According to this posting at Reddit, the photo below was taken at a Motorola conference. It’s refreshing to see such candor in this type of PowerPoint presentation:
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Yeah, this should be screamingly obvious to longtime blogosphere denizens, whether readers or writers, but as George and I like to say, “There’s a lot of value in repeating the obvious.” So in that spirit, I point you to this Bivings Report article, 16 Ways The News Media Can Use Blogs. The 16 ways are:
- Solicit ideas for coverage.
- Request feedback on how to shape an editorial product.
- Host public blogs.
- Provide ongoing coverage.
- Foster interaction between journalists and citizens.
- Cheaply report news about niche interests.
- Request help from the public on covering a story.
- Get experts to interact.
- Get non-journalists to report on their areas of expertise.
- Provide sneak peaks of upcoming stories.
- Allow journos to share their interests and passions.
- Share internal memos and briefings with the public.
- Defend editorial decisions.
- Provide case studies for issues of public interest.
- Share what you’re reading.
- Publish content that didn’t make it on air or in print.
The article goes into detail and provides examples for each one of these 16 ways.
HotelChatter’s top 5 list of hotels that cater to geeks:
- Tribeca Grand, New York City. The iStudio rooms — those are the ones whose numbers end in 06 and 16 — are equipped with Apple G5s and enough multimedia production gear to create your own indie film or song. There are Bose SoundDocks for your iPod, or if you’ve forgetten yours, they’ll loan you one, pre-stuffed with (presumably hip) music.
- Hotel@MIT, Cambridge, MA. I stayed here back in 2003 and loved it. Yes, there’s free WiFi with a strong signal everywhere, but the T1 wired access in the rooms is a dream. Each room has access to the networked printer. The laptop-sized room safes are a bonus. Room art: Scientific American comics in the bathrooms and photos of MIT engineers hard at work and play. I personally recommend this one.
- Woodlyn Park, New Zealand. Themed rooms: a couple are half-underground, like Hobbit houses, a couple of others are built into a Bristol freighter plane and a few more are inside a 1950s train car.
- Faena Hotel + Universe, Buenos Aires. A geek chic hotel that’s stylish, yet has geek niceties like a well-placed flat screen (the interior designers took glare into consideration) and good Wifi. Not necessarily a geek hotel, but at least it has nice amenities.
- Sidi Triss, Tunisia. A geek hotel primarily because it was Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s home in the original Star Wars.
- Wynn, Las Vegas. No idea why this made the list: yes, it has nice HD TVs and VOIP phones in every room, but that hardly makes it a geek hotel. The true geek hotel in Vegas for the longest time was the Alexis Park Resort, a small casino- and slot machine-free oasis across the street from the Hard Rock Hotel and home to both the DefCon and Black Hat conferences. DefCon has since moved to the Riviera.
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TIE Fighter Speakers
For the Star Wars fan who’s already bought all the toys, posters, movies, book and model kits, here’s a set of TIE fighter speakers…
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Bad News Travels Even Faster Now
Jeremy Zawodny points out the dangers of having an automated news feed and stock ticker on your company’s home page…
You know you’re living in the 21st Century when you’re accused of murder and your computer is seized for evidence, but it become even more painfully apparent when they find a history of Google searches for incriminating phrases like:
…as well as searches for gun laws in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
(By the bye, those search links above will run a Google search, so if you’re planning on icing someone, don’t click on them, mmmkay?)
The moral of the story, from a Machiavellian point-of-view: when Googling for murder techniques, use an OS that you boot from a USB stick.
“In the new world of network-enabled information gathering and dissemination,” writes Tim O’Reilly in the O’Reilly Radar post Journalism Through Computer Programming, “programming is as critical a skill as writing and photography.”
Tim wants to keep recent programmers-as-journalists meme alive (see our previous posts, Newspapers Need Nerds! and Nerds and Newsrooms for more), and it’s an interesting idea. In a world where computers have found their way into just about every facet of life, it only makes sense for people with computer programming skills — even if they’d never think of themselves as computer programmers — to follow.