Plenty of skeptics for Jack Dorsey’s next move
Jim McKelvey shows off Square. (Dawn Majors, St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
My colleague Tim Barker had a story this past weekend for our business section about the next business venture for Jack Dorsey, the St. Louisan who co-founded Twitter and has just started generating buzz for his latest venture, Square.
The mobile credit card payment system depends on a small piece of hardware that plugs into the audio jack in a user’s smart phone. With that dongle, a user can accept a credit card payment by swiping the card through it, getting the buyer to sign with his finger on the phone and, bingo, the transaction is done.
Tim (who is one of the reporters I edit) interviewed Jim McKelvey, a co-owner with Dorsey in Square and the guy who helped inspire the idea, thanks to a lost sale at his Third Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis. McKelvey couldn’t take a payment from a customer who wanted to pay with American Express. Read more
How Google has invaded my life in just 11 years
Yesterday’s Gmail outage inspired a stunning tidal wave of Twitter activity, demonstrating how thoroughly Google’s e-mail service has wedged its way into people’s lives. It reminded me of a post I’ve pondered for awhile: How many times does Google touch my life in a day?
Ultimately, I decided not to write it that way. Google touches my life too many times in a day. It would be a pretty boring narrative to describe a day in the life of Google and me. But I am still compelled by the idea of how many ways Google has become entwined with my life. Just 11 years ago (to the month), Google was incorporated. We’d never heard of it. It was just another search engine. And now, I can’t imagine getting along without it. Read more
Interesting stuff I saw online, Aug. 22 to Aug. 25
Here’s some of the stuff I thought was interesting while stomping through the Internet from Aug. 22 through Aug. 25:
- Is It O.K. to Blog About This Woman Anonymously? – The Moral of the Story Blog – Interesting take on the idea of anonymous comment. The writer comes down against it.
- The Risks, and Rewards, of Social Media for Newspapers – Nice rundown on policies and pitfalls in newsrooms over the use of social media — professionally and personally.
- Teaching Online Journalism Updated tutorials for Audacity (audio editing) – "I finally revised and updated the three tutorials I use to teach journalism students and professionals how to edit audio using Audacity, a free program that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux."
- Out of the Frying Pan and into the Mildly Uncomfortable Sauna: The Not-So-Bad-But-Still-Unconstitutional Social Networking Ban – Wow. "A week ago, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed a bill, HB 1314, making it illegal for convicted sex offenders to access a 'social networking website.'"
The interesting stuff I saw online, Aug. 19
Here’s some of the stuff I thought was interesting while stomping through the Internet on Aug. 19 from 7:46 pm to 8:37 pm:
- Let It Be 26True. Beatles And iTunes Come Together Again In Rumors – I'm gonna have to buy all these Beatles CDs again, for the third time.
- You’re Doing It Wrong Part 348: Complete And Utter PR FAIL – Great post. I was hit by this PR firm spam blizzard today and didn't get a chance to blog about it myself. Thanks, TechCrunch, for taking care of it for me.
- The Limits of Control – "With journalists and their employers increasingly active on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, news organizations are struggling to respond to a host of new ethics challenges."
- MediaShift . Journalism Students Need to Develop Their Personal Brand | PBS – "As a journalism professor, I have found there is one thing guaranteed to set off a flurry of frenzied activity in the classroom. It has nothing to do with exams or story deadlines. Rather, it is prompted by a simple question to students: How many own your name as a domain name?"
- Lost Remote: The Business of Journalism – "When a source told WCCO-TV’s Mark Rosen that Brett Favre would join the Minnesota Vikings, he sent out a tweet. Moments later, other reporters re-tweeted the news, and it was piped out to Facebook. Soon, WCCO was one of the top three trending topics on Twitter, reports MinnPost, sending a big traffic burst to WCCO.com. The tweet beat WCCO’s TV coverage, but not by much."
Interesting stuff I saw online, Jun. 1 to Jun. 8
Here’s some of the stuff I thought was interesting while stomping through the Internet from Jun. 1 through Jun. 8:
- Boston Police Would Tweet A Zombie Attack | NewsTechZilla – "I love things like this; when an organization or company I assume is otherwise faceless is able to properly use social media (by, gasp, being social), it always kind of makes me happy."
- ConvoTrack – Loads comments from Twitter, digg, etc. on any page – "This simple bookmarklet will load comments from Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, HackerNews and any blog mentioning the article and will load it in a handy sidebar."
- 50 Great Examples of Data Visualization – "Below are 50 of the best data visualizations and tools for creating your own visualizations out there, covering everything from Digg activity to network connectivity to what’s currently happening on Twitter."
- Is this useful? An account of how I started blogging and how it changed my journalism – "Pete told me this was known as “crowd-sourcing” and had a wide range of potential applications for newspapers. I can not stress enough how helpful it was to have someone that I could call to have coffee with and pick their brains on how the web “worked”. I started to look at journalism in a new way through Pete’s explanations of blogging."
Kurt's Tweets- Why is this not a national story? Maybe I missed it. Appalling. Disabled woman was tortured and held as a sex slave http://ow.ly/2CiAq
- Bravo. RT @pwthornton: "Banning unsigned online comments undermines the media’s role as a forum for debate.” http://bit.ly/bmZsOn
- I would like to just take the two steps forward and skip the one step back. How about that? Would that be OK?
- Still seeking talented journalists to run #Patch sites in two south St. Louis County communities. Know anyone? http://ow.ly/2Axnv
- Waiting for a listings collector to give her more #Patch marketing cards. The work never stops.