It's a pity that new media has never really thrown up a replacement for those sort of columnists, isn't it? Negroponte in Wired, Douglas Adams in MacUser, and (slightly more obscure!) Dave Langford's work in various Amstrad PCW magazines in the UK.
Slashdot did experiment a little with Jon Katz, most notably his 'Voices from the Hellmouth' series, but he was never really aiming to sound the same note of wry detachment as those magazine greats.
It's a pity - I'd rather read a monthly column of that sort than any amount of pointless bickering on Twitter.
You've had this fragmentation of attention. Many of the main computer magazines had essentially destination columnists whether writing under their own name or a pseudonym--which periodically passed to a new writer (which in Cringely's case was a matter of some controversy at one point). The latter were often written in a sort of gossipy style intended to make the reader feel that they had an inside view of a company or an area of technology.
wormius · · focus · HN ↗
roryirvine · · focus · HN ↗
Slashdot did experiment a little with Jon Katz, most notably his 'Voices from the Hellmouth' series, but he was never really aiming to sound the same note of wry detachment as those magazine greats.
It's a pity - I'd rather read a monthly column of that sort than any amount of pointless bickering on Twitter.
ghaff · · focus · HN ↗
It was a different time.