Archive for January, 2008

Taking political social networking up a notch, we get Election 2008 TV. This social network for the political set is focused on video as their social medium of choice. It's a nice way to make the election process more personal.
Election 2008 TV gives users a place to put their political videos supporting candidates, to see candidates in the news, to see the videos put up by others about candidates, and more. Each video has a way to comment and discuss [...]

There was a little-noticed bit of news out of Myanmar this week; a blogger, Nay Myo Latt, was arrested after writing about what is happening within the country, including increased loss of freedom following last fall's protests and subsequent government crackdown
As a blogger, I see stories like this fairly regularly coming out of countries with much more oppressive government controls of what people can do and say online. In Myanmar, this arrest is symptomatic of a much larger issue. I [...]

Ebay announced a fee structure change this week, and also announced changes to their feedback system. The fee changes are welcomed by most sellers, who thought the fees should not have been raised that high in the first place. However, the changes to the feedback system have many sellers concerned.
Ebay's recent battle to keep the attention of buyers and sellers reflects the struggles that many older web businesses face - keeping up with the Web 2.0 Joneses. As new [...]

Last November I wrote about an innovative service that was set to redefine the way consumers buy TV shows online. SyncTV allows users to "download any episode of any show on that channel any time you want," as SyncTV President John Gildred explained. "You will have a whole catalog of all the shows under that channel for a really small price of just a couple of dollars per month."
This week, after receiving an invite into the private beta, I have [...]

I've been stewing over a post by Mike Mason at his blog Agile Thinking for a couple of days. I make no secret of the fact that I come at this whole writing about tech thing from the perspective of a former developer, so when he titles at post “Startups: Fire Your Dev Teams” you tend to sit up and take notice.
And most of the folks who are commenting on his piece certainly did just that.
However, even as a former [...]

Once just a listing of blogs, BlogCatalog has slowly grown over the past year into more of a social network for bloggers with more than 100,000 members. Today, users of the BlogCatalog service will find the ability to easily download a customized version of the SezWho comment tracking plug-in for their blogs.
After signing up for SezWho, BlogCatalog members are provided a link via email where they can download and install the special plugin. Through the collaboration of the two [...]

Users of the Movable Type 4.1 blogging platform from Six Apart can now enjoy the added benefits of microblogging with a new plugin known as Action Streams, which is part of the company's strategy towards more social openness.
With Action Streams, which works similarly to Facebook's news feed and FriendFeed (previously covered here), bloggers can “aggregate, control, and share” actions around the web, while avoiding some of the problems that have plagued current offerings. For example, Six Apart mentions that users [...]

Right from Google's initial launch of Android, I've been curious about what the overall plan was for the product. After all, Google sank an enormous amount of money into its development, and judging from the blogs of Java developers that I read, a pretty good amount of time as well. It seemed an awfully big project to have launched without the usual amount of Google fanfare, and it was coming fairly late in the game, with Symbian, Windows Mobile, and [...]

The MySpace Developer platform, announced last June and expected to have launched much earlier than now, will finally be launched on Tuesday, February 5th according to sources at the company. Beginning today, programmers can pre-register for the MySpace API program
Amit Kapur, who has been promoted to be MySpace's new Chief Operating Officer, will oversee the new platform and has already mentioned that the API will support Google OpenSocial from the start, though few other details have been released. It has [...]