Welcome, Twitter Users
It is likely that you arrived at this welcome page by clicking the link on my Twitter profile. This post is my primitive method for tracking traffic from Twitter.
Read MoreAnalyzing an Experiment in Blogging
Since October I've been experimenting here with some personal blogging. Why, you might ask, when I already blog at my job? Isn't that a busman's holiday? Perhaps. But I had plunked down money for this domain, and I had some ideas and obsessions to explore that didn't fit in with my work. And I also wanted to conduct a few experiments. When a blog is housed within a major news site, the metrics get hard to sort out. With some great content and breaking news, and a huge built-in audience, it is a simple matter to draw millions of views. (Palafo.com has drawn under 5,000 views in its entire existence, with who knows how many hundreds of those clicks attributable to family and friends.)
Read MoreWhat My Smart Playlists Showed Me (3)
Name of iTunes Playlist: The Older Faves Rules: Rating is greater than *** (3 stars). Last played is in the last 12 months. Last played is not in the last 6 months. Date added is in the last 24 months. Play count is greater than 5 times. Skip count is zero. [See all lists.]
Read More'Old' Media, 'New' Media, on Twitter
I jumped into an esoteric debate Wednesday evening: What is the most effective way mainstream media can use social media like Twitter? Should they never post RSS feeds automatically? Must every tweet be crafted by human hands? Notice that I don't say "old media," because I happen to think that term is bull. Plenty of supposedly "old media" outlets have been on the Web since the earliest days and produce innovative multimedia content that is as good as or better than anything found elsewhere in the "new media." But that doesn't make for a good story. (Yes, plenty of old media practitioners still have their heads in the sand. And I don't claim to have figured it all out -- my point is, nobody has figured it out. The Web is 20 minutes old. Nobody knows anything.)
Read MoreFailure-to-File Syndrome
The top aide to New York's governor has quit in a scandal over his failure to file his taxes since 2001. His lawyer says he suffers from something called "late-filing syndrome." A paper by a lawyer and a psychiatrist says people with the syndrome are perfectionists and workaholics, who have difficulty talking about their problems with others and cannot ask for help until their secret is exposed.
Read MoreNeveah Must Be Missing Some Angles
City Room has posted a chart showing the most popular baby names in New York City in 2007. Most of the popular names have the whiff of daytime dramas (Madison? Justin?), even among those from non-European backgrounds. The No. 1 name for Asian boys? Ryan. For Hispanic girls? Ashley. But, I wondered, what happens when you dig deeper into the health department's full list [pdf]? You find boys with somewhat unusual names for this day and age, like Achilles, Shemar, Shiloh, Orion; and small clusters of baby girls with names like Dakota, Essence, Heaven, Serenity, Shiloh again, Treasure, Precious and Princess.
Read MoreAbout the Name @Palafo
When I started working on the metropolitan desk of The New York Times in 1997, the newsroom was using a publishing system known as Atex for text editing. Usernames were six characters long. The naming convention at the time was to take the first two letters of the staffer's given name and the first four letters of the surname. Patrick+LaForge=Palafo.
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