VentureBeat runs a story on author Scott Rosenberg who says that Twitter has set blogging free. Or, more precisely:
“Blogging has always had this word ‘trivial’ hung from its neck,” Rosenberg said. “Twitter has finally liberated blogging from that, from all these charges from the media, all these dismissive putdowns of trivialities.”
It’s an interesting thought, the notion that the blog bashers have moved to Twitter. What do you think, is Twitter helping traditional blogging in this way?
Oh look, VentureBeat rebranded itself a bit. I hadn’t noticed, despite glancing through all the updates from this blog on a daily basis. I read it through my RSS reader, and that is a problem for the publisher.
We already deducted that the massive footer ads will get you nowhere, unless you can sell them from a fixed price (don’t accept that, media buyers!). That means that you probably want your RSS readers to pop in on your site every now and then.
How do you get your RSS subscribers to visit your blog? Share in the comments.
4.7 million pageviews. That’s what a not yet launched gadget site clocked in at while live blogging WWDC! Amazing, right? Actually, it is so amazing that both VentureBeat and TechCrunch writes about it.
So how did they do it? [Read more…]
Techmeme is adding a human touch to its news aggregator, by appointing Megan McCarthy as editor. She’ll rearrange and moderate the news on Techmeme, to keep them more up to date and avoid old and outdated one. She’ll also handle all the pissed off journos who thinks they are bypassed, something that might be a daily issue for her if you read between the lines in the VentureBeat post. I don’t know about that, but it’s not the most grateful position to have, when some cranky tech blogger feel passed over for the 20th time…
So what will change? This:
Humans have always edited Techmeme of course, just implicitly. For instance, when a blogger links to a story, the headline might move higher on Techmeme. What’s different now is that an additional human editor will carry out changes explicitly to directly improve the mix of headlines on Techmeme. Though the implicit edits conveyed via algorithm outnumber the explicit edits perhaps by 1000 to 1 or more, the impact of the human editor is nonetheless pronounced.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? [Read more…]
Giga Omni Media have closed a deal with NYTimes.com, which means that content from the GigaOM network will be available on NYTimes.com come early October. They are not alone in this, but rather a part in redesigning the Technology channel at NYTimes.com. Other heavyweights that inked a deal to have their content available through this are ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat.
This is the third heavy weight syndication deal for GigaOM, with BusinessWeek and CNNMoney already in the bag. Meanwhile, VentureBeat’s content is available on IDG’s Industry Standard. As far as I know, this is the first syndication deal for ReadWriteWeb though, although I might have missed something. [Read more…]
12seconds.tv is something of a Twitter for video. The site lets you share videos of up to 12 seconds length, which by itself is something of a challenge. Personally, I’m not convinced, I just don’t see why I should use the service.
That hasn’t stopped it from releasing an API, which might be what the service needs. VentureBeat writes about it, and notes that there’s already support for 12seconds.tv in TweetDeck, one of those Adobe AIR applications that lets you update numerous social web sites, like Twitter. The API, by the way, is available here.
Does 12seconds.tv have a future? What do you think?
A new version of FriendFeed is in the works, perhaps not so surprisingly in itself, but it might be coming pretty soon. MG Siegler over on VentureBeat got it confirmed, after spotting the domain beta.friendfeed.com in his Flickr traffic logs. It is getting harder and harder to keep web apps secret, I’ve had clients in the past who got unwanted attention to online services in an early stage, for instance.
It could, however, work the other way around. Since a lot of bloggers are watching their statistics closely, this could be a way to leak information of a new service to get some bonus coverage before going out flexing the PR muscles?
