They do take a few creative liberties, though. Enjoy.

Books that turn back into trees? Not so far fetched anymore.

Reports of Blogging’s Death have been greatly exaggerated.

For The Escapist’s fifth anniversary, a look back at the bold experiment that is the online video game magazine.

Web developer v.s. SEO “expert” v.s. social media “expert”

Coffee powered cars? Now I really miss my diesel Jetta.

A great gallery of modern products had they been made in 1977.

Then the whole desk starts shaking. I consider the possibility that maybe I’d had too much coffee and turn around in an attempt to focus my eyes but the room is still shaking and my entire apartment appears to be slanting.

I still thought it might be an illusion until I realized that the slanting was causing one of the cats the slide down the floor.

“Um, shit just got real.”

As I’m sure most everyone knows by now, the Ottawa area was rocked by a 5.0 earthquake with the epicentre in Val-des-Bois Quebec.

Once the tremors had subsided, I glanced back at my computer where TweetDeck had been open to see a flurry of earthquake tweets being posted.

Indeed, since Twitter gained popularity, the microblogging service finds itself taken over any time the ground shakes.

This has a tendency to bring out the social media enthusiasts to once again proclaim that social media sites like Twitter are displacing the tired old media by bringing real-time up to the second breaking news updates.

And while it’s true that a few hundred people had tweeted “EARTHQUAKE!!!” before a single news website that posted anything, just how important was this?

I mean, yeah, an earthquake happened. I felt my apartment rocking. I can’t say I really needed Twitter to inform me of this fact.

Once folks had calmed down a bit, additional details of the quake began pouring in, again before old media news sites had them. But there was a problem with these instantaneous updates: Most of them were wrong.

Following the whole thing on Twitter, the magnitude of the quake went from 5.9 and over time eventually dropped down to the actual 5.0. The epicentre changed a few times, as well.

Meanwhile, a little more than an hour after the initial shakes, The Ottawa Citizen had an article up with the accurate details as well some additional information on the geology of Ottawa that has the area particularly at risk for earthquakes, though most are too minor to be felt.

Now, a good deal of the details being spread on Twitter were also getting corrected in real-time, but due to the nature of the service making it easy for users to “retweet” posts to their own followers, often the damage is done quickly.

I’m not going try to pretend I’m immune. In a quick joke posting I tossed up on this blog, I too was one of the people using the wrong magnitude.

Having the incorrect Richter Scale number posted right after seismic activity isn’t particularly harmful, it also leaves me to wonder about the value of getting wrong information fast versus waiting an hour for the right info.

None of this is to say that there’s anything wrong with Twitter and social media, just that the enthusiasm for the idea that any of this is somehow a better replacement for old media is a little over the top.

Besides, following the quake, Twitter was an excellent source of entertainment with witty remarks coming in as fast as the incorrect information.

Thus, we have a homemade printer built out of Lego, using a felt marker for ink. Truly a marvel of engineering.

Though, part of me does wonder just how much of a victory it really is. I mean, I’ve worked for daily newspapers, writing constantly isn’t particularly new.

On the other hand, this time around, there was no assignment editor telling me what was going on today and to get cracking. No real threat if I didn’t make it.

I guess most importantly, I forced myself to find time to write something every day even though there was no per-word rate to speak of.

I guess with most situations, the real value I feel to blogging is getting faster at putting together something coherent. At least, I hope it was all coherent.

However, that hasn’t stopped him from updated his blog.

Leaves me to think I should stop complaining about trying to keep my own blog updated.

And on the topic of Wired, the current issue has a fascinating article about biobanks and the sad state they are in.

Then The Onion takes on Facebook privacy.