At the beginning of the year, Twitter was already a big deal in the geek community and was already well on its way to becoming a leading social media service.
How do we know how it's doing at the close of 2009? Check this: Dell Inc. claims to have earned [...]
Facebook Connect: on route to becoming the one ring to rule them all?
Inside Facebook reports that "MySpace is planning to make [Facebook Connect] a key part of the site, rolling out a number of Connect features in the first part of 2010." Earlier this week, [...]
Journalists often like to lecture bloggers about the need to “pick up the phone” while writing blog posts. It’s in order to do journalism-y like things, they say, like confirming facts, getting reaction quotes, additional background, that kind of thing. Though journalists can be a little sniffy about it, they [...]
Before I get into what will likely be a somewhat negative diatribe about ”Boxed In,” by Grady Hendrix, I’d like to start out by saying how much I love online magazine Slate. I’ve read it daily for years and greatly enjoy its intelligent and savvy coverage of politics, [...]
Several years ago, I thought that the future of online content would be led by Netscape (which later “spun” off to become Propeller), which innovated by using a mixture of user submitted content and curated content with an element of community-controlled voting or ranking. As we get [...]
We hear a lot these days about the distributed web, the interconnected web, the social web, this kind of thing. It really hits home though in the real time real world when a mammoth web entity like Yahoo throws in with reigning king of the social webs Facebook on something [...]
With the news today that MSNBC.com is now offering embeddable video players as part of its product offering, ABCNews.com clearly falls behind the pack as the only major U.S. television news organization to not offer embeddable video online.
Let’s recap.
CBS News: Yep.
MSNBC: Yep.
Visit msnbc.com [...]
A few weeks ago, I finally decided to do something about the fact that tagging on Online Media Cultist had been broken for some time. And that led to a general tinkering and design reboot session that has resulted in a fairly significant change to the way [...]
Before we blog focus, I strongly recommend that you read David Carr’s New York Times piece called The Fall and Rise of Media. It’s a pretty extraordinary recent history of traditional media vs. “new media,” New York City, and the massive and convulsive changes that continue [...]
Chris Brogan turned me onto a project called the Lemonade Movement:
More than 130,000 advertising professionals have lost their jobs in this “Great Recession.” Lemonade is about what happens when people who were once paid to be creative in advertising are forced to be creative with their own lives.
The trailer [...]
I thought I’d try something a little different this holiday season and whip up a list of ten gifts that webby people would truly enjoy. And by webby people I mean me, so have at it in the comments if you’d like to make your own recommendations!
Amazon Kindle
Well, you know that when James Cameron spends a decade working on a new flick, he’s not going to go light on the marketing.
The result, on the webby side at the least, is awfully intriguing.
The Official Avatar Interactive Trailer is an Adobe AIR app that brings [...]
In a recent Blog Focus column, I focused on the buzz surrounding Xbox Live’s addition of social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter. Quoting myself, I wrote that “this is a significant development that further brings the big time gaming, broadcast media, and social media worlds together… and [...]
My brain perks up when I notice some of the Internet’s leading voices saying similar things.
Exhibit A: Steve Rubel is talking about digital curation and the role that brands can help play to find “good stuff.” In AdAge, Rubel notes that while Facebook and Google are [...]
It was a little thing but a much debated thing nonetheless for quite a little spell. Twitter asked its teeming tweeting millions “What are you doing?” though for a great long time that questions was somewhat and then completely irrelevant. From breaking news coverage on the ground to summing up [...]
Jason Calacanis is the CEO of Mahalo.com, “a human powered search engine,” as well as the former co-founder of Weblogs, Inc. and GM of Netscape. His latest mission (quest?) is to ensure that entrepreneurs are never forced to pay to pitch to angel investment firms.
Jason was kind [...]
You’re blasting monsters back to the depths of hell, or watching seasons 8-14 of South Park straight through, or doing some kind of special black ops mission behind the beaches of Normandy circa late spring ’44, let’s say. You know, a typical Saturday afternoon on the couch.
Now, here comes the [...]
Online advertising is “booming,” according to The New York Times… if they’re running before, after, or during a video, that is. Therefore, many bloggers and industry observers are going to be keeping a close eye on Google’s experimentation with “skippable” online video ads, or advertising that can be [...]
These darned kids, what with their Twittering and Interwebs tubing and all.
All of this social media tom foolery is enough to dilute creative powers and potency from the artistic genius. At least that’s what John Taylor, Duran Duran bassist (and ’80s hair master) would have us believe. “When artists today [...]
Twitter is now big business. How do we know? Because services are springing up that are betting that big time companies are willing to pay big time bucks to harness, filter, and interpret the orgy of data, link-sharing, and communication that is taking place on the 140-character-based beast each day.
