Now this is a fascinating look at the birth of old-media doom: a 1981 report by a San Francisco TV station about people getting newspapers over their home computer!
It runs about 2 minutes. At 50 seconds in, you’ll see that among the first 8 newspapers available over CompuServe was the “Star and Tribune.” So, far [...]

 
This chart comes from StateStats, another of the endlessly creative (and mindlessly fun) tools floating around the Web. Enter a term, and the site will show you which states search for that term most often. Above you see the search results for “lefse,” with North Dakota leading the way, Minnesota No. 2 and South Dakota [...]

Communication is taking up a larger than ever chunk of our budgets. I got to thinking about this over the weekend, when I sat down to pay the bills.
Our household spends around $200 a month on phone, Internet, cable TV and cell phones. That’s probably pretty close to the average. According to various industry databases, [...]

I wrote here recently about Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service. With more than four million users, it’s caught on well. However, it’s still surviving on venture capital cash – and more than two years after its
launch, Twitter has yet to come up with a business plan for actually making money.
That fact has landed Twitter on a list of [...]

Editor’s note; This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost. To see the original, go to http://tinyurl.com/5l2n4m.
I’m thinking about phones.
I carry a basic little Verizon flip-phone. I can make calls, text and take pictures. But I’m developing some serious lust for an iPhone.
I’m not the only one. At least half a dozen times in [...]

I found myself getting a bit sentimental about the late-’80s/early ’90s Twin Cities music scene when I saw this post by Jim Walsh at MinnPost about a recent Jayhawks reunion show in Spain. Seeing the grainy reunion concert footage Walsh found on YouTube got me thinking about what might have been for some of my favorite [...]

That’s the title of a new book due out later this fall from Pioneer Press technology reporter Julio Ojeda-Zapata. Julio was good enough to visit Fast Horse yesterday and lead a fascinating discussion about the business uses of Twitter.
For the uninitiated: Twitter is the leading microblogging service. It allows you to use your computer or phone to post short [...]

That is a freakin’ amazing statistic!
It comes from a report released yesterday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which I’ve always found to be a fascinating source of information on the impact of the Internet.
There’s virtually no gender difference, either: 99% of boys and 94% of girls between ages 12 and 17 play video games. I [...]

I recently wrote a post about having mixed feelings about the number of faux “people” popping up in the social media space.  However, today I came across an online personality who I thought was pretty cool.  His name is Tommy Silk and he’s at the center of a creative new campaign from Intuit QuickBooks. Tommy is a fictitious music [...]

This winter while watching a riveting episode of CSI: New York where real life meshed with Second Life in murderous mayhem, my Luddite boyfriend turned to me and said, “Wow, wouldn’t it be cool if you could really be a 3D character online?”
Unbeknownst to him, there is a Second Life. And you CAN be a 3D [...]