Content Preview: rss
Seth Finkelstein 14 days ago
"Belle de Jour" an alleged anonymous prostitute blogger, is now allegedly outed as Brooke Magnanti, a scientist. I'd believe she's the writer, but I don't buy the story. I'm going out on a limb here. All the initial punditry I see is of the type What Does This All Mean? I wish there was more Why Should We Believe This? Supposedly: "I couldn't find a professional job in my chosen field because I didn't have my PhD yet. I didn't have a lot of spare time on my hands because I was still making corrections and preparing for the viva and I got through my savings a lot faster than I thought I would." Unable to pay her rent, Magnanti's mind turned to other things. She told the Sunday Times she wanted to start doing something straight away, "that doesn't require a great deal of training or investment to get started, that's cash in hand and that leaves me spare time to do my work in". Her solution was prostitution. I DISBELIEVE . To ...
Seth Finkelstein 39 days ago
Compare: A recent _Wired_ Twitter article, quoting Twitter's CEO: Do you understand how money flows to the Internet? When you know that Twitter is a vehicle for directing information and traffic to large audiences, you realize there’s obviously a huge business. Microsoft Bing search: Because today at Web 2.0 we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now). Google blog: In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic. Me: (a while back, for which I was much flamed) People aren't being connected by the 'real-time messaging service', ...
Seth Finkelstein 60 days ago
A few months ago, Charles Arthur had a column The long tail of blogging is dying ("The popularity of blogging seems to be fading as people turn to the easier aspects of social media: status updates and tweeting") People are still reading blogs, and other content. But for the creation of amateur content, their heyday for the wider population has, I think, already passed. The short head of blogging thrives. Its long tail, though, has lapsed into desuetude. See also The Rise of the Professional Blogger The blogosphere was supposed to democratize publishing and empower the little guy. Turns out, the big blogs are all run by The Man. There's a predicatable reaction to articles like these - reading it absurdly as saying nobody would ever post again, redefining the word blogger to mean low/unpaid corporate writer who rants, discounting the article because of the author, and so on. But it's quite measurable. Not by text string searching an index, which is ...
Seth Finkelstein 87 days ago
As part of what I call The Sign Of The Bubble, I've been interested in what happened to a venture capital fund which wanted to invest $100 million dollars based on "RSS" (syndication feed) businesses, started by two people at Harvard's Berkman Center. It raises many issues that I shouldn't elaborate on in a public message. But I was never able to figure out how to ask the questions I wanted to ask, in a context and manner that might have gleaned candid answers. And it didn't seem worthwhile to annoy people over the issue (both in asking sensitive questions, and in possibly writing about it). But the peHUB site ("A Public Forum for Private Equity") now has a short article on it: RSS Is Dead, So Is The RSS Fund. Key points: The firm launched with a press release touting "the creation of a $100 million fund," but that was basically a PR stunt. ... [they] wanted to raise $100 million, but had only $20 million from a cornerstone The firm ...
Seth Finkelstein 93 days ago
The "WikiFur" community has finished its escape from being digital sharecroppers on the electronic plantation, err, part of wikifarm company Wikia, Inc. Remember, that's the startup co-founded by Jimmy Wales to, in the words of one article (they said it, not me!), "take the success -- and, indeed, the underlying philosophy -- of Wikipedia," and "commercialize the hell out of it". As put in a statement: Why did WikiFur move? Our current host, Wikia, is a for-profit company funded by venture capital. They have been able to expand rapidly as a result, and provide both technical and community support. This has usually been beneficial to WikiFur. However, there comes a time when every business has to start making money. To increase revenue, Wikia applied new adverts which intrude into the content area, pushing aside existing content. We believe this significantly detracts from the design of these pages. To date, WikiFur readers ...
