Archive: Digital culture
Twitter Status Update
Back in April, I began playing around with Twitter, a Web site that invites its users to post very brief notes--as in, 120 characters or less, spaces included--for anybody to read. One of my initial motivations for this experiment was shallow and vain: All the cool kids were doing it,...
By Rob Pegoraro | July 21, 2008; 11:12 AM ET | Comments (12)
Social Skills For Address Books
Most of the time, I review just-released products. Today, I'm writing about a product that doesn't exist yet, and may never: an address-book program that would update its records when your friends update their own entries on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn. The components that would be...
By Rob Pegoraro | July 10, 2008; 09:36 AM ET | Comments (10)
Remembrance of Things Password
As I was working on last week's review, I had to test those two HP laptops on an old wireless network at the Post's offices "secured" with a 26-character WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) key. Being 26 characters long, and being stored in hexadecimal notation (the numbers 0 through 9 and...
By Rob Pegoraro | June 17, 2008; 09:03 AM ET | Comments (21)
Who Needs "Push" E-Mail?
A lot of gadget owners these days demand "push" e-mail -- the ability to have a message show up on a handheld device the instant it lands on your mail server. BlackBerry users swear by this feature, and iPhone users are looking forward to getting it through the new Mobile...
By Rob Pegoraro | June 10, 2008; 10:14 AM ET | Comments (25)
What's In a Username?
As I've continued my exploration of social-networking sites, it's been interesting to see how the Web at large still hasn't figured out how we all ought to describe ourselves in the usernames we choose at these sites. You have two general options here: * a username based strictly on your...
By Rob Pegoraro | May 27, 2008; 11:59 AM ET | Comments (33)
Social-Networking Sites And Multiple-Personality Disorder
If you spend enough time at any one social-networking site, you're likely to find that some of your friends may have chosen to take up residence on a different social network, while work colleagues can be found at a third and neighbors at yet another. If you're going to keep...
By Rob Pegoraro | May 12, 2008; 12:45 PM ET | Comments (2)
Blog Burnout
It's something of a comfort to see something new at your favorite blogs every day. But as each morning brings a new posting--maybe followed by one at lunchtime and others in the afternoon and at night--you may forget that there's a human being with a day job and non-computing interests...
By Rob Pegoraro | May 8, 2008; 09:50 AM ET | Comments (17)
Status Consciousness
This morning's column, like an increasing number of my Thursday pieces, started out as a blog post. I thought I'd write a short bit about the art of writing a clever Facebook status update. I'd seen this form of concise creativity take off on that site (especially after this Palo...
By Rob Pegoraro | May 1, 2008; 09:36 AM ET | Comments (6)
Mail Manners: A Question Of Quoting
Several days ago, a reader asked about one of the most divisive subjects in Internet culture today--a topic that can set even old friends on edge, should they disagree about it. I'm not talking about Mac versus PC, the iPod versus other MP3 players, cable versus satellite or any of...
By Rob Pegoraro | April 9, 2008; 12:25 PM ET | Comments (32)
April Foolin'
Whatever you do, don't click on any videos on YouTube's home page today. It's the first of April, so it's time for another round of Internet pranks. YouTube has executed one of the most audacious, or maybe just annoying, April Fool's tricks ever by pointing every home-page video link to...
By Rob Pegoraro | April 1, 2008; 12:01 PM ET | Comments (10)
Fandom 2.0: A Quiz
As some of you all may have noticed, we had the first baseball game of the season last night in D.C. In other words, baseball fans here are now officially free to spend way too much time on the Web following the sport--a habit I indulged in myself after last...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 31, 2008; 11:53 AM ET | Comments (2)
Facebook's New Levels of Friendship
Somebody at Facebook may be reading my column. Last summer, I wrote that this site and other social-networking sites erred by trying to confine all of our varying levels of closeness to a binary scale of "friend" or "not friend." Now, Facebook is letting its users decide how much of...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 21, 2008; 11:00 AM ET | Comments (16)
Driven to Distraction
Today's column has probably been years in the making. It's great that the Internet has been such an everlasting font of knowledge and entertainment, but at a certain point you actually need to focus and get one task done--whether it's writing that e-mail you owe to a long-lost friend, finally...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 20, 2008; 11:15 AM ET | Comments (8)
Farewell, Arthur C. Clarke
If you received an e-mail from me several years ago, you might have seen it end with this quote: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. This line, which I'd seen thrown around without attribution on the Internet years before, was a snarky way to mock the...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 19, 2008; 11:19 AM ET | Comments (11)
Methods of March Madness
Starting this Thursday, office productivity across America is going to tank. It's time for March Madness, which means a steady stream of college-basketball playoff games--any one of which could destroy your brackets--airing when you're supposed to be at work. The traditional way to keep up on the Big Dance is...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 17, 2008; 12:46 PM ET | Comments (15)
News You Can Reuse
In the interest of full disclosure, as I was writing today's column I could not help thinking that: a) it would get picked up by the news-aggregator sites that I describe in the piece, b) the users of those sites would then discover other things I've written, and c) that,...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 6, 2008; 08:55 AM ET | Comments (7)
Formats That Fail You
This morning's column talks about one of my lingering frustrations with the business that I cover--the apparently perpetual need to buy new copies of my favorite movies and music. I'm not talking about "special editions" of movies or remastered versions of albums that add content or quality, but copies of...
