AdAge sparked a flurry on Twitter Monday with a juicy essay, RIP, the Press Release (1906-2010) — and Long Live the Tweet, by @SimonDumenco. Tweetmeme Captures The Retweets The flurry featured a lot of straight retweets, a few “huhs?” and at least three rebuttals. Mine was one of them:

That’s Mark Zuckerberg’s personal philosophy from his Facebook profile as reported by Jose Antonio Vargas in his 6,000 word New Yorker piece, The Face of Facebook — Mark Zuckerberg Opens Up. A snippet: He walked into the house, which is painted in various shades of blue and beige, except for the kitchen, which is a vibrant yellow. Colors don’t matter much to Zuckerberg; a few years ago, he...

Alexia Tsotsis says that if you were an Internet hipster you’d have seen this three days ago: French designer Evan Roth has made a ten minute music video consisting of popular gifs vs. the typical fragmented Girl Talk tomfoolery (from the 2006 album Night Ripper). While Roth’s cleverly titled “Cache Rules Everything Around Me” is absolutely not the first time someone has combined Internet...

Emergency teams using search-and-rescue dogs are continuing to comb through the ruins of the San Bruno neighborhood where a gas pipeline exploded Thursday evening. Most of the area has been searched by now without having found additional bodies, and although reports I’ve seen are conflicting (understandably so), it appears that no residents remain unaccounted for.

I cannot speak for 9-11 survivors for I am not one. I am only a walker. A person who walks with people on the way back from hell. I can only give you my understanding of those whose staggering gait I know deeply. I’ve been a post-trauma specialist and psychoanalyst for forty years. I’ve worked with 9-11 survivor families, individuals and first responders from New York and New Jersey who survived...

It’s also about lives. This happened in San Bruno, California, but ancient, poorly maintained infrastructure is a problem all over the United States.

We know that in a crisis or breaking news situation, the Twitter stream can get clogged with retweets, rumor and people trying to hijack a trending topic. Enter curated.by as a possible solution. San Bruno CA - Image Links To Google Map Tweet From Sarah Granger - Image Links To Tweet Thursday about 6 pm, an explosion rocked San Bruno, CA, located near San Francisco airport. I learned about the fire via Twitter,...

Net Neutrality: A Crucial Issue With a Lame Name by Tina Dupuy The term “net neutrality” has the magical property of making most people’s eyes glaze over. First, it sounds like a gambling term. “I have a system and net neutrality – I can’t lose!” Second, no one using the Internet calls it “the net” anymore. Just like no one in San Francisco calls it “Frisco.” So the term “net neutrality”...

This has got to be one of the best headlines on the Net today: Android Is As Open As The Clenched Fist I’d Like To Punch The Carriers With. I expected it to be link bait, but it’s not. … the so-called open system is quickly revealing itself to be anything but… the carriers may actually be able to exploit this “openness” to create a closed system that may leave you crying for Apple’s...

With the clash of religious radicals of all kinds apparently accelerating, this article by Mohammed Abbou of Algeria’s Le Quotidien d’Oran offers a ray of light from the Muslim world. With his account of the day human beings landed on the moon, Abbou illustrates how the backward views of the ignorant faithful continue to blind people to the truth of the world they live in. For Algeria’s Le...

In an apparent response to attorneys general in 17 states demanding that Craigslist remove its adult services section because the site doesn’t adequately block potentially illegal ads promoting prostitution and child trafficking, the section was replaced Saturday with a black bar that says, simply, ”censored.” Michael Arrington notes that Craigslist has taken a disproportionate share of the...

Hello there: Dr. E. here… It’s often told as a joke, but it’s no joke really: what money is charged to the consumer of education vs what money can actually buy for that consumer, has often become a mockery … With the massive closing of excellent trade schools across the nation, and university increasingly out of financial reach, what if we are driving toward a majority mass of minimum...

Updated: Think about this for a moment: you tweet something you genuinely think is the truth, and then you discover that you made it up. In effect, it was a lie. What would you do? This is not an academic question: the odds that one day each of us will tweet something that is less than 100 percent true are pretty high. How might you effect a correction? I’m about to outline what you should not do, with...

That’s not me saying that; it’s Stephen Hawking, in his new book which will be released next week. Or, at least, it’s what CNN says Hawking is saying:

Can established software giants — Microsoft, Apple, even Google — get “the social web”? From Microsoft, we have the ignored “social” tab on the Zune; from Google, the death of Wave (less than a year) and lackluster response to Buzz. Apple joined the foray yesterday. I asked on Twitter if we really need a new social network, a niche one for music:

The difference in a nutshell: Analyst Michael Gartenberg sums it up nicely on Twitter: “Apple and Google taking two different approaches. Google wants input one. Will never get it. Apple wants input two and might.” He’s referring to the input jacks on your TV set. Google is trying to replace your cable box or satellite TV box as “input one.” That’s really ambitious, and a...

I don’t make predictions. But I read a lot of them. And repeat the ones I like. Some swirling around Wednesday’s Apple event (10 a.m. Pacific)… Nearly everyone expects Apple TV to be renamed iTV and go on sale for $99 ($130 less than the current model). One hold out, NewTeeVee’s Darrell Etherington: While I don’t doubt that Apple has big plans in store for the iTV, I find it very unlikely...

When in doubt about whether the Fourth Amendment gives the federal government a specific surveillance authority, err on the side of the Fourth Amendment. the federal government’s surveillance authority.

Chase Whiteside (interviews) and Erick Stoll (camera), still students at Wright State University in Dayton, OH, are New Left Media. They were at Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally. Say they: The participants spoke abstractly about the need to restore “honor” and “pride” to a country that had lost it. When pressed for when our country had lost its honor, most cited the election...

Frederick Deligne, Nice-Matin, France This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

What could President Obama and Fed Chairman Bernanke undertake with respect to national economic and financial policy that would not require any Congressional approval? Congress will likely undertake nothing of any notable legislative substance before the November elections out of complete institutional gridlock, fear, ignorance and paralysis. If the next Congress is controlled by Republicans, even less than...

This article from award-winning Izvestia columnist Malor Storu cites some startling statistics – mostly from the U.S. Congressional Research Service – to highlight just how expensive in lives and money the war in Afghanistan is compared to past U.S. wars. For Izvestia, Malor Storu writes in part: Since the time of Genghis Khan, several empires have tried to solve the “riddle of Afghanistan.”...

The Koch brothers are all the news, David and Charles… along with what some call their ‘libertarian’ based outpouring of money so much of which is ‘heavily weighted giving’ to protect their own business interests: oil, lumber, formaldehyde. Well, they earned it. They can give it to whom they wish. Within the law. But some choices seem puzzling. And I dont mean the amounts of sugar...

China produces 97% of the global supply of rare earth metals, elements that are used in nearly every electronics component and many other advanced technologies. There has been whispering for a couple of years that they would be cutting exports on most rare earths starting this year and all rare earths by 2012 due to their domestic manufacturing demand. This will leave Taiwan, Japan and other technology manufacturers...

Google announced yesterday free voice phone calls via GMail to the U.S. and Canada and calls to other countries billed for as little as $0.02 per minute. (Here’s their price comparison table.) The feature was rolled out to everyone in the U.S. today. (If you don’t see the feature yet, try logging out of Gmail and signing back in.) It looks like GMail users like it: This afternoon Google tweeted...