Last night, San Francisco got a high-dose injection of East Coast media experts.

In an event space once belonging to the San Francisco Chronicle, New York University’s Clay Shirky, Columbia University’s Emily Bell and City University of New York’s C.W. Anderson sat down for an onstage interview with AllThingsD editor Kara Swisher (who is herself a transplant from the New York area).

The group convened at Intersection for the Arts to discuss “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present,” a new report published by the Columbia Journalism School, which also hosted the event for its centennial. You can find the full report at this link; it is also embedded at the bottom of this story.

After the event, I caught up with Anderson and Bell for a few postgame questions about the changing state of the media:

Many of the people in attendance tonight were in some way connected to the media. Why should people outside those circles pick up this report?

C.W. Anderson: To understand the hypercharged individual. If you want to understand how technology is empowering individuals to have all sorts of new responsibilities, but also significantly more ability and authority, you should read this report. There is far more pressure on you, and far more responsibility, because you’re now acting in public in a new way.

And for those who are in the media, what can they do? Is there some action individual journalists can take now?

Anderson: Individual journalists should familiarize themselves with how a database works, how an Excel spreadsheet works.

Most seem to know nothing about that.

Anderson: Yeah, my initial answer would be, “Oh you should learn to code.” But let’s not even go there yet.

Why not?

Anderson: Because, as you said, most journalists don’t even know how an Excel spreadsheet works.

So it’s a step-by-step thing?

Anderson: One thing at a time. Every journalist should learn some basic coding skills — not necessarily becoming coders themselves, but understanding the people who do in their organization, understanding what they can ask from them. But, hey, baby steps. Do Excel first.

Emily Bell: It’s really about understanding that the world of information is changing very quickly. We’ve always aligned journalism with things like marketing and PR, because it’s about telling stories and how you present something. But what about journalism as finding and distributing information? Learn math.

What about news editors? What should they do?

Bell: There was a phase of everything being converged — the offline and online newsroom. I wonder now whether a lot of that was a big waste of time. [Laughs] That’s why I think so many journalists now leave and do their own thing. They want to be freed of whatever that process is, just to experiment with new stuff. It sounds wishy-washy to say “enable your staff,” but that’s a hard thing to do.

And what about that distinction between journalists and non-journalists? Do we need better media literacy?

Bell: The public and journalism are indistinguishable. Journalism as a profession and a trade can’t take all of this on. Some of this has to be about how society is changing. Often, people produce really good journalism, but if they’re not journalists, they don’t do it all the time.

And that’s not a problem.

Bell: No. But we need people doing it all the time.

Read the entire report, “Post-Industrial Journalism,” here:

More and more, regular people are learning how to program: Codecademy is drawing hundreds of thousands of students; hackathons have become a seemingly everyday happening across tech-savvy cities like San Francisco; and now some are even calling for children to learn to program in elementary school.

So, are journalists setting themselves up to get left behind by technology again?

Not this weekend, at least. At the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle, a hackathon called NewsHack Day kicked off yesterday with a day-long session aimed at teaching reporters how to scrape data for their stories.

Led primarily by ScraperWiki’s Thomas Levine, attendees got a crash course in how to find and pull down data, clean it up, and apply it to projects.

“Computers can do anything that a team of interns can do,” Levine said.

My project? Instantly scraping Securities and Exchange Commission filings for the “compensation tables” that detail what company execs get each year in salary and perks. Done manually, digging those tables out of multiple documents can be slow, but they often contain interesting insights.

Even if some of the drudgery of document-reporting can be outsourced to a computer, though, technical know-how isn’t enough to make a strong story.

Levine used a Department of Labor Web page that linked to unions’ collective bargaining agreements as part of his introductory lesson. But, while looking at the site, he said he didn’t know the difference between “private sector” and “public sector” unions.

T. Christian Miller, a senior reporter for ProPublica in attendance at the event, said the union example shows the need for journalistic “hacks” and tech-savvy “hackers” to work together in the future.

“Every journalist needs to know a little about coding, but it’s hard to expect full knowledge,” Miller said.

To remedy that knowledge gap, the journalists in attendance Friday will be joined over this weekend by designers and programmers, to either flesh out their existing projects or start new ones.

NewsHack weekend organizer Michael Coren, a contributor to FastCompany and The Economist, said projects can be either “story hacks” to bring data into in-progress stories, or more general “news tools” that reporters can use on any number of stories.

