Digg: What’s My Motivation?

September 7, 2006

A brouhaha at Digg over its cliquey community strikes me as having focused attention on one of the core issues of social media – what will motivate users enough to get them to contribute to the community? On one hand, recent data about wikipedia suggests that there are many contributors who do a lot of […]

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Toronto WiFi Lights Up

September 7, 2006

The Globe, the Star and IT Business have the goods on the launch of Toronto’s wifi network. Pricing (after a 6 month free period): $29 a month, $10 a day, or $5 an hour.

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Is the Fifth Estate a Fifth Division?

September 6, 2006

Columbia Journalism Review has a piece on Iraq war reporting (contrast the story with the case of Judith Miller) that has to make one wonder about the uselessness of the news media precisely when it was needed the most.

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The HP Saga: Surveillance – is this the HP Way?

September 6, 2006

The news is piling up on the astounding allegation that HP’s Board Chair, Patricia Dunn, directed the surveillance by pretexting of the home phone records of HP Directors in an effort to find a leaker who was passing information to the news media beginning with the furor over the ouster of former CEO Carly Fiorina. […]

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The Next Campaign

September 6, 2006

The next campaign is gearing up to run on shrill pandering to xenophobia and fear. I’m buckling up for many months of appeals to the lowest common denominator.

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A Big Day for Kiko

September 6, 2006

An acquisition by Tucows and the first male heir. It’s all Kiko, all the time.

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Web Worker Daily

September 5, 2006

What a pleasure to see Om launch Web Worker Daily. Many of the observations he makes about the changing nature of work resonate with me; they’re values I’ve enthusiastically incorporated in my law practice since leaving BigLaw to do it on my own: Broadband, as I have written in the past, is freeing us from […]

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Meta-Meta Bubble

September 3, 2006

Dave Winer calls the meta-signs on Bubble 2.0 exactly right, IMO. And what could be more genuine than a simulated parody about reality (or is that a genuine parody about unreality)? And I’ll add one the obvious comment: when Winer blogs a Techmeme headline about Arrington commenting on Web 2.0, well that’s pretty meta.

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MyTunes

September 2, 2006

Finally, something truly interesting in social media: MySpace plans to distribute, sans DRM and using Snocap’s technology, music from the many bands that call it their online home (Mashable calls it 3 million). Mathew wonders whether the low (or no) profile of those bands will allow the feature to amount to anything. Agreed, but much […]

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Go Keith Go

August 31, 2006

US TV news finds its spine.

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Is Social Software too Social?

August 31, 2006

Nicholas Carr once again pokes a stick at the ‘sphere, this time commenting on whether the hype surrounding social software is overdone. I suspect that in response many of the usual evangelizers will say nay, and that there will be some gnashing of teeth, rolling of eyes, and of course the usual ad hominems. For […]

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The Bland New Days

August 29, 2006

Rafe Mair vents in the Tyee on the uselessness of much news media: The media has been defanged because it is controlled by men who have reasons to be nice to government. … Blandness rules the airwaves and print. This means the public is less well informed and government can pretty well do as they […]

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