For years, I’ve been reading that Wikipedia is dying. (Of course, on the internet, anything successful attracts an “is dying” movement.)
Today, there’s a Wall Street Journal article that does a half-way decent job of glancing at the history of the site, but does so under a [...]
I typically only “tweet” or “glue” movie reviews. For instance, as I was leaving the theater last night, I tweeted this: “Blind Side is awesome for those who love sports movies and Sandra Bullock’s legs.”
But I wanted to say a little bit more about [...]
Longtime readers of this blog (and the two of you know who you are) are aware that I love maps. I’m on record as saying the greatest software ever is what is now Google Earth. In presentations about social media, I always emphasize that [...]
I had a minor jolt seeing a big banner ad across the top of Wikipedia this morning. However, the “ad” (actually a few are rotating) is a link to a message from Jimmy Wales encouraging users to donate to the [...]
I have a theory that goes something like this: If the name of your organization is Interactive Advertising Bureau, any study of the needs of internet marketers is going to suggest that “advertising” is the solution. According to my theory, [...]
Long-time readers of this blog know that I’m a fan of airports that provide free wifi to travelers. I think wifi should be like air conditioning or rest rooms — part of the convenience infrastructure, not a profit center. Airports can profit from the service in a number of ways: [...]
Lord grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, [...]
When I started blogging almost ten years ago, I decided that I would not blog about the transactions of the magazine world: the buying, selling, launching, closing, hiring, firing stuff. Those things are what trade (business-to-business) publications and news websites focus on and I don’t really want to play the [...]
Today, the New York Times has a story that was DVR’d two years ago and re-played today.
2007 story: Viewers Fast-Forwarding Past Ads? Not Always
2009 story: DVR, Once TV’s Mortal Foe, Helps Ratings
I remember that previous story because I blogged about it at the time [...]
I’ve been so jammed with projects the past few days (yes, even through the weekend), I haven’t done my usual ego roundup checks (don’t tell me you don’t have a Google alert set up for your name). So I’ve been remiss in not saying a public thank you for the [...]
[Notes: You can view all my "Thoughts on Twitter" posts displayed chronologically here: [www.RexBlog.com].]
If you read this blog closely, you know I’ve been whining for a “lists” or “groups” feature on Twitter since, well, about the time I started using it. (About 90% of the complaints [...]
The Wall Street Journal this morning reports (paywall protected) that the December issue of Esquire will include some “augmented reality” features that, when held up to a video camera, will trigger some video. While the phrase “augmented reality” is about to become one of those terms you’ll get sick [...]
This post, in what I’d say if I were wearing my editor’s cap, “buries the lede.” But hey, this is my blog and rambling before getting to the point is part of what I do and who I am.
Last night, I attended an impressive event at [...]
As my accidental role as content curator of geekish news for non-geeks, I have a rule: when a certain person I consider my control group for non-geekish people (i.e., my wife) asks me about something that has not even launched but she’s heard about it from a general news source [...]
[credit:Sure, I’d like to see Congress and the President “deal with the “too big to fail” problem, but I can’t help but be amused at the irony of the care keepers of the too-big and always failing federal government tackling this problem.
I [...]
[Note: I am going to start doing more small business related posts here. When I do, I'm going to add relevant links to the wiki-model resource SmallBusiness.com, which, as a matter of disclosure, is owned by Hammock Inc.]
TechCrunch posted a Q&A transcript in which' [...]
For a few people who are obsessed with the way content flows from creator to consumer (to use a food metaphor), today is a rather interesting day. It’s the day when a concept that started out being called an RSS news reader — and specifically, a concept [...]
I feel certain that after you read this PDF from the Congressional Research Service about the global e-waste crisis, you’ll join with me in starting a worldwide movement to encourage people to stop consuming content from e-waste producing devices (that also require electricity from coal-burning, river-polluting plants) and go back [...]
I love the magazine format. I’ve admitted that on this blog quite a few times during the past decade.
However, I’ve also repeated many times that I am not a fan of the magazine business model — the mass media business model where a publisher depends on gathering [...]
I’m not a member of the Direct Marketing Association, so I only know what I read about a dissident board member alleging that the organization “is managed with casual regard for the by-laws that ensure that members come first and that DMA stays a leader.” According to DirectMag.com, [...]
In the early days of this blog, I wrote a lot about my NFL home team, the Tennessee Titans. Being a fan is part of who I am. And, frankly, it’s always been easy to be a fan of the Titans because even in their bad years, [...]