So, the SEC scraper would be a “news tool,” because — if it works, and that’s a big if — it could scrape any company’s filings from any year for compensation info.

But what’s the bigger point of all this? Does the reporter of the future have to be equally adept at both writing and coding?

No, Coren said — the most important skill reporters can gain from NewsHack Day is being able to talk like a programmer. That means journalists can know what’s possible with technology and communicate what they want the tech experts to do.

Coren criticized newsrooms that segregate techies from journalists — singling out CNN, as of the time he previously worked there — as part of the problem. He said the sense of journalism as a community of people with different skills is the real goal of NewsHack weekend, not the projects.

“If we come out with great code, I’m going to be happy, but at the end of the day, it’s two days,” Coren said. “The community is what’s sustainable.”

According to sources close to the situation, longtime Yahoo front page chief Liz Lufkin has parted ways with the company.

The departure last week appears to be related to a reorg by newish editor-in-chief Jai Singh, who used to run the editorial efforts for the Huffington Post, at the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Singh appears to be setting up his own team and, thus, Lufkin was out.

Lufkin has been at Yahoo for many years, most recently as VP of front page programming. In that job, according to one bio, she supervised “editors in Sunnyvale, Santa Monica, New York and Dallas and consult[ed] to various international Yahoo! sites. Liz’s group contributed to the successful development of Yahoo’s pioneering content optimization personalization system, improving the relevancy of Front Page for users and providing new insights on audience behavior.”

Previous to Yahoo, she had been deputy managing editor at Gannett’s USATODAY.com and USA Today. She had a similar job at the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle.

Lufkin’s job at Yahoo is a critical one, given how powerful the front page of the site is, with 600 million unique visitors and billions of page views.

While the portal system has been under siege in recent years, it is still a massive driver of traffic to Yahoo’s own Web properties and elsewhere on the Internet.

Yahoo declined to comment (but I am right!).

UPDATE: Yahoo said that it had hired CNET editor-in-chief Scott Ard to take Lufkin’s place. Ard, who worked for the CBS-owned tech news property for 12 years, will report directly to Jai Singh, editor-in-chief of the Yahoo Media Network.

It’s a little bit like Groupon Now and LivingSocial Instant, which offer deals that can be redeemed immediately and are based on your location.

But the comparisons with the industry’s leaders and TownHog end there.

Lilia Martinez-Coburn, TownHog’s VP of product and marketing, explains that since getting into the business in late 2009, the company has shifted its focus away from building up a huge sales staff and competing one on one with the giants in the space.

Instead, it is offering the platform it built for its own deals to third-party publishers.

Today, its platform is being used by several companies, which already have the distribution and the sales force, including CBS Local Offers, OpenTable, Cumulus Broadcasting’s SweetJack.com, the San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate and others.

TownHog’s consumer-facing site now primarily operates in San Francisco only, where it continues to help SFGate source deals.

This is the second time the company has shifted businesses. Previously, it was called DotBlu, a social games company that didn’t work out. But since the company still had some money left in the bank, it tried the daily deals business.

Many started to think TownHog was again on the downturn earlier this year, when it started scaling back the number of employees it had.

Martinez-Coburn explains it has been reducing the number of people on staff because it didn’t need as many salespeople, since its publishing partners were increasingly sourcing the deals directly. About a month ago, TownHog had 40 employees; today it has closer to 30.

“As our partners ramp up and are getting the hang of how to sell this, the hope is for them to take on the role and source their own deals,” she said.

Other companies providing white label platforms in the daily deals space include Tippr and Group Commerce.

TownHog’s mobile product, which it unveiled today, is called Express Offers. It will allow partners to quickly launch a standalone iPhone app to publish offers.

Unlike traditional deals that run for 24 hours and make you wait to redeem them, consumers will have the chance to purchase these offers immediately from the phone or online.

Going forward, Martinez-Coburn said she hopes that all offers on their network will be offered instantly because of the benefits to the consumer and the publisher.

Publishers gain the opportunity to run more than one offer at a time, instead of providing just one deal a day. In addition, Martinez-Coburn said, it will help with conversion rates. Right now, many publishing partners promote deals on the radio or in the paper, and when people see it or hear about it, they immediately want to go and get 50 percent.

When they realize they have to wait 24 hours, the conversion drops off.

