Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | new media
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August 17, 2006

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 top search term entered by AOL users is "Google."
August 7, 2006

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 "Internet" (many 'Net folks pooh-poohed AOL even then), we were all missonaries preaching the online faith. Like the other handful of online companies at the time, we spent more than half of our long days meeting with potential partners, advertisers and content providers, as well as anyone who would spend the time to listen, to tell them about the Internet and how it would change their lives.
March 15, 2006

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:
January 14, 2006

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 ends like podcasts on the thing, I’ve been putting videos on it.
August 15, 2005

The future of journalism, of course, is in the hands of the young journalists and journalism students who are about to enter the profession. That’s why I’m happy (and honored) to be volunteering as one of the professional mentors working with a group of students on AAJALink, the student-run Web site covering the annual convention of the Asian American Journalists Association. The confab is in Minneapolis, a city I’ve never traveled to. So far, I haven't seen much of it except what I’m sure must be the world’s largest Target (a two-story department store a block away from the retailer’s corporate offices, which is also on the downtown Minneapolis Nicollette Mall).
July 8, 2005

There was an interesting piece in the Washington Post yesterday, about a woman in South Korea whose dog pooped on a subway. She refused to clean it up, much to the consternation of other passengers nearby (what the hell is a dog doing in the subway anyway?). One passenger took a digital photo and put it on a citizen journalism Web site, and then all hell broke loose. Everyone started calling her the "Dog Poop Lady" and chattering back and forth online about how awful she is. Bloggers joined in, and the search for her identity began (her face was obscured in the photo).
May 11, 2005

(Note: I worked for DenverPost.com from 2003-2006.) No, don't barf. I know a lot of people -- especially the kind of people who read blogs, who I think are by nature technologically savvy and opinionated -- hate even the concept of AOL and everything the company stands for. But hear me out, because I truly believe that without AOL and its millions of users, the Internet wouldn't have evolved as quickly as it has into an everyday part of our lives. Washington Post technology writer Robert MacMillan wrote today in his "Random Access" column about RSS feeds, and how RSS is too complicated and technical to become mainstream, even though there's a huge buzz about it in the online media. I agree completely with him. RSS is bogged down deeply in geek quotient.