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journalism

Twitter's spooky secret: It's full of ghosts

A Friday piece in The New York Times exposes what we all sort of knew already: some of those celebrity Twitter accounts are actually ghostwritten. Other ones are fake. That guy twittering as Christopher Walken is not actually Christopher Walken.

It's not terribly surprising. Nobody actually thought, for example, that the official Britney Spears Twitter account was actually written by the pop singer herself. But some others, like rapper 50 Cent's, come across as fairly authentic to the degree that some fans could be miffed to find that it's actually the head of his digital-media team doing … Read more

McCain "Twitterview" not a journalistic high point

ABC's George Stephanopoulos is an excellent reporter and Senator John McCain has given some great interviews. But while yesterday's " twitterview" may have been a watershed moment for Twitter, it was far from a high point for either journalism or politics.

After reading a transcript of the interview, I have to question whether the 140 character format makes any sense as an interview technique, especially when dealing with life and death questions such as "What worries you more: Pakistan or Iran?" to which Senator McCain responded, "Both. The challenges are different but both significant.&… Read more

LiveJournal accounts getting hijacked

LiveJournal warned its users on Monday that lapsed Hotmail accounts are to blame for bloggers having their LiveJournal accounts hijacked.

"Recently some journals and communities have been broken into, their contents deleted, and their owners locked out," LiveJournal said in an e-mail to its users. "The problem appears to stem from Hotmail's policy of recycling inactive e-mail addresses."

Anyone can claim a Hotmail address if it has not been used in more than a year, the e-mail says. Hijackers are grabbing lapsed e-mail addresses that have been publicly displayed on LiveJournal profile pages and are … Read more

From bad to worse: The state of the media in 2009

You can reduce the conclusions from the sixth annual report on the state of the U.S. news media to a couple of words: Infinitely bleak.

And that's taking the optimistic view.

The 180,000-word report by he Project for Excellence in Journalism comes against a backdrop of newspaper closings and staff reductions around the country. It just so happens that this week also marks the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's farewell as a print publication. After that, the newspaper will be offered solely in digital form. But as the report makes clear, the transition from dead trees to the Web … Read more

Investigative journalism: First casualty of the Net?

I'm spending Saturday in an auditorium somewhere in the bowels of Microsoft's Mountain View, Calif., campus. The occasion: a series of panels co-sponsored by Microsoft, Google, the Computer History Museum, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, probing "the impact of information technology on society."

That's quite a mouthful, not to mention quite an ambitious subject to tackle, but a very timely conclave. To their credit, the hosts have assembled a collection of very big brains up for the task.

The day started off with a rocking presentation by Joshua Cohen, a Stanford professor … Read more

LimeWire strives for relevancy by tapping Web 2.0

Despite intense popularity of the BitTorrent system, Gnutella clients aren't dead yet. LimeWire 5 for Windows, Mac, and Linux keeps its hand in the file-sharing pot by borrowing your Google contacts to create a friend network and a snazzy redesign that surfaces the most important information first.

If you're not a fan of the Gnutella file-sharing protocols, I doubt this will be enough to grab your eye. Torrents run faster, depending on the number of seeders, and torrent content is rarely faked in the way that plagues the Gnutella networks. If LimeWire lights you up, though, there's … Read more

The 404 278: Where we stab ourselves to deaf with Knife Music

Today we get down and dirty with David Carnoy, Executive Editor and resident tech carnoysseur at CNET.com. As a self-published author (check out his book at KnifeMusicBook.com), he gives his unique take on the recent Amazon Kindle 2 announcement, iPhone eBook alternatives, and whether or not the Kindle can cordially coexist with tangible novels and newspapers.

We also ask him to stay for a few stories, including a study out of Europe that finally takes a logical stance on video game censorship. We also try to congratulate David on the recent birth of his twins, but get sidetracked … Read more

Let's Twitter a reaction to the overreaction to...Twitter

Each time our little world suffers a disaster, man-made or otherwise, count on the usual suspects to rush to their keyboards and pound out yet more bloviation about the existential importance of Twitter to our 24 x 7 ecosystem.

Before some of you jump ugly on me, let me hasten to mention that I've long found Twitter to be extremely useful. But how long before we can move past this "wonder of Twitter" moment? An earthquake in China, the Mumbai massacre, war in Gaza--Twitter's proved itself as a tool to report and comment on breaking news. … Read more

Google offers help transplanting your blog

Google on Friday released an open-source project, Google Blog Converters, intended to help people move their blogs from one service to another.

There are a number of popular publishing systems for housing blogs, some of them services and some of them software people can run on their own servers. But if you want to change infrastructure, it's rough going. Information isn't necessarily locked up and inaccessible, but the practical barriers of moving it to a new publishing system are high.

Google, which actually has a "data liberation team," announced the Blog Converters project to deal with … Read more