Scott Rosenberg
About: I'm a writer, editor and Web site builder. I was co-founder of Salon, where I served as technology editor and later managing editor and VP/editorial operations for many years. I'm also author of the book Dreaming in Code.
Blog Posts
Noonan agonistes — or, journalists should write what they know and think
--The problem with too many journalists — and especially those journalists inside the Beltway — is this: they do not write what they̵...
Why I’m hopeful for Obama; and what if it’s a tie?
--Watching the gyrations of this election has been diverting, but really, the road from here is not going to change no matter what happens this week ...
Premature spotlight on Spot.us
--I met David Cohn through my association with Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net and have kept up with his sometimes frenetic activities online. Re...
Clearly not self-promotional enough
--On the recommendation of BoingBoing, I hied myself over to check out Polymeme, a new news-aggregator site that collects top stories based on cluste...
“Cone of Silence” contradictions
--During the Rick Warren/Saddleback event over the weekend — in which Obama and McCain were both asked exactly the same questions, and Obama we...
Essential skill: The art of rustling up readers
--I saw this on Twitter today from Jay Rosen: Publishing used to be the barrier. Now that publishing is easy, getting your stuff picked up, linked t...
Who’s gonna win? Follow the state tallies
--People ask, “Who’s gonna win in November,” and then they talk about national polls or national issues or national debates. All th...
Open Salon launches
--Not one but two big developments (coincidentally simultaneous) in projects that are intertwined with my life! The first, noted below, was Chandler ...
Chandler 1.0 ships
--When I first began reporting on Chandler for Dreaming in Code at the very start of 2003, there was talk of shipping a 1.0 version within a year. Th...
McCain’s pass on adultery: the real double standard
--There’s a lot of fingers pointing today about double standards in the media because of the mainstream outlets’ unwillingness to follow ...
Sarah Lacy’s Once You’re Lucky: Money doesn’t change everything
--I’ve just finished Sarah Lacy’s book Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of We...
ABC should reveal anthrax-Saddam connection sources
--In Salon, Glenn Greenwald spent the weekend doggedly pursuing a series of disturbing questions — old but terribly pertinent once more —...
Jay Rosen and the journalism tribe’s migration path
--At the Personal Democracy Forum last week, which I did not attend, Jay Rosen delivered a talk in which he described the turmoil in today’s ne...
Rustication
--I’ll be offline most of this week with my family, camping, during the difficult interregnum between end of school and start of summer day cam...
Blogging and journalism: it’s a graph, not a line
--Romenesko is linking to this from Adam Lashinsky at Fortune: I’ve been coming around to the opinion that bloggers are just journalists and t...
McCain’s celeb ad, Obama’s premature presidentiality
--It was just about four years ago that the Swift Boat campaign kicked into high gear and knocked the Kerry campaign back on its heels. Kerry’s...
Obama’s already got public financing
--I am no expert on campaign finance reform. But I’ve followed the issue for a long time.So when I got asked over breakfast about the headlines...
Poniewozik on the “Beltway-Blog battle”
--The Beltway-Blog Battle (James Poniewozik, Time, this week): Maybe we’ll also stop arbitrarily dividing “real” from “amateu...
Tools for an informational self-audit
--“Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to.” I believe I first heard this exhortation from Howard Rheingold. Don’t k...
Bloggers vs. journalists again: Getting it right the first time
--You go away for a week, you come back, and people are still arguing about blogging and journalism! Sheesh. This bit jumped out at me from my catchu...
BlogHer and beyond
--Whenever anyone says “the blogosphere” (yes, this includes me), you need to back them up and ask, “Which blogosphere would you be...
Obama gets serious
--Laying low as I try to get some writing done. But this is irresistible. Times story today discusses why comedians are having a hard time poking fun...
Keep saying “Phil Gramm is right” — Democrats will love it
--Amity Shlaes, in the Post, says that Phil Gramm was right: we are a nation of whiners. There is no recession. It’s all in our minds. Suck it ...
Eclectica / Links for July 7th
--It’s worth fighting for: On her blog, a Tampa newspaper intern praises her editor’s speech about newsroom change in the wake of layoffs...
More on the settlement: AP’s nightmare identified
--Robert Cox, the Media Bloggers Association guy who represented Cadenhead in this matter, has a lengthy post about what happened this week. Go read ...
AP affair: prelude to a longer conflict?
--So the AP has closed the book on its dispute with the Drudge Retort. The matter may be “closed” — but the book never got written!...
AP vs. Drudge Retort: one tough question still unanswered
--Some day this blog will return to coverage of other stuff, but in the meantime, the AP/Drudge Retort story continues to percolate. Today Robert Cox...
AP takedown fallout
--I’m happy to see the AP vs. Drudge Retort story picking up steam. It’s fun watching the way this issue cuts across so many divisions in...
AP backs off — or does it?
--Confusing NY Times piece up tonight first suggests that the AP has “retreated” in an “about face” after its hamhanded taked...
AP responds on blog excerpting
--I just received email that I assume is genuine with this statement from the AP: AP wants to fill in some facts and perspective on its recent action...
