Ha, I was just thinking about Matthew Sweet the other day. Twenty years! The one time I saw him in concert it was also painfully, strikingly loud.

As a regular NYT reader I can confirm that they don't do this all that often. (I never see it in the sports section, for example, where you'd be particularly likely to find local and unpolished spoken inflections.) [insert liberal media bias snark here]

And don't forget, too, that the kings of the hill are the long-term temps of the Internet. Consider your four pillars: a decade ago, it was Motorola or Nokia with mobile (when it was hardware-oriented), Yahoo with search, AOL with identity. Then again, Amazon, well, they've been atop that hill for awhile now, haven't they?