Travels with Rhody

I submitted my “World Wide Wade” column today, Tablet Fever: How Apple Could Go Where No Computer Maker Has Gone Before, to Slashdot, the news aggregator site for nerds. (I count myself as one of those, by the way.) When Slashdot accepts and links to your articles, it can bring tens of thousands of page [...]

In a presentation at the Boston Book Festival last weekend, Jon Orwant, a Google engineer involved in the company’s Book Search project, made a memorable and, I thought, quite perceptive remark about the e-book business.
“Think about the books you have at home and how you organize them,” Orwant said. “Some of you may not organize [...]

Got an unexpected scoop today while attending a session on the future of reading at the inaugural Boston Book Festival. Turns out that the Internet Archive and the One Laptop Per Child Foundation have been working behind the scenes for the last year to convert the 1.6 million public-domain books scanned by the Archive for [...]

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.