Girlspoke blogger Meme will appear on Playboy Radio in about an hour that would be 7:30 EST via Sirius Radio. According the girlspoke website you will be able to listen to the recording via a podcast later in the week.
Ecto a popular desktop blogging client compatible with just about every blogging software on the planet has unveiled Ecto 2.0 beta for Windows. I run windows unlike Matt (the editor) and have been waiting for this new version to come out to test. I will be giving a decent review in a few days after trying it out.
Hat Tip: Darren Rowse
Fired Washington Post Blogger Ben Domenech called the Washington Post Editorial Staff Fools.
“While I appreciated the opportunity to go and join the Washington Post,??? Domenech said, “if they didn’t expect the leftists were going to come after me with their sharpened knives, then they were fools.???
Ben Domenech fired back a rebuttal to all the claims of plagiarism. But clearly if he wants to work in journalism, he’s now passed himself off as The Bob Knight of Blogging. An ill tempered, yet talented guy who everyone admires but no one wants to get near. This is a bad label for anyone who wants to make it in journalism. Luckily for him we live in a new media world. He can always spin this bad press into developing a new level of prowess for his blog.
Darren Rowse, and Jeremy Wright recently celebrated B5Media’s 6 Month Birthday. Businesses are all relatively new at the six month stage. But conversations and relationships are all starting to gel. One of the things that was especially profound about this was something Darren referenced he called them ‘campfires’.
A friend recently reminded me that throughout all history people have clustered together to have conversations. Over the ages a lot of these conversations happened at the end of the day around a campfire where extended families would come together to tell stories, debate issues that impacted them and to entertain each other.
Over the centuries the locations of where these conversations took place changed with in more recent history us moving towards methods of communication that relied upon paid centralised experts to inform and entertain us.
With the advent of new media, like blogging, we’re seeing a move back to the days of people informing and entertaining themselves. In a sense what I see b5 (and other blog and podcast networks) doing is creating spaces for these conversations to happen.
It gives me a great deal of joy to see 100 small (but growing) campfires glowing in the b5 landscape and to witness the growing numbers of people gathering around them to learn, build community and converse.
This is truly what new media,social networking, and really largely what Web 2.0 is all about. It’s about creating conversations. Every blog network, social networking site,podcasting network, vlog out there is lighting fires and asking people to join them in the conversation. This is why it’s just so silly to sit around and fight because occasionally you want to go sit around someone else’s campfire. The more campfires we have the better. It’s about distributed media, not monopolized conversation.
The Old Media is scared of conversation. Mostly because they are so used to being the only one that gets to talk. Kevin Anderson from another campfire group Corante recently touched on this point very well. He is referring to new media, interactive media when he says:
They feel a sense of ownership with their media, but not with the stuff they dismissively call the MSM (the Mainstream Media).
I think Kevin hit the nail squarely with that swing.
Police in Boulder, Colorado used MySpace to identify suspects in a robbery and rape case according to detectives. The incident took place on February 23rd in Boulder when the unnamed victim was sexually assaulted at a party. Police were able to identify the suspects with her help, and the use of the social networking site MySpace which was were she met the seven people involved in the crimes. She did not know the full names of the suspects because she met them online. The suspects allegedly also stole upto 40,000 dollars worth of electronics, jewelry and other valuables at the party. The men face numerous charges steaming from the incident.
While some speculate this could probably be a black eye for the social networking site. The pros and cons are evident. Police were able to utilize the same technology quickly to identify the suspects. Negatively speaking you never know who your meeting online until you meet them in real life. All the more reasons for Fox Interactive to potentially create a system for parents to monitor their chidren’s activities. Luckily for Fox/MySpace the victims, and suspects were all adults. If this had been a case of an underaged victim we might see a much greater backlash than what MySpace is seeing at this point.
Via APWire
Industrious Kid gets 6 million in funding to bring children to the wonderful world of blogging and social networking.
