Via the O’Reilly Radar Tumblr:

The most important lesson I learned in journalism school:

Question everything.

And that’s why Andrew Balemi’s elegant post, “All about election polls,” makes me happy.

Via oreillyradar:

Some lovely bits from Paul Ford’s excellent piece, “Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?”

“There should be a word for that feeling you get when an older person — and not much older, so quickly are things changing — shames him or herself by telling young people how to live. I’d vote for Bedeutungslosigkeitschmach, or ‘irrelevance shame,’ (made up with the help of Google translate) or perhaps Rünschmerz, the horrifying gut pain one experiences watching Andy Rooney.”

“Google regularly announces initiatives to ‘save’ the newspaper and book industries — like a modern-day hunter who proclaims himself a conservationist.”

“I keep sensing some serious hurt feelings from the older-media side — ‘Why would you love that thing instead of me?’ They act like my wife would if I brought home a RealDoll. But it’s not like that. I don’t think people love Twitter or Facebook in the same way they might love Parks and Recreation or Twilight. Rather, we like the beer and tolerate the bottle. And even if we have those other browser tabs open, we’re still hungry for endings.”

Those are just highlights. This is a phenomenal essay.

… RIM has repeatedly told carriers that, unlike Apple, it believes that they deserve a portion of revenues from its apps store and as well as future services. Although given the relative paucity of BlackBerry apps, the offer has relatively little financial value as of now.

That’s the same as me telling the carriers they deserve revenue from my app store.

I’m not sure a religious construct will hold up under strict scrutiny, but this is still an interesting comparison of cloud ideologies:

In a sense, these three companies’ cloud services do represent three different concepts of God. Google is an Old Testament, theist-style cloud all the way: He through whom all blessings and punishments come, who must be praised and supplicated; without the Cloud, you are nothing and have nothing. iCloud represents more of a Deist ideal. The Cloud exists, but its presence is more to be felt than seen; if it does its job right, iCloud will instill great doubt that it even exists, or that it takes any notice of us at all. Amazon is a form of agnosticism. You don’t know if you really believe in it or not, but you do know that on the third weekend of every month this pointy building near the center of town throws a really great bake sale.