‘Net Buzz: L.A. Times writer shuns interaction with readers; not so here.
Shame, shame, shame on you, Joel Stein of The Los Angeles Times. Those of us who write opinions for a living have a hard enough time maintaining civil relationships with our audiences without an arrogant, solipsistic, attention-needy freak — your words, not mine — giving readers the impression that we don’t care what they think.
Well, let me say that I may have once or twice in my 30 years of doing this sort of thing been tempted to write as Stein did:
“There is no practical reason to send your rants to me. If you want to counter my opinion publicly, write a letter to the editor. If you want me fired, write a letter to the publisher. If you want a note back, write a letter in lipstick on the bathroom mirror. Or you could just write mean things about my column on some blog. Don’t worry, I’ll see them. I have a “Joel Stein” RSS feed that goes straight into my arteries.
“But don’t make me feel like you expect a return e-mail. Because this takes my assistant four to five hours every week. I know this because my assistant is me.”
Tempted, yes; however, that is not what I believe, well, at least not 99% of the time.
As Stein goes to great lengths to point out in his column, he speaks only for himself, so please, dear reader, do not generalize to trade-press scribes such as myself the offense Stein not only generates but openly courts.
As for me, I will admit to having snickered once or twice at certain parts of Stein’s rant, but rest assured that I care deeply about what you have to say — 99% of you, anyway, 99% of the time.
The other 1% should still feel free to contact me at jstein@latimescolumnists.com.
If you’re going to send gifts to journalists or bloggers (or journalist/bloggers) don’t be ham-handed like Microsoft, be artful like EMC.
The EMC Information Calendar arrived here recently, and it offers a treasure trove of tidbits, quotes, tech history and philosophy — only a slice of which is related to storage in the narrow sense. Great artwork, too. It’s exactly like one of those page-a-day desk calendars from The Onion or Dilbert, only for people who know that a petabyte is not an injury inflicted by an animal-rights activist.
You can see the archived pages for dates gone by via.
Jan. 3: “The (first disk drive in 1956) stored 2,000 bits per square inch. In disk drives today, the figure is as high as 135 billion bits per square inch. That’s almost a 70-million-fold increase. And in the next five years, we will ship more disk drives than we shipped in the first 50 years.” — Currie Munce, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
Jan. 4: “From the days of Sumerian clay tablets until now, humans have ‘published’ at least 32 million books; 750 million articles and essays; 25 million songs; 500 million images; 500,000 movies; 3 million videos, TV shows and short films; and 100 billion public Web pages.” — Kevin Kelly, “Scan this book!” New York Times, 5/14/06
May 2: Lieutenant Commander Data is an android who serves as the second officer and chief operations officer aboard the starships USS Enterprise-D and USS Enterprise-E. Data was built with an ultimate storage capacity of 800 quadrillion bits (approximately 88.8 petabytes.) — Wikipedia
Feb. 2: “The first digital computer in 1944 filled an entire room and cost around $1,000,000. Today, an equally efficient computer fits in a 5-by-5-foot filing cabinet and sells for less than $200,000. Someday soon, big computers will be reduced to the size of a shoe box and sell for several hundred dollars.” — Time Magazine, April 27, 1957.
They missed the part about accessing them in every coffee shop, but it was 1957.
Dec. 28: “There are three kinds of death in this world. There’s heart death; there’s brain death; and there’s being off the network.” — Guy Almes.
Want a physical copy of this calendar for your own desk? Sorry, friends. “They’re not for sale . . . maybe next year,” an EMC spokesman tells me.
Take that, Microsoft — anyone can go out and buy an Acer Ferrari laptop.
OK, please don’t write to Stein. Try buzz@nww.com.