Case [...]
The blogosphere is already responding in earnest to the horrific shooting spree at a Texas military base that resulted in 12 deaths and 31 wounded:
Twelve people have been killed and 31 wounded in a shooting spree at a Texas military post in a murderous rampage that officials believe was [...]
Technorati is cooking up some pretty great interviews these days. Here’s a wide ranging and rather interesting interview with Weblogs, Inc. (owned by AOL these days) Director Brad Hill, conducted by my old mentor, Blogcritics co-owner, and friend Eric Olsen. Check it:
Here’s the link to the interview on Technorati, [...]
As is often the case, when I’m not posting a lot here I’m off bustling and hustling on other webby things. Of course, there are periods of severe laziness as well, but who’s not guilty of that once in a while?
The last few months have seen a [...]
via twitpic.com
Something seems deeply strange and wrong to me, seeing Betty Draper (January Jones) in a pic with John McCain.
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via onstartups.com
Pretty interesting stats about entrepreneurs from a report called The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur.
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via sfgate.com
Sports geeks are well familiar with the concept of “power rankings,” which ranks teams relative to one another each week.
Tim Goodman’s Bastard Machine has long been one of my favorite TV blogs. It has earned even more respect from me by rolling out its [...]
via imaletyoufinish.com
You just knew that somehow, someway, the Kanye “I’m really happy for you…” meme was going to get mixed up in the all time classic Xzibit “Yo dawg…” meme.
And finally… it has.
You may now commence with the celebrations.
No Tags [...]Good thoughts from Tim O’Reilly backstage at TechCrunch50 — particularly like his take on getting behind companies that are situating themselves where technology is headed, as opposed to doing “me too” or derivative plays.
No Tags [...]Click for call-back: If you feel your question is more easily answered over the phone, click the [...]
via inquisitr.com
The trend of charging subscription fee for value-added content continues with Ars Technica. It’s interesting to see in this case that Ars is attempting to charge a pretty hefty fee by online content standards ($50/year) in exchange for a large array of content, benefits, [...]
via latimes.com
I had a similar reaction to the initial television coverage of the LA fires as this TV critic. In fact, I spent much of Sunday anxiously scouring TV and the webs looking for updates on evacuations going on in my area. LA Times online [...]
Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins is one of the great and underrated flicks out of the ’80s.
And was there ever a better creepy/noble mentor figure than the great Chun ?
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via stephenfry.com
I love that Stephen Fry does the blogging thing. He’s one of my favorite authors, so seeing his take on technology and the strange ways of the modern world is always a lot of fun.
No Tags [...]By James Hibberd
Aug 24, 2009, 08:04 PM ET
RDF is looking to launch the U.S.’ first interactive animated series.
The reality production company behind such shows as Fox’s “Don’t Forget the Lyrics” and ABC’s “Wife Swap” is teaming with new-media company [...]
via steverubel.com
I’m really interested right now in the interaction between Google products (gmail, Google Reader), Posterous, and Twitter. And FriendFeed? Still trying to figure out where FF fits in these days.
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via nydailynews.com
Uh oh. Plaxico, why did you have to go and be so dumb…
Posted via web from Eric Berlin\’s posterous
No Tags [...]Pretty great analysis of Inglourious Basterds (which I haven’t seen yet — but I must and will soon) and Tarantino’s overall body of work.
I do think that Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are masterpieces both, whereas Tarantino’s followups have been merely good (Kill Bill) to very good (Jackie [...]
I get deal pitches daily. I want all of you to understand the code words that IMHO are sure fire signs that the entrepreneur has no idea what they are doing and is destined to fail. This is from an email today, redacted of course to protect the guilty. My [...]
I get deal pitches daily. I want all of you to understand the code words that IMHO are sure fire signs that the entrepreneur has no idea what they are doing and is destined to fail. This is from an email today, redacted of course to protect the guilty. My [...]
Twitter. Yes, I’m on it now: http://twitter.com/ericries
via startuplessonslearned.blogspot.comEric Ries’ Lessons Learned is a great [...]
via tvsquad.com
The Kids are back! I wasn’t a big fan of Brain Candy, but I’m really looking forward to this.
Posted via web from Eric Berlin\’s posterous
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via jmorganmarketing.com
People are *not* happy about this Brady PR situation.
Posted via web from Eric Berlin’s posterous
No Tags [...]Posted by Ken Wheaton on 08.19.09 @ 12:40 PM
What’s worse than being spammed by Brody PR with a pitch for a social-media book that likely didn\’t need to be written? Being spammed by a PR firm [...]
