Online Media Cultist

In 2005 and 2006, MySpace was the king of the hill. “Web 2.0″ was in its ascendancy, and everyone couldn’t stop talking about MySpace. Kids loved it and were telling their parents and friends, single people flirted and told their single friends, bands loved it and marketed their asses off, while the mainstream media pumped [...]

The other day I was doing housework while listening to my iPod. An amazing, mind blowingly great song by Bob Dylan popped on. I don’t recall having heard it before, but I’ll never forget it. It’s called Hurricane, and it’s about eight and a half minutes long. I liked it so much that I listened [...]

Free online music service Pandora has amassed an impressive 20 million users in its three years of existence, according to TechCrunch (citing Twitter!). Back in July, I gushed in an article entitled I’ve fallen in love… with Pandora, noting the killer combination of attributes included the fact that it’s easy, powerful, addictive, and info rich: This is [...]

Musicians and bands and music companies have been experimenting with how to distribute new work for several years now. Everyone knows that the old model is crumbling, and the scramble is on to find new ways to make money from the music game. The interesting thing about it to me, taking a step back, is to [...]

I recall checking out Pandora a few years ago. I liked it, but there were so many social music applications coming out at the time that it didn’t really stick with me. Well, I probably should have stuck with it because its current incarnation is stunning. There are several reasons why. It’s easy. This is huge because [...]

Hopped up on coffee and in the midst doing my daily frantic scan of social media sites, blogs, websites, and e-mail, a strange question arose in my mind: Will today’s kids think about blogging in the same way that my generation does? It’s an odd question on a few levels. I’m in my mid-30s (how did I [...]

Influential tech blogger Michael Arrington announced the “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without” for 2007 today. The list of 15 web services – including Digg, Flickr, Gmail, Skype, Techmeme, Wordpress, and YouTube – is interesting as a collection in several ways. My first thought is that while most of these services didn’t exist two or [...]