Okay, maybe “lost” is overstating things. Still, I tend to forget about most of the stuff I write the moment I’m done with it. So I certainly don’t have vivid recollections of writing my weekly Technologizer column for TIME.com, which I did from September 2010 until February 2012.
But when I was freeze-drying the Technologizer website, I created an index of every Technologizer post. It dawned on me that the index was far from complete, because quite a few of the words I wrote under the Technologizer banner were published on TIME.com, not Technologizer.com. And at first—before I joined TIME‘s staff— they appeared every Tuesday (later shifted to Thursday) in TIME.com’s Business section.
Technologizer on TIME wasn’t too different from Technologizer.com. I probably stuck more consistently to addressing a big, mainstream audience, and tried to cover the big topics of the day: smartphones, tablets, social networking, the evolving PC, and various things that seemed interesting at the time, such as Quora, OnLive, and Blekko. My wonderful editors, Jim Frederick (whom I still can’t believe is gone) and, later, Doug Aamoth, barely touched what I wrote. I think most of the headlines are mine, and nearly all of the topics are—though Jim did ask me to write about a dust-up behind the scenes at TechCrunch. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to cover that, and the piece turned out quite well.
Compiling the list of stories below was complicated by the ramshackle state of TIME.com’s archives. It’s possible that all these pieces are still there, but I have two author pages on the site—here and here—and neither includes my columns. When I began writing for TIME, most of its online tech coverage—except for Technologizer—appeared on an excellent semi-standalone site called Techland. TIME asked me to write a weekly post for that site promoting my column; those items are on one of my author pages, but the links to the columns they reference are now broken. Also, those Techland posts were eventually folded into TIME.com and are now labeled as Technologizer pieces, which they weren’t originally.
Since TIME, like most major media outlets, can’t be trusted to preserve everything—at least in minty condition at the original URL—I decided to link to the columns as they appear on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, sometimes with a missing image or two. I think I found all of them. We might or might not have considered the final article below to have been a column—it appeared around the time I joined the staff and segued from columnist to full-time writer.
I don’t plan to spend much time reading these old pieces, so I can hardly expect that you will. Just skimming the headlines below is a nice, efficient way to get a sense of what was going on in consumer tech at the time, though. Everyone was trying to beat the iPad. Streaming TV was picking up steam. People were beginning to have qualms about Google and Facebook. Cars were getting smart. And the death of Steve Jobs was a moment like we’d never seen before.
I’m not going to try to index every Technologizer piece I wrote for TIME.com as a staffer from 2012-2014—there are just too many. (I did list some in this roundup of the best of Technologizer.) Nor have I yet compiled a list of the Technologizer columns that appeared in TIME‘s print edition. But I am still proud that my little gadget blog’s brand extensions included a presence in the world’s most famous news magazine—especially in print, but also in the form of these online originals.
- Where Are the Rivals to Apple’s iPad? (September 14, 2010)
- Finally, a 21st Century Browser from Microsoft (September 21, 2010)
- Here Come the New Internet-TV Boxes (September 28, 2010)
- iPhone vs. Android: The Smart-Phone Wars Rage On (October 5, 2010)
- A Five-Step Program for Facebook Happiness (October 12, 2010)
- TiVo Gets a Major Upgrade, but Can It Beat Google TV? (October 19, 2010)
- Apple’s New Goal: The Computer as Appliance (October 26, 2010)
- Can Microsoft Get Its Mojo Back? (November 2, 2010)
- Samsung’s Galaxy Tab: The Anti-iPad (November 9, 2010)
- Search-Engine Wars: Can Bing (or Blekko) Beat Google? (November 16, 2010)
- E-Reader Wars: Nook Color Takes on the Kindle (November 23, 2010)
- Post-Black Friday: How to Find Holiday Tech Deals (November 30, 2010)