This interactive visualization of tweets is very cool.
Posted via web from Eric Berlin\’s posterous
No Tags [...]I love every moment of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. Every shot, every scene, every performance, every bit [...]
I saw a few minutes of the game while at the gym, got me excited for the upcoming season. Go Giants!
Posted via web from Eric Berlin\’s posterous
No Tags [...]If you haven’t had time to catch up on Mad Men or just need a quick chance to refresh yourself ahead of the new season (Sunday night!), here’s your chance. The entire second season, recapped in four minutes:
Possibly the best line of the season: “I don’t have a contract.” [...]
Slate\’s TV Club is always great, so I\’m thrilled to see it back in action for this season\’s premiere of Mad Men. Well, I\’m *more* thrilled to see Mad Men *finally* back for this season. Sunday night at 10pm on AMC, but who\’s counting (the hours)?
Such an amazing movies, War Games is. This scene is hilarious… and check out the creepy futuristic early 80s electro vibe that\’s thrown down if you make it past the first scene to when Broderick is doing research.
\”Backdoors are not secrets…\” Classic line on a Friday.
Ah, Brooklyn, with its hipster trends…
Posted via web from Eric Berlin\’s posterous
No Tags [...]\”…in what could amount to a brilliant SEO play.\” Doesn\’t that fly in the face of the AP hating that Google and other aggregators are \”stealing\” AP\’s content?
Posted via web from Eric Berlin\’s posterous
No Tags [...]Facebook + FriendFeed vs. iGoogle: the next great social networking battle?
Posted via web from Eric Berlin\’s posterous
No Tags [...]The aftermath of FriendFeed\’s acquisition by Facebook will be very interesting to watch. I still love FriendFeed and will stick with it for the foreseeable future.
I was VERY excited when I first watch Streamy\’s demo video, but that seems like ages ago now. Between FriendFeed and Posterous [...]
I’m going to experiment a little bit, both with how I post to OMC and with its content. Probably the boldest experiment since I started this blog in January 2007 (if anyone has been reading anywhere near that long, thank you from the bottom of my heart!).
The experiment is [...]
Have you noticed that web series are getting really good these days? I’m noticing that the best are trending toward being short-ish, punchy, and are increasingly starring fairly well known actors who can stretch their acting chops and have some fun on the interactive small screen.
And that [...]
When Kevin Spacey is teaching David Letterman how to use Twitter on television, you know that it’s pretty big.
And when Letterman “doesn’t get it,” and Spacey jokingly chastises him for not getting it, and the crowd and audience are with Spacey, you know that it’s really big.
Check it. [...]
I found this meme about FriendFeed being like “Syphilis” to be kind of odd. In short, TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington likens FriendFeed to a place where “mob justice enthusiasts” are able to thrive. It’s understandable of course that there should be concern about people “becoming comfortable writing seriously threatening stuff [...]
Short but interesting post by Jason Kaneshiro of Webomatica on his self-imposed “social media blackout”:
At this point, Twitter is my only social networking website, getting sporadic use. Much to my surprise, I’ve enjoyed this self-imposed exile quite a bit. [...]
Overall, spending less time on speculation, discussion, and criticism, [...]
Over the weekend, in an effort to grab some downtime while shaking a nasty cold, I rented Midnight Club Los Angeles for Xbox 360. I had such a blast (if you’re a fan of Grand Theft Auto IV, particularly its street racing aspects, you’ll dig it for sure) that [...]
I’m continuing to enjoy using Posterous, and can see why people such as Steve Rubel are switching over to it as a comprehensive social media and blogging tool. In fact I was prompted to write on FriendFeed a little while back:
Just added my posterous rss feed to FriendFeed. [...]
For a while — and we’re still in that while I suppose — it became trendy for longtime bloggers to muse about and in some cases pull the trigger on “retiring” from blogging and moving online publishing activities “exclusively” to microblogging platforms like Twitter.
Today, Steve Rubel’s (long one of [...]
This ReadWriteWeb article dates back to late April, but it’s worth linking to and talking about for anyone who may have missed it.
Last month, you may remember having heard about a special iPhone ad from Dockers. Its claim to fame was that it was the world’s first “shakable” [...]
Every time I read stories — and there are many of late streaming out of places like China and Iran — about governments cracking down on Internet use, censoring websites, blocking people from Internet access, and so on, I think something to the effect of: Yeah, but there’s got to [...]
I strongly believe in the notion of the microstartup, as defined in a Jason Calacanis essay back in November 2008 called The Future of Startups. Here’s the short definition:
The zero cost startup has led to the age of the “microstartup.” It’s no longer two folks in a garage [...]
