Starting a New Chapter

Back on February 9th, I announced that I had a cool new job, as an editor at large for TIME. I’ll be writing about personal technology for the publication in both its online and print incarnations. And Technologizer is coming along with me: Starting later today, it will become part of TIME.com.

When we flip the switch, heading to Technologizer.com will take you to the new version that’s part of TIME.com. You’ll also find Technologizer posts, and scads more stuff, at TIME.com’s all-encompassing tech section, Techland.

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Technologizer’s Greatest Hits, 2008-2012

Whenever people ask me what the topic of Technologizer is–which they do all the time–I have a stock answer which happens to be true. This site is about the intersection between the tech-related stuff that I’m interested in, and the tech-related stuff that a critical mass of other people are interested in. You see, I’m not very good at covering topics I don’t care about–but I do like people to read what I’ve written.

My interests are eclectic enough that Technologizer has tended to be eclectic. And when other folks started writing for the site, it sometimes got eclectic in ways that surprised even me. One of the great pleasures of blogging here is that so many of you have gotten what we do here, even in cases when the subject matter has gotten a tad peculiar.

Now that Technologizer is about to end its life as a stand-alone site and become part of TIME.com,  I wanted to look back at some of our most popular stories to date. Here’s a month-by-month accounting of the most-read items we’ve published, by unique visitors. (Unless otherwise specified, I wrote all of these.)

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Checking In

My apologies for the lull in activity here since I announced my new gig as an editor at large for TIME. Before too long, Technologizer will reemerge as a blog hosted by TIME.com. In the meantime, I’m doing most of my blogging on TIME’s Techland. Here are a few items you may have missed:

• I tried Apple’s upcoming OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, an even more iOS-esque Mac operating system.
• I wondered if Windows for ARM-based processors is a stopgap rather than the future.
• I attempted to collect the most plausible-sounding iPad 3 rumors, from the most reliable sources.
• I mused about the rants of an understandably prickly member of RIM’s board of directors.
• I worried about Microsoft’s plans for Windows’ iconic Start button.

See you over there, I hope–and I promise to drop in here as well before the TIME.com transition is complete.

It’s TIME for a New Adventure

Three and a half years ago, I quit a cool job and started Technologizer. It’s been the best gig I’ve ever had. So far.

As a sideline, starting in September of 2010, I’ve been writing for TIME.com and TIME magazine. That too has been huge fun, and an honor. Over the past few decades, TIME has influenced my editorial brain as much as any publication. Just as important, I’ve been impressed by its current incarnation online, in print, on tablets, and elsewhere.

I’m pleased to announce that my relationship with TIME is about to become way more than a sideline: I’ve agreed to join its staff as an editor at large.

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The Top 25 Technologizer Stories of 2011

2011, as you may have noticed, is finally over. And what a year it was in tech. The news just kept on coming, and while some of it was sad (the passing of Steve Jobs), alarming (the PlayStation Network break-in), or just plain weird (Qwikster!), it was never tedious.

Technologizer has never set out to be a plain-vanilla tech news site, so what gets read around here isn’t a snapshot of the year’s most momentous stories. Instead, it’s something a bit more idiosyncratic: a gumbo of major events, personal observations, history, and more. Basically, it’s what I and my fellow Technologizer scribes thought you’d find interesting.

And here are the 25 stories that you found to be most interesting–as ranked by the number of people who read them.

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Coming on Monday: WWDC 2011 Live Blog Coverage

On Monday June 6th at 10am PT, I’ll be at San Francisco’s Moscone West for Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote. It sounds packed, packed, packed–we’ll get our last big look at OS X 10.7 Lion before it ships, and our first big looks at the next version of iOS, and the long-rumored service now known as iCloud. And rumor has it that there are occasionally surprise announcements at these events. (I’m told Jobs likes to keep them until the end.)

I’ll blog the keynote news as it happens, with color commentary from special guest Doug Aamoth of Techland. Tens of thousands of folks attended our last Apple live coverage (the iPad 2 announcement), but we’ll save room for you. Join us at technologizer.com/wwdc11–and go there now to sign up for an e-mail reminder if you like.

Fujitsu ScanSnap Giveaway: The Winners

We have winners in our ScanSnap scanner giveaway! Ruth Hiner won the ScanSnap S100. And Harvey Rogers won the ScanSnap S1300.

