For several years I’ve enjoyed reading Jeff Harrow’s reports from the frontier of high tech. He was sort of a proto-blogger from way back, an amateur journalist who turned into the real thing and consistently digs up good stuff. First he was at Digital writing something called The Rapidly Changing Face of Computing. He stayed there as Digital got acquired by Compaq. Then Compaq decided that paying him to write a tech column wasn’t a good investment and nudged him out the door. By that time his loyal following was such that he decided to strike out on his own. His current vehicle is the Harrow Technology Report, which he publishes fortnightly. I have no idea how he’s doing financially, but the good stuff is flowing once again.
His May 13th edition (The Ever-Full Beer Stein) has a great example of what he does really well: he converses with his readers, and publishes what he learns. In this case, he first asked readers to tell him about a funny-looking doohickey he’d seen on high tension power lines. What people sent back was fascinating, and a nice illustration of what makes the web so cool. As he wrote: “As I expected, our community of Harrow Technology Report readers represents an incredible wealth of knowledge about almost anything technical, and clearly, many of you enjoy sharing your knowledge with others. Answers started streaming in within minutes of publication, and although there’s only enough room to share a fraction of the responses, these few samples will provide the surprising (to me) answer to this mystery.” Go there and learn about the mysterious doohickey.
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 