tuesday

0 comments

Compare: Gawker's story about Horse_ebooks and Shortformblog's story about reply girls. Once again, spammers are ahead of the curve in predicting the future of the internets: The Pseudo-Algorithmic Human!

friday

1 comment

Rick says a bunch of interesting things in his new column about whether you need to a be highly networked individual to succeed online. I especially relish how he ties geography into the conversation, alluding to a midwestern startup.

And many, many more hyper-social New Yorkers and San Franciscans make successful startups than antisocial Midwesterners. Or even antisocial New Yorkers. These are things you can control. You can move to San Francisco. Better yet, you can move to New York. You can go to meetups. You can go to conferences. You can email investors. You can go to classes at General Assembly. It's in your control. Or, you can stay at home in the Midwest, reading TechCrunch and talking about how it's all rigged and an insiders game.

This will frustrate my friends in Minneapolis -- those dozens of startups trying to compete at CoCo and other places. They're trying to create their own scene right now. Creative acts are becoming increasingly dependent on groups of people. Being part of a "scene" in music was undeniably important in the '80s and '90s, but now it's become as true for fashion, technology, theater, and nearly all creative arts.

It's an interesting dilemma building a company in the midwest: Your success is as much a factor of your peers' success -- the community's success -- as it is the brilliance and execution of your idea.

monday

4 comments

Opposing visions of the gamification of the web from this morning:

Joseph Puopolo on Techcrunch:

Gamification has become one of the hottest buzz words in the industry and is probably in the process of taking over a website or user experience near you.

David Jacobs on his blog:

I surveyed the community services I frequent -- Metafilter, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Flickr, Mlkshk, Mixel. These services do present goals to their users and they have crafted a user experience that nudges them towards those goals -- but they do it without points, ranks and the other mechanisms and patterns advertised in the Techcrunch post above.... At some point people are going to wake up to the fact that the gamification industry is a scam.

For sure, "visualizing success" is a major component of social sites, but there are still scant examples of successful sites with more game-like components like leaderboards and badges, despite the rampant startup growth.

sunday

0 comments

From an interview on ReadWriteWeb with Dens, this bit about the future of Foursquare:

The challenge isn't really that dissimilar than some of the growing pains and hazing that Twitter went through. For a long time, Twitter was "oh, it's just people tweeting what they had for lunch, or that they're going to the movies." That wasn't interesting for a lot of people.

Then they hit a moment that was a little bit of critical mass and a little bit of clarity, where people started using it to break news and share headlines and spread information. And that's when it started clicking for a lot of people.

It is reminiscent of Fred Wilson's post from a couple months ago, Mocked and Misunderstood, where he posits that the most ridiculed services could be the most successful. It's an over-simplification (hello, ChatRoulette), but there's definitely something to this.

sunday

0 comments

The Death of the Cyberflaneur argues that the web once seemed a place for the anonymously strolling (not trolling) flaneur:

Transcending its original playful identity, it's no longer a place for strolling -- it's a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone "surfs" the Web anymore. The popularity of the "app paradigm," whereby dedicated mobile and tablet applications help us accomplish what we want without ever opening the browser or visiting the rest of the Internet, has made cyberflanerie less likely.

It then goes on to blame Facebook for much of this problem.

friday

0 comments

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) Will Wright Is Back. Whah! “If we had that much situational awareness about you and at the same time we were building this very high-level map of the world, and I don’t just mean where Starbuck’s is, but all sorts of things like historical footnotes and people you might want to meet. I started thinking about games that we can build that would allow us to triangulate you in that space and build that deep situational awareness.” And maybe it includes a TV component! (His 2007 SXSW keynote is still my all-time favorite.)

2) Just.Me. Looks interesting, love the name.

3) Denton’s Memo. Okay, this commenting system (Pow-Wow) could be the real deal. However, I doubt that the product itself will be that revolutionary — I mean, how much can we do with comments? But the power will be in pairing it with an editorial agenda. Imagine if something like Reddit or Metafilter were more programmed, had the power of a media enterprise around it.

4) Newsright Launches. Sigh. These guys keep trying.

5) VYou 2.0. VYou comes out of Beta on Monday.

monday

0 comments

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) North Koreans weeping hysterically over the death of Kim Jong-il. THEY ALL DESERVE OSCARS. (This video will be a pervasive meme in 5… 4…)

2) WHERETHEFUCKSHOULDIGOFORDRINKS. (dot-com)

3) Distrust That Particular Flavor. William Gibson has a book of non-fiction coming out next month.

4) Rob Delaney’s new Comedy Central Show Using Twitter. Also, the design of those new FastCo pages!

5) Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works.

friday

3 comments

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) The Spielberg Face. Once you’ve seen it, you can never not see it.

2) The 20 Unhappiest People You Meet In The Comments Sections Of Year-End Lists. Yes.

3) WhoSay Strikes Deal With AP. The future is celebrities owning and distributing their own gossip.

4) Ebert’s Best Films of 2011. Someone kept Drive on their list!

5) Jack Shafer: Are you reading the best magazine in America? I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that Bloomberg Businessweek is my favorite magazine right now. (Also, props to Reuters for hiring Shafer and letting him write so glowingly about their primary competitor.)

thursday

5 comments

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) 25 Most Viral People. (On the internet.)

2) VCs Predict What Will Happen In 2012.

3) CNN: A Social Media Addict Tries to Disconnect. Day 1: “I land at Antigua’s airport, where I’m greeted by warm sunshine, a long customs line and a man playing Bob Marley’s ‘Three Little Birds’ on a tin drum. All of these observations are ones I ache to tweet.” Hrrrrm.

4) The Death of Television. From Evan Shapiro of IFC, who is probably the smartest tv exec I’ve ever worked with.

5) SAY Media. For most of 2011, Aol was the most interesting company on the digital media scene — every week was a new product launch, a new purchase, a new scandal, a new reorg. For 2012, SAY Media could take its place. For several years, people in the industry have heard various rumors of a “blog rollup.” It’s never happened because most of the time these companies stall after buying one or two properties. But SAY Media is really giving it a go. Sure, xoJane hasn’t performed that well, and the mishap with Rookie didn’t help, but by most accounts Dogster is doing well, and snagging Frommer with its purchase of Read Write Web is tantalizing. (And the reported $5M price tag indicates they’re being tactical and might not burn out.) Now there’s rumors of an IPO, plus some chatter about a revved up CMS. You never would have guessed that the merger of a blog platform and a video ad network would lead to anything, but prepare to hear endless stories about it in 2012.

wednesday

0 comments

1) VC Memes. Well. Done.

2) All the End Of Year Stuff At Pitchfork.

3) Biz Insider Launched an Advertising Vertical Last Week. Servicey.

4) Best New Blogs of 2011.

5) P.R. Stunts in a Digital Era. “A lot of brands are seeing the value in a P.R. rep who has an online persona that can be used to magnify the brand message.” Some boner actually said that.

monday

1 comment

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) Klosterman on Tebow. The interesting thing here is that it seems to start as another analysis of hater culture, but then it does a few back-flips and turn-arounds and, oh christ, it's about faith!

2) WeedMaps Acquires Marijuana.com For $4.2 Million. You missed this breaking news over Thanksgiving.

3) The yearly Hood Internet dropped.

4) Pitchfork's Top Music Videos of 2011. Best year for the medium since the .90s? Sure, let's try out that idea.

5) Did You Read? This. Is. Amazing.

thursday

2 comments

Fifteen things that intrigue me right now:

1) You Say You Want a Devolution? Here's an interesting thesis from Kurt Anderson in Vanity Fair: While there have been massive technological changes in the past 20 years, everything looks the same. That is, he suggests, if you looked at a random snapshot from 1991, the people and buildings and cultural objects would mostly look the same as today. So? Well, that certainly isn't true if you looked at 1931 to 1951 or 1951 to 1971. This is one of the broad cultural essays that "seems right" though I'm not sure why.

2) The .xxx top-level domain went live yesterday. You will know it when you see it.

3) Who's Afraid Of Lana Del Rey? I'm glad someone wrote this, but isn't the artifice of "authenticity" itself the bugbear to be slayed?

4) Fast Co Design. Fast Company has a design blog that tries "to bridge the fuzzy border between design and business."

5) New Walker Website. Waaaay back in the day, The Walker was one of the earliest organizations (and for sure, the first museum) to take up blogging, but the effort seemed to only get partial internal support. Last week, a site redesign revisited the idea of museum as a locus for content generation (or "idea hub"). Congrats, Schmelzer, nice work. (See also: The Atlantic and Artlog discuss the redesign.)

6) The Bitter Email Exchange between David Denby and Scott Rudin over the Review Embargo of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Rudin missed such a great opportunity to use a scathing Subject line!

7) Aaron Sorkin's New Project: Newsroom. People who say they aren't excited for this are lying.

8) Bjork's Favorite Recordings.

9) The Utne Reader to Leave Minneapolis. Sad. I used to have an office across the street from these guys in Loring Park.

10) JimRomenesko.com. Hello there, old timer!

11) Barney Frank's Best Insults.

12) Richard Lawson in Atlantic Wire. How fast did this become the best writing online? In just weeks, we've received thought pieces like When Fans Attack and movie reviews that read like the best of the New Yorker (so: Anthony Lane not David Denby), while still satisfying us in that off-hand impulsive bloggy way. (See also, this post on Gawker that isn't at all about Lawson but somehow the commenters turned it into a rally cry.)

13) The Trailer to Shame.

14) @FAKEGRIMLOCK.

15) Paste's 50 Best Songs of 2011.

tuesday

0 comments

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) Minneapolis Is A Startup Powerhouse! Sure, why not?

2) Lets Not Party Like Its 1999. All party reporting should be like Ricks.

3) Marc Maron Podcast. I finally listened to this over Thanksgiving. So good.

4) Those Pics of DiCaprio as Gatsby Floating Around the Internet.

5) YouTube Innovation. For the first couple years after landing into Googles lap, YouTube had essentially zero new product innovation, perhaps because they were busy fighting off lawsuits. But in the past year, numerous interface, design, and product changes have made it a surprising place of innovation  perhaps the most innovative department in all of Google. One very small example: You can subscribe to feeds of videos that appear on your favorite websites, such as Hipster Runoff, Kottke, TMZ, and Cute Overload.

wednesday

0 comments

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) Daughterly Nepotism. Oooooh, boy. Chelsea Clinton, Jenna Bush, and Meghan McCain now all work for work for NBC. This makes me miss the 30 Rock cafeteria!

2) The Bipolar Reactions that Lana Del Rey Elicits. Watch the video and then look at those comments!

3) Slaughterhouse 90210 Entries Like This One. She’s still got it.

4) After 17 years on the web, Kottke finds the craziest thing he’s ever seen.

5) Social Media Pillows. There ya go, the beginning and end of the Fimoculous Holiday Shopping Guide.

tuesday

0 comments

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) This Appealing Headline. “The Atlantic’s online ad revenue exceeds print”

2) This sentence in Vanessa’s profile of Arianna Huffington. “It’s a feat — Huffington’s characteristic gift — to aggregate childbirth, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tiger Moms, a cow, Nancy Reagan, and unconditional love into one surprisingly intimate, seamless skein, and it makes spending time with Huffington a pleasure, even if interviews with her can be stultifying.” (Also, this accompanying graphic.)

3) UC Davis Pepper Spraying from Multiple Angles. Like if Time Code were a documentary.

4) eBay buys Hunch. This one’s about as obvious as it comes. I know nothing of the back story, but I’m sure Amazon had a chance and passed because Bezos doesn’t overpay for anything. While I hope Hunch still seeks a consumer-facing solution, I’m pretty sure it will end up being integrated into eBay and slowly disappear.

5) Startup Angel Funding Rap. Check please!

monday

1 comment

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) This NYT Map of NYC Startups.

2) How I Ended Up Leaving Poynter. Jim’s highly-detailed account doesn’t make Poynter look worse, but they sure don’t look any better.

3) Betabeat’s Most Poachable Players in Tech. The best thing about this is not knowing most of these people.

4) Sylo. I love when people do creative things with their VYou accounts.

5) Gawker Redesign Second Thoughts. Appropos of nothing, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Denton had gone in a different design direction. If, as he said, he believed so much that the traditional reverse-chronological order of blogs was broken, why didn’t he go with a information-dense gridded design (like Vulture and The Verge) instead of the two-pane iPad-inspired layout? That also seemed to have been Steve Jobs’ feedback. (Btw, traffic across Gawker Media right now is even lower than when he lost the bet.)

friday

0 comments

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) Reddit IAmA. Most people are pretty familiar with this amazing series on Reddit, but it’s interesting that content programming this precise and defined has emerged organically out of a user-generated platform.

2) Grantland’s YouTube Hall of Fame. On the opposite end of the spectrum is this highly programmed concept which is a goldmine of YouTube esoterica.

3) Video Beast. This will probably lose a million bucks per quarter, but it will be fun to watch while it lasts.

4) RecordSetter.com book. Can an open source version of record-making outseat the Guinness Book? I think so!

5) The Top 10 Reasons Lists Are Popular With Journalists. “There’s this form of nostalgia tied to them, but I actually think of them in terms of the future.” Someone said that.

thursday

0 comments

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) Match the DeLillo to The Cover. 10 for 10.

2) Kabletown. Ive heard NBC employees  including executives  actually refer to Comcast as Kabletown, even at work. Ill be surprised if this will be allowed to continue forever.

3) Sarah Silvermans 13 Breakup Songs. I made it into a Spotify list.

4) Felix Salmon: The Future of Adverising and Mark Suster: The Future of TV. These two pieces say an immense amount about two things I am currently obsessed with talking about.

5) The Verge. The Verge is the tighest merger of magazine thinking and blog culture that weve ever seen. Its also proof that even crowded spaces can be broken into with the right execution.

wednesday

3 comments

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) This Nick Denton Quote. "The problem is the boring people online -- they're incredibly difficult to get rid of, because theyre often really nice."

2) ThinkUp 1.0. Finally! (Sorry, Gina and Andy, but a lot of people are excited for ThinkUp, which allows you to back up all your personal/social data to a web server.)

3) Nymwars. Once it gets an official name, you know trouble is brewing.

4) ASOS iPad App. This is the end game of the merger of editorial and commerce. Amazing experience and content integrated almost perfectly into a purchase environment. (There are mens and womens issues.)

5) Uproxx. I suspect most of us wouldn't know about it if Cajun Boy weren't writing there, but Uproxx is the latest in the growing genre of web culture blogs. And judging from posts like Alison Bries GIF-Able Moments and Thirteen Movie Poster Cliches, it could be the best.

tuesday

0 comments

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) Jotly. So good. I almost dont want to tell you its a parody.

2) NYT on Reality Weekly. The amazing thing here is that no one thought of it before. It will be huge.

3) Don Draper at 84. I hope he looks more convincing than DiCaprio as J. Edgar.

4) Foursquare Badges Level Up. Smart. Its the little things.

5) Minneapolis, Mark Mallman. The amazing bit here is at 2:15 where Mark turns the city into a spaceship. (Also, Minneapolis people really like Minneapolis things, dont they? Its nearly as bad as Portland.)

(#Fun! I will try this for a week.)

monday

0 comments

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) The Atlantic Cities. Urban affairs microsite, yeah!

2) OKFocus. An agency-type-thing from Ryder Ripps. This is the other internet.

3) ScoutMob. The deals app that everyone suddenly seems to be using. Seriously, ask the person next to you  I bet theyre using it.

4) Pinterest. Everyone knows how fast this is growing, but its fun to wonder how Tumblr might react.

5) EW Viewer & TV Guide Watchlist. Sure, Umami and GetGlue have a head start, but it's good to see that the magazines arent just sitting around waiting for social tv to eat their lunch. Everyone seems to acknowledge this is going to eventually be a huge industry. My guess is that some futuristic AppleTV/Twitter integration takes the market, but maybe someone else can get a mindshare first.

(#Flashback! This is what blogging used to be. Yeah, I'm not sure if it's any better either.)

2 hours ago

tuesday

8 comments

by ADM

I thought it would be funny.

So I walked into Fimoculous on Christmas and started blogging anonymously, without telling Rex, the owner, beforehand. Which -- you guessed it -- means that pretty much everything posted here since then is by me, not him. (How: I spent time as a house-guest here about a year ago, and the keys were still under the mat.)

Just after I started, I learned that Rex had recently been in a kerfuffle in which someone accused him of saying "anonymous blogging is bad," and that he was later characterized as saying "blogging is dead." Even better. My Operation: Goldilocks was evolving into A Scanner Darkly -- turning against itself, or at least appearing to. It seemed like a good opportunity to indirectly engage both of these issues.

Is blogging dead? I don't want it to be, which is another reason I tried to revivify this blog, which was about 10 years old and staggering around like a zombie. In my opinion, there should be room in our online discourse for blogs like this one -- offering a consistent, often thoughtful perspective, collecting and observing things of interest to its readers. But being consistent, thoughtful, and observant requires effort and time, and it requires the same of its audience.

And that, I think, is why blogging, for the most part, appears to be moribund: Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, etc., are media that have evolved such that there is no expectation of prolonged engagement with pieces of content on the part of their writers or readers. Consider the recent widespread use of the shorthand "tl;dr" (too long; didn't read). This dismissive assessment is commonly interpreted as fair, expected criticism of the author, not the reader who offers it because he couldn't be bothered to read the content simply because it was long, regardless of its undiscovered merits. The media that are replacing "traditional" blogging value brevity above all, so much of the incentive to write anything that is both long and thoughtful diminishes (since few will bother to read it), and the self-motivation required to do so will only increase over time.

It's funny to be talking about blogging -- which for its entire lifespan has been dismissed broadly for being superficial and narcissistic -- as being a besieged outpost of well-developed, thoughtful writing, but I think that's exactly what's happening. It's no one's "fault" -- it's just the natural evolution of popular content production and consumption towards the most frictionless state: from books to periodicals to personal websites to blogs to Twitter to the Like button. When a medium comes along that's easier than clicking the Like button -- maybe thinking you Like something -- you can be sure everyone will speculate about and then bemoan its death before moving on.