Thanks to Fujitsu for providing the scanners…and to everyone who entered here and on Twitter and told us about the paper documents in their lives.

Your Chance at a ScanSnap Scanner

Weren’t we supposed to live in a paperless world by now? I seem to have at least as much stuff printed on dead trees in my life as ever—business documents, photos, greeting cards, and a whole lot more. So do you, I’ll bet. And if you’d like to cut clutter by bringing them into the digital world, here’s a way to get a shot at a scanner that can do the job.

Courtesy of Fujitsu, we’re giving away two of its snazzy ScanSnap scanners in a random drawing: the super-portable S1100 (a $199 value, shown on the left above) and the double-sided S1300 ($295, on the right). Both are compact desktop models that can scan to PDF, Office, e-mail, and more, and are compatible with Windows PCs and Macs.

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The IronGeekiest of Them All

One of the last things I did at South by Southwest this week was probably the most fun and definitely the wildest and wackiest: On Tuesday afternoon, I competed against Joshua Baer, Larry Chiang, Amanda Coolong, Lydia Leavitt, and Nan Palmero in a tournament known as Das IronGeek. We raced around the SxSW show floor, competing in a typing test at the Das Keyboard booth, sifting through sand to find phone cases with Seidio, answering trivia questions provided by Triviatise, going head-to-head in air hockey over at MapQuest, and setting up servers for SoftLayer.

In the end, the contest wasn’t that much of a contest: Josh Baer, founder of the neat service OtherInbox, won the overall competition handily and beat me at air hockey like I’ve never been beat before. I went away happy anyway, having tied for second place, won the trivia round, and generally comported myself better than I did at last year’s inaugural IronGeek edition.

After the jump, a few photos I took of my fellow contestants.

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We’re Up for Some Awards!

I’m tickled to report that Technologizer is a finalist in this year’s Maggie Awards, a sixty-year-old competition conducted by the Western Publishing Association, an organization of print and online publishers located in the western US states. In fact, we’re in the running in three of the Web categories:

Best Web Publication/Consumer (hey, we’re up against our friends at PCWorld here)

Best Web or Digital Publication Article/Consumer (for Fanboy! The Strange True Tale of the Tech World’s Favorite Put-Down)

Best Web or Digital Publication Blog/Trade and Consumer

The winners will be announced at an awards gala on April 29th in LA. I’ll let you know how we do.

Technologizer at SxSW

I’m getting ready to head for one of my favorite tech conferences, Austin’s South by Southwest Interactive, which starts this Friday and goes well into the next week. I’ll mostly be hanging out, meeting interesting people, and looking for cool companies to write about–but I’ll also be part of two official events at the show.

Official event #1: On Monday, March 14th at 12:3pm in room 12AB in the ScreenBurn section at the Austin Convention Center, I’ll moderate a panel called “Platform Success: Earning Developers’ Trust, Hearts, and Minds.” Panelists include Peter Hoddie of Marvell, Brandon Watson of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 team, James Keller of iOS developer Small Society, and Ben Satterfield, the CEO of TestFlight.

Official event #2: On Tuesday, March 15th at 3pm at the SxSW Block Party, I’ll be doing my darndest to fare well in a competition called Das IronGeek, which pits a few folks against each other in a tech tournament including a typing race, a build-your-own server competition, and other challenges, including at least one they haven’t told me about yet. (I competed last year, in the inaugural edition, and didn’t do so well–but this year I’ll prevail. Or at try not to embarrass myself.)

Hope to see some you at one (or both) of these events, or just around town.

Win Tapper World Tour–and an iPod Touch to Play It on

Tempest. Tapper. Rampage. Popeye. Dig Dug. Those are my five favorite classic arcade games, and I’m really not sure what order I’d rank them in. Tempest would probably come out on top–but Tapper would have a shot, too.

Tapper debuted in 1983 and existed in two versions. In one, you played the part of a bartender who served Budweiser beer, in an early example of product placement in games. The other edition was Root Beer Tapper–shown above–in which you were a soda jerk serving non-alcoholic refreshments. The gameplay was identical: You ran around tapping beverages and flinging them down counters at hordes of impatient customers in various settings. It was twitchy good fun, the graphics and sound were excellent for their day, and I know that the game has held up well–I played it, repeatedly, just a few months ago at the amazing California Extreme arcade mega-event.

