Rafe's Radar

Blogs: What are they good for? Where are they going? We have three experienced guests today to discuss. Don't miss this look into the current and future state of the blogosphere.

Our guests:

Anil Dash of Expert Labs, an independent nonprofit which creates new Web technologies to help policy makers in the White House and the rest of the federal government tap into the public's expertise using social networks. Anil was also employee No. 1 at Six Apart, the blogging platform company that makes Movable Type, Typepad, Vox, and that ran LiveJournal for several years. Welcome.

Kourosh Karimkhany, chief operating officer of TPM Media, which runs the influential left-wing blog Talking Points Memo. Kourosh was a vice president at Conde Nast Digital, where he was responsible for acquisitions and investments. He also served as the general manager of Wired.com.

Sachin Agarwal, CEO of the microblogging service Posterous. Like Tumblr, Posterous is a new type of blogging platform, designed to bring blogging to a whole new audience by integrating tightly with e-mail. It is challenging incumbents WordPress, Movable Type, and Google's Blogger.

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Today, we rescue you from the indignities of working in a cubicle. We've got your rear-view mirrors, your headphones, and should all else fail, your USB foam rocket launchers. Because, you know, work is war. Also: How to stream music on an iPhone, how to test your home network for open ports, and much more.

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In late May, a John Gruber blog post on Daring Fireball titled, Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks, finally explained to me why pasting headlines into the spreadsheet of stories I want to talk about on Buzz Out Loud each morning had become a pain in the neck. Tynt makes a utility that lets publishers modify what's put onto a computer's clipboard when the user performs a copy action, breaking usual computer behavior and upending user expectations.

As an example of how Tynt "breaks" copy and paste, go to Wired.com and copy headline text from the site, for example, "Deep-Sea Vent Discovery Sets Hydrothermal Life's New Depth Record," what you'll get when you paste it is instead, this:

Tynt-enabled super-paste can overwrite existing data already in a spreadsheet

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

It's the extra two lines, a blank line and the "Read More" text, that annoys users like me who are trying to fill out spreadsheets or forms with headlines, and who want the source links elsewhere (off to the side, in my case). I know it sounds like a minor complaint, but as Gruber points out, "It's a bunch of user-hostile SEO BS...Everyone knows how copy and paste works. You select text. You copy. When you paste, what you get is exactly what you selected. The core product of the "copy/paste company" is a service that breaks copy and paste."

I agreed, and I put up a Twitter rant myself: "How to screw up cut-and-paste: http://bit.ly/cC34ok Daring Fireball on Tynt. Bonus: How to disable it."

My retweet of Gruber's post lead to a call from the Tynt marketing team, a meeting, and the eventual realization that the people at Tynt are not jerks, that they haven't broken the Internet, and that, in fact, they're sitting on a killer business model.

... Read More

On this episode of the Roundtable, we're talking about how to really use social media in your business. We're not going to say you should hire a bunch of "consultants" to tell you that Twitter will rocket you to success. Instead, we'll explore how to carefully, deliberately use your brand and your personality online to make your loyal customers more loyal and to spread the word to potential new customers.

And yes, the most recent and possibly most successful social campaign ever is the Old Spice program, which we will be talking about. Also, today: What Apple could have done in the social space to mitigate some of the brand damage caused by the problems with the iPhone 4's antenna design.

Our guests:

Brian Solis, founder of the branding and marketing firm FutureWorks. Now, there are hundreds of marketing and PR people in tech, and it's fair to say that most of them have at one point or another pitched me. Including Brian. But behind Brian's PR chops is a person who does more than pitch. Brian is one of the few branding and marketing people I've met in this business who backs up his approach with both a sensitive social radar as well as a real head for research and numbers. His books, Putting the Public back in Public Relations, and Engage, are thoughtful works on how to use social media.

And joining us from the real world (not tech): Rick Bakas, director of branding and social media for St. Supery winery. Rick is also author of the book, 75 Savory Tips for Social Media Success. Rick's real-world cred includes the fact that he's a Certified Sommelier from the Court of Master Sommeliers. He's also an old-school branding expert.

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Josh Lowensohn has been using the iPhone 4's iMovie video-editing app, and compares it to the new YouTube editor and old standbys, iMovie for the Mac and Windows Live Movie maker, among other apps. Also, your questions answered. Mostly. We still haven't quite figured out how to ditch cable TV and just use the Internet and game consoles in its place.

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The iPhone 4's radio woes are well-documented. The most recent tests, like our own, show dramatic radio performance issues when a part of the external antenna is gripped.

This week on the Roundtable, we delve into the electronic and radio engineering issues affecting the iPhone 4's antennas, as well as other phones. Our guests are CNET's Maggie Reardon, author of "5-bar phone signal: What's it get you?," and AnandTech's Brian Klug, who tested the iPhone for that site and co-wrote "Apple's iPhone 4: Thoroughly Reviewed."

If you want to really understand why the iPhone behaves the way it does, watch or listen to this episode of Reporters' Roundtable.

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If you're going to spend more time touching your keyboard than your spouse, you might want to put some time into picking a good one (keyboard, that is). Here are our tips for keyboards. Plus, of course, your questions answered. And the obligatory Evernote tip.

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Why go to space? And how? This week, two great guests talk about how our space program has changed since Apollo, whether we're going back to the moon or pressing on to Mars, and how we need to build the "Interstate for Space" to get to either of those rocks.

Our first guest is space journalist Miles O'Brien, for 16 years a space and aviation journalist with CNN, and currently chairman of the Education and Outreach Committee for NASA. He produces the podcast, This Week in Space.

We also have with us Commercial Spaceflight Federation President Bretton Alexander. Brett previously served under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as senior policy analyst for space issues, and was author of the 2004 Vision for Space Exploration (PDF), a White House plan to go back to the moon.

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This week on the show: Road tripping. We've got real-world road tests from road warriors Daniel Terdiman of CNET Road Trip 2010 and Darren Kitchen, of Hak5 and his own cross-country motorcycle trip.

Also, Android and networking tips.

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