I can’t be 100% certain, but I’ll wager that Dan Lyons, AKA Fake Steve Jobs, is staging what, if it does turn out to be fake, one of the most brilliant bits of satire since A Modest Proposal.

Fake Steve has been posting today about receiving an offer from Apple to shut down The Secret […]

It’s hard to come by exclusives in the tech blogosphere, but I’m betting I have the exclusive blog post on this: Guy Kawasaki interviewing Robert Scoble at the Stanford Web Publishing Course. I’m here along with them and a bunch of other web-savvy “faculty” helping a group of publishers get more web savvy — my […]

The Huffington Post has unveiled a new comment system that allows top commenters to become featured bloggers on the site. I interviewed Arianna Huffington about the new system — our Q&A appears below. First, a few thoughts on the idea of promoting commenters to bloggers.

It didn’t take long, but I’m now posting things to Twitter that are very much an extension of what I post on this blog. There may have been a few instances where I posted a link or a thought to Twitter that might have previously been a blog post, but I’m not sure.

I’m definitely […]

What is NXTWidget? The NXTwidget is a web widget. Readers of a publisher’s website can scroll through thumbnails of the digital edition and search inside the digital edition for keyword content. One click opens the digital edition on the page the reader has selected.
Where?It’s a web widget, designed to go on a publisher’s website. […]

So I got my Publishing 2.0 feed set up to crosspost to Facebook and Twitter, but I’m wondering about the utility of doing so, given that most of the people I’m connected to on Facebook and Twitter also subscribe to my regular blog RSS feed.

I’m starting to think that this has the potential to […]

With some wickedly smart and prescient people having invested in Twitter and with Jason Calacanis having quit Facebook (high profile anti-hype is always an interesting sign), I’m going to invest some time in trying to figure out how to maximize the utility of these two applications, particularly for communicating on the web — Fred Wilson’s […]

Each killer communications app has a unique core value proposition that nothing else can beat:

Telephone — synchronous one-to-one voice

Email — asynchronous one-to-one text

Instant messagingg — synchronous one-to-one text

Blogging — asynchronous one-to-many text

Thanks to Dick Costolo, zen master entrepreneur and all around righteous dude, who cited Publishing 2.0 as one of his favorite blogs in a WSJ piece about 10 years of blogging, I got asked to make a video. Choosing from a bunch of questions, I decided to go serious on the blogger vs. journalist (non)issue, […]

Movable Type has just released version 4.0 and reversed a decision that nearly killed MT 3.0 and led to the rise of WordPress — MT 4.0, currently in beta, will be released in open source later this year. (See Read/WriteWeb coverage.) The interesting question is how the market will respond to an open source battle […]

I just went to the New York Times homepage and saw that political reporter Katharine Seelye is “live-blogging” the democrat’s New Hampshire Debate. Newspapers and other mainstream media have had blogs for quite a while, but this strikes me as the moment when blogs officially went mainstream and when journalism crossed a tipping point of […]

The hallmark of the new media revolution is that the balance of power is shifting to individuals — on the web, anyone can can be a publisher, individuals can make their voices heard through comments on nearly every item of content, and search puts individuals rather than media brands in control of content discovery. But […]

How foolish would someone sound in 2007 making a sweeping generalization about what people do with websites? Probably about as foolish as making sweeping generalizations about what people do with printing on paper — and as foolish as making sweeping generalizations about what people do with blogs.

A blog, after all, is just a content management […]

By now we are all quite familiar with the upside of blogging — free, easy-to-use software and the powerful network effects of the web have enable thousands of people who might never have had a voice back in the days of scarce publishing resources to have their voices heard far and wide. But you rarely, […]

The once monolithic media industry is undergoing a radical schism, dividing itself into content creation, on the one hand, and content aggregation and distribution on the other.

