Audrey Watters

A friend asked me a couple of weeks ago to help him get started with freelance writing. You know the type -- the "what should I do with this Bachelors Degree in English?" sort. And I'm the tech blogger with the degree in Folklore, so I am super sympathetic, trust...

Bunny rabbit combat. It's all well and good until there's bunny death and bloodshed. Because then, of course, there has to be bunny vengeance. Oh come on, you've read Watership Down. You know how anthropomorphized rabbits are! You know they can make for pretty good storytelling. Admittedly, Wolfire Game's bunny...

I've been saying for a week now that I'd write something about my thoughts as a new Mac user. But in all honesty, that would mostly involve pointing you to this Lifehacker post on the best free Mac downloads and saying "holy shit, Growl is the best thing ever." And...

A few months ago, one of my favorite bloggers, Temerity Jane, swore she'd become a better Internet citizen and issued a challenge to herself and her readers to become a person-who-comments. And although I agree wholeheartedly about the whole digital citizenship thing, I've never quite made it over the captcha...

Holy crap, what a week! I penned around thirty blog posts, here and there, at this place and that. I'm done rit out. So lemme summarize: The word of the week was "cloud," as I took on a new writing assignment for RWW's cloud computing channel, as I wrote about...

Christopher "moot" Poole's TED talk was posted online last week. In it, the 4chan founder talks about the culture - and the cultural impact - of the imageboard. 4chan is often credited with originating several popular Internet memes, including the Rickroll. Users can post anonymously on the board, and as...

I love my iPhone. I won't lie. It doesn't leave my side. I try to reign in my love of the device. I really do. I mean, I am suspicious of Apple's control over mobile app development and distribution. I don't like DRM. But dammit, it's a beautiful piece of...

The prank has a long folk tradition, as something we do as a rite of passage as well as an act of insurrection. Folklorists (like myself!) have argued that this makes pranks important transformative and anti-hierarchical performances -- ideal, I think, for use in political theater. I believe in the...

Last weekend, I went out-of-town, and thanks to the reach of the AT&T network - which apparently covers neither San Francisco, nor downtown Eugene, nor the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington -- I was away from the Internet for four days. In the world of a tech blogger, that's an eternity....

This weekly roundup actually includes two week's worth of material as my trip to Sasquatch, combined with the non-existent AT&T service, meant no update last weekend. As usual, many of my favorite stories have involved education technologies, a topic that, I'm told by my editor, does not generate a lot...