He should stick to politics – how quickly they forget! It wasn’t traditional media in the US that put Barack Obama in office, if I’m not mistaken:

Mr. Obama said he noted the trend. “I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,” the President said.”What I hope is that people start understanding if you’re getting your newspaper over the Internet, that’s not free and there’s got to be a way to find a business model that supports that.”

Pfft. Maybe it has to do with the fact that bloggers are starting to take on the role that journalists also do, which is undercover investigations – and it didn’t go well for Obama: barack Obama

Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign has been in full damage control mode since the senator’s blunt remarks about the nature of small town Pennsylvania voters were secretly recorded by a Huffington Post blogger at a recent San Francisco fundraiser that was supposed to be off limits to the press. Read more

what do you think?

 

Kentucky Fried Chicken offer to fix potholes in exchange for graffiti – err sorry – advertising on the hole covers.  From The Chicago Tribune:    Colonel Sanders look-alike Bob Thompson helps a repair crew in Louisville “re-fresh” one of the estimated 350 million potholes nationwide. (KFC Corporation photo/ March 24, 2009) There is a danger on social networks that sell spotlight advertising of the same kind of backlash. We’ll  Everybody needs a little KFC. But maybe not Chicago. The fast-food chain has sent off a letter to the nation’s mayors, offering to patch their potholes for free. The company will leave Continue Reading…

 

Politics and social networks don’t mix?And if they do, how do online communities have a say, and aren’t just ‘used’? I’ve have my doubts about Obama’s commitment to social media. Oh, not to social network marketing – the pushing out, on social media broadcast channels like YouTube and Twitter, of widgets and press releases. But he or his advisors stopped tweeting the day of the election and weren’t heard from for months (there are now 2 tweets on his account). Fundraising using social media – full marks. Listening to the people? Hmmmm… An Obama Promise Broken Already? I was excited Continue Reading…

 

New software automatically reaches out of the screen and handcuffs you to Facebook until the court documents arrive. Oh, alright, that’s a fib… Oh, we love Nick Abrahams at Deacons. Well as much as one can love a lawyer Australian court serves documents via Facebook The big question about Facebook is does it have any valuable commercial application? Well it seems that the courts have found one. Today in what appears to be a first in Australia and perhaps the world, Master Harper of the ACT Supreme Court ordered that a default judgement could be served on defendants by notification Continue Reading…

 

DirkTheCow on Twitter just linked to ThisIsHerd blog post on Vancouver film students who blog. 3rd largest country for blogging.Iran: A nation of bloggers from Mr.Aaron on Vimeo.It’s just a shame that they don’t mention that the President of Iran blogs President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran Blog It’s not that the video is wrong, it’s just that knowing the President of a country – especially Iran – blogs, adds something to the story. He even has comments turned on. Not the type we have in the West but presumably honest and valid in Middle Eastern culture: Dear and honorable president Continue Reading…

 

I saw that Meraki has won a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer prize, and it reminded me that a new kind of economy – well, an old one made more feasible through economies of scale – is arising. The Social Economy. Meraki Inc. USA Sanjit Biswas, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer www.meraki.com Meraki Networks, Inc. builds products for wireless community networks. It offers an integrated package of software, hardware, and management services to build mesh networks. The company’s platform is used to connect communities, apartment complexes, or business districts to the Internet. Its Meraki Manage, is a Web-hosted service that Continue Reading…

 

Well, here it is… Previewing Google Friend Connect: Website owners can make any site social Easily insert social features to make “any app, any site, any friends” a reality MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (May 12, 2008) – Tonight at Campfire One at the Googleplex (http://code.google.com/campfire/), Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) will announce a preview release of Google Friend Connect, a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors. Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social — and now they can be, easily. With Continue Reading…

 

Note: Social Media is user-generated, member created, content. Not interactive stuff from a web agency or traditional media company.I’ve been following 5min_tech on Twitter for a while now. 5min – Find the Best How To, instructional and DIY videos – people uploading 5 min videos to educate other people. It’s called a videopedia. Kinda cool to have people doing stuff for free – how many businesses are having their models threatened now? I would be shoving the videos I usually sell up in 5min chunks on this site, and then using it to promote my live tutorials, workshops and labs Continue Reading…

 

Sitting in my hotel room in Jeddah, trying to resist the lure of waffles with strawberries. Found this article in Gulf Business magazine: Behind the VeilTo the average observer in the West, women in the Middle East are a repressed gender, confined to their homes by the ‘conservative’ male. The truth is a bit different. There has been a dramatic shift in Arab attitudes over the past decade, with women in the Middle East now charging up the corporate ladder and finding success on their own terms. The article then goes on to talk about women entrepreneurs in the region, Continue Reading…

 

Defamation laws need to change. Or the courts will be swamped. Media distribution is now in the hands of everyone, and not everyone will behave themselves: Fuzzy Wikipedia Entry Leads to Zoeller LawsuitWikipedia founder Jimmy Wales declined to comment on the suit, but he said Wikipedia is no different from any Internet message board — meaning objectionable comments have to be posted before they can be removed. “We try to police it pretty closely, but people do misbehave on the Internet,” said Wales, of St. Petersburg, Fla.Pro golfer Fuzzy Zoeller is teed off over what he calls defamatory statements about Continue Reading…

 

From Bizreport by Kristina Knight: Reuters Partnering With PluckIn a first-of-its-kind move, news syndication company Reuters will begin syndicating blogs. The partnership will join the news service with social media firm Pluck; along with the partnership, Reuters reportedly will invest in the firm. The partnership with Pluck, which runs BlogBurst syndiators, will give advertisers more variety, according to Reuters. “Pluck represents the next evolution in finding interesting information sources for our clients,” said Reuters President Chris Ahearn (via MediaPost). “The mainstream media can embrace the fact that a variety of blogs out there have compelling information that people can read.”Here Continue Reading…

 

Snippets from New York Times’ David Barboza article, courtesy of The Ledger Online: Today, Baidu has a market value of $3 billion and operates the fourth-most trafficked Web site in the world. And Baidu is doing what no other Internet company has been able to do: clobbering Google and Yahoo in its home market. But Baidus evolution, and Mr. Lis journey as an entrepreneur, offer textbook examples of the payoffs and perils of doing business in China and suggest that Baidu may prove to be far more resilient than some analysts believe. China has a population of 1.3 billion, about Continue Reading…

 

…and read this. From Dylan Welch at the Sydney Morning Herald: Medical website hits back at doctors A professor of medicine working with an online medical diagnosis website says a call by the Australian Medical Association to avoid such sites was ill-informed, and “they need to be open to this new technology”. NSW AMA President Andrew Keegan last week criticised the growth of web diagnostic tools, saying it was inappropriate for a diagnosis to be given without a full face-to-face history by a doctor. But Professor George Rubin, a consultant with private hospital owner Australian Macquarie Health Corporation, which runs Continue Reading…

 

2Spare.com (2 Much Time 2 Spare) have a list of the top 87 bad predictions in all sectors. The list has 590 votes. Let me extract out the ones of interest in computing and such – and I’ll add a few at the bottom of recent ones: «640k is enough for everyone.» William F. Gates III «I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.» IBM Chairman Thomas Watson, 1943. «Everything that can be invented has been invented.» Charles H. Duell, an official at the US patent office, 1899. «This antitrust thing will blow over.» Bill Gates, founder Continue Reading…

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