Dan Rosenbaum

• Home
  • Newspapers or Net?
  • Blogs vs Journalism?
  • Weblogs as Journalism
  • Here Come the Women
  • The Earth Yet Moves
  • Consider the Source
  • Why E-Tailers Fold
  • The Brain-Dead Pool
  • Spare an E-Dime?
  • Digital Identity
  • Videotext
  • Remember Elvis
  • Schools Online
  • Archimedes
  • The Z Glove
• Career
• Music
• Blog

To give you an idea of how long I've been at this, mine was pretty much the first generation of journalists whose words never hit paper until they came off the newspaper press that night. I wrote using a VDT (a Harris 1600) and transmitted copy to a mainframe computer, which routed the stories via a blazingly fast 1200bps circuit to newspapers all over the world, where they were edited, laid out, and composited on computer terminals.

Some people like computer screens. Some people like paper. Some people like conferences and trade shows. The key is getting the information people want, when they want it, where they want it, how they want it. Finding that delicate balance among the what/when/where/how of media is what turns my crank, and it's what I've spent the last 30 years doing.

Mass media is largely designed to be ephemeral (though Brewster Kahle has done a lot of excellent work to persuade people otherwise). A lot of my best work has long ago hit the bit bucket. But not all.

Here are some of my more recent writings about the meet-up of old and new media. This is how newspapers can fight Craig's List. This is why the "blogging vs journalism" debate misses the point. This is how asking whether blogging is itself journalism only confuses the question. And this is the exact moment that the Web became a mass medium.

From WinMag.com, here's my take on putting digital genies back into analog bottles, and two columns about what happens when online businesses think they're immume to the laws of financial gravity.

I've long been fascinated by the possibilities of electronic cash and electronic identity.

From UPI, this item was the first national write-up of an early experiment in consumer-level electronic media.

From NetGuide: "'Remember Elvis,' my friend Grace said. 'People try to ban what they don't understand.'" This one argued that wiring schools is dangerous and subversive, and that we should begin immediately. And this one got collected in a standard Freshman Comp textbook, alongside essays by Maya Angelou, Anna Quindlen, Fox Butterfield, William Least Heat Moon, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; I argue the (alloyed) virtue of branded information.

From Computer Update, the magazine of the late Boston Computer Society, a lighter column imagining a conversation between Archimedes and his flak, Delirium. As ever, PR wins out.

And remember Jaron Lanier, the virtual worlds guru? I caught up with him way back at the 1986 Consumer Electronics Show, where he was flogging his first product.