Has it really been forty-five years this week since Technologizer’s debut? Why, it seems like just a few months. But it’s true–we’ve been covering technology since April, 1964, when CPU speed was measured in picohertz and “satellite radio” was something the CIA used to spy on Castro.
From our humble beginnings to our present-day state–which is arguably even more humble–it’s been a wonderful ride. After the jump, a few mementos and memories.
Mind if ask for a favor? Federated Media, Technologizer’s advertising partner, is conducting a survey to learn more about the demographics of Technologizer’s community. The information we collect won’t be used in any personally-identifiable manner–just to do a better job of targeting ads to the type of folks who visit the site, and therefore making them more relevant and useful. If you can take the survey, I’d appreciate it.
Click here to begin the survey.
Thanks!
Funny but true: More and more, Technologizer has been living a double life. It is, of course, a Web site. But an awful lot of general chatter and discussion of specific T-stories is going on over at Twitter, where I’m @harrymccracken.
(Actually, Technologizer has a triple life if you count the official Technlogizer Twitter feed, which is @technologizer. That one’s an automated feed of all Technologizer posts. But @harrymccracken is a mix of links to posts and original stuff, and it’s far more bustling.)
Below are some of the Tweets I’ve gotten today on my post about the new, extra-minuscule iPod Shuffle–good stuff all. (I’ll probably bring you some other Tweets about Technologizer stories from time to time, too.) If you haven’t checked out Twitter, consider this my personal invitation to stop by and hang out with us there…
When I started Technologizer back in June of last year, it was never my intention to be a one man band. I knew I wanted a bunch of other folks contributing–in part because I can’t crank out an unlimited number of words a day, but mostly because I wanted the site to benefit from the voices of multiple contributors with different sensibilities and areas of expertise. I’ve been remiss in not telling you more about the people behind the bylines. I’ll correct that in a series of posts I’m calling Meet the Technologizers.
It’s utterly obvious that the first such post should be about Ed Oswald. Other than yours truly, Ed is Technologizer’s longest serving, most prolific author: He contributes one or most posts most days, and sometimes tackles stories before I’ve gotten up in the morning or after I’ve hit the hay. (He does work a different shift from me that gives him a head start–he’s based in Reading, Pennsylvania–but as far as I can tell, he never sleeps)
I first came across Ed’s work when he was a reporter over at BetaNews, a site where he worked for four years before going freelance last year. But tech reporting, it turns out, was not always in his blood:
Journalism was actually not my first choice of profession. Actually as a kid I wanted to be a TV weatherman. Seriously. However, once high school came around I joined the TV crew and took an interest in reporting. My grades in math and science just weren’t there, so I decide to pursue a career in journalism.
Getting into tech journalism seemed natural to me. I have been a tech geek for as long as I can remember. My first computer back in the early 1990s was an old Panasonic portable computer with an included thermal printer and two floppy drives that I picked up at a ham radio swap meet. Couldn’t do much on it, but I could get on Prodigy, and I was in heaven. I can even tell you my first username on there–VSJT79A. Yeah, I’m a dork.
Writing about technology is great fun to me, and comes natural. I love gadgets, and I’ll say the best part of this job is the chance to play with all the latest and greatest stuff. A techie couldn’t ask for anything more.
As you can tell from his Technologizer contributions, Ed is a generalist–but he’s particularly passionate about anything relating to digital media, as well as the products of a certain company headquartered in Cupertino, California. Other beats include “net censorship, the intersection of politics and the Internet, and online copyright.”
Oh, and his post about a weird auction site called Swoopo ranks among this site’s biggest hits–he wrote it four months ago, and commenters continue the conversation to this day.
Outside of tech, Ed is still a weather buff. And a Volkswagen fan. And a snowboarding newbie. I’m very happy to have him on board–and I’m glad that he’s happy too.
Okay, that’s one Technologizer introduced; stay tuned, and I’ll tell you about the rest of the crew…
During my almost fourteen years as an editor at PC World, there was no question who our most popular writer was. It was Steve Bass, who was associated with PCW for even longer than I was. As the author of a well-read column, newsletter, and blog, as well as lots of feature articles, Steve was sort of the fearless leader of a sizable army of loyal, outspoken fans. He created a community long before anyone talked about online communities, and when readers told us what they liked about PCW, it was often, essentially, “reviews, news, tips…and Steve Bass.”