But, even blogging isn't dead yet. There are some people out there who are still committed to the form, even if it seems no one else is, regularly posting smart, thought-provoking analyses and observations of their respective interests. A few that come immediately to mind:

• Joanne McNeil at Tomorrow Museum
• The brilliant Danah Boyd, whose research and insight into social media and youth culture is unmatched
• Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG, who is at once reportorial and speculative
• The visionary architect Lebbeus Woods
• Errol Morris and his "too long," multi-part monographs, some of which are probably the best things ever published originally on the web

And there are others who take the time to put together coherent, original posts:

• Star Wars Modern, where I'm not always sure what's happening, but I appreciate the effort involved
• Nav at Scrawled in Wax, usually correlating academic concepts of post-modernism with pop culture
• Amy at Amy's Robot, who has been writing witty, thoughtful posts on pop culture and politics for NINE YEARS. Collaborators (like me) have come and gone at that site, but Amy is still there. Someone oughta be reading her.

A confession before I continue: for every one of those sites I mentioned, I have often found myself getting the gist of a post, thinking "that's a good insight," and then skimming the rest of it. Does that matter?

Continuing, let me also mention some more widely read sites that I think demonstrate originality and effort:

• John Del Signore at Gothamist, whose humor brings color to stories without obscuring them
• The Big Picture photo blog, started by a developer at the Boston Globe who is now launching a similar project for the Atlantic
• Yeah, what the hell -- I'm leaving it on this list: even Boing Boing can be pretty good sometimes, when it's not being a caricature of itself...
• Maybe you have your own suggestions to share in the comments

And lastly, if you miss Fimoculous now that it's zombified, just replace that section of your brain with Pop Loser, which I've been ripping off mercilessly for the last month and which strikes me as the blog that is the spiritual inheritor of this one.

Will any of these blogs still live in 5 years? Will new ones rise to take their place? So far, trends appear to indicate no: aggregation, automation, voting up, "liking," etc., seem to be resulting in a hivemind where thoughtfulness is replaced with promulgation and sameness. Maybe we need a "link aggregator in reverse" that shows the links of interest to you that everyone else like you hasn't Liked yet.

And what of Fimoculous? You'll have to ask Rex. I'm leaving the keys on the counter and heading back to my cabin in the woods. It's so relaxing there! Especially in the easy chair.

Thanks for reading, or skimming. And thanks, especially, to Rex. See you next time.

Update: Rex offers his take, on Tumblr.

tuesday

1 comment

While we are on the subject, here are some other blogs you may find worth reading:

• Scouting NY. A location scout writes about NY's overlooked places.
• Second Avenue Sagas. Some of the best analysis of NYC subway issues.
• Abu Aardvark. Thoughtful examination of internal and external politics of the Middle East.
• NYTPicker. Picks apart the NYT, sometimes taking it a bit too far.

tuesday

8 comments

Blogging is dead, say bloggers, some of whom REPORTEDLY recently gave up their personal blogs for a Tumblr. Which is not like a blog at all.

tuesday

1 comment

Google engineers grew suspicious of Bing results and set up a sting operation, which shows that Bing has been stealing results from Google. And they didn't even provide a via link, which is what you should do when stealing links from someone.

saturday

0 comments

In this clip from the Today show in 1994, Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric attempt to explain the internet to their viewers while simultaneously asking what it is. They hadn't figured out the @ sign just yet.

wednesday

0 comments

Regarding Photos of Bloggers, Alone, Illuminated by Computer Screens. But the link -- is it worth anything?

wednesday

0 comments

Facebook to allow HTTPS for all page views. This is to make it secure and private, like everyone wanted. Hm?

thursday

0 comments

Slavoj Zizek has a new piece in the London Review of Books comparing the Wikileaks situation to The Dark Knight: "In one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks Putin and Medvedev are compared to Batman and Robin. It's a useful analogy: isn't Julian Assange, WikiLeaks' organiser, a real-life counterpart to the Joker in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight?" [summary on Biblioklept]

sunday

1 comment

I was having one of those "alternate history" moments this morning. Like, what would have happened if Adobe had not purchased Macromedia? (Would Flash be dying or could it have been purchased and refined by Apple?) Or what if Microsoft and Yahoo had merged three years ago?

Vaguely related: Hacker News randomly brought up a Paul Graham post called Microsoft Is Dead to the homepage today. It was written three years ago.

sunday

5 comments

"President Obama has signaled that he will give the United States Commerce Department the authority over a proposed national cybersecurity measure that would involve giving each American a unique online identity." Sounds scary, right? But don't worry: such a system "would enhance security and reduce the need for people to memorize dozens of passwords online." Feel better?

thursday

1 comment

Battelle says, very simply, that the reason Facebook should go public is that it will end up being accountable about the issue of privacy. (Conversely, maybe that's the reason they never will hold an IPO?)

wednesday

0 comments

Huh. Wordpress.com shut down the blog Reblogging Julie, the super negative Julia Allison site that you forgot. Peter Feld writes: "If the U.S. State Department is serious about wanting to shut down Wikileaks, they obviously need to hire Julia Allison."

wednesday

12 comments

Doesn't it seem like you're hearing about Quora just as much as you were hearing about Twitter right before it exploded? There's a reason for that: interest in Quora is exploding, at least according to Dustin Curtis's inbox. He says in his post that the tipping point seems to have been December 26, when "something strange happened." He doesn't say what, but I think it may have been this widely linked-to TechCrunch post about why Flickr didn't build Instagram, which was sourced from a Quora thread. Related: Why did Yahoo/Google Answers and related efforts crash, but Formspring and Quora (and VYou?) start taking off? The "social" feel of them?

Update: A Quora engineer provides the explanation and describes the impact on its servers, which were not prepared for the 10x load. The TechCrunch post(s) mentioned above contributed.

wednesday

0 comments

A few months ago, a writer at Vanity Fair called me to say the editors had just seen The Social Network, and there was a problem. Now they wanted a story that was "just like that internal story of Facebook." I rubbed my head for a while, but I couldn't think of anything even remotely like that, so we talked for a while about other ideas that might work instead. Now, months later, it appears that those Vanity Fair editors found their story, because this story about two people suing Arianna Huffington over the origins of HuffPo just dropped from the sky.

saturday

0 comments

Tomorrow Museum: The Blog in 2011: More Pictures, More Words. "Some 1,600 word blog posts are better off paired down to epigrammatic tweets."

monday

2 comments

How much did it cost AOL to send discs to everybody, all the time, in the 90s? "A lot," says Steve Case (on Quora). Roughly $35 per customer, over time. But the gambit worked.

Update: AOL's former chief marketing officer has joined the Quora thread. Two tidbits: (1) She claims that at one point, 50% of all CDs produced in the world had AOL logos, and (2) for a while, the conversion rate on the direct mail campaign was 10%. Amazing.

monday

0 comments

That didn't take long. Less than a month after a London Ignite hyper-real presentation on an imaginary 4Chan-motivated flash mob gone fatally wrong, a man was falsely accused of murder on Facebook and returned home to find an angry mob there.

saturday

0 comments

Google's Christmas doodle is "its most ambitious one yet." Backstory from WSJ. [via Engadget]

thursday

15 comments

I was thinking this morning about how I can remember exactly where I was the first time I saw Napster. (One of the IT guys at work showed it to me. It was mesmerizing.) This got me thinking about other online apps/phenomena that I can recall seeing for the first time with precise clarity. Here's my list of I Know Exactly Where I Was When I First Saw...

• Napster
• Google Maps
• Friendster
• Hot Or Not
• Wikipedia
• YouTube
• Dodgeball
• Foursquare
• Chatroulette
• 4chan
• Bro Icing
• Netscape browser
• The Paris Hilton Sex Video
• lonelygirl15
• Goatse.cx
• 2 Girls, 1 Cup

And for whatever reason, some things not on this list:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• eBay
• PayPal
• iPhone
• Gawker
• Digg
• AOL
• Flickr
• Firefox
• Chocolate Rain
• Rickrolling
• Any video with a cat

Yours?

thursday

2 comments

Login Is Not A Verb.... dot-com. Oh shutup.

monday

2 comments

Is Digg dying? I say maybe! (Not really.)

thursday

0 comments

moot's TED talk. Previously: interview with moot.

thursday

1 comment

While millions of young, tech-savvy professionals already use services like Facebook and Twitter to keep in constant touch with friends, a new social networking platform called Foursquare has recently taken the oh, fucking hell, can't some other desperate news outlet cover this crap instead?

friday

0 comments

The Awl is the new Metafilter? ~700 comments, so let's try that theory for today.

wednesday

0 comments

BuzzFeed lands funding. $8 million is a lot of virality!

monday

1 comment

The Chatroulette kid gets the New Yorker treatment. He likes SF more than NYC; he met Ashton and Demi, and Fred Wilson; it was originally called Head-To-Head; the name Chatroulette was indeed inspired by The Deer Hunter. The end.

wednesday

0 comments

Cool new thing: Twitter delivers Embeddable Tweets.

tuesday

0 comments

Tweet-O-Meter.

thursday

5 comments

This internal Gawker memo in which Denton bestows advice on how to win at the internet is fun to read, largely because the note seems so surprisingly banal ("readers respond to drama") when compared to the often excellent work that appears on the media empire's sites. [via] -NA

wednesday

0 comments

Though they aren't always the most current - this essay on 'A White Boy's Defense of Avatar' went up yesterday - there are at least a couple of reasons to enjoy Ryeberg (tagline: 'Curated Video'): not only is their mixture of embedded video and the essay a uniquely online form, they're also just delightfully odd.

Examples? Poet Lynn Crosbie's strange tribute to Michael Jackson; Mitu Sengupta on 'Bombs, Bombshells and Bollywood'; the ever-awesome Lisan Jutras giving Keyboard Cat the kind thoughtful of analysis I always thought it deserved; and Bert Archer on the quintessential songs of the 80s and 90s respectively.

Bonus link: Markus Kirschner on cyborgs and fetishising technology in an essay called "Fucking Machines". -NA

tuesday

0 comments

The central premise of this essay at online literary mag Wag's Revue - that both the ubiquity and SEO-focus of Google mean that quantity reigns over quality - feels a bit over the top.

But, beyond being really funny, it does make two important points: 1) that "the fact that the internet emerged in an advanced capitalist society where knowledge is intensely privatized and proprietary [means] the valorization of surplus value trumps ethical concerns"; and 2) that SEO depends on finding and tricking 'e-rubes' to fall for AdSense ads that no-one I know ever actually clicks on.

Might lean too far toward the Keen-Carr side of the spectrum, but it's smart and well-written enough to make it worth a read. -NA Update: PDF of the essay.

friday

0 comments

Regarding yesterday's discovery @WhatTimeIsItNow: it turns out there are more than a handful of Twitter clock bots out there to tell you what time is it. In the words of @big_ben_clock, Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! -JM

thursday

3 comments

WhatTimeIsItNow: hilarious? useful? Updated over 276,482 times*, which only ranks as #47 on the top 100 most noisy accounts on Twitter. (The most updated account has tweeted more than 1,560,818,) -JM *corrected via, not daily updated, but aggregate.

wednesday

1 comment

Sausage Party "looks at your upcoming Facebook events and rigorously assesses their respective sausage ratings on a 0 to 5 sausage scale." (via.) -JM

monday

0 comments

Tomorrow Museum asks: "When did curate stop meaning, as the OED says, 'to look after and preserve' and start describing the retweeting of bit.ly links and SEO optimization?" That and more...

thursday

0 comments

Welcome to DotComArchive.org... If you created or worked at an internet technology company during the 1990s, we invite you to tell us about your experiences. :DS

thursday

0 comments

Chat Roulette Bingo.

wednesday

0 comments

I'd be wary of a site that offers to call your cell phone for you in case you can't find it. Who knows what telemarketing list you'll end up. Plus side: Oh, there it is! Whoops, and just figured out how that site works as spam. So no links for it! Never mind, different spam site. Go ahead and use at your own risk. -- DG

monday

0 comments

It will be very interesting to see how NYC media absorbs this one: Mediagazer. It's a spin-off of Techmeme focusing on media news. -RX

monday

4 comments

Elizabeth Spiers' The Gloss, which Peter Feld reviews in GuestofaGuest today:

When Spiers described her earlier idea for an online "Maxim for women, Women's Wear Daily noted comparisons to Gawker Media women's site Jezebel (where that story's writer, Irin Carmon, now works). However, The Gloss feels quite different from Jezebel. It's female-positive, for sure, but without the overtly feminist voice often found in Jezebel. (Spiers' "Maxim" concept was intended to cater to the female id and the female ego.")

New York's okay if you like saxophones a women's site catering to your ego where the only dude is Michael Orell. --DG

monday

1 comment

Fred Wilson said he was going to reach out to the founder of Chatroulette to see if he'd visit America. Now it appears he's coming. -RX

saturday

0 comments

A few hours ago, Conan O'Brien (@conanobrien) announced on Twitter that he had finally selected someone to follow -- a random person:

I've decided to follow someone at random. She likes peanut butter and gummy dinosaurs. Sarah Killen, your life is about to change.

She had 3 followers. Now, as I post this, she has 9,200. It seems her life is already changing, at least a little bit. --ADM

Update: Here's an interview with her.

friday

0 comments

The Wolfram|Alpha knowledge engine can now answer queries about the Academy Awards. So you can enter a query like "academy awards for The Godfather" and it will show you the Oscars it won. Note that the examples suggest querying with the phrase "Academy Awards" but using "Oscars" seems to work too. --ADM

friday

9 comments

The New York Times Magazine has a long article about an online phenomenon in China: "human flesh search engines:" [via Waxy]

They are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It's crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online -- with offline results.

The article opens with the story of a woman who appeared in an anonymous web video stomping a cat to death. Viewers organized an effort to identify her. Shortly thereafter, living in a small town in a country of one billion people, she was identified. And ostracized.

The article suggests such efforts are more mainstream in China than in the US, though identification and subsequent harassment of "people who have attracted their wrath" is common among certain online communities here, too. In fact there are exact parallels: a group of users on 4chan have also tracked down a cat abuser (among many others).

But perhaps all online communities and social networks are essentially human flesh search engines, or easily transformed into them as desired -- although usually with less malice. We might not be much more closely connected than we have been in past years, but with 400 million people on Facebook alone, discovering (and persisting) those connections is becoming trivial. Powered by the data and photos in these social networks, recent technological advancements such as real-time face recognition built into cellphones will soon erode, if not entirely dissolve, anonymity.

With your anonymity goes your privacy. Does it matter? Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg says a desire for privacy is no longer the "social norm." But maybe such social norms were a casualty of his -- and others' -- business models. Uploading a photo of myself doesn't mean I want everyone to be able to identify me on the street. Emailing clients regularly doesn't mean I want them to see the names of everyone else I'm in contact with. But to Facebook, Google, and other companies, it does. This is the bargain we've made: give me convenience and connectedness, and I'll give you my anonymity and privacy.

We know the short-term consequences of this already -- insurers checking up on us, bosses peering into our personal lives, and so on -- but what are the long-term social and psychological consequences? Adults today have had years of disconnection from their pasts and had the option of growing up and evolving outside the gaze of their childhood peers, their relatives, etc. But today's kids will spend their entire lives on the social web. Will this hold back their personal growth in any way? Would you be different if everyone you've known from elementary school and beyond could look in on you at any time? Will today's kids grow up acting more conservatively because they know their behavior (and that of their friends) will be publicly and permanently documented? Or, will this instead cause a greater liberalization of social behavior as they become adults in a generation that accepts everyone acts foolishly, and everyone's foolish acts are publicly and permanently documented?

Or maybe the problem will solve itself. It seems possible that if nearly everyone you've ever met is your "friend" on Facebook, then your social network will eventually become so diffuse and the amount of information available will be so overwhelming, no one will bother checking up on anyone they don't really care about. Sound familiar? Maybe the social network will supplant the role that the internet played in our lives 10 years ago: others could often find you in its vastness if they cared, but they didn't. Just as ten years before that, we all had our names in the phone book, but no one called. The social norms adapt.

How do you see them evolving in the next 5 - 10 years? And how will Facebook and Google respond to or drive the changes? --ADM

thursday

0 comments

Rex's oft-repeated prediction about the Hipster Grifter is one step closer to reality: Ex-con Kari Ferrell will be answering readers' questions at Gawker. She'll be responding by video. Get in there, Rex! --ADM Update: Her response is up.

wednesday

0 comments

"A raid on suspected militants in the West Bank planned for Wednesday was called off by [Israel's] military because a soldier posted details of the operation on Facebook."

The offending message:

"On Wednesday we clean up Qatanah, and on Thursday, god willing, we come home."

He also gave up the name of his unit, the time of the operation, etc. Maybe we should just give Facebook to the guys at Guantanamo. --ADM

wednesday

1 comment

Google Blogoscoped takes a look at the current state of Google Knol, Google' almost-forgotten, and allegedly more "authoritative" response to Wikipedia. Knol launched with much fanfare in 2008, although plenty of skeptics at the time felt the walled garden approach would fail.

Since the last time you've heard anything about Knol was probably in 2008, it's probably safe to say that it is now a failure. Will it recover? Google Blogoscoped says the developers seem to be "taking a long term view" of the project, and notes they are still actively improving the service. But the post estimates that Knol only has about 163,000 articles on it, many of which appear to be spam or debates about Knol itself. (Wikipedia has 3.2 million articles in English alone.)

As a result, few people seem to be thinking about or looking for Knol. Some Google Search Trends charts included at the bottom of the article dramatically illustrate this point. (The blue line is Wikipedia, the red line is Knol.)

Have you used Knol? Contributed to it? Made any money from it? --ADM

tuesday

0 comments

Putting aside the brief hysteria that PleaseRobMe.com set off recently, will your use of social media sites have an impact on your insurance rates? For instance, if you post your vacation plans or pictures from a wild house party, will your insurer notice? According to Computerworld, Legal & General, a home insurer in the UK, is exploring the possibility. [via Techdirt]

This kind of thing sounds implausible to me, but there have been reported cases of health insurers reviewing the Facebook activity of those they cover, and taking adverse action as a result. --ADM

tuesday

0 comments

Joel Spolsky, widely known among programmers for his exceptional blog, Joel on Software, has a thoughtful piece in Inc. about corporate blogging.

