By far, Saul Hansell is one of the coolest writers for the NYT bits blog– when he doesn’t act like a total JERK, that is. The jerk attitude comes out when he tries to be all inventive and suggest certain services as if they were completely his own idea. I mean, I’m sure they were his ideas, but shouldn’t he do some basic research to check and see if his great ideas were already in the works?

I don’t blame him for being ignorant; we do it all the time. We make suggestions; ideas that we think are brilliant. Because they probably are. After all, great minds think alike.

But Hansell works for the NYT. It’s not a private blog like this one that gets 10 random users a day (and even those people get here by googling terms like ‘unicorn sex’ so they’re not reading my stuff about new media). He has more responsibility to do research before he writes. Take, for instance, his post on using cellphones as verification tools “Could a cellphone app do that for us?” he asks (Duh, it’s already happening in other countries). A few weeks later, he announces that an iphone app based on that very idea has hit the market. Gee, are we supposed to clap and cheer?