It is always nice when an intern makes good, and that is entirely the case with Drake Martinet (pictured here), who joins All Things Digital–as of yesterday, in fact.

We could not be happier. Plus, we knew he was our kind of geek after he agreed to spend the night in a tent next to Robert Scoble, to cover last year’s Apple iPad release.

That was when Drake was an ATD intern, until he headed to the New York Times this past summer to work on social media efforts in the newsroom.

And that’s one of the many things he will be working on here, making ATD more Facebook-worthy, Twittified and YouTubed within an inch of our lives.

Drake will also be working on upgrading our multimedia efforts–which is to say, figuring out a more sophisticated strategy for us than BoomTown’s Flip video camera assaults, helping mesh up business development efforts with our editorial integrity, analyzing our analytics and even making sure our new interns are up to snuff.

And, for his next trick, he will also be doing posts on interesting early start-ups and emerging ideas, much in the same way he did a bang-up job with a feature called “Almost Famous” when he was an intern.

Whew! Then again, he is young!

Still, Drake has done a lot so far.

After receiving his masters degree from Stanford University’s graduate program in journalism this year, and spending time in the school’s design program (the d.school), Drake moved to Brooklyn to work for the Times.

In addition to his weekly start-up column for ATD, his written, photographic and video work has appeared in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle and numerous Web sites and blogs.

A native of San Diego, Drake first moved to Northern California to attend the University of California at Davis. He has lived in the greater Bay Area for the last eight years, excepting short stays in Louisiana, Washington D.C., New York and Chile.

When not working on a story or doing a little Web development, Drake can be found at his workbench building all manner of things physical and electronic, like the solar-powered Timbuk2 backpack that accompanies him almost everywhere.

He also loves to twist through the Peninsula hills on his classic Triumph motorcycle. (And, now that he is our employee again, perhaps we’ll make him do it with Scoble in tow.)

Drake joins a spate of recent hires at ATD, including: Liz Gannes on social (now appearing here in her new blog, NetworkEffect); Tricia Duryee on e-commerce; Ina Fried on mobile; and, last but not least, Arik Hesseldahl on enterprise.

And, as usual, much more to come….

The above is an article of faith among a certain kind of Web publisher. And some of them are even paying for studies to prove that display ads–basically all the ads you see that aren’t part of search results–really do work on the Web.

Except when they don’t. That’s the unsettling conclusion that some research funded by Yahoo (YHOO) recently reached, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

The study was produced by the Web giant’s Yahoo Labs, which has been getting new attention in the Carol Bartz regime and beefing up its staff of social scientists by “adding highly credentialed cognitive psychologists, economists and ethnographers from top universities around the world.”

One of the new hires, economics professor David Reiley, tried to track the benefits of a Yahoo ad campaign on behalf of a retail chain. He found that the ads did work, but only for people born before Woodstock:

The research, conducted in partnership with an undisclosed national retailer, sought to accurately measure the impact of Internet display advertising across online and offline sales, by tracking people who had registered with both Yahoo and the store. The research found an approximately 5 percent increase in spending among those who had seen the ads–with 93 percent of those sales occurring in stores.

The potentially worrisome thing, however, was that among those under 40, the percentage was nearly zero. That could reflect the unpopularity of the particular retailer among that demographic. Or it could underscore a growing immunity to display advertising among the Web-savvy younger generation.

Yikes. I asked Yahoo for its take on the study and the company sent me a (not surprisingly) sunnier summary of the research. Some of its highlights:

Major Findings:
By combining a controlled experiment with panel data on purchases, we find statistically and economically significant impacts of advertising on sales.

We estimate the total effect on revenues to be more than eleven times the retailer’s expenditure on advertising during the study.
93% of the effect was on offline (in store) sales.

Persistence: The effects of the campaigns were persistent over time, meaning that the sales impact could be tracked for a period of time after the campaign ended.

Demographics: there was no significant correlation or differences w/r/t location (by state) or gender.

But there was a significant difference w/r/t to age: customers over the age of 40 were significantly more responsive to the ads in terms of sales. The largest effect came from senior citizens (65+).

Clicks versus non-Clicks: Though clicks are a standard measure of performance in online-advertising, we find that online advertising has substantial effects on those who merely view but do not click the ads.

We find that 78% of the effect in sales comes from those who view ads but do not click them, while only 22% can be attributed to those who click.

