Category Archives: Technology

Does an Apple a day keep the Newsday away?

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A few days ago, I posted a YouTube video showing a viral ad from Newsday advertising its new iPad app.  The video shows a guy using an iPad to swat a fly, with the iPad shattering. Cool!

But the video is now down, and I wonder why. It wasn’t taken down by a DMCA take-down sent to YouTube, because the video now says it was removed by the user. An article at Networkworld.com confirms that Newsday removed the video. A Newsday rep stated: “We have taken the commercial ‘Flypaper’ down and its short, glorious run appears to be over.”

But why? Was the notoriously thin-skinned Apple upset? If so, that’s idiotic. Is Apple worried that people will start assaulting insects with their technology? Remember, Apple: iPads don’t kill people, people kill people!

Bottom line: if Apple is putting pressure on Newsday, shame on Apple. If Newsday — a news organization — is caving to demands from Apple, then double-shame on Newsday.

But as pointed out by Networkworld.com, we don’t know (yet) what happened, and Newsday is being tight-lipped with the reasons.

Well, Apple? Newsday?

Social networking word-of-the-day: “thinvisibility”

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A new word for Facebookers and social networkers who cavalierly post embarrassing information about themselves to the web: thinvisibility:  Here’s a starting definition:

Thinvisibility: n.

  1. Being neither completely visible nor completely invisible.
  2. Being a tiny, shiny needle in a haystack of information overload.
  3. Being invisible to everyone except data aggregators and digital preservationists such as Google, the Wayback Machine, the NSA, and others.
  4. Being invisible to employers, colleges, police, neighbors, friends, exes, stalkers, acquaintances, and others, who are not interested in you, until they are.
  5. Being visible.

Animals, information, and language

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This summer has been a wonderful three months of reading and writing. Currently, I’m reading Alex Wright’s Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, a book about information and information overload, a topic of long interest to me. Wright’s book includes interesting discussions of just how basic information management techniques are to humans and others, including how non-human species such as insects and birds preserve and disseminate information for the benefit of the group. Serendipity also struck when I recently came across this video from Time Magazine, showing Kanzi, a bonobo ape from the Great Ape Trust, who has a vocabulary of nearly 400 words that he expresses using a touch screen. Through Kanzi and earlier apes such as Koko (who used sign language to ask for a pet cat), we need to be reminded that information management and language skills are not limited to homo sapiens.