Katjusa Cisar
Most Recently: An Interview With Glenn Greenwald
Katjusa Cisar is a freelance writer living in Atlanta.
An Interview With Glenn Greenwald
Salon writer Glenn Greenwald got rock star treatment at the National Conference for Media Reform, held this past weekend in Boston, where he took part in a standing-room-only panel discussion of WikiLeaks with Emily Bell of Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Greg Mitchell of The Nation, Australian journalist Christopher Warren and Micah Sifry of Personal Democracy Forum. READ MORE
Us v. Them: When The Liberal Media Met In Boston
At my first session at the fifth National Conference for Media Reform in Boston, at a panel called “Wikileaks, Journalism and Modern-Day Muckraking,” I sat next to a man who regaled me at length with how he had learned to find the real news from Libya via a Toronto professor’s blog. Later, as NCMR volunteers walked around the room collecting questions for the panelists on three-by-five cards, I watched him filling up most of his card. He carefully block-printed a preamble and two-pronged question, the first part of which was, “IS RESISTANCE FUTILE?” READ MORE
Drake University's New Ad Campaign: It's A Big D+
The marketing team that dreamed up Drake University's latest campaign, "The D+ Advantage," got so carried away by an apparent allusion to positively charged molecules that it thought it could either ignore or, alternately, capitalize on one obvious fact: the logo is the grade for pathetically under-average schoolwork, a D-plus. READ MORE
Twitter vs. Google: Which Gets You Better Info, Really?
It's painfully quaint now, but there was a time in the not-too-distant past when using "google" as a verb sounded strange and people sheepishly chuckled about "googling" themselves. Now we have a staggering number of ways to suss information out of the "World Wide Web," to stalk and to share knowledge (or kittehs and double rainbows, whatever). Last week, Facebook widened the possibilities even more when it started rolling out a feature that allows a Facebooker to draw on the site's more than 150 million other users for answers to questions. Facebook Questions gives users options to run a poll, to tag questions in categories or sign up for alerts when new answers pop up. For the past month, I've been testing the limits of Facebook Questions' basic premise: the fusion of social network and information hub. READ MORE
A Q&A with the Creator of "I Write Like": "The Algorithm is Not a Rocket Science"
This week's meme is I Write Like, a new website that uses an algorithm of mysterious methodology to tell you which author's work your writing most resembles. You enter some text-"your latest blog post, journal entry, comment, chapter of your unfinished book"-and a split-second later, it spits out the html code for a blog-ready badge: "I Write Like H.P. Lovecraft," or any of the 49 other authors in its database. It's hard science and great literature, together at last! Well, kind of. READ MORE
