After the tragic Boston Marathon Bombing, earlier this week, and with the current pursuit of the MIT shooter, law enforcement, news agencies, and the netizens of America rallied together and demonstrated just how interactive the news has become.

Late into the night, I was glued to my computer, with one window showing a live newscast, a Twitter feed of Watertown running in another, and, of course, Reddit. I watched and read with concentrated obsession: there was an emotional whirlwind in my head of concern for my friends in Boston and at MIT, a blend of urgency and excitement as the manhunt unfolded, and genuine fascination with how connected I felt to the scene.

My computer had become a makeshift command center for tracking the Boston manhunt.

(Credit: Screenshot by Eddie Cho)

I started to reflect upon how news consumption has morphed from a passive into an active pastime for consumers.

As I listened to the police feed, I was constantly comparing transcripts with what was on the news, and googling definitions of various police codes as they were listed with thick, regional accents that sounded so foreign to me: It was like conducting a symphony of information management that quite frankly, I had always known consumers were capable of, but never actually applied to such a degree -- until now. Twitter, Reddit, and streaming radio and TV had turned my PC into a command center.

... [Read more]

(Credit: Screenshot by Nicole Cozma/CNET)

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Yahoo's new Mail app lets you flip through your messages.

(Credit: Screenshot by Lance Whitney/CNET)

Yahoo on Thursday released a Mail app for iOS and Android tablet users and a Weather app for iPhone owners.

A Yahoo Mail app has already been in play for the iPhone and Android smartphones, but the new version takes advantage of the larger screen size of tablets. A full-screen reading mode lets you flip through your e-mail messages as if you were reading a magazine.

Flipping through messages this way feels so much more natural than having to tap on each e-mail in the inbox to read it, especially on a tablet. It's an innovative and welcome approach, one I'd like to see pop up in other e-mail clients.

While in full-screen reading mode, tapping on the tablet displays a toolbar from which you can reply to or forward the current message, send it to the trash, move it to a folder, or add a star to mark it as important. All of the "starred" messages are sent to a specific folder where you can review them all in one shot.

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At least the turtleneck is pretty close.

(Credit: Screenshot by Amanda Kooser/CNET)

Comedy site Funny or Die beat out the competition in getting "iSteve," the first Steve Jobs biopic, out for viewing. Take that, Ashton Kutcher. In all that haste, Funny of Die may have cut a few corners as far as accuracy goes. That's left the film open for evisceration by Apple fans on high alert for anachronistic images.

The film is full of tripping Steve Jobs scenes, Bill Gates beating computer components with a hammer, and Steve Wozniak looking like he just wandered off the set of "Lost." It's also full of computer parts that just don't fit the time period. It's the sort of thing that will either make Apple fanboys giggle, or send them up in arms to the Internet to complain.

wow cool, I didn't know they had USB, serial, IDE, and DDR RAM in 1976! #iSteve twitter.com/MichaelSteeber...

— Michael Steeber (@MichaelSteeber) April 17, 2013

Michael Steeber, video editor at 9to5Mac, has proven to be a valuable resource for ... [Read more]