NIKKEI VIEW: The Asian American Blog

I know some of my friends think of me as a gadget freak, but I only get crazed about a new toy every once in a while. iPods, for instance. Or digital cameras before that. Walkmans (Walkmen?) in the ’80s.
Here’s my newest gadget recommendation: We recently bought two Flip video cameras and we’re [...]

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As a card-carrying baby boomer (I guess officially, with my AARP membership!), I was 10 when most of 1968 happened. It was a pivotal year, no doubt — though in my consciousness, ‘69 left a deeper impact.
AARP magazine does a fine job of using the Web as a story-telling device to revisit the year. [...]

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I started a fulltime job in February, working for Examiner.com as Director of Content. And it’s kept me from blogging.

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We don’t have cable TV — at least, not at the moment — and don’t have a TiVo or other digital video recorder. We also don’t watch much broadcast TV. Instead, we catch up on TV series on DVD, thanks to Netflix. We’ve burned through entire seasons of “24,” “Alias,” “X-Files,” “Smallville,” “Sopranos,” “Six Feet [...]

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Newspapers come and the news is gone the next day. TV reports are even briefer. Magazines tell their stories week by week, or month by month, and then they’re forgotten. But content on the Internet has a more persistent life cycle. Now, content can live forever — or at least, a lot longer than it [...]

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… Well, maybe not completely different, but music that you most likely haven’t heard.
It’s been a long time since pop music has been a unifying force for an entire generation (or two, or three). Now there are too many genres, too many listeners with too many tastes, too many subcultures, too many niches (it’s [...]

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It’s a somewhat goulish idea: take a recording of a late, great artist, and shore it up with new backing tracks. It’s been done before, with Natalie Cole’s “duet” with her father, and the remaining Beatles backing a newly-discovered John Lennon solo track. And if you wanna look at it from a contemporary perspective, digital [...]

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Happy 5th birthday to the iPod.
I was kind of slow to get on the bandwagon, mostly because it was (and still is, although not as much) so damned expensive to join the iPod club.
But like a lot of people, once I got the thing, I was hooked. It’s a cliche to say it but I’ll [...]

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I grew up – like all baby boomers – during an era of radio when the Top 40 format was perfected during the first two decade of rock and roll, and genres didn’t divide up into separate formats. An entire generation of pop music fans pretty much grew up listening to a wild mix of [...]

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The New York Times this morning tracked down the identity of “funtwo,” the musician who has dazzled millions — literally — with his amazing dexterity on electric guitar, captured on a five-minute, 20-second video that is one of the most-watched clips of all time on YouTube.com. The mysterious player turns out to be a 23-year-old [...]

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CNN this week ran this Associated Press story, about how musicians who’ve been holdouts from the iPod/iTunes bandwagon — the Beatles, Led Zep, Garth Brooks and others among them — will probably cave in and finally allow their music to be downloaded song-by-song.
Apple’s iPod dominates the digital music player market, and iTunes accounts for over [...]

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When I wrote last week about the death of AOL, I may have been premature. Maybe it’s just the start of a new chapter in AOL’s lifespan.
Take this Washington Post story today, for proof. AOL last week screwed up and released private information about its users and how they use the company’s search engine.
Significantly, the [...]

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Truly, it’s the end of an era.
My first online job, way back in 1996, was as Content Editor of AOL’s Digital City Denver. It was a great time to be working on the Internet — there was a palpable sense of excitement. Everything was new, and everything was possible.
Never mind that AOL wasn’t exactly the [...]

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Is it just me? I really think “Ask a Ninja,” a free video podcast that consistently ranks among the top-5 popular video podcasts on Apple’s super-influential iTunes store, is dumb. Really dumb.

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Here’s the best description I’ve read yet about the “Jack FM” format — a hodgepodge of album oriented and hit songs from the past two, maybe three decades played up in no particular order. The stations that feature the format (Denver’s Jack 105.5 FM was the first station in the U.S. to adopt the format, [...]

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I get a lot of inquiries about podcasting because DenverPost.com has had podcasts for a year, from newspapers interested in starting podcasts, consulting companies researching them, and from students working on papers.
I recently received a note from a student in England, and I thought I’d post his question and my response:

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I love how smart Apple is with its line of iPods, and more important, the content it makes available for iPods. I got a video iPod for Christmas (good thing, since my 40GB 4th generation iPod is filled up with over 11,000 songs), and in addition to putting all my classical music and odds and [...]

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When Barbie was “born” into the Mattel family of toys in 1959, she wasn’t just a doll. She was the epicenter of a retail revolution.
When parents bought their baby-boomer girls a Barbie, they were agreeing to an unspoken but implicit contract with the toy store to return time and again and buy stuff – lots [...]

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