August 2009
links for 2009-08-31
Fox Juices ‘Fringe’ Re-Runs with Twitter Twist - PC World Fox reruns are being resizzled as “tweetpeats” with cast and crew tweeting during broadcast (tags: twitter)
The Newspaper Original Sin: Keeping online units tethered to the mother ship | Howard Owens Owens (of the Batavian online only newspaper) thinks the original sin of newspapers going online was not...
links for 2009-08-30
The Medium - Facebook Exodus - NYTimes.com Facebook exodus is a new movement? (tags: facebook)
6 tags
The War On Flow, 2009: Why Studies About...
So, the war on flow continues. I liked the study from a few years back that equated multitasking with smoking dope in its effects, and perhaps the most masterful attack was leveled by Christine Rosen in her Myth Of Multitasking (see Christine Rosen Joins The War On Flow), or Nick Carr, who said the Web is making us stupid. They are all looking backward, and using old tools to measure,...
Get A Life: Being Involved Online Is Still Suspect
I can think of a dozen angles that Phyllis Korkki might have used for a piece on a study about internet use by Forrester. I guess it was inevitable that she starts by ‘balancing’ the piece with a jab:
[The Count - An Online Outlet for Creating and Socializing]
People sometimes criticize the Internet as a colossal time waster. But it also has a role in releasing people’s...
links for 2009-08-29
Three Possible Economic Models (Part 1) | Open The Future | Fast Company
Jamais Cascio divides future economics into three paths
(tags: World economics futurism)
Quant versus Qual In The News Debate
A slow motion debate — slowed by people’s vacation schedules — has been taking place at Steve Buttry’s blog in the comments to a post entitled “Newspapers’ Original Sin”. Buttry presented an argument that newspapers have failed to innovate in business models and supporting technology, while others have suggested other rationales for the current woes...
links for 2009-08-23
Setting the price of a free press — latimes.com “Putting aside the irony of the man who probably has done more to undermine serious English-language news coverage than anybody else in our lifetimes now proposing to save it, Murdoch is right, and newspaper proprietors should elect his proposal or one of the others also being discussed — and soon. American papers had ...
My Name Is Stowe, And I Am An Onfovore
I am not an infovore, obsessed with ‘consuming content’, using the old media terminology. I am actually something else: an “onfovore”. By this I mean two uses of the term “on”:
I have gotten to the point where I really need to be “on” — on the Web — to do what I do. I am constantly connected to a variety of online information...
links for 2009-08-22
Thank you Forrester, a Grand Adventure! Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing Jeremiah Owyang is leaving Forrester (tags: Business jeremiahowyang)
WOW: Facebook Launches a Twitter App Facebook is providing a means for Facebook pages to post updates to Twitter. More of Zuckerburg’s Twitter angst
Twitter to roll out commercial accounts this year |...
Social Currency: Swarmth and The Coinage Fallacy
A new twitter application, Bet Your Followers, treads some pretty strange ground. The premise is that you can gamble against the game or with another Twitterer, using followers as if they were poker chips. However, since followers aren’t purchased using cash, the notion is that you are gambling away “social currency”.
I squarely agree with Ben Parr on this one:
[via Would...
links for 2009-08-18
Tr.im to Go Open Source, Community Owned Tr.im has opted to go open source with its URL shortening technology (tags: Technology twitter urlshorteners)
An Exchange With John Katsantonis
So, last week I got yet another press releasey sort of email, which announced yet another lightweight online discussion forum, Our Convo. The email included a few hints about an odd positioning for the app, which I thought worthy of posting:
[email from John P. Katsantonis, PR Director of OurConvo.com]
What we don’t need, in theory, is yet another “online social media...
links for 2009-08-17
Carsonified Meet @HelloApp, Making Conferences More Fun Ryan Carson debuts @helloapp, a Twitter appliance for conferences, with limited features and new microsyntax.
The Future of Facebook Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing Jeremiah Owyang reads the (obvious) tea leaves re: Facebook plans, and seems bullish. No mention of Friendfeed? (tags: Technology...
Corporations Want To Own Our Experiences And Our...
It’s fairly Orwellian. Sports leagues want to prohibit fans from taking pictures or videos of the games, since the want to own all media representation of the events. So, they prohibit fans from taking any recording devices — including cell phones — into the events:
[via Social Media Banned from College Stadiums by Adam Ostrow]
Today, the Southeastern Conference (SEC) is...
Status Update: Multiply.com
Looks like the bounce in visitors that media sharing network, Multiply.com, got after acquiring the MSN Groups service back in late 2008 has started to peter out.
I wonder if those old MSN Groups people are moving elsewhere, or if this is a wholesale defection from niche social networks in general?
