Today I’m giving a presentation at the National Association of Science Writers about technology writing, and one of the basic points I’ll be making is that it’s almost impossible to characterize what “tech writing” is when our daily lives are pervaded with everything from computers to biotech gadgets. Tech writing can be, as a result, focused on almost anything. This makes tech writing quite different from science writing, which is often (though certainly not always) focused narrowly on pure research, as well as publications in scientific journals.

In that spirit, I offer to you a list of articles that could be categorized as technology writing despite the fact that they are also just as focused on other topics, such as parenting and consumer decision-making. All of these stories are chosen to reflect recent examples of tech journalism.

Technology for its own sake:
World’s Smallest Storage Device Lies in the Nucleus of an Atom [IDG via New York Times]

Technology and culture/arts:
ROFL Con Main Event [NPR]

Technology and business:
Yahoo Layoffs Won’t Solve Bigger Issues [CNNMoney]

Technology as service writing or consumer-oriented writing:
Google’s iPhone Challenger [Financial Times]

Technology and crime:
Identity Theft Harder Than Ever to Prevent [io9]

Technology and the family:
Web Content “Disturbing Children” [BBC News]

I’m here in lovely Denver, attending the World Science Fiction Convention. This annual event is a gathering-place for SF writers and fans — people who want to geek out over books rather than the latest Star Wars series (although there is a fair amount of Star Wars geeking, partly because several authors here have written Star Wars books). I’m not on any panels — just came to meet people and see some readings.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to join a bunch of brilliant SF writers for an afternoon tour of NORAD, the vast underground facility built inside Cheyenne Mountain during the Cold War to serve as a military command center during nuclear attack. Now it’s mostly a museum, but it was still “top secret” enough that we couldn’t see the fabled command center room portrayed in WarGames. Here’s what I wrote about visiting NORAD.

If you’re here and want to meet up, io9 will be having a cocktail meetup tomorrow night at 5 PM in the Hyatt Regency bar. Come drink with us and then go see the Hugo Awards ceremony.

I have finally returned, after a long melodrama involving myself and the new (lovely) WordPress upgrade. In the end, I got help from the awesome Elly with my upgrade. Sorry for the long absence, during which a lot has changed.

First, what hasn’t changed: I am still running the science fiction and science blog io9, which is part of the Gawker Media Network. I’m proud to say that the blog is doing fantastically well, and we hit an all-time high last month with over 8.8 million views. A lot of that had to do with our coverage of geek media extravaganza Comic-Con, where studios and publishers announce their upcoming creations for next year.

What has changed: After nine years, I finally decided to move on and stop writing my weekly culture and technology column Techsploitation. I had a blast writing it every week, and it was great to have a regular outlet where my radical leftist side could team up with my super geeky side. But I had been writing it weekly for nine years (did I mention the nine years?), and I wanted to go out on a high note, before I started to burn out. I was sad to let it go, but I’m happy to put more energy into the posts I do for io9 — many of which are fairly political, and all of which are alarmingly geeky. You can read my farewell column here.

I’m excited to be part of an excellent panel at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Organized by feminist-scientist dynamo Patricia B. Campbell, the panel is called Blogs, Boards and Bonding: Using Electronic Communities to Support Women in Science. I’ll be joining several other distinguished panelists, and talking about my experiences trying to squash gender stereotypes in the world of science writing, as well as how blogging has helped female scientists find community and get their work noticed in unconventional ways.

Despite my furious posting on io9, I am continuing to write my weekly column Techsploitation. It’s nice to have a place where I can still be an angry leftist when it comes to science and tech, and these days there’s more than ever to be pissed about. Here’s what the radical, destroy-the-current-hegemony part of my brain has been doing for the past several weeks.

I thought a lot about consumer biotech. I worry that companies such as 23andme.com, which offers to sequence your genome for $1000 and tell you things about yourself based on your genes, will become the basis for new social networks based on genome-compatibility. Think of it as user-generated eugenics. Then I scoffed at people’s concerns over eating cloned meat, and talked about how cloning livestock for meat isn’t the real problem. Factory farming is.

I told you about how Comcast has a subtle but nefarious plan to stop file-sharing by occasionally stopping data packets that it believes are from file-sharing programs. And I screamed and yelled and stomped my feet about the government’s nonsubtle, utterly evil plan to grant telcos immunity for having handed over their customers’ personal data to the NSA without warrants.

Now that I am editing and writing a mainstream blog, I worry a lot about what will happen to this once-upstart medium as it merges with more traditional media. I wrote about my concerns that blogs will lose their edge and make the same mistakes that mainstream magazines and newspapers did when they started self-censoring and narrowing the range of what it’s permissible to talk about in a public forum.

And just last week, I wrote about the mysterious severing of 5 undersea fiber optic cables, which cut off network service to many countries in Asia and the Middle East.

I’m finally catching my breath after doing nothing but blog at io9 for about 5 weeks straight. In between posting, I also managed to organize a conference for Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility called Technology in Wartime. It was held at Stanford (thanks to the Center for Internet and Society!) on January 26, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how it turned out. We had a full audience, despite the early start hour on a Saturday, and the speakers — including luminaries Bruce Schneier, Cindy Cohn, Ronald Arkin, Herb Lin, Kevin Poulsen, Barbara Simons, Patrick Ball, Noah Shachtman, and Nick Mathewson — were terrific.

Thanks to videographer Mark Burdett, the proceedings are now archived in video form on Archive.org. You can see a complete list of panels/speakers, with links to video, here. Thanks to everybody who came out, and to the board of CPSR for helping make this such a great conference on a timely topic.

So today my new science fiction and futurism blog, io9, went live. It covers everything from hard science to bizarre tales of alien invasion, and is published by Gawker Media. Much to my happy surprise, we had a blockbuster first day — in fact, with over 450 thousand page views as of this writing, io9 has had the most successful launch in Gawker history.

I have been working on this blog incredibly hard for months, and almost nonstop for the past month, with terrific help from associate editors Charlie Jane Anders and Kevin Kelly. So it’s good to see all those months of blogging in the dark paying off! I’m looking forward to lots more blogging about weird science experiments, mind-blowing scifi novels, and the gore-tastic B-movies that make my life complete. If you have any story ideas for io9, or there’s more of something you’d like to see, don’t hesitate to write!

Update: We wound up having 750 thousand views that day. Phew!

You can find me at io9, blogging about science fiction and science and the future until my brains explode!

The mayoral election earlier this month in San Francisco was abysmal. Our conservative-leaning incumbent Gavin Newsom ran virtually unopposed. Still, I sought out the one candidate I think could turn this city around. That’s why I voted for Josh Wolf, a young blogger who was imprisoned for not handing information over to the police related to story he’d posted online. Find out more about what Josh Wolf represents for the future of politics.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve also been playing with a new map mashup tool that shows which countries are censoring social networking sites such as YouTube or MySpace. The tool is called the Access Denied Map, and you’ll be surprised to see who is doing the blocking and why.

Back in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church would sell you an “indulgence” for your sins. Pay the church a set amount per sin, and they’d hand over a piece of fancy paper saying your sin had been wiped clean. It was a quick way for the rich and middle classes to buy their ways into heaven.

These days, green chic has brought us the carbon offset as a modern-day form of the indulgence. Fly on a plane, and for a few extra dollars the airline will throw some money at a random “clean development” project. You pollute the earth with your jet ride, but you feel so much better inside. This is also the worst possible way to support green development. Read more of my rant about the dark side of carbon indulgences.