New Twitter RT Link: Be Cautious
For those of you who are in the Twitter “retweet” beta test, I have a word of advice: proceed cautiously. Here’s why. Currently, retweets that are executed via the Twitter web “retweet link” are visible to your followers who are using the web interface to read your tweets but are not visible to popular third party clients. Let me say that a different way: popular third party applications are currently not displaying RTs executed via the Twitter web interface “retweet” link. In other words, these retweets are MIA in a fol

Smart Phones Rule
“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all…” JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien may be onto something … – and the cell phone industry certainly seems ready to embrace the concept of “One Device to do it all.” Smart phones have become the multi-tool of the 21st century, although I’m personally still eagerly awaiting the first models to feature a folding knife and a pair of pliers in the accessories list. Preferably, this phone would be rubberized, water and dirt proof too. Meanwhile, I am excited to see that it’s getting easier to use smart phones to find these dirty, wet places. Last week, Google announced it

New Income Streams for the Digital D-I-Y Musician
The digital revolution has brought about the age of the DIY musician, or as Sonicbids.com founder Panos Panay calls it, the “artistic middle class.” With technology, artists are able to produce and distribute their work easily while maintaining creative control. But big record labels, despite their floundering, still appear to be the way for an artist to go from anonymity to platinum-selling success. So how is this middle-class musician Panay speaks of making money and supporting his or her craft? Traditionally, artists have had several income streams. These include income from record sales, live performances, performance/mechanical royal

Google, The Platform
Listening to Google CEO talk about the importance of a “new platform” while noting that “enterprise-focused” engineers are a small percentage of the company’s engineering team, I flashed back to 1984. When Apple introduced the Macintosh with that Ridley Scott commercial, the company was making a statement about the “cultural implications of personal computers.” Apple’s deliberate shunning of IT departments, Steve Jobs’ goal of democratizing technology, the 1984 slogan “The Computer For The Rest of Us”, the 1998 slogan “Think Different” — each are examples of

This Bloody, Hungry Revolution
Nearly five years ago, my wife and I set out on a road trip across America, armed with a couple of cameras, laptops, and a burning need to tell a story about a growing insurgency against big box stores.  What we didn’t have were jobs (I was determined never to work in TV news again), much money in the bank, or any clue what we were going to do with our footage when we got home — it was all “close, but no cigar” with networks like PBS and Discovery, which meant all our effort could conceivably lead to nothing. But thanks to a