He credits fellow developer Kathy Sierra with helping him verbalize something he may have only intuited:

"To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur's blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn't. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company. Blogging as a medium seems so personal, and often it is. But when you're using a blog to promote a business, that blog can't be about you, Sierra said. It has to be about your readers, who will, it's hoped, become your customers... So, for example, if you're selling a clever attachment to a camera that diffuses harsh flash light, don't talk about the technical features or about your holiday sale (10 percent off!). Make a list of 10 tips for being a better photographer. If you're opening a restaurant, don't blog about your menu. Blog about great food. You'll attract foodies who don't care about your restaurant yet."

But are corporate blogs necessary or even desirable? Despite running one for 10 years, Spolsky isn't convinced. He observes that many successful companies -- Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. -- have lousy blogs, and Apple has none at all. Finally (and relatedly), he announces that in a few weeks, he will be retiring his blog. He makes a good case for doing so, but it seems to me that companies who lack a large customer base and name recognition could gain a lot by blogging the way he did. --ADM

monday

2 comments

The tradition of issuing deadpan ripostes to spammers goes back at least a hundred years, from Mark Twain to those guys who get West African 419'ers to do miraculous things.

Here, Lonely Sandwich finds a middle ground between the two with this breezy reply to a pay-for-play scammer who offered to "review" his iPhone app (for a small fee, naturally). --ADM

monday

1 comment

The Foursquare Rap - Badges Like Us:

--RX

monday

0 comments

Yelp's CEO Jeremy Stoppleman responds again to accusations (and the new lawsuit) that suggest the site extorts the subjects of its reviews. --ADM [via BAR]

monday

0 comments

George Soros has been buying massive quantities of Yahoo stock, increasing his holdings from 726,000 shares to 3.5 million. No one knows why. An analyst at Minyanville recommends being cautious about following Soros on this one. --ADM

tuesday

1 comment

And there it is: "Verified Account" next to @DalaiLama. Is there anyone left? [via]

tuesday

1 comment

Videogum gets a redesign. To me, it doesn't really matter what it looks like as long as they keep Gabe Delahaye around, but still, go see it! --FD

tuesday

1 comment

This is a week old, and most likely old to a lot of people, but this post about becoming the mayor of the North Pole on FourSquare is interesting in the whole gaming the system / creating useful systems debate. -RX

monday

1 comment

Jennifer Egan nails it in the Times Book review with a poetic description of our online condition. --FD

I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I'm guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn't there.

saturday

0 comments

User Labor Markup Language:

With User Labor, we propose an open data structure, User Labor Markup Language (ULML), to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor, which is currently a monetized asset for the service provider but not for the user herself.

friday

0 comments

Your favorite new Tumblr:"Museum of Modern Celebrity Tweets". --MM

thursday

0 comments

Early detection, prevention is key: Are You Raising a Douchebag? --MM

thursday

0 comments

Today in Tumblr stats: The Universal Record Database (URDB) reveals that the most "popular" post on Tumblr is a wedding proposal video created by some random dude. As of this morning, the post was liked/reblogged 12,844 times. --MM

wednesday

0 comments

Oh no. I just found Hipster Wife Hunting , a website dedicated to the admiration and appreciation of the hipster female. And they have t-shirts.--MM

wednesday

0 comments

This is really a great way to waste your time: Thanks to the new collaboration between Google and Russian Railways, you can now take a virtual cross country trip across Russia! The Moscow- Vladivostok route is 9226 km long so in order to make your trip more pleasant Google included audio clips of Russian classic literature, brilliant images and fascinating stories about the most attractive sites on the route. --MM

tuesday

0 comments

I'm not sure how I ended up on Razorfish's site, but this is a well-done timeline: A Decade In Search. --RX

tuesday

0 comments

Remember when Matt Haughey was on the cover of Brill's Content? No, of course you don't. But just like the good old days, here's an interview with him.

I have people constantly asking me to recreate Gmail, recreate Flickr, recreate Twitter, recreate Delicious. "Can't I just post a link instead of having to make a post about it?" "Can't I upload photos into posts?" Well Flickr already does photos so much better, so why don't you just go there and we'll figure out ways to bring them into our site.

--RX

monday

0 comments

For anyone who thinks ChatRoullete is meaningless.

monday

0 comments

Racked.com enlists Katie, a 5-year-old fashion blogger to cover New York Fashion Week:

"I met Carlota, the vice president of Hautelook, and I interviewed her about her job. I told her my favorite color is turquoise, like the flower on her necklace. Then I put on some glitter make-up and lip gloss, talked on my favorite pink phone, and checked my email."

Whatever. -- MM

monday

1 comment

A young lady of 18, wealthy, pretty and agreeable, wants a husband. Not finding any one of her acquaintance who suits her, she has concluded to take this method of discovering one. The happy gentleman must be wealthy, stylish, handsome and fascinating. None other need apply. Address within three days, giving name and full particulars, and enclosing carte de visite, Carrie Howard, Station D, New York.

--Craigslist, June 5, 1863 --MM

saturday

0 comments

NYT tracks down the creator of Chatroulette. He's a 17-year-old Muscovite.

Bandwidth bills show sums which shock me as a teenager, but I am not very worried.

wednesday

0 comments

A tidy link farm of people's diverse impressions of Google Buzz today: Dennis Crowley, Robert Scoble, Mat Honan, Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer, Tim O'Reilly, Kevin Rose, and MG Siegler. (Mine? It's as annoying as fuck. It will be huge.)

tuesday

3 comments

Clay Shirky, for instance, the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, is a man whose name is now uttered in technology circles with the kind of reverence with which left-wingers used to say, "Herbert Marcuse." "Web 3.0 is not an upgrade -- it's a revolution," says Shirky characteristically. Shirky, along with Jeff Jarvis, a Cotton Mather (or Billy Sunday) figure, who has turned his sky-is-falling lectures to old-media executives into a lucrative consulting practice to old-media businesses, Chris Anderson, Wired's editor in chief, and Jay Rosen, an N.Y.U. professor -- all dedicated bloggers and, in Internet parlance, "quote monkeys" -- have essentially morphed the anarchic, 60s-style, Whole Earth Catalog roots of the Internet into aggressive business theory.

Even when you don't want to like Michael Wolff, you have to love pshit like that.

tuesday

0 comments

What makes the NYT Most Emailed list? There's a study for that:

Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list.

tuesday

3 comments

ChatRoulette gets the NY Mag treatment.

Our most popular new online tools -- Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Digg -- were designed to help us tame the web's wildness, to tag its outer limits and set up user-friendly taxonomies. ChatRoulette is, in this sense, a blast from the Internet past. It's the anti-Facebook, pure social-media shuffle.

sunday

1 comment

It's usually provoking when the academic press gets ahold of popular technology, because it tends to create new sociological, economic, or aesthetic perspectives. But this long New York Review of Books piece on Facebook reads more like an attempt to coalesce everything that has already been written about Facebook, without any attempt to say something unique. But I wonder: is this the fault of the academic press, or is popular publishing already doing a decent job of contextualizing Facebook?

tuesday

2 comments

Because there's nothing to see here lately, please check out these wonderful new things: Unhappy Hipsters, Star Wars Modern, Firmuhment. Already contenders for best blogs of 2010!

monday

2 comments

And the winner for "Best Google Streetview Discovery" goes to... Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne bathing nude in his backyard.

sunday

0 comments

Foursqaure, on your desktop: FoursquareX. See also: Top Foursquare Users Index.

thursday

1 comment

Like a lot of Gen Xers, I often wonder how college would have been different with Facebook (or for that matter, cell phones). Here's a small glimpse of what it might look like if Foursquare were: Foursquare at Harvard. [via]

monday

1 comment

Rumpus: You've previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use.

Employee: I'm not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user's user ID, and then the password. I'm not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out 'Chuck Norris,' more or less. It was pretty fantastic.

Rumpus: This was accessible by any Facebook employee?

Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn't as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look.

This and much more in Conversations About the Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee.

monday

35 comments

While compiling this list, I asked a few people a dumb question: What was the biggest online event of the year?

Random answers included Oprah joining Twitter, Michael Jackson's death breaking on TMZ, and Susan Boyle coming and going. Someone even tried to argue that a writer who detailed his firing from The New Yorker on Twitter was momentous.

Sigh.

But frankly, I've got nothing better. So try this out: Matt Haughey selling PVR Blog on eBay for $12k was the most emblematic online event of 2009. Why? Because the amount seems both ridiculously high and preposterously low at the same time. It proved that if there was ever a time when you couldn't tell what the fuck something was worth, this was it.

With Kim Kardashian making $10k per tweet, even internet fame seemed synchronously bankrupt and filthy rich. Or as someone else asked, how didn't we notice that Perez Hilton had accidentally become more famous than his namesake Paris? And how is it possible that more people are reading Reblogging Julia than Julia herself?

So it's time to stop being wishy-washy about our value assessments. A few years ago, someone convinced me to drop the title "Best Blogs" from this annual list and change it to "Most Notable" blogs of the year. It made sense at the time, when the medium was still figuring itself out: chiefs were being chosen, voice still being refined. But as I began to assemble this year's list, it became clear that, no, these blogs actually were my favorites, not merely the most interesting.

So here they are, the 30 Best Blogs of 2009:

[Previous years: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008.]

Special thanks to these exceptionally nice people for contributing ideas to this list: Caroline McCarthy, Joanne McNeil, Melissa Maerz, Chuck Klosterman, Soraya Darabi, Mat Honan, Katie Baker, Erin Carlson, Noah Brier, Jason Kottke, Taylor Carik, Nick Douglas, Lockhart Steele, Matt Thompson, Anastasia Friscia, and Kelly Reeves.

wednesday

0 comments

I guess because this blog is sometimes concerned with online civility, I should link to this: The Warm-Fuzzy Web. Tumblr and The Awl exploded with comments, so you can find your side-taking there.

monday

0 comments

Kinda interesting: online ad rate chart.

wednesday

0 comments

I wanted to pick The Awl for best new blog of the year in Bygone Bureau's roundup, but Womack took it, so I chose Mad Men Footnotes instead. And rather than actually talk about it, I choose to rant about Tumblr.

Whether your metric-of-choice is book deals or raw numbers, The Kids Who Tumble graduated to big boys on the playground, not so much by stomping the other kids as by inventing their own game in the corner. Tumblr's make-or-break premise was always that the semi-closed platform (insular, secular, participatory) would eventually make a deeper connection than the open online systems (cosmopolitan, egalitarian, populist) powered by Feedburner and retweets. Whereas anyone can read blogs or tweets, tumbling nearly demands participation.

sunday

3 comments

End game in the rush toward transparency and the death of privacy? Blippy, which lets you share your to make your credit card purchases public. [via]

tuesday

1 comment

A couple new Google things to watch: Google Goggles and Living Stories. Very different, but both potentially big deals.

tuesday

3 comments

This Financial Times article about the downfall of MySpace and its conflict with News Corp is pretty funny for all kinds of anecdotal reasons, but my favorite bit is this:

Former MySpace executives say News Corp dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a program that allows users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends' pages without having to open a new browser window.

Oh really? So that's what Ajax is!

thursday

1 comment

Meta-Enabling should be the word of the year. It's everything that's right and wrong about the internet right now.

wednesday

3 comments

A South Korean holding company has purchased Barbarian Group. If those dudes weren't my friends, I would compare this to the Mad Men takeover by McCann.

tuesday

1 comment

Square, the credit-card reading iPhone hardware add-on and micropayments system from Twitter alum Jack Dorsey, has launched.

wednesday

0 comments

Like Twitter and Facebook, Foursquare taps into our inner exhibitionist self -- a malady of the post-Internet era. It allows everyone to be a Ruth Reichl, the legendary food critic -- an arbiter of taste. With a narcissistic quotient that is higher than a genius's IQ, it's only a matter of time before it's discovered by everyone from dithering fashion editors to pro athletes and pop stars. And when that happens, yet another tech pop phenomenon will be born.

--Om Malik

thursday

0 comments

I missed this from a few days ago: Foursquare made its API public. Some new things include Last Nights' Check-ins and a Wordpress plugin.

wednesday

1 comment

Good interview with David Karp in Vice.

thursday

0 comments

Awesome Weird Al cameo in the new Know Your Meme on Auto-Tune.

sunday

0 comments

Google Dashboard. Provided by Google as an aid, this is actually a quick view of how scary it is that you store so much stuff in Google.

wednesday

3 comments

End. Of. The. World. Flickr added people tagging.

tuesday

7 comments

"Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned." Previously: Bad Strategies.

wednesday

1 comment

Awesome Youtube Comments -- dot-Tumblr-dot-com, of course.

tuesday

2 comments

Following the New Yorker profile, Gawker is offering $1000 for photos of blogger Nikki Finke. If you include Eater's little gimmick to give you $25 for shutting down your food blog, this is becoming a strange little trend: micropayments as a form of promotion.

monday

18 comments

The FTC ruled today that bloggers must disclose any freebies or payments they get for reviewing products. Update: Fines are up to $11,000.

saturday

1 comment

Genius.

thursday

1 comment

The Six Apart kids gave me a preview of this last week, and it's out now: Typepad Motion. It wraps the social graph onto your blog platform. (It essentially combines Typepad and Pownce, which they bought almost a year ago. Another analogy might be "a cleaner, more extensible Ning.")

thursday

0 comments

Anyone else noticed the chartjunk on Google Maps lately?

tuesday

9 comments

Question: who actually uses those "share this" buttons cluttering up all websites? Seriously, who? Sites are increasingly looking more like this graphic that accompanies the NYT story about those social media buttons. While I'd like to say these are complete bullshit (and I try to convince clients that they are), you can't ignore that ~200 retweet count on Techcrunch posts. Do any of those really matter? Are those influencers, or bullshiters?

(Similarly, isn't it crazy that no one has stopped and wondered how the hell ShareThis and Bit.ly, like Pluck before them, became hot startups? It's like once the legitimacy of user-generated web 2.0 companies was accepted, no one dared ever question the importance of the intermediary ever again.)

tuesday

1 comment

So I've read several analysis stories now and I still don't understand why Adobe bought Omniture. $1.8 billion seems like an awful lot to spend to get those Flash apps tracked correctly!

thursday

1 comment

Weirdest thing Google has ever done: Internet Stats. It's little factoids collected from around the internet. I recommend @HolyCrapFacts instead.

wednesday

5 comments

50 things that are being killed by the internet. #1: "The art of polite disagreement." Yes, that.

thursday

0 comments

The Web Ecology Group has another new paper: The Influentials: New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter. Example finding: "sockington is more influential than MCHammer, while MCHammer is more influential than three major social media analysts (garyvee, Scobleizer, and chrisbrogan)."

wednesday

1 comment

Gawker Media launched seven years ago. They're gloating celebrating their success with a few quotes from those heady days.
Dave Winer:
"It's such a stale idea. The Web is distributed. Try to get the flow to coalesce in a premeditated way. Not likely to work."
Anil Dash:
"Will it be profitable? I think it's possible but it's much more likely to break even long-term. Which, for the publishing industry, ain't too bad."
Matt Haughey:
"It's still too new of a site, but I'm looking forward to seeing how well written it is, and if it keeps me coming back. If so, and it makes the people behind it money while doing it, maybe professional blogging can work afterall."

tuesday

1 comment

If aliens invaded and threatened to kill all of the internet save one link, Auto-Tune Kitty would be my choice. [via]

tuesday

7 comments

I was waiting for someone to write about how Twitter isn't popular among the kids. (The 18-year-old who sounds like a 68-year-old -- "I just think it's weird and I don't feel like everyone needs to know what I'm doing every second of my life" -- has 11 followers.)

monday

2 comments

This chick totally sets the record straight on furries! (Luvs the music. Why are cute cuddly furries always into death metal?) [via]

monday

3 comments

I hope this goes to the Supreme Court.

sunday

2 comments

Amidst all the debate about content stealing and aggregation, Blodget has released Embed This Post for the Alley Insider sites. [via]

friday

0 comments

StuffHipstersHate.Tumblr.com.

friday

1 comment

Twitter to Add Location. Was wondering how this would ultimately be executed. It's at the API level and users can opt in to add location metadata. The teaser:

For example, with accurate, tweet-level location data you could switch from reading the tweets of accounts you follow to reading tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city -- whether you follow them or not.

Techcrunch adds:

Just imagine if a service like Foursquare was able to send your actual location to Twitter alongside the name of the place you are at. That would save the people who follow you on Twitter but don't use Foursquare the hassle of looking up the location of the place you are at if they want to meet up with you.

wednesday

6 comments

Google's IPO was five years ago today. I was trying to remember the skeptics. Here's one:

"I'm not buying," Stephen Wozniak, an Apple co-founder, declared to The New York Times in the weeks before Google went public.

saturday

5 comments

There are two clashing worldviews. There is my view, that a human being is in charge of his or her own life and, with sustained focus, can reach higher and higher achievement every week, gradually approaching (and maybe one day reaching!) a virtuous, peaceful, and happy life.

The other view is more of a victim mentality: that life happens to you, that infinite frustration and suffering are unavoidable, that the only reasonable way of coping with such an awful world is to attack whoever seems to actually enjoy life -- because surely they are dishonest or crazy and must be brought back down to Earth.

