Travels with Rhody

I’m writing this in Salt Lake City, about three-quarters of the way from Boston to San Francisco. Just two more days of driving to go. If you do all your transcontinental travel by plane, you forget how big the country really is—especially the western half of it.
Usually I’d be paying more attention to the scenery [...]

No self-respecting digital media writer can go on a road trip without documenting the whole thing digitally. Soon after I’d decided to drive from Boston to San Francisco to take up my new post as Editor of Xconomy San Francisco—and recruited my good friend Graham Gordon Ramsay to share the driving—we hatched a devious plan [...]

I haven’t been updating Travels With Rhody much lately, and today I can finally say why: I’ve been working behind the scenes to help launch Xconomy San Francisco, the newest city in Xconomy’s national network. (Props to Scott Kirsner at the Boston Globe for figuring this out a couple of weeks ago.) The new site [...]

I couldn’t be more gratified about the response that the Mass Mobile Month campaign has been generating in the local technology community. With 15 events on the docket between late February and early April, and with something like 25 supporting organizations signed up to help promote them, it’s looking like March 2010 will be the [...]

A side project that’s been occupying a lot of my weekend time lately has finally come to fruition. It’s an e-book version of the first 80 editions of my weekly Xconomy column World Wide Wade, which focuses on the intersection of digital media, Internet culture, entrepreneurship, and creativity. The book is called Pixel Nation: 80 [...]

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 [...]

You know how listening to music on a friend’s pricey Bose headphones makes it harder to tolerate your tinny little speakers at home, or watching your favorite show on a high-definition screen spoils you for regular TV? I’m at a moment like that in the way I look at photographs. For the last few weeks, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]