Man, now Brian too! Brian pinged me earlier today to let me know that he was hanging it up here at WIN, officially marking the end of our three-and-a-half year partnership. Working with Brian has been amazing experience, Brian has the most intense work ethic of anyone I’ve ever met and single-handedly built and developed Blogsmith into a world-class content management system. I know he’s involved with ComicMix now, but if anyone deserves some time off, it’s Brian. Hard to believe I’m the last one left…
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I know it’s been a while since I talked about this, but I was just thinking the other day about Dave Winer’s panel at Mix07 about creating the perfect podcast player and thought: Why don’t we do a unconference about this? We saw so much interest and excitement about the prospect of building one, it’d be awesome to get a bunch of smart, creative people all in the same place at the same time to talk about it. I could see UI experts interacting with hardware engineers, software gurus chatting with podcasters about what features they’d want for producing podcasts, gadget enthusiasts (like me) talking about what works and what doesn’t about the current players that are out there, etc. I have no idea whether it’d get us any closer to getting one built, but it’s hard to imagine that SOMETHING positive wouldn’t come out of so many motivated people coming together with a common goal in mind. Dave, you up for it? I’ll be back in San Francisco next month, I’m sure we could throw something together.
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Crazy week, huh? I hate talking about Engadget over here, since technically this is supposed to be my personal blog, but I would like to say thanks to everyone for their patience and understanding during this whole situation.
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Well, I finally made the pages of The New Yorker, my favorite magazine. It’s just a couple of quotes in an profile of Walt Mossberg, but I’ll take it! -
Just read over at Epicenter that PC World Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken quit in protest today because the mag’s new CEO wanted to spike a “whimsical article” titled “Ten Things We Hate About Apple.” Guess the new CEO didn’t want to alienate Apple, and apparently he had been telling editors to be softer in their reviews of products from companies that advertise in the magazine. It’s a complete violation of church and state for a publisher to try and manipulate editorial to please advertisers (or potential advertisers), and I gotta say, I support what Harry did 100% and have a tremendous amount of respect for the stand he took. That kind of integrity and honor is all too rare these days.
I’ve been extremely fortunate in that I’ve never had to face a similiar situation here at Engadget. One of the things I most worried about after I sold the site to AOL is that they’d try to water down the editorial or try and tell me what to do or what to write (or not write). I made it clear to them from day one that I’d never compromise our editorial integrity, and to their credit, no one at AOL has ever tried to interfere with what we write — in fact, I’ve never had any kind of discussion with anyone at AOL about what direction our editorial should take, Ryan and I have just run things exactly as we’ve seen fit.Harry, I’m sure you’re going to be contacted by a ton of publications in the coming days and weeks, but we’d be more than happy to have you with us here at Engadget in whatever capacity you’d want.
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Had a meeting at an office building in Midtown the other day and from the window was able to snap this pic looking down onto the Apple Store on 5th Ave (wish I’d had a better camera with me than my Treo). Funny how impressive the store is from the outside and how collossally drab and boring it is once you get inside.
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And I also have a tiny bit of news of my own to report: I’ve joined the board of trustees of Rhizome.org, a non-profit which has been promoting digital art for over ten years now and is affiliated with the New Museum of Contemporary Art (which also happens to have a brand new building going up just a few blocks away from where I live). I’ve been a fan of the site for years and am looking forward to helping them figure out what role a digital arts organization plays in a world where practically everyone’s become a cultural producer. -
Can’t believe that it’s actually happening, but Judith Meskill is leaving WIN. She’s one of the few people actually predates me at the company, and it’s truly hard to conceive of this place without her holding down the fort and watching our back. Judith went way beyond what you could ever expect from someone. She put her heart and soul into making WIN great, and just generally set the tone for the entire organization (yes, even more than Jason did!), and I’m excited to find out what she does next!
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Forget all those April Fools Day hoaxes that are going around; the real news is that Scripting News reached the ten year mark today. Big ups to Dave for both pioneering the genre and toughing it out for a decade, blogging can be something of a contact sport. I’m just about three-and-a-half years from the ten-year-mark myself — though unlike Dave I’ve jumped around a bit more and have long since abandoned my original blog to the mists of time.
