ThoughtCafe | Online Magazine

Even though new media mouthpieces have been shouting for some time about the end of print newspapers, it still comes as quite a shock when perhaps the biggest name in print newspapers admits they are in huge trouble.While being interviewed a year ago, the editor of the New York Times stated that there would be [...]

I read with interest this evening a post at ValleyWag about Forbes magazine, who have been running two operations for the last several years - both in Fifth Avenue - one dealing with the print publication of “Forbes Magazine”, and the other dealing with it’s online incarnation - “Forbes.com”. The staff do not speak, communicate [...]

Watching the US presidential debates from the other side of the planet has been interesting - not least because of the willingness of the candidates to jump on any perceived weakness of their opponent, seemingly without testing the veracity of their sources.
Perhaps the most noteable example so far has been “Joe the Plumber”.
While out on [...]

The polls have been closed here in Oklahoma for almost two and a half hours now, and at 7:01pm local time, NBC projected that John McCain had won the state.
No surprise there as Oklahoma has not voted Democrat since 1964.
It’s going to be a long night, one I’m not planning to stay up for. I [...]

As November 4th inches closer and closer, it is becoming quite apparent that America is in some of the oddest times my generation has seen. (I will not include other generations since the did, indeed, witness the civil rights movement, women’s right movement, and numerous other historical things.) I do not remember any other time [...]

While reading various news stories this morning, it struck me how a story will break in one place, and spread quickly through related news sources over the following minutes. Somebody will get the scoop, and then the geek army seems to descend - quickly followed by the unwashed masses.
Nowhere is this more true than within [...]

Today, October 20th, is my friend Charlie’s birthday.
He could care less.
It could be because he’s 65 years old, in resonably good health, and things like birthdays just get in the way.
I have several friends like that. Birthday-shirfday. Big, fat, hairy deal.

I don’t have a rhythm yet to my life.  I want to write fiction as I love it and almost all my friends would rather be fictional characters than the real thing and I can’t blame them.  I would say it’s a generational thing but even the young women in my life, my Goddaughter and [...]

Where did he learn how to do all this stuff?
My twenty-two year old son, Jeff, can fix just about everything he can get his hands on. He has saved his 80 year old grandmother more money than anything.
One of the first things Jeff fixed for his Grandma was her hot water heater. It was malfunctioning [...]

I’ve started watching more independent films lately. The most recent two I watched are “In America” and “Bella”. These two movies contain so much beauty, selfless love, and community that it makes me thirst for those things in real life.
“In America” is a movie about an Irish family that moves to New York and how [...]

Make no mistake - the book I write during November will be crap. Utter garbage. But if I succeed, I will be able to tell people that I wrote a book. Advice for taking part in NaNoWriMo states that participants should aim above all else for quantity - quality should be of no concern. This [...]

Certain names have an unintentional yet very real comedic bent for me. I don’t mean the usual Annette Curtain ‘amusing’ name. I mean those names that are perfectly normal and have been in accepted use for hundreds of years or more, yet tickle the funny bone.

If you think that anal sex is just for Greek philosophers and Christian priests, then this book is just the thing.   The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women offers comprehensive information on all aspects of anal
eroticism and health. For all women—heterosexual, lesbian, bisexual, and men who have sex with women—who want to learn how [...]

I have identified the three stages of the flu.
The first is the PRE-FLU: You generally feel like crap, nothing makes sense, and you don’t know why you’re feeling so bad because you’re pretty sure you’re not sick.
Next is the ACTUAL FLU: One day about two weeks or so of feeling like crap, you start to [...]

At present I am commuting into the city for three days each week – and for the remaining two days I live close enough to the office to ride a mountain bike to work.
While the bike means our household only has one car, and is therefore more ecologically conscious than most in this part of [...]

Being the inquisitive sort of chap that I am, I often find myself trying out new things on the internet, and wondering how I might make use of them. While my personal blog, the “Enormous Waste of Webspace” might be termed my “blog”, I have recently been toying with both Tumblr and Posterous.
You may recall that I looked [...]

It’s been a while since I talked about the stuff I’m listening to while commuting back and forth from London. Regular readers will know that mainstays include the various output of Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht. I have been listening to something different recently though, which I think I may actually [...]

Has it occurred to anybody else that Google seem to be really interested in whatever they are currently working on, and then lose interest as soon as something more interesting to them comes along?
It’s difficult to judge if nothing is going on in terms of development of their various properties, or if they are just bad at [...]