The nature of this transformation suddenly crystallized for me when I read Tom Foremski’s piece on the new West Coast/East Coast media industry divide. Tom seems to be focused […]

Chris Anderson highlights the tiny direct cash return that Guy Kawasaki earned on his first year of blogging: $3,350 at a CPM of $1.39. That’s a pitiful CPM by mass media standards — and it’s totally wrong. The way media has traditionally worked, the more “pure” the audience is, the more efficient it is […]

PayPerPost finally caved under pressure from the FTC and every blogger with an ounce of ethics — they now require “some” form of disclosure, which can include a “site” disclosure, i.e. you can bury a link to your “disclosure” in your sidebar. I was a bit dismayed to see that some of those who have […]

People don’t like to be deceived. When they think they are looking at noncommercial content, and you give them an ad instead, that’s deception. That’s why Wendy’s took flack for circulating ads on YouTube that were not clearly discernible as ads. And that’s why PayPerPost’s new disclosure policy generator won’t help bloggers avoid deceiving their […]

The Sanctimonious-sphere is all up in arms because Nielsen BuzzMetrics asked attendees of their CGM summit this week not to blog. I attended the summit, and I respected their request not to blog — and I think the request was perfectly reasonable. Why? Because it wasn’t an open “conference” — it was a private client […]

What’s more amusing? Scoble and New Media folks discover “engagement,” a term that the old advertising establishment has been “engaged” with for quite some time. Or, that hot and utterly hip video blogging has been caught up in a he said, he said spat over audience measurement. Welcome to media! These guys sound like a […]

Richard Edelman and Steve Rubel have final responded to the Wal-Mart flog incident with an appropriate mea culpa. They both insist that they could not respond to the storm of criticism sooner because they didn’t have all of the facts — and without all the facts, they couldn’t CONTROL the conversation. Both Richard and Steve […]

I’ve been wondering when Gabe Rivera would finally get around to “monetizing” his wildly popular (in tech circles) TechMeme. Gabe clearly put a lot of thought into his sponsorship model, which allows sponsors to display items from their RSS content feed on the front page of TechMeme. It’s very original, and like all great ideas, […]

On Wednesday, I’ll be blogging The New New Internet Conference on Web 2.0 for Business in lovely Tysons Corner, Virginia for two reasons.

First and foremost: relative to coverage of Web 2.0 in the consumer space, I’ve seen much less discussion of Web 2.0 applications for business — other than endless coverage of the emergent […]

I noticed that Engadget has ascended to the top spot of the Tecnhorati Top 100. Scanning down the Top 20, I was struck by the dominance of Tech/Geek blogs and Political blogs.

1. Engadget — TECH/GEEK
2. 老徐 徐静蕾 新浪BLOG
3. Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things - TECH/GEEK
4. Gizmodo, The Gadget Guide — TECH/GEEK
5. The […]

A debate has erupted over the definition of blogs and the value of blog “influentials” as drivers of advertising CPM rates, which is so Old Media in the particulars it’s really quite astonishing. Scoble challenges Windows Live Spaces’ definition of a blog and then plants this lightening rod:

What does Microsoft do when it says “we […]

There’s yet another (tiresome) dust-up in the blogosphere over the existence of an “A List” and its relationship to the “long tail” of 50 million+ bloggers — and whether it’s fair — courtesy of Nick Carr, everyone’s favorite lightnight rod. Here’s the filter I always use to make sense of this — technological advances (e.g. […]

Steve Rubel complains about the “Underground Blosophere,” which is essentially bloggers emailing each other in search of links. Steve admits that this email practice is what helped get him where he is today, but then he brags about having “kicked this habit,” as if it were shameful.

Many of the comments on his post say this […]

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released the results from a blogger survey today, which detailed the reasons why bloggers blog. The report focuses on some notion of storytelling vs. journalism (whatever), but what jumped out at me was that 7% of bloggers said that making money is a major reason why they blog. […]

Dell launched a blog and promptly got savaged by Jeff Jarvis and Steve Rubel for not immediately engaging the issues of poor customers service that have tied Dell to the whipping post of the blogosphere.

