It would appear that an earthquake was just felt across the UK (hopefully not a major one!). Where did the news first break? Well, we heard about it over Twitter. It's all over the site, including being broken on Twitter-based news organization BreakingNewsOn, which is reporting a 5.3 magnitude earthquake in the UK with minimal damage reported so far. Where didn't we hear about the quake? The mainstream press.
A few weeks ago we published a piece on this blog entitled The Danger of Free, in which we discussed the rise of free - a marketing strategy where digital products are given away. This month's issue of Wired magazine features a cover story
on the topic by editor-in-chief Chris Anderson. The article is a preview of his forthcoming book, called (you guessed it) Free. However in this post we look at two issues that make this new economic model rather worrisome: monopolistic markets and complex transactions.
Orglex is a new semantic-web powered news, blog and job search engine with a social networking component and industry vertical focus. It's an interesting service that brings together a number of different approaches we've seen elsewhere to build something relatively new.
Semantic analysis of content makes topic focused search smarter than otherwise possible, and wrapping it in other value adds like blog and job search is a smart, solid play.
Mobile marketing startup, TextBound, has big plans to make text messages the new mass media for advertisers. Like we mentioned earlier, more and more companies are going to be betting on location based mobile ads this year, and TextBound hopes to capitalize on this trend. But unlike mobile social network/marketing vehicle, Fluc, TextBound isn't about connecting with your friends, it's about delivering ads to your cell phone via text message, then taking you to the mobile web for more details.
We've written a lot about the Internet's role in American politics over the past six months as the US heads toward presidential elections next fall. How the web is playing a key role in this election cycle is a fascinating story, but the Internet is having a profound effect on politics in other parts of the world. We've focused on the US mainly because elections there are the most well publicized worldwide, and because the majority of RWW's lead writers hail from America. In Malaysia, though, web users have been able to draft three popular bloggers to stand for seats in the country's parliament.
VisualComplexity.com is a site that intends to be a unified resource space for the visualization of complex networks. Their main goal is to better understand the different types of visualization methods used across several different disciplines, including social networks and the World Wide Web. Although this site is not new, with all the discussion around the idea of a "social graph," it's a good time to revisit what VisualComplexity has to offer. With the social graph, we're attempting to map everyone to everyone and show how they are connected. This is no minor undertaking.
The social news space is developing at a mind-boggling pace. Just in the last 48 hours Yahoo! launched its new site Buzz, the increasingly mainstream site Mixx announced more funding and Digg held its first ever town hall meeting. Meanwhile a screenshot of the soon to be aggregated service Tumblr has been leaked, my email inbox is filling up with friend notifications from the $5 million richer FriendFeed and BricaBox launched a social content service. Those are just the highlights over the last two days, there's even more related news I'll pass over for now.
Scott Karp attempted to coin a new term on his Publishing2 blog today: link journalism. "Link journalism is linking to other reporting on the web to enhance, complement, source, or add more context to a journalist’s original reporting," he wrote. Links as journalism is something that Karp has been writing about recently; it ties into new media and citizen journalism, and it is something that we think warrants a closer look.
We have two winning comments today, from Michael Lambie and Vibhu Norby. Michael's comment was on our post The Best Things About Adobe's AIR Platform. He suggested that AIR could be used to create an offline browser. Vibhu's comment was on Microsoft: ROI Measurement is Broken - he thinks that "Microsoft is looking a step before the search". Well done Michael and Vibhu, you've each won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget.
BricaBox is a new type of service that combines elements of social networking and content creation into a medium it calls a "social content platform." The NYC-based startup hopes to do for social content what Ning did for social networks. It launches quietly early this morning in public beta.
It probably seems like a thin difference, but within the social content platform lies an elegant concept. The site delivers a platform upon which any sort of content vehicle can be built.
