The Most Powerful Man in Technology Journalism 205
prostoalex writes "The Wired magazine takes a look at Walt Mossberg, technology columnist for Wall Street Journal Personal Technology section. The magazine quotes some of the technology advances and fixes, for which we should be thankful to Walt Mossberg: 'RealNetworks overhauled its RealJukebox player. Intuit revamped TurboTax. Mossberg even forced Microsoft to scrap Smart Tags, which would have hijacked millions of Web sites by inserting unwanted links to advertisers' sites. Few reviewers have held so much power to shape an industry's successes and failures.'"
Thoughts on Mossberg from a long-time WSJ reader (Score:5, Informative)
I.e. get some new devices, play around with them, and write the obvious stuff about them. The article talks about how he "stopped" Smart Tags and Turbo Tax licensing ... but I'd argue "DUHHHH" ... everyone agreed these were bad ideas ... but if the WSJ writes about, then I guess it must be true! And his comments on the user interfaces aren't exactly rocket science. Note that since he is such as "name", he gets amazingly early access to stuff, and folks I know in "bizness" say he has a HUGE influence.
It has seemed in the last few years that his assistants are mentioned more often in the columns, which leads me to wonder if he has scaled back his workload/reviewing/writing and just coasting on his name/column.
I.e. I'm not sure that whoever is the technology editor at the WSJ makes that much difference - as long as they are reasonably competent in their reviews/writings, they will be well read.
Having said all of the above, he has an column read by millions in the WSJ ... where all I have is my personal web page! ;-) [komar.org]
Re:Gay Nigger Zeikfried takes lead in peoples prim (Score:1, Informative)
So I went and poked the url with the wget stick, and found this inside:
What the fuccccck? Whose idea was it to put clipboard access in Javascript? However, this is quite an amusing use of it.
Mossberg suggests paid ad-free Google Gmail (Score:5, Informative)
He suggests in today's Wall Street Journal that Google should offer an ad-free Gmail for a nominal fee, much like Slashdot's ad-free version.
In its current form, he fears that Gmail, will undermine Google's integrity, something that is perhaps more important than their technology. He says, "I'm calling on Google to preserve its sterling reputation for honesty and customer focus by offering an alternative form of the new Gmail service. The company should offer Gmail accounts without the ads, and without the scanning, for a modest annual fee. That would put the choice where Google has always placed it: in the hands of its users."
Here's the link, but unfortunately you'll need to be a WSJ online subscriber to see it:
Clean Image Is So Key To Google's Success, Why Take Gmail Risk? [wsj.com]
Dag. (Score:3, Informative)
Smart Tags (Score:2, Informative)
SmartTags (Score:2, Informative)
-bZj
Who owns who? (Score:1, Informative)
Did anyone bother running these companies through http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/ [cjr.org] along with the writers names? You'll find some interesting connections. I'm always suspicious of news pieces that fawn other news pieces.
Re:Waaaah? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Mossberg suggests paid ad-free Google Gmail (Score:2, Informative)