Travels with Rhody

I found out about President Obama’s visit to MIT on Thursday, after the White House had stopped giving out press invitations, so I didn’t get to see him at Kresge Auditorium. But I feel like the solution we came up with at Xconomy for covering the President’s visit was even better than sending a staff [...]

While reading a Book of Odds essay on the frequency of various last names in the United States, I came across a link to a fun site called “How Many of Me?” If you enter your name, the site will search U.S. Census Bureau data to figure out how many people have your first name, [...]

I got my fifteen minutes of fame this month—in Sweden, anyway. The folks at NyTeknik, the Swedish business and technology publication that is home to Xconomy’s favorite Swede, former Innovation Journalism fellow Erik Mellgren, published a piece about my declaration of “e-mail bankruptcy” in a column last February.
Here’s the article, by Elisabeth Vene, followed by [...]

My friend Brad King, a journalism professor at Ball State University, makes fun of me for being such a Web and gadget geek while at the same time shunning social networking tools like Facebook. He’s got a point. I’ve written a lot about Facebook, MySpace, and their predecessors, but I’ve never wholeheartedly joined in, the [...]

The following is an excerpt from today’s World Wide Wade column at Xconomy:
Maybe you’d like to have a sleek, attractive blog or website for yourself or your business. Maybe you’ve looked around at some of the free blogging or lifestreaming platforms like Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr, TypePad, and WordPress.com and you’ve been underwhelmed by the cookie-cutter [...]

The panel on “Bootstrapping PR for Entrepreneurs” at the Web Innovators Group meeting on September 29 was extremely well attended, and I had a great time serving on the panel alongside Bob Brown of Network World, Peter Kafka of the AllThingsD blog, and Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe. Mike Troiano of Holland-Mark, and formerly [...]

When I switched away from Tumblr as my blogging platform I thought I’d have to give up mobile posting from my phone (via e-mail in Tumblr’s case). Then I discovered the Wordpress app for the iPhone, which seems to work well. If only I could type faster with my index finger.

I love September. There’s a back-to-school crispness in the air that always gets me jazzed to learn something new, even though I’ve been out of school for 15 years. Maybe you feel it too. And with a long holiday weekend coming up, perhaps you’ve got a few hours free to experiment with a new tool [...]