damonlavrinc

A new format to go with new aggregation system. Not that anyone...

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:40:00 -0700

A new format to go with new aggregation system. Not that anyone gives a shit. Anyway… reads!

Catching up on a few of Dan Neil’s most recent reviews.
Farewell, Big Prince: Lamenting the end of the Mercury Grand Marquis - Motor Trend
Flipboard CEO Mike McCue - Business Insider (Related)
Yours is a Very Bad Press Release - The Awl
Secrets of the Boy Genius - Fortune Tech
Take Me to an Elks Lodge and Don’t Step on It - NYT
Apple Magic Trackpad: The Beginning of the End for Mac OS X - Gizmodo
‘Kids,’ 15 Years Later - The Awl
One Man’s Journey Into Stunt Books - Wired
Thoughts on Designing for iPad - Derek Powazek
Has Arianna Huffington Figured Out the Future? - Newsweek
Inside the Fog of War - Reports From the Ground in Afghanistan - NYT
Se7en, Se7en, Oh My Se7en! - Vintage Jalopnik
What Caffeine Actually Does to Your Brain - Lifehacker

I finally got fed up with TweetDeck a few weeks ago (and...

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:09:46 -0700

I finally got fed up with TweetDeck a few weeks ago (and anything Adobe Air-based) and managed to snag a free copy of Socialite during a day-long promotion. It’s still a little rough around the edges (relaunch requires me to sign into Facebook each time, the occasional crash and Google Reader bogs the whole party down), but the Twitter and Facebook integration is the best I’ve experience with a native Mac app and I’ve ported in my Tumblr followers as an RSS feed – eliminating an additional browser window and condensing all the social network cruft into one place. These oddly colored words provide instructions on getting the RSS feed from Tumblr. More Socialite details here.

Photo

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:19:48 -0700

The Best Magazine Articles Ever

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:15:49 -0700

The Best Magazine Articles Ever

The last week’s worth of reads. Yeah, it’s a bit...

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:08:19 -0700

The last week’s worth of reads. Yeah, it’s a bit much.

Real Editors Ship - Paul Ford, FTrain
How the Mainstream Media Stole Our News Story Without Credit - Danny Sullivan, Daggle (Related)
Three Things Google Can Learn From Apple - Henrik Werdelin, Fast Company
You Are Not a Gadget - Laura June, Engadget
The Original (Goodbye Splendor) - Anthony Bourdain
In a World of Online News, Burnout Starts Younger - Jeremy W. Peters, NYT
iPad Fuels Magazine Disruption - Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired
How to Tell a Journalist from a Blogger - Jolie O’Dell
Writers Explain What It’s Like Toiling on the Content Farm - Corbin Hiar, MediaShift
Why Journalists Make Mistakes & What We Can Do About Them - Mallary Jean Tenore, Poynter
Trackday Diaries: Distraction, the street-steer mindset - Jack Baruth, TTAC
The Good News About Mel Gibson - Frank Rich, NYT
What the audience wants isn’t junk journalism - Laura McGann, Nieman Journalism Lab
Capital Flight - Jodi Enda, AJR
Bill Murray is ready to see you now - Dan Fierman, GQ
Sorry, No, I’m Not Going to Write a Piece Arguing That Dan Lyons Is a Jackass - John Gruber, DaringFireball
Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown - Fred Vogelstein, Wired
Wikileaks May Have Just Changed the Media, Too - Alexis Madrigal, Atlantic
Tesla Electric Cars: Revved Up, but Far to Go - Claire Cain Miller, NYT
Why Editing Could Make a Comeback - Alexis Madrigal, Atlantic
HY Society - Ezra Dyer, Automobile
Technology, Objectivity, the Death of Newspapers and Fox News - Joe Windish, The Moderate Voice
Vintage: More Bloggers Raising Money. Here Come The Politics. And Here Comes My Rant. - Michael Arrington, TechCrunch

Another quick turnaround review.

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:28:00 -0700

Another quick turnaround review.

2,000 words in under two hours. And it reads like it too.

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:28:25 -0700

2,000 words in under two hours. And it reads like it too.

[via]

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 22:15:55 -0700

[via]

Porsche Le Mans 1970 Dashboard. Based on the P’6612. One...

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 08:20:12 -0700

Porsche Le Mans 1970 Dashboard. Based on the P’6612. One please.