-Jakob Lodwick, Being Gawked At, and not that different from my interpretation.

friday

3 comments

What kids searched for this summer. Seeing "sex" and "porn" at #4 and #6 reminds me of how, from age 10 to 15, I looked up "fuck" every time I picked up a dictionary. Some terms you might also need to Google:

• "Webkinz" (#16)
• "Runescape" (#37)
• "Nigahiga" (#99)
• "Miniclip" (#18)
• "Poptropica" (#54)
• "Hoedown Throwdown" (#61)
• "naked girls" (#86)

thursday

1 comment

Twitter is finally adding a new feature: making retweets part of the platform.

wednesday

0 comments

Anil did one of those Big Think things. I recommend The Philology of LOL Cats.

sunday

0 comments

On Language: FAIL. Not as good as Know Your Meme: FAIL. [via]

tuesday

0 comments

What's Your Douchebag Name?

monday

1 comment

Mechanical Turk Diaries. Hello, Neal Stephenson future! [via]

saturday

0 comments

business.twitter.com. See also: "For some reason, Twitter is blocked on White House computers."

wednesday

0 comments

okthxbye?

tuesday

1 comment

If ever I wanted a Twitter account verified... @CharlieKaufman

tuesday

1 comment

Meme clash: Honan's Ask A Flowchart for Single Serving Sites. Uses its own websites, such as AmIDoingThisRight.com, to come to the final app to end all single-serving apps: WiredSingleServingSiteGenerator.com.

tuesday

3 comments

Metafilter is 10 years old today.

friday

4 comments

The talent search is over. Rocketboom hired another Brit, mememolly, as their host.

friday

1 comment

"Hulu, in effect, is Amazon.com to YouTube's eBay."

thursday

2 comments

Gawker is bringing back the pageview bonus model. The economy has recovered! Update: They also updated commenting with some interesting features.

friday

1 comment

Twitter shortcuts. Several things in here that I had no idea about.

sunday

14 comments

Mashable story about SEO Tips for using Twitter. Sigh. Do people really think like this?

sunday

0 comments

My master's alma mater, the University of Washington Digital Media program, is offering a class dedicated to Twitter. They have a blog and a twitter account.

sunday

1 comment

Psychologist finds Wikipedians grumpy and closed-minded. [via]

saturday

0 comments

Kottke's right about Twitter litter, which is why I want an app that will just give me friend recommendations. Update: NYT story about Vark.com, a revved up Yahoo Answers that uses your Facebook friends and their extensions.

wednesday

5 comments

So Google is now recycling episodes of Rocketboom from 3.5 years ago?

tuesday

5 comments

Koogle, the new "kosher" custom search engine for ultra-Orthodox Jews that filters out "prohibited" content and shuts down on the Sabbath. What's next -- custom search engines for hipsters, Scientologists or foodies?

saturday

1 comment

The new domain squatters.

thursday

5 comments

Three smart things to read related to the Facebook username thing: Douglas Rushkoff, Chris Messina, and Anil Dash.

tuesday

1 comment

Vanity URLs are coming to Facebook.

tuesday

2 comments

YouTube's tricked out page for The Webbys has the 5-word speeches, including Sarah Silverman's.

tuesday

7 comments

Anyone used Wolfram Alpha since it first came out? It has new features! How about Bing? It's results might be better than Google and Yahoo! What's that -- you don't care?

saturday

12 comments

Even though everyone instantly knee-jerk hated on Bing, Microsoft's new search engine launched last week, it quickly doubled Microsoft's search size and flew by Yahoo in popularity. Update: Oh, this is cool. Someone built a blind search engine where users compared the results of the big three and voted on the best. Bing apparently was winning!

thursday

3 comments

Steven Berlin Johnson in Time on Twitter. "Skeptics might wonder just how much subversion and wit is conveyable via 140-character updates. But in recent months Twitter users have begun to find a route around that limitation by employing Twitter as a pointing device instead of a communications channel." Yep, Twitter is pretty much a link blog now.

monday

1 comment

New Wall Street Journal culture blog: Speakeasy.

friday

3 comments

I've grown skeptical of most new collaborative communication tools. They always seem to suffer from an inherent problem: they feel like they were designed by project managers for project managers. (When I worked at Microsoft, I called this PMware. Microsoft is basically packed with PMware.) This use-case is, needles to say, quite limited. But I can see Google Wave spreading to a larger audience. The demo is 80 minutes long but O'Reilly has a summary. It essentially collapses IM and email into a wiki-like space. It's pretty cool.

thursday

3 comments

Proceeding Heffernan's column last week about Mint.com, a number of commenters voiced security concerns about the site. The CEO came back with a pretty interesting response about the level of security, which includes biometric access, video surveillance, "man-trap" doors, encryption, and other things straight outta Ocean's Seventeen. But here's something that's never exactly been addressed by Mint: read the fine print and you'll see that you're essentially handing over right of attorney to Mint. (They need to do this to get this level of access.) It's kinda creepy, but I still use it.

thursday

0 comments

CanYouCopyrightATweet.com. Yes! No wait, I mean no! [via]

thursday

2 comments

TechCrunch: "Have you ever been annoyed by the fact that Wikipedia has a wealth of textual information but no videos and hardly any pictures? [...] This is where a new service called Navify comes in. Launched in public beta today, Navify intends to enrich Wikipedia by adding pictures, videos and user comments to each article."

tuesday

1 comment

Meme Scenery. Waxy erases the figures from classic internet memes to reveal only the backdrops.

tuesday

2 comments

Another new cool NYT display: Times Wire. It stacks up everything coming out of NYTimes.com as blog-like/rss-like feed in reverse-chronological order. [via]

saturday

4 comments

Yooouuutuuube.com. Simultaneously view every frame of a video. For instance, of course...

thursday

3 comments

Is Twitter finally doing something new? "Twitter has some very interesting plans for its newly-unveiled live search function: soon it will activate crawlers that will index the links users include in their Tweets. In one fell swoop that turns Twitter into an even more powerful news and opinion aggregator." [via]

monday

0 comments

AUTO-MEME. Think of it as the single-serving site that can inspire single-serving sites. [via]

sunday

0 comments

Go Daddy recommends against purchasing .tv domain because Tuvalu is sinking.

thursday

1 comment

Is there any innovation left in online news design? Let's look at the experimental msnbc.com story page which creates layers for text, photos, data, videos, etc. Craig Saila describes how it's attempting to forgo pageview-driven logic in favor of "capturing the intent of what a page view is."

thursday

0 comments

A gallery of anonymity. [via]

thursday

0 comments

Rick Astley pens the bio of moot for the Time 100 poll. He thanks him and says "I suppose at first I was a little embarrassed by it. I always liken it to when people look through their photo albums or home videos from 20 years ago and think, Gosh, did I really wear that?" More entries. [via]

wednesday

8 comments

Your 57th Twitter link today: Most Twitterers are Quitters. Nielsen study reveals that 60% of users who sign up for Twitter don't return to the site the following month, which I hereby declare The Oprah Effect.

wednesday

0 comments

The Twitter Approval Matrix. Julia owns the banal/navel-gazing quadrant, but she's gotten quite good at making fun of herself.

wednesday

1 comment

I know how you feel, Oprah.

monday

0 comments

The relatively insightful comments to Heffernan's NYT Mag Comment Is King column led to a follow-up post commenting on the commenters which will likely bring more comments.

friday

1 comment

Hugh launched OMGICU, which is sorta Gawker Stalker gone mobile. OMGICU WTF?

thursday

2 comments

GeoCities was still around?

thursday

13 comments

Kottke goes in defense of Twitter, which isn't shocking, except he even goes to bat for even the inane "what I had for breakfast" conversations, suggesting that this is the raw material of social bonds. Balk made a somewhat similar point, that those who oppose Twitter speak from a privileged position. It's true, right? Most of the people I know who are opposed to Twitter are merely holding onto a previously official way of speaking, which they are slowly losing.

wednesday

1 comment

Editor: So which of you hasn't written about Twitter yet?
Writers: [blink]
Editor: How about you, Dowd?
Maureen: Ah, fuck.

And things that sound like every nyc-based journalist/blogger from 15 months ago: "I would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account."

wednesday

2 comments

What hath Oprah wrought? A 43% spike in Twitter, that's what!

tuesday

1 comment

Jesus, another new Google thing today: Profiles. They are sparse, but it looks like the beginning of... something. [via]

monday

0 comments

Rocketboom has a new host.

saturday

2 comments

"Twripple: The vast footprint created when a single status update propagates across social media networks, blogs and search engines."

friday

0 comments

Beyond the /btards, is anyone still using Omegle? Because now people are launch apps that sit on top of it, such as Mobozo.com, which is kind of a Digg for your anon chat sessions.

friday

3 comments

I couldn't sleep last night. I don't know what sorts of thoughts occupy your mind at 4am, but I was recalling the blog/news coverage from 3.5 years ago when Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. It was nearly all positive at the time, but I was calling bullshit. Today, YouTube is still pulling in nickels on its investment, and reportedly losing another half-billion to bandwidth costs. This is a stupid thing to lose sleep over, but this morning I awoke to the news that YouTube will be setting up a payment program for premium content. Yawn.

tuesday

-1 comments

I finally got around to reading Grigoriadis' NYMag cover story on Facebook from last week. No new ideas in there, but she again comes up with the phrasing to make everything seem slightly more interesting than maybe it is.

monday

0 comments

New Know Your Meme (I'll link to every one of these from now to forever): Yo Dawg. Also: Andrew announces the series as officially spun off.

monday

2 comments

Poll hacking brought to a completely new expertise. Wow, 4chan wins. [via]

monday

5 comments

Yes, I've already filed a complaint that Boxxy didn't make URLesque's 100 Most Iconic Internet Videos list, but they're forgiven for interviewing Andy about the #1 slot.

saturday

4 comments

So which of you am I going to marry? (I know, I know... I'm going to marry a retweeter.)

wednesday

0 comments

Good work from Andy: Attribution and Affiliation on All Things Digital, which I won't quote at length. :)

wednesday

4 comments

Lindsayism confessed to me that she is only slightly annoyed with the arrival of Highdeas, which she's been doing since 2005.

tuesday

1 comment

Overlooked anniversary: Five years ago (yesterday), Subservient Chicken changed the internet by launching the notion of (love it or hate it) viral marketing. One of its creators, Rick of Barbarian Group, reflects on its creation and lasting impact. "Then, of course, there's the question of whether or not it worked. This is mostly answered now, I think. But to recap, yes, it worked." Happy birthday, chicken.

monday

27 comments

So let's see if this starts any debate.... my pal Matt Haughey recently wrote a little ditty called This Is How Social Media Really Works where he essentially argues that this new marketing force is completely unnecessary:

So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need "social media marketing" after all.

I've been known to rant about this new breed of internet expertise too, but that's probably because NYC seems to have more social media experts than rats. But for the sake of argument, a counter-example of Matt's attempts to find a swingset, here's a story from Ad Age about buying an air conditioner. It makes a compelling case for a more subtle presence for brands to exist in online social spaces. Thoughts?

monday

1 comment

Web Trend Map 2009. It maps the 333 most influential domains and the 111 most influential people onto the Tokyo Metro map. Height of a station correlates to its traffic, revenue, and trend; width represents stability. And so on...

friday

1 comment

First.

tuesday

0 comments

New Know Your Meme: Numa Numa.

tuesday

2 comments

Team Scoble? Blech, okay. But yeah: "Zuckerberg is right. He shouldn't start listening to his users now."

monday

5 comments

This is making the rounds today: Omegle. Anonymous, random, one-on-one chat. Seems compelling for 20 seconds.

sunday

0 comments

NYT thinky-think piece that compares the evolution of wikipedia to that of cities. The argument frames itself around Andrew Lih's new book, The Wikipedia Revolution. Meanwhile, over in Arts, there's an urban planning piece: Reinventing America's Cities: The Time Is Now.

friday

1 comment

Caterina Fake's new startup: Hunch. Via her blog post: "Hunch is a decision-making site, customized for you. Which means Hunch gets to know you, then asks you 10 questions about a topic (usually fewer!), and provides a result -- a Hunch, if you will. It gives you results it wouldn't give other people."

friday

0 comments

My probably favorite session at SXSW this year was Merlin Mann and John Gruber just chatting about being passionate about what you do online. That sounds like a bland proposition, but it turned out funny and illuminating: Obsession Times Voice.

thursday

4 comments

Come to think of it, I could use a Twitter ghostwriter too.

Annie Colbert, a 26-year-old freelance writer from Chicago who is one of [Guy] Kawasaki's ghost Twitterers, said she judged her performance based on how often her postings for Mr. Kawasaki are "retweeted," that is, resent by other users of Twitter.

Recently, she said, she had a coup when the actor Ashton Kutcher repeated her post about a YouTube video showing someone getting high from a "natural hallucinogen."

"Facebook is like Cheers, where everyone knows your name," she said. "Twitter is the hipster bar, where you booze and schmooze people."

She said she had been considering trying to get other ghost Twitter clients. "I don't think I could ghost Twitter for 100 people," she said. "More like 10 clients. I think I would have to get to know them."

thursday

0 comments

Rocketboom revisits the Know Your Meme Gameshow. Great production, given the circumstances. And once again, we killed them. Team Boxxy!

tuesday

1 comment

Twitter Gets a Conference. Game over!

monday

1 comment

"How will Google ever make money?" --Business Week article from 2000.

friday

10 comments

Last night I randomly asked, "what makes my link blog different from my Twitter different from my Tumblr different from my Facebook stream?" Mat Honan then answered on Twitter ("Replies"), on Tumblr ("Reblogging"), on Facebook ("Comments"), and now he can answer here.

wednesday

0 comments

Winners at the SXSW Web Awards included Lost Zombies (Community), Hulu (Film/TV), Why So Series (Games), Project Miso (CSS), The Bygone Bureau (Blog) and We Tell Stories (Experimental / Best of Show).

wednesday

6 comments

I guess the personal highlight of sxsw was the "Bikini Flashmob" that Foursquare and I threw at the Omni Hotel pool, where I wore the worst Japanese-tourist-trapped-in-Texas outfit one could possibly assemble at the souvenir shop -- David Carr describes the scene in today's NYT. Post-Austin, people ritualistically debate panels versus parties, but for me the best part is the space in between: dinner with groups of eight or so smart people and spontaneous conversations in the hallways between sessions. The booze is fun, but you forget it in the morning; the panels are theatrical, but seldom revelatory; that leaves you with the conversation, which is always why we always trek to Austin in March.

friday

3 comments

Just in time for SXSW, foursquare is now available in the iTunes store. [Previously.]

thursday

2 comments

Jimmy Fallon blew up Twitter tonight.

wednesday

4 comments

Foursquare is already getting press, even though it's not released and Dens still won't let me blog about it. Oh wait, does this count?

tuesday

4 comments

New Know Your Meme: Boxxy! Excellent!

tuesday

4 comments

Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere? Nope, just you, TechCrunch.

monday

0 comments

Ev of Twitter was on Charlie Rose and at TED last week. And that story about Facebook trying to buy them -- true.

friday

7 comments

So now we can add this to the canon of newspaper-saving stories: App Out Of It, Paper-Boy! At over 6,000 words and starring many of the city's brightest meta-media bylines (John Koblin, Matt Haber, Gillian Reagan and Doree Shafrir), this should -- finally? -- be the think piece that identities the problems and presents the solutions. However, if you read closely, it's more of a "throw everything against the wall" approach than a cohesive web strategy.



Some of you might recognize the rhetoric. It feels like one of those "brainstorming sessions" that marketing/editorial execs love to hold. If you've ever worked for a big media company, you know exactly what I'm talking about: every six months, it's the same dozen people trying to predict the future. (I enter a guilty plea: I've held as many of these as anyone. You know why? Because if you work for a lumbering big media company long enough, the only catharsis is trying to imagine the impossible.)

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's first admit that this story is fighting the good fight. This sort of cultural rhetoric is juicy and readymade for the <blockquote>:

The media of the 21st century is one that is blogged -- not a negative thing, see later in the piece! -- and merged with the users' own experiences and viewpoints synthesized with the original. If postmodernism came to literature in the '80s, it's got to come to journalism now.

That sounds right! But what does this future look like? That's where you start to see the gaudy side of postmodernism, a pastiche of the greatest hits of the past decade. It's basically the Girl Talk version of product development, including all of the following:

+ Personalization. "How about customizable home pages for users? So when they go to NYTimes.com, it will display, say, only international news and science headlines, and eliminate maybe sports- and style-related articles. Users could set preferences to display more new podcasts or video posts and drag and drop any reporters' column into a specific space on their home page."

+ Hyperlocal "A combination of local news and location-based technology has the capacity to be the foundation of this kind of distribution system."

+ Audio Stories. "Maybe Times reporters should file mp3s of their articles, reciting their reporting, along with their print stories, so people riding on the subway, and listening in their cars can participate."

+ Flashy Advertorial. "FlipGloss, a California-based ad start-up that just launched their beta site last week, is one company offering a model for high-end publishers and brands. Their interactive Web advertising translates the visual experience of flipping through a magazine on the computer screen."

+ Mobile. "The idea is this: The news must go mobile."

+ The Live Web. "Everyone in the new world has a status. Newspapers can take a lesson from 'status culture' by integrating it into their sites. What are readers reading right now? How many people have their eyes on one story? Who are they emailing it to? Where are they blogging it? How are their friends using the site?"

+ RSS Readers. "If they want their Twitter feed or del.icio.us links integrated into their home page, so they can see what their friends are reading, let them set that preference as well."

+ Audio Comments. "Users could comment on the article, by calling into the Times and record a comment, which will be automatically transcribed and posted on the website."

+ Subscriptions. "Premium access -- one better than the failed TimesSelect project -- will bring in revenue."

+ Applications. "The Times already has an application that is free for download on various devices including the iPhone and the BlackBerry -- with simple headlines and easy reading. But applications with added data, personalized content and social media would be more valuable."

+ E-Ink. "Perhaps more newspapers should be meeting with mobile device manufacturers and designers to make sure they are catering to consuming news on the go. Can you imagine the next Google/New York Times Android-powered portable reading device?"

Wheh!

Although none of these are bad ideas (some are quite good!), none are particularly novel. It presents this mashup as innovation, even though all of them have been around for a decade. But nostalgia-as-futurism is not really the big problem with this story. The fundamental concern is more prosaic: this story proposes that doing everything is the solution.

This spaghetti-throwing exercise accidentally reveals the actual looming problem inside media companies. Contrary to popular belief (propagated entirely by people who have never worked there), good ideas are not in short supply within big media companies. (You want to meet an aspiring futurist? Stop by the online department of a media company.) By far the biggest problem is focus.

Let's put this simply: there's a management problem inside big media, not an innovation problem.

But in fairness to this story, I am glossing over the prevailing thesis, which does deserve some attention: applications are the future of news. ("If news sites entered these other areas -- became social, hyperlocal, mobile -- perhaps they could retake the center stage and bring paid readers and advertisers to the same place?") That bit of futurism is worth contemplating, but it also deserves some scrutiny. We have some hardware-as-future precedent to discuss. Until recently, the software industry also thought it should build itself into hardware. But Google came along and nuked all of that. If the Mountain View idealists taught us anything about application development (and the word "Google" appears 27 times in this story, so they must, right?), it's that the browser is still the king. iPhone apps are cool, and they undoubtedly should be explored, but will newsy-retrofitted hardware and custom applications ultimately be the savior? TimesReader, anyone?

