Hypercrit

Michael Becker writes about journalism, new media and digital culture in general.

Month: July, 2008

Social networking guilt

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 […]

Social networking resolutions

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 […]

Grammar Stickler

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 and the […]

Should newspaper sites permit user comments?

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 of thought […]

The sad case of non-hoaxster James Conradt

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.