CNN Fires Blogger

Funny, for an industry that thrives on freedom of expression, they can be rather harsh censors of their own people.

Chez Pazienza was fired from her job at CNN for blogging about her job at CNN.

While I understand that a company has to protect it’s proprietary secrets and shareholder value, somehow news companies seem like they should rise above the rest in protections for freedom of expression.

The firing of Chez Pazienza for blogging just gives credence to her criticism of CNN as a company that has lost touch with the core values of the news media that made Murrow and others of his generation respected giants of American culture.

It seems CNN’s effusive support of blogs, bloggers and blogging (not to mention freedom of expression) is somewhat of a superficial show of face and not a real core value.

TinyURL Creator Extension for Firefox Speeds Twittering

OK, I admit I am addicted to Twitter.

One problem with (errr, feature of) Twitter is that you only have 140 characters per message, so long URLs need to be shortened. That’s where TinyURL comes in: it creates very short URLs that redirect to the longer URL you want to shorten. (Try it here: http://tinyurl.com/2lfjw2 it links back to this page.)

Using TinyURL frequently I thought to myself “wouldn’t it be great if there was a FireFox extension for making TinyURLs?” Well, of course somebody has already made it: the TinyURL Creator Firefox Extension!

Once you install it, make sure you go to View –> Toolbars –> Customize and drag the TinyURL icon to the address toolbar to make it really fast and easy to make TinyURLs.