- PC vs. Mac: Which Is Right for You? (December 7, 2010)
- Google Nexus S: Top Android Smart Phone Now (December 14, 2010)
- The Promise and Pitfalls of Cloud Computing (December 21, 2010)
- 2011: The Year Ahead in Consumer Technology (December 28, 2010)
- What to Expect from the Consumer Electronics Show (January 4, 2011)
- Apple Beware: Enter the New iPad Rivals (January 13, 2011)
- Your Best E-Reader May Be No E-Reader (January 20, 2011)
- Is Quora the Next Red-Hot Web Start-Up? (January 27, 2011)
- Camera Phones vs. Cameras: Not Perfect, but Great (February 3, 2011)
- Motorola’s Atrix 4G: A Phone Thinks It’s a Laptop (February 10, 2011)
- Finally, Cars with Web Savvy (February 17, 2011)
- iPad Gets Competition: Meet Motorola’s Xoom (February 23, 2011)
- Google’s War Against Rotten Search Results (March 3, 2011)
- The Post-PC Era Is Already Here (March 10, 2011)
- A Golden Age of Browsers: Wonderful but Boring (March 17, 2011)
- Gmail: Can’t Live with It — or Without It (March 24, 2011)
- Amazon’s Cloud Music and Storage: A Good Start (April 1, 2011)
- Why Google Isn’t the New Microsoft (April 7, 2011)
- Personalized Magazine Apps: Cutting the Web Down to Size (April 14, 2011)
- The BlackBerry PlayBook: Another Interesting Unfinished Tablet (April 21, 2011)
- How Safe Is Your Data? Lessons of the PlayStation Security Breach (April 28, 2011)
- TV Everywhere? Cable on the Net Isn’t There Yet (May 5, 2011)
- Google’s New Android Plan: World Domination (May 12, 2011)
- The Best Universal Remote of All: Your Phone (May 19, 2011)
- Windows 8: What Should Be, if You Ask Me (May 26, 2011)
- Mac Security Threats: How Vulnerable Is Apple? (June 2, 2011)
- Welcome to the Beginning of the End of the PC Era (June 9, 2011)
- Google Steps Up Its Search-Engine Game (June 16, 2011)
- Audi’s New A7: A Sports Car for the Internet Era (June 23, 2011)
- HP’s TouchPad: A Promising Tablet That Needs More Polish (June 29, 2011)
- Google+: Google Reverses Its Social-Network Curse (July 7, 2011)
- Four Ways to Put Your Stuff in the Cloud (July 14, 2011)
- With OS X Lion, Apple’s Macs Enter the iPad Era (July 20, 2011)
- It Just Doesn’t Work: Why New Tech Products Are Increasingly Unsatisfying (July 28, 2011)
- Home Theater, Internet Style (August 4, 2011)
- Why I Already Miss Physical Media (August 11, 2011)
- Sifteo’s Cubes: Blocks with Brains (August 19, 2011)
- The Beginning of the Post–Steve Jobs Era (August 25, 2011)
- The PC Isn’t Dying — It’s Just Evolving (September 1, 2011)
- The TechCrunch Crack-Up: Unfortunate and Inevitable (September 8, 2011)
- Windows 8: The PC Goes Post-PC (September 15, 2011)
- Google+’s Real-Name Policy: Identity vs. Anonymity (September 22, 2011)
- Did Facebook Just Change Social Networking Forever? (September 29, 2011)
- Steve Jobs: Remembering the Dissatisfied Man (October 6, 2011)
- In Praise of Minor Upgrades (October 13, 2011)
- Magic Mirror: GM Brings OnStar to Non-GM Cars (October 20, 2011)
- Windows XP Turns 10: Why It Won’t Go Away (October 27, 2011)
- Sound Off: Three Approaches to Wireless Music (November 3, 2011)
- Android’s Fragmentation Mess–and How to Fix It (November 10, 2011)
- First Look: Galaxy Nexus and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (November 17, 2011)
- Windows Phone 7.5: Microsoft’s Overachieving Underdog (November 24, 2011)
- Facebook and Privacy: Imperfect Together (December 1, 2o11)
- First Look: OnLive’s Cloud Gaming Service Comes to Tablets and Phones (December 7, 2011)
- A Few New Year’s Resolutions for Tech Companies (December 22, 2011)
- Toshiba’s Thrive 7: Still Searching for the Perfect 7-inch Tablet (December 29, 2011)
- Tech 2012: Please Don’t Call These Predictions (January 4, 2012)
- Ultrabooks: Bringing Sexy Back to PCs (January 13, 2012)
- Search, Plus Your World: Google’s Risky Gambit (January 19, 2012)
- It’s Time to Stop Talking About the Apple Cult (January 26, 2012)
- Sony’s Highly Personal, Surprisingly Decent 3D Viewer (February 2, 2012)
- Why We Need a New Definition of ‘PC’ (February 9, 2012)
- Apple’s OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: The Mac Gets Even More iPad-Like (February 16, 2012)
- OnLive Desktop Plus: Windows at Its Speedy Best — on Your iPad (February 23, 2012)
Omg, on 11/30/2010, you actually *did* write up a holiday guide!