In theory, Jeff and Steve are right — although, with all due respect, they were just a wee bit sanctimonious […]

Oh, the existential crisis (and real personal trauma) of it all — Amanda Congdon and Andrew Baron of the hugely popular Rocketboom videoblog have parted ways, which raises the question — who is Rocketboom?

Mike Arrington says, “Amanda was RocketBoom.”

Jason Calacanis says in an open letter to Amanda, “When you’re the talent you build brand […]

Gawker’s Nick Denton has announced a restructuring, including a staff shake-up and the sale of two under-performing sites. Nick is a smart guy, and he’s clearly getting ready for the inevitable moment when the new media bubble begins to deflate — a “perversely countercyclical move” he calls it.

What I found most fascinating is the […]

After my initial revulsion at http://www.payperpost.com, the new service that connects bloggers who want to shill with companies in need of shilling, I created an account to get a look at the terms of the offers. After some very bad PR, PayPerPost is not surprising PAYING bloggers to drum up some more PR — and, […]

The phenomenon called blogging has now been starkly divided into the pre-PayPerPost era and the post-PayPerPost era. I’m referring to a new service that makes an explicit business model out of what up until now has been an implicit accusation, often leveled without cause. PayPerPost enables companies to pay bloggers to say nice things about […]

So much for blogging as conversation, at least according to Seth Godin:

I think comments are terrific, and they are the key attraction for some blogs and some bloggers. Not for me, though. First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning. Second, it takes way […]

Marc Cuban’s rant about blogging vs. traditional media doesn’t really break any new ground, but this observation did get me thinking:

99pct of blogs are about what someone has to say. 99 pct of traditional media is about making money. Which is exactly what leads to the resentment between bloggers and traditional media and why blogging […]

Randall Stross, in a Times article, wonders who will pay for TV now that ad-skipping DVRs and on-demand broadband video have destroyed TV’s mass media advertising model. I wonder whether late 20th-century TV content production will follow the same path as early 20th-century transatlantic ocean travel, milk delivery, and buggy whip manufacturing — marginalized or […]

Much has been said already about the lawsuit against blogger Lance Dutson by ad agency Warren Kremer Paino Advertising, but here are some issues I haven’t seen addressed yet:

1. The lawsuit should be required reading for every blogger — seeing the substance of his blog posts cast in the legal terms of defamation, whether right […]

Have you checked out the Technorati Top 100 (by unique links) lately? It’s starting to change in very interesting ways.

First, Dave Winer is gone. That’s right — Scripting News is no longer a top 100 blog.

So what knocked him off? Personal blogs by young Asian women, most of them on MSN Spaces:

#18 http://spaces.msn.com/babygal89eunice
#19 http://spaces.msn.com/ringmanchoi
(Both […]

Can’t we lay to rest the endlessly inane debate about whether blogging can succeed as a business? (The latest miss-the-point round is between Jason Calacanis and Alan Meckler.)

Since everyone seems to be having so much trouble with this, let’s make it really simple:

- Blogging is just a form of publishing

- If you publish useful or […]

Web 1.0 gave us “internet,” “HTML,” “email,” “hyperlink”, “online,” and, of course, “web.” Web 2.0 has given us “social media,” “citizen journalism,” “tagging,” “blog,” “podcast,” “Web 2.0″ (of course) — and the list goes on.

Web 2.0 is still in the wrangling over terminology phase — especially over Web 2.0 itself. Recently, there’s been some […]

Now that Google has turned marketing into a quantifiable, profitable activity with measurable ROI, how is it that business blogging gets away with the same soft arguments that boosters of brand advertising typically use (and for which they have rightly been taken to task)?

