Coolhunt #1: Follow-Up

In completing Monday's coolhunt #1, we sent email to half a dozen business and technology journalists at The New York Times to inform them they were coolhunted and what we discussed. Here are the six journalists we pitched:

Saul Hansell - Technology
Bob Tedeschi - Ecommerce
John Schwartz - Internet Business
Connie Hays - Retail Ecommerce
Kevin McKenna - Circuits Editor
John Markoff - we are not worthy

We received a personal reply from one of the journalists who took issue with some of the statements from our Log. We hope he'll decide to post publicly here, so we can engage a little on those issues.

We also posted a comment to the TreeHugger Business & Politics blog, thus completing our mission of 1 site review, 1 post, 1 comment, and 1 connection. Our comment on TreeHugger was not only approved, but is featured today on the front page of the Business & Politics blog.

STEVE O'KEEFE
Coolhunt Moderator

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Overcoming the pyramid of professional oppression

Image
“ Why is it that Nobel prize winners are always nice, and the people right below them on the professional ladder are complete assholes?”  This question was asked to me about ten years ago by one of my hosts, a senior professor in economics, when I was giving a talk at a university in Florida.   My host was perfectly right – fully confirmed by my own experience of the last 22 years at MIT. A fair share of Nobel prize winners reside at MIT and Harvard, and many others come to visit – usually they are a pleasure to talk to, and amazingly approachable. The same universities are full of people with huge egos, right below the Nobel prize winners, who are convinced that they deserve the Nobel prize and just didn’t get it because some assholes were against them. These people pull the levers at the most respected academic institutions, as editors in chief of prestigious scientific journals, making tenure decisions for junior faculty, and deciding on funding and promotions. Usually, the...
Read more

Predicting Stock Market Indicators Through Twitter “I hope it is not as bad as I fear”

Image
We have been working on trying to predict market indicators for quite some time by analyzing Web Buzz , predicting who will win an Oscar, or how well movies do at the box office . Among other things we have correlated posts about a stock on Yahoo Finance and Motley’s Fool with the actual stock price, predicting the closing price of the stock on the next day based on what people say today on Yahoo Finance, on the Web and Blogs about a stock title. The rising popularity of twitter gives us a new great way of capturing the collective mind up to the last minute. In our current project we analyze the positive and negative mood of the masses on twitter, comparing it with broad stock market indices such as Dow Jones, S&P 500, and NASDAQ. We collected the twitter feeds from one whitelisted IP for six months from March 30, 2009 to Sept 4, 2009, ranging from 5680 to 42820 tweets per day. According to twitter this corresponds to a randomized subsample of about one hundredth of the full volum...
Read more

My life in Alternative Realities - fatherlanders and nerds don’t go well together

Image
We are all living in different alternative realities, people with different personalities see reality from very different perspectives, potentially leading to a lot of friction and misunderstandings. “Nerds” are open to change, they believe in the progress of technology and innovation. “Fatherlanders” abhor change, they like tradition and authority, valuing the fatherland above all, and would like to reestablish the good old times. “Spiritualists” believe into supernatural forces, they are religious, meditate and hope that the forces of nature will heal their ailing. “Treehuggers” believe into sustainability and global warming, they want to save nature by restricting technical progress. I experience  this friction frequently in my daily life. As a computer and technology nerd with spiritualist and treehugger inclinations, my communication with members from other tribes sometimes does not end well.  My interactions with officers of the US Department of Homeland Security and the...
Read more