From the audience’s impact on the making of LOST to the eerie web promotions for The Dark Knight Returns, our media is becoming more immersive by the day. WIRED contributing editor Frank Rose noticed this trend and embarked on a years-long voyage to connect the digital dots. His goal was Read more…
Why we need to stop living vicariously through our pop culture heroes and start living our own lives like we mean it.
NOTE: I wrote this years ago, but I took it down when I last redesigned my blog. Then a reader told me that this post helped her a lot over the years, and she asked me if I would consider reposting it. So, after a few small updates, I did. Read more…
Facebook is making us boring. Our perpetual digital connectivity has warped our minds into believing that others are hanging on our every word… even when those words are all about our allergies, our retail woes, our opinions about pop culture, politics, and other inanities. In other words, the very stories Read more…
Life is short. We’re busy. Things happen. And then we die. In the meantime, here are 10 questions you should ask yourself more often, so you don’t end up running in place between now and then. What did the 18 year-old me think the current me would be doing? What Read more…
On Sunday nights, Mack Collier runs a Twitter-based group chat called #blogchat, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about blogging while hobnobbing with their peers. But, based on the defensive reaction to some of my comments from several of the #blogchat participants, I’ve realized that Read more…
I don’t know anybody who loves pop radio. I know people who listen to it ironically, as though they’re not comfortable admitting they don’t entirely hate Lady Gaga. And I know people who admit to liking just Lady Gaga, or just Usher, but still insist they “hate the radio.” But Read more…
One of the web’s primary flaws is that it’s actually too easy to use. And as content becomes ever easier to create, finding quality content becomes even more difficult. That’s the general premise of Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen, which lobbies for the return of cultural gatekeepers. It’s Read more…
There’s a gentleman’s agreement in social media that needs to be debunked. We’re always supposed to judge ourselves by the quality of the conversations we have, rather than the sheer volume of our reach. Even Gary Vaynerchuck, who has more Twitter followers than anyone else who’s not “mainstream famous,” preached Read more…
This past week, I attended #140conf in New York City, where some of the biggest names with the widest reach on Twitter came together to discuss the platform’s future. Instead of recapping the event with a play-by-play, I’d rather share one key observation I made during the event that, I Read more…