Kara Swisher Quotes

I have found, writing a blog, that being non-opaque is necessary. You pretty much have to say what you know in much more firm terms or risk that the legions who always know more than you do will tell the story better.

One of my favorite vacation memories was the Thai foot massage and Internet access salons in Bangkok, followed up by my testing cellphone coverage while wading in Provincetown Harbor on Cape Cod.

It is hard to look away from the swirl of media that the untimely and tragic death of Heath Ledger has engendered, and the Internet has jacked the frenzy into overdrive.

With giant sites like Facebook and MySpace becoming as generic as Yahoo and AOL of old, more and more sites will be looking for an edge by drilling down deeply to serve a highly targeted audience.

My father died when I was only five years old, and that was the moment when I learned a cruel lesson that tomorrow, in fact, might not be another day.

People are worried about what's going to happen to journalism - and they should be. Every day, the blogosphere is getting better and print media is getting worse; you have to be an idiot not to see that.

My telephone manners were, well, offensive to some. As I lugged my cell around, yammering away, I noticed cold stares from passersby who viewed me as a kind of techno-terrorist, or at least incredibly rude.

For the record, my mother is an astonishing and loving grandmother.

Really smart people don't want to say stupid things, and they really don't want to be a part of a PR-engineered interview. People really do want to be smart, and they want smart questions. So, if you ask smart questions, there's no way you can't do well.

Dr. Louis Bush Swisher died from the complications of a brain aneurysm that burst without warning one sunny Sunday morning less than 40 years ago.

I know: I am a freakish geek. Or is that a geekish freak?

While I am not saying Facebook cannot be a wonderland for marketers, I am still waiting to see the proof of it, and so should every reporter.

Wherever you go at SXSW, there you are standing in line. Or watching other people stand in line.

Everything is a narrative in life. I learned that early on as a reporter at the 'Washington Post.'

As anyone who has covered the company for any length of time knows, Yahoo's record on major decision-making has been akin to a hippie commune - a lot of wrangling internally in a culture where everyone seems to have a voice and a reticence to push the button to launch.

Home is where the pants aren't

I, for one, am pretty exhausted since I started blogging almost a year ago. But I am blaming that on my two sons, aged 3 and 6, whose perpetual-motion-machine energy is hard to keep up with at my advanced age.

I don't have bad taste; I have no taste. I wear a lot of the things I wore in high school, but not the cowl-neck sweaters. I was never tall, and I am the same size, so I still wear a lot of those clothes.

While a lot of what is on Facebook is a better amalgam of what AOL, Yahoo, Amazon, and other Web pioneers introduced long ago, with a nice dash of connection and really identified community, this kind of thing is not a new idea.

As I always like to keep in mind about everything: Don't fight the trend.

As I have said many times - I like Facebook. I think it is well built and run. It's cool. I think it is, in its next-step way, even visionary.

Here's the thing: I fell impossibly in love with the Internet from the minute I saw it in action in the early 1990s. From that moment on, I have studied it, analyzed it, reported on it, and, mostly, have not been without it as a part of my daily life since.

Having a baby had always seemed the easiest and most natural thing to do, and I had never felt - even in my most furtive days of coming out - that being gay would mean I could not become a mother.

Casting my fate to the heavens, quite literally, I decided to go wireless. Completely wireless. All wireless, all the time, everywhere.

Unlike the messier MySpace, Facebook has a cleaner and easier-to-customize interface and is much more, as Zuckerberg once described it to me, 'utilitarian.' I would call it useful and more relevant than other competitors, and a white-label version would likely be a hit.

No amount of tools can help a bad product. You have to remain genuine in your product development innovation and quality.

I don't write about Google except to insult the company.

Canceling my landline phone account, cutting off service to my home for good, and rendering the telephones that had long sat on tables in every room as useless as my closeted bread machine, I took the final step in a lifelong attempt to free myself from the wires that tethered me.

It's easy to forget the ever-plodding eBay with all the noise made by the more lithe and lively Web 2.0 companies.

Readers appreciate the truth. Why say, 'Some think a situation is a mess?' Based on my reporting, if a situation is a mess, then I say that. The truth is always what reporters tell each other when they get back to the newsroom.

In Greek mythology, Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy, except - due to her rejection of Apollo's affections - nobody would ever believe her warnings.

Despite my so-so-experience with the iPhone, I do love its touchscreen technology, a feature I miss with my standard-issue BlackBerry.

I am an unrepentant tweetaholic. I use the communications service all day long to discover news, interesting tidbits and, of course, to flack the work of our tech and media news site, Re/code.

It's not all silliness, as interactive SXSW is filled with aggressive learning, discussing, and a whole lot of futurizing.

It's the nature of journalism to need to be close to your subjects. And either you're able to be tough on them, which a lot of us are, or you get in bed with them, and some people do.

Luckily for both the tech industry and Hollywood, there is only one thing that counts - use of the Internet is still growing exponentially, as consumers shift to digital everything from analog.