Typically, my presentation “slides” are meaningless without me narrating them. They illustrate what I’m talking about, so if I’m not talking, well, you’d have to make up your own story to go along with them. However, several people asked if I’d post this presentation from yesterday’s Barcamp Nashville, so [...]
“The biggest problem faced by small businesses is not access to credit but a shortage of customers,” according to Temple University professor Bill Dunkelberg, who serves as chief economist of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB).* For the past 35 years, Dunkelberg has managed for NFIB, the oldest, [...]
On Saturday, if you are attending Barcamp Nashville, sign up for my session called Wiki 101: How to Use Wikis to Do Just About Everything, scheduled for 2:30 p.m. (Rejected titles included: “Wikis are way more cool than Twitter” and “Wkis & SEO: Your [...]
I didn’t use Google docs until about six months ago, and now I can’t remember what it was like not using it.
But I’ll confess: I drive some people crazy with all my sharing of Google documents.
The primary reason I love Google Docs is that I like [...]
Just in time for the National Peanut Festival, AP President Tom Curley is sounding nuttier and nuttier:
“Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers,” (the president of AP) said. [...]
No Waffle Zone
You know all those economists who failed to predict the 2008-09 recession and then warned of a depression but now are saying that we’re recovering, but don’t expect a robust recovery?
Why do we believe these jokers?
In August, in the course of a week, I [...]
(Updated: See note added at bottom.)
This may surprise the people who confuse my championing the magazine format with some delusional form of cockeyed optimism: I fully expect all magazines to die. The first magazine in America lasted one issue, so the legacy of magazines dying is as [...]
Over the weekend, PaidContent.org’s Staci Kramer passed along a joke via Twitter she heard at the Online News Association awards:
How does a journalist count?
“One, two, Trend!”
I thought of that joke a few minutes ago when I saw the WSJ.com headline, “Recession Spells End for Many Family Businesses.”
Curious [...]
On July 28, 2005, I blogged this: “I say podcasting won’t officially be mainstream until it has its first payola scandal.”
I thought of that short post (these, days, such a short post would have been relegated to Twitter) when I read this headline on AdAge.com:
FTC Cracks Down [...]
“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have [...]
Flickr has long had a feature called “sets” that allows a user to organize groupings of photos in any way the photographer wants to share them. Flickr recently added another feature that, at first, seems to be the same thing — but the new feature allows users to collect, annotate [...]
It’s worth taking a look at the Wikipedia entry regarding yesterday’s earthquake and resulting tsunami in the south Pacific.
As some people know, I am in awe of Wikipedia and its underlying technology, culture, community and practices. (That’s another post for another day.)
This post, however, is just [...]
First off: Today is not actually the fifth anniversary of podcasting. Dave Winer had demo’d file enclosures distributed via RSS over three years earlier. In other words, RSS-enabled audio and video distribution was almost four years old, five years ago today.
However, today is the 5th anniversary [...]
I guess people who read Vanity Fair and watch 60 Minutes don’t have Kara Swisher’s real-life friends to let them know what real people think.
For those who don’t know who Kara is, she’s the plugged-in and influential tech journalist/pundit who last year wrote about an informal poll she [...]
Boston.com’s “Big Picture” collection of moving photography of flooding from the southeast makes me think there’s an instant magazine in there somewhere (see yesterday’s post).
[...]
Derek Powazek’s Strange Light“Strange light fell over Australia on 23 September 2009. An unexpected dust storm blanketed New South Wales and Queensland, turning [...]
Jason Fried of 37signals (the company that provides the “not-free” web-application Basecamp, the project management software my colleagues and I use at Hammock Inc.) wrote a rather amusing post in the guise of a Press Release on his company’s blog today. In light of a $100 million VC investment [...]
I don’t know what this means, so I’m choosing to believe it’s some RSS-induced positive karma indicating good things about the economy. Last night when I opened Google Reader, these three headlines were lined up, one-after-another, in a feed folder I have set up for business news:
Since Monday was a national holiday in Japan called Respect for the Aged Day, I think it’s only appropriate that during this week, I use my fast-approaching “aged” status to bash the notion that “digital natives” — young people who have grown up with keyboards [...]
It seems logical to me that people who friend lots of people on Facebook who own labrador retrievers are likely owners of a lab themselves.
So if the Boston Globe does a story about two MIT students who do a project wherein they analyze who people friend on Facebook and, [...]
“It’s like someoneA story in this week’s Sports Illustrated profiles the radical approach to football conventions taken by Kevin Kelley, coach of the Pulaski (Arkansas) Academy Bruins football team.
In short, [...]
