Results tagged “susanmernit”

With SFist Rita's report yesterday about Apple settling with Creative, Apple fanboys can console themselves with the news that Microsoft is also getting dinged for even more money in a patent infringment suit. Meanwhile, retail workers who downloaded the development version of Apple's new OS, Leopard, are getting canned left and right (scroll down). But BusinessWeek thinks good iPod news is on the way, while Wired News explores the back alleys of Chennai in search of smuggled iPods and Powerbooks.

A new neighbor has moved into an old house in the 'hood, renovated the place and promises to be part of the community -- going to PTA meetings, Little League games, community centers and talking to local activists. But the guy you know and love will still come back and visit. Vienna, Virginia's Backfence has acquired Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere, garnering further citizen-media cred and a new market! Susan Mernit scooped the blogosphere yesterday morning, beating even the press release and Dan himself to the news. The Mercury News offered full coverage, with no fewer than three items.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day! Did you know that America's "first black Millionaire" was Yerba Buena resident Alexander Leidesdorff? Eric Meyerson got a chance to see Nobel Laureate Jimmy Carter at a recent book signing. And the wheels of the criminal justice system continue to squeak, with this harrowing tale of dealing with the Fremont courts.

Beth Spotswood pops ten questions for Gavin Newsom, and we want answers. Speaking of interviews, Shout Magazine raps with local MC Paris. And a crop of top local writers weigh in on the JT Leroy fracas, including Thomas Roche, Mark Pritchard and our own SFist Violet.

Ah, nothing like controversy to get the week off to a good start. Susie Bright isn't particularly happy after lending JT her support early on (scroll down for more from Susie in the comments). And Edward Champion reminds us that JT isn't the only one lacking a firm grasp on the line between fact and fiction, with James Frey under the microscope. Municide publishes a response to their own flight of fancy, purportedly from an actual Muni driver. We think the response would be better if we knew it came from a crack-smoking Muni driver with a criminal record and Hollywood friends, but you can't have it all, can you?

We'll start with the 2005 year-in-reviews. Robert Haaland says 2005 "was a great year to be a queer union organizer." Om Malik points out that the number of broadband connections grew 35% last year. And Jenguin literally looks back at 2005 with a selection of her photos.

Ever wondered how those Googlers spent their "20%" time? Playing with obscene amounts of silly putty, apparently. Susan Mernit points to a blogger's tale of terror at 30,000 feet, the mainstream media coverage they received, and the nasty responses from commenters at an Alaskan Airlines IP address. Speaking of blogger relations, PR pro G.A. Marken drops by Silicon Valley Watcher to guest post about what bloggers mean to the media landscape from a marketing perspective.

Let's start by kicking out the jams. DJ Icewater mixes the sounds of Yay Area soul from past to present for a a Shout Magazine Shoutcast. What's old to Swerbo but new to us are hi-fi recordings of The Slip and Surprise Me Mr. Davis show at the Independent in November. Nicole Lee suggests some music podcasts, including a podcast by geek-rock legends They Might Be Giants. And topping the Yahoo search charts for 2005 are a mess of musicians, including our own Green Day at number five.

We're currently waiting for our gut instinct -- that Yahoo has, in fact, purchased Flickr -- to be proven right on Tuesday. And by "gut instinct," we mean we shook the old Magic 8-Ball and got "All signs point to yes."

So we're up late last night, checking Susan Mernit's blog to see if she had already posted on the dinner at Yahoo yesterday, when we catch her post from earlier in the afternoon. She linked to John Battelle's coverage of a fracas involving a Googler fired for content on their blog. Seems Mark Jen, a new employee at Google, was dutifully using their blogging engine blogger to post to Ninety-Nine Zeros, Life @ Google from the Inside. Now he's on the outside looking in.

Nothing like media-business wonkery, news aggregation and browser-based application design to get a blogger all hot and bothered. Thanks to Susan Mernit, Beth Laing of Mediacenter invited us to their Emerging Technology Conference. Okay, not really. We just got invited to the casual dinner at Yahoo, where they plied us with booze and chicken and then tried to take advantage of our post-prandial trance to slip some PowerPoint slides by us. Little did they know that if there's one place bloggers are most comfortable, it's at corporate catered events. The hard work is elbowing up to the table -- but once they're done eating, the bridge has been crossed, and will probably be burned behind them.

SFist was so proud when we broke it to good friend Susan Mernit that she had scored a Bloggie nod in the "Best-kept Secret Weblog" category. Hers is the smartest blog you're probably not reading. When she's not in New York working with her consulting group 5ive (no, not Merlin Mann's hilarious site of lists -- we'll get to him later) to get somebody's business into shape, she's toodling around the South Bay hobnobbing with digerati superstars. Who says bi-coastal has to mean a place in LA?

Next time we're sending out schwag bags to all the voters. Looks like we've been snubbed by the august nominating committee (read: random cranks on the internets) for this year's Bloggies. Oh well.