Way to go, Mika!

Full disclosure: Perhaps I'm biased, because I've made two appearances on MSNBC when Mika Brzezinski was anchoring (one about the MySpace pirate and one about the AutoAdmit lawsuit). But all I can say regarding this clip is: right on. There's a time and a place for video footage of Paris Hilton leaving jail, but it's not MSNBC morning news.

Additions to the Twitter lexicon

A bit of cultural irrelevance, for posterity's sake:

twittercept (v.): to twitter that someone is about to twitter something embarrassing about you before they have a chance to twitter it. (Ex: "Josh is going to twitter that I asked him, 'Shall we do porn, or something funnier?'") (c) C. McCarthy

twittercize (v.): to criticize the content of another person's twitter through a twitter of one's own. (Ex.: "@Josh: Stop posting under the influence.") (c) J.B. Sacks

twitwned (adj.): pwned via Twitter. (c) J. Lowensohn

The Economist on Stephen Colbert

From the Economist:

An odd thing about political satire in America is that it is directed nearly as much at the media as at politicians. Headlines in the Onion...would not be so funny if those in the New York Times were not so ponderous. Mr Colbert's show would make no sense if cable-news blowhards such as [Bill] O'Reilly did not exist. The post-modernity of it all was illustrated when Mr O'Reilly actually appeared on “The Colbert Report” and jokingly admitted that his aggressive on-screen persona was “all an act”. Mr Colbert replied: “If you're an act, then what am I?

I must say I love the use of "the post-modernity of it all."

Best representation of Twitter hype yet

Thanks to Rafe Needleman for passing this on to me.

BubbleBathNYC

Jennie blows bubbles, originally uploaded by caroline m..

Yesterday I was in attendance at BubbleBathNYC, a project organized by a School of Visual Arts student that basically consisted of...lots of people in Union Square blowing bubbles. I took a ton of photos. At the same time, I was participating in Shutdown Day, which encourages you to not use your computer for 24 hours. The two were unrelated, but it was definitely a very cool coincidence that a fun, quirky, let's-go-outside event was taking place on a day where we were encouraged to ditch our monitors for sunnier spaces.

I'll probably post more about my Shutdown Day experiences later.

Reason #1 why I need to lay off the pop culture

Please tell me I'm not the only one who immediately thought "and the only prescription is...more cowbell!" upon reading the headline of this WorldChanging post.

Pass the popcorn and Digg in

I've got to admit that I've never been much of a believer in Digg, for pretty much the same reason that most people who aren't believers in Digg profess to not be believers in Digg. You know: narrow audience that tends to digg things that aren't actually news ("Check out this Easter egg I found when I hacked this back-end Linux gobbledegook!"), potential for rigging, etc. I'm still skeptical of its potential, the same way that I'm skeptical of "anti-Digg" news aggregation models like Daylife.

(For the record, I think Daylife is great, and I had great conversations with Jeff Jarvis and the Daylife guys at the Founders Club mixer last month, but my opinion is that all those experiments in next-generation news delivery should be taken for what they are -- experiments. Some will percolate to the top. Some won't. Some will change their models drastically and then succeed. We'll see.)

But back to Digg. I'm not going to tell you that my outlook on Digg changed completely, because it didn't (it only changed a little bit). But today marked the first occasion that I watched a post of mine climb from RSS-reader obscurity to the upper echelon of Digg's current Top 10 in Technology (the only Digg category that actually matters). To keep it brief, I posted about a funny video that I saw on the Wired blog Cult of Mac, which in turn had ironically been plucked from Digg. Considering its original source, I had not expected it to get Dugg at all, but lo and behold, someone gave it a boost early on. Then there were three Diggs, and five Diggs, and it hovered around a dozen for a while. I'm assuming that then a moderately popular blog must have linked to it, because over the next few hours it steadily rose into the 20s, and then it was around 30 when I logged off at the office.

Cue dinnertime: a nice healthy salad with goat cheese and beets, since I was still kind of full from this afternoon's impromptu peanut M&M festival in my cube. I'd picked up a magazine at random and read something that made me want to look something up regarding a Crave post, so I fired up Firefox and started sifting through posts when -- Crikey! There are 300 Diggs on that silly post about the Novell 'I'm a Mac' ad parody! So I clicked on the post's Digg link, and there were already five more Diggs than there had been on the previous page view. So I ate a bite of salad, and then hit reload again. Three more Diggs! By the time I'd finished dinner, it had crawled up into the current top 10 in the technology category.