Count me among the group disposed to think that brand ads on the Web do work, by the way. But then again, I have a vested interest in this being true since it’s what’s supposed to keep me clothed and fed. I’d hate to see scientific proof that it’s all a pipe dream.

For a contrary perspective, funded by people whose interests align with mine, check out this study funded by the Online Publishers Association.

[Image credit: pedrosimoes7]

AT&T (T) has unveiled plans to raise landline phone rates by more than 20 percent in California, according to both the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The company plans to start telling customers next week that charges for basic phone service will jump to $16.45 from $13.50 effective January 2.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Last night, BoomTown moderated a really interesting panel for an organization called Girls in Tech, titled “Journalism 2.0 RoundTable.”

Girls in Tech describes itself as a “social network enterprise focused on the engagement, education and empowerment of like-minded, professional, intelligent & influential women.”

With those lofty requirements–combined with the fact that I was a girl when we had yet to land on the moon–I have no idea what I was doing there.

In any case, it was held in the San Francisco offices of MySpace and covered such topics such as: How blogging and citizen journalism have changed the landscape, what works in the highly connected digital media space, and, of course, the ups and down of being a woman in the male-choked tech industry in Silicon Valley.

The panelists included former San Francisco Chronicle tech editor Deborah Gage, ZDNet’s Jennifer Leggio, Ubergizmo Editor Eliane Fiolet, VentureBeat’s Camille Ricketts and TechieDiva’s Gina Hughes.

It was a lively discussion, with highlights such as Fiolet telling a hilarious story about an encounter of the irksome kind at a gaming conference and jokingly recommending violence as a solution, and Hughes talking about the sometimes trollish commenters of Yahoo (YHOO) when she blogged there.

Overall takeaway: Be loud, be proud and ignore all the noise. That, or make some more–and, preferably, via Twitter.

I also did a short interview at the event with social media blogger and PR guy Brian Solis about his latest book, “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.”

Natch, here is a lovely video I did–interviewing Solis, Hughes and Ricketts–which also includes yet another cruel “no comment” from Facebook’s talk-to-the-hand PR terror Brandee Barker:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090813/girls-in-tech-journalism-20-panel-speak-loudly-and-carry-a-big-stick/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20090810/verizon-to-buy-naming-rights-to-oakland-coliseum/ http://allthingsd.com/20090810/verizon-to-buy-naming-rights-to-oakland-coliseum/#comments Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:50:20 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=14218 Verizon Wireless (VZ) is reportedly in the final stages of negotiating a five-year, multi-million dollar deal for the naming rights to the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, the decrepit home of the Oakland A’s and the Oakland Raiders. The report, by the San Francisco Chronicle columnists Philip Matier and Andrew Ross, notes that the stadium has been without a naming deal since the expiration of a 10-year naming agreement with McAfee (MFE) in 2007.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090810/verizon-to-buy-naming-rights-to-oakland-coliseum/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090608/exclusive-brand-head-olivo-out-at-yahoo/ http://allthingsd.com/20090608/exclusive-brand-head-olivo-out-at-yahoo/#comments Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:22:23 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=14295

Allen Olivo, SVP of global brand marketing at Yahoo, is leaving the company, according to sources.

The high-level departure is the latest at Yahoo (YHOO), as major executive changes continue. It was announced today internally.

Yahoo confirmed the departure in a statement to BoomTown: “After more than three years at Yahoo!, Allen Olivo is leaving the company to pursue other interests. Allen has been a dedicated and valued member of the Yahoo! team and we wish him well in his future endeavors. Allen will remain at Yahoo! for a period of time in order to ensure a smooth transition.”

Olivo ran brand marketing for the Silicon Valley-based Internet giant, which is about to undergo a major new push under CEO Carol Bartz.

Olivo was reportedly up for the chief marketing officer job, which went to former NetApp (NTAP) marketing exec Elisa Steele recently.

Olivo joined Yahoo in early 2006 and has been responsible for “overseeing all aspects of its advertising and brand marketing strategy worldwide, including design and editorial.”

He’s worked at a variety of marketing jobs, including at the San Francisco Chronicle, Robertson Stephens, Amazon (AMZN) and Apple (AAPL).