Despite all of this, I still recommend you trudge through the theorizing in here. The industry quotes are decent, and the thesis holds up most of the time, except when it's subverted by its own gizmo doohickey fascination. There are clearly some good ideas in there, if you can dig them out from the busy thicket.

p.s. This piece also happens to coincide with a lackluster redesign of Observer.com. It's unfair to hold the writers up to the mirror of the tech/biz units of a company, but it also makes the whole thesis a little suspect.

friday

4 comments

Since we're all about search lately, here's something new to play with: SearchMe.

friday

2 comments

Finally catching up on some reading from earlier this week, this NYT story about Google's "deep web" initiative seems to have been overlooked. This bit was new and intriguing:

Google's Deep Web search strategy involves sending out a program to analyze the contents of every database it encounters. For example, if the search engine finds a page with a form related to fine art, it starts guessing likely search terms -- "Rembrandt," "Picasso," "Vermeer" and so on -- until one of those terms returns a match. The search engine then analyzes the results and develops a predictive model of what the database contains.

The idea that Google is spidering via search queries is fascinating itself, but that it's building database models from this... this seems to be creeping us toward a semantic web future.

thursday

4 comments

I've been thinking this too: Twitter = YouTube. The argument: YouTube is now the second-most-popular search engine and Twitter Search (as we've previously mentioned) has immense potential to become the next big thing in search. Small prediction: Twitter hasn't released any new features in a long time, but the next thing we'll see is a fancy new search feature (geo stuff? retweet/favorite filters? something....) that includes a revenue model. (More info: Borthwick had similar musings about Twitter Search a couple weeks ago.) Update: more context from Honan in the comments.

wednesday

0 comments

Most Ridiculous Flickr Comment Thread Ever. [via]

wednesday

0 comments

For those who were just dying to know, Hipster Runoff is not Tao Lin, but is probably Carlos Perez.

monday

5 comments

Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You're a Loser or Old or Something. (Doing research for Know Your Meme: The Game Show!)

monday

2 comments

25 Most Valuable Blogs. Wowowow.com somehow makes it. [via]

monday

6 comments

Why do people Twitter? Because of their underdeveloped sense of the self, of course.

thursday

1 comment

NYT gets lots of important people to talk about the Facebook flap. Not one of them goes meh.

thursday

13 comments

Jorn's "Web 3.0 is going to be about filtering Web 2.0" got retweeted 50 times, which elicited the post Twitter's Two Cultures (retweeters vs. favrders). Update: Honan gives a pretty good counter-argument in the comments.

wednesday

5 comments

A link-heavy and quote-filled NYT story about the current controversy on Tumblr.

wednesday

1 comment

On an SEO forum, some people are discussing how to monetize 4chan. The funny thing is that the SEOs are bigger assholes than the /b/tards.

wednesday

4 comments

...and the inevitable /b/ post following the interview. Welcome, newfags!

wednesday

66 comments

An Interview With The Founder of 4chan

A month ago on the eve of ROFLcon, I interviewed the founder of 4chan for a magazine story that never ended up running. He chatted about everything from the techincal complexities of keeping 4chan alive to the anxieties of operating the most controversial site on the internet. By the end of the interview, I was thinking "This kid has seen stuff that would make my eyes burn, but he seems so smart and sweet about it all." (He started the site when he was 15; he just turned 21.) It seemed like insightful stuff that should run somewhere, so here it is....

Like many successful internet phenomena, 4chan is a shockingly simple idea: an online bulletin board where anyone can post pictures.

This simplicity is deceptive.

4chan is actually one of the most robust, complex, annoying, disgusting, illuminating, perverse, fascinating online communities ever created. It is the direct or indirect source for many of the strangest internet memes: RickRolling, LOLcats, Sarah Palin's email hack, Anonymous, Chocolate Rain, and many other minor and major feats of esoterica (i.e., fucked up weird porn). Most of these viral specimens arose from the site's most popular image board, /b/, which can be the source of considerable hand-wringing and fist-clenching for anyone who has dared navigate its murky, anonymous waters.

4chan's founder is a 21-year-old New Yorker named Christopher Poole. Known as "moot" to the site's devotees, Poole is disarmingly well-spoken and pragmatic about what he has created. "It's my belief that the community should dictate its norms, standards, and rules," he says. "I've left /b/ to its own devices, with very little intervention."

Of all the memes spawned from 4chan, is there one you feel most attached to?

At the last ROFLcon [in Cambridge last April], someone asked "Do you like RickRolling?" I said something to the effect of "Screw RickRolling!" Everyone gasped because that was the cool thing at the time.

But now they'd probably agree.

Yeah, once Nancy Pelosi does a RickRolling video with her cat on YouTube, you know it's done.

But then I remembered that my favorite was something called Weegee, and only two people in the crowd were like "Yeah, Weegee!" That's a good sign -- that no one knows what it is.

What is it?

Weegee is just a vectored photo of Luigi from Mario Brothers placed in completely random situations.

Sounds harmless. Does it bother you that most people think of 4chan as only being the most controversial board, /b/?

We have 44 image boards at this point, so in that sense it's a small part of the site. But /b/ accounts for 30 percent of our traffic. That's where the attention is, that's where the headlines are coming from. That's also where a lot of the rowdiness and lawlessness goes on.

What do you think of that lawlessness?

Some of it can be healthy, as long as it remains within certain boundaries.

What boundaries?

Like that we don't actually break that law. Because of the lack of rules, 4chan has fostered an environment where there's a lot of creativity and good things coming out of it. But at the same time, when people go out and do crazy things...

Which kinds of things?

The best example is when Jake Brahm was arrested for posting a bomb hoax. [In October 2006, Brahm was arrested for threatening to blow up multiple NFL stadiums. He was sentenced to six months in prison.] And after that we saw a lot of copycat stuff. People were getting arrested for saying they were going to do the same thing. Law enforcement was coming every week and asking for our help.

When you started the site, did you expect any of that?

Absolutely not. Its popularity has been entirely an accident. I was 15 years old and into anime. I threw up one image board, which was the original /b/. At first it was all anime. As people started posting other things, I added more boards and /b/ remained the random board.

4chan has blown up over the past five years. It's gone from 100 people to 4.75 million per month. And /b/ is pushing 100 million pageviews.

What makes it so big?

At the time, it was very unique. Image boards and anonymous BBS had been big in Japan, but not in the West, where we were used to bulletin boards and blogs. When 4chan started, the format was new. And it was unique because of the anonymity aspect.

What was your scariest moment running the site?

Probably the first time I was contacted by law enforcement. At the time I was 16 and I was living with my mother. That was shocking.

Given your user base, are you worried about your own identity theft?

Yeah, I originally hid behind the moniker because I was 15. It was not appropriate to use my real name at the time. My friends didn't know, my parents didn't know, my educators didn't know. Back then, people didn't appreciate the site so much, but now I can point to good things like LOLcats. Back then, they would have just seen porn.

When did your family find out?

Only when those articles came out last year. I kept it a secret from almost all of my friends and family until 2008. It was five full years of living a double life.

Was your mom shocked?

I don't think anyone was put-off. Four years ago, it was just a porn site. It's matured a lot into something a little more presentable. Now I think they can appreciate it as more than that.



One of the most interesting things about 4chan is that nothing gets archived. Threads disappear within an hour. It's a contradiction -- 4chan is known for creating memes, yet it's designed for them to die so quickly.

The lack of retention lends itself to having fresh content. The joke is that 4chan post is a repost of a repost of a repost. There was a guy who was downloading every image from /b/. He calculated that 80 percent of what's posted has been posted before. So it's survival of the fittest. Ideas that are carried over to the next day are worth repeating. The things that are genuinely funny get carried over.

The reason we're seen as a meme generation factory is because of the unique qualities of the image board and the lack of retention. On other bulletin boards, threads are archived indefinitely. All the big threads have been around for months or years. But with 4chan, something has to be really good to keep getting posted.

How involved are you with Anonymous?

I'm not involved at all.

What do you think about it?

I think it's interesting. When Scientology tried to make the Tom Cruise video disappear, there was this instant mobilization of thousands of people who banded together overnight. They had plans to stage a worldwide protest. I thought that was pretty incredible. I was fascinated by it.

Are there situations where they go too far?

I would say so. Submitting bomb threats -- stuff like that is going too far. You need to be smart about it. You can't just throw it all away with threats, you have to be proactive and productive.

Because there's no membership policy, it seems like anything can get attributed to being an act of Anonymous.

Yeah, now it's become more of a buzzword for the media. Now anytime something happens, it gets labeled as "an act of international hate group Anonymous."

That's why I always personally felt that the movement was destined to fail. You've got two types of people: You have the Anonymous members who are genuinely passionate about dismantling Scientology, but then you have the casual hangers-on who are just there to troll. Because you can't filter it and because the membership is open, Anonymous will always be held back by the bottom rung who are pelting Scientology with eggs and bomb threats and these mischievous juvenile acts. They are holding back the people who take it more seriously. For every step forward Anonymous makes, they can go 10 steps back with one negative headline.

You must feel something similar. 4chan has a mixed public image too.

4chan certainly has a stigma.

And Anonymous seemed to emerge out of 4chan.

Yeah, I would say that's definitely the case. Anonymous culture emerged out of image boards. The rules of these communities spawned some of the original thinking behind the group. But once the Scientology protests started, people outside of 4chan joined. At that point it diverged into its own thing.

How much does it cost to run the site?

About $6,000 per month. That's actually not too bad for a site that is all rich media and has 300 million pageviews. I don't have any overhead past that. I don't have any employees. I don't have an office.

Are you making your money back?

Just barely. We're trying to convince advertisers that our community is worth their ad dollars. That's been a really uphill battle because of our content. Advertisers will Google us and see that we're huge, but they'll also see all these threats and hacks. It scares them away. Overcoming that stigma is difficult.

Have you thought about dropping the controversial board?

People have suggested dropping /b/, but that's the life force of the site. I can't do that. It was the first board, and it will be the last board to go.

I imagine you've seen so many strange things doing this site. What's the most demented thing you've seen?

I'd be happy to email you something. [Laughs.] I've seen some horrible shit. I like to think that I've grown as a person, but at the same time I think a little piece of me continues to die every year.

What have you learned from all this?

I'm still trying to figure that out. I need to start thinking about getting a job. I don't have a resume. I've been asking myself, what have I learned about the internet, what have I learned about myself? At this point, I've been unable to articulate that.

sunday

5 comments

Lev in Time: Facebook is for The Olds.

friday

5 comments

FriendOrFollow.com. Who are you following on Twitter that isn't following you back?

monday

5 comments

Is Yahoo looking to buy Tumblr? Vallewag says so... Update, Karp's response: bullshit (basically).

monday

1 comment

Twitter gets the NY Mag treatment, but with the mark of Will Leitch: How Tweet It Is. It leads with some discussion of the innards of the company and its future revenue models (the traditional story line), but it ends on a future-looking bit about the Hudson plane crash.

saturday

0 comments

Fred Wilson on Facebook opening up API access to user's status updates. "It seems to me, and I am certainly influened as an active user of and investor in Twitter, that status has emerged as the ultimate social gesture." Update: Get Facebook Status Updates as T-Shirts.

tuesday

19 comments

Several people have noticed that I've been getting interesting commenter spam on my site over the last couple days. I've deleted most of it, but I kept it alive on this one post. Why interesting? Because the spam appears to be (actually, almost certainly is) written by actual humans, rather than by spam bots. You can tell because the "commenters" actually seem to address the topic of the post. The only quality that makes it spam is including links to spam-o-licious sites. And now it's gone to an extreme: the spammers are commenting on my comments about spamming, including more spam links. And another reason it's interesting: there must be some significant investment in hiring these spammers. It makes you wonder, is it some sort of off-shore gold farming generating this stuff? I'll continue to delete it, but it does raise an interesting question about actual commenter motives: if you're responding to an issue in a comment, is putting a product in your sig file any different than linking to your personal blog? Is this a case of commenters merely reinventing the product placement?

monday

4 comments

@PleaseRetweet. This is the end / Beautiful friend / This is the end / My only friend, the end.

sunday

15 comments

Twitter is three years old; one of the founders writes about its creation. "For months, we were in Top Secret Alpha because of competing products like the now-defunkt Dodgeball. "

saturday

5 comments

Who Is On Twitter? "people who are just back from a really awesome run."

wednesday

6 comments

Calacanis goes all emo in his post on We Live In Public. While trying to coin a new term, Internet Asperger's Syndrome (IAS), he says: "The classic argument when someone 'famous' gets beat up is to say 'Didn't you ask for this?' Well, actually, no. The reason I got into blogging was not to be famous or to get attention. It was simply to have an intelligent discussion with people I respected. The people I thought were interesting were debating stuff in the blog format, so I was drawn to it." Is there anything left to say in this hatah/empathy, snark/criticism, trolling/creating debate?

monday

5 comments

URLesque had a video booth at ROFLcon where they asked people "What do you love/hate about the internet?" I'm in there hating on hating haters, hatefully.

friday

0 comments

Blah, blah, blah, blah, Bloggies.

friday

2 comments

Boxxy boxxy boxxy boxxy boxxy boxxy boxxy boxxy, part two.

wednesday

0 comments

For NYC developers: NYTimes.com Hack Day.

wednesday

5 comments

Social Media "Experts" are the Cancer of Twitter (and Must Be Stopped). "The zombies then seek each other: You'll always notice that of the 5,000 followers that a social media expert has that all 5,000 of them are also social media 'experts'. Their only form of conversation is to quote each other and live tweet conferences where they gather."

monday

20 comments

Boxxy is about to explode into LonelyGirl15 proportions. UPDATE: Waxy transcribes the video inside, it made Buzzfeed, and this thing will only get bigger throughout the day.

monday

2 comments

Danah Boyd's 406-page PhD dissertation on teens and social networks.

sunday

0 comments

Riffing off an NYT story about YouTube's ascendancy as a search tool, Snarkmarket proposes Youtubeipedia. Update: perhaps this is a start... Wikipedia Beefs Up for Multimedia.

saturday

27 comments

Kottke.org redesigned. No more yellow -- bold! UPDATE: not sure why, but the comments on this post took off, and Jason showed up to say he's now written about a post about it.

friday

2 comments

For anyone following Dodgegate, some links: Rick's Soliloquy, Peter's Last Days, Caroline's Eulogy, Gawker's Take-down, Rachel's Thoughts, and Dens' Retort.

friday

0 comments

New Tumblr, version 5, is out.

thursday

2 comments

On today's I'm Just Sayin Show: Why Do Women's Magazines Suck?

thursday

11 comments

Dodgeball is shutting down (which is news for about a dozen New Yorkers), but Dens is working on a replacement.

wednesday

0 comments

Detailed update on the Twitter account hacks from a couple weeks ago: it was an 18-year-old kid.

sunday

0 comments

So if you want to dabble in this Tumblr thing, here are the Tumblr Award Winners (mysteriously without links, probably because they can't do anything that isn't a reblog -- kidding!)

tuesday

10 comments

HowToUseTwitterForMarketingAndPR.com.

monday

0 comments

Always the best: Kottke's Best Links 08.

monday

0 comments

Another Twitter thought: people love to mention when someone notable shows up on Twitter, whether that be Shaq or Diablo. But no one ever says, "Hey, did you see Shaq has a [MySpace|Facebook|FriendFeed] page?" Anyway, Kurt Anderson is on Twitter.

monday

3 comments

Breaking news from Fox News' Twitter. Looks like someone hacked it. Update #1: It's deleted. It said "Bill O'Riley Is Gay." Update #2: Britney Spears and Rick Sanchez also hacked. [via]

sunday

0 comments

First Mommy Bloggers, now Twitter Moms.

sunday

7 comments

In the comments of this post, my friend Rico makes an interesting comparison: lexapro on Twitter Search vs. lexapro on Google. Very different results! It suggests an interesting question: could conversational knowledge eventually usurp search knowledge -- and doesn't it already, in many ways?

tuesday

1 comment

In the "if you like x, then you'll like y" category, a new WSJ blog: Digits, which some say suspiciously looks like NYT's Bits.

tuesday

19 comments

If we could bundle up the internet into a few snappy headlines, 2008 might look like this:

+ Commenters Went Crazy
+ Twitter & Tumblr Went Mainstream
+ Rickrolling Went Very Mainstream
+ Big Media Went Nowhere
+ Oversharing Went Wild
+ Politicos Went Online
+ 4Chan & Lifecasting Went Awry

If not exactly an admirable time capsule, it still felt something like progress. I personally began the year promising a reduction in my daily internet intake, yet ended it with 100 additional sites in my rss reader. Perhaps it was a resolution meant to be broken.

In previous years, this list was dubbed "The Best Blogs You (Maybe) Aren't Reading." But that wordy contrivance seems presumptuous in these niche-filled times, where everyone seems to read everything yet no one seems to read the same things. So I took some advice that Lindsay gave me last year and dubbed this a collection of "notable" sites instead. That appellation seems more appropriate.

Maybe half of the blogs listed below are new, and the other half deserve attention for having reinvented the medium in some way. Consensus is an impossible task in a world this diverse, but that shouldn't stop us from pointing out excellence when we see it. So here they are, the most notable blogs of the past year:

-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

Special thanks to Rachel, Noah, Andy, Emily, Spencer, Matt, Lindsay, Joanne, Matt, Karina, Kelly, Robin, and Taylor for their tips -- and inspiration -- in compiling this list. See you next year!

