What Happened to Your Old TV or Monitor

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This is horrifying and quite damning of both technology companies and consumers (I’m as guilty as anyone else). The New York Times reports on the glut in recycled displays: Back in 2004 recyclers of old televisions and monitors were selling the glass in these discarded devices for as much as $200 a ton. The recycled materials would go into new cathode ray-based displays.

Because of the nearly total shift in the market towards flat screen displays, today it costs those same companies as much as $200 a ton just to remove the now unwanted devices. Naturally many of them don’t bother, and huge repositories of old televisions and monitors now sit in sometimes illegal quantities in warehouses. Worse, the owners of some of these businesses, cutting their losses, sometimes abandon them entirely, resulting in public health hazards; at one site the lead levels were seventy-five times the federal limit. Read the whole story.

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Reading into Google Reader’s Story

A lot has been written already about Google’s announcement that it will shutter its Google Reader product on 1 July. It’s a decision that has infuriated many, partly because when the company launched Google Reader in 2005, its free price tag undercut and then virtually destroyed the market for competitive products.

Soon enough, Google Reader had become a de facto industry standard, even as it became more and more apparent over the years that the company cared little for the market that it had come to own. As its hegemony endured, an ecosystem of Google Reader-based feed reading clients came into being, like a city that builds itself on an earthquake fault line. If you were in the market for an RSS client at any time in the past three or four years, you’d have been hard-pressed to find one that wasn’t based on Google Reader. So once it passes into the next world, Google Reader will leave in its wake few if any robust alternatives for consumers to choose from.

There are some important takeaways from this unfortunate history. First in my mind is the fact that Google Reader didn’t beat every other feed reader purely because it was free. Google Reader won because it was an extremely well-executed example of interaction design.

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Back to Blogging

It’s no secret that this blog has been operating at a reduced pace for some time now. I’m struggling to post much of anything, and I’m utterly failing in writing the kind of stuff I would like to be writing: longer and (hopefully) more substantive essays than what’s been posted recently, the kind that I used to turn out regularly.

And it’s hardly the case that I’ve been stumped for topics to post about, either. To the contrary, all sorts of blog post ideas continue to occur to me at all times. Often I’ll start mentally drafting them, anticipating a free moment when I can type them out and turn them into real posts that get published on this site — you know, like a blogger would do. But then a very busy day goes by, and two or three more, and before long the post no longer seems timely or unique and the moment is gone.

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The Post-Posterous World

Posterous, which was my favorite among the many hosted blogging platforms of the past few years, recently announced that it will shut down on 30 Apr, a little over a year after the company was acquired by Twitter. If you’ve got any blogs running on the service, there are instructions on requesting archives here, though be forewarned that the process of generating the archives may take several hours or more.

Also included at that link are instructions on moving your Posterous content to both WordPress and Squarespace. Either of these options are more than capable substitutes for Posterous’ functionality. But for me, the demise of Posterous means there’s really no reason to continue avoiding Tumblr.

(To be clear, this blog you’re reading is run on ExpressionEngine. I’ve been using services like Posterous for peripheral blogs that I keep mostly for my own amusement. More in this blog post from last year.)

Unfortunately, Posterous conspicuously omitted notes on how to move your blogs to Tumblr. Given the past rivalry between the two services, that’s probably understandable. Thankfully, the folks at Indian startup 3crumbs have put together Just Migrate, a simple Web-based tool that will copy all of your Posterous content to a Tumblr blog more or less effortlessly. Tumblr places some restrictions on how much content can be imported at once, and the demand on Just Migrate is already so great that the service is currently maxed out. I was lucky enough to get my migration done over the weekend, but if you get into their queue today, yours should be done well before Posterous’ 30 Apr shutdown date.

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