It's blogedelic!

I should note that as an (almost) one-year veteran of tech journalism, I'm not a total stranger to Digg, nor am I unfamiliar with the bizarro-world feeling of having ridiculously dumb posts wind up with 1000+ Diggs (hello, pirate toaster). But watching the process? That's both cool, as well as a reminder that I should probably get a life.

Then, to top it all off, I found this great article on Digg concerning crowdsourcing. So much for my belief that you never found anything good there.

Oh, and this afternoon I was stricken with the Thursday Afternoon Distractedness Syndrome and took this picture of myself with the Photo Booth feature on my MBPro. That was my day. Not nearly as exciting as sipping cocktails at a Second Life demonstration at the Hotel on Rivington (that was last night) or snapping photos of innonate looking like a lush and a half at the Web 2.0 Meetup (that was Tuesday), but hey, we all need our quiet evenings.

The Jobsian Dilemma

My iPod, a 20-gigabyte fourth-generation model that was perpetually enclosed in a hot pink iSkin, died several months ago. I'd had it for over two years, and I certainly did take it to the gym when I shouldn't have (running with a hard drive-equipped iPod can really take a toll on its lifespan, in case you didn't know). So I suppose it had reasonably reached the end of its lifespan.

Since then, I've been operating solely with a little silver clip-on Shuffle. It's much better for working out, and I've been enjoying the autofill function for re-discovering music that I hadn't listened to in ages (New Pornographers, anyone?) At the same time, however, I'm hoping to get myself a new "real" iPod at some point. Last night I was on a train from New Jersey back to Manhattan and suddenly I really wanted to listen to the Shins' Wincing the Night Away. But oops, there weren't any songs from it on the Shuffle. So that minor inconvenience ended up making me consider why I've put off buying a new iPod for the past few months.

And the reason why? Steve Jobs is making me afraid to buy an iPod. I am wholeheartedly convinced that if I buy a new iPod, within a week Mr. Jobs will make a grandiose surprise appearance, rub his hands together, and announce that a completely new iteration of the iPod has been released and anyone who has an old one can just suck it. The thing is, I recently learned that I'm not the only one. I have a handful of friends who similarly relate to me that their iPods have died and they're putting off on getting new ones. The video iPod has been pretty standard for long enough now, they say, and consequently they think it's about time that we'll be seeing a totally new one that will render the current "generation" thoroughly obsolete. I kind of see where they're coming from. I bought my old 4G when that round of iPods was brand new, and I'm glad I hadn't gotten one of the older ones. Hello, click wheel!

So who's to blame? Is it Jobs himself, or is it the legions of Apple rumormongers who continually convince us that the release of a touchscreen, 100GB, Beatles-edition iPod is absolutely imminent? Or is it the good old American ethic of thriftiness telling us "no, don't get it, save the money now and wait for something better?"

I call it the Jobsian Dilemma.

Philly, 'Heyday,' and the ilk

Despite what my last name may hint to you, I had a very low-key St. Patrick's Day; took a long weekend and went to visit my family. They live pretty close to Philadelphia, so on Sunday morning we drove into the city and went to the Tutankhamun exhibit that's currently at the Franklin Institute. Good stuff. I would've liked to see more about the current work that's gone into analyzing the contents of the tomb and how our knowledge has changed over the years, but I suppose that really wasn't the point.

Last week I plowed through Kurt Andersen's Heyday, which a whole lot of mainstream publications have been paying a lot of attention to recently. I liked it. It was by no means perfect, and I can definitely see the perspective of the reviewers who thought that Andersen did a better job of recreating the historical background than in developing the characters and plot. It's true; were it not for the research behind Heyday, it'd be a mess. Some of the characters are indeed under-developed, and there are plot lines that disappear midway through the book into the background. More than a book, it's really a story about a set of characters traveling through a series of past events. Kind of like Gone With The Wind in the sense that experience and historical detail tends to trump plot, but Heyday places more value on the history.

That being said, I found it a great read. I'm a huge fan of Kevin Baker's "City of Fire" trilogy, and most of it essentially read as though it could have been the prequel -- right down to the same motif of immolation (SPOILER ALERT: one of the main characters is a serial arsonist who, Andersen "reveals," was responsible for a number of major real-life NYC fires). Midway through, however, Heyday turns into a road story. That's one of the drawbacks, in my opinion; Andersen really tried to have it both ways with regard to making it both a NYC-centric historical novel and a Twain-like travelogue. He pulls it off decently, but it did muddle the reading experience somewhat.

