Blogging

This Is How Gizmodo Started

Gizmodo editors talked to Peter Rojas, the site's founder, as part of the celebration of our tenth anniversary. Here's what he said.

Tumblr Now Allows Creators to Charge for Content—You Know, Except for Porn, Which Is Still Banned

Tumblr? Tumblr... I haven't heard that name in years.

Good Night, Meat Prince

Bryan Menegus is one of the most frustrating editors I’ve ever worked with, which is to say he had annoying feedback like ‘Do you have a source on this?’, ‘This paragraph is complete gibberish’, ‘Did you forget to end this sentence?’, or ‘This is just totally factually wrong’. He also changed the structure of sentences…

For Sale: Massive Blogging Platform, Lightly Used

Six years after being acquired for an astonishing $1.1 billion, blogging platform Tumblr and its 550 million monthly users are reportedly on the auction block with no indication of who might be in market to buy it. Yahoo—which was folded into Oath, and now Verizon Media Group—purchased the scrappy start-up for a billion and change…

Warning: The Flash‘s Iris West Has Started Blogging Again

Last night’s episode of The Flash saw Iris, through some metahuman shenanigans, accidentally granted Barry’s speedpowers, giving her the chance to be Central City’s hero for a little while. But it was not to last, and Iris has hung up her briefly-used (but excellent) hero costume for a return to… well, blogging. As Iris has…

Facebook Attempts to Make Notes Less Bleak

Facebook Notes are bleak. The blogging alternative that Mark Zuckerberg always insisted was not for blogging is a great way to read long blog-like posts from people that you used to know. And now, thanks to a facelift, Notes look less like status updates and more like, well, blog posts. The social network is now…

If you’ve noticed the amount of science news in your Facebook feed is on the uptick, here’s one reason why: in a survey of nearly 4,000 scientists, 87 percent agreed that “participation in policy debates and engagement with citizens and journalists is necessary to further their work and careers.” The study also found that “a…

The Flash‘s Iris West Is The Worst Blogger Ever

Ah, Iris West: Jitters barista by day, intrepid chronicler of the Flash’s superspeed shenanigans by night. But while The Flash has been off the air, we’ve been thinking that maybe Iris isn’t Central City’s best Citizen Journalist. In fact, she’s actually the worst blogger on the internet, which is quite an achievement. Her Blog Is…

Check Out A Paleoanthropology Blog From The Late ’90s

In 1998, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger teamed up with National Geographic to create a blog about his team’s search for humanity’s origins in Africa. The site (or, at least, parts of it) is still live. NatGeo called its venture “National Geographic Outpost,” and described it as “an Internet bridge between scientists and explorers in the field…

Tumblr’s OS X App Is a Full-Screen Tumblr Because Nothing Else Matters

Tumblr just launched a weirdly bare-bones app for Apple’s new OS X Yosemite. If you have a Mac and you download it, you’ll be able to post to Tumblr from elsewhere on the web using a “Share” button. The other thing it does: You can also use it to turn your computer into a Tumblr-only…

This Guitar Blogs

What happens when you give Steve Benford, the Professor of Collaborative Computing in at the University of Nottingham, a guitar and some time? He creates an instument that blogs is what. Inspired by a banjo with a rich history, Benford decided to bring the Internet of Things to a guitar. In doing so, he created…

Court Determines that Bloggers Are Journalists, Then Screws Them Over

A New Zealand court last week found that bloggers are journalists, a belief shared by many U.S. and Canadian courts as well. This means that bloggers can legally refuse to hand over the identities of anonymous sources. It also means that courts can rob them of that right. Top image: Gargolyle on New Zealand’s High…

Bokeh Is a Beautiful and Clutter-Free App That Logs Your Life

A growing obsession with digitally archiving everyday life has given rise to countless apps facilitating your diaristic tendencies. Rising above the clutter is Bokeh, a new service that strips lifelogging to its essentials with a pared-down app that stresses less is more. Bokeh‘s goal is to provide a super-streamlined way to record life’s moments in…

Cyber Therapist Can Spot PTSD by Creeping on Veterans’ Blogs

It takes a lot of experience and skill to diagnose a psychological disorder. If you’re a meager human, that is; computers have learned to do it reliably with nothing but an algorithm and mountains of data. https://gizmodo.com/new-cyber-therapists-can-diagnose-depression-using-kine-5992936 That’s the principle data analytics firm SentiMetrix is putting to use to spot PTSD in soldiers by reading…

The Word Weblog Was Born 15 Years Ago Today

You call this blog a blog because 15 years ago today, a guy named Jorn Barger (aka @RobotWisdom) coined the phrase “weblog.” Barger’s earliest posts are still all online, dating back to this day in 1997. The term wasn’t shortened to “blog” until two years later when another early online writer, Peter Merholz, jokingly listed…

Blogger Invoices Local News After They Rip His Video From YouTube

Blogger Michael McKisson got a bit of a surprise when he turned on the TV and saw a familiar video. The clip, which McKisson had filmed and uploaded to YouTube for his own blog, Tucson Velo, was featured in a story on the local news. McKisson had not given them permission to use the video,…

9-Year-Old School Lunch Blogger Silenced By Politicians (Updated)

For the past two months, one of my favorite reads has been Never Seconds, a blog started by 9-year-old Martha Payne of western Scotland to document the unappealing, non-nutritious lunches she was being served in her public primary school. Payne, whose mother is a doctor and father has a small farming property, started blogging in…

Brave Blogger Confronts Evil Newspaper Editor Who Plagiarized His Post

On May 1, a Missouri man named Duane Lester published on his personal blog a post titled “Changes Implemented After MO Auditor Finds ‘Serious Shortcomings’ In Holt County Sheriff’s Department.” 10 days later, the local newspaper for Oregon, Missouri, covered the same story Duane had written about on his blog. In fact, the Oregon Times…

The Blog Is Dead; Long Live Tumblr!

Judging by Google popularity, the word “tumblr” will be a more common search term than “blog” before the end of the year. Welcome to the future, where the majority of web sites sound like band names. https://gizmodo.com/when-band-names-die-they-go-to-tumblr-5890449 Just as blogging has become recognised by the mass media as, like, a real and (occasionally) serious thing,…

Legendary Music Blogger Sean Adams on ‘Slow Death of MP3 Blogging’

MP3 bloggers were the revolutionaries of music criticism, taking on established outlets like Rolling Stone and Spin by being faster, cooler, and more musical – in that they could embed what they were talking about. Readers could hear it for themselves as they read the blog, rather than looking for it on Napster or waiting…