Is that an iPhone with telephoto lens attachment in your pocket or are you just trying to make a lame joke?

Much in the way that everybody who saw Sideways is now an expert on wine, the tragedy of blogging is that anybody with a laptop and a Gmail account is an expert on technology. So now that Chrome will actually be a full-fledged operating system, let’s see what the experts have to say.

The canonical example of failure in tech journalism is TechCrunch, a blog that once declared Google’s MapReduce to be a system that “reduced the links found on the web into a map that search algorithms could run over.” Yes, this will do nicely. TechCrunch embodies all that is wrong with blogging as journalism: shoddy fact checking, writing that would fail a high school English class, and a pre-adolescent in-the-brain-out-the-mouth reporting style.

—Ted Dziuba takes TechCrunch to task for, well, mostly being a bunch of morons.

Thomas L. Friedman is off today.

—This is what happens when the Times lets Friedman take a day off – Maureen Dowd literally loses her goddamn mind.

How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it’s a digital slate I’m carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?

Books not only furnish a room, to paraphrase the title of an Anthony Powell novel, but also accessorize our outfits. They help brand our identities. At the rate technology is progressing, however, we may eventually be traipsing around culturally nude in an urban rain forest, androids seamlessly integrated with our devices.

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James Wolcott wonders how we’ll brand ourselves in the era of the iPhone and Kindle.

I’ve often wondered about this notion. Interestingly, it wasn’t that long ago that the devices themselves said a certain something about the user – when I got my first iPod, clunky by today’s standards of haptic glass, they were accessories to the cult of Mac only, which branded the spartan white earbud wearer and identified her somewhat singularly on the train downtown. When those same earbuds became universal, the addition of the microphone node on the right side became a new signifier of a different, elite status, once again now all but meaningless by ubiquity.

But now that streaming bits are replacing paper as the medium of choice, our last outward cultural identity is fading. My bus, for instance, is traditionally broken down into New Yorker readers and Economist readers, with an almost alarming regularity. There are interlopers, of course, lugging technical tomes and the occasional gamer magazine, but non-book readers tend to break down into one of those two (there will sometimes appear a New York Times Magazine, but these are without fail also New Yorker readers. Please don’t ask why I know this, I just do.) Whether there’s a fundamental difference between the two isn’t a call I’m willing to make, especially since I fall in the decidedly superior New Yorker camp (natch).

I still haven’t found an e-device that replaces paper for me yet , certainly not in the transcendental leaps and bounds way that my iPod replaced my Discman, but I suspect this is only a matter of time. At which point, I’ll need to seriously consider the impact of replacing a handsome shelf of books as I recently did with every CD and DVD I’ve ever owned, ripped to a spacious hard drive and squirreled away out of site. I hated the stacks of shiny discs, impossible to organize, all clumsy and fragile, despite the fact that I once fetishized my music collection and the image of me it projected out into the world. But I love my books and have no clue what I’ll replace my bookshelves with some day. Probably a bigger, thinner, higher def TV.

He was pronounced dead at the scene, and Camden firefighters pulled his chocolate-covered body out of the tank.

—Yes, it’s incredibly sad, but it’s pretty hard not to laugh when reading that. [via @gruber]

Correct me if I’m wrong – and I’m sure you fucking freetards will find something to correct – but I think Linus Tordalv started working on Linux back in 1991 when he was a high school student in his native Denmark.

—There are something like seven super nerdy jokes in there, which is why I’m glad Fake Steve is back.

Google announces Chrome OS

Aimed at Netbooks, it’s a new windowing system that runs Chrome, all on top of a linux kernel. Apps will all be web based and will run on any platform that Chrome does.

On the Internet, the average attention span is three to five minutes. We have to cater to that.

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Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment, on the end of plot in porn at a time when the internet makes fulfilling your prurient desires easier than ever.

Yes, that is a New York Times link

Remember when I told you that Poeks is smart? Now there’s this.

Everything about this is fantastic. [via toldorknown]