Random quotes, images, and thoughts from Ed Ireson.
H.O.V.A.
Les Pensées de Ed
Yeah, I don’t know what the hell is going on either. (via This American Life)
car2go Blackberry/HTML5 WebApp
I love the car2go service… I use it every day to go to work (since parking is rather limited). With the car2go, I can park on the street and not pay the parking meter.
Trouble is, when I’m out and about — it can sometimes be hard to locate a car2go. There are some iPhone apps, but I’m still using a Blackberry. So I spent my Sunday afternoon creating ATXcar.mobi.
If you use a Blackberry, or a modern web browser (not including Safari) — it will use geolocation to find car2go cars near you. Check it out, send me feedback, let me know if you face problems. I’ve only tested on my Blackberry Curve, so I’ll be interested to see how it works for other models.
Howard Rheingold on new media literacy: “Increasingly I think the digital divide is less about access to technology and more about the difference between those who know how and those who don’t know how. The ability to know has suddenly become the ability to search and the ability to sift”
Krewe of Dead Pelicans — The Gulf of Mexico’s Jazz Funeral (via The Gambit)
The AP Stylebook Struggles to Remain Relevant
The poor AP. Although I was never a big user of the AP style (I preferred MLA & The Economist Style Guide), it is the most widely used stylebook by journalists. But they are struggling to keep up with new media. They list POS as standing for “parent over shoulder”. Most under-30’s probably use it as Wikipedia defines it, “a euphemism for ‘piece of shit’”.
And while they finally caught on and have removed the space from “web site”, they went and added a space to “smartphone”. Not that Google is king, but given that it wants to correct “smart phone” to remove the space — it’s a good indicator that popular usage is without the space.
This is probably why I was never a fan of the AP Style. It forces writers to not use common sense. One of the other changes was to require the country after certain cities, including Frankfurt and Copenhagen. While there are certain readers who might benefit in knowing that those cities reside in Germany and Denmark, respectively — that is not the case for all publications. I know journalists are often taught to write to a 9th grade level, but how about writing to your audience specifically? A 9th grade level works if you’re writing in Newsweek or USA Today, but less so for The Economist or The New York Times.
BP & The Spill: Fanning the Flames?
Some reasonable comments on the Oil Spill on the Humid City blog. There has been lots of back and forth in the media and on Twitter, and this article is a step back from all of that. Worth the read, and kudos to @humidcity
