So, has social media fixed everything yet? It’s election time, and if ever there was a time to fix everything, this is it.

Question-and-answer sites have a long heritage, but the quest to perfect the model keeps yielding lemons. Some, like Yahoo, are great big sour ones. Others are small and maybe even sweet, but restricted in scale and not terrifically lucrative. Right now, though, two services are competing to reinvent the model.

Pine Point didn’t vanish, exactly. You can’t demolish a community without leaving debris, debris of many sorts, and it turns out that that debris has been preserved in a most poignant and remarkable way.

When I met Charlie Schmidt, midway through the accidental fame convention, he was at the bottom of a lecture hall, surrounded by a small knot of onlookers. The owner of the most famous cat on the Internet was holding court.

“If you held her and kept moving, she’d go into a stupor,” he was explaining. “But if you held her and didn’t move, she’d bite you.”

What’s iPhone etiquette in a world full of iPhones? Is it possible to produce one at the table without being that guy? I’m here to tell you that it can be done. Consider the four following scenarios…

Virtual goods drive some people nuts. I understand this. Why, you might ask, would sound-minded citizens spend real money for imaginary items in some Facebook game? Would not that money be better going to something useful, like lunch, or the local orphanage? Besides, (you might continue) how much real money could one possibly want to [...]