Archive for July, 2008

New York State appears determined to change its name from the Empire State to the Nanny State. Not content to rest on its press-grabbing headlines for convincing ISPs to ban USENET and forcing online companies to collect sales tax by claiming affiliate advertisers constitute "doing business" in the state, law-makers are back at it with two more news-making legislative moves.
I never thought I'd be defending Comcast in any situation, but I am now. New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo [...]

My session at PodCamp3 Boston was called Breaking Into the Conversation, Busting the Clique. It was about how to use social media to its fullest potential for you. Basically, how to be heard online and what social media tools are your best option.
So many people assume that to be a success when using social media, or to have it be productive for them, that they must follow the A-List or only vie for the attention of the top tier early [...]

So Google is in negotiations with Digg to buy the social voting site for “around $200 million”. Now what? Of course, a valid question here would be why Google is still acquiring companies offering all kinds of services when it could have been much simpler to build a similar service of their own in a matter of weeks (and there are tons of scripts allowing to launch a Digg clone available already so this is hardly any problem at [...]

I have just received an update from Fluther about the new functionality that they have launched that is intended to make the service more social and reduce the noise level.
For those uninitiated, Fluther basically is a Q&A service that allows anyone to ask questions and get answers from other users familiar with the subject. While there’s nothing new about online Q&A solutions, there is something unique about Fluther: it actually allows for real-time interaction between the users around questions - [...]

Yesterday, I talked about the successes of grassroots fundraising with social media, and while it's true that there are inspiring stories of Web 2.0 denizens coming to the aid of others in one form or another, the successes aren't always the case, unfortunately. There are plenty of times when fundraising online isn't fundraising at all, or comes with a heaping side of negativity.
When Connie Reece was talking about the success that she's seen with the Frozen Pea Fund at BlogHer [...]

Allen Stern at Center Networks caused a bit of a stir with his post "Do You Compensate Content Creators?" last night and into today. Allen's take on the ad-supported revenue model is that those who read/enjoy/learn from content should demonstrate their appreciation by clicking an ad, since that's how people get paid.
I don't agree, and said so in the comments, but I wasn't able to articulate what I felt was inherently wrong with the online ad model. [...]

Mere hours after Michael Arrington reported that his sources suggested that MySpace would roll out support of OpenID some time later this week, the rumors have been confirmed officially in a press release. And it would have been strange not to expect a big announcement from MySpace the day before Facebook’s developer conference, right?
So initially MySpace will serve as an issuer of login credentials for its users (so that their MySpace URLs can be used as logins for other sites [...]

It is rather disturbing to see everything free online and users revolting even because of web services making them watch some ads to earn at least something to sustain their businesses. Today we are going to see another example of a product switched to a free model - this time by Vancouver-based Calgoo Software.
Basically, Calgoo is a suite of calendar tools that allows you to have a single desktop calendar solution that synchronizes all your calendars across different platforms, including [...]

There was one thing that surprised me at PodCamp3 Boston, and that was how overwhelmed by choices even the best and brightest in the new media, old media and social fields are right now. With a new social media platform, application or site popping up near daily, the constant question was how to choose what to use.
The answer is to use what works for you, and nothing more. Unless you are someone like myself, whose bread and butter depends on [...]