Social News
Chris O’Brien debunks the myth of paid journalism (much like I did in What’s A Fish Without A Bicycle?):
[via Future of Local News About More Than Paid Content]
During an otherwise mundane story about Microsoft’s recent decision to offer a free, web-based version of its Office suite of products, I was struck by this sentence in an Associated Press story:
With Office 2010,...
links for 2009-08-15
Epeus’ epigone: How Twitter works in theory Kevin Marks does a rockstar job of conveying the essence of Twitter (tags: Technology twitter)
Spot.Us, pioneer of crowdfunded journalism, preps for expansion Nieman Journalism Lab “In our interview, I skipped the basics of Spot.Us and focused on what Cohn has learned since launching in the fall. One key lesson, he said, has been ...
6 tags
Project Retweet: When Ultrastructure Becomes...
The Twitter retweet convention — where a user copies the text of another’s tweet, prefixes an ‘RT @another’ on the front, and then posts this amended copy — has become commonplace, widely supported by Twitter clients as a single mouseclick. However, Twitter has resisted making this convention part of the Twitter platform as a core primitive.
Note that...
Project Retweet: When Ultrastructure Becomes...
The Twitter retweet convention — where a user copies the text of another’s tweet, prefixes an ‘RT @another’ on the front, and then posts this amended copy — has become commonplace, widely supported by Twitter clients as a single mouseclick. However, Twitter has resisted making this convention part of the Twitter platform as a core primitive.
Note that...
First Look: Our Convo
Looking at the website for Our Convo it seems like just another online lightweight discussion forum, differentiating itself from Facebook groups as being more open and all strokes of the conversation available on a single page.
Ok. But the email I got extolling it was odd:
What we don’t need, in theory, is yet another “online social media network.”
Having said that,...
Fewer workers, bigger paychecks in high tech
[via Fewer workers, bigger paychecks in high tech]
Among the report’s key findings:
— 86,137 high-tech jobs evaporated between 2001 and 2008, leaving the region with 435,826 people employed in the 11 industrial groups;
— Aerospace, pharmaceuticals and scientific research were the only sectors to add jobs during the period, while semiconductors, telecommunications and...
First Look: DecideAlready
DecideAlready - Frequently Asked Questions.
First Look: YouAre
I confess. I am starting to lose track of all the applications that are streaming by these days. Maybe it’s the start of Alzheimer’s or something.
Anyway, I am going back to something I did back in the Precambrian explosion of applications, which was to chronicle all apps that I took a first peek at. These are ‘First Looks’ and in some cases I may get back with a more...
Blodgett Says Google Should Acquire Twitter
Blodgett is hawking a Google buy of Twitter for $1B, for the obvious strategic reasons of blocking Facebook/Friendfeed. He also points out that Google could straighten out and accelerate Twitter scaling in a big way. I bet the price tag will be more like $2B though, if such a deal comes together, as I predicted at the start of the year.
Imagine a twitteresque social flow as a core aspect...
Real Time Really Disruptive Media Conference in...
Looks I was responsible for a conference coming up in Stockholm this October:
[from Real-time / Twitter conference in Stockholm by Annika Lidne]
At a bouncing post-Reboot street party in Copenhagen honouring the late Michael Jackson, Internet philosopher Stowe Boyd - who I also met at Jeff Pulver‘s 140conference (about Twitter) - convinced me that I must hold a conference around Twitter...
Archive Twitter In Google Reader
I use Snackr as my RSS reader, so after reading Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post How To: Backup And Search All Your Friends’ Tweets In Google Reader, I logged into Google Reader, deleted everything, and following his instructions, I am now archiving all my friends Twitter streams there.
Next, and perhaps more importantly, I need to archive my own stream there.
I want to thank Dave...
Kevin Marks' Flow Past Web = The Web Of Flow
In a recent post, Kevin Marks suggest that the ‘Real Time Web’ might be the wrong metaphor for what is happening, building on a comment by Rob Hof:
[from Epeus’ epigone: The Flow Past Web: even better than the RealTime thing]
The ‘RealTime Web’ may be a name we are stuck with, but it is still a misleading one. Real-time software is a well-defined field where ...
links for 2009-08-11
The lost art of reading by David Ulin “I sit down. I try to make a place for silence. It’s harder than it used to be, but still, I read.” (tags: reading)
What Works: The Web Way vs. The Wave Way - Anil Dash Anil thinks Google Wave is too big a step to catch on with developers. What about with users? (tags: google wave, anil dash)
iTunes Going Social?
The rumors of an iTunes-linked social application from Apple are growing:
[via More iTunes 9 details, Apple developing social networking application? : Boy Genius Report.]
The social networking integration that we reported iTunes 9 would have seems to be part of a bigger social networking push by Apple. We’ve been informed that Apple has plans to tie iTunes 9 into a “Social”...
Zuckerberg Has Gone Twitter Crazy, And Friendfeed...
Since Twitter turned down Facebook’s acquisition offer, Zuckerberg has led a crash redesign of Facebook, making it more Twitter-like all the time. Now, as has been reported by TechCrunch, he’s acquired Friendfeed — or more aptly, the Friendfeed team — so that he can put together another run at Twitter.
