Infotainment. That chestnut of a neologism was originally coined, if I recall correctly, to describe cheesy CD-ROM products designed to entertain and educate. Later, it was used as a pejorative description of A Current Affair-style journalism. But for my money, there’s no better word to characterize the experience of Ignite…
The Denver Public Library has long been hip to technology, whether it’s offering DVD selections that rival Blockbuster or allowing patrons to download tawdry B-movies from its website. Now the institution’s getting into the smartphone craze, having developed a mobile website optimized for portable devices where folks on the go…
Social media is a great tool with dozens, if not hundreds, of legitimate, quality uses. It’s an excellent tool for networking, doing all kinds of research, sharing important information, managing collaborative projects and so forth. But unfortunately, that’s not all it’s used for. Not by a long shot. The fact…
Finding the right map for the trip at hand has always posed certain hard choices. Do you go for one heavy on the topography contours, or one with legible road numbers? Hydrographic features or better trail markings? In one of the more practical developments to emerge from Washington, the U.S…
Our featured Twit this week is one Patrick Hester, or @atfmb, as he’s known on Twitter. In addition to his very fine hat, Hester is a Denver writer, blogger and Twitter wit who captured our attention with this plea: “How about me?! I’m a Denveridianiteism looking to be a published…
Every day, I use multiple social media services to work, stay in touch with friends and keep up to date with what’s going on in the world. Half an hour on MySpace here, twenty minutes of Facebook there, and a quick look at Twitter every hour — it adds up…
Our latest round of queries asking the Twits of the world to justify their following has yielded some good results. Exhibit A: Michael Salamone (@michaelsalamone), a funny guy who persistently bugged us to feature him until we had no choice. There was just no other way to shut him up…
It’s almost Thanksgiving and that means it’s time to take a few days off of work, see all the family you so carefully avoid most of the year and stuff yourself until you want to puke and/or pass out. The normal way to celebrate Thanksgiving is to ask everyone what…
What writer wouldn’t want to cover the Olympics? The glitz, the glamor and the high-profile nature of the gig are just about irresistible, regardless of your feelings about winter sports. I mean, I’d jump at the opportunity, and I couldn’t care less about skiing, skating and curling. Well, curling’s kind…
The holiday season is in full swing, and even Denver’s monthly Tweetup is getting in on the action. The November meeting of the Twitter faithful is pairing up with the Denver Santa Claus Shop for the latest event, to help ensure a merry Christmas (or other culturally appropriate winter holiday)…
Denverite Brian Crecente is sort of the Rupert Murdoch of video games. As the editor-in-chief of the influential video game blog Kotaku, Crecente, a former Rocky Mountain News scribe, was recently named of the twenty most influential people in the video-game industry by GamePro magazine. Crecente has decided to put…
Back again in our old “three Twits to follow” form for a special Holiday prep edition to get your burgeoning Twitter feed feeding you stuff you can use as the holiday season descends. As always, follow us at @denverwestword, @cafewestword, @westword_music and @casciato. @Colorado_Moms: If it’s your first holiday away…
Downloading of movies, music and other digital media has the entertainment industry in an uproar. All of a sudden, they’re afraid those multimillion dollar budgets aren’t going to be recouped, and they have families to feed! Okay, they have coke habits to feed, but same difference, right? Despite a few…
This weekend, INK, a movie shot locally for $250,000 and self-distributed by Double Edge Films, was uploaded to various torrent servers such as the Pirate Bay. In just a few days, the movie has been downloaded nearly half a million times. By Hollywood’s calculations, this is a massive loss of…
Our featured Twit this time out was one of the few who drew several nominations from people other than himself — he’s really quite popular. (Granted, he did nominate himself, because, like everyone on Twitter, he likes to self promote). You can find him on Twitter as artbyNemo, and, it…
It would take some sort of rocket scientist to create a model of advertising that doesn’t suck. No coincidence, then, that Roger Toennis used to work on projects such as the autonomous lunar rover, Titan 4 rockets and air-to-air missiles before creating Loyal2.me, a product that promises to actually make…
Facebook, we need to talk about our relationship. But don’t freak out — I’m not dumping you. Yet. Look, I like you. I really do. I mean, when we first met, I was really into you. You were so much less gaudy and stupid than MySpace. You helped me get…
This week we decided to go a little meta with our Twitter poll. See, we know what Twitter has done for us (shameless self-promotion, convinced us that we needn’t put on pants to “socialize” with strangers, taught us to think in 140-character bursts). But we decided to use it to…
When we heard recently that Walmart has begun selling coffins online, our first reaction was stupefied disbelief. Really, Walmart? Coffins? Online? Aren’t there some things that just shouldn’t be sold online? Well, of course there are. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t sold online anyway. We put our crack research…
This week, we’ve decided to select a favorite Twit from among the masses and press him to justify his following. Our selection is @CacheFlowe (aka Justin Gitlin), a local musician/artist/technical whiz-kid with a hand in many a music and/or art project around town. Plus, if you like your men nerdy,…
All too often, people get so hung up on the fantastic future we didn’t get that they can’t focus on the even-crazier one we did. You know the complaints: “Where’s my flying car? Why can’t I live forever? When do I get to visit the moon?” But flying cars are…
Halloween is rapidly approaching and we’re already a-quiver with excitement. Next to New Year’s Eve, Halloween is probably the biggest excuse of the year for adults to go out and act foolish and immature — good times! We can’t wait to see the parade of sexy witches, sexy vampires, sexy…
