Online Media Cultist

There’s so much going on these days that it’s hard to keep up.
And for boys and girls as obsessed with the Interwebs as we are, that’s a good thing. It’s exciting times. In fact, Mark Evans says that These Are the Best of Times, noting that “we’re living in the midst of an innovation […]

Everyone I know talks about MySpace. It’s still very much the predominant social networking powerhouse on the planet, with mega millions of people friending and flirting and comment-leaving and social networking away.
As MySpace has expanded it has gone to great lengths to add lots of features and improve its notoriously wonky UI, all in […]

Sure, I understand that “useful” is a general and sometimes useless term. It’s relative and subjective; what’s useful to someone may not be to someone else.
But I pose the question nonetheless about social news sites, Digg being the grand daddy of the lot: are they useful anymore?
To be sure, Digg continues to be […]

Social networking has entered an interesting phase. There’s a ton of them, for starters. The launch of a new social networking website with “awesome web 2.0 features” and “media sharing capabilities” won’t even illicit a slow, drawling yawn anymore. There’s simply too many of them out there already, with titans MySpace, Facebook, and a handful […]

Twitter is hugely popular, growing quickly, and has attracted lots of funding and worldwide buzz and all the other things a wildfire-on-the-way-to-greatness web start-up could ever hope for.
But how’s it ever going to make money?
That’s something that people have been discussing for a long time now. Aidan Henry, who I know from MappingTheWeb […]

This video exploring new features on Google Earth 4.3 is pretty cool, and gets cooler the deeper in you go. The 3D buildings layer is amazing. Baltimore was used as the example, and it had me wishing for more episodes of The Wire!

It’s Friday, and some Fridays are more Friday than others, you know? In any event, definitely time for some videos.
I’ve been talking about Grand Theft Auto IV a lot this week both here and over on Twitter. This video posits what GTA IV would look like on the old NES.
I’m a sucker for […]

We’re living in an era where scholars – self-appointed and otherwise – are attempting to generate buzz and sell books via bizarre, “controversial,” and flat-out silly ideas about the Internet and technology.
The latest example comes in the form of Professor Jonathan Zittrain of Oxford University. Zittrain believes that the “rise of gadgets like the […]

As online video producers experiment, fumble, and tinker their way toward a model for making money on scripted online video content, an old school premise emerges on the new media scene: product placement.
It makes sense. Because online video needs to be able to be seen where there’s audience (see: YouTube), advertising that is already […]

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0, one of the crazy-smartest people writing about the interwebs and what-it-all-means today, continues his exploration of the over coverage of breaking news stories with a piece called The Declining Value Of Redundant News Content On The Web. In this case, Karp uses the Microsoft-Yahoo non-merger aftermath as a means to […]