Myspace.com and TheFacebook.com may have the attention of teens, “tweens” and college kids, but Industrious Kid Inc. plans to carve out a space in the crowded social networking world by making bloggers out of elementary school students.
Formed last September, San Francisco-based Industrious Kid has pulled in $6 million in Series A financing from a group of undisclosed individuals. The company is using the round, which closed last fall, to finish development of its first offering, imbee.com, which it plans to launch in May, said Vice President of Marketing Tim Donovan. “The age demographic [for blogging] is getting younger and younger,” said Donovan. “But none of the [current sites] were developed with children in mind.”
A question for the readers. Will this work? Not having kids of that age yet. I wonder if there is enough attraction to get elementary kids blogging. I mean really what’s the point? Don’t they get enough interaction at school? Is this a dumb shellout for a VC to hand over 6 million and bank on children blogging at age 9?
Microsoft continues to confuse the heck out of me. I am always more and more perplexed by the decision of this company to rebrand products create poor interfaces, and launch products a year late. And have Robert Scoble as its unofficial company spokesman, err evangelist. While this post is highly opinionated. The product MSN Spaces is more MySpace and less blogging platform and hopefully that will change with the rebranding. It needs to be more powerful blogging application with simplification if its going to become one of the market leaders if you ask me. Oh Scoble where art thou? If Spaces was so great why are you using WordPress?
MSN INTENDS TO ADD NEW features to its blogging service and change its name from “MSN Spaces” to “Windows Live Spaces” this summer, reflecting the Redmond software giant’s plan to monetize its online offerings under the “Live” flag.
An MSN spokesman said the company will gradually add Windows Live features, rather than relaunch the site. “MSN Spaces will focus on building Windows Live innovations into a ready=for-market product, rather than shipping as a beta in the Ideas site,” the spokesman said. “MSN Spaces will seamlessly transition to Windows Live Spaces as we add new Live features to the service later this summer.”
Via MediaPost
Over the last week or so Google’s Adsense has opened up a help center. Also Yahoo has updated its terms and conditions and added some new features.
Jen and Darren have some conversations and discussion going about all of this.
I’m not big into following all the details of the advertising world. But these seem like some moderately good decisions.
Steve Rubel, pointed me to FeedRinse, a service that cleans up your feeds. Only problem is the Premium version cleans up and sorts around 300 feeds. Problem. I need it to sort roughly 1500 feeds. Sadly enough this is how many feeds I have locked into various feed readers. My quick and easy feedreaders split up into various niche’s include a blogging channel, a sports channel, and a marketing channel. Each with roughly 500+ feeds in it. So you understand I need something very powerful. Feedrinse in the future may offer this kind of technology but at this point it does a rather horrible job of anything. In fact I couldn’t even figure out what it does.
Anyhow what we really need is more of a web based Awasu mixed with Bloglines, and the concept behind Feed Rinse. Then I would be happy.
There has been a lot of conversation going around the blogosphere about MySpace. I’m in a younger age bracket so I presumably should have a myspace right? Wrong. I use TagWorld. Either way MySpaceWatch now has a free acount level that allows parents to monitor their children’s activities. Or maybe a boyfriend wants to monitor his girlfriend. You get the idea. Spread the word. We can now stalk our significant others better today than ever before.
We have decided to create a free account level to myspaceWatch. The free account is functionally similar, and has a text-based advertisement through AdBrite at the top of the page. This seemed to be the best “happy medium??? for advertising, since AdBrite lets us show decent ads without being cheesy. The people who currently have paid accounts have been bumped up to the “pro??? level.
Here’s the scoop on the new account levels:
Free Account
Sign Up Now* Monitor 1 profile
* Profile is crawled twice daily
* View up to 25 of a profile’s friends
* Ad-SupportedPro Account ($6/month via PayPal)
Sign Up Now* Monitor up to 5 profiles
* Profile is crawled every 6 hours
* View up to 100 of a profile’s friends
* No Ads
via MySpaceWatch
