Mr. Jackson alleges that Mr. Kutcher’s “smart decisions in the start-up space make most venture capitalists look like amateurs.” Despite that, Mr. Jackson points out:

“But he doesn’t get a lot of coverage. At least not as much, in the tech press that is, as Peter Thiel or Ron Conway or Paul Graham. And that’s probably because he still describes himself as an actor.”

Guess all that stage time about his approach to investment at TechCrunch Disrupt wasn’t enough. If you ask Mr. Jackson, “Kutcher has invested in so many–and had so much success with– startup companies, that he might be called a venture capitalist first and an actor second.”

Let’s look a little closer at this premise, shall we? Read More