Online Media Cultist

The Department of Justice approved the merger of Sirius Satellite Radio with XM yesterday, combining the two major satellite radio companies in the U.S. market.
I hope the merger ends up being a good thing for the industry and consumers both, and more than anything doesn’t mess up what I think is a fabulous service. […]

In the midst and tumult of companies falling all over themselves to launch applications within Facebook’s wildly popular platform was a dirty little secret: that with about 20,000 Facebook apps to choose from, it’s now nearly impossible to stand out from the crowd to gain traction. At some point the scales will inevitably slide to […]

Go Big Always takes some “older” new media companies, such as CNET and MacWorld, to task for not fully embracing social media and declares, consequentially, that “they’re getting their ass handed to them by blogs.” And that’s quite a large collective ass at that!
The rationale for the ass handing basically boils down to the […]

What’s up with Alexa ranking spikes?
If you’re into the web and a stats junkie, that probably means that you’re over at Alexa at least several times a day checking out ranking trends. Everyone knows that Alexa rankings (which are based on sort of a Nielsen-like system of extrapolating overall rankings based on the web […]

If Apple can pull the trigger on a potential deal with major music companies to offer a “radical new business model that would give customers free access to its entire iTunes music library in exchange for paying a premium for its iPod and iPhone devices,” it could be a game changer.
The fact that music […]

If a text message is magically sent from a forest with no one in it to another forest with no one in it, did it really happen?
So it goes that “compulsive e-mailing and text messaging could soon become classified as an official brain illness.” That is, if the American Journal of Psychiatry has anything […]

It hit home for me this morning – not enormously revelatory of course to anyone paying attention – that we’re in the midst of a great and sweeping period of mergers and acquisitions right now in the tech and Internet space. We’re probably in something like the “latter web 2.0 days” of the Internet’s evolution, […]

AOL is furiously trying to break the bounds of its decaying empire, and it just might succeed in doing that.
But the price, my friends, is high. AOL announced that it will acquire social networking site Bebo for $850 million. Bebo is one of those social networks usually placed in the “middle tier.” It’s no […]

Scott Karp uses the Eliot Spitzer story – no, not the tawdry bits but the fact that is a wall-to-wall, traditional/new media Media Event of Proportions the Likes of Which – to talk about link journalism: “There is a HUGE opportunity for news brands to redefine what they do for such “media frenzy” stories — […]

Last July, I wrote about Hillary Is 44: Whereas HillaryHub.com is like an official campaign television commercial, Hillary Is 44 is more along the lines of a third-party “issue group” campaign. For the time being, Barack Obama is the target. For example, the notion that Obama is the presidential campaign’s front runner is referred to […]