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090608/exclusive-brand-head-olivo-out-at-yahoo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090227/do-magazines-need-their-own-kindle-yes-says-hearst/ http://allthingsd.com/20090227/do-magazines-need-their-own-kindle-yes-says-hearst/#comments Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:54:22 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=4690 If Amazon’s Kindle is the iPod for books, do we need a Kindle for magazines and newspapers? I’d say no. But publishing heavyweight Hearst disagrees and is going to come out with an e-reader of its own, according to a published report.

Fortune says Hearst, which publishes magazines like Cosmopolitan and Esquire, and, for the time being, newspapers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the San Francisco Chronicle, is working its own Kindle-like device.

“I can’t tell you the details of what we are doing, but I can say we are keenly interested in this, and expect these devices will be a big part of our future,” Hearst digital head Kenneth Bronfin tells the magazine. Some more vague details, which don’t include a launch date:

Insiders familiar with the Hearst device say it has been designed with the needs of publishers in mind. That includes its form, which will approximate the size of a standard sheet of paper, rather than the six-inch diagonal screen found on Kindle, for example. The larger screen better approximates the reading experience of print periodicals, as well as giving advertisers the space and attention they require.

…the Hearst reader is likely to debut in black and white and later transition to high-resolution color with the option for video….Downloading content from participating newspapers and magazines will occur wirelessly….

What Hearst and its partners plan to do is sell the e-readers to publishers and to take a cut of the revenue derived from selling magazines and newspapers on these devices. The company will, however, leave it to the publishers to develop their own branding and payment models. ‘That’s something you will never see Amazon do,’ someone familiar with the Hearst project said. ‘They aren’t going to give up control of the devices.’”

Intriguing? Yes. But I don’t have high hopes for the Hearst reader.

That’s in part because building consumer gadgets is a lot harder than it looks–remember all those awful MP3 players that predated Apple’s (AAPL) iPod? And I’m particularly worried about consumer gadgets designed with publishers in mind instead of consumers/readers.

But I’m also skeptical because I don’t really see how a dedicated magazine/periodical player does much for readers, period.

You can debate the pricing and feature set on Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle, but at least there’s a use case for the device: It’s designed to let you read for long stretches of time, which is pretty hard to do on iPhones and BlackBerries.

But I can easily plow through newspaper stories and magazine articles on my relatively frill-free BlackBerry 8830 (if you do the same, let me recommend Instapaper.com and/or Handmark’s FreeRange Reader). And bear in mind that Amazon’s device is also designed to let you hoover up newspapers, etc., as well; the New York Times says it is already selling a “modest” number of subscriptions to Kindle users.

So if Hearst’s Kindle Kopy is going to take up space in my gadget array, it’s going to have be something pretty special.

[Image credit: Library of Congress via Flickr]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090227/do-magazines-need-their-own-kindle-yes-says-hearst/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090224/hearst-threatens-to-close-the-sf-chronicle/ http://allthingsd.com/20090224/hearst-threatens-to-close-the-sf-chronicle/#comments Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:33:04 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=8797 Hearst Corp. this afternoon said it may sell or close the San Francisco Chronicle if a new round of cost-saving measures cannot be accomplished in the coming weeks. Hearst said it will undertake “critical cost-saving measures including a significant reduction in the number of its unionized and non-union employees.”

Hearst said the Chron lost more than $50 million last year and that “this year’s losses to date are worse.” The company said the paper has had “major losses” each year since 2001.

The statement is basically a warning to the Chronicle’s unions that they can either play ball or watch the paper go up in flames.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090224/hearst-threatens-to-close-the-sf-chronicle/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080730/yahoo-annual-meeting-countdown-2-days-to-go-slim-pickens/ http://allthingsd.com/20080730/yahoo-annual-meeting-countdown-2-days-to-go-slim-pickens/#comments Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:15:18 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=2454

Oh dear, oilman T. Boone Pickens has apparently been Yanged.

That sounds like something that would happen out on the back 40 of a Texas ranch that no one in the clan ever discusses in polite company.

Actually, losing about $50 million is also something moneymen like Pickens don’t like to talk about either, even if he is as rich as can be.

Of course, in dumping his 10 million shares so precipitously, Pickens’s parting shot showed exactly what Yahoo’s big weakness is as the company heads into its annual meeting this Friday: an increasingly depressed stock.

Indeed, because of Pickens’s departure as an investor, Yahoo (YHOO) shares dropped just below the dangerous $20 a share level yesterday to $19.71, not far off the $19.18 price that prompted Microsoft (MSFT) to attack in February.

