Monthly Archives: July 2008

Social networking guilt

By Michael Becker | Published: July 31, 2008
Facebook makes me feel guilty. It’s not because the pop­u­lar social net­work­ing site takes bites out of my work­day, and it has noth­ing to do with my self-initiated com­pul­sion to post news items for my friends to ignore (while they chat back and forth, lament­ing the end of Scrabulous as they knew it). No, my [...]
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Social networking resolutions

By Michael Becker | Published: July 30, 2008
For the past year and a half, I have been dis­tracted to the point of exhaus­tion by try­ing out every new infor­ma­tion man­age­ment and social net­work­ing mashup that’s found its way into my Firefox plu­gin folder. These have included Zotero, Google Notebook, Del.icio.us, Diigo, StumbleUpon, Google Docs, Scribefire, and seem­ingly dozens of other browser plu­gin [...]
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Grammar Stickler

By Michael Becker | Published: July 28, 2008
It’s time to play Spot the Comma Splice! From today’s arti­cles on the Bozeman Daily Chronicle Web site: As of Saturday after­noon prices for gas var­ied around Bozeman with the Loaf & Jug on Eighth Avenue and College Street, at $4.19 per gal­lon, the Loaf & Jug at 19th Avenue and Main Street at $4.15 [...]
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Should newspaper sites permit user comments?

By Michael Becker | Published: July 26, 2008
A cou­ple of arti­cles this week in Gawker and TechDirt (with the lat­ter fol­low­ing the former’s lead) ask whether news­pa­per Web sites should allow users to comment. Gawker says news­pa­pers should stop “slum­ming as blogs and dis­al­low com­ments” because they rarely gen­er­ate intel­li­gent dis­cus­sion. This is in part because users often don’t give a lot [...]
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The sad case of non-hoaxster James Conradt

By Michael Becker | Published: July 25, 2008
When does a hoax become ille­gal? When does par­ody become libel? What con­sti­tutes good taste and what makes par­ody into forgery? Those are some of the ques­tions peo­ple ought to be ask­ing about the unfor­tu­nate case of James W. Conradt.
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