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He’ll Google for you

March 31, 2008 by Scott Rosenberg 2 Comments

My former Salon colleague Farhad Manjoo is out the gate early with an elaborate and delightful April Fool’s stunt called “I Google For You.” Check it out.

I can’t figure out if it’s truly the latter-day, John Henry, man vs. machine thing it purports to be, or whether there’s in fact some Eliza-style script behind the scenes cranking out the slightly customized search results. Since upon inputting one query I learned I was 84th in the queue, yet I received a link to my answer in an emailed reply within a minute or so, something tells me there’s more machine than man at work here.

Either that, or Farhad’s in for a long night!

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NY Post: Go online, end your career?

September 21, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg 2 Comments

From the “Did they actually write that?” dept., in Keith Kelly’s NY Post media gossip column (via Romenesko):

Not everyone who was spared in the Business 2.0 meltdown is going to Fortune.

Erick Schonfeld, who was an editor-at-large based in New York, has decided to end his 14-year career and jump to Michael Arrington’s influential blog, TechCrunch.

“It’s true,” said Schonfeld, “I’ve accepted a position to be co-editor at TechCrunch.”

“There was a ‘Schindler’s List’ [of Business 2.0 staffers who would be spared] at one point, but I took my name off it so I’d be eligible for a severance package,” he said

Mr. Schonfeld, as someone who left the comforting rituals of the print world for the wilds of the Web many years ago, I can assure you that career continuation remains a possibility. But even at this late date, I guess, there remains the possibility that colleagues and peers will consider you to have fallen off the edge of the earth…

(Here’s Schonfeld’s post about his move.)
[tags]media, journalism, errors[/tags]

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Only connect

May 2, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg 2 Comments

Walgreens signThere’s a Walgreens on the corner I pass every morning between BART and the office. (There’s a Walgreens on most corners that haven’t already been occupied by a Starbucks.) And recently, every morning I have seen this sign, and every morning I experience a little twinge of awe.

All Walgreens are connected!

Are they like the Indian restaurants clustered on 6th street in New York’s East Village, long rumored to be connected via underground tunnel to one central kitchen?

Or is this connection more metaphysical — do the stores experience that oceanic feeling of connectedness that tells them, yes, they belong here, they are at home in the world?

I knew Walgreens was a chain. I didn’t know it was a great chain of being.

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Job titles for the new millennium

August 28, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Each wave of Web development brings with it a new crop of confounding job titles. Consider the Vertical Keyword Analyst, which appears to have something to do with picking keywords that will be valuable on Google in certain market segments that the media business refers to as “verticals.”

Is the vertical keyword analyst someone versed in the lore of vertical keywords but unfamilar with, or utterly bored by, horizontal keywords? Or are we talking about a keyword analyst who happens to work standing up? Can a vertical keyword analyst still live up to the job title after the fifth margarita? Or is this in fact a shrink who uses a novel variation on the old Rorschach technique, asking patients to fill in the DOWN rows of a crossword and then studying their revealing choices?

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Links: DoD PowerPoint, interface combat, David Kaiser

August 21, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment
  • I did not know that the historian David Kaiser, who taught at Harvard when I was a student, has a blog, and a good one, indeed. Most recently he puts Judge Anita Taylor’s recent decision against Bush’s domestic wiretapping program (full text of the ruling) in context:

    I was inspired by her opinion and am distressed that a variety of legal scholars, including some opposing the program, have claimed that it lacked legal sophistication. Certainly it did not focus primarily on recent precedents, although it cited some of them, nor did it, in accepted legal fashion, attempt to decide the question on the narrowest possible grounds. Instead, Judge Taylor reached back to the origin of the Republic and to the text and essential philosophy of the Constitution to point out that a President, once again, was taking advantage of an emergency to disregard both…. to those legal professionals who found fault with Judge Taylor’s opinion, I can only reply that it is clear enough to be understood by any intelligent high school student, much less a grown citizen — and that, like the finest opinions of Justice Black, it relies above all on the simple tactic of arguing that the Constitution means what it says.

    [via Brad DeLong]

[tags]flash, powerpoint, rumsfeld, wiretapping[/tags]

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Random notes

July 27, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment
  • Visual design guru Edward Tufte’s new book, Visual Evidence, is out. I haven’t read it yet, but if it is anything like its three predecessors it will not only be eye-opening but will embody the principles it espouses. I wrote at length about Tufte almost a decade ago in Salon, in March ’97.
  • “What happens when you take everything in your house and make one giant chain of dominos?” Some people in Japan find out. It’s on YouTube. I saw it because Doc Searls linked to it back when only 250,000 people had viewed it, and now over 500,000 have, and we should really be shooting for >1,000,000, so I’m doing my part.
  • Who knew there was a They Might Be Giants tribute album with covers by the Wrens, Frank Black, and the Long Winters? (The latter two also each have new discs out or on the way.)

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Meat space

July 25, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg 2 Comments

This incredibly short little [tag]science fiction[/tag] tale will take you only a couple minutes to read. BoingBoing pointed it out a while back and I just stumbled upon it again. It’s a thing of brilliance. Also funny.

The title is: “They’re Made Out of Meat.” The author is Terry Bisson. Read it.

There is also a well-made little film on YouTube but I prefer the text.

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