Tom Merritt

Thomas Andrew "Tom" Merritt (born June 28, 1970 in Greenville, Illinois ) is a technology journalist, writer, and broadcaster best known as the host of several podcasts. He is the former co-host of Tech News Today on the TWiT.tv Network, and was previously an Executive Editor for CNET and developer and co-host of the daily podcast Buzz Out Loud. He currently hosts Daily Tech News Show, Cordkillers, and Sword and Laser, among other shows.

Early life

Merritt was born in Greenville, Illinois, to a food scientist father who worked on the Coffee-Mate project. Merritt received a BS in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and pursued graduate work in communications at the University of Texas at Austin.

Career

Merritt's career in radio began in 1986 as a DJ for WGEL, a country music station located in Greenville, Illinois. In 1993, he worked as an intern for National Public Radio's "Morning Edition". From 1999 to 2004 Merritt worked for TechTV in San Francisco as an Executive Web Producer and served as a radio host with TechTV until 2003.

Spoon River

The Spoon River is a 147-mile-long (237 km) tributary of the Illinois River in west-central Illinois in the United States. The river drains largely agricultural prairie country between Peoria and Galesburg. The river is noted for giving its name to the fictional Illinois town in the 1916 poetry work Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, who was from Lewistown, which is near the river.

The river rises in two short forks near Kewanee in southern Henry County. The East and West forks join in northern Stark County, approximately 10 miles (16 km) southeast of Kewanee, and the combined stream meanders south and southwest through rural Stark, Knox and Fulton counties. The lower portion of the river passes through a scenic region of hills in Fulton County, and passes approximately 5 miles (8 km) southwest of Lewistown. The river joins the Illinois from the west opposite Havana, approximately 40 miles (64 km) downstream and southwest of Peoria.

The Rock Island Trail passes over the Spoon River 1.75 miles (2.82 km) northwest of Wyoming, Illinois.

Spoon River Anthology

Spoon River Anthology (1915), by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of short free-form poems that collectively narrates the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters' home town. The aim of the poems is to demystify the rural, small town American life. The collection includes two hundred and twelve separate characters, all providing two-hundred forty-four accounts of their lives and losses. The poems were originally published in the magazine Reedy's Mirror.

Content

The first poem serves as an introduction:

DailyTech

DailyTech is an online daily publication of technology news, founded by ex-AnandTech editor Kristopher Kubicki on January 1, 2006. The site features a prominent "comments" section that acts as the forums for the publication. Users are able to moderate or respond to each post, a template the editor admits borrowing from Slashdot. The operating revenue for DailyTech is primarily dependent on advertising, with syndication of their news feed also providing some revenue.

The website is split up into two sections: "news" and "blogs." Both appear on the front page, though blogs are sectioned off and declared differently in the title. News content on the site primarily consists of computer-related hardware news, but also includes a variety of science, defense and consumer-tech information.

The schism between DailyTech and AnandTech occurred in goodwill, with the goal of establishing DailyTech as a news site that would not be bound by the NDAs that AnandTech has signed. Anand Lal Shimpi is frequently quoted and featured on DailyTech; however, the two publications compete against each other for readership, despite AnandTech featuring a feed of news articles in a side bar. The DailyTech news feed is also used by other technology and science websites.