Nevertheless, I still prefer not to complain. It was flawed, sure, but it's my kind of book. I'm picky. It takes a lot to make a book the sort that keeps me up until 2 AM reading.

I'm a Twitter convert

I gave Twitter a nod in yesterday's post, but I've been hearing so much about it recently that I decided to elaborate. I didn't realize there was actually a correlation between Twitter hype and the lead-up to SXSW, mostly because I knew I wasn't going and would have other things to focus on (though it seems like everyone I know is there!), until my colleague Daniel enlightened us all with his SXSW Twitter report earlier today. I must say that I can see Twitter fitting well into a large, hard-to-find-people event in which folks are arriving from all over the country--many of whom may not have ever met each other in real life. So it's kind of perfect to be gaining momentum right around this kind of high-profile tech event.

Anyway, I started using Twitter two or three days ago, and it really is kind of addictive because you don't want to have anything out-of-date on there (or at least I don't. Does that make me OCD?) I don't have a whole lot of friends using it at the moment, but it already has proven somewhat convenient--case in point, earlier today I noticed that one of my friends on Twitter had listed that he had some work to do. I had some work to catch up on as well, so I shot him a text message and asked if he wanted to find a WiFi-enabled café and do some unofficial coworking. Yeah, I'm an addict now, I suppose. I can foresee it being as socially relevant as Facebook if it can gain the user base. Right now it looks like it's restricted primarily to geeks, hipsters, and the gray area in between, but it's easy to use and not overtly nerdy in any way (something that Digg has an issue or two with), which in my opinion means it does have mainstream potential.

(For the record, I have turned off mobile alerts after my cell phone started buzzing repeatedly at 2 AM with potentially intoxicated Twitter updates from one of my friends. I'm also primarily using the Mac app Twitterrific -- very cute little piece of software.)

Two confessional posts in a row! I guess it's guilty pleasure season.

Confession: I'm addicted to all things green tea.

Twitter would have me believe that just about everyone who's involved with any kind of new media or geek culture is in Austin for SXSW right now. It's probably right. I, however, am sitting in a Lower East Side café with some folks from nextNY who are trying to get a Coworking sort of thing together. I've been here working on a feature story that just got finished. It's been fun.

That being said, I've realized that I probably have an unhealthy addiction to green tea and all its delicious derivatives. I've drank green tea for a while, but I didn't start going for the unsweetened stuff until December, and I'm tempted to attribute the 3-4 cups I down every day to the fact that I haven't (yet) been sick this winter. Antioxidants, right? Then I got into green tea ice cream, and the frozen yogurt from Pinkberry (with kiwi chunks mixed in). Now I've discovered the cold-weather equivalent: green tea lattes. I ordered one at this café, and it literally tastes just like green tea ice cream, except warm. I think the obsession has just been taken a step further.

I guess there are worse things I could be addicted to drinking.

And now for the next iteration

This is probably my fourth (fifth? sixth?) attempt at starting a blog, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it actually turns out to be successful. And by "successful" I don't mean "people reading it," but rather I mean that 1) it doesn't devolve into crap that I ultimately find embarrassing and want to delete, and 2) it doesn't get to be such a chore that I just stop writing. A fair number of people I know have been bugging me to start a blog. Apparently it's a bit of a prerequisite these days.

But here's my dilemma. I'm a new-media journalist. That means two things. One, despite the fact that I'm pretty much nothing special, my entire work takes place on and over the Internet, and consequently I feel as though anything I do on the Internet is intimately tied to my work. As a result, I'm very conscious of not wanting to say anything that will inadvertently have negative consequences for myself or my job -- I'm not talking self-censorship here, I'm talking "let's not be stupid." I have a deep respect for my profession as well as the company that employs me, and for that reason I think it's necessary for me to keep those interests in mind when I write anything.

The second reason I have for not starting a blog is the fact that I write all day. I love it. I really do. But when I get home, I'd rather read a book, watch a movie, or go to a concert than get back to my keyboard and bang something out. This means that if I'm going to write a blog on my own time, I don't want to feel like it has to be either regular or good. But if I don't post regularly, I look like a slacker, and if I write crappy posts, I look...lame.

See why I vacillate over this so much?

But anyway, here I am. I'm not going to try to keep this identity separate from my work identity (always a fine line to tread) but at the same time, don't expect any juicy office gossip or insider dirt. Trust me, I'm really not that interesting.