An interesting thing happened at the New York Times over the past 10 years as the paper has shifted an ever-increasing amount of focus and resources from its print edition to its web edition in response to the rise of the internet:  America’s newspaper of record, the flagship of a print journalism industry facing arguably the most direct internet-related challenges of any industry you could name, has instead embraced internet technology - not only as a delivery medium, but as a newsworthy subject in and of itself.

And by doing so, the Times has evolved into one of the more important technology news destinations on the web.

Understandably, some of the Times’ technology and media coverage is geared purely towards the casual general reading public  (a recent Andy Rooney-esque lamentation on the demise of the Filofax comes to mind).  If you haven’t noticed, though, there’s also an impressive amount of reliably high-quality technology journalism coming from 8th Avenue these days: the top-level NY Times technology section contains feature articles by the Times’ able stable of tech writers, more informal and interactive coverage can be found in the Bits Blog, and lastly, for coverage of technology for the consumer there’s the “Personal Tech” section (since non-sales driven coverage of new CE products is pretty tough to come by, I find this section particularly refreshing).

It doesn’t stop there, though - the Times is also a reliably discriminating  aggregator of worthwhile tech coverage from external sources such as redwriteweb.com and venturebeat.com.

In short, I find the NY Times technology coverage well-considered, timely, and (maybe most importantly) comparatively hype-free.  It’s a web destination that’s well worth your time (and of course it’s all also available as RSS feeds and/or email newsletters).   So, props/kudos to the NY Times - for not only meeting the challenge of the  internet head-on, but for seeing an opportunity there.

Here are two recent NY Times articles that touch on subjects we’ve written about here as well:

• The privatization of internet We’ve been noticing an unmistakable trend towards the privatization of certain areas of the internet for a while now.  In fact, it’s been one of our favorite topics (we’ve written about it here and herehere).   For both purely technical and business-driven reasons, we’re looking for the trend to continue - and here’s a good NY Times article on one aspect of it: ‘peering’, the shift from public internet backbone routing to private networks:  Scientists Strive to Map the Shape-shifting Net

• Paying via credit card Back in February we wrote about how donating to the Haitian earthquake relief  fund via text message was so utterly painless that we had completely forgotten about it by the time the next phone bill showed up with those several unexpected $10 charges.   Here’s a Times article from a month or two later about more advanced (non-text based) methods : Cellphone Payments Offer an Alternative to Cash

I’m now at week 3 of my 7 week contract project here in Berlin.   I’ve gotten used to my German keyboard layout, I’ve learned not to go for irony when making jokes, and with the help (and patience) of some friends here, I’m even building up my Deutsche vocabulary, however slowly (I’ve decided to ignore the various grammatical cases and noun genders – and the resulting 16 different situations affecting how one says the word ‘the’ - for now).

Anyway, over the past few weeks I’ve had ample opportunity to pick up on some of the differences differences between how Germans and Americans approach technology, both in and outside of the workplace…

Read the rest of this entry »