I saw the Sport Illustrated demo video long before the iPad was  released. It was everything the iPad should have been on Day One. A mind blowing demonstration of what the future of the magazine could be.

The problem is, the iPad cannot currently do what the demo presents, and it should, right now. Flash is the only current technology that would make that possible. (more...)

Twitter, for better or worse, seemed to define 2009. It was in 2009 people in the mainstream stopped seeing it as a ridiculous outlet for people who feel the need to share the mundane details of their day and began realizing it was the go-to source for breaking news and to tap straight into the minds of the news makers, news writers, news gatherers, and thought leaders. 2010 will be the year when we begin to consume media in a whole new way. It seems almost a foregone conclusion that Apple will release a device long lusted after by gadget geeks many are speculating will be called the iTablet. Conde Nast, Time magazine and others have already been working on how they will create content for this kind of device and they're prepared move forward even if Apple isn't. Convergence between web content and television has never been done quite right. Web video has matured to the point now where people are beginning to go to their laptops before their television to catch up on programs they missed. (more...)

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The Yes Men's provocative anticonsumerist pranks tend to be hit-or-miss, with some of their more outlandish stunts not quite clicking because no one could possibly believe them in the first place.

If fooling people is their measure of success, it looks like their latest looks like it's hit the bullseye: Reuters, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNBC all took a Yes Men press release that claimed to come from the Chamber of Commerce at face value. (more...)

The Jerz The corruption sweep that put New Jersey under a national spotlight this past summer was massive even by the Soprano State’s standards. Citizens seem to be holding Gov. Corzine partially responsible for enabling a climate of corruption. His opponent, Chris Christie, who spent seven years as a U.S. Attorney in Newark, was largely responsible for the massive sweep that resulted in 44 arrests, including three mayors, five rabbis, and two state assemblymen. The busts caught national attention, catapulting Christie into the limelight. He's riding a wave that has him leading in polls despite being a Republican in an otherwise Democratic leaning state. (more...)

There is something a good portion of liberals and conservatives can agree on: Obama does a lot of talking but not quite enough following through. At the Human Rights Campaign 13th Annual Dinner, Obama reiterated his campaign promise to abolish "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."  The reaction by some seemed to suggest that people thought Obama was repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," which is not the case, it's just more talk. (more...)

The days of blogger payola are over, if the Federal Trade Commission has anything to say about it. The Federal Trade Commission slapped down a new set of rules today that require full disclosure by bloggers when they receive freebies or payments from companies for reviewing their products. The rules take effect Dec. 1, and those out of compliance could be fined up to $11,000 per violation. Ouch. (more...)

Newark is a city in transition and at the center of that transformation is its mayor, Cory Booker. Crippled by riots that took place in 1967, the city struggled to recover and it was only until recently, almost a half century later, that Newark has begun to rise again. Booker's sweeping reforms in city government and law enforcement have made Newark the leading city in America for violent crime reduction. In 2008, Newark had its lowest murder rate since 1959. (more...)

We live in interesting times. Today, you can take the entire world with you in your pocket, but few can be bothered to get off the couch. That said, increasingly, applications on the web are making it more difficult to ignore the call of the wild. Some of the coolest apps on your phone right now encourage you to get off the web and get a life. (more...)

Note: The Twitter screengrabs to the right date from just after the crash, but the time indicators at the bottom reflect the time of screengrab, not time of posting. This post has been updated with new information since publication. Right now I'm watching Fox News' live report on the collision between a plane and a helicopter over the Hudson River today in Manhattan. It's about 90 minutes after the crash occurred, according to the first tweet I've seen about it, from Anthony De Rosa at 12:10 pm. It's a surprisingly precise way to assess it — reports place the crash at just after noon — because one moment my Tweetdeck was filled with details of brunch, coffee and morning runs, and the next tweets from people like Brian Stelter and Marc Ambinder started coming thick and fast, along with incidental reports from people I follow who just happened to be on the west side — like Michael Orell: "At Chelsea Piers Gym. This is the second time I'm watching a plane crash recovery from the Hudson. All wreckage looks to be submerged." (Update: First tweet I can find on this is Dan Belanger (@ziggfather) at 12 noon exactly.) By now, 90 minutes later, the networks have gotten a handle on it — NY1 was covering it almost immediately; the New York Times put out a story at about 1:05 p.m. (following up on a news alert banner at around 12:25 p.m.); Fox News is providing fantastic live coverage with commentary from anchor/host Jon Scott, also a licensed pilot and scuba diver with rescue training, who is giving extremely sharp ongoing analysis. But right when a story like this breaks — an event in public that no one has an exclusive on, just an army of news junkies trying to collect and share new emerging information — there is just no beating Twitter. (more...)

Before Gen Y, the voracious creators and consumers of social media, came Gen X, who built the infrastructure on the web that made social media possible. Where these generations intersect is through the movies of John Hughes, who suddenly passed of a heart attack while on a morning walk today in Manhattan, at the age of 59. Hughes movies spanned from domestic gender role comedies like Mr. Mom to classic road movies like National Lampoon's Vacation (for which he wrote the script), to the 90s Home Alone franchise. But what really defined Hughes was his coming-of-age teen angst classics like Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Buellers Day Off. My contemporaries grew up on those movies and saw ourselves in Anthony Michael Hall's unrequited young love for Molly Ringwald. We could relate to the vicious social cliques and the politics of high school that The Breakfast Club explored and broke down. We all wanted to be Ferris Bueller and escape from boring classes, outsmart nasty principals, and sing on a giant float with fetching German lasses. It's unlikely that the teens of Hughes' films could exist today. (more...)

A rabbi, two mayors, an organ donor, and a developer walk into a diner... It sounds like the start of a bad joke but it was all part of another dark day for a state notorious for political corruption. It was also a day that gave the best in the Garden State a chance to show off their journalistic chops. (more...)

Like it or not, sponsored content is a common practice all over the web.  Daily Telegraph, Gawker Media, Mediaite, The New York Times, LA Times, and National Geographic have all incorporated sponsored content amongst their editorial in some fashion. The practice is not native to online content and dates all the way back to the 1600s when the Japanese called them "Hikifuda" or drawing cards. (more...)