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sarahintampa

tampa girl talks tech

Does New Media “Journalism” Have Standards?October 4

Opinion: I butted my way into a Twitter exchange today between two respected journalists, Mathew Ingram and Kara Swisher. Apparently Ms. Swisher didn’t think Mathew should have spread the tweet gossip about Steve Jobs’ heart attack considering that he hadn’t fact-checked the story for accuracy.

Mathew, on the other hand, disagreed:

While I have nothing but respect and admiration for the real, j-school trained journalists out there and feel they provide an important service in our society, I think I’m going to have to agree with Mathew on this one.

Let me explain why.

New Media Vs Old Media

This goes back a thought-provoking conversation I had with Mary Fallon at this year’s DEMO conference about the differences between “old school” journalism and “new media.”

T-Mobile To Me: No HTC Dream, Sorry, Never Heard Of ItSeptember 24

Just for fun, I emailed T-Mobile several days ago and told them I had heard they will soon be offering a phone called the HTC Dream which ran Google software. I mentioned that I read about it on the internet and that I wanted to check it out before I decided on the iPhone. I asked when I could expect to see it in stores.

Their response? No HTC Dream! Not even a mention of it coming soon. If I wasn’t a tech geek who already knew better, this sort of communication (see below) would have sent me right to the AT&T store.

Note that this email arrived yesterday – at 10 PM the day before the big Android announcement.

Dear Sarah Perez,

Hi Sarah my name is Steve; thank you for contacting T-Mobile and giving me the chance to help. I see you emailed online customer care regarding the HTC Dream Phone. I know how important it can be to get the latest phone at a great price so I would be delighted to research this for you.

First, Sarah I apologize for the delay in our reply. We are getting an usually high volume of emails and are working to answer

Microsoft Embraces “I’m A PC”September 18

A recent post on the Windows Vista Blog led me to a New York Times article: Echoing the Campaign of a Rival, Microsoft Aims to Redefine ‘I’m a PC’. It’s worth the read. The Microsoft ads weren’t being “cancelled” and the campaign isn’t a failure…they were just icebreakers…like they said.

About the new ads, via the NYT article:

What follows is an audacious embrace of the disdainful label that Apple, Microsoft’s rival, has gleefully — and successfully — affixed onto users of Microsoft products: “I’m a PC.”

One new Microsoft commercial even begins with a company engineer who resembles John Hodg

Why Is iTunes 8 Giving Vista Users A BSOD?September 12

I guess Apple forgot that not everyone uses a Mac.

Vista users got a nasty surprise when they went to upgrade to iTunes 8: a Blue Screen of Death, aka a BSOD. Say what you want about Windows, but I haven’t seen BSODs on my home machines since the early days of XP.

What’s Causing the BSOD?

You can follow this thread on this Apple forum to read the growing list of posts written by increasingly frustrated users. At one point, an Apple rep “Roy B” jumped in to offer assistance, but his questions clearly show that the issue caught Apple completely off guard:

Hello all,

If you are experiencing this BSOD when you have an iPod connected with iTunes 8 installed, please follow these steps and email me <royb@apple.com> with your answers:

    * Look in the Programs and Feature Control Panel. Do you have Logitech Setpoint software installed?
    * If so, what version is it? (To see version info in Programs and Features, right-click the column

Samepoint: Social Conversations SearchSeptember 7

I just discovered Samepoint courtesy of Killer Startups, and I was intrigued. A social conversation tracker? Sounds like something I want to check out. The site allows you to perform searches across the social web including Facebook, Friendster, Diigo, StumbleUpon, FriendFeed, Yelp, Twitter, MySpace, Simpy, Mister Wong, Blogmarks, and Reddit…but oddly, not Twitter. The site also searches blogs via Technorati and by performing searches on Wordpress.com.

Snapshots

After you run a search, you can narrow down your options using the “Search Within” feature in the right sidebar. Here you can select any one of the sites to see just results from the site. Now, you would think that in doing so, the main page of search results would be updated to display the filtered items, but instead, you’re presented with a “snapshot” of searches from that site just beneath the “Search Within” box: