Archive | About Technologizer

Technologizer’s Greatest Hits, 2008-2012

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 29, 2012 at 11:53 am

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

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 16, 2012 at 3:29 pm

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:

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

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It’s TIME for a New Adventure

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 9, 2012 at 2:10 pm

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

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 2, 2012 at 12:25 pm

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

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 2, 2011 at 6:29 pm

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.

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Your Chance at a ScanSnap Scanner

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 18, 2011 at 10:57 pm

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

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 16, 2011 at 10:39 pm

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!

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 16, 2011 at 11:30 am

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.

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Technologizer at SxSW

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 7, 2011 at 12:05 am

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.

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