The Huffington Post will be bringing on a former Newsweek staffer to cover hot political topics and the upcoming 2008 Presidential Election. Big news as new media continues growing and competing with mainstream media.

I’m just waiting for HP to launch a video blog to compete with the nightly news.

The Huffington Post, which started about 18 months ago as a political Web site for celebrity bloggers, is preparing to venture into original reporting, with plans to cover Congress and, already, the 2008 presidential campaign.

Arianna Huffington, who started HuffingtonPost.com, said yesterday that the site had hired Melinda Henneberger, a print journalist most recently with Newsweek magazine, as its political editor. The site has about 2.3 million unique visitors a month, making it one of the more popular blog sites.

Via NY Times

Originally posted on November 30, 2006 @ 9:02 am

China apparently is tired of annoymity, in an effort to bolster “security” online. China will force users to register online with their real names. Looks like all avenues of freedom are being squashed in the big red state.

Officials with the Internet Society of China (ISC) have confirmed that China is exploring adopting a real name system in parts of the Internet, Shanghai-based Oriental Morning Post reported Wednesday.

Hu Qiheng, chairman of the board of directors of the ISC, was reported to have said on Tuesday at Info China 2006 in Beijing that China is making attempts to strike a balance between individual privacy and public interests.

“The past understanding of privacy is too absolute. Not only China, but also the whole world, should realize the necessity of balancing individual privacy and public and national interests,” he said.

A new system is likely to be adopted, requiring Chinese netizens to submit information like real names and ID card numbers when they register a blog or a BBS (Bulletin Board Service) account.

Originally posted on November 30, 2006 @ 10:56 am

Security Port tackles the issue of cyberstalking and have aimed it clearly in the face of bloggers.

Cyberstalking is a new phenomenon that allows anonymous online stalkers to prowl for victims. Online bloggers traditionally provide personal details about their lives. As a result, many women that blog are becoming victims. Most people are concerned about children on the Internet and set up rigorous posting guidelines for children, adolescents, and teenagers, but few adults heed the warnings and often do not consider that they too can be targeted.

Do you think we should setup annonymous tactics to avoid detection by our cyberstalkers?

Originally posted on November 29, 2006 @ 8:56 pm

It must be one heck of an outage if you can knock out that grid. Kinda scary to think about what it takes to take the whole shebang offline. Will be interesting to watch the damage control and the bounceback. Although I’m sure its an upgrade from most shared hosting servers.

Customers of MediaTemple’s GridServer, which received widespread attention upon its debut last month, experienced significant downtime Tuesday. GridServer is among the many cluster-based grid hosting services, offering the promise of enterprise-level reliability and scalability in an affordable web hosting plan.

GridServer got a big boost when its launch was featured on TechCrunch, a leading technology blog. On Tuesday, bloggers who were among the early adopters to GridServer were airing their grievances as their sites were slowed by performance problems. MediaTemple provided regular updates on its efforts to stabilize the system, citing bugs in a third-party storage system as the cause for the outages and sluggishness. The performance problems began at 10 a.m. Pacific time and continued past 5 p.m. for some customers.

via

Originally posted on November 29, 2006 @ 9:20 pm

With the recent Edgeio acquisition of Adaptive Real Estate, it appears Edgeio plans to merge the worlds of real estate listings and the blogosphere. Atleast that’s what it looks like over here.

I am pleased to announce that edgeio has made its first acquisition. About a week ago we acquired the assets of Adaptive Real Estate Services, a company built over the past several years by father and son team Robert and Peter Meyer.

ARES, as it is known, has patiently built up relationships with Brokers and Agents in 70 of the top MLS organizations (multiple listings services) in the US. It has about 1.5m homes listed for sale in the areas it covers.

Originally posted on November 29, 2006 @ 9:17 pm