How hilarious are the transcriptions by Google Voice? None of these messages had anything to do with what was in the transcription. At this point, I never trust what I read. Below, a selection of my favorites:

My friend had called me back to say she was also walking around downtown and that I should come over to see her apartment:

Fred called to see if it was okay to have his brother over for dinner:

My friend Sophie called to see if she could bring her friend Jacob over to my apartment:

My friend called to see if she could pick up her shoes that she left at my house during our Halloween party:

I caught up this weekend with all the to-do about Lindsey Hoshaw’s piece in the New York Times about the Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s a fine article and it reads exactly as one would imagine it would in the Times Science section, but as a few people have pointed out, Hoshaw’s blog is a more interesting read, interlaced with stories about the crew, life on deck, and day-to-day discoveries from life at sea. But I don’t agree that the Times made a mistake in what they decided to publish. After all, if every journalist blogged while they were reporting, I’m sure it’d be a fascinating read (Philip Gourevitch in Rwanda? George Packer in Iraq? Yes, please!), but would everyone still read the accompanying 10,000 word piece? I’m not so sure.*

Either way–and I don’t want to diminish the excitement Hoshaw must feel for publishing her first piece in the Times–I can’t help but observe that the whole thing feels a little gimmicky. The real story is how Hoshaw’s trip was not paid for by the Times, but crowd-sourced by Spot.us. And as David Cohn, Spot.us’s founder, points out:

A freelancer and a news organization wanted to work together, but they needed to grease the wheels with some money. This is not uncommon. News organizations have a shrinking staff and budget. They must rely more on freelancers, but also don’t want to burn through the entire freelance budget on a single story. This is one reason why we are seeing less original long-form reporting. Spot.Us acted as the grease.

What Cohn doesn’t mention, and I think is worth bringing up, is that there’s also a lot of trust between editors and their writers. I’m not saying Cohn’s wrong: newspapers and magazines can’t afford expenses like Hoshaw’s. But they also can’t trust her as much as they could one of their own reporters. Because you know what would suck more than a really pricey expense account? A kill fee. So Spot.Us is also a special kind of grease. One not just for ambitious stories that would cost too much money to fund. But one where the crowd agrees to take the hit if the writer, for whatever reason, can’t deliver.

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* I also don’t think the web needs to be a container for every back story. Sometimes, it’s okay if we don’t see the behind-the-scenes. It’s why editing can be valuable.

I had an interesting conversation last night with my friend Jamin about video games and, more specifically, games for girls. (Jamin wrote a piece for Slate this week about the hazards of cooperative gaming and what it brings out in all of us.) He mentioned one particular video game (and I apologize if I’m bungling the details, cocktail conversation always sounds like a dream upon replay the next day) which reinforces collaborative playing. Its strategy is a bit like the inverse of prisoner’s dilemma, in that certain obstacles are impossible to defeat without the full team. In other words, the strategy of charging ahead and besting your collaborators might pay off in the short term, but it also means that down the road, there’s a higher chance in getting axed for good. And while the setting for the game sounds totally unappealing to me–killing zombies, yuck!–Jamin mentioned that more women play the game than men.

[UPDATE: The game is called "Left for Dead."]

I’m not a gamer. But of the games I’ve loved (and devoted many, many hours of my life), they tend to be social. Like the Sims, for example. (Another game I’ve been told is played more by women than men.) I’d be curious to learn of any larger breakdowns in video-game sales along gender. Am I like most other women? Do women prefer more social and/or collaborative-strategy games than men? Anecdotally, it sounds like yes, we do. It would be interesting to explore why.