Contributing to a new blog
Tuesday, June 26th, 2007At the Times, we’ve started a new technology blog, Bits, to complement our reporting for the daily paper. Check it out here.
Archive for the 'New York Times' Category
three from the last week
Monday, April 30th, 2007Amazon expands its shipping program to independent online retailers.
Silicon Valley startup Vudu creates an Internet movie store for the television.
The new wave of social networking for the mobile phone.
Lessons from Yosemite’s Fatal Past
Saturday, April 21st, 2007
Last summer, with my brothers Brian and Eric, Jennifer and I took an incredible rafting trip down the Colorado River, through the first half of the Grand Canyon. One of our guides, an erudite, friendly guy that we all called “Dr Michael,” seemed to know an awful lot about fatal mishaps in canyon history. For good reason: it turned out that Dr. Michael Ghiglieri was the co-author of the longtime Arizona bestseller, “Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon,” which pretty much covers the territory you’d expect.
During one of those sparkling nights in the canyon, the doctor mentioned he was working on a new book: Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite. My razor-sharp journalistic instincts kicked in. Back at home after the trip, I bided my time and kept in touch with him. This week, I took the opportunity of the new book’s impending publication to meet Dr. Michael again in Yosemite and write this article for the Escapes section of the New York Times. Needless to say, rational readers of his excellent, thorough and chilling book will not be wandering off Yosemite’s marked trails anytime soon.
10 hour crackberry withdrawl
Thursday, April 19th, 2007
RIM’s Blackberry service went down Tuesday night for 10 hours. I didn’t notice but plenty of others did.
Manners people!
Sunday, April 8th, 2007There’s no use denying it- online discourse can get pretty ugly. Maybe it’s the relative safety of flinging insults from our computer desktops that lead so many online discussions down dark alleways of ire and verbal abuse.
After one recent brouhaha - the kathy sierra affair - a few digerati took notice and decided to act to improve civility on the Internet. Web 2.0 guru Tim O’Reilly and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales are crusading for a Blogger Code of Conduct - a set of rules that bloggers can voluntarily follow and use to implicitly guide the behavior of guests to their sites.
I write about the effort, and its chances for success, here, in Monday’s paper.
Cracking the auto theft code
Sunday, April 8th, 2007
Former police officer Mike Bender was a huge help while I researched my Wired magazine story last summer on the theft of our transponder-protected hybrid Civic. Then I discovered that Mike wasn’t just an aid to curious journalists, but a invaluable resource to many detectives and insurance investigators, who need all the help they can get when to understand the technology in 21st century cars.
In today’s auto section of the Times, I write about Mike, his assistance to law enforcement, and his campaign to illuminate the connections between street racing, auto theft and insurance fraud.
Rumblings of a MySpace Revolt
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007
Look at these last two photos and you can see where I’m taking my coverage in the Times.
This is a photo of MySpace star Tila Tequila, who blogged a surprising rant against the social network last weekend for blocking a music-selling tool on her MySpace page. On Tuesday, i wrote about the emerging tensions between the Fox owned Internet company and its users over the use of unauthorized widgets.
On Wednesday I wrote about an interesting new policy proposal that could elucidate the muddled numbers around identity theft.
Today we track Motorola’s drastic earnings shortfall.
Busy week.
True Dat
Monday, March 19th, 2007
You’ve probably seen the salacious ads, plastered across sites like MySpace and Friendster. Dating site True.com has rediscovered the age-old notion that sex sells. However, like a Texas politician, it is also combining those sex drenched ads with a bit of piety, asking state governments to pass laws requiring that dating sites conduct background checks on their members or disclose that they fail to do so.
In today’s paper, I look at True.com, its eccentric founder Herb Vest, and why True and some of its less than honorable business tactics seems to making many of its rivals a little hot under the collar.
cisco acquires tribe.net
Tuesday, March 6th, 2007Today Cisco announced it is buying the technology behind eclipsed social network Tribe.net, which I first reported on the paper’s web site on Friday. It’s an odd deal, but puts the Silicon Valley equipment giant on track to help its customers, like telcos and media companies, set up their own social networks. Today, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube seem unique. But clearly a multitude of clones is on the way.
a fistful of stories
Monday, February 26th, 2007From last week:
On Monday, Miguel Helft and I profiled the digital fingerprinting companies helping Web 2.0 sites filter user submissions for copyrighted content. Google’s YouTube was seemingly dragging their feet on implementing the technology, but a few days later Google announced they would begin filtering YouTube.
In Wednesday’s paper, I profiled eBay’s marketplaces president John Donahoe.
And today, onetime pirate pariah BitTorrent joined the flood of companies offering Hollywood movies and TV shows for sale over the Internet.