Can people get even dumber? Forgive me for the cynical view of my own species but … well, some of my best friends are human. Actually dumber is not quite accurate. Can they get even more ignorant? If our lack of interest in anything besides ourselves wasn’t bad enough, now humanity is being aided and abetted by the latest in technology.

To wit, this advance being unveiled at the MSN homepage:

I’ve been in journalism for close to 30 years. As one would expect, my skills, the tools of the trade and the state of the industry itself have evolved dramatically over that time.

Newsrooms that once functioned under a cloud of cigarette smoke now work in a cloud computing environment. Writers who once tucked a reporter’s notebook in their back pocket now wield a digital voice recorder or a Flip camcorder. Editors who once redlined copy and haggled over how headlines matched the lead art now stress over Web analytics and keyword selection.

Audiences want to interact with media brands on mobile devices—via “untethered digital content”  said John Loughlin, Hearst Magazines EVP and general manager, at the recent Digital Innovators' Summit in Berlin.

The Boston Herald has never been one to update just for the sake of updating. At the Herald (where I used to work) the general theory is, “If it’s good enough for Gutenberg, it’s good enough for us – and besides anything new would cost money.” So now the paper says it is “preparing” to move away from the Atex system it has been using for the last 27 years.

The Atlantic is looking to a new commenting system to help increase reader engagement on its newly redesigned website.

The Atlantic, a 150-plus-year-old magazine that publishes in print 10 times a year, covers culture, business and politics. The website redesign, launched earlier this week, is designed to better integrate magazine content, blogs, videos and other Web content around seven topic areas.

The most helpful productivity tools are the tools that have tools. This has become a lot more visible lately with "App Stores" popping up everywhere; however, the concept of extending an initial framework has been around for a while, often through third-party use of APIs.

My top two production tools are of this variety: frameworks that are impressive as standalone products and extremely helpful when augmented. (Disclosure: much of my equipment is Mac-based though many of the programs I work with are universally accessible).

Small media companies need flexible, cost-effective tools that can be ramped up quickly and with little technical expertise. Actually, large media companies want those things as well, but the enterprise requirements of companies with 50 or 100 publications put them in another league.

Here at eMedia Vitals, we run our business almost exclusively using "cloud-based applications". That's the fancy way of saying that the applications we use are on the Internet and we pay for them by the month.