Here are the keys to developing a successful media franchise.
1. Choose a topic about which people love to argue — the more passionately they like to argue over the topic, the better. Make sure there are two distinct camps in this topic — a clear “us” and a clear “them.”
2. [...]
My friend, the novelist Alice Randall, is profiled in an “At Home” feature in Thursday’s New York Times (D-1). The online version has already been posted and features a wonderful slideshow of photographs of the home of Alice and her husband, David Ewing, by [...]
As on most days, Seth Godin has an insightful observation — today it’s about e-mail. Seth’s post is a cautionary note to marketers (Seth’s audience) about the trap e-mail lays for them (us): it’s so enticing to believe e-mail is “free” to send out, but the [...]
It appears from media accounts and Presidential speeches, we’re supposed to be treating this week as an anniversary, of sorts.
Unlike 9/11 or Katrina, however, it’s hard for most Americans (including me) to conjure up visual imagery of any disaster that occurred this time, last year. Sure, there are the cliche [...]
I wondered why yesterday’s Calvin and Hobbs comic strip panel started showing up on some of “meme” tracking approaches I use to keep up with some of the geekier interests I have. Why would one particular day of Calvin and Hobbs be getting so many likes and shares and [...]
Boston.com’s “The Big Picture” is displaying some incredibly moving photography related to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. These images are worth all the words I could possibly write.
[...]Since I’ve complained for several years about the stumbles in using new-media by my local newspaper, the Gannett-owned Tennessean.com, I feel compelled to provide a shout-out this morning to their blog, Titans Insider. As I’ve long said on this blog, the best writing in the Tennessean, and most [...]
Today, Apple is making “An Announcement.” The event is themed, “It’s Only Rock & Roll” and all the best Apple watchers have spent weeks speculating about what will be announced.
While the September announcements have traditionally been focused on new iPod models, you never know when there will [...]
I read Fred Wilson’s observations nearly everyday. If one reads Fred’s blog because he’s an early investor in such ventures as Twitter and delicious.com, then you don’t know all of what went into making Fred a successful VC.
Today, he writes about an important key to his success: failure.
He [...]
[via: ReadWriteWeb.com]:
“All blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud. There is currently only one RSS aggregator that supports RSSCloud, Dave Winer’s brand-new reader River2. [...]
This morning, I read a post by Michael Arrington about a “a small device that you wear on a necklace that takes photos every few seconds of whatever is around you, and records sound all day long.”
Mike’s essay made me think of a long-ago point [...]
Random thoughts, in no particular order.
Free vs. Pay on SWA: Here’s another experiment in “free-conomics.” Rather than charge for your baggage, Southwest charges for premium services. There are no assigned seats on an SWA plane, so your place in line determines where you will sit. Checking in online, starting 24 [...]
When you’re a member of the Apple cult, it’s sort of like being in the Boy Scouts: you must continually earn merit badges on your way to becoming an Apple FanBoy Eagle Scout.
This week, we’re all earning our Snow Leopard merit badge.
For those of you not in [...]
I recently read (and recommend) the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson. If nothing more, reading the book will allow you to argue for-or-against what it says rather than argue for-or-against what it doesn’t say, but what you think it says. [...]
From A Hero Named Bill Cahir Dies in Afghanistan by Dana Milbank, in today’s Washington Post:
On Saturday, millions watched as Ted Kennedy made his final trip to Arlington National Cemetery. With rather less attention, Arlington’s soil opened again Monday to accept the remains of one of Kennedy’s former aides, [...]
About five months ago, a couple of weeks after what now looks like the “market bottom,” I wrote a blog post titled, ” The recession may not be over, but the recession narrative seems to be recovering. In it, I wrote that one of the narrative shifts would be [...]
I can’t go through these few days each year without thinking back to 2005 and how I anticipated Katrina approaching the gulf coast leading up to August 29 and then gradually realized the severity of what was taking place. By reviewing my blog posts, I [...]
According to this article on Boston.com, “Consumers under 35 devote much of their online time at entertainment news and gaming websites while middle-age folks are more interested in using the Internet to read about news or to go shopping, but whether young or old, most people are logging only [...]
Recently, on a business news feed I subscribe to using Google Reader*, I’ve noticed a daily recurring AP story that does nothing more than list the Dow Jones Industrial Average daily gains or losses since last September 15, the day Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection — [...]
Michale Wolff’s Vanity Fair profile of Politico.com’s success includes this fascinating paragraph (near the bottom) describing how the company makes money:
“Politico puts its current traffic at 6.7 million unique visitors per month (down from a high of more than 11 million during the campaign), yet it still can’t [...]
