Featured Articles

Tweets From Mars

December 08, 2008 13:40

The Discovery Channel has a short article about the Mars Phoenix Lander’s Twitter stream.  NASA staffer Veronica McGregor hit on a brilliant idea: use Twitter to send short, 140 character updates about the lander’s progress to thousands of interested people.  It kept people engaged and w...

Facebook Says, “Only Connect.”

December 01, 2008 17:21

Two articles today about Facebook’s upcoming Connect service, which will allow you to sign in to Web sites using your Facebook credentials.  They’re being very cautious with the rollout of Connect — after all, it was only a year ago that they ticked everybody off with ...

The Evolution of the Citizen Journalist

December 01, 2008 14:53

Back in the early 1990s, an amateur with a $300 video camera exposed police brutality and changed the way that news was reported.  During the 2004 Asian tsunami, bloggers on the scene posted updates every few minutes with details that matched, or exceeded, those provided by the mainstream press.  A...

Recent Articles

Fearless: The Richard A. Sprague Story

January 12, 2009 05:00

By Joseph R. DaughenIn <i>Fearless: The Richard A. Sprague Story</i>, Joseph R. Daughen chronicles the significant events of a renowned Philadelphia lawyer who changed the landscape of the profession. Richard A. Sprague's philosophy holds that the law is sacred in this land,...

Jenkins Closed on Saturdays Beginning January 2009

December 31, 2008 15:28

Having reviewed usage on Saturdays over the past few years, we found that an average of 14 patrons, some of them members of the general public, use Jenkins on Saturdays. This is less than 3% of our membership The cost of keeping Jenkins open on Saturdays is about $30,000 annually. Not only do we...

Cuil Has Tanked (In Case You Actually Care)

December 30, 2008 16:29

Cuil, the new search engine that launched in July with massive media hype, is getting almost no search traffic, reports TechCrunch.  I’m not surprised — it was almost unusable when I tested it.  Apparently, I wasn’t the only one, either. If you want next-gen search engines, try t...

Money For Nothing

December 30, 2008 16:07

Last month my son — Mr. Monosyllabic — set the family record for text messages: 5,001.  If I hadn’t already surrendered to inevitability back in the spring and agreed to shell out $30 a month for unlimited texting, he would have dinged me for $1,000.  Why do I have to spend so m...

Garner on Language and Writing

December 29, 2008 05:00

By Bryan A. GarnerIn her foreword, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg declares the book to be “a ‘must read’ primer” for her law clerks. Anyone with a lively interest in language, writing, and law will find this book hard to lay aside. Library Record • Borrow it • More...

A Lean Christmas For Google Staff

December 23, 2008 20:00

No cash bonuses for them this year — the company’s stock is trading at less than 50% of what it was last year.  So they only get a free G1 phone. I’m sorry, but they shouldn’t kvetch, for the following reasons: (a) 570,000 people are unemployed, the highest number in more ...

PACER Turns Twenty

December 22, 2008 14:45

Here’s an article from The Third Branch celebrating PACER’s 20th birthday.  Usage is up, way up: in 2008 alone, they added more than 130,000 new users. Even though Carl Malamud of public.resource.org thinks PACER is “broken” and suffers from a “mainframe ...