Technosailor.com

It’s a late Fourth of July afternoon here in Bethesda, Maryland and I was sitting here working on a chapter in the new book. Peacefully minding my own business while the steady stream of chips from Tweetdeck occurred, I did not realize what was happening.

Steve McNair died. Putting aside the tragedy (he was a former Raven, a hero among athletes and, by all acounts, men – NFL MVP, a warrior known to play through countless injuries, mature in his approach to life and the game), we witnessed a catastrophic failure of major media. Again.

I’m not one to crucify major media. Indeed, I may be one of the few in my industry to want to see the newspaper and other forms of traditional media succeed in a huge fashion. The problem is that, even in the days of blogs and Twitter, we still rely on major media to report the news. To do the journalism. To find the sources and produce the confirmation.

I’ve been invited to speak to two groups of Congressional staffers today. In about 30 mins, I’ll speak to Republican staffers at the Capitol Hill Club. Later today, at 1:30, I’ll be speaking to the Democrats in their Capitol Building office. The topic is Blogging, microblogging and social media and the event is hosted by [...]

Note that this is a multiple page post. If you are reading in some feed readers, you may not get the entirety of the article unless you come to the site itself.
The question posed over at Friendfeed asks, “Are blogs killing newspapers?”
The answer, quite simply, is no they are not.
I have talked about the newspaper [...]

It’s been no secret that John McCain running mate, Sarah Palin, has been less than popular. Uttering many gaffes during the last two months of the campaign, she was an obvious choice to attribute the failure of the campaign. People simply wanted to believe that she could say some of the stupidest things on the face of the earth because, after all, that’s what stupid people do.

After the election, Republicans were looking for some kind of reason to understand their loss. Democrats? Well they were happy to pile on anyone around and gloat about it. The media willingly became accomplices to any story that made sense. Bloggers? Reckless.

I had the misfortune recently of sitting through a discussion of the policies of both Presidential candidates on data protection and cybersecurity. Or so I thought.
While the representative from the Obama campaign, a respected law professor and privacy expert who I have seen testify before Congress many times, was direct but cautious in his answers [...]

Cheap video and still digital cameras, broadband, and the advent of blogging have brought about this idea of “citizen journalism,” presumably to report the “real” stories that get ignored by “mainstream media.” Many bloggers have assumed this mantle of “citizen journalist,” and some sites like The Uptake have embraced the idea of publishing firsthand reporting by Joe Sixpack, as Sarah Palin would say. This has acquired the “citizen journalism” title. Some sites take this further, like the “collaborative journalism” of NowPublic. CNN has had an “iReport” site that posts “citizen journalists’” clips, reports, and other snippets.