The blogosphere is abuzz because Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, apparently mopped […]

Apparently it’s easier for Robert Scoble to get naked than it is for corporations — that’s the word from OMMA Hollywood:

Consider the blog by golf equipment company TaylorMade-Adidas golf, which launched about 18 months ago. When bloggers want to mention a particular golf club, the legal department wants a symbol–an ‘R’ in a circle–to appear […]

If accurate news and information were a sausage, reading tech.memeorandum this weekend would be like watching it get made. “60% of Windows Vista Code Being Rewritten!” the headlines blared. No it’s not. What if it is? This can’t be true. What does it mean? Help!?!

It’s the those darned “non-credible journalists,” Scoble complains — and those […]

So Microsoft is going after IBM with a $500 million marketing campaign, which apparently doesn’t include a large role for blogs or other “hot” viral marketing tactics? Hmm, go figure:

The campaign began yesterday with eight-page advertisements in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other newspapers. The $500 million to be spent […]

I’ve been wrong to complain about too much media — just as Seth Godin is wrong to suggest that excessive blogging is cluttering the “blog commons.” Thanks, as always, to Umair for the beacon of light:

More to the point: should we see the new world of micromedia as a limited resource; a commons, like Hyde […]

So Dave Winer wants to stop blogging, and Mike Arrington says, NO, you can’t, because Scripting News belongs to “us,” the readers. Mike is half right — Dave does “own” Scripting News, but the blog has become an institution, like any other Old Media company. Dave suggested that he should sell Scripting News to TechCrunch, […]

So New Media is about conversation — but what is the point of conversation?

If it’s the never-ending blogger conversation about snarking, A-Listers, link baiting, traffic envy, ego bashing, etc. etc. then the point is to act like an algae bloom and block out the sun — witness tech.memeorandum today (it’s a Sunday).

But what about […]

I’ve read A LOT about Web 2.0 — I haven’t seen so much Koolaid since I was at summer camp. And I’ve taken a stand that Web 2.0 is a long way from Media 2.0.

Kent Newsome has the latest antidote to Web 2.0 hype, invoking Monty Python’s Holy Grail to show that most Web 2.0 […]

I’ve discussed the problem of geek control of Web 2.0, along with many others including Umair Haque, Pete Cashmore, David Beisel, and Fraser Kelton. (Hit tip to Pete for pulling together the threads.)

This new Geeks for Non-Geeks movement got me thinking about the evolving definition of a “geek.” The following is just a first draft, […]

It’s official — advances in communications technology (email, cell phones, voicemail, telework, etc.) have made workers less productive. Rather than make our lives easier, technology is making our lives more complicated and more difficult. From a study by Day-Timers (via CNET):

Unlike a decade ago, U.S. workers are bombarded with e-mail, computer messages, cell phone calls, […]

Leave it to a librarian to demonstrate that blog posts don’t have to be free-wheeling, loosely-structured, rambling opinion pieces with healthy doses of rant and snark, but can instead be structured, elegantly-organized, thoughtful and sober explanations of important topics. I discovered InfoTangle, a blog by Ellyssa Kroski, a reference librarian at Columbia University (also a […]

From an interview with Michael Wolff:

I’m not a fan of the idea that I should be a blogger, let me say that. One should probably be distrustful of blogs. One should probably be distrustful of most things one reads. The quicker the things that you read are written, the more you should be distrustful of […]

Here’s what’s wrong with all the discussion about the future of blogging as a business — blogging is not a business!

Here’s the latest me-too analysis from The Chicago Tribune (which cites a recent Gallup poll on blog readership):

Even if blogging flops as a business and doesn’t attract more readership, many bloggers will still have […]

As usual, the blogosphere’s response to a hot new feature is (largely) to gush. Technorati announced a new favorites feature, and everybody goes ga-ga, i.e. it’s “cool” so it must be good.

