Author Archive

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 [...]

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. [...]

We've all seen the successes of Barack Obama's campaign fundraising and the mainstream media coverage of microlending services like Kiva, but there are tons of other places on the Web where social media is being utilized for more grassroots efforts.
One of the most visible efforts in this regard has to be the Frozen Pea Fund . In less than six months, the idea begun by Susan Reynolds and Connie Reece after Reynolds' cancer diagnosis has spread through Twitter, ooVoo, and [...]

Ah, Playboy. The American institution that's made a fortune based on the objectification of women has invaded the blogosphere in a way I didn't think they were capable of any longer. In an era when every possible permutation of porn is available at a mouse click, who'd have thought that Playboy, a publication that's considered by many to be about as racy as Marilyn Monroe's dress billowing over a grate, could still cause controversy?
It all started with a letter that [...]

Against our better judgment, we are back at Talkshoe tonight for the third-ish installment of Things You Can't Say on the Internet, with me, Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr, and Steven Hodson of WinExtra and Mashable.
Tentative topics for this evening include:

Why Steve Jobs gets away with everything short of murder and maybe that, too
Does anyone still care about the menage a trois of Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo? And who'll end up in bed with whom at the end?
The resurrection of [...]

Joss Whedon and company weren't prepared for the enormous interest in his created-for-the-Web musical Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, which premiered Act I Tuesday online and crashed the servers almost immediately. The online-only musical features several Web 2.0 in-jokes, such as the villain, Dr. Horrible, having a vlog, then being thwarted by police and the superhero Captain Hammer after revealing his plans for a freeze ray on the vlog.
Conceived during the recent writers' strike, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog came with the [...]

"Android Developers Revolt." "Android Developers Flee to iPhone Platform."
The headlines on tech blogs lately are starting to read like supermarket tabloids, so I dug a little bit deeper to see if all the smoke has a fire behind it. What did I find?
Yes, there is a petition asking for more information from Google. Yes, I read it. But here's what it looks like to me: a vocal minority of Android Developers are frustrated and comparing the Android development process to [...]

One thing I quickly noticed when browsing the App Store, both in iTunes and on the iPhone, was that there seemed to be some bizarre method of listing the apps. I like finding things in neat categories and alphabetical order within the categories, but there seemed some anomalies in the sorting that placed apps out of order.
Apparently, some of the developers feel the same way that I do about success or failure being presence in the App Store, and also [...]