WHEN Barack Obama used Twitter as a potent campaign tool last year, Filipino politicians took notice. Now, with national elections just a few months away, a number of them, too, have their own accounts with the popular micro-blogging service. “What’s a 52 yr old guy to do the night before his wedding?” posts Senator Mar Roxas, one of the first politicians in the country to sign on to Twitter, on the eve of his marriage to broadcaster Korina Sanchez. “Tying the knot in the age of Twitter is certainly something, haha.”
ON the Internet, longer isn’t always better. When it comes to addresses, a shorter URL is much easier to remember, to jot down and to pass on to friends. In contrast, a long address is more prone to being mistyped or, on some online forums, unceremoniously cut. And, as anyone who works in a newspaper or magazine knows, a kilometer-long URL is a pain to set in print.
ONE of the biggest back-from-the-brink stories of the 1990s was IBM. After suffering a staggering $8.10 billion loss in 1992, the lumbering giant turned its declining fortunes around by transforming itself from a hardware company to a dominant provider of software and services. Now, it appears the company has become too dominant, and is under scrutiny by antitrust authorities in the United States and the European Union for a business segment few people think about these days--mainframes.
Digital Life is a blog that features a technology column by the same name that appears every Tuesday in Manila Standard Today, a national daily from the Philippines. This blog gives readers easy access to the column, which started in November 2002. Copyright 2009 Chin Wong.