As I succinctly noted on Twitter, my morning roughly started as follows:
I woke up, fired up coffee, eggs, ham, and toast (which constitutes a fancy breakfast in my house). Checked e-mail and hit the front page of The New York Times online, which is oddly making its [...]
From The New York Times:
China has accomplished remarkable things in the past 20 years, including building one of the world’s largest economies. Computers helped speed that development — and will be even more important in the future. So Beijing’s decision to require that all new personal computers sold [...]
I keep seeing a Scientology banner ad being served to OMC via Google Adsense.
That shows how far contextual advertising still has to go, I guess!
No Tags [...]I had the pleasure of meeting Steve Spalding (How To Split An Atom, Crossing Gaps) at SXSW this year, and could tell right away that this here is a gentleman to keep an eye on in the webby and entrepreneurial sense.
The simplest way to describe Steve is [...]
Darren Rowse probably doesn’t remember this, but he and I had a lengthy IM chat circa 2005 or so. I lived outside of San Francisco at the time, and Darren lives across the date line in Australia. He was (and is) friendly, engaging, informative, and passionate about the craft, science, [...]
I’m an obnoxiously loud advocate for HBO’s The Wire. I binged out on a bunch of episodes recently, and was blown away all over again about how gritty, rich, dark, hilarious, complex, scathing, and real it is all at the same time.
I mention because I discovered a [...]
Broadcasting Brain picks up a rather interesting post from Jay Cruz that challenges me to consider Twitter and social media in a light that I haven’t quite done before called Why I’m Quitting Social Media:
I realized that at best social media is entertainment disguised as “useful” information or [...]
Duncan Riley reports sad news that Drew Olanoff — a person I’ve had some personal interaction with from time to time and certainly someone I highly respect in the web space — has been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
While I’m not a huge gamer, I love my Xbox 360. I use it mostly to access my Netflix “instant watching” account, download the occasional movie (flicks like Cloverfield in HD are sick house), as our default DVD player, and… oh yeah, playing games on it are pretty great too!
That [...]
I’ve been thinking about how to write this post for a while.
It’s not that I’m trying to convey anything earth-shattering; it’s just that I’ve wanted to both convey that my attitude toward blogging has changed (evolved?) while also *showing* the change through what I’m doing with Online Media Cultist. The [...]
As respected online publications such as Salon.com, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal removed all or most of their paid subscription models over the course of the decade, conventional wisdom formed that holding print content intended for a mainstream audience behind a pay wall [...]
We recently covered status update services Ping.fm and HelloTxt, competitors in the growing market for tools and services that help social media fans and online marketers manage communication using multiple social media profiles. Now Facebook has made Facebook Pages, the publicly available profiles [...]
Increasingly, social media web sites are becoming much more than places to keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues online. They’re becoming major hubs of information consumption, analysis and distribution as well, so it’s important to understand how this trend is playing out on some of the more popular [...]
Just as services designed to help social media enthusiasts manage multiple online profiles are becoming increasingly popular, services designed to manage posting status updates and communication to multiple online profiles are becoming plentiful as well. Recently, I covered Ping.fm, which has now been joined by Italy-based [...]
Inbound marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers. In other words, instead of taking the time and resources to go out and find customers, you set yourself up in such a way that the right kinds of qualified leads find you. Inbound marketing, focused on areas like [...]
For many bloggers, RSS subscriber numbers are a fun and useful way to get an approximate read on how many “loyal customers” they have. For others, however, RSS numbers take on a greater significance, impacting such things as advertiser and investor relationships, as well as a web [...]
For web workers, some social networks matter more than others. What I mean by that is while MySpace is still one of the most popular web sites on the planet (Alexa has it ranked No. 9 currently), it’s simply not that important — in relative terms — for [...]
I’ve been getting my tweet on of late, talking about my recent “discovery” and obsession with 30 Rock. This little gem of a clip had me stitches, simply because it’s bizarre and random and very “who would think of that?” In short, amazing.
I give you Werewolf Bar Mitzvah, [...]
Whether you help run a web-based startup, are a member of an online production team, or earn your living in part by understanding how things get done on the web, it’s important to get a sense of how the most innovative Internet companies create their products and build their businesses [...]
Collaborating on design work is notoriously difficult. Deciding what the perfect shade of blue is, how rounded those rounded corners should be, and whether or not to make the logo bigger is all difficult enough when a discussion is happening between people in the same room. Add [...]
Image by sxc.hu user blu_arim
A piece by Chris Brogan called “Why Bookstores Are My Office” made me think about how web workers and telecommuters have an enormous amount of discretion in setting up, organizing and utilizing their time. Web working is [...]