Sorry to play the skeptic, but I think it’s a big yawn. So now I can have my reading list on Technorati along with […]

I’ve seen many bloggers criticize Old Media for reprinting press releases and otherwise uncritically passing along corporate propaganda. But the TechCrunch PR feeding frenzy on tech.memeorandum today was truly a sight to behold. (My goodness, Gabe, is Memeorandum a meme-tracker or a PR tracker?) The title of Dan Farber’s post, TechCrunch leads Silicon Valley Web […]

Michael Arrington declares that BlogBurst Can Save Big (print) Media. To suggest that the lack of blog content is all that ails Old Media is deeply naive. Old Media needs to follow bloggers into the new content creation frontier, but that in itself will NOT solve the problem of business models.

I will give BlogBurst […]

Blogs don’t matter. Web 2.0 doesn’t matter. Old Media doesn’t matter, and neither does New Media. So what does matter? — talent, insight, and, most of all, ideas. George Will makes this point elegantly:

The more journalism I read and do, the more convinced I am not merely that ideas have consequences, but that only ideas […]

Here’s a confession — before I started blogging, I never read blogs. These days, it seems I read little else, but it took becoming a blogger to make me a blog reader. Is it possible that bloggers are the only people who read blogs?

According to a recent Gallup poll, blog readership was either flat or […]

The blogger A-list continues to view the notion of “gatekeepers” defensively, as if it were an accusation (or “whining”) — Seth Finkelstein does a fantastic job of debunking the notion that there are no gatekeepers, using the romantic myth of new frontiers.

In response to Seth’s post, mine, and a few others — Doc Searls writes […]

The backlash and naming calling over Scoble’s declaration that bloggers who run AdSense are “employees of Google,” is understandable (it was a stupid thing to say), but this is an age-old issue in media — how do media companies avoid appearing that they’re “in the pocket” of advertisers?

Concerns that advertisers — who keep the […]

The demise of Publishing 2.0 was predicted early on — I’m still chugging along, but Phil’s point here is spot on — starting to blog is easy but blogging successfully over the long term is really, really hard. Which makes me wonder about the future of consumer-created media, especially in light of a fascinating analysis […]

Bloggers are great at channeling outrage, but when it comes to their own affairs — or pet topics — they are uniquely defensive (I include myself in this critique). I’ve been trying to sort through the FON “scandal,” and the efforts to defend the bloggers involved has lead to some rather tortured explanations. Take […]

From Karl Martino at Philly Future — corporations see blogs as media they can manipulate. If it happened to Karl, it can happen to any of us. Please blog about this and show your support:

Here goes a strike against grassroots (efforts without $6million dollar backer) civil journalism sites….

Without naming any names….

A user on our site […]

The citizen journalism movement is shaking Old Media journalism out of its complacency, but is it realistic to believe that citizen media can and should replace institutional media? I remain deeply skeptical.

Jeff Jarvis is out in force again today, smacking the “dinosaurs” of Old Media for not understanding the power of the people. As usual, […]

There is a bubble in the tech industry, but it has nothing to do with the behavior of venture capital, as so many people are discussing. There’s a bubble because the tech industry is trying to be the new media industry, and very few people in the tech industry understand what’s really happening to the […]

The reactions to Dan Gilmor’s open letter on Bayosphere have fallen into two camps — lessons on start-ups and lessons on the dynamics of citizen journalism.

These perspectives, while important, miss the critical question in middle — who will fund citizen journalism, or any journalism, for that matter? As Justin Fox puts it in his […]

The conventional wisdom is that traditional advertising is wounded and dying at the feet of innovators like Google AdSense and Word of Mouth Marketing. The NYTimes continues its role as a media and technology hype machine today with its coverage of the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association meeting:

Speakers with titles like “marketing medic” or “manager of influencer […]

The quality of analytic thinking in the blogosphere is too often marred by sloppy reasoning, lack of cogency, groupthink, unreasoned orthodoxy, and just plain laziness. I’m no master of analytic precision myself, but it’s something I care about and something I wish the blogosphere would care more about.

In fact, I think the poor quality of […]