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parislemon

Some blogs have topics. Not this one. Tech. Digg. Facebook. Sports. Videogames. Life.

On "Slow Blogging"November 29

The New York Times recently ran a piece about a so-called movement called "slow blogging." In it, they talk about a growing number of people who are rejecting the "fast food restaurant"-style blogging that a lot of large blogs do in favor of a snail's pace approach. This makes me laugh.

First of all, obviously not everyone writes at the same speed, with the same frequency or about the same topics. To insinuate that there are only two types of blogging: Breakneck fast and turtle slow is ridiculous.

Second, "slow blogging" is hardly a new movement. Since it's inception, some people who write personal blogs have spent a lot of time writing long, thought-out posts that they clearly care about. That never stopped. Just because bigger blogs that NYT mentions like Gawker, Huffington Post and TechCrunch are more visible these days (because most are just as good or better than many mainstream media publication IMHO) doesn't mean they

Why are mainstream media publications such pansies?November 27

Earlier today I shared a link on ParisLime (my Tumblr link/misc blog) of David Pogue's review of the new BlackBerry Storm. I shared it mainly because his title was brilliant: "BlackBerry Storm Downgraded to a Depression." But now I see the title has been changed to the infinitely lamer "No Keyboard? And You Call This a BlackBerry?"

Hard to know exactly why the change, but I'd be willing to bet it was one of three things: 1) The New York Times didn't like Pogue's snarky title 2) NYT didn't think the title was clear enough or 3) NYT didn't like "Depression" in the title given the rough economic times. No matter what it was, how lame is that?

Titles are important. In the age of endless online news, they pull a reader in. While the new title is clearer I suppose, it's boring. It sounds like a tagline for the Storm's new advertising campaign.

This switcheroo today also got me thinking

Twitter's New Business PlanNovember 21

A funny tweet by Twitter chief executive Ev Williams.

Though talk of Twitter's lack of coherent business plan has died down in recent months (there are more important things going on in Silicon Valley -- like people losing their jobs and their shirts on stock losses), it's still out there.

Twitter has succeeded in getting the user base. Now it's going mainstream. One way or another someone will figure out a way to make Twitter a viable business, whether it's Twitter itself or a larger company that uses it as a piece of a larger pie.

The Zune: From Shit Brown to Irrelevant in 60 Seconds FlatNovember 19

I don't get where Microsoft is going with the Zune. It's clearly worse then the iPod. It clearly sells a lot less. It's not going to catch up anytime soon unless Apple abandons the iPod line completely in favor of the iPhone, and it would only do that if and when flash media players become a niche market. So why is Microsoft keeping on keeping on?

Certainly, I'd guess there's an element of stubbornness, Ballmer and crew don't want to lose any battle to Jobs and crew. But overall it just seems like another bad strategy. Once again, Microsoft, which is a huge money-making machine in certain fields, is distracting itself with a fight it can't win -- much like it's doing in battling Google in search and advertising online.

And if they must insist on battling their rivals (Google and Apple) in every market, why not go for the real golden goose -- the iPhone? Microsoft keeps indicating that it has no intention of making a piece of hardware for a phone, but it really should consider it. (And I'd be willing to bet it's prototyping ideas despite denia

Chief Ya-Who?November 18

I've never met Yahoo's soon-to-be-ex CEO Jerry Yang, but from all the interviews and talks I've seen, he seems like a pretty nice guy. Unfortunately, nice guys often don't translate well as heads of big companies. It's sad, but to look out for the best interest of your company, you have to be pretty ruthless. Yang, it seemed, had no fangs.

The fact that he's stepping back into his figurehead roll as "Chief Yahoo" is humorous. The name itself sounds like something like "head dunce." And sadly, that is how Yang's tenure as Yahoo CEO is likely to go down in history.

What's odd to me that is I've met a ton of current and former Yahoo employees and they are almost uniformly brilliant people. The same cannot be said for many other companies. For whatever reason, Yahoo has just not been able to pull it together over the past few years.

They should have bought Facebook a couple years ago. I've heard from people th