News Obituary 2.0: Remembering the Dead, Digitally As anyone who's lost a loved one knows, the process of dealing with a death is grueling - on both a practical and an emotional level. That's nothing new. But with the rise of Internet technologies, some of the processes and practices we've developed around death and dying may be changing. As daily newspaper readership dwindles, for example, what… Audrey Watters View comments
Music Last.fm Outage Continues - Did You Notice? Music streaming service Last.fm has been experiencing one of the most serious system outages it has ever encountered. It is just now returning to normal after being down for 24 hours. According to Last.fm database architect, the service has been "experiencing an extended period of downtime in all user-facing services," and it could take some time… Play Sarah Perez View comments
Analysis tv, facebook, Is a post-TV future becoming easier to imagine, because of the Internet? That's one question raised by the news that SpongeBob SquarePants, the undersea mega-star of stage and screen, will premier his newest show first to his 16 million fans on Facebook and then only later on the old-fashioned boob-tube. On Thursday January 27th, SpongeBob (or… Play Marshall Kirkpatrick View comments
Apple Developers Share Mac App Store Sales Figures When Apple's new desktop-focused Mac App Store launched, it was expected to be a hit. One day later, Apple confirmed that the store was taking off, with over 1 million downloads on its first day. But how many of those were free apps? How many were copies of Twitter for Mac or Angry Birds? What about individual developers' results? As it turns… Sarah Perez View comments
Analysis Final Jeopardy: Can a Machine Think? In early April of 1990, I was a contestant on Jeopardy. If you were watching back then, I was the "Supercomputer Programmer from Aloha, Oregon" who won three games and $38,000 and then lost - badly - in the fourth. So there's quite a bit of personal history tied in with the news last week that a supercomputer from IBM, called Watson, had beaten two… Guest Author View comments