-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

This list on previous years: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2006 | 2007

friday

0 comments

New "Know Your Meme": The Lipdub.

thursday

4 comments

There was a rumor floating around that Obama might pick Lessig to run the FCC. Um, guess not -- he wants to demolish it. (Anyone else notice Larry becoming increasingly libertarian lately? It seemed to start with his apology for getting Microsoft wrong in the '90s and more recently we've seen a drastic shift in stance on net neutrality.)

sunday

1 comment

It's starting to feel like if an event was live Twittered, it didn't really happen. This guy tweeted the runway plane crash in Denver yesterday.

friday

0 comments

I kinda love that Twitter is being used for an impromptu nyc snowball fight right now.

tuesday

0 comments

PeopleWhoDeserveIt.com.

saturday

4 comments

IsThisYourPaperOnSingleServingSites.com. [via]

saturday

6 comments

I'm pretty sure Tumblr makes you stupid. [via -- reblogged!] See also: Tumblr is Second Life for people who dont realize they're losers.

monday

9 comments

I helped Rachel launch a new thing today: Charitini. For the moment, it's a hub around doing charitable giving for her birthday, but she's got big plans with expanding it.

thursday

0 comments

Three new interesting features on NYTimes.com: 1) a unique way of handling letters to the editor, and 2) click EXTRA for an alternate view of the homepage with copious external links, and Nicholas Kristof is on Twitter. Clever.

thursday

1 comment

Over on Tumblr (that locked box of inside jokes and sex talk, reminiscent of AOL in 1995 -- OMG, I'M SO KIDDING), a scandal is breaking out because someone named Tara Michelle (dead link now) faked an online identity that eventually led to an online boyfriend. The Tumblr gang is now having fun with the meme. [See previously: Plain Layne, Kaycee Nicole Swenson, etc.]

wednesday

2 comments

Two headlines that ended up next to each other in my rss reader: YouTube Says Monetization is Coming | Twitter Says the Revenue's Coming Soon.

sunday

0 comments

The NYT Mag story on Google's international legal quandries is worth reading. The backdrop is how free speech is defined country-by-country (holocaust denial, for instance, is illegal in France and Germany), especially as it pertains to removing content from YouTube. Lest you think that America is free speech oasis, it also tells the story of how Joe Lieberman has been trying to get YouTube to take down videos produced by Islamic terrorists, even if they don't feature hate speech or violent content.

friday

2 comments

I've been more-or-less offline for a couple weeks. Here's everything that happened in my absence: Shaq joined Twitter, the Macy's Day Parade was rick-rolled, that tween fashion blogger turned out be real, Jarvis yelled at someone again, a super whale fail, Michiko railed against Gladwell, a whole issue of NYT Mag went to screens, SearchWiki, Hannity dumped Colmes, Arrested Development movie... again, and... yeah, not much.

thursday

6 comments

Hoo-fucking-rah. YouTube switched to widescreen. Obama's Weekly Address is no 16:9.

friday

3 comments

Teenager commits suicide on Justin.TV. Sigh.

wednesday

3 comments

I expect a very very very long reply to this over here. (I'm half-way through Jarvis' book, What Would Google Do. Rosenbaum has the right take so far.) Update: there it is, shorter than I guessed it would be.

monday

0 comments

Guess who signed up for Twitter -- Al Gore! Wait, I didn't hear you cheer....

monday

0 comments

For the true Web 2.0 addictive-compulsive personality: UserNameCheck.com. Lookup whether a username is registered on 68 sites.

wednesday

0 comments

MyFirstTweet.com, another production from Noah.

monday

26 comments

David asks what features Tumblr should add, and a bjillion people answer. But no one requests more Tumblettes, so I will!

saturday

0 comments

NYT Styles story on Likemind, Noah's hivemind-cum-meetup-cum-flashmob group.

saturday

1 comment

Heffernan looks at something you've probably encountered, The Hitler Meme, which uses a 2004 German movie to satirize everything and anything -- Sarah Palin, Burning Man, Brett Favre, Obama, Hillary, HD DVD. It's basically FAIL meets Godwin's Law.

friday

0 comments

Twitter trends. See also: twitter.grader.com.

friday

1 comment

This is retarded. Seriously, terrorists can use anything. Why not: "Walkie-talkies and batteries on FBI most-dangerous list"?

thursday

3 comments

Twittering the Day Away. "I have Twitter block...."

tuesday

4 comments

Boutin advises: don't start a blog, start a twitter.

saturday

1 comment

Dude killed his wife because of an update to her Facebook status. Now that's complicated.

friday

0 comments

Qwitter. It tells you when people unsubscribe from your Twitter. So now you know when you've been BAD.

thursday

4 comments

Waxy tried to kill FAIL earlier this year. Now Slate gets all Safire on its entry into the lexicon.

thursday

0 comments

Andrew Sullivan's "Why I Blog" from The Atlantic will probably be the most quoted thing on the internet for the next few days. So here are a few quick excerpts for faking your way through conversations:

A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

But a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms into a painfully public and immediate one. It combines the confessional genre with the log form and exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before.

The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is -- more than any writer of the past -- a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.

Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader. The proximity is palpable, the moment human -- whatever authority a blogger has is derived not from the institution he works for but from the humanness he conveys. This is writing with emotion not just under but always breaking through the surface. It renders a writer and a reader not just connected but linked in a visceral, personal way. The only term that really describes this is friendship. And it is a relatively new thing to write for thousands and thousands of friends.

A good blog is your own private Wikipedia.

People have a voice for radio and a face for television. For blogging, they have a sensibility.

To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm's length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth.

The triumphalist notion that blogging should somehow replace traditional writing is as foolish as it is pernicious. In some ways, bloggings gifts to our discourse make the skills of a good traditional writer much more valuable, not less. The torrent of blogospheric insights, ideas, and arguments places a greater premium on the person who can finally make sense of it all, turning it into something more solid, and lasting, and rewarding.

tuesday

0 comments

The 15 dumbest names for Web 2.0 startups.

tuesday

0 comments

YouTube now second-most-popular search engine.

monday

7 comments

Chicago has mysteriously become ground central for the local online media battle. The Onion recently launched its entertainment portal, Decider, in Chicago. Huffington Post last month launched its local effort in Chicago. NBC just launched a new affiliate site, NBCChicago.com, that is heavily entertainment-based. Curbed and Eater will be spreading there soon, and EveryBlock also hails from ChiTown. And in addition to the normal Gothamist and MetroBlog presence, Gapers Block has a huge following.

saturday

0 comments

Workflow for Online Editorial Content. Somewhere in there is "write story."

friday

0 comments

New "Know Your Meme" segment on Rocketboom: O RLY?

wednesday

1 comment

YouTube, Now in Super HD.

tuesday

0 comments

Vallewag rumor: Google wants to buy EveryBlock. (Previously: my interview with Holovaty.)

sunday

0 comments

Esquire's decent story on the Google diaspora.

friday

0 comments

Are you a rabble-rousing blogger who worries they might get sued? You can now take out liability insurance!

friday

3 comments

Hahahaha chart.

thursday

1 comment

Slate: How Do Bloggers Make Money?

thursday

1 comment

Disenchanted by the lack of good information about the economic bailout, Matt starts a new site, The Money Meltdown, to collaboratively assemble the best information.

wednesday

3 comments

Google 2001. Search the index from seven years ago.

tuesday

1 comment

Alley Insider: Has NBC Figured Out Web Video?

tuesday

0 comments

Biz Week: The 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

monday

1 comment

Is snark killing the web? Have at it, kids. Update: Gawker sez, "If there was less snark, the world would maybe, possibly be a better place. But it would be way less fun."

monday

0 comments

A new study reveals that narcissists can be identified on Facebook. As if you needed science.

monday

0 comments

Gospelr. Twitter for bible freaks. [via]

saturday

1 comment

The Anonyblogger. Fake is the new anonymous.

friday

0 comments

Whether you call it a "blog war" or a "blog theater," more proof that the commenters are winning: commenters take over Slog thread and create an impromptu play about George Washington.

thursday

3 comments

Waxy on Attack of the Show chatting about the Sarah Palin email.

tuesday

3 comments

The link bait to beat all link bait: The 50 Buzziest Blog Posts of All Time. (Not bad, though. Full of nostalgia.)

monday

0 comments

Twitter's CEO on how traditional media is Tweeting. "Twitter provides a great man-on-the-street account of what's happening right now." Update #1: in a twist, Gawker scolds Dorsey on race/class issues and compares it to relying on commenters. Update #2: TwitterIsAPenis.com.

monday

1 comment

The Big Money, Slate.com's new business site, launches today. As NYT suggests, it could be the best worst day in recent financial history to launch a financial publication. Features will include a blog dedicated to Google, an ad comparison engine, and a Twitter account that takes jabs at WSJ. (Disclaimer or whatever: I might write for it.)

tuesday

0 comments

Google Turns 20 (speculative fiction). [via]

tuesday

2 comments

Yammer.com. It's basically a private-label Twitter for corporations. [via]

monday

0 comments

Nick Carr on Google's 10-year anniversary.

sunday

3 comments

It was inevitable: The Twitties.

saturday

3 comments

Sorry to ruin your weekend, but you have another internet-related NYT Magazine story to read: Brave New World of Digital Intimacy. (It's Clive though, so it should be okay. But it can wait until you're back from shooting wolves from airplanes.)

saturday

0 comments

This is just the kind of good publicity bump that MySpace needs: MySpace Cofounder Tom Anderson Was A Real Life WarGames Hacker in 1980s.

thursday

0 comments

NYT catches up on the Truman Show Delusion (in Styles, nice). [Previously]

wednesday

60 comments

Haughey on the demise of commenting over the years. It's tough because I love blogs and I love comments in blogs, but I'm starting to think there's this "new generation" that has grown up online only knowing blogs as having snarky comment areas and never realizing it used to be a personal, intimate space where you'd never say anything in a comment that you wouldn't say to a friend's face. Yes.

monday

3 comments

The most boring site on the planet, FriendFeed has a new beta redesign, which is still mighty sucky, but it has added the most important feature in the history of social networks, Fake Following, which TechCrunch describes as a "seemingly unintuitive feature that allows users to look like they're following their friends without actually getting their updates." More like this, please.

monday

0 comments

Google results for "[x] girls [y] cups". [via]

sunday

2 comments

The New York Times has a link blog. My work is done here. [via]

sunday

4 comments

Some days I feel like turning off my RSS reader and just watching this all day.

thursday

0 comments

Two interesting personal management startups that launched today: Daytum (in beta) is a home for collecting your daily data; Itsaris is a bookmarking site for storing entire web pages.

thursday

0 comments

5 Ways the Newspaper Botched the Web. A nice little history of early newspaper consortium projects starting as far back as 1983, including one ugly company I was involved in.

thursday

4 comments

It seems such a small revolution, but one of things I instituted at msnbc.com was embeddable video. A year later, no other site affiliated with a news network had gotten on board -- until recently. It looks like cnn.com just added an "embed" button. [via]

monday

2 comments

Memorize these: 14 Ways to Use Twitter Politely.

monday

4 comments

Six Apart puts the domain to use: Blogs.com. It's basically an editorialized aggregator.

monday

1 comment

Chicago Tribune Magazine cover story on Adrian Holovaty (cover), whom I interviewed earlier this year. Update: EveryBlock has launched in three more cities... Seattle, DC, and Boston.

thursday

0 comments

For those of you who were shocked to see that Exxon was on Twitter: it was fake.

wednesday

17 comments

Random blogging etiquette observation: it's curious that bloggers almost never link to the "printer friendly" version of a story, when that version is more visually pleasing and usually advert-free. (Even more strangely, the only person I can think of who occasionally uses that link is Romenesko.) Is this actual courtesy, or mere convenience? And what would happen if every blogger started to suddenly change their seemingly good-willed linking practice?

monday

1 comment

Salon tries to reintroduce the old blogger tipping system.

monday

21 comments

[Apologies for the insidery nature of this, but just this once.] Hey Blakeley, you managed to wrap what I like least about both Gawker and Tumblr in one simple paragraph! There's a whole established history of crediting links -- Gawker and Tumblr are the most flagrant abusers of that history.

thursday

0 comments

A timeline of internet memes. [via]

thursday

5 comments

AsPostedontheNYTimes.com. Some dude who appears to be crazy is cataloging all the comments he makes on NYTimes.com blogs.

wednesday

0 comments

How much of a meme has it been this summer? So much, that it's even in The Onion now: Local Idiot To Post Comment On Internet. "After clicking the 'submit' button, I will immediately refresh the page so that I can view my own comment. I will then notice that my comment has not appeared because the server has not yet processed my request, become angry and confused, and re-post the same comment with unintentional variations on the original wording and misspellings, creating two slightly different yet equally moronic comments. It is my hope that this will illustrate both my childlike level of impatience and my inability to replicate a simple string of letters and symbols 30 seconds after having composed it."

tuesday

0 comments

Google is working on a venture capital arm?

sunday

2 comments

Sousveillance

sunday

2 comments

Responses from Weev, Fortuny, and Schwartz to the NYT Mag troll article. Update, from the comments: Heffernan & Weev 2.0. Update: Fortuny Gets Sued.

saturday

3 comments

NYT: Don't Want to Talk About It? Order a Missed Call. The story uses SlyDial, a service that allows you to leave a voicemail without letting the person hear their phone ring, to set up a thesis about "tools that let users avoid direct communication." Clever thesis, but it rubs dangerously close to falling apart when it cites other tools (including Twitter and Facebook) which create more direct communication, not less.

friday

2 comments

The last episode of lonelygirl15 will be released today. WHAT? YOU HAVEN'T BEEN WATCHING?

thursday

7 comments

Pretty much designed to explode the internet, NYT Magazine's story on trolls: Malwebolence. Who knew these people were self-identified? Welcome to backlash to the backlash to the backlash. Link stream: Metafilter | NY Mag | Slashdot | Digg | Gawker | Weev.

thursday

0 comments

Delicious.com (no more periods!) relaunched with a new design. They even made you a movie.

thursday

0 comments

This is long, but it's actually pretty fantastic, if you're into academic studies of goofy internet phenom: An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube, from the guy who did The Machine is Us/ing Us. [via]

thursday

1 comment

Good Valleywag headline: Forrester acquires Jupiter, creating monopoly in Internet quote-factory market.

wednesday

0 comments

From Lewis Black's Root of All Evil: How Blog Comments Could Have Ruined America. See also: Jarvis' recent tirade. And also: Merlin Mann on bystander culture. And, wtf, Bob Garfield interviewing Ira Glass on commenters. What the hell -- Poniewozik too. Will commenters be the Time Person of the Year?

tuesday

0 comments

Two okay follow-ups to Sunday's NYT internet literacy story: long-form non-fiction is needlessly overwritten and the idea of literacy is changing.

tuesday

0 comments

StupidFilter tries to programmatically identify stupid comments. Good luck with that!

tuesday

3 comments

SF's version of Jakob/Julia: the public breakup of Tara Hunt and Chris Messina. [via] Update: responses from Chris and Tara.

monday

12 comments

Cuil, or not.

monday

1 comment

Tilzy: Get Your War On, the animated series.

monday

1 comment

The predix apps are back: Predictify + WashingtonPost.com. [via]

thursday

8 comments

Yeah, I thought it looked a little familiar too.

wednesday

0 comments

Google's sorta-take on Wikipedia, Knol, went live today. More deets.

tuesday

2 comments

Ryan is leaving Engadget; Moe is leaving Jezebel; your Tumblr looks great!

monday

0 comments

Twitter has a new nemesis: USA Today. Didn't see that one coming!

monday

0 comments

Two psychiatrists "believe they have discovered a signature mental illness of the YouTube era: patients who claim they are subjects of their own reality TV shows." You mean, I'm not? [via]

monday

1 comment

Though perhaps the most statistically dubious and blatantly linkbaitish list of all time, I have only one response to NowPublic's MostPublic Index: suck it, Sklar!

sunday

1 comment

Y Combinator's Paul Graham: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund.

saturday

1 comment

"How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?" Heffernan gets all Safirey: Online writing is a typographical and grammatical mess. Should we fix it? Hey, lookie there, Derrida reference.

friday

0 comments

Now everything is oversharing, according to the commentocracy.

thursday

12 comments

It's been a while since you've asked -- actually, you've never asked -- but let me tell you... my favorite new blog is This Recording. What we have here is failure to communicate... strange little essays, or collages, usually around people, like Cronenberg or Ashbery or Anselm or Scarlett or Diablo or Sun Ra or Pasolini or Sasha (!!!), that are pieced together with aphorisms, links, pictures, and music, with lots of italics and ellipses. You don't really "read" the posts so much as "scan" them, which is not the same as "skim" -- it takes time. Sometimes they adopt the style of a writer -- Brett Easton Ellis -- and other times it's just something random like deducing who killed Chris Farley. Even the straight-up stuff, like the memo to Hollywood on which books to adapt, has this strange outsider voice. Most of the writers are, I think, from LA, or at least it feels like LA. It's not done-with-it-all jaded like NYC or earnestly passive-aggressive like the Midwest. It's more like some crazy ass pastiche, like this random thing about Mad Men from a few days ago, which we can either call an "essay" or visual-poetry-media-criticism-mashup. Whatevski, I could read this Molly person all day. Update: "when Walt Whitman liveblogged Abraham Lincoln's funeral".

thursday

1 comment

Hey West Coasties, don't forget, you have your own Julia too. "I wonder if the discrepancy between Internet fame and real fame has something to do with being so hate-based?"

wednesday

0 comments

Since I'm talking about comment culture too much lately, linking to Gessen's new post seems required. "I think, generally speaking, that every site gets the commenters it deserves... It's disingenuous for people writing online, especially for people who are expert at writing online, to pretend like the commenters they attract (over and over again) are somehow incidental to the work they do, or the context in which they do it... You may not be legally responsible for the things that appear on your site, but you are I think morally responsible." See also: Choire thinks NYT should sue anon commenters. Controversial!

tuesday

0 comments

NYTimes.com blog count: 70+ and rising.

tuesday

16 comments

Kottke: Just. Don't. Look. It's great advice if you're tired of the relentless "look at me!" blog onslaught, but it's more difficult if you feel compelled to be in touch with it all -- able to talk about all corners of politics/culture/media/tech. Sometimes you need to see bad movies to recognize the good ones, ya know?

tuesday

0 comments

Google is testing social search.

tuesday

0 comments

Twitter bought Summize, which now redirects to search.twitter.com.

monday

2 comments

Commenters Are A Trend.

saturday

0 comments

I read Wikipedia's Lamest Edit Wars for sustenance.

