Seeking validation, not illumination

I got an email yesterday from a woman -- I think she's an East Coast real estate agent -- who's just furious at the Associated Press for daring to fact-check some speakers at the Republican convention in St. Paul. "It makes me so mad to see the media pick apart the candidates -- all for their own selfish purpose," she wrote. "I am an independent voter and have not yet decided who will win my vote, and articles like this infuriate me!"

It's time for bigger pictures

I blew a good half an hour yesterday utterly fascinated by this:

Codrie, La., after Hurricane Gustav

It's "just" a 360-degree picture, something that's been around on a lot of news sites since the early days of iPix and Quicktime VR.

But it's huge.

And I tell you what, on a 20-inch Apple Cinema monitor, you feel like you're going to get dunked. The detail is just dazzling. Click and spin and look around.

Editor and Publisher finally gets blogs

I don't know how many years ago it was that I heard Greg Mitchell say he was on the verge of launching an Editor&Publisher blog. I do know that the setting was New Orleans in the pre-Katrina era.

Since then, E&P has continued to limp along, powered by a dismal excuse for a Web content management system administered by what appears to be an exceptionally inept IT department.

Chrome: It's not a browser, it's the first web OS

Sometime today, Google is due to release the first version of Chrome, which is being described as a Web browser. It's not that. It's transcendent. Chrome is a Web operating system.This should be no surprise. Since the earliest days of Netscape, the vision has been to make the Web the center of an applications universe, relegating the "desktop" to the dustbin.