AP sends takedown letters to Drudge Retort: Do excerpts and links infringe?
--Rogers Cadenhead has long run a site called the Drudge Retort at www.drudge.com. Today he posted the news that the site has been targeted by the As...
Please pay attention, please?
--Here’s a few other links carrying on from yesterday’s post about Nick Carr’s lament that Google and the web in general have made ...
Links for June 12th: Vanity Fair nonsense, Mayhill Fowler vs. Politico, new Opera, Wikipedia style
--Blogopticon | vanityfair.com: Chart professes to track popular blogs along two axes, news/opinion and scurrilous/earnest, but it is ridiculou...
Nick Carr’s new knock on the Web: does it change how we read?
--The funny thing about Nick Carr’s Atlantic cover piece, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” is that the piece itself has the truncated ...
Page-views — in 2008?
--Apologies for the light posting, which will continue for a bit. Combination of head-down-in-book-work and family commitments. Got a long post from...
Gates and Ballmer at D: Lament for lost youth
--I’m keeping my head down in my book writing, mostly, this year, but I allowed myself one trip to one industry event, so here I am at Walt Mos...
Amanda Congdon’s back — but, er, not first
--I have a special place in my heart for video-blogging star Amanda Congdon, since through some total coincidence she ended up briefly plugging my bo...
Links for May 18th 2008
--Had my head buried deep in writing this past week. Getting some traction, at the expense of other communications. JoshKornbluth.com: My friend th...
McCain’s bearings
--Bearings are the calculations a navigator makes to stay on course. “Losing your bearings” means, essentially, losing your compass ̵...
Links for May 8th 2008
--The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy): I first met McCarthy via the Well, many years ago; later she sublet an office cube at Salon&...
What deep pockets say
--When the history of this strange and soon-to-be-concluded Democratic primary season is written, let it be noted that the candidate whose income was...
Rare sighting of Google error message
--We have become dependent on Google as a part of our Web infrastructure (too dependent, some say), in part because Google’s reliability record...
Feelies redivivus
--I discovered only by chance that Glenn Mercer, one of the key figures in one of my favorite bands of all time, the Feelies, put out a new solo albu...
Yahoo/Microsoft collapse, the morning after
--I thought the Microsoft/Yahoo merger would be a disaster for both companies, but the news of Microsoft’s withdrawal of its offer should not b...
Clay Shirky and the cognitive surplus
--“You know, much of England was drunk on gin for 20 or 30 years during the 18th century.” I studied English history, but my brother stud...
Flashback 9/11
--I’ve been spending a lot of time digging through the blogospheric record of 9/11. And it’s brought back some of my memories of those te...
Everything connects
--For something like 25 years I have had a postcard (now tattered and brown-edged) taped near wherever I write: One reason I became a writer is that...
Checked out for a bit
--We’ve been on vacation this week — springtime on the Pacific coast! — so no posts about Hillary vs. Obama, the transformation of ...
Obama’s fundraiser, Mayhill Fowler, and the “supporter/reporter” question
--Here’s a fascinating story from Jay Rosen about the Off the Bus blogger who first reported on Obama’s “bitter in PennsylvaniaR...
Times/Journal convergence
--As long as I can remember I’ve read the New York Times (I grew up in NYC). Since the mid 90s — when I moved from being a newspaper crit...
Links for April 9th: Fresh Air, Firefox, business models…
--Assessing the Human Cost of Air Strikes in Iraq : Fresh Air: Terry Gross interviews Marc Garlasco, who went from a Pentagon job selecting “hi...
Why the Web-only life is not worth examining
--Today’s Journal features a Portals column by Vauhini Vara that represents yet another attempt to gauge how far Web apps have come by attempti...
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to write Facebook apps
--My friend and former colleague Chad Dickerson has a great post about Facebook developers reliving the perennial platform-developer’s nightmar...
Links for April 7th
--Tom Lehrer’s “That Was the Year That Was”: Lehrer’s best album, now in live video. I absorbed it as a young boy in the mid ...
NY Times: Blogging’ll kill ya?
--Matt Richtel is on the front page of today’s Times with a piece about the tech blogosphere as a 24/7 sweatshop — one that might even be...
In the Web archives
--I’ve spent most of this week deep in the archival attic, researching the new book in old documents, digging through the dull roots of today&...
He’ll Google for you
--My former Salon colleague Farhad Manjoo is out the gate early with an elaborate and delightful April Fool’s stunt called “I Google For ...
Internet garbage dump? What Weizenbaum really said
--Joseph Weizenbaum — creator of the Eliza chatterbot and author of “Computer Power and Human Reason” — passed away recently....
Give us each day our daily campaign call
--During each election season, most days, each campaign runs a daily conference call with the media. These calls are the candidates’ equivalent...
Disk — raw or cooked
--I returned from my travels, sat down at the desk yesterday morning, fired up my email program, and — ffftt!!! — encountered one of thos...
Links for March 21st 2008
--Bit of a backlog from my travels! Games, Storytelling, and Breaking the String: Smart Greg Costikyan essay about narrative and games. Martian He...
