It’s been just over two years since the New York Times dropped the paywall on its website and the Gray Lady looks about ready to admit defeat. This is a move similar to the one that NewsGator made with its products this last summer and will likely not be the last of the paid-turned-free-turned-paid online services. I have very little faith that people will pay for New York Times online if they’re simply charging for the same content. That being said, if the price is low enough I may consider it.
Category Technology
Google Wave
I have 25 invites for Google Wave. If you want one, PM me on Twitter or leave a comment on this thread. I’m not really into Google Wave, but it may have potential, depending on how people use it.
Also, my last final is tomorrow afternoon. I will see you then.
NYC Apps Contest
Hot on the heels of San Francisco’s App Contest, New York City is following suit with an app contest of its own. There are a number of prize categories but the grand prize winner gets $5000 and dinner with the mayor of New York City.
Apple Leaves U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Apple announced today that they were leaving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with some pretty strong language:
“Apple supports regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and it is frustrating to find the Chamber at odds with us in this effort.”
The controversy arose from a Chamber of Commerce filing to the EPA in August that called for a trial. The Chamber’s senior VP for the environment even went so far as calling for it “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century“. The irony: Scopes lost the monkey trial.
College Admissions Blogging
New York Times has a story about MIT’s student blogs:
Posting untouched student writing — and comments reacting to that writing — does carry some risks. Boring, sloppily written posts do nothing to burnish an institutional image, college admissions officials say, and there is always the possibility of an inflammatory or wildly negative posting.
App Contest for SF Data
Gavin Newsom announced a contest for the data that is at DataSF.org:
The day-long app-building contest is open to developers, journalists, community organizers, policy wonks, students and others interested in building a better San Francisco from more than 100 datasets available on DataSF.org.
Find Evan Ratliff
Evan Ratliff disappeared. Find him. This has got to be one of the coolest projects I have seen in a long time. Imagine getting paid to disappear for your job.
A PHP Bug That Will Never Be Fixed
It’s too bad really, I quite liked my office raptor free.
Silicon Valley Goes from Libertarian to Keynesian
Silicon Valley Goes from Libertarian to Keynesian – Digits – WSJ: “The venture capital community is feeling some culture shock as it prepares to go after billions in government stimulus funds for tech and telecom startups.”
Emacs Snake
Sometimes old games are more fun…
The Problem With Waffles
Since the death of OiNK just under a month ago, the BitTorrent community has been frantically searching for a replacement tracker that is just as good. Two trackers, specifically, have been touted as the “official” replacement, what.cd and waffles.fm on social news sites such as Digg and reddit. There is, however, another tracker that is already considerably larger than both of those trackers, STMusic.
STMusic has had no coverage the conventional websites but has had the advantage of open registrations for the first couple weeks after OiNK was closed. This meant that nobody had to beg for an invite on any large forum and would also partially explain why nobody heard of it.
Waffles.fm and what.cd created a large interest and buzz in their websites by limiting the amount of users that were able to register. This helped with viral marketing but may lead to the eventual downfall of these private trackers. With so few users, there are not enough leachers to get many users ratios up to a decent level. Right now, there are over 4 times as many torrents as there are users with thousands being added every day. As it stands, even people who upload torrents are not getting enough hits to be a good incentive.
If waffles.fm and what.cd are going to work, they need to start allowing more users in. By increasing the amount of users, they will water down the over saturated base of uploaders. A good torrent site needs people who don’t upload but simply download and keep torrents alive.
iPhone Overhype: Philadelphia Mayor in Line
In a sign that the iPhone is way too hyped, the mayor of Philadelphia has been waiting in line since 3:30 this morning. According to a reader at Consumerist nobody really likes him but he could at least be pretending to work today.
Technorati Tags: iphone
On Mob Mentality
The Internet prides itself in being inherently anti-establishment. The users on digg think they have it all figured out and can bring the political system to its knees. Reddit prides itself on being a more intelligent digg and yet still has all of the same characteristics. However, by creating these lofty ideas of themselves users on sites like digg and reddit can lose touch with the original goal of expanding their knowledge and get caught up in the grassroots mob mentality of the Internet.
Let me provide my favorite example. A fringe Democratic presidential candidate from Alaska is invited to a debate hosted by MSNBC. This candidate is unprofessional in his tone and presentation and yet gives frank answers to issues that many other politicians beat around the bush about. The video is posted on Youtube and the social news sites go wild despite the fact that this man is clearly not presidential material.
This obsession goes out of control with spinoff posts like, “___ omitted from NBC poll because he was rude” or “Get ___ on Myspace’s movers and shakers”. It is evident to anybody on the outside that these people have lost site of their purpose for promoting the man in the first place. They are more obsessed with themselves and how they perceive they can influence people than the content they are displaying. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the mob mentality of sites like digg, thus proving that the self proclaimed athiest-knowitalls of the Internet are not as smart as they thought.
Technorati Tags: digg, reddit, socialnetworks
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Technorati Tags: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Edwards and Obama Embrace Social Networking
Social networking is definitely the buzzword leading into the 2008 campaign cycle and the Democrats seem to be all over it. It started with Howard Dean in 2004 and Joe Trippi’s book “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” explained how well it worked.
Following the footsteps of the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John Edwards have definitely embraced the social networks. John Edwards first started on this when Kevin Marks and Danah Boyd (correct me if I am wrong on this one) convinced him to sign up for an account on Myspace.
A few months ago, Barack Obama launched his own social network for campaigning, my.barackobama.com. This site encourages users to blog and set fundraising goals for Mr. Obama’s campaign.
Now, Edwards has an account on Twitter. I don’t know if it is ghostwritten but this sort of thing definitely makes a politician seem more personable. I guess it could be like the modern equivalent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fireside chats.
At the same time, Redstate.com is using social networking sites to show things former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani has said in the past regarding abortion. It will be interesting to see if this type of thing will actually make that big of a difference with social conservatives.