By the feeds, follows and stats, I see there are plenty of new Oddly Together readers since I permanently moved to Tumblr from hosted WordPress (in May 2010). Welcome! For your reading pleasure, here are five past posts about blogging and journalism that I consider to be thoughtful, provocative and worth your time.
Perhaps I don’t pay enough attention to Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis. Something, somewhen, somehow bugged me about his blog posts—maybe it was frequency or attitude, I don’t recall—and so I nuked his RSS feed sometime ago.
But post “The Big Game, Zuckerberg and Overplaying your Hand” has me howling delight, even though Jason rambles on even more incoherently than I do. Thanks to Dare Obasanjo for tweeting the link.
Keeping with the privacy philosophy espoused by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, I pulled this picture from his profile.
I have deeply mixed feelings about siding with Apple and not Gizmodo regarding the iPhone prototype the Weblog paid to acquire. After all, as a seasoned journalist, I should strongly advocate no-questions-asked free speech. Instead, last night I blogged for Betanews: “Apple should sue Gizmodo over stolen iPhone prototype”. I had planned to write something at Oddly Together, but Betanews founder Nate Mook asked for a story, which I gladly delivered.
“Did you really need to publicly shame the poor guy with his full name and photo?
Don’t you think he feels bad enough already?
Did that really add anything to the story?
You just took a dark time in this man’s life—caused only by his negligence, not malice—and made it much worse.
For what reason? Did you make anyone’s lives better by having done that?
—Tumblr lead developer Marco Arment in post “Damn, Gizmodo”.
Marco responded to Gizmodo post “How Apple Lost the Next iPhone”, which identifies the developer who accidentally left the device on a bar tool. Gizmodo paid the finder—I say thief—for the iPhone prototype.
Do you have a story about ethics in blogging or journalist that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.
“It’s all about profit, and I understand where the silence is coming from, but they are missing the long-term picture. [Chinese leaders’] end game is to extract as much technology out of American companies as they can, transfer that to their own companies and, when they feel those companies have reached a level of technical maturity, show the American companies the door.
Dan Slane, chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, speaking to Bloomberg about Google’s plan to offer uncensored search data in China and why the information giant stands alone.
Do you have a Google or China that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com
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“Morgan Stanley recently decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. A Morgan Stanley fund purchased the buildings at the height of the boom, and their value has plunged. Nobody has said Morgan Stanley is immoral—perhaps because no one assumed it was moral to begin with. But the average American, as if sprung from some Franklinesque mythology, is supposed to honor his debts, or so says the mortgage industry as well as government officials.
Roger Lowenstein in New York Times Magazine story “Walk Away From Your Mortgage!”; how banks walk away from their mortgages but expect consumers who owe them morally obliged to pay up.
Do you have an ethics or questionable banking story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.
There has been quite the ethics flap over the last 72 hours or so about TechCrunch’s handling of leaked Twitter documents.
Bottom line: Michael Arrington was wrong to distribute any of the leaked material, which was stolen by a hacker. The posting of the documentation is unconscionable. There is no journalistic excuse, or justification for it.
Graduates are hitting the job market and New York Times has a warning: Nothing public you post online is private, and potential employers are scouring your Facebook, MySpace or Xanga to see who you really are.
Story “For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé,” in today’s Times, quotes Washington University in St. Louis Vice Chancellor Mark Smith, “‘I think students have the view that Facebook is their space and that the adult world doesn’t know about it. But the adult world is starting to come in.’”
Back in December, I blogged about the kind of things that kids reveal online that they shouldn’t. After all, it’s information predators might be hungary to get. But employers are a concern, too, and their reaction can profoundly affect young adults’ lives.
Regardless of the audience, predators or employers, people that reveal too much on blog or social sites can find themselves in a heap of trouble (I’m dropping the “networking” from “social.” It’s oh-so last week, already).
This week, I saw the movie “Shattered Glass” on cable for the second time in a week. The film unravels the deceptions of Stephen Glass, the former New Republic writer who made up quotes and even whole stories. If I correctly recall, the magazine found problems with 27 of the 41 stories he wrote while working there.
My daughter has really gotten into this old “My Little Pony” Hasbro CD-ROM game she’s been playing at a friend’s house. I vaguely remember seeing it on store shelves years ago, but just figured it wasn’t my daughter’s speed. After all, she favors things like Sonic the Hedgehog or The Sims. But apparently, she really likes this My Little Pony game. I would buy it if I could find it. Hasbro doesn’t sell the game online, and no stores anywhere in my area carry it. Sure, there are some cheap copies still available on eBay. Assuming they’re legit.
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