http://tamharbert.com Award-winning journalist specialized in providing compelling, insightful content on technology, business and government Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:31:27 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Every few years, some big trend comes along in the technology industry that drives marketing spending through the roof. It creates a flood of advertising in the trade publications and a tsunami of marketing materials, such as white papers and case studies, as companies scramble to position themselves on the ... http://tamharbert.com/blog/making-rain-with-cloud-computing/ A writer’s personal brand is becoming increasingly valuable. As a freelancer, I establish my brand through networking – both in person and via social networking. I spend a lot of time showing people what I know, what I do and how well I do it. I have a website. I ... http://tamharbert.com/blog/brand-new-confusion-how-much-of-your-brand-does-your-employer-own/ With the explosion of online publishing, many people are now posting words on the web and calling themselves journalists. But a good proportion of them are more like plagiarists. I recently got a first-hand lesson in this. While preparing to pitch a story idea to an editor, I googled “mainframes ... http://tamharbert.com/blog/online-plagiarists-catch-them-if-you-can/ The more I hear about stubbornly high unemployment and the jobless recovery, the more convinced I am that we’re looking at things all wrong. We’re in the midst of a national political obsession about creating jobs, but what exactly constitutes employment today? Fewer and fewer U.S. citizens hold a 9-to-5, 40-hour-a-week ... http://tamharbert.com/blog/a-jobless-recovery-that-depends-on-how-you-define-jobs/ Republicans and Corporate America frequently argue that reducing corporate taxes will lead to investment in the United States and the creation of more U.S. jobs. They say that if corporations could retain more of their earnings, they would spend it in ways that benefit the U.S. economy. First, that ignores ... http://tamharbert.com/blog/what-%e2%80%9ccorporate-america%e2%80%9d-really-does-with-tax-breaks/ It’s scary enough that technology, specifically the Internet, makes it easy for publishers to replace U.S. journalists with low-cost writers from developing countries. Reuters, for example, uses staff in India to write financial news reports. Now comes the next wave: software that might just replace journalists entirely. A couple of ... http://tamharbert.com/blog/will-software-replace-journalists/ This Saturday, September 24th, is National Punctuation Day. Many of us writers have pet peeves about punctuation and can cite ferocious battles with copy editors over things like semicolons, the serial comma and m-dashes. I’ve never been able to figure out the semicolon, for example. I know a few writers ... http://tamharbert.com/blog/worth-exclaiming-it%e2%80%99s-national-punctuation-day/ I have fond memories from my print magazine days of battles with art directors over cover story spreads. As a writer, I always thought words were more important than images. But those damned designers often slashed text to make more room for their precious photos and illustrations. We might ... http://tamharbert.com/blog/set-in-stone-architect-chisels-away-at-the-words-of-martin-luther-king/ Recently, I sat through a 90-minute presentation on “Who Needs Newspapers?” at the National Press Club. The presenters, both retired journalists, never really answered that question. Rather, they spent the time telling the audience how they had toured the country, interviewing editors and publishers to find out how newspapers were ... http://tamharbert.com/blog/who-needs-newspapers-nobody/ Google changed its algorithm in late February, and I am proud to announce that I saw no drop in traffic to my website. The change was designed to weed out content farms and other low-quality websites that were gaming the search engine’s system by packing their sites with SEO ... http://tamharbert.com/blog/good-for-google-good-for-journalism/