Tech

Indian Teen's New Blog Crunches Numbers

Yuvi Pandian's a 17-year-old in Chennai, India, whose interests in statistics and tech have combined, in true "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter" fashion, to form Stat Bot, a blog that crunches numbers to produce graphs, pies, and other visualizations of our sad corner of the web. I discovered Pandian today when he turned up in my Meme13 feed. In the four weeks since he began the site, Pandian has shown us how Digg headlines have changed over time, which Twitter clients are favored by ... (read more)

Exclusive: Techbloggers Have Sold Their Souls

On WebProNews, Robert Scoble demonstrates why the leading techblogs are becoming less critical and more susceptible to hype -- they're bargaining with PR flacks for exclusives: I've noticed that PR types are getting very astute with dealing with bloggers lately and getting their wares discussed on TechMeme. First they'll call Mike Arrington of TechCrunch. Make sure he's briefed first (Mike doesn't like to talk about news that someone else broke first, so they'll make sure he is always in the ... (read more)

Cluetrain Derails in Blacksburg, Virginia

One of the best-known techbloggers was embarrassed Monday when he sent the following private e-mail and it was published by the recipient: From what I gather so far (and info is incomplete), most of the cell phones in use by students at Virginia Tech, and the system they used as well (much more feature-rich than phones provided by big carriers, and user-programmable to boot) were provided by a company in New York run by my friend ... . I think what they're doing is critically important: helping ... (read more)

Intel's New Chip: More Important Than Cancer

Robert Scoble, the former Microsoft blogger who's now a exec at podcasting startup PodTech, recently engaged in the following exchange with one of his readers: Reader: You think Intel making a smaller chip is more important than cancer? Scoble: having cancer is important to THAT ONE PERSON. Intel chips change the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Scoble, the 86th-most-linked blogger on the planet, is angry that more blogs don't link to him, so he made an example of the tech site Engadget ... (read more)

Steve Gillmor's Got My Attention

Steve Gillmor parted company with ZDNet and shut down his InfoRouter blog a few weeks ago, stating afterward on his personal blog that there were "real issues, some of which I can't discuss except by indirection." I was upset to see InfoRouter shuttered, because I've come to appreciate Gillmor's bizarre takes on Web 2.0, which read like tech magazine hype filtered through Dennis Hopper. Cracking open the story lines: engaging Hollywood and the record business. Not by embarrassing or attacking ... (read more)