We get tips. Lots of them. Sometimes Gawker features editor Tom Scocca responds to them. These conversations are memorialized here in an occasional feature we call Tom Tips Back.
In the olden days, in order to make a phone call to someone farther than shouting distance, you had to stand in one place and speak into a receiver wired to a wall, and if someone called you, you had to dash from wherever you were to wherever the phone was anchored. Most people still do this, apparently??
Last week, the blog world picked up an LA Times news story about a scientific study that had just been published in an academic journal, Communication, Culture and Critique. The title of the study: "Women (Not) Watching Women: Leisure Time, Television, and Implications for Televised Coverage of Women's Sports."
Douglas Britt (pictured) is the "Society/ visual arts writer" at the Houston Chronicle. And he's extremely busy! So he sent out the following 15-point email to "every gallerist/cultural group in Houston," our tipster says. Print out a copy, and memorize!
America's Paper of Record cannot afford to have its reporters sending text messages or calling 411 on their company phones. What a pitiful state of affairs.
If you happen to be a commuter train driver, it's probably not a good idea to be texting with a teenager while you chug along. Lots of people might die.
In a letter to a congressional committee, AT&T said it is "carefully considering" monitoring how its users surf the Web. In a similiar letter, Internet service provider Charter Communication said it had plans to do the same. ISPs Bresnan Communications, CableOne, CenturyTell, Embarq, Knology and Wow already track their users' activities on the Web, according to Silicon Alley Insider, which put together a list of ISPs and portals that do and do not track users.
Well, the Internet was fun while it lasted, but now three of the nation's largest service providers are going to shut it down and throw us all back to the dark ages of telephones and postage stamps. "Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music files. For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country's largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity."
Boa-sporting Mediabistro.com proprietress Laurel Touby continues unabated in her menacing campaign to misuse email—an invention originally designed to simplify communications. Her latest infraction: in order to promote an upcoming "Mediabistro Circus," she decided to save a little time by sending a mass email to her entire contact list—all 2,000 people. The message starts off with an apology to those who "hate my guts," which is a good sign that perhaps it would be better to pursue a different outreach strategy. The entire ill-conceived email, after the jump.
