Writing

Seth Goldstein:Netscape browsed the Web. Yahoo! organized it. Google searched it. And now Facebook has made it social.Right or wrong, it's an interesting characterization.Plus, it implies myriad opportunities around each point -- browsing, organization, search and social community. Users can [...]  Read more

The traditional approach to content distribution has been "if you build it they will come." Distribute quality content in one place, buying the shelf space for that place, then market it to drive users/viewers to that place. TV, cable, movies, [...]  Read more

Great analysis from Umair at Bubblegen on advertising on social nets:"The point is - ads on social nets are seriously underperforming at the moment. It's unlikely that naive ads will be the b-model that lets them capture a share of [...]  Read more

Fascinating chart from Business Week showing what people are doing online:They don't describe the chart as "social media" - but looking at the online actions listed (creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, inactives) seem to be a decent representation of activities [...]  Read more

I found some great thoughts at elearnspace:Restructuring Education Love this quote by Clay Shirky: "The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the society they live in. As a [...]  Read more

Well, this has probably already been the case for years, but in the past two weeks:*Openads, the "free, open source ad server," announced a $5mm funding, in part to become an open advertising platform. Their core products, Openads 2.o (formerly [...]  Read more

My friends at Lotame processed their one billionth ad transaction this weekend and will quickly double that.At the same time, Jeremy Liew writes about content specific ad networks that in effect are creating synthetic ad channels:"Synthetic channels, like the channels [...]  Read more

Jason Calacanis has a new venture, Mahalo, and I love it.It's not because I think the idea of the "first human-powered search engine" is a necessarily novel or a good one -- I have no idea if this is new [...]  Read more

Atif Rafiq, in an essay called "In Defense of the Text Web, writes that:"[I]t’s simplistic to believe that anything produced in text today can be better consumed in video. The written word is and will remain the optimal form for [...]  Read more