Without Shoes? Maybe. Without Words? Never!

The shoemaker's children, it's said, often go without shoes. I'm not often shoeless - I keep my Louboutins and Blahniks on my feet, where they belong - but given my compulsive need to communicate, I've been surprisingly cavalier about updating this page, preferring the more immediate gratifications of Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

I'm still writing, editing and consulting, but there is one big change: I'm spending most of my time working on a new book, which will be my sixth - and is my first novel. Which doesn't give me much time for bloggery.  And my primary residence is now in San Francisco, though I go back to New York as often as I can.

Change is good. Letting people know about it is even better. More updates soon.

In Which I Confess To An Addiction

Hi, I'm Nancie, and I'm addicted to the New York Times. A print subscriber since birth, I mastered the subway fold at age 10. I've had the paper delivered in every city I've ever lived in. I have the Times apps for my iPhone and my new iPad (thank you, Santa), and just in case that's not enough of "all the news that's fit to print," it's my homepage. (Disclosure: They've quoted me several times too.) My habit's so bad that Twitter has run out of Times writers, editors and sections to recommend to me.

So I feel justified in nitpicking occasionally. Like today's story about schools giving kids iPads (nice job, Apple PR team!). Which followed yesterday's piece bemoaning the lack of adequate WiFi at tech conferences and in other group settings. You'd think someone besides me would notice the connection, and wonder if the schools were adequately prepared.

Does this mean I read the "paper" (even though I actually read it on paper less and less) more carefully than its editors? Or is that like a saloon habitué critiquing the bartenders?

Your Back Fence Got In My Glass Ceiling

For a while I had a blog about women and technology. (It's pink. Get over it.) Yesterday, Mashable posted a piece by Jessica Faye Carter about women and social media that made many of the same points I've made for years about women and interactive media overall. (Those points were less widely appreciated back in the Digital Iron Age when there was no Web and the Internet was primarily Star Trek Usenet groups.)

Women are generally better communicators, so it's not surprising that we make the most of new ways to communicate as they come along - we use email, Facebook and mobile minutes far more than men do. But try as Carter might, she wasn't entirely convincing when she shifted from women as consumers to women as thought leaders.  For one thing, the 10 individuals in Twitter Grader's top users are male.

We may have come a long way, baby. But we still have a long way to go.