News this morning is that AOL is going down the path already cleared by companies like Demand Media and Associated Content, and getting into the business of commissioning small content “piecework” based on consumer interest as gauged by search queries...

Forgive this author a moment of own-horn-tooting. It was always flattering and humbling to me to hear Dreaming in Code spoken of in the same breath as The Soul of a New Machine. With Say Everything I also had a model in mind: Hackers, Steven Levy’s...

Here’s what turns out to be the most intractable problem I’ve encountered in my move to OSX as my primary work platform: For years I used a programmers’ text editor tool in Windows called Ultraedit. It worked great and allowed me to record macros. The...

Over at MediaShift’s Idea Lab blog, where as a Knight News Challenge grantee I’m posting occasionally, I’ve published a discussion of an interesting problem we’re grappling with at MediaBugs: How do you organize a set of categories for all the...

While we’re on the subject of the value of search… Ken Auletta is on KQED Forum right now, talking about his new Google book, and I just heard him comment on Google’s vulnerability to new competitors by hauling out the old complaint that Google’s...