Reno and Its Discontents has a great post about the attitude being displayed by Baby Boomers toward social networking sites, applications, or whatever you want to call them. It’s not too often that you get to experience something frequently, as I do in presenting on social networking to travel and tourism business owners and such for my job, and see it be backed up by some research. This is a guaranteed point of discussion in every presentation I do. I call it the “Don’t they have lives?” discussion, and it’s about to make its way into my future presentations so I can cut it off before it has a chance to fester in the crowd. Read it, and think about it. It’s true from what I can see. (Baby Boomers Hate Social Networking)

Food, Inc., an independent film about the way of American food production, is playing Century Riverside on Friday, July 31. The film features such people as Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation; Gary Hirshberg of Stoneyfield Yogurt; and author Joel Salatin. Visit the website for more information, and plan on catching a viewing of Food, Inc. (via Reno Baby)

This is the money quote: “Second, it’s now confirmed that anonymous attack forums are part of the news business model, one that appears to be borne as a survival strategy. Whereas newspapers would once spend time verifying the identity of authors to letters to the editor, media now appear to gladly provide forums to the uninformed and bitter. As newsrooms continue to shrink and be eliminated, the “anything goes” approach to increasing news site visitation and repeat pageviews can now be spun to advertisers as the maintenance of a ‘vibrant community.’” (The Good, the Bad, the Spin)

Awesome idea. I love his point b) too. It really is. I was having a talk with someone today at the Summit in south Reno and she told me her Blackberry Curve was garbage. She was just waiting until she could get out of her contract to get an iPhone. And we both laughed at how iPhones are now the basis for every mobile phone conversation. Now they seem like they’re the basis for any mobile applications that pop up. (via Daring Fireball)

This hits a note close to home. A couple weeks ago, I was sitting and chatting with Mike Henderson, Wolfy, and he was saying that too often, arguments (debates, as I refer to them) online were a little too all over the place. I answered back that I thought that was the point of online conversation—that all thought was iterative, and the perfect blog post and the perfect comment didn’t necessarily exist—that all debate was based on the last thing said. That’s the beauty of the ongoing conversation online, as I see it. Granted, this isn’t necessarily “investigative journalism,” but it is something that can be equated to what’s being said here. All online conversation offers the opportunity to drift off-topic, seemingly, when what’s really happening is that the people involved are thinking through their positions and adjusting to what they see as the point of the moment. That’s a big deal. Whenever anything is put into print it’s over. Either you write a perfect article, or a flawed one. That’s that. And a lot of people think that’s the way it should be. In a generation, that’ll be laughed at. I think we should laugh at it now. (via Journerdism)