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27 May 2010 22:44

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Music: M.I.A. doesn’t handle long-form interviews very well

  • The messages have mostly been from people trying to hook up with M.I.A. If she wants to get together with John at Bard next week, I have his number.
  • New York Times staff writer Lynn Hirschberg • Regarding what happened to her after the pop star, angry about the very interesting, exhaustive piece Hirschberg wrote about her, posted a phone number on Twitter claiming it was hers, like so: “CALL ME IF YOU WANNA TALK TO ME ABOUT THE N Y T TRUTH ISSUE, ill b taking calls all day bitches ;)” In reality, it was Hirschberg’s, and her voicemail totally filled up as a result. Listen. M.I.A. is an awesome musician who deserves a lot of respect for her art, but this is pretty much the worst possible way to handle a situation like this. You’re 34, not 12. source

30 Jul 2009 17:00

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Politics: David Pogue wants cell companies to suck it up and change

  • These messages are outrageous for two reasons. First, they waste your time. Good heavens: it’s 2009. WE KNOW WHAT TO DO AT THE BEEP.
  • David Pogue • In his blog that’s leading the way in the “Take Back the Beep Campaign.” Pogue argues that those messages that tell you how to leave a voicemail are a “blatant money-grab” and just plain stupid. As you can imagine, not many people disagree with him.  • source

12 Mar 2009 10:20

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Tech: Google wants to do to voicemail what it did to e-mail

  • The concept Google Voice is a new service that we’re sure they’re positioning as yet another cornerstone of your life. Essentially, it gives you a centralized number and a huge selection of tools to make the pain and knottiness of phone calls and voicemail easier to deal with. Good for them.
  • The key feature Google Voice’s top feature here is a piece of voice recognition software that converts your callers’ voicemails to text and lets you read them on your computer, Gmail-style. You mean we can look at speech-to-text versions of the calls we get from our bill collectors?! Awesome! source