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category archive listing Category Archives: experience

Failure as Taboo: My She’s Geeky Tweets Part 2

Back in January I attended — and live-tweeted — the She’s Geeky unconference in Mountain View, CA. Very slowly, I’ve been mulling over what I tweeted from there. Especially from Susan Mernit’s Jan. 31 session on that taboo of taboos, especially for women in business and tech: discussing and dealing with failure.
(For more context on [...]

Being a Citizen Shouldn’t Be So Hard! Part 1: Human Nature

NOTE: This is part 1 of a multipart series. More to come over the next few days. See Part 2.
This series is a work in process. I’m counting on Contentious.com readers and others to help me sharpen this discussion so I can present it more formally for the Knight Commission to consider.
So please comment [...]

Symphony of Entropy

My days feel like this lately…

Thanks, Dawn

The Stereogram Approach to Finding the Meaning of Life

Gary W. Priester (Click image to enlarge.)

Often, the first challenge in life is simply to see the target.

I really used to hate stereograms.
When they became popular in the early 1990s, they often reduced me to serious frustration and headaches. I would stare at them — glare at them, really — trying to will their embedded [...]

Growing a Quality Twitter Posse: My Do’s & Don’ts

My Twitter posse is always there for me. Today they offered fast, good ideas for E-Media Tidbits.

Like a lot of people, I’m an avid user of Twitter. But I don’t do so aimlessly. Twitter is worth my time because every day it offers me clear rewards:

Posse power. The 700+ Twitter followers I’ve accumulated have proved [...]

I’m trying out Seesmic: Twitter meets YouTube

I’m trying out the new video-based social media service Seesmic, based on recommendations by Paul Bradshaw and other colleagues. It seems kind of rough so far, but I’m used to rough.
Here’s what I like and don’t like about it so far…
(UPDATE: Heh… OK, another thing I don’t like.. Apparently embedding a Seesmic video in a [...]

Dale Willman on radio in Indonesia

Dale Willman

Borobudur, a Buddhist temple on the island of Java.

For a change of pace, here’s an audio podcast. My good friend and environmental journalism colleague Dale Willman just got back from a three-week trip to Indonesia where he was training radio journalists there how to do an environmental radio show — and just how to [...]

Beth Kanter digs further into the Nokia N95 firmware quandary

eschipul, via Flickr (CC license)

My friend Beth Kanter is keeping a close eye on Nokia, hoping to keep her new N95 from turning into a brick, like mine did.

Recently I bought, fell madly in love with, and then sadly had to return a near-perfect moblogging tool — the Nokia N95 — after the very first [...]

N95 Report: Why I had to give up

NOTE: I posted the article below about 10 minutes too soon. After completing the Nokia firmware upgrade as instructed, using their software on a Windows laptop, my lovely N95 morphed into an expensive brick. It won’t start.
It’s surprising how upset I am about this. I’ve held off for years on getting a serious cell phone [...]