iPhone Mania

Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman camped out overnight in front of a Washington, DC Apple store in order to be among the first to get one of the new iPhones.  Megan assures us that this is a mere sociological exercise for her: "I feel no desperate urge to get my hands on one of the VERY FIRST 3G IPHONES, but ...

Evolution of Social Media: From Blogger to Twitter

Looking for art to illustrate the previous post, I stumbled on this amusing bit at Dave Schappell's blog: There's some truth to that. . . .

Congressional Twitter Fight Hits NPR

Friend of OTB Aaron Brazell was on NPR very early today talking about the controversy over Congress and social media. The cause of the Twittering representatives has been taken up by bloggers like Aaron Brazell of Technosailor. "Frankly, we're in 2008, and we have a government for the people and by the people," says Brazell, who lives in Baltimore. "Right now, ...

Blogrolls, RIP

Duncan Riley laments the demise of the blogroll. Once upon a time in the land of the blogs, the blogroll reigned suprmeme. Everyone had a blogroll, and it was a great way to discover new and interesting blogs. But somewhere along the way blogrolls fell out of favor, and you don’t seem them much at all today. [...] Unlike other areas of blogging, ...

Congress Banning Social Media?

As if to prove Robert Heinlein correct, the House Administration Committee is, apparently with honorable intent, considering effectively banning the use of popular social media sites, including YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook by Members. Soren Dayton couches this in partisan terms: "In typical fashion, House Democrats are trying to pass rules that stifle debate and require regulation." In fact, though, it appears ...

Blog Linking Less Important?

Louis Gray believes the importance of blog linkage is declining, noting that, "I've seen traffic from other blogs to be driving an ever-declining percentage of visits to my site, swamped by social media tools, aggregation sites, and of course, Google search." He offers three likely explanations: 1. People are relying on aggregators to find them new sources of information, including ...

Who’s Smearing Whom?

James Kirchich, recent nominee for an Yglesias Award for fairness, says that, while the Obama campaign is setting itself up to believe that "The only obstacle between Barack Obama and the presidency is the mountain of smears that will no doubt come his way," the truth of the matter is that most of the smears are coming from his side. Thus ...

Social Media Overload

Mark Glaser calls attention to one of the strange dilemmas of modern life: deciding whom to "friend" on various social media sites like Facebook and MySpace. Is the person a friend, a real friend, or someone who wants to be a friend? Should I add them as a friend because it’s polite, or ignore them because I want to protect ...

Journalism in a Post-Literate Society

In a recent speech at Harvard, TPM founder Josh Marshall argued that the competition from the Internet is killing newspapers but improving journalism. Stacy McCain, though, contends, "iIt's not the Internet that's killing journalism, it's illiteracy." Rather than former print consumers switching to digital media, "There is, instead, a shrinking readership of news, period, regardless of whether the news is ...

Phenomenology of Blogging

Julian Sanchez posts, cryptically, "This animal rights discussion is reminding me how little worth saying can be said in blog posts. I think I'm done with this medium for a while." I'm not sure what brought that on, really, since pretty much anything one can say anywhere can be said in a blog post. It's not like Twitter, which comes ...