Five Steps to Encourage Readers to Blog on Your Website
"A few moments of advance thought can help determine whether a new blogging tool will enable a vibrant community, or open yet another empty forum."
Confessions of an Online Journalism Tool
"There are a multitude of free (or cheap), powerful tools available to the online journalist that approximate expensive software and make you look more professional than you are. Which is a good thing."
Microblogging Mania: Twitter Helps with Reporting, Filtering the News
"One year later, I’ve found that Twitter has gone above and beyond my original expectations in terms of usefulness, allowing me to obtain and share information efficiently."
The Top 10 Tech Trends
One of my favorites: "The mobile phone will be a mainstream personal computer."
Social Networking Ad Spending Update
"eMarketer has revised its US social network ad spending projections, estimating that advertisers will spend $1.4 billion to place ads on online social networks this year, down from the previous projection of $1.6 billion."
Too Many Choices, Too Much Content, Too Many New Web Services
"Sometimes it’s just hard to keep up. In this technology-focused niche we all live in there are new applications, new initiatives, and new platforms that spring up every day, not to mention constantly breaking news that fills our RSS readers. Take a day off and you’re behind."
"Hyperconnectivity" On the Rise as Masses Adopt New Communication Tools
"These individuals are moving up the connected ranks, using blogs and wikis in the workplace, as well as adopting multiple devices and applications to suit their work, personal, and communication needs. This places an increasingly mission-critical focus on the technology that these well-connected users demand."
Clustering News Stories Via Aggregation
"Have you noticed that when there are a bunch of articles about the same story, we’ll group them together? I think this is one of the key features of Google News. When you’re browsing through Google News and you click on a link to see "all 257 articles"
Where Does Google Go Next?
"For all Google’s success, it still has just one meaningful way of making money: its powerful search-advertising system. It’s a gusher, but it’s the only one. All the other projects it has in the works are just that, projects."
How Apple Leveraged Their Intellectual Property Through Trademarks
"The Apple strategy is particularly important because companies typically don’t give enough attention to the management and potential value of trademarks — especially when it comes to the nontraditional variety. This is partly because trademarks, like other intellectual properties, are complex assets. But they can make a significant difference."
We Don’t Need More Information or Aggregation, We Need Inspiration
"The cost of information creation/storage dropped to nearly zero and left us with infinite amounts of information, creating the problem of finding the right information. Web 2.0 provided us technology to tackle this. Partially by clustering people and information into communities. It also gave us user generated content. Instead of companies or professionals, everyone could now create information, video, audio, pictures, and share it with the whole world. the Internet changed from a static library of information into a dynamic world of opportunities. Everyone can now become a storyteller by simply starting a weblog. The subscription to a magazine or newspaper has now been replaced by RSS subscriptions to weblogs. And to structure this world full of dynamic information we need new ways of finding the relevant stuff."
Why Yelp Works for Restaurants & Business Reviews
"What Yelp did differently than [its many competitors], was to spend most of its energy attracting a small group of fanatic reviewers… People come to write reviews as a hobby and also to meet other people."
How Auctions Set Ad Prices on Search Engines
"The outcome of the ad auction is efficient in the sense that the available ad slots are awarded to those who value them mostly highly. The outcome is also equitable in that the price an advertiser has to pay is determined by the other advertisers — those with whom it has to compete for slots."
Google Launches Friend Connect, Trying to Tie Social Networks Together
"Friend Connect uses OpenID, oAuth and Open Social to let users log in to their favorite apps using a trusted ID provider and then access their friend info from those apps – all while on another website altogether."
Microsoft Launches Space Tours on the Web
Microsoft "…on Monday launched its WorldWide Telescope, a free Web-based program that allows Web surfers to explore galaxies, star systems, and distant planets."
The Growing Backlash Against PR Spam, And The Rationale For MicroPR
"The root cause here is the delusion on the part of the clients that this sort of PR carpet bombing works, that mass media messages embedded in a press release or press release-ish email work, and that we, the bloggers, actually react positively to this junk."
How AT&T Spilled the Starbucks Beans
A look at how AT&T fumbled what should have been a great product & service announcement.
Twitter and the China Earthquake
"Let’s see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences."
The Challenge Of Non-Local Newspaper Advertising
"Here’s the economic reality for national newspaper brands: Print readers are scarce. Online readers are a commodity… Here’s the bottom line business model problem: Unlike in print, newspapers create no unique value for advertisers online."
Rip-Off Journalism on the Web
MG Siegler outs an online news site that "see a news story. They sit back for a few days and let everyone else weigh in. They take the best of those ideas and craft a post out of it. The stories often look well-crafted because of this."
Three Reasons to Use the Commenting Tool Disqus
Disqus offers bloggers these features for their commenting functionality: threaded discussions, email replies and shared profiles.
Why Filtering is the Next Step for Social Media
"If there’s one thing to be learned from social media tools, it’s that these services were not made to interact with one another. Here’s a look at why noise levels are high and why filtering should be the next step for social media platforms."