saturday

3 comments

Though it might seem that every ounce of nuance has been sucked out of this whole "commenter culture" meme -- yesterday it was Time with "Post Apocalypse" and previously it was NYT Styles with "All-Stars of the Clever Riposte" and NY Mag with "The What You Are Afraid Of" -- I'm still convinced there are some missing pieces, even if I can't put my finger on them....

saturday

7 comments

A lot of people (and by "a lot" I mean the 47 people who are trudging through this whole confessional bloggy moment) will find Chez Pazienza's "Droll Models" in HuffPo edifying.

saturday

5 comments

Calacanis quit blogging too. The internet is eating itself.

friday

6 comments

Jorn of Robot Wisdom, who invented link blogging, takes up Warren Ellis' critique from earlier this week in which he said, "The world does not need another linkblog." It might seem that I'd naturally rally around Jorn on this one, but I'll say this instead: if Fimoc had not existed for the past way-too-many years, and I had to invent something now... I would probably not try to invent a link blog. We are compelled by our histories.

thursday

2 comments

This should momentarily balance those other lists: Fifty Most Influential Female Bloggers.

thursday

0 comments

NY Mag just bought MenuPages. NowPublic just bought Truemors.

thursday

8 comments

Hello, future: WSJ on 4chan. Update from the comments: Time also has a 4chan story today.

wednesday

38 comments

This response to the Jezebel Incident is getting passed around a lot right now in Tumble-land. I think there's something smart to this reaction... but I also think there's the voice of dad saying "You kids should learn your place." (I shouldn't be trying to unpack this on a link blog!)

wednesday

1 comment

You favorite Tumblr for the next five minutes: One Person Trend Stories. (It's media criticism, fiction, humor, and decent writing, all wrapped in one.)

tuesday

3 comments

Buzzfeed announces $3.5 million in funding. Congrats, Jonah and company.

tuesday

2 comments

New from Google today: Lively, a Second Life knock-off.

tuesday

1 comment

I love the "In Popular Culture" section of nearly every Wikipedia article (which inevitably has at least one Simpsons reference). XKCD does too. Unfortunately, some Wikipedians took that one seriously. [via]

monday

0 comments

Good issue of Technology Review this month, populated with articles about various Web 2.0 conundrums (privacy, data portability, internet gridlock) and companies (Plaxo, Facebook, KickApps, Twitter, Pownce, Qik).

monday

1 comment

Makes me wish I had actually finished a year of Japanese in college: Wired gallery of Japan's Hottest Celebrity Bloggers.

sunday

0 comments

NYT profile of the downforeveryoneorjustme.com creator, who uncoincidentally works at Twitter.

saturday

3 comments

Good column on this whole over-sharing debate: The Overshare War. "I think the people who complain about oversharing are snobs. They want their art filtered, processed, sanitized and read-only. They don't object to emotion per se, they just want it managed and packaged for them."

wednesday

3 comments

ChaCha.com. Huh, I've never heard of this before, but you text a question to 242242 and a human texts you back an answer. [via]

wednesday

0 comments

VioletBlueVioletBlue.net, an archive of the deleted BoingBoing posts. [via]

wednesday

0 comments

The exact median blog post: "I was new to the city and scared, so I drank too much and met someone." That's it, I quit.

wednesday

0 comments

Radar: An Extremely Brief History Of Blog Feuds.

tuesday

7 comments

Update: Xeni wrote to point out that the reason the post was deleted was because it was accidentally double-posted to BoingBoing Gadgets. I'm sorry for the misunderstanding, which basically invalidates most of what I say below.

LAT's Web Scout on Violet Blue's scrubbing from BoingBoing. I've got an inkling of an idea of what happened, based upon previous gossip I heard. But I'll wait for a while to see what emerges. Anyway, some people have been asking me what exactly BoingBoing deleted about me. I've decided to reproduce the post, which was originally at this location, but is now gone:

Filmolicious [sic] dug a 15-year-old copy of Wired issue 1.0 out and gave it a loving, thoroughgoing examination through the lens of history. My life was changed by that issue -- I read it on the bus on the way to university in Waterloo, Ontario, got off the bus, took one look at the campus, and thought, "Christ, why am I here, when all this stuff is going on out there?" A few months later, I'd dropped out to program CD ROMs for the Voyager company, whose wares had been reviewed in that inaugural issue.

I remember exactly where I was when the first issue of Wired was handed to me. Exiting a coffee shop called The Urban Stampede -- the only coffee shop within 70 miles of the small midwest state school I was attending -- a friend accosted me, clutching a mysterious magazine with a striped spine. He shoved it in my hands, exasperated, "You have to see this." Wired instantly became required reading for all of our friends.

And our favorite part of the magazine was buried in the back, in the pages that articles jumped to: the colophon.

There were probably two reasons why we loved the colophon: 1) we had no idea what a colophon was, and 2) it showed the means of production of the magazine. The colophon listed the computers (Apple Macintosh II), the printers (HP Scanjet IIc), the layout software (Quark XPress), and even the routers (Farallon). And then it concluded with some music (Dinosaur Jr., Curve, k.d. lang, etc.) and a final heading for "drugs of choice" (caffeine, sugar, Advil).

My post that they are referencing is here, and the reason I think it was deleted is here.

See also: MeFi erupts in speculation.

UPDATE #1: BoingBoing responds, sorta.

UPDATE #2: Valleywag floats rumors.

sunday

0 comments

ENOUGH with the parties, where is the innovation? What the fuck are we celebrating anyhow? Of course I happen to like parties, but I agree with Ethan's point about Mashable. Seriously, when the fuck was the last time you heard someone say, "You must read this Mashable post"? And it's in the Technorati Top 10! Whatever, great parties though!

saturday

7 comments

Tomorrow Museum takes up the issue of BoingBoing deleting posts from people who are marginally critical of the site. It happened to me a few months ago too, seemingly because I wrote this, more as a disappointed fan than a disgruntled rage machine. It's a nasty moment online right now, where a lot of people are trying to figure out how to write critically about internet society and its participants while not joining the throng of noisy hatah culture. BoingBoing's tactics suggest they are on the wrong side of this debate.

friday

0 comments

Sasha Frere-Jones guest-stars on Pot Psychology. Looks like he didn't smoke enough.

friday

1 comment

Deadspin's conversation with Buzz Bissinger. This conversation is becoming ground central for this debate about the public internet, commenter culture, and the tone of online chatter.

friday

3 comments

Without comment, I give you:

19TH NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
(Jagger/Richards)

You're the kind of person
You meet at certain dismal dull affairs.
Center of a crowd, talking much too loud
Running up and down the stairs.
Well, it seems to me that you have seen too much in too few years.
And though you've tried you just can't hide
Your eyes are edged with tears.

You better stop
Look around
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.

When you were a child
You were treated kind
But you were never brought up right.
You were always spoiled with a thousand toys
But still you cried all night.
Your mother who neglected you
Owes a million dollars tax.
And your father's still perfecting ways of making sealing wax.

You better stop, look around
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes
Here comes your nilne-teenth nervous breakdown.

Oh, who's to blame, that girl's just insane.
Well nothing I do don't seem to work,
It only seems to make matters worse. Oh please.

You were still in school
When you had that fool
Who really messed your mind.
And after that you turned your back
On treating people kind.
On our first trip
I tried so hard to rearrange your mind.
But after while I realized you were disarranging mine.

You better stop, look around
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.

friday

0 comments

I killed Tim Russert (on Wikipedia), aka why editing Wikipedia still is exciting.

thursday

0 comments

After another completely retarded week for those who live publicly on the internet, some advice from Will Leitch: Someone Hates You Online. Try Not To Be Offended.

wednesday

0 comments

Wired's story on ROFLcon, by Brian Raftery.

saturday

0 comments

Create your own Yahoo resignation letter: Yahoorezinr.com. Poor Yahoo.

thursday

0 comments

The Twitter Hall of Shame: 50 Tweets That Will Echo in History.

thursday

3 comments

My favorite blog right now, you ask? The answer is not Keith Gessen's Tumblr, which causes much brow rumpling and eyebrow raising. (Sometimes I read his posts like poetry, repeating the lines, hoping that something will reveal itself. It's annoying because I really believe someone should be carrying the flag he's unfurled and raised. There's a legit point in his ruckus, but I just don't know where the fuck he's going with it.) No, my favorite blog right now is my pal Joanne's Tomorrow Museum. She has been doing careful thought pieces on little cultural phenomena. Sure, I like the stuff on internet celebrity -- Microcelebrity and Frienemies and We Live in Public -- but there's also the essay on Boss Culture and the one about Hypertext and the Kindle. She has a super-informed voice that eschews trickery. Maybe this is the flag we should be flying under.

wednesday

7 comments

The news that Reddit is going open-source got me thinking about other sites that have done the same. The three other examples I could come up with are Slashdot, LiveJournal, and Consumating. All seem to be, well, increasingly obsolete. (A different debate might be does Slashdot still matter? I'm sure it's audience is still sizable, but does it matter?) Are there any better examples? And who would benefit from this, if anyone?

wednesday

0 comments

The One Red Paperclip Guy (refresher: he started with a paperclip and kept trading up until he had a house -- and then he published a book about it) is now trying to trade his house. So far, he's gotten one proposal: a red paper clip.

wednesday

0 comments

YouTube: dude getting a Tay Zonday tattoo. Weird. [via]

wednesday

6 comments

Over the past couple months, I've been working with New York Magazine to develop some stories related to internet media. The first is "The Microfame Game", an analysis of how micro-celebrity is generated, with advice on how you -- yes you! -- can use the internet's self-publishing tools along with the new networked media machine to generate well-deserved acclaim. The eight-step plan is intentionally cheeky, but it's also probably helpful, if you're the kind of crazy person looking to create a successful online identity.

My original inspiration for writing about this topic was Kevin Kelly's essay 1,000 True Fans, which is a motivating take on how small amount of renown can be turned into a successful career. In thinking about the idea, I smacked out the three paragraphs below, which never made it into the story but can serve as the spark of the original idea:

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a rock star. I wanted to stand in front of large groups of people and scream at them. I wanted to proclaim my love for their mid-size city and then show them my genitals. I had no interest in becoming a musician, because I wanted to be a rock star.

Before the internet, or before whatever weird historical moment we're in that causes us to overuse the phrase "before the internet," being a rock star used to signify something grandiose. As subcultures arose, the term itself became imbued with meaning beyond music: one could be the "rock star of sushi" or the "rock star of hedge funds."

And now, with an eroding mass culture, and with the internet slicing everything to tasty bite-sized morsels, the "rock stars of _____" are the only rock stars who matter. With subcultures now the dominant culture, the only solution is retreating to the fringes and joining these new niche rock stars, the microfamous....

Read the Full Article at NYMag.com.

wednesday

0 comments

Mark Cuban stays on message with his rant against YouTube: Hulu is kicking Youtube's Ass. At least he's got a point this time...

wednesday

0 comments

Where Are They Now? Profiles of first-generation dot-coms eToys, Webvan, Pets.com, Boo, TheGlobe.com, Entertaindom, Excite@Home, Kozmo, Garden.com, and DrKoop.com -- early giants that I bet most of the dot-com kids have never hear of. [via]

tuesday

1 comment

TimesPeople (FAQ). It's an NYT app (a Firefox add-on) that you can use to "create a network of like-minded readers." You add friends and it adds a social networking bar to the top of NYTimes.com. There's also a Facebook app. Some people will likely criticize the closed nature of this, or the "do I need another social network?" aspect, but I think this is a smart move. UPDATE: Caroline's CNET story.

sunday

1 comment

How we read online. Yup.

friday

0 comments

Slog + Gawker + Commenters = Mean Commenters Are Running Bloggers Out of Town. This seems like a good way to wrap up a truly fucked up week on the internet.

friday

0 comments

Post-post-post-post-insidery: Keith Gessen Is The Internet.

thursday

8 comments

Vanity Fair: The Blog Matrix. [via] UPDATE: NY Mag responds.

wednesday

1 comment

All of the five-word Webby speeches. Colbert: "Me, me, me, me, me!!!" Update: video from WSJ.

tuesday

3 comments

Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

monday

8 comments

Keep me away from Rock Band from now on, m'kay? But that Tumblr party was fun, right? (Me, me, not me.)

monday

0 comments

YouTube for the paranormal set: Para-Tube.com.

thursday

5 comments

The Ira Glass Twitter page that made a lot of people giddy has changed its named to "Fake Ira Glass." Sorry kids, you were punked.

thursday

1 comment

TechCrunch launched Elevator Pitches yesterday. Make a video to pitch your startup idea, then upload it. I'm not sure why, but this sorta annoys me.

wednesday

1 comment

Vanity Fair: Very long oral history of the internet.

monday

0 comments

Decent: Can subcultures still thrive in the glare of the digital age?

monday

3 comments

NYT discovers Garfield Minus Garfield.

monday

0 comments

Plurk is Twitter on a timeline. Kinda sexy. See also, minimalism taken to its furthest logical conclusion: Adocu.

thursday

9 comments

I think this, partially, is what I was also trying to say:

It's not far off to say that the demographic that cared about this story most was the New York new media crowd. That group's open access to megaphones and soapboxes belies its exceedingly small and unrepresentative nature -- so much so that with a collective eye blink it can light up the blogosphere with vituperative chatter about what's, after all, just a story about the by now unsurprising pitfalls of playing with the Web's peephole-filled boundaries between public and private.

wednesday

0 comments

ROFLcon, last month's internet meme conference in Cambridge, appears to be now taking its act on the road. Events of some sort are scheduled this summer in Chicago, Seattle, San Fran, and NYC. They need to go wherever this kid is.

tuesday

0 comments

Emily is doing a Q&A after that NYT Mag story. Also, she was on NPR's Day to Day.

tuesday

1 comment

A new "best of Twitter" application: Favrd. From the blog post about it: "By any means necessary, web-strategy, social-media, online-marketing webcocks -- unaware as they are of how toxic their presence is in the arenas they cannot shut up about -- must and shall be filtered out of view." Perfect.

tuesday

0 comments

It's like they're uping the ante: NY Mag cover story on blog commenters.

monday

1 comment

Must-read debate: Twitter! TechCrunch?

thursday

21 comments

Emily's NYT Magazine cover story: "Exposed." Chat windows across NYC are lit up like ticker-tape parades right now. (I haven't read it yet.) Update: Alright, I've read it. I vomited out a ridiculous amount of nonsense (with footnotes!) in the comments.

tuesday

0 comments

Denton got ahold of the cover to the upcoming NYT Mag expose by Emily Gould, which will have everyone in nyc media blogland in a tizzy this weekend.

monday

0 comments

Twitter seems to be bringing out the experimentation in people... TweetWire.com tries to build a newspaper out of Twitter posts. And Firehose is just that.

wednesday

0 comments

Hadn't heard this one: CurrentTV Offered $100 Million For Digg In 2006.

monday

1 comment

Twictionary.

wednesday

2 comments

Blah, blah, blah.... Webby Award Winners... blah, blah, blah.

monday

0 comments

The headlines will write themselves... GodTube has raised $30 million. Holy fuck.

saturday

0 comments

NYT Sunday Styles feature on Jezebel . (Hey Kruc, what's the state of that commenter party? And please, be careful with how you spell Jezzies this time.)

thursday

0 comments

Rocketboom posts another of my favorites from ROFL Con: David Weinberger's keynote.

thursday

0 comments

Mena Trott imagines what it would be like if videoblogging were available to us in 1994, which actually isn't that different from if I did a videoblog now. UPDATE: Videogum did a fake videoblog too. [via]

thursday

8 comments

Place your bets on the make-believe Twitter follower race between Ira (800+), Diablo (700+), and Julia (600+). I'm still winning, but this can't last much longer!

wednesday

1 comment

Facebook in Real Life. [via]

wednesday

0 comments

One of my favorite presentations at ROFL Con last weekend was Jason Scott's aggressive tour of pre-LOL memes. Rocketboom caught the action.

thursday

7 comments

Best single serving site ever: IsMikeArringtonADick.com.

tuesday

4 comments

Chart: How Viral Works, aka The Hegemony of NYC Tumblrs.

tuesday

5 comments

New viral internet content blog from AOL: Urlesque.com. Gawker says it will destroy me, but they haven't heard about my miraculous new compensation model that will DESTROY them. Pageview bonus compensation? Phrack that, number six six six! We're going PPF -- that's right, Pay Per Fuck. Consider this the press release: the Fimoc blogging empire will compensate its employees based on how often they get laid. As the only metric that matters in blogland, it will force my minions to greater heights than your intern commenters and non-celebs could ever imagine. (LINK TO THAT PSHIT, AOL!)

monday

0 comments

SixApart buys Apperceptive, launches ad network. Congrats to David Jacobs and company, who I've been working with a bit, because nearly everyone in online nyc media has worked with them at some point. Update: Anil's post.

thursday

4 comments

Kevin Kelly: "Digital things I've been wrong about." A list of predix he got wrong -- Photoshop, Quicken, eBay, etc. What would be at the top of my list? Easy: Huffington Post. The internet, after all, is supposed to be anti-celebrity, yet it continually proves me wrong. So, your biggest prediction gaffe?

thursday

18 comments

My favorite Facebook Lexicon graph. My second-favorite. Yours?

wednesday

2 comments

Michael Arrington doesn't like to make corrections. He'll even block you if you suggest he's wrong.

tuesday

1 comment

New uber-meme: unquitting. Hugh, Julia, Andrew -- I'm looking at you. (Can we blame it all on Choire?)

tuesday

22 comments

A bunch of random domains that I own, which, when clicked on, redirect back to this site, for now: viewsource.tv, azineaboutyoutube.com, seattlespeak.com, fimicolous.com, ficklecorp.com, remoter.tv, saltychewy.tv, voyeuse.tv, rexsorgatz.com, watchingparis.com, realfakereal.com. It's like a history of forgotten and future projects. Fess up, what are your weird domains?

monday

1 comment

The rumors are true: three of the Gawker Media sites are being spun off. Wonkette is going to Ken Layne; Gridskipper is going to Lock; Idolator is going to Buzznet. Update: Gawker post | Wonkette post | Valleywag post (where Denton is dropping juicy comments).

