Mitch Ratcliffe blogs about the constantly changing boundary between media and life, the businesses that live on that border, and the meaning of all this change to society and the economy.
William Gibson, "Father of Cyberpunk," long known for his prescience, has put his finger on a fundamental truth about the world we live in today. His new book, Spook Country, contains a couple passages everyone concerned with media business models should read and consider (along with the rest of the book, which is a pretty good yarn about the hidden currents of American paranoia).
In recent days, I've received a half dozen invitations to join Quechup (it gets no linkage because it deserves none), which is billed as "the social networking platform sweeping the globe." Turns out it the service is more like a cancer than a popular uprising, because it is spamming the address books of people who are fooled into joining.
My old friend and cofounder at BuzzLogic, Todd Parsons, has posted about the need to connect financial incentive to blogging activity, calling it an "an army on the rise":Despite its image, Pay Per Post is gathering steam and the reason is, for many individual publishers out there, the personal satisfaction they get from blogging is not always enough. The numbers tell us that many want to take their self-publishing efforts to another level and generate revenue, no matter how small.
I'll be at Chris Pirillo's Gnomedex Conference in Seattle later this week. Look me up if you are there.
I don't personally care whether Rudy Giuliani's daughter had joined the One Million Strong for Obama group on Facebook, because it doesn't constitute an endorsement in the sense that the press has asserted.Friending someone isn't the same as saying you want them to be your president.
For all the hype of the Summer of Facebook, the direction social networking is headed will lead only to dead ends. A discussion of social networking at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit the other day demonstrates that, for the most part, social network providers only want to keep their members on the inside of their walled gardens.
Here's my challenge. I'll pay $100 for a VoIP client I can use over WiFi on my iPhone.
Despite my reservations about AT&T, which were well founded and widely documented, I did go to the AT&T store at 38th Street in Tacoma, Washington, yesterday to buy an iPhone. Several "spectacular" features of this launch deserve mention.
On the last afternoon of the Supernova Conference, David Weinberger and fellow ZD Net blogger Andrew Keen, debated the question, "Disorder: Feature or Bug?" Unfortunately, they didn't actually manage to demonstrate a definitive answer to that question, because all we learned was that they disagreed.
I am very impressed with the specs and reported performance of the iPhone. For weeks, I've been thinking over whether to go buy one.