By Rob Pegoraro | February 28, 2008; 10:56 AM ET | Comments (24)
Tuesday Tidbits: Audio and DRM
The past few days have brought a couple of interesting data points on the world of downloadable audio. First, after a successful trial on the eMusic download store, book publisher Random House will no longer require "digital rights management" (DRM) copy-prevention software on its audiobook downloads. The news first surfaced...
By Rob Pegoraro | February 26, 2008; 12:45 PM ET | Comments (22)
Best Dot-Com Super Bowl Ad?
Super Bowl commercials usually stick to a few popular genres: "guys will do anything for beer," "talking animals are funny," "talking animals doing anything for beer are funny" and so on. For the purposes of this blog, though, the most interesting sort are the ads aired by dot-coms that, over...
By Rob Pegoraro | February 4, 2008; 11:45 AM ET | Comments (18)
Book 'Em!
Reading books, newspapers, a magazine and a blog on Amazon's Kindle brought more annoyances than I'd expected, as I outline in today's column. Ultimately, I only found one way in which this clearly trumps a printed book--the fact that you don't need an opposable thumb to turn the page. Allow...
By Rob Pegoraro | December 6, 2007; 10:43 AM ET | Comments (14)
Calling On the Run
It amazes me how some people can't live without their gadgets -- phone, MP3 player, GPS, whatever. A disturbingly high number of guys can't even let a call go to voicemail when they're in a public bathroom. (Note to the Apple publicist who tried calling my cell phone last Thursday:...
By Rob Pegoraro | October 29, 2007; 12:35 PM ET | Comments (29)
Facebook Follow-up
Since I wrote a column earlier this summer about the awkwardness of folks who don't meet the dictionary definition of "friend" asking to be my Facebook friends, the inevitable has happened: Strangers or near-strangers have realized that I'm on Facebook and have sent me friend requests. Some are easy to...
By Rob Pegoraro | October 12, 2007; 11:41 AM ET | Comments (10)
A Dot-Com Dream Lives
A little while ago, I paid a parking ticket online, and it was more pleasant than I could have hoped. First, the $30 fine was no big deal, given that I'd somehow gone more than seven years without getting ticketed in the District. Second, paying up was simpler and faster...
By Rob Pegoraro | October 9, 2007; 10:01 AM ET | Comments (2)
Buzzword In Progress: "Bacn"?
Perhaps I'm behind the times, but apparently "bacn"--the misspelling is intentional--has become a popular term of art for the automatically generated notifications from legimate, non-spam sites. BuzzFeed offers this concise definition: Bacn describes the things you signed up for but that still feel like clutter in your inbox: Email lists,...
By Rob Pegoraro | August 21, 2007; 03:42 PM ET | Comments (20)
Theresa Duncan Has Signed Off
When I logged on this morning, I had a message waiting for me from my colleague Beth Chang, who used to review kids' CD-ROMs for the Post back when you couldn't expect them to work on your computer every time: so, i was trying to figure out where i knew...
By Rob Pegoraro | August 1, 2007; 01:41 PM ET | Comments (3)
Fashionably Plate
Not long ago, I came across this odd sight on my morning run--a car with personalized license plates that read: CTRL X That's computer-ese for the "cut" command. I looked around for cars with CTRL C and CTRL V ("copy" and "paste") but didn't see any. A couple of blocks...
By Rob Pegoraro | July 31, 2007; 09:09 AM ET | Comments (14)
Art Imitating (Digital) Life
I don't usually play theater critic on this blog, but I had a thought-provoking Saturday evening last weekend watching a set of three short plays, called "This Digital Life: BASIC Instructions for Coping with the 21st Century". Tomorrow afternoon, that show -- part of this year's Capital Fringe Festival --...
By Rob Pegoraro | July 27, 2007; 01:26 PM ET | Comments (1)