I don’t know what he paid to acquire this team, the...
links for 2009-08-10
G.D.P. R.I.P. by Eric Zencey “In general, the replacement of natural-capital services (like sun-drying clothes, or the propagation of fish, or flood control and water purification) with built-capital services (like those from a clothes dryer, or an industrial fish farm, or from levees, dams and treatment plants) is a bad trade — built capital is costly, doesn’t maintain itself, and...
First Look: AtTheBigRiver.com
The brainiacs at Dancing Mammoth have launched a new service called AtTheBigRiver.com. For want of a better term I will refer to this as a redirection service.
Too lazy to figure out the URL to the Beatles official site? Don’t bother. Just leave it up to AtTheBigRiver, and use this URL, instead:
the-beatles.atthebigriver.com
The service is built on a database of URLs for the most...
What’s A Fish Without A Bicycle?
Michael Sokolove does a masterly job of pulling together all the journalistic angst of old school newspaper people when confronted with the bleak prospects of big city newspapers going under. It’s part wake, part crackpot economics, some recriminations about media companies moving to slow, a few mentions of craigslist: all the usual tropes.
[What’s a Big City Without a Newspaper? by...
links for 2009-08-07
Twitter Restores Service After Online attack - NYTimes.com
“But Bill Woodcock, research director of the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit technical organization that tracks Internet traffic, said the [denaial of service ] attack [on Twitter] was an extension of the conflict between Russia and Georgia.”
(tags: twitter, abkhazia, georgia)
7 tags
3 Life Meta Hacks: Erosion, Streams, And Piles
I am not a Getting Things Done fanatic by any stretch of the imagination.
According to the authors of the fabulous book, A Perfect Mess, I am what is known as a “scruffy” (see In Praise Of (A Little) Mess: Be (A Little) Scruffy):
Scruffies don’t organize everything: they are “data-driven”, using their environment to channel their work, like the piles of things I...
links for 2009-08-06
IZEA Calls for Transparency, but Can Twitter Remain Pure? Ted Murphy Thinks So | All Up in Your Business | Fast Company I am glad to see that IZEA’s tools for Sponsored Tweets are pretty good at goading the hired twitterers to put in microsyntax that discloses the for-fee basis of the post. (And it defaults to “AD:” at the start of the tweet, which is the microsyntax I ...
More On Real Time News: Abundance, Scarcity, And...
Economies are not defined by money, per se, but by the exchange of goods and services that make them up. Currencies are a way of keeping score, a measure of indebtedness, since money stands as an implicit obligation that others owe: to exchange goods and services when offered currency.
Last night, a fight broke out on Twitter between Jeff Jarvis and Tim O’Brien (see /Message: Jeff...
Jeff Jarvis and Tim O'Brien Arguing About Real...
There is an interesting back-and-forth on Twitter right now, with Jeff Jarvis and Tim O’Brien (Editor of Sunday Business section of New York Times) going on about the link ‘economy’. (Remember this is a Twitter stream, so the latest post is at the top: you’ll need to read from the bottom up).
So, are links a ‘currency’? Is this an economic shift at...
links for 2009-08-05
Outlook: How Gawker Ripped Off My Story and Why It’s Destroying Journalism - washingtonpost.com Ira ‘Gawker ripped me off’ Shapira has online chat, gets the network effects all wrong, again (tags: ian+shapira gawker wapo)
Delicious Does Twitter, Sort Of, But It's Not The...
I read that Yahoo had released a new version of Delicious with a Twitter integration. So I went and fiddled with it. The background: I used Delicious for years, tolerating the stupidity of one-word tags, initially because there wasn’t much else that I liked and partly because there is an automatic ‘daily posting of links to your blog’ option. But months ago I switched to...
Apple, The Appeal Of Open, And The Case For Closed
Back in 2001, when AOL was acquiring Time-Warner, the FCC ruled that the company’s instant messaging network (AIM) could not add new advanced features — specifically audio and video capabilities — unless AIM was reworked to allow interoperability with other services, specifically MSN and Yahoo Messenger. AOL opted not to open its service, and simply put off adding those...
The Future Of Money: Mark Vanderbeeken and Irene...
Last week, I interviewed Mark Vanderbeeken and Irene Cassarino of Experientia, an Italian user experience firm that was instrumental in setting up KashKlash, an “open forum and web project focusing on alternative economies in a post-money future”.
As Irene described the project back in February, Kashklash is “a collaborative project between Heather Moore of Vodafone,...
Tearing Up The Tabloid: What A Hyperactive NY...
Over the past years, the manner in which I experience and participate in media has changed dramatically. I have written about this extensively on /Message and in other contexts. If this were just the whimsy of one aging, leftish, technodweeboid intellectual, perhaps nothing truly interesting could be derived from my experiments and passions. However, I don’t think that is the case. On...
As Media Economics Shift, Old Media Can't See The...
As old school print media smashes face first into the web, the discordant yowls of the dispossessed journalists seem to be growing louder. Today’s case in point is Ian Shapira, who was Gawkered:
[via Ian Shapira — How Gawker Ripped Off My Newspaper Story ]
[…]
I started thinking about all the labor that went into producing my 1,500-word article. The story wasn’t...
