Online Media Cultist

If you know what MMOPRG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) means, then you almost certainly bow down to the WoW. World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game set in an immersive world replete with guilds, alliances, beasties, and hordes, is built on the engaging concept of completing quests to gain experience and rewards within the [...]

I usually like to call out wire stories as nearly something of a hazard for news seekers online. Sure, it’s hard news in the purest form, “just the facts, ma’am,” and so on, but it’s sometimes arduous to weed your way through the very sameness of the coverage (for a current example, search for “Bush [...]

One of the dirty little secrets of the Internet is that a great deal of the browsing and clicking and reading and interacting are done at the office, on the boss’ dime. And when you’ve hit that post-lunch lull and you’d like nothing better than for your desk to auto-magically transform into a luxuriant cot, [...]

The best ideas are almost always the simple ones, and usually the hardest to come up with and execute effectively! MyBlogLog, a barebones social network with huge appeal and upside for bloggers, clearly did both and was rewarded with a $10 million acquisition by Yahoo! In relation to the inflated valuations we’ve seen recently, I [...]

Just as writers write for many different kinds of reasons, bloggers create blogs with all kinds of purposes and goals in mind: from taking the blogosphere by storm by reporting on the latest in Quantum Leap memorabilia shows to keeping Aunt Tilly and the kids up to date about barbeque shindigs up by the lake, [...]

Google, in partnership with EarthLink, will provide free WiFi service for the city of San Francisco. This may well be a landmark development in lowering the digital divide and allowing that much more access – rich and poor, majorities and minorities – to the Internet. I think it’s great for those lucky San Franciscans who [...]

Feedburner has launched a new service that tracks both site traffic and RSS subscribers in one place. While many publishers use one service (such as Site Meter) to track on-site page views and another to track RSS subscribers, this is the first time a comprehensive service has been offered that allows publishers to get a [...]

Do a search for a current news story at a popular news aggregator/search engine, and you’re likely to get a large number of results. But the catch is that most of the results are likely to be the same or very close to the same, because all the news sources that have picked up the [...]

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 [...]

I’ve spent a lot of time studying social news sites over the last year or so, particularly digg, netscape, newsvine, shoutwire, and reddit. Trying to figure out how to get “your” story on the front page of one of these sites is a tantalizing art, a frustrating science for any publisher. And short of flat [...]