Obama’s gamble on complexity
--Because I’m on the road I didn’t get to listen to Obama’s Tuesday speech until last night. I’d heard a mixture of reactions...
On the road
--This week I’m in NYC doing interviews for the new book. So posting will likely be light. I have now been living in the Bay Area so long (over...
On the road
--This week I’m in NYC doing interviews for the new book. So posting will likely be light. I have now been living in the Bay Area so long (ove...
Links for March 13th 08
--The Case for Full Disclosure: James Poniewozik in Time argues that journalists should stop pretending they’re not human beings or citizens an...
A lightweight blog-post draft management system
--[This is a post describing a technique I’ve found useful for managing my blog. Feel free to skip the geek-out!] For a long time I’ve wi...
Maazel: “What I do here is of no importance”
--On Fresh Air yesterday, conductor Lorin Maazel described his Zen-like approach at the podium, aimed at achieving “no tension … other th...
Links for March 11th
--EETimes.com - IT pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum dies: I’m surprised that this obituary hasn’t circulated more widely. Weizenbaum was the cre...
RIP, Gary Gygax, and the nature of roleplaying
--The death of Gary Gygax, co-inventor of Dungeons and Dragons, has occasioned an outpouring of writing on the place of D&D in our culture. Salo...
Pro Publica: can investigative journalism thrive with no bottom line?
--As the business model that supports traditional journalism erodes, with digital distribution dissolving the bonds that held together the elements o...
Podcast with Dave Winer on the primary and McCain’s temper
--Dave Winer asked to talk with me for a few minutes this morning for a primary post-mortem. (Actually, post mortem is entirely the wrong term in thi...
Links for March 5th
--Village Voice — Seven Questions For John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats: I go through times when I don’t write much, but I think ...
Singing in Code
--OK, this one is just for plain fun: it’s the first Wordyard playlist. When I was planning my campaign of global domination for Dreaming in Co...
Links for March 3rd
--Think Progress — The legacy of Bush’s presidency.: This “are you better off?” chart comparing January 2001 to the present (...
Abandon hope, all ye who unsubscribe here
--For some reason I’m getting some email product newsletter that I don’t want. It’s called “Web Buyer’s Guide Technolog...
Those paperbacks are gone
--I’m out of copies, so this concludes the free-paperbacks-for-bloggers program. Two side notes: A handful of the requests I received got trapp...
Links for February 28th
--Programmers At Work: Susan Lammers is making her excellent interviews from the 1984 book Programmers At Work available on the Web via a new blog. I...
Chesterton quote archeology
--That Orwell quote earlier this week that began “Our civilization is founded on coal” had a “pace Chesterton” at the start t...
Free Dreaming paperbacks: going, going…
--Thanks for the great response to my offer. I’m sending out copies today to all the bloggers who’ve requested, and I’ve got just ...
Links for February 27th
--Ethan Zuckerman — Searching for common ground with Andrew Keen: Zuckerman wants to ask Andrew Keen, the Cult of the Amateur provocateur, a po...
Judging books by the page
--I confess I’m confused. A good while back I read about the “page 69 test” — apparently descended to us from Marshall McLuh...
Code mining
--I wrote Dreaming in Code because I believed that, as Bjarne Stroustrup says, “our civilization is built on software.” I noticed that cr...
Free Dreaming in Code paperbacks for bloggers
--It’s been fantastic keeping track of the reviews and critiques of Dreaming in Code in the blogosphere for a whole year. I’ve diligently...
Dreaming in paperback
--This week, the paperback edition of Dreaming in Code arrives in stores. (And of course at Amazon, too.) The official publication date is Tuesday, F...
Word processing, then and now
--Clive Thompson writes about how software can shape our creative work: Our tools, of course, affect our literary output. And all this made me wond...
Be Kind Rewind and the infinite garage
--I haven’t yet seen Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, but A.O. Scott’s New York Times review made me want to: …It treats mov...
Links for February 22nd
--DNA seen through the eyes of a coder — Parallels between genetic code and software code. (via Clive Thompson) Diagnosis: Email Apnea? - OR...
OOPSLA podcast cornucopia
--OOPSLA is the ACM conference that most broadly and widely addresses the sorts of questions I tried to explore in DREAMING IN CODE. I found the two ...
“Heretic Pride” from the Mountain Goats
--Earlier this week I received my (pre-ordered) copy of the new Mountain Goats CD, “Heretic Pride.” My enthusiasm for the music of John D...
Code Reads update
--I haven’t been able to keep the Code Reads project going at all this year. And what with work proceeding full bore on my next book project, t...
Spolsky: how programmers redefine their way around hard problems
--I only just caught up with Joel Spolsky’s amusing and insightful Yale talk posted last December — a return-of-the-prodigal-son sort of...
Eugenides on valentines: “cheapening and commodification”
--Overheard at the end of Michele Norris’s interview with Jeffrey Eugenides on last night’s All Things Considered: MN: Happy Valentine&...
The road goes ever oon
--I don’t know which is more lamentable here: The revelation that the Tolkien estate has apparently received zero dollars for the (phenomenally...
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