Twitter

I admit it. I have jumped onto Twitter. At first I was skeptical. I mean telling the world what I think on an up-to-the minute frequency. Then I was playing with it by jotting down some thoughts about things. Searched for some people I knew and was impressed by the number of other twitterers. When I look at my iPhone, I now check Twitter for the latest stuff. Amazingly, I often learn the breaking news faster this way than browsing one of my bookmarked online newspapers. Spooky. For now I am hooked. I know I won't be twittering all of the time and who knows how long I will keep with this, but hey you won't know unless you are looking.

If you are interested in following my musings, feel free to follow me there (as well as here) via my Twitter ID @hratner.

Great comment on the possible fate of all social networkers

Nature.com Takes Home a Webby

Whew! Quite the evening at the 12th Annual Webby Awards. Over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the Big Apple and everyone in their finest attire. NPG staff mingled with well over 1,000 attendees at this gala event at the famous Cipriani Wall Street.

The awards event was kicked off by David-Michel Davies, Executive Director for The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. The MC for the event was none other than the incredibly funny Seth Myers - head writer of SNL and co-anchor of Weekend Update. Great material with impeccable delivery. "If you don't know me, that's because I work on something you might not know: television." "We are here tonight to honor the 2% of the Internet that is not dedicated to pornography." He likened his current success on TV to the equivalent of being a dinosaur groomer. "Thanks a lot Internet."

Over 200 webby awards were handed out. Each recipient only saying five words max as their acceptance speech. Lots of Obama references, quite a number of Slinky jokes (after all the Webby is a dressed-up Slinky), and lots of acceptance speeches by TED and NY Times. The NYT won eight awards including best online newspaper.

Yours truly went up to accept the award for Nature.com. We won for Best in Science in the Society cluster. Sites that empower and educate people, facilitate civic participation and enable learned pursuits. Our ditty "Nature - the natural selection" was met with polite applause for cleverness. OK, it was not the best one of the night but my President Obama lines were all pretty well taken by previous winners (see Arianna Huffington below) but it was more thoughtful than many such as "Thank you very much, really" and "This thing smells like butt."

Highlights of the evening were:

* Onion on World of World of Warcraft
* Arianna Huffington's "President Obama. Sounds good, right?"
* NY Times': "Elliot Spitzer. We thank you."
* Flock announced: "No sh**, we beat Facebook?!"
* Lou Reed spotting
* Political Satirist Stephen Colbert's "Me, me, me, me, me" acceptance speech for Webby Award's Person of the Year
* Ludacris introducing Will.i.am (top producer and founder of The Black Eyed Peas) for his work on the "Yes we can" music video of Obama.
* Laurie Anderson (experimental performance artist and musician) introduced the legendary David Byrne for his lifetime achievement award
* David Byrne "DJ, Can't you play another tune?" (He was extremely gracious with autographs and photos)

It was a surreal yet exhilirating experience enjoyed by Jamie Sampson, Elliott Herman, Adam Horwitz, Scott McCool, Juan-Carlos Sobrino, Jessica Rainey, Hillary Spencer, Jude Robinson, and of course Glennis McGregor along with me. Quite a number of other winners gave us props about the coolness of design and our breadth of top-notch content.

Thank you to all of you who have made Nature.com a success! You all know the special contributions you have made. A special commendation to Glennis. Not only has she been our online design force, she also had the forethought to enter us into the contest. Now onto preparation to win again next year!

See more photos from the gala.

See www.webbyawards.com for even more!

Web 2.0 Expo comes to the Big Apple

Web 2.0 Expo often brings along some mind blowing thinkers and cool new software and services. I went to this event on the West Coast in '07 and it was well worth the trip. Now that it's a local event for many publishers, how can you pass it up. Sign up here early.

The Future of Journalism!

What will journalism look like in 2018? Our answer, albeit with a twinkle in the eye, is this film: Keep the Faith. Produced at Axel Springer, Europes largest newspaper publishing house. Happy to hear your thoughts. Howard - maybe this is far too Web 2.0 for you? :-) What is a realistic perspective on changes in the media in the coming ten years? 

False Alarm

Unfortunately, the scheduled Thursday nights in June and July conflicted with a lot of my business travel so I had to back out. I have given NYU some great leads on my replacement. The class is sure to be great even without yours truly.

I'm Teaching Again!

Yes, its true. I am lined up to teach again this summer - June through July. The class is called
Crossing the Digital Divide What Print Professionals Need to Know. I am still trying to decide whether to host it at my place or at a NYU computer lab on 42nd Street. Any thoughts on this would be most appreciated. Have a look at the class description and let me know if you have any questions.

SeaDragon Rocks the Hard Rock

Last year Microsoft demonstrated their SeaDragon software that easily allowed users to zoom in dynamically on images. This tech is now part of Silverlight 2 and referred to as Deep Zoom.

A great example can be found at the
Hard Rock Memorabilia site

John Udell also commented on this tech here going into some depth about the facility for making persistent links to parts of the images.

Definitely worth a look!

Ask.com Leaves General Search Market

I was blown away to learn that just this week that Ask.com announced that it would be narrowing its search engine to focus on topics for women in their late 30s and older, who already make up a disproportionate amount of Ask’s users. According to newly appointed CEO Jim Safka. (Summary at TechCrunch) Ask will lay off about 40 employees, or 8 percent of its work force.
With Yahoo and Microsoft continuing to duke it out over a potential takeover, it certainly seems like Google has even more room now to continue to balloon further into the unstoppable monster that it has become.

A Unit of Knowledge

KnolStuff.com is a new social networking community for Google's Open Encyclopedia.


From the site: The days of our beloved, AD-FREE, one-spot knowledge source for all our questions, Wikipedia, might be numbered. Google, the giant search and advertising company, has announced Knol ("which stands for a unit of knowledge") as an alternative to Wikipedia.