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…

Joy of Tech brings me joy

I know Steve is a daily Engadget reader, but I never fully understood why until now.

Mentoring the next generation of gadget bloggers

Late last year Peter and I began a mentorship program with some students of the Torah Academy of Bergen County; Eli, Chaim, and later Charlie and Tzvi got together to begin writing an editing a gadget blog aimed at teenagers casually interested in technology, dubbed the TeenTechBlog. These kids have definitely made a lot of progress over the past six months. Starting a site and following it through isn’t as easy as it looks, and they’ve have been continually upping their game despite their demanding school schedule.

I think the question I’m most often asked by people not already in the industry is, “How do I break into writing about technology?” The answer is pretty simple: start writing, keep writing (even when the initial luster has worn off, even if you’re not collecting droves of readers and scads of review units), and with any luck you’ll hone your skill and catch your break — not unlike the path the crew at TeenTechBlog are already on.

“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.

Good folders to exclude from Time Machine backups

Time Machine is a really effective tool for backing up everything on your drive. And when I say everything, I mean it — Time Machine indiscriminately backs up a lot of junk on your drive. And because of the techniques it uses and the way some files are used by your apps, you might find that your 500GB external backup drive is getting full after just a few months of use.

It’s really easy to identify folders for exclusion from Time Machine, which will save time and space during backups. It’s worth noting, though, that if your machine’s drive does fail, you won’t be able to execute a full restore without having some of these locations backed up. Then again, if you’re anything like me, you’re far more likely to just do a full reinstall and just restore your lost user data. (Doing a full restore from backup just doesn’t have many advantages compared to a full system reinstall, anyway.)

These are just a few suggestions — you should NEVER exclude anything from backup if you’re unsure you have another copy, aren’t able to get it again, or are unaware of the possible ramifications. Of course, you’ve got any good folders you think should be added to the list, feel free to drop ‘em in comments.

Obvious
The duh stuff.

• /Applications - This will likely save you more space than any other single folder, especially if you have lots of apps. Just make sure you know what programs you’d want to get back if your machine were to die.

Caches and downloads
Big directories of files that should probably be excluded automatically, but aren’t. Unless you’re a crazy developer debugging code, you’ll probably never need a backup of your caches.

• /Users/[user]/Library/Caches and /Library/Caches - Between the two you can knock off a few hundred megs of constantly changing, essentially useless data.
• /Users/[user]/Downloads - Where all your internet downloads wind up. Frequently changes, and if you’re anything like me, it’s filled with gigs of garbage.
• /Users/[user]/.Trash and /.Trashes - Some people might see value in backing up their trashed files. Not I.

More after the break. More…

Does Twittering mean you blog less? The answer might surprise you.

The other Twitter-related post I’ve been wanting to write lately regards the correlation between the decline of “regular” blogging (which I’m now referring to as macroblogging), and microblogging (specifically, Twittering). Ask anyone with a blog that also spends time Twittering, and they’ll likely tell you that as their microblogging has gone up, their macroblogging has gone down. That’s definitely been my take — I’ve been Twittering a lot more in the last six months, and I feel like it’s has a substantial impact on the volume of posting on my personal site.

So I decided to plot the numbers to prove the theory that Twittering was, in fact, causing my personal blogging to atrophy. I had a very clear image in my head of what the two lines would look like: the blog would be trending down ever so slowly, taking nosedives during busy months, while the Twitter line would be going up pretty fast. So you can imagine my utter surprise when I hit the render chart button and the following showed up. More…

Microblogging needs platform independence

Although I’m fairly ill-equipped to delve deep into burgeoning distributed social networking “standards”, there are some clear trends in play pointing toward the need for microblogging to become a platform independent activity. (The multiple Twitter outages over the last week are only the icing on this cake.)

Although blogging can trace its roots to zine / underground publishing culture, it wasn’t until the first blog CMSs landed in 1999 and 2000 (like Blogger and Movable Type) that mainstream audiences experimented with self-publishing. Those blogging at the time might remember what a highly platform-based experience it was. RSS and other forms of one:any (not just one:many) aggregation hadn’t yet come into widespread use, meaning some of those early platforms fed right back into their own siloed communities. This was especially apparent in the case of LiveJournal, which was really popular back then. Way late to RSS, LiveJournal instead relied on a light social networking system that aggregated posts to groups of friends using the service. Sounds familiar. Of course, blogging eventually grew up and out of its early stages into something far more horizontal and platform independent, ensuring the activity of blogging didn’t tie users to just one system and set of relationships.

Although Twitter should be clearly wary of users eventually fleeing for a distributed, decentralized, relationship-based cloud of microblogging, I think most in the know would agree that ultimately it’s what the medium needs to make the next step. Because of Twitter’s dependence on relationships, though, that transition probably won’t come easily; perhaps that’s where services like FriendFeed and other meta-aggregators step in as the glue for disparate, distributed life-content apps. Or perhaps that’s the tack Twitter needs to build into its own business, ensuring it makes the transition from early platform to future technology leader.

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)

Harry McCracken leaving to start a new site

So Harry McCracken is leaving PC World on June 2nd to start his own tech site. The man’s a titan in our industry, I can’t wait to check out what he’s got cooking — good luck, Harry!

P.S. -And no, the EIC gig I referenced the other day wasn’t this, so there you go.

Quote from Helvetica

As a type geek took me longer than I’d like to admit to catch Helvetica (the movie), but there was definitely one quote by Lars Müller about the quaint ubiquity of the modern world’s “default” typeface that stuck with me: “What I like is that this very serious typeface tells you the dos and don’ts of sweet life — it must be Helvetica.” [Photo by Marcos Dopico]