Poorly designed mobile sites 'drain smartphone battery' 23 April 2012 From the section Technology Image caption Mobile sites such as Wikipedia could be tweaked to save battery life, the researchers said Poorly coded websites are causing smartphone batteries to drain more than necessary, research has…

Eight months ago, Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton was predicting a 40-percent drop in U.S. advertising and paring back accordingly: He laid off 19 writers and, by selling some blogs and consolidating others, shrank his blogging empire from 13 titles to 9. Well, that dire forecast hasn’t quite…

The big news in the online media world today is that AOL (s aol) plans to swallow Huffington Post for $315 million and hand over control of its entire editorial and content operations to founder Arianna Huffington. Although Om is skeptical of this deal for some very good reasons, I think it makes a…

Earlier this year, the Huffington Post announced the launch of Huffington Post Social News , a service which aggregates Huffington Post content that Facebook users comment on and share. In an interview with PaidContent ‘s Staci Kramer, the company provided details about traffic and engagement since…

The lists on Buzzfeed seem designed to rouse us momentarily from a late-afternoon slump and then quickly shame us into getting back to work (better not to be caught by one’s colleagues paging through “11 Stars Who Professionally Stripped” or “33 Animals With Stuffed Animals of Themselves”), but…

He also refuses to put ads on the dashboard, users' customized streams of posts from blogs they follow. "We're pretty opposed to advertising," Karp said this week in an interview at the company's Park Avenue office. "It really turns our stomachs." Some Tumblr users seem to agree. Anthony De Rosa ,…

Last summer, Turntable.fm set techie hearts pounding: Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein, co-founders of a struggling start-up called Stickybits, had pulled an audacious pivot, scrapping their service and betting everything on online music, the most treacherous business on the Internet—and it worked.…

Last Tuesday, Buzz Bissinger hopped the Amtrak train to Philadelphia from New York, where he had done a bit of publicity for “After Friday Night Lights,” a 12,000-word e-book that had been performing nicely since its release. But when he opened his laptop to check his ranking on Amazon , he found…

At 7 a.m., 10 senior Sears executives gather in a sixth-floor conference room in Hoffman Estates for a daily meeting — or, as some refer to it, a "daily beating" — with Edward "Eddie" Lampert. Via teleconference from his home base in Greenwich, Conn. (and, at least one time, via a call from his…

Estimated annual avian mortality from communication towers by Bird Conservation Region. High mortality estimates in Peninsular Florida and Southeastern Coastal Plain reflect the more numerous and taller communication towers in these regions. Every year nearly 7 million birds die as they migrate from…

The special tool we use here at The New Yorker for punching out the two dots that we then center carefully over the second vowel in such words as “naïve” and “Laocoön” will be getting a workout this year, as the Democrats coöperate to reëlect the President. Those two dots, often mistaken for an…

Now and then, a video with real social relevance goes viral , the most obvious example being Kony 2012 . But far more often, videos that capture the zeitgeist and spread like wildfire across the Internet are celebrity-driven, shocking, or just dumb fun, like that talking dog. Rarely do viral videos…

Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West. SEATTLE — Satan in Seattle, as the walking wounded of the book business describe Amazon.com, continues to expand from the shores of Lake Union here, with nearly a dozen new office buildings housing the global nerve center of earth’s…

If it's after midnight on just about any night, Bruce Davis will be perched in the same spot at the same brasserie—and probably drinking the same drink. Mr. Davis is one of New York City's foremost regulars, with an extraordinary commitment to an otherwise ordinary restaurant. His monthly bill at…

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Jody Herr in a field that he farms in Lowell, Ind. Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times To Jody Herr, it was a telltale sign that one of his tomato fields had been poisoned by 2,4-D, the powerful herbicide that was an ingredient in Agent Orange, the Vietnam War defoliant. “The leaves had…

All the President's Men There is a framed movie poster sitting on a radiator in my office almost directly across from my desk. I can’t help but see it every day, all the time. It’s an original “one-sheet” (creases and all) that was used in theaters to promote All the President’s Men , the tale of…

Last spring Sam Fiorella was recruited for a VP position at a large Toronto marketing agency. With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford, and Kraft, Fiorella felt confident in his qualifications. But midway through the interview, he was caught off guard when his…

Plenty of newspapers and other mainstream media entities are happy to use social tools like Twitter and Facebook to promote their content, host comments on their news stories in order to build traffic, and otherwise try and take advantage of the web. But while some are making strides in actually…

Were you ever in a public place and became aware that a guy nearby was frantically scribbling in a notebook, a disheveled lunatic madly writing as if the future of the world depended on his accumulated observations? Yeah, that was me yesterday. Not being the curious onlooker. I was the lunatic. I…

Story highlights Gawker chief: Idea of positive online comments has become a joke Nick Denton speaks at the South by Southwest Interactive festival He said the bigger a site is, the harder it is to curate comment sections One idea? Making certain stories only open to a few select commenters In the…

We’ve written before about the commenting system at Gawker Media’s family of sites, which for my money strikes the best balance between complexity and simplicity, between encouraging good behavior and policing bad. (I also just like that Gawker’s a company that really thinks about comments, that…

When Facebook launched the ability to embed Facebook comments on third-party websites, a lot of publishers saw it as a life-saver: not only would it improve traffic by exposing their content to others on the social network, but Facebook’s “real names” policy would also cut down on trolling and bad…

Gawker's Nick Denton speaks at Ad Age 's Media Evolved Conference on Nov. 15 in New York. Gawker Media chief Nick Denton talked about the image problem that arises from having a conspicuous cohort of fanatical but ill-informed commenters at Ad Age 's Media Evolved conference today, where he also…

Over the past couple of months, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton has made it clear that he doesn’t like blog comments very much, and that includes the ones on his own sites such as Gizmodo and Jezebel. He said so during an interview at South by Southwest , where he called the long-held idea that…

I’m in an interesting position. I’m currently in the process of overhauling this whole ANIMAL thing, from the basics of our site content, to building out plans to expand in the future, how to make money, etc. We’re taking a real stab at turning this little blog into a big ol’ thing. (Blessedly, I am…

Ted Nugent understands how to get attention in the internet age (image via @daylife) Ted Nugent likes to say outlandish, controversial things because he craves attention. Not adoration so much – rather the sort of attention a car accident gets: wide-eyed stares, dropped jaws, that sort of thing. He…

Being a dominatrix is much like being a journalist. In both professions, you have to be a good listener. You have to get people's names right. Journalists are supposed to tell the truth. A dominatrix tells the story her client would like to hear. I wouldn't be able to make the comparison if I hadn't…

Arts and Entertainment Blog Katie Roiphe's Newsweek cover story ignores the fact that in every century and decade, sadomasochistic erotica has broken into the mainstream. By Twitter April 16, 2012 Katie Roiphe has written a link bait-y Newsweek cover story making an interesting claim: that the pop…

Every American can be his own policeman; the country has nearly as many guns as it has people. Credit Photograph by Christopher Griffith Just after seven-thirty on the morning of February 27th, a seventeen-year-old boy named T. J. Lane walked into the cafeteria at Chardon High School, about thirty…

Thanks to a couple adamant atheists in my family, I was kept far away from religion growing up. It was supposed to be my choice what kind of God I wanted running my life, if I wanted one at all. I remember the first time I visited church, when I was seven, with my best friend across the street and…

Editor’s note : Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of just.me . He was a co-founder of TechCrunch. Follow him on Twitter @kteare . Google’s stock declined by over 4% yesterday. Many have put this down to the company’s decision to create a non-voting…