Journalists and all creative users of video, data, and technology: The Google for Media summit in NYC last week was pretty mind-blowing. From the Google Trends workshop alone, I had dozens of story ideas. And did you know Miley Cyrus crashed her fans’ Google hangouts?
If you’re interested in what we learned, check out this Storify summary. You may see a familiar face in the tweets!
Filed under Blog, Community of writers, Events, Writing and technology
Poster designed by the author via keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk
Earlier this month, a horrendous customer service call made headlines. Being the glass-half-full kind of gal that I am, I want to share a sunnier experience with people paid to listen to us whine.
It starts with a WordPress blog–just like the one you’re reading now. I’ve used WordPress for nearly eight years now, and currently own or contribute to half a dozen WP sites.
When I’ve bumped up against the occasional website snafu, I’ve always been able to pluck an answer from the help topics or the forums and fix the problem myself. Then I came up against email forwarding that mysteriously stopped. We’re talking about the service where you can take an address like info@funkycucumber.com and automatically forward it to me@gmail.com (if you’re not doing this yet for your own website, look into it!* It’s free. And it works great. Except when it occasionally doesn’t). Continue reading
The sun rises near Rancho San Cosme in Baja California, Mexico.
In one of the first pre-dawns of 2014, I stood next to a handful of travelers and watched the sky. As I focused on the layers of stars, I saw it. Meteors cascaded one by one through the Baja night. The only sounds for minutes at a time were our gasps.
It was the end of a two-week bus tour along that western peninsula of Mexico, and that entire time I’d been without a computer. I wanted to bring my laptop, but logistical concerns mounted: Limited access to electrical outlets on the bus where we spent much of our time, the risk of damage or theft, few opportunities to connect to email or look up words and maps. So I left it. Continue reading
Filed under Travel
QR codes like the ones above appear on every poster, magazine, and billboard these days. They let advertisers cut down on words and plop anyone with a QR scanner onto a web page with more info. So what is so special about these? They advertise resources at a library. Garbled-looking symbols take the place of words that in turn lead us to words.
Photo by Rhea and her Android.
Filed under Image for the day
Rhea Kennedy Morgenstern, writer 