sunday

2 comments

This should replace Rick Rolling. [via]

sunday

2 comments

Andrew is auctioning his Twitter account on eBay. He has 1,395 1,542 followers, which right now is worth $510 $1,125. I have 1,034 followers, and plan to sell all of them up the river if that bitch hits four figures. Update: It hit four figures. But if you look at the bidders on the auction, you see lots of people who have recently tried to purchase domain names on eBay. So, sorry Andrew, but I think you're selling yourself to spammers.

friday

0 comments

"Flickr video ate my baby for breakfast" -- this and more, on Twitter.

thursday

0 comments

From Merlin: Twitter Profile Page Ideas. Mm-hm.

wednesday

1 comment

I'm writing this at 10 pm ET, which is usually around the time that newspapers break their big stories online from tomorrow's papers. Tonight a funny thing happened. WSJ just reported that Yahoo and AOL were close to brokering a merger that would thwart Microsoft's bid for Yahoo. But NYT also just published their story claiming that Microsoft and News Corp were in negotiations to make a joint bid for Yahoo. The stories don't necessarily contradict each other, but they are clearly written from radically different sources. I say we just merge them all and call it Yahooglenewscorpaolsoft.

wednesday

1 comment

Radar: Web's 10 Most Hated People.

monday

0 comments

The internet show that Twitter spawned? Sure, that's what You Look Nice Today (iTunes) is. It comes from the medium's three best voices: @lonelysandwich [Adam Lisagor], @hotdogsladies [Merlin Mann], and @scottsimpson [er, Scott Simpson].

saturday

0 comments

Jack Shafer rants about links on news websites, including seo-friendly keywords, keyword popup ads, and other topics.

thursday

2 comments

Craigslist now has a blog. [via]

wednesday

0 comments

Current.com redesigned, and it now includes a new video news show updated every hour. Hm, not sure about the computer-narrated voice though... [via]

friday

1 comment

In "An Example of Creative Commons Not Working", my pal Aaron talks about how his Flickr photo was stolen by BoingBoing without attribution. (I've tipped it to Valleywag, who will probably title this "Cory Doctorow Is a Hypocrite.") Update: Cory apologized.

friday

3 comments

Got an idea for a stupid YouTube video? Whatever it is, it's not nearly as bad as the SEO Rapper. [via]

wednesday

4 comments

The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs. Drudge = $10 mil, BoingBoing = $8 mil, Gawker Media = $150 mil, etc. [via]

tuesday

3 comments

NYT yesterday: "[Rick Astley] has not spoken publicly about the meme and efforts to reach him through his agent were unsuccessful." Maybe no one has tried hard enough, because LAT tracked him down for his comments on the most important meme of our time. (Also, Rick Astley looks ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like Rick Astley.)

monday

0 comments

Quotably tracks Twitter conversations -- a feature that Twitter desperately needs. [Me on Quotably and Twitter.]

sunday

0 comments

In this week's NYT Mag, my pal Tom writes a profile of Patients Like Me, a networking site where people enter their medical conditions and talk about them. I like the charts.

sunday

0 comments

LAT story on life-casting, starring Calacanis and Qik.

saturday

0 comments

Andy is on an important mission: to kill the FAIL meme.

wednesday

2 comments

Five "Web 2.0" ways to break up with your boyfriend.

tuesday

2 comments

Last week I saw a presentation for a site called Cafe Mom -- ya know, a social network for moms. I started joking that Cafe MILF would probably be more successful. Then today I read that Cafe Mom landed $12 million in funding. Huh, maybe I'm not so clever.

friday

1 comment

Scientology responds to Anonymous with YouTube video. Up next: attacking Gawker with a Facebook widget.

thursday

4 comments

[SXSW-influenced post #4.] So yeah, Lacygate. Not that you need another opinion, but since I was there... My take is that the audience reaction was unnecessarily harsh, and based mostly on style than substance. Some people have criticized her for "softball questions," but I don't think those people have ever been to a keynote before. Rather, it was mostly her passive-aggressive interview style that seemed to annoy the masses. And make no mistake about it -- the audience really was annoyed. (It's interesting to read the opinions of people who weren't there -- their perspective is similar to that of Lacy herself, who was clueless of the mounting tension until nearly the end. But if you were sitting in that room, you could feel something horrible was about to happen.) Even if the crowd was over-reacting, it was surreal how aggressive Lacy became toward the audience once she realized what was happening. She could easily have recovered pretty quickly, but instead chose to get combative with a couple thousand bloggers. It was like a lesson in how not to manage a community -- like Web 2.0 in reverse.

thursday

2 comments

[SXSW-influenced post #3.] The best SXSW presentations are never explicitly educational. Most of what's left to be learned from others about online interaction is around what not to do. Which is why Andy's Worst Website Ever session was my favorite. (My contribution would have been my idea to do a print zine about YouTube. I'm not even really kidding.)

thursday

7 comments

[SXSW-influenced post #1.] Julia has sworn that she's going to make her Tumblr more mature. This could be interesting/disastrous to watch. Meanwhile, people like Ryan want to ban mentions of her from the internet. It's understandable. However, Julia's most recent post about breaking up and the internet is actually a decent attempt (counterpoint!) at talking about something more substantiative -- and it reveals a lot of what I suspect some people will be talking about in big mainstream media places over the next couple months. Even I have become fatigued by the way break ups have become massive public events!

thursday

2 comments

News you can use! HowManyFiveYearOldsCouldYouTakeInAFight.com.

tuesday

2 comments

Spielberg is starting a social networking site for "users who've had or who are interested in sharing paranormal and extraterrestrial experiences." Zoinks.

monday

0 comments

Arrington starts off with something of a point about Valleywag, which seems to be getting less interesting as it gets desperate for scandal. (The whole Jimmy Wales storyline that it's currently obsessed with is just boring. And it sorta makes me feel sorry for everyone involved. Which is hard to do!) But Arrington's faux-ethicist values aren't up to the task -- he eventually loses our attention by playing the suicide card. It's a ridiculous gesture, especially since everyone knows suicide is more likely in The Valley if you get added to the TechCrunch Dead Pool than if your weird kink is revealed on Valleywag. (Dave Winer's decent counterpoint: Isn't Wikipedia the scurrilous one?)

sunday

0 comments

Nicholson Baker's fantastic essay in the New York Review of Books: The Charms of Wikipedia. The first half proposes that the attraction of Wikipedia is its game-like quality, full of characters who play out anon roles on the encyclopedia's stage. "Wikipedia would never have been the prodigious success it has been without its demons." And later: "Not only does Wikipedia need its vandals -- up to a point -- the vandals need an orderly Wikipedia, too. Without order, their culture-jamming lacks a context." And then later, he admits his obsession with fighting against the "deletionists," those curmudgeons who are purging hundreds of articles every day. Baker's profile (username: "Wageless") lists all of his contributions and edits. [via]

tuesday

5 comments

A minor moment in meta-blog genius: a Gawker commenter by the name of IndianSlipper has taken over a random Gawker post and declared it her his blog. Update: dude even has his own t-shirt!

tuesday

1 comment

Roll your own single-serving site: rex.isyournewbicycle.com.

tuesday

0 comments

It's, like, totally lonelygirl15 cute that Frrvrr is intensely sticking to its guns.

sunday

0 comments

Guardian article on videoblogging featuring Joanne Colan (Rocketboom), Alex Albrecht (Diggnation), Xeni Jardin (BoingBoing TV), Mark Frauenfelder (BoingBoing TV), and Ze Frank (The Show) that gives one the impression that there's a movement.

saturday

2 comments

New site alert: "Frrvrr uses cutting-edge technology to identify topics you might be interested in based on your browsing history, public records, health records, email activity, legal filings, and web profiles." What!? Exactly. Lindsay and I were debating the legitimacy of site -- to my eye, it seemed just crazy enough to exist and it's even having a launch party at SXSW. Then she noticed the party is sponsored by The Onion. Oh. Oh, nevermind. I signed up for the Beta anyway!

wednesday

0 comments

Strictly No Photography. "Photo-sharing for pictures taken where you are not allowed to take them."

wednesday

0 comments

If you read the EveryBlock interview, you might recall Adrian mentioning that they would later explain why they decided to eschew Google Maps and instead build their own mapping application. The explanation has been posted.

wednesday

3 comments

Webcomic that makes me shiver in its accurate portrayal of what it is like to date me.

friday

1 comment

Kottke creates a meme out of 37% of the things I link to.

thursday

4 comments

The New York Times is trying to gentrify Twitter. A column from a self-confessed parent contends that Twitter can be used to manage household communication. I suppose that's true, but that's like saying Craigslist's Casual Encounters can be used to meet really great friends.

wednesday

1 comment

CNN has launched iReport as a stand-alone site, dubbed as "unfiltered, uncensored user-powered news." Hm.

wednesday

0 comments

If you ever want to befriend someone who works in online media, I suggest you just say these words: "I hate my content management system." You will become instant friends, quickly sharing tales of cached pages, ridiculous workflow, outrageous downtimes, and reprehensible slowness. Which is why I love that there's an upcoming NYC media event entitled I Hate My Content Management System. Go there, meet your soul mate!

tuesday

1 comment

Sad, Bill Gates quit Facebook.

tuesday

0 comments

Email yourself from the future: FutureMe.org. ("Dear Future Me, I told you it wouldn't last.")

monday

0 comments

PMOG is hot.

sunday

6 comments

I hope everyone else sees the hypocrisy of Google's press release on the Microsoft-Yahoo merger. Invoking the spectre of monopolies hardly seems like a good move here. The "wise Google-ish thing to do" here would have been just to stay quiet. (Update: Microsoft's response came in quickly.) [More inside.]

saturday

1 comment

Some good new Twitter apps: Twitter 100 (shows 100 of your friends on one page), Tweet Scan (search Twitter), Favotter (shows everyone who has favorited you), Tweetmeme (tracks popular links), Twitterverse (big Twitter tag cloud), and Politweets (tracks candidate name references).

thursday

2 comments

Two sites I've been playing with lately: DailyLit emails you snippets of a novel every day; Instapaper stores articles that you want to read later. (There's something interesting here about how these two sites represent reverse trends of each other. Or not?)

monday

0 comments

Extending my thoughts on prediction applications, there's now HubDub, another site that lets you make predictions on news stories. AP story.

sunday

0 comments

"If one of Mr. Denton's bloggers had posted the Tom Cruise video, his or her haul thus far would be more than $17,000. In an instant-message interview, Mr. Denton, who replaced Mr. Sicha with himself as editor, wrote, 'Unfortunately, I don't get page-view bonuses'."

wednesday

0 comments

At long last, Adrian and Wilson have launched their neighborhood-aggregation site EveryBlock.com (funded by a Knight News Challenge grant). It's available for Chicago, San Fran, and NYC. It's a data emporium -- for instance, here's graffiti in nyc. (Poynter.org: interview.)

monday

1 comment

It was easy to see how this would turn out: Ana Marie Cox starts Twitter account --> Jarvis calls it out --> NYT publishes story on microjournalism --> Fimoc recaps.

thursday

0 comments

Episode #6 of Chelsea Peretti's "All My Exes": Ze Frank!

thursday

0 comments

So the internet throws a party and everyone is invited...

wednesday

2 comments

The Observer has a profile of Tumblr founder David Karp. Because NYC is a media town, it's a little slow to everything -- but after years of making fun of Tumblr and Twitter (because they didn't get it), several media types across town are starting to get on board.

tuesday

0 comments

Karina makes some good points about Zack Galifianakis' web stardom. The online video persona that he's built (sorta like a reticent Jack Black) is pretty interesting.

tuesday

0 comments

There is something clearly faulty with a study that suggests BoingBoing is fast.

monday

5 comments

So if I somehow talk Anil into explaining how one easily gets to Harvard from NYC, I'll be going to ROFLCon in April. You should go too. See also: I Can Has Rezearch Papar?

sunday

0 comments

This will be good: Choire is guest-editing Kottke.org this week.

friday

1 comment

Zuckerberg on 60 Minutes.

wednesday

0 comments

Art Fag City's Best of the Web and Worst of the Web always rock.

tuesday

0 comments

The bestest Gawker post evah.

tuesday

2 comments

Doing research on a project, I accidentally just stumbled across Suck.com's NETMOGULS, a project I remember so well yet completely forgot! Scroll down the names on the left (frameset!) for a flashback to who was hot online in 1997.

monday

4 comments

So this is sorta interesting.... last week Nick Douglas did a post on Gawker about 2 Girls 1 Cup. The commenters FREAKED like nothing I've ever seen since the last time I made fun of MetaFilter. But realizing that their freakouts would in fact lead to more pageviews for the post (and per the new retribution model, more money for Nick), the community decided to take their comments to a four-month old post instead. Crafty, this industry's audience. [via]

saturday

4 comments

Twitter + reviews = TwittCrit, which Jeff just launched. Almost a year ago, I was working on the exact same idea but for music. Of course I never finished it.

friday

0 comments

Wikipedia + bar codes + tags+ the physical world = Semapedia.org. Further explanation.

wednesday

0 comments

I'm probably obliged to link to Radar's profile of Josh Harris. I was once obsessed with We Live In Public (dead link), Harris' long-ago-defunct attempt to do an online reality tv show, which predated other panopticon phenomena like Justin.TV, Ustream, The Hills, and even Big Brother. In the middle of the dot-com boom (and perhaps the most telling sign of that age), Harris, who also founded Pseudo.com (big press and big bomb), famously wired his entire house with video cameras. (One of my most-recommended items of all time is Errol Morris' First Person, which includes an absolutely fascinating episode about Harris and his girlfriend living 24 hours/day online.) Harris is now back with Operator 11 and, more importantly, a movie called We Live In Public, the trailer of which actually puts the whole voyeurism/exhibitionism world under something of a microscope.

wednesday

0 comments

Jason has released his amazing Best Links 2007.

wednesday

3 comments

Gawker Media's sci-fi blog, edited by Annalee Newitz, has launched: io9.com (explanation and interview). Also, the new bonus-by-pageview structure has launched and Nick Denton is editing Gawker.

saturday

1 comment

Web-Alerts.com: text alerts for your favorite sites.

saturday

0 comments

Protagonize.com: community-driven interactive fiction.

tuesday

0 comments

A Twitter account that lists 2008 predictions.

monday

5 comments

A new super stalking site: Spokeo. Enter someone's name and it will update you whenever the person does something online -- updates their Facebook notes, adds to their Amazon Wishlist, uploads photo to Flickr... and so forth. [via]

monday

0 comments

Time reports on a Parson's class where the goal is to become internet famous: Googling for Your Grade. Update: here's the blog for the class.

thursday

27 comments

Last year I decided to put on twist on my annual "best blogs" post [2002, 2003, 2004] by taking a turn toward the obscure. Because blogs now pervade the media landscape, it makes little sense to write a post arguing that Huffington Post is better or worse than DailyKos -- or Cute Overload.

It turned out that this change -- pointing to lesser-known sites like History of the Button, Buzzfeed, and Indexed -- was a rather auspicious. Within 24 hours of releasing the list, seven of the top ten links on Del.icio.us' typically-tech-centric hotlist were sites on my list. And so in the spirit of celebrating the lesser-known, it's time again to point toward the best blogs that might have flown under your radar. Here they are, the Best Blogs of 2007 that You Maybe Aren't Reading:

And finally, thanks to Taylor, Ben, Robin, Lindsay, Melissa, Scott, Alisa, Gavin, Jason, Peter, Matt, Choire, and Anil for their tips on this project. See ya next year.

monday

2 comments

The term "weblog" was coined 10 years ago today by my sorta-kinda-mentor-hero Jorn Barger. He gives 10 Blogging Tips at Wired.com.

sunday

2 comments

Since Drudge is also reporting it, I guess it's safe to now say: the leading contender for the job of new managing editor of Gawker is... Nick Denton. Valleywag was at its best when Nick helmed it, so we'll see how this works. Update: Now NYT has the story.

saturday

6 comments

My old friends and colleagues at Internet Broadcasting launched an interesting new site today: Slantly.com. The idea is that you make claims (Wikipedia has a legitimate competitor in Google Knols, An Arrested Development movie would please me, etc.) and people vote on whether they agree or disagree with them. So it's basically Digg for opinions. (You have to vote to see other people's opinions, but even that feature is up for debate.) You can seemingly build a profile with various claims, which others will either support or deny. Clever -- and a nice surprise.

friday

4 comments

Google unveils rival to Wikipedia. This seems dumb.

tuesday

0 comments

TheSixtyOne seems like a promising new music site. It borrows small ideas from Critical Metrics, Hype Machine, and ImInLikeWithYou.

monday

5 comments

Everyone knows I despise Fark, so let's just note their attempt at trademarking "NSFW" and move on without comment.

wednesday

3 comments

When the Seattle-based online photo editing site Picnik launched, the first thing I told Davidson was, "Flickr is gonna buy this." Instead, it looks like they're licensing the tools. [via]

tuesday

1 comment

Now available: that n+1 piece that sorta kinda tumbled the Gawker house of cards last week.

tuesday

0 comments

New Yorker: Emoticons During Wartime.

friday

8 comments

While guest-editing Gawker last week, it was pretty easy to tell that something was wrong: IM conversations were quirky, people reacted in strange ways to innocuous comments, and, well, Choire said so. And so, it's no surprise that Emily and Choire are leaving (sorta brilliantly buried in that post), but the job posting (which contains Gawker's first acknowledgment of the NY Mag article by linking it with an "existential crisis" -- errr) does strike a peculiar note: "It's no longer enough to take stories from the New York Times, and add a dash of snark. Gawker needs to break and develop more stories. And the new managing editor will need to hire and manage reporters, as well as bloggers. Gawker.com receives more than 10m pageviews per month. Think of Gawker less as a blog than as a full-blown news site." New York is weird.

tuesday

1 comment

Although I am no fan of LOLcats, I am definitely interested in the intersection of pop culture and internet memes -- and so is Anil, who's going to ROFLCon, a conference being organized at Harvard to celebrate online memes and celebrities. Sign me up.

tuesday

0 comments

Ze: On Feeling Uninspired.

tuesday

0 comments

Ben has been riding high on the fame handed to him for launching his social weather site Cumul.us (which he coded up at night while working for me by day, natch). Current TV even picked it up and did a segment.