LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Maybe it was the crippling writers' strike or the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or was it something in the expensive bottled water in Beverly Hills where Oscar organizers are based.

Last week we wrote a piece questioning whether perhaps 37Signals had lost focus with the upgrades to their popular Backpack organizational tool. We argued that the changes were morphing Backpack from a simple organizational tool into a robust intranet system that put it on a collision course with Basecamp, the company's groupware application. Many commenters on the 37Signals blog felt the same way, though most on this blog seemed to disagree.
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This is guest post by Dan Zarrella, a social media marketing consultant. You can follow him on Twitter here. While some people have said that Digg has begun to lose its relevancy since the recent algorithmic changes, I believe it still represents an incredibly rich resource for studying social media and how stories and links spread throughout the web community. Once a link "goes popular" and is listed on Digg's homepage it is seen by many and p
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The problem with running a site that relies heavily on users to generate content, is that it puts a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of those users (in relation to the site owners). If users are unhappy with something about the way a site that relies on user generated content is run, they can theoretically hold the site hostage until they get what they want. This week, eBay sellers unhappy with the auction giant's recent change in l
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GeoXtract is a powerful tool that allows you to integrate your own data with Google Maps or Google Earth. Using this desktop application, you can create a personalized map with no programming experience required. Using your own data source, which can be an Excel Spreadsheet (.xls), Access database (.mdb), or Comma-Separated Values file (.csv), geoXtract walks you through the process of creating a mashup. The program uses a wizard that helps you
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Recently the winners of the MobileMonday Peer Awards were announced, coinciding with the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We covered the 25 nominees here. The award recognizes early stage and emerging Mobile Web start-up companies. Buzzd, a provider of local real-time search information for bars, clubs and restaurants, won the jury, audience and community awards under the 'early stage' category. Buzzd's win again shows that location-based se
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The dean of journalism at Northwestern University seems to have gotten himself in a bit of a sticky wicket, as it were. Apparently, John Lavine, the dean of the Medill School of Journalism, has been indulging in the use of unattributed and unnamed sources in his columns for the Medill alumni magazine and 16 NU journo instructors aren't very happy about it. Not only are they not happy about it, but according to the Chicago Tribune they are demandi
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In a July 12th NewsBusters article I noted that the Chicago Sun-Times made a move to revitalize their diminishing subscription numbers by turning back time and returning to its liberal roots. That sentiment was captured by Cheryl L. Reed in a statement she made after being promoted from the paper's book editor to the new editorial page editor. We are returning to our liberal, working-class roots, a position that pits us squarely opposite the Chic
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The Uganda Skateboard Union is a nonprofit that develops skate-parks and clubs for kids in Uganda. Judging from their blog, they're doing amazing work, growing fast, and doing stuff that should be replicable elsewhere. Our first park was completed over a year ago. It has been a great success, lots of kids have been learning to skate, all of them are improving, and loving it more than ever. We now want to spread skateboarding to a new community in
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Logos Bible Software publishes specialist electronic editions of scholarly works -- they use a "community pricing model" that allows their community of customers to work together to establish the demand for the work and set a fair price for it before it is produced: They also do what they call community pricing, where they don't know how to set the price. Here, they expose the price curve to their users, letting users choose the price they are wi
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Novelist John Scalzi, who has earned a buck or two from writing, has written a damned fine post about money management for writers. I spent a few years figuring this stuff out myself -- the hard way -- and really wish I'd had this around when I started earning my living from writing. 4. Your income is half of what you think it is. When you work for someone, the employer withholds your income and Social Security taxes for the IRS, pays part of you
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A Swedish couple has been fined for failing to register a legally approved name for their seven-year-old child, who is presently called "Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116" (pronounced "/?al?bin/"). They've offered to change the kid's name to "A," but the Swedish government says that won't do, either. Because the parents (Elizabeth Hallin and an unidentified father) failed to register a name by the boy's fifth birthday, a district court
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Jürgen Stumpf's Berlin wine-bars in the gentrifying neighborhoods of Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte run on the honor system: show up, drink wine, and pay what you think you owe on the way out the door. Each of Mr. Stumpf?s three honor-system wine bars (a fourth, down some stairs on Kollwitzstrasse, is temporarily closed while it deals with licensing issues) carries a different assortment of red and white wines. Their owner hails from the north Bavaria
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The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency carries stunning videos of Earthrise from the moon, shot with the Kaguya's cameras: Kaguya carries two high-definition television cameras, each fitted with a 1,920 by 1,080 CCD. However, most of the movies are downsampled and cropped to 320 by 240 pixels (which is about half the resolution of a standard-definition TV). Almost all of the movies are from the wide-angle camera, which has a field of view spannin
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China is rocking from a sex-scandal involving a popular actor whose laptop was plundered by a service tech who has been trickling out shocking photos of the idol getting laid by various famous personages. The Chinese government is straining to slow down the scandal, but it's spreading like wildfire. The images - illegally copied from the star's customised pink MacBook - have prompted a media frenzy here that has eclipsed the fixation about Britne
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Alice In Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS) is an unusual neurological disorder that causes the person with the condition objects to sometimes perceive certain things as much smaller than they are. It's also referred to as "Lilliputian hallucinations," after the tiny folks in Gulliver's Travels. In The Guardian, Rik Hemsley describes life with the spatial distortions of Alice In Wonderland Syndrome. From his essay: When it first happened, I was a 21-year
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Linda Stone (who coined the phrase "continuous partial attention") has noticed that people hold their breath and breathe shallowly when answering email, a phenomenon she'd dubbed "email apnea." She's posted a little rumination on the long-term health impacts of impaired email breathing. I wanted to know -- how widespread is email apnea*? I observed others on computers and BlackBerries: in their offices, their homes, at cafes. The vast majority of
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TV Signoffs collects videos of the signoff videos of TV stations of the bygone era. These are just great -- I was always an early riser as a kid so I would catch the sign-on every morning. Link...