Online Media Cultist

Before this week, if someone had brought up the Grand Theft Auto franchise to me, I would have shrugged my shoulders and perhaps offered a vague recollection that some values groups were in a panic years ago when the San Andreas version came out. That’s all changed now. Grand Theft Auto IV is absolutely stunning, [...]

It’s Friday, time for some fun. This video is somewhat derivative of the truly hilarious Internet party, but it’s still pretty good stuff. Imagine if Facebook were real life, and its human agent was a smug British man who randomly shows up at your door. Enjoy… Found via Laughing Squid.

Just as speculation was heating up that Twitter is considering abandoning its Ruby on Rails framework for PHP or Java, it hit another big service downtime snag this afternoon and into this evening. Interestingly and not surprisingly, chatter about Twitter switched over to Friendfeed, which does a lot of business – and quite well at [...]

Hang out with any website publisher long enough, and the subject will eventually turn to traffic. Numbers. Depending, the terms uniques, page views, impressions, or even hits may be tossed around. All web publishers are interested in the subject, even if some take a pointed disinterest in knowing how many people are visiting their site. [...]

Back in September, I excitedly announced that Online Media Cultist had hit the 100 RSS subscriber mark and mused that “we may not see triple digits again anytime soon, but for the moment I’ll take a moment to celebrate… and to thank everyone who has thought enough of this site to sign up and have [...]

In an interesting piece, Alexander van Elsas muses that Friendfeed likely “will compete with services like TechMeme for the most important aggregation source of tech news.” Techmeme aggregates breaking tech and Internet news stories through an algorithm that tracks stories by influence and links. It then ranks these stories by timeliness and importance and updates [...]

Lots of fun stats to pick through from a recent Universal McCann report on social media (found via ReadWriteWeb). Some quick takes: 83% watch video clips, up from 62% in the last study in June 2007 The maturation of social media tools based around video has just begun. This is going to be an area [...]

There’s been a debate going on the last few days about how “important” Twitter is, about how many regular people (read= non-geeky non-web-obsessed folk) know about it, whether or not it will ever hit a mainstream audience, and so on. Regardless (and I think it will hit the mainstream, probably in 8-12 months), Twitter is [...]

I added the Disqus comments plug-in to Online Media Cultist last night. I hope it provides value for everyone who is kind enough to leave comments. For a few anxious moments I thought I’d managed to lose all of comments made here since March of last year, but managed to resurrect them soon enough. Please [...]

Recently, I’ve been trending toward using Techmeme, a content aggregator and “meme tracker,” and Twitter, a communications aggregator and “people knowledge tracker” of sorts, as a way to bring news and information that’s relevant and valuable to me. Fred Wilson of A VC seems to be of a similar mind but theorizes that the “average [...]