Like me, Steve is still a contributing editor for PC World, but is now focusing most of his energies on his own startup gig. In his case that’s TechBite, a newsletter and site that are all Steve, all the time. I’m delighted to announce that Steve has agreed to let us borrow some of his material. It’ll appear on Technologizer in the form of blog posts, but if you want to make sure you get a full weekly dose of Bass, head over to TechBite and sign up for his newsletter, which comes out on Wednesdays.
It’s great to be associated with Steve again–and I know you’ll enjoy his contributions, whether you’re an old fan or will be encountering him for the first time.
I’ve been talking about launching a Technologizer e-mail newsletter for almost as long as there’s been a Technologizer. This is the week it happens. On Friday, we’ll send out the first weekly edition of T-Week, in which I’ll wrap up the tech week that was with news, commentary, and links delivered straight to your in-box. You can sign up to get it delivered for free right here–and I hope you do.
Quick reminder: We’re still looking for tech-related predictions for 2009 from members of the Technologizer community. And we’ll give away a cool Seagate 1TB external drive at random to one person who submits a prediction. We need ’em by 12pm PT on this coming Wednesday, and will compile the best predictions into a story we’ll publish soon thereafter. Full details and a submission form here. Thanks, and hope that 2009 is treating you well so far…
Last month was a wonderful one for Technologizer from a traffic standpoint–we had more big hits than in any month to date. But in case you missed any (or all!) of ’em, here are the top ten, in order of total page views to date:
1. Apple Patentmania: 31 Years of Big Ideas: I discovered that you could use Google Patents to look up old Apple patents, and found the drawings they contained fascinating. I thought other folks might, too. They did!
2. Patentmania: The Golden Age of Electronic Games: I couldn’t stop digging up old patent drawings, so I collected ones for Simon, the Atari 2600, Vectrex, and other old games into a gallery.
3. iFrauds: The Fakest iPhones Ever: I went to a lousy liquidation sale and wanted to kick myself until I saw that it was rife with weird imitation iPods.
4. The 13 Greatest Error Messages of All Time: A story from back in September that seems to be the closest thing Technologizer has to a timeless classic so far.
5. State of the Browser Betas: A Technologizer Cheat Sheet: A quick rundown on what’s up with the next versions of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari.
6. Is Swoopo Nothing More Than a Well-Designed Gimmick?: Ed Oswald’s musings on an oddball auction site turned out to instigate an ongoing discussion that just keeps going and going.
7. The T-Grid: BlackBerry Storm vs. iPhone 3gG: A quick spec comparison between two leading touch-screen phones.
8. The 13 Other Greatest Error Message of All Time: A sequel to top story #4, based on nominations from folks who read the first article.
9. The Best of Frenemies: A look at tech players who can’t live with or without each other.
10. Windows 7 First Impressions: Hey, This Looks Pretty Good!: My take on the first prerelease version of Windows 7 to escape from Redmond.
(It’s kind of obvious I’m obsessed with patent drawings, huh?)
Best wishes for 2009 from Technologizer–thanks for being part of our community. Hope you have a great year in all respects–both technology-related or otherwise.
Confession time: I like reading tech predictions, but I don’t much like making them…mainly because I’m just not that good at it. So I’m putting the burden on you guys: I’m rounding up predictions for 2009, and will publish highlights much as we did with our Whaddaya Want? wishlist project. You can guess at cool products and services that we’ll see, corporate mergers that’ll happen, embarrassments that will be suffered by major companies–anything, really, as long as it relates to technology.
How will I induce you to chime in? With a prize, of course. We’ll pick one community member who contributes at random and give that person Seagate’s FreeAgent XTreme external desktop hard drive, a Cadillac of a drive with 1TB of storage and FireWire 400, USB 2.0, and eSata ports. If you’ve got a Mac, you can choose to receive the FreeAgent Desk Mac drive, which is designed for Macs and bundled with OS X software tools, instead. (Prize courtesy of Seagate.)
You can submit predictions until 12pm noon PT on Wednesday, January 7th; we’ll draw a winner and notify that person by midnight on Friday, January 8th.
Please use the handy-dandy form below to submit predictions–more than one is fine, but won’t increase your chances at winning the drive, so just include ’em all in one message. Please give your real name and be sure to provide a working e-mail address, so we can e-mail you with any good news (if you’re logged into WordPress.com, we’ll get your e-mail automatically). Thanks in advance! And remind me to follow up a year from now to see how well we (er, you) did at guessing what 2009 would bring.
[UPDATE: Submissions are now closed–thanks to all who contributed.]
