Online Media Cultist

As the blogosphere starts to mature in bits and spurts, earning a full-time living as a “professional” blogger is a notion and dream for thousands.
A New York Times piece from the weekend looks at the growth of jobs stemming from the blogosphere. Interestingly and perhaps not surprisingly, blogging gigs tend to be much […]

A tectonic shift is taking place, and we’re just beginning to see the visible results. Television is slowly but surely bowing to ascendant power of the Internet as the place where people gather to discuss, interact, and increasingly watch episode video content (translation to human = television programs).
Very interesting news came yesterday in that […]

Still semi-fuming about Andrew Keen’s new book, I began reading a piece, by Time writer Joe Klein, called “Beware the Blogger’s Bile,” skeptically to say the least.
Refreshingly, it’s an intelligent and balanced piece (to counter Keen’s description of his own book as “not designed to be particularly fair or balanced”!) that looks at […]

Another self-described expert is trying to sell a book by attacking the blogosphere, blathering about how a “pajama army” of “exuberant monkeys” is creating “an endless forest of digital mediocrity.”
Now there’re some images for you, eh? Puts you in the mind of a demented Peter Pan 2.0 or some such.
The author, Andrew Keen, […]

Wikipedia defines PageRank as: “a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.”
Google’s mysterious and fiercely guarded PageRank system is the stuff of web publisher dreams and nightmares. A […]

Political organizations such as MoveOn.org proved during the 2004 presidential campaign that it’s possible to organize “real life” events involving thousands of people.
Now, things are getting more interesting. TechCrunch features a few stories this morning that show how “web 2.0″ companies are innovating to draw eyeballs and repeat visitors.
Instead of being just another […]

The battle for intellectual property rights online will be playing out for many years to come. The latest news comes in the form of Jorge Romero, a dude from Chicago who had the misfortune of uploading a bunch of episodes of hit TV show 24 (personal note: I dropped off watching Bauer and co. in […]

TechCrunch reported over the weekend that social news superpower Digg will expand its categories in “the next 6 to 12 months” to cover reviews of products and services.
This is the most significant development to hit the social news/social bookmarking world in a long time.
Here’s why: The “big three” (Digg, Netscape, Reddit) of social […]