One lap of the Circuit de la Sarthe in a Porsche 956. Before the...

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:57:19 -0700

One lap of the Circuit de la Sarthe in a Porsche 956. Before the chicanes on the Mulsanne Straight. [via]

Monday Reads: Techmeme Offers Tech News at Internet Speed -...

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:57:27 -0700

Monday Reads:

Techmeme Offers Tech News at Internet Speed - Claire Cain Miller, NYT (Related)
Yahoo and Google in high-tech news war - James Temple, SFChronicle
A Web Site That’s Not Afraid to Pick a Fight - Jennifer Mascia, NYT
The culture wars gave Toyota a license to kill - Jack Baruth, SpeedSportLife
You Are Not Your Phone - Joel Johnson, Gizmodo
Sam Smith dishes out four quickie reviews for Esquire

"It occurred to me, as I sat there watching an interracial couple banging, that jacking off in a..."

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 20:25:47 -0700

“It occurred to me, as I sat there watching an interracial couple banging, that jacking off in a hotel room was not unlike the larger experience of campaign reporting. You watch two performers. You kind of like it when one of them gets humiliated. You know they’re professionals, so you don’t feel much sympathy for them. You wish you could participate, but instead you watch with a hidden envy and feel vaguely ashamed for watching. You think you could probably do as good a job or better. You sometimes get a glimpse, intentionally or not, of society’s hidden desires and fears. You watch the porn week after week, the scenes almost always the same, none of them too memorable. The best ones get sent around the Internet.”

- Michael Hastings – Hack, GQ (October 2008)

This week’s shorter-form reads: Bugatti Veyron...

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 15:04:44 -0700

This week’s shorter-form reads:

Bugatti Veyron Supersports 16.4 Speed-Record Debrief - Mike Spinelli, 0-60
Adventures in media transparency - Gleen Greenwald, Salon
Leaked docs show Motorcyclist caved to advertiser pressure, fired editor - Wes Siler, Hell for Leather
How feminist blogs like Jezebel gin up page views by exploiting women’s worst tendencies - Emily Gould, Slate (Related, Original)
Another Power Grab by Porsche’s Engineers - Ezra Dyer, NYT
Will the iPad Make You Smarter? - Brian X. Chen, Wired
Dinner at Le Bernardin - Patricia Calhoun, Westword
On Cannibalism - Warren Ellis, Wired

Sir Stirling Moss’ steering wheel from his 1962 crash at...

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 14:23:00 -0700

Sir Stirling Moss’ steering wheel from his 1962 crash at Goodwood.

Nissan MID4: Mid-mounted V6, all-wheel drive, four-wheel...

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 12:49:00 -0700

Nissan MID4: Mid-mounted V6, all-wheel drive, four-wheel steering. Stillborn in ‘87.

Video

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 11:51:56 -0700

Uniques

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 11:48:00 -0700

All this talk of uniques overtaking page-views as the defining metric for online success has me worried about one thing: alienating readers. If the new edict is simply to get fresh eyeballs onto sensationalist stories, so be it. Originality is a must and it’s the only surefire way to grow readership and increase credibility. But at the same time, the relentless push for uniques has the potential to come at the expense of diluting what made some sites successful to begin with. Traditional outlets simply focused on their individual beats while aggregation sites provided readers a clearing house of the most important news in a specific topic. There’s a potential for balance between the two, but I’ve yet to see any site pull it off.

Gallagher is a racist right-wing nut-job. My 10-year-old self is...

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 20:34:00 -0700

Gallagher is a racist right-wing nut-job. My 10-year-old self is disappointed. My current self isn’t surprised.

"Rather than train journalists to dismiss their own experiences, what if we trained them to use those..."

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 19:26:18 -0700

“Rather than train journalists to dismiss their own experiences, what if we trained them to use those experiences to help them explain the news to their audience? Allow their humanity to shape their journalism? This isn’t some radically profound notion—it only seems that way in the context of the ridiculous zero-sum debate over the relative merits of “straight” news versus the self-absorbed nature of blogs. Maybe there is a way to combine the best of both.”

- Look at Me! - Maureen Tkacik, Columbia Journalism Review

The newest member of the family, reviewed.

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 19:25:00 -0700

The newest member of the family, reviewed.