So I could fill up perfectly good space with all the reasons why I allowed the dog to eat my homework, leading to my not posting anything of value over the last week or so. (I did waste some perfectly good blogging time writing one of those insidious, invidious Facebook quizzes, but decided it wasn’t such a waste after all when 341 people had taken it within 48 hours…and I had only directly promoted it to 4. Add end to monograph on viral marketing. And then there was the WordPress upgrade that didn’t go well.)
Anyway, all of the following items wanted me to write about them – but I didn’t. I’m thinking that if I ‘fess up, I can start fresh tomorrow.
10. I still think I want to turn this into a different sort of online quiz because there are lots of perfectly good words in here, as well as some that are, well, fecklessly louche. N.Y. Times mines its data to identify words that readers find abstruse » Nieman Journalism Lab.
9. L. Gordon Crovitz, on the Op-Ed page, quotes Jeffrey Matsuura: “Intellectual property rights were not goals in and of themselves, but were instead a mechanism through which society attempted to facilitate creative collaboration.” Why Technologists Want Fewer Patents – WSJ.com.
8. “A modified version of the Internet’s communications protocol, devised for interplanetary use, is being tested by spacecraft.” via Monitor: Dot Mars | The Economist.
7. “[S]ome postal officials are pushing for a fundamental change: five-day delivery.” via Post Office Looks to Scale Back – WSJ.com.
6. Some dandy back-and-forth between two of my favorite Steves, Outing and Yelvington. And then more great stuff from Brother Y after a trip to Minneapolis.
5. Too many stories on iPhone 3.0 were written for anyone in the universe (whether the currently known universe, and or any portion thereof that is not yet discovered or explored) to write anything new or interesting or of the remotest value. So I wanted to write about how silly I found it when the “ring/silent switch” fell off my iPhone 3G, what has to be a $0.01 piece of material, and the friendly folks at the Genius Bar handed me a new phone instead of reattaching the switch. But I didn’t. And I now I did. (As I did manage to tweet, I am still ROTFL.)
4. The Printers Row Lit Fest, formerly Printers Row Book Fair. Will I feel better if I tell you to visit melissaisaacson.com (she was there, too) and then to read a handful of her posts? Yes.
3. My new Kindle DX, which I see is already backordered till next week. Mine was a gift from Scott Smith, Ann Marie Lipinski, Jack Fuller, Howard Tyner, and Alison Scholly. I’m liking it. I’m also surprised to realize that, in its lovely and functional leather case, it seems to weigh nearly as much as a MacBook Air. (Not in reality, I guess – specs would tell me it’s 26 ounces vs. the Air’s 48. I’m just sayin’.)
Medill graduate student Nick Allen deigns to pose with a professor.
2. My trip to ESPN to talk about petabytes of data, and then to have dinner with my old boss Vince Doria, its senior VP and director of news. Such a busy trip there wasn’t time even discuss their new iPhone app. But I did pose on the set of SportsCenter, and did resist the urge to lapse into my radio voice.
And the No. 1 thing I didn’t write about, but I hope I still will:
1. The student presentations (that’s the archived streaming video) by the joint journalism and computer science class (that’s a summary press release) taught by Kris Hammond, Larry Birnbaum, Jeremy Gilbert, and Rich Gordon.
There. Shall we let bygones be bygones? I think we shall. On to Cambridge, for the announcement of the 2009 Knight News Challenge winners. And then back to Medill for commencement convocations on Saturday.