As I’ve written many times before, I’ve grown weary of trying to evangelize the time-saving, productivity merits of using a service like Google Reader. More than that, I’ve learned how much it scares people to hear the initials RSS (despite the reality that it powers features [...]
[Notes: You can view all my "Thoughts on Twitter" posts displayed chronologically here: [www.RexBlog.com].]
On Twitter, I’ve had a running gag for several months in which I note that the New York Times hazes reporters by making them write a story about Twitter. That’s why there’s a [...]
This post on “the official” Google Blog explains how, if you use Google Maps for Mobile and have the My Location feature enabled*, your phone sends anonymous bits of data (the data is not pegged to your account) back to Google describing how fast [...]
Southeastern Conference TwitterThose who read this blog with any regularity know that I am not a fan of the management (not the reporters and editors) of AP or the media company,
Today, I’d like to give some shout-out praise for Gannett and AP refusing to [...]
Econsultancy’s Patricio Robles recently interviewed me and the result is posted on Econsultancy.com today. Knowing the global audience of digital marketing and ecommerce pro Econsultancy has, I was honored to take part in the discussion. I’m also grateful Patricio gave me this great ego-boosting [...]
Despite my efforts to say it’s just the term “social media” that I think has a short shelf-life (and not all of those services, features and approaches that fall under the umbrella term) some people not familiar with me or this blog still didn’t understand my post the other [...]
Samir Husni (Mr. Magazine) posts a rant about the publishers of Ladies Home Journal’s apparent attempt to rebrand Ladies Home Journal into LHJ. In marketing material to advertisers, the word “magazine” is mentioned only once but the magazine is referred to as a “national media brand” [...]
(Click for larger view.)
That bar you see above (larger view) is a “visual representation of how the internet sees me.” It was generated by a project called Personas, part of an exhibit currently on display by the MIT Media Labs. “It [...]
As there are 2,221 proposals on the “Panel Picker” for next March’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival, perhaps you’ve missed these:
We Just Saw Robert Scoble: A panel of SXSW attendees who just saw Robert Scoble share their thoughts on seeing Robert Scoble.
SXSW Was Better Before You [...]
Despite using it in our company’s marketing material (hey, we know a thing or two about search and marketing), I don’t like the term “social media.” I dislike it for the same reason I never liked the term “Web 2.0.” As I wrote in a [...]
CN Tower
Over the weekend and today, I’ve been at a large convention in Toronto: the annual meeting of ASAE* and the Center for Association Leadership. While I’m not blogging about it here, you can find a lot of blog posts, photos and tweets from me and others [...]
The other day, on a post about the acquisition of FriendFeed by Facebook, I pointed back at a post I wrote in October, 2007 in which I wrote, “I already have a friend feed - it’s called an RSS newsreader.” I suggested in my post about the acquistion [...]
The SEC adopts Ahmadinejad The St. Petersburg Times is reporting that the Southeastern Conference has sent its 12 schools (including my across-the-street neighbor, Vanderbilt) a new media policy that, in effect, bans fans from posting Facebook updates, Twitter tweets, photos on Flickr, video [...]
Apple Knowledge Navigator concept (cir. 1988).If you don’t follow the tech blogosophere, first, congratulations, it must be nice to have a life.
Second, even if you don’t follow the tech blogosophere, you’ve still likely heard that Apple is supposed to [...]
[credit: public domain via Wikipedia]
Five months ago, I wrote that the “recession may not be over but the recession narrative seemed to be recovering.” Based on the non-science with which I made that correct call, I’m now ready to call a new shift in the [...]
Boy, did I get this one wrong. When I first read about an all-star group of former Googlers getting together to create what sounded like yet another RSS newsreader/lifestreaming/social-media aggregation thing — in new clothes — I was completely unimpressed. What made their effort seem like a [...]
Via the BBC, I learned a few moments ago that today is the 40th anniversary of one of the most iconic photographs ever taken, Iain Macmillan’s shot of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road. Of course, we all know the photo because it became the famous album cover [...]
[Notes: You can view all my "Thoughts on Twitter" posts displayed chronologically here: [www.RexBlog.com]. Second, after starting to write this, I noticed ubber-blogger Robert Scoble wrote a post on the same topic. I thought of just pointing to it and saying, "what he said," but had, by then, [...]
A couple of days ago, the the New York Times reported on findings from the new Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry Forecast that projects media expenditures from 2009-2013. From that NYT story, a game of “telephone” has rippled forth across the land that has boiled [...]