Yahoo shares are now just holding onto the edge at $20.05 this morning.

This is perhaps Yahoo’s biggest external problem. While the stock has shown resilience of really dipping to the mid-teens, if the shares drop that far, Pickens will look attractive compared with the kind of vulture investors who will show up to pick at Yahoo.

While Yahoo’s assets add up to $20 or more per share on a cash basis, staying above this threshold has largely been predicated on the fact that investors imagine some deal, any deal, between Yahoo and Microsoft in the future.

Such a deal might be the right move, but investors should probably accept the fact that it might never happen and that Yahoo and Microsoft will keep their digital efforts solo.

That’s the trap Pickens wandered right into like a particularly clueless bear.

And while Pickens took aim at Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang at an editorial board meeting with the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday, noting, “I think that Yahoo management was pathetic,” the fault is entirely Pickens’s own in greedily following along with activist investor and longtime crony Carl Icahn.

Pickens had bought a pile of shares in May, after Icahn announced his intention to wage a proxy fight against Yahoo and force it into a sale of some sort to Microsoft.

One problem: Yahoo and Microsoft execs did not go along with the grand idea of enriching either Pickens or Icahn, who aren’t exactly digitally inclined.

That’s no negative really, except to say that the Internet space is not quite the same as oil or, really, most other industries yet.

Despite the struggles of Yahoo and Microsoft against the more powerful Google (GOOG), the Internet remains a fast-growing industry with many options.

In other words, not quite ripe enough for takeover artists’, well, pickin’.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080730/yahoo-annual-meeting-countdown-2-days-to-go-slim-pickens/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20070716/monday-morning-quarterback-the-knitted-iphone-edition/ http://allthingsd.com/20070716/monday-morning-quarterback-the-knitted-iphone-edition/#comments Mon, 16 Jul 2007 07:24:32 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070716/monday-morning-quarterback-the-knitted-iphone-edition/ I will admit it–I made copious fun of Walt Mossberg, John Paczkowski and our Web genius Adam Tow after they all quickly bought iPhones last week, right after the much-hyped uber-cellphone was launched by Apple.

That’s why I deserve the round of merciless teasing I got from them when I suddenly decided I had to have one, too–after a weak moment in the Apple store in the Grove in Los Angeles.

Like a lot of others, I was also nervous about it being Apple’s 1.0 version (and was trying to heed tech’s No. 1 caveat that you should always wait for 2.0 at least). But after playing with it even more, I also quickly realized it was like every other cellphone’s–and I have had them all–16.0 version, so much improved that other issues (yes, the poor AT&T wireless network) seemed less significant.

Perhaps I should have just stuck to my knitting, as seen here in a very funny post on Daddy Types, which is a blog apparently aimed at new fathers.

Given the massive falloff in business, why shouldn’t print just pack it in? Jon Fine of BusinessWeek in his Media Centric column this week poses that important question in a provocative piece.

Play with me on this one: Which major American newspaper should be the first to throw up its hands and stop publishing a print product?”

He names the San Francisco Chronicle as the guinea pig. Along with its money-losing status, Fine also notes that it exists in a plugged-in city ripe to support a large online business dependent on ad dollars.

And here’s a good video from Wall Street Journal Video about using digital tools to get a better golf club:

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And let me just say after a week in the wilds of Yosemite, it’s as crowded there as in the big city, as you can read in this disturbing story from the San Francisco Chronicle this weekend on the traffic jam to reach the summit of the famous and breathtaking Half Dome. As you can see by this stunning photo by Michael Maloney, getting away from it all is a bit harder than it seems and a whole lot more dangerous (there have been a few recent and obviously fatal falls on the cables going up the last stretch of the climb).

Wimp that I thankfully am, I did not try this trek and stuck to clambering over the slippery rocks under picturesque waterfalls, even as I desperately tried to catch an errant wireless signal.

Mostly, it was to no avail, and I thank the comment on my whiny post on my journey to the land of beauty and no-digital-connection that pointed out where I could jack in.

Indeed, I did manage to sign on at the lovely and historic Ahwahnee hotel there, where my family stayed for two nights after too much dust-choked and mosquito-plagued rustic cabin camping.

But, to assuage another commenter who wished I would learn to commune with nature more and my computer less, I did have a killer view of Half Dome as I microprocessed from a very comfy chair about one foot off the ground.

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