And now there’s Tapper World Tour, a new version for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad from Warner Bros. and Square One. You may not be surprised to learn that the graphics are more ambitious this time around, and you serve drinks in a lot more settings. But the basic drink-flinging gameplay looks like it’s come into the modern era intact, as it should:

Lovers of 1980s gaming have another reason to be interested in this revival: Its graphics were designed by Don Bluth, whose animation studio produced the animation for Dragon’s Lair (1983) and Space Ace (1984), two games which used laserdiscs to provide astoundingly rich animation and audio for their era.

Interested in playing the new Tapper? It’s scheduled to show up on the iOS App Store in early spring. And courtesy of Warner Bros. and Square One, you have a chance at a free copy–and an 8GB iPod Touch to play it on. We’ll be giving an iPod Touch with Tapper World Tour preinstalled to one lucky winner.

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Join Us for Live Coverage of Apple’s iPad 2 Event

And the tablet news just keeps on coming. This time it’s from Apple–and it involves an event which will happen next Wednesday, March 2nd at 10am PT in San Francisco. Please join me for live coverage from Yerba Buena Gardens; your comments during the proceedings are usually at least as interesting as my live commentary. You can sign for a reminder if you’re so inclined: Technologizer.com/ipad2.

Coming on Wednesday: Live Coverage of HP’s Web OS Event

Those of us who think that WebOS is one of the best mobile operating systems in the business are looking forward to the WebOS event HP is holding on Wednesday, the first big bash it’s thrown since it acquired Palm last year. The company has pre-announced that it’ll announce something related to WebOS tablets, and there could be more news. (I’m still waiting for a handset that looks a bit like an iPhone but runs WebOS.)

The event is happening at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, and kicks off at 10am PT; I’ll be there and am looking forward to liveblogging the proceedings at technologizer.com/webos. Come hang out with me, won’t you?

Technologizer and TIME.com: The Details on Our New Partnership

If you’re the type who examines Web sites really carefully, you may have noticed something new at Technologizer: the “in partnership with TIME.com” labels at the top and bottom of each page. I’m thrilled to say that our site and TIME.com are expanding the collaboration we established back in September, when I began writing a weekly original Technologizer column for TIME.com. (It also shows up in the magazine–for instance, my story on Quora will be in this week’s issue.)

What does our broader arrangement mean for the Technologizer community? In some respects, not much: The site remains an independent business. I still have the honor and responsibility of calling the shots on editorial content and all other issues; the same folks will be writing for the site. But TIME.com’s sales team will be responsible for selling the ads that make Technologizer a viable business. You’ll also see links to Technologizer stories over at TIME.com, alerting new readers to our existence.  I’ll continue the Technologizer column for TIME and guest contributions over at TIME’s Techland site–and will contribute some more ambitious stories to TIME.com as well.

In short, the idea is to use our editorial and business partnership to bring more Technologizer to more people than ever. And while Technologizer continues to be an experiment in small-scale, hand-made, small-batch journalism, it’s exciting to team up with one of the most powerful media brands ever.

I’d also like to take a moment to thank all the smart people at Federated Media, the company which signed on to be our advertising partner before the site even existed. Without their enthusiasm, creativity, and hard work on our behalf, there might not be a Technologizer at all; I’ll be grateful for their support forever, and am happy to say we still have some irons in the fire together.

Thanks to you, too: As I never tire of telling people, Technologizer is the best job I’ve ever had, and it’s you guys (here, on Twitter, and on Facebook) that make every day a new adventure. You’re an inspiring bunch.

Here’s a story from MediaBistro on the news.

Me at Macworld Expo

About twenty years after I attended my first Macworld Expo, I’m tickled to be speaking at one. Week after next, I’m part of a new Macworld feature called the Industry Forum, which consists of quick presentations by a bunch of folks–other speakers include Macworld Editorial Director Jason Snell, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, Mac founding father Bill Atkinson, and others.

As usual, Macworld is at San Francisco’s Moscone Center; I go on Wednesday, January 26th at 10:40am. (The conference sessions run from January 25th-29th and the show floor opens on the 27th.) My topic is “Thoughts on Mobile,” and I plan to spend twenty minutes exploring the current state of competition between iOS devices and their competition and mulling over where it may lead in the months and years to come.

Hope to see you there!