The events surrounding the reporting of Michael Jackson’s death last week bring up issues with news reporting that I think are worth discussing.
Granted, this discussion isn’t new, but it’s interesting, at least to me.
Twitter offers a new channel to reporters, due to its immediacy and network effects, i.e. it’s very quick to publish and easy [...]
I’ve been yammering on about trust as the key component to encouraging participation in online communities for a couple weeks.
Today, Facebook opened its walls to allow search engines to index anything you publish, meaning the layer of trust can be removed, and all your updates *could* be released into the wild.
The change has been rolled [...]
The debate about whether FeedBurner’s inclusion of FriendFeed subscribers is a good or bad thing has me thinking how to determine a person’s reputation and influence.
As I keep saying, trust is the key component to New Web. Without trust, it’s difficult to build a community around anything.
Reputation and influence are the next big things in [...]
Did anyone notice a larger than normal bump in their FeedBurner stats last week?
Last week, the FeedBurner numbers shot up from about 1,000 readers to more than 1,500. I’m behind on my reading, but so far, I haven’t seen this covered anywhere but on the FriendFeed blog.
Some movement in subscribers is common. However, this was [...]
Last week’s post on the 90-9-1 rule was pretty popular. It bounced around Twitter and FriendFeed, and thankfully, Disqus’ Reactions feature allowed me to track comments on it.
So, like any good blogger, I’m going where the traffic is.
The 90-9-1 rule interests me for a number of reasons beyond the obvious applications it has to driving [...]
It’s been a while since I blogged over here, the last few months have been intense adding new members to my team in the national security group. We’ve been working on some really great projects that I’d love to talk about but I’d have to kill you. There is something new on the horizon that [...]
April was a big month for Connect, if you consider 195,000 pageviews and 11,000 unique visitors big anyway.
If you’re Facebook or Twitter, that’s a slow morning, but for our little network, which has a capped number of possible users somewhere around 80,000, it’s gangbusters.
Since January, Connect has been growing each month, and I wonder [...]
The title sounds pretty highbrow academic. It’s funny to me.
Anyway, I just read that according to ComScore, Twitter grew 131% in March.
Insanity.
That number doesn’t include international or client-based usage. While I read through my feeds today, I got five new follows, all from people I don’t know. Oh, and there’s the whole Aston Kutcher vs. [...]
I suppose I blog a lot about Disqus because we’ve been using it here for a while. I’ve gone back and forth about whether we should keep it, especially after WordPress introduced threaded comments.
Although I’m not in love with the idea of a) not owning the comments and b) taking a performance hit on every [...]
I always find it noteworthy when a handful of stories about a single company or service pop up within a day or so.
Usually, none of them alone is all that interesting, but as a collection, they sometimes form a story that I find blogworthy.
This time it’s Google’s Web Search.
Totally weird to see that in print. [...]
As is usual during the weeks before and during South by Southwest, there are a lot of product announcements.
I’m not quite sure how/when it happened, but SXSW Interactive has become a nexus of startup activity and geekery, e.g. Twitter’s first bump came when the service won the SXSW Web Awards in 2007.
So, it’s become a [...]
Today, Facebook previewed changes it plans to make to their site next week. There are quite a few:
A redesigned home page with live updates, filters and a universal publishing model (very much like FriendFeed’s).
One minor change that’s part of the universal publishing box is changing the verbiage “What are you doing right now?” to “What’s [...]
I have a few friends that were avid users of Ma.gnolia, which was a social bookmarking tool, similar to Delicious.
I had an account there, but never really used the service much. I say similar to Delicious and use the past tense because Ma.gnolia’s database crashed on January 30. They recently announced that all user data [...]
This post on Mashable today about another WordPress plugin that can integrate and surface your FriendFeed and Twitter activity on your blog got me thinking about what a blog means anymore.
Blogging used to be the ultimate form of self-expression (or navel-gazing, depending on your perspective) on the ‘tubes, but now, Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook scratch [...]
I found this interesting post from Hivelogic about avatars in Rich’s shared items this week.
Turns out it’s both timely and exactly in-line with my own experiences and thoughts about avatars. Dan’s post is definitely worth a read, and to encourage a click-through on your part, I’ll only cite him when we happen to agree.
A combination [...]
My wife and several of my Facebook compadres have engaged in the latest version of the “things about me” meme.
Only this time, it’s 25 things and 25 people.
You may recall about a year ago, I started up a version of this meme, a.k.a. blog tag, with the eight things/eight people format. If you read here, [...]
No sooner had the ink dried on my post about tweeting with care, than my feeds yielded this post from TechCrunch.
The short version is that a phisher hacked into some poor dude’s Facebook account, then whipped up a friend-in-need story and tried to sucker one of his friends into sending money using FB chat. Mad [...]
Or maybe you did?
I polled Twitter to see if anyone else noticed an influx of activity and friend requests from Facebook over the holidays, loosely interpreted as the end of December. Meg agreed, and everyone else wisely continued enjoying their seasonal free time.
According to Hitwise, Facebook saw its highest ever daily traffic number on December [...]
While we wait for the semantic web to serve up really targeted and useful ads, I, for one, continue to ignore 99% of the ads presented to me.
But sometimes, they slip through, twice today in fact.
Although they work pretty much all the time, Google Ads have turned up many failures in the past. For example, [...]
Hard to believe, but not everyone seems excited about Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect or MySpaceID for that matter.
Must be the time of year.
Anyway, I remain excited about GFC because if nothing else, it adds social to any web site, which is something I think appeals to the vast majority of users. I’d love [...]
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