Veronica profiled in August issue of PlayStation Mag

Nice, Veronica was profiled in the August issue of PlayStation: The Official Magazine! I don’t think it’s on newsstands yet, but I can’t wait to give it a read. Photo from V’s Flickr.

Maybe we’ll pay you, AP, if you pay us

Of all the AP quotation commentary floating around in the last week, I think possibly the most effective point came from [edit] a certain well-known conservative author [/edit] who, by the AP’s own scale, claims she’s “owed” some $130k for unauthorized quotes and excerpts from her blog. Clearly, if the AP wants to impose these totally arbitrary rules on others, it’d better be prepared to live by them itself. (And let’s not even get into the irony of the AP accepting free, in-the-field breaking news submissions from “citizen journalists.”)

It seems like life in the (rapidly shrinking) print bubble has severely distorted the AP’s outlook in the midst of an increasingly predominent all-digital media landscape. If I were them I’d be careful in the coming weeks and months — unlike the print pubs that syndicate their news, there isn’t any real need for the AP on the internet, and at this rate I’m not sure they’ll be missed.

Qore is go!

Veronica’s big, long awaited, heretofore secret project Qore launched for download last night — we grabbed it this morning to see how the final version looks. Very hot. And I’m not just saying that, because, well, you know. Also, I’m declaring myself the first (ok, maybe second) to have unearthed the Qore easter egg: press L2 from the home screen and you get taken to a mini-game called Death Orb. More from Joystiq and PS3 Fanboy, and Veronica; Death Orb shot after the break. More…

“Annoying habits” ad irony

You know, if you’re going to do a feature called “The 10 Most Annoying Habits of Technology Companies”, you’d do best to vet your own site first — especially the page dedicated to annoying advertising.

Although to be fair, they do disclaim being guilty of the same, and I’m sure the site’s editorial staff doesn’t approve of that kind of advertising nor want it on the site. Trust me, I understand as well as any editor that the people making the content don’t always have much or any say in how their property advertises — but that’s both a double-edged sword and a conversation for another time.

Ownership rundown: who owns who in tech pubs

Lots of media buys going down lately — some solid, others a little harder to see. But for better or worse, in the last couple of years the new media market’s definitely trending heavily on the corporate-acquired end of things. Just for grins, let’s take a quick look at who owns who. Note: this is by no means an exhaustive list (nor does it include aggregators like Techmeme or Digg), just a few of the popular editor editor-driven tech sites on my radar.

Owned
Ars Technica - CondéNet (Condé Nast)
Crave - CNET (CBS)
Engadget - AOL (Time Warner)
Slashdot - SourceForge, Inc.
Wired blogs (Danger Room, Epicenter, etc.) - CondéNet (Condé Nast)

Independent
BoingBoing - Happy Mutants, LLC
GigaOM - GigaOmni Media
Gizmodo - Gawker Media
PaidContent - ContentNext Media, Inc.
Silicon Alley Insider - Silicon Alley Insider, Inc
TechCrunch - Interserve, Inc.
VentureBeat - VentureBeat, Inc.

Independent, on hire
Fake Steve Jobs - Forbes
Scobleizer - FastCompany (Mansueto Ventures, LLC)

CNN headline t-shirts: tacky, hackable

I’ve been almost completely incapacitated for the last week due to this crazy flu I picked up — but damned if I didn’t feel like I was still in a fit of feverish delirium when I found out that CNN took a page out of the Weekly World News playbook, using an instant t-shirt app to merchandise those tawdry headlines. How about instead we use CNN’s tool to make a shirt that actually bears some resemblance to truth and reality?

Veronica is blowing up!

So everybody found out today that V’s heading to Revision3 to do Tekzilla — but that’s only one of her two new regular post-Mahalo gigs. But besides the other thing (which is equally if not more awesome) did I mention she also had a song written about her recently? And did an interview with RCRD LBL? Looks like I’m gonna have to step up my game to keep pace!

Selling News.com to bloggers? No, thanks.

James Nicholson over at Seeking Alpha thinks CNET should sell off its tech news division, News.com, to some other network of “top-tier tech blogs” (Engadget, Tech Crunch, etc. are named), and keep the best writers of the defunct brand to build a better blog network at CNET. Um, yeah, no thanks. That plan makes no sense, not only because the only thing that makes News.com any good is its editors, but (and no offense to all my pals at CNET) the editorial and business models of that division are becoming increasingly deprecated. So yeah, in that regard it does make sense to start thinking about a sale, I suppose — especially considering how much work (read: catching up) Dan Farber’s got to do about right now.

Profiled in Wired, on G4 tonight

I don’t have a ton of time to get into the storied history of Wired’s year-and-a-half-in-coming profile of Engadget vs Gizmodo, but suffice it to say they spent the better part of five pages taking the typical, obvious angle (ZOMG IT’S LIKE A FRAT WAR WITH GADGET BLOGS LOL), missing the real story right under their noses: that we were right there redefining the face of tech media, and everyone — CNET, NY Times, even Wired — had to change up their game to adapt. (Most of them only did so too late, which is part of the reason why we wound up on top.) But that’s not really as fun as getting David Pogue to comment on blogger gaffes and his perceived immaturity of the medium. That’s not to say the thing was a complete wash, there’s some worthwhile stuff and I think they kind of got a bit of the essence of both publications, but I just find all this rivalry stuff so passé. It’s really not all it’s cracked up to be, believe me.

Anywho, aside, for those interested in hearing me ramble about what’s up with Apple doing music subscriptions, I’ll be on G4’s Attack of the Show tonight. See you there!

The real reason fanboys hate tech reporters

Farhad Manjoo had me at “On hot-button issues — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the Mac-PC divide — we’re quick to see bias in even the most objective news.” He’s penned a solid read about that pestering bit which really ought not be as prevalent as it actually is in the wonderful field of writing about tech: the kicking-and-screaming high-intensity “BIAS!” that usually seems to be more in the head of the gadget fan in question than the editorial.

I’ll leave you with this pull: “If I see the world as all black and you see the world as all white and some person comes along and says it’s partially black and partially white, we both are going to be unhappy. You think there are more facts and better facts on your side than on the other side. The very act of giving them equal weight seems like bias. Like inappropriate evenhandedness.”