Andrew Ratner

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Obama bests McCain in battle of Web sites

July 13, 2008

The allure of Sen. Barack Obama's candidacy to people nimble with the Internet was clear long before he became his party's front-runner. A Web designer produced an online video mimicking a famed Apple Computer commercial to mock rival Hillary Clinton before the first primary vote was even cast.

    Recent columns

  • Time for a change in Obama's playlist

    June 29, 2008

    Questions posed to presidential hopefuls reflect their times. Remember the famous one for Bill Clinton during the Rock the Vote forum - boxers or briefs?

  • Screen, paper create reading overload

    June 15, 2008

    Print is having some issues at the moment, which may be like saying New Orleans took on some water. Insults fly, playground-style, about how long one published entity or another will be alive. Microsoft's CEO says no ink-on-paper newspapers or magazines by 2018; someone else says there'll be no Microsoft by then either. Newsweek will be gone in five years, predicts a columnist willing to bet dinner on it; I prefer steak, the magazine's editor shoots back.

  • A social site just for lacrosse? Just ask him

    May 25, 2008

    As the top men's teams in college lacrosse face off for the national championship outside Boston this weekend, Web designer Glen Doss plans to be competing there, too - for fans' attention.

  • Preakness craziness gains Web immortality

    May 18, 2008

    For many who spent yesterday at the Preakness infield, the hangover won't be the worst part of this morning.

  • Cyrus a teen star for different era

    May 4, 2008

    I don't recall any photos of Marcia Brady wrapped in a bedsheet from my boyhood.

  • Is an era ending? Media mogul sells blogs

    April 27, 2008

    It didn't rank up there with Alan Greenspan's famed caution about "irrational exuberance" a decade ago, before the dot-com bubble burst and wiped out trillions in paper wealth, but Nick Denton's warning the other day caused people to take notice.

  • Going online to cut junk mail, save forests

    April 20, 2008

    Sander DeVries and his brothers were complaining about junk mail a few years ago, but unlike complaints about the weather, they did decide to do something about it.

  • Olympics: made for bloggers

    April 13, 2008

    "Swifter, Higher, Stronger" was how Pierre de Coubertin described the Olympic ideal a century ago, after resurrecting the games of the ancient Greeks.

  • The 10 biggest blogs are -- how's that again?

    April 6, 2008

    Name some of the biggest newspapers and magazines in the country? You probably couldn't help but get a few of them right.

  • True devotion: blogging about the Orioles

    March 30, 2008

    Blogging about the Orioles isn't for the faint of heart.

  • The Web can save you some pennies on gas

    March 23, 2008

    The Internet has helped consumers save money on various travel expenses: Bid down the price of a hotel room. Shop smarter for airline tickets. Make car rental companies compete more aggressively for your buck.

  • The Spitzer scandal: There's life in old media yet

    March 16, 2008

    Shortly after the allegations surfaced about Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, CNN wrote on its Web site:

  • The race heats up, and the slime meter jumps

    March 2, 2008

    After whipping up the crowd for a John McCain appearance in Cincinnati last week, Ohio radio talker Bill Cunningham got a scolding from the Arizona Republican senator for smearing Sen. Barack Obama, whom he repeatedly referred to as "Barack Hussein Obama." A day earlier, a photo of Obama in a turban during a diplomatic trip to Africa somehow found its way to the Drudge Report online.

  • A first field guide to the mysterious blogiverse

    February 24, 2008

    When this newspaper launched its Web site in 1997, it held a seminar at an off-site location for staffers to learn about the Internet. The Sun's first Web editor asked the class to type any subject that came to mind into the "search engine."

  • Counting the crimes counting them twice

    February 17, 2008

    Long before a video of a Baltimore policeman berating a skateboarder in the Inner Harbor became a YouTube sensation, crime was one of the hottest Internet topics from the city.

  • Blogs and politics; each gets messy

    February 10, 2008

    Maryland voters are gearing up for the most consequential presidential primary in decades - and so are the bloggers, who barely existed the last time there was a presidential primary here.

  • Internet use is booming - in very Chinese ways

    February 3, 2008

    China will probably surpass the U.S. as the nation with the most Internet users later this spring, according to statistics recently released by the Chinese government.

  • Super Bowl sparks some super advertising blogs

    January 27, 2008

    The History Channel documentary Life After People the other night concluded that 10,000 years after man becomes extinct, little beyond remains of the Great Pyramids and Mount Rushmore would indicate that human beings ever walked the earth.

  • Internet services win fans for their reliability

    January 13, 2008

    If you don't count Jared the Subway dude, the two nerdiest characters in American television commercials are probably the Verizon tech and John Hodgman as the "PC" in the Apple spots.

Andrew Ratner

Andrew Ratner

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