geist - ReadWriteWeb http://www.readwriteweb.com/feeds/tag/geist en Copyright 2012 Richard MacManus readwriteweb@gmail.com Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:15:00 -0800 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=4.35-en http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Study says 85% Online Canucks have Facebook Profiles facebook_canada_jun09.jpg According to research group Ipsos Reid's "Social Networking: 2009" poll, Canadians are flocking to social networking sites. In the last 18 months, the percentage of Canucks with a social networking profile has increased from 39% to 56%. This rapid rise in social networking users has Canadian marketers scratching their heads as to how they can best brand in the space. With more than three quarters of those online owning a Facebook profile, it's not surprising that the blue beast is the main topic of discussion in relation to marketing groups. Says report writer Mark Laver, "Online social networks tend to be extremely personal and this thus creates a dilemma for marketers and businesses - how to communicate in a personalized setting without upsetting the target audience."

]]> Nevertheless, while traditional marketers are often met with resistance within the site, political advocates working within Facebook have had resounding success in Canada.

Perhaps most successful is University of Ottawa professor, Michael Geist's, outspoken stance against the introduction of the Canadian DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). A little over a year ago, Geist launched his Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook Group in the hopes of educating the public about a bill he saw as a "sell out to American pressure". Geist believed that Bill C-60 would have effectively duplicated American copyright legislation and created an unfair imbalance between copyright holders and general consumers. Thousands of Canadians agreed and the Fair Copyright Facebook group gained widespread popularity.

On the day the DMCA was to be voted upon, the Facebook group had more than 25,000 members and Federal Industry Minister Jim Prentice dissolved the legislation in favor of further analysis. While there was no admittance from the Minister that online resistance was the reason, Industry opposition Charlie Angus exclaimed, "They tabled the bill this morning, now 3 hours later he tells me they've got cold feet? Did they just discover Facebook this morning?"facebook_canada_jun09a.jpg

Whether Canadians like it or not, Facebook has changed the landscape of Canadian politics. Geist's Fair Copyright for Canada group currently has more than 89,000 members, and he was named the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer of 2008. Meanwhile, the Conservative government has promised to reintroduce the DMCA, but no date has been set in legislature. For more on the Geist and the Facebook group, check out the coverage on CBC's The Hour.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/study_says_85_online_canucks_have_facebook_profile.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/study_says_85_online_canucks_have_facebook_profile.php Facebook Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:00:00 -0800 Dana Oshiro
How to Enjoy Craigslist's New Blog, Born Without an RSS Feed When they say Craigslist is simple, it really is remarkably simple. The company finally launched an official blog and it's every bit as functionally pared down as the rest of the site. Maybe even more so - there's no way to subscribe. What's a blog without subscription? A blog that gets read a lot less than it would be otherwise!

That's a real shame because there's already some very interesting looking content there. This is a solvable problem, though.

]]> Michael Arrington, who saw the blog first, writes "The blog is lacking a RSS feed and has only rudimentary comments, but it is a true blog nonetheless." Why didn't they just through up a WordPress install? Nobody knows. While the bloggyness of it all seems debatable, we've got your RSS feeds right here.

Half for fun and half for work, we created an RSS feed for the new Craigslist blog that you can subscribe to below. That blog should be interesting, but if it ends up half as interesting as the Best of Craigslist section of the site - then look out Technorati 100.

The New Craigslist Blog

Full feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/craigslistblog2

The body of the posts won't be delivered in this feed, as we struggled to scrape a feed at all using Feed43. When I say we, in this case, I mean my dashingly handsome and brilliant co-blogger Josh Catone.

Unfortunately, you can't take for granted that anything you build on top of Craigslist is going to survive, even if it solves a problem over there. The beautiful multi-city search tool Crgslst got shut down days after we wrote about it here. Luckily the wonderful Image preview extension for Firefox still works - check that one out.

The Best of Craigslist

The feed URL below will deliver the items on the Best of Craigslist page - warning lots of naughty words - very funny stuff. Even the Best of Craigslist's own native RSS feed is broken, so we scraped that too. Anybody who said you couldn't build a huge company online without giving RSS its due was obviously wrong.

Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BestofCraigslist2

As was pointed out by one of our fantastic commenters, it turns out there is a full feed available for Best of Craigslist at feed://www.craigslist.org/about/best/all/index.rss. Though for some reason the page itself doesn't have the URL right.

We hope you enjoy these feeds. Isn't RSS a wonderful thing? We sure think so here at RWW.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/craigslist_blog_rss_feed.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/craigslist_blog_rss_feed.php Blogging Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:30:30 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick
MySpace Pushing New Apps Hard After watching from the sidelines for almost a year while rival Facebook had praise heaped upon it by the press for the success of their application platform, it is no wonder that MySpace would be pushing its recently released developer platform hard. It has been just about 3 weeks since the first few apps were unleashed on the MySpace public, and over the past two days MySpace had made a pair of announcements that demonstrate just how much the company is committed to seeing their platform succeed.

]]> Press Opps For Apps

First, MySpace is taking the unorthodox move of giving applications some access to their PR department. MySpace announced on Monday that it is looking for a few good apps with whom to put out joint press releases. This is undoubtedly a good move for MySpace PR because it allows them to create a more continuous buzz about the platform. But like the platform itself, sharing the stage with app developers is a surprising shift from old policies for the News Corporation-owned social network.

This is, after all, the same News Corp. whose President and COO Peter Chernin said in 2006, by way of introducing plans for MySpace to compete with many of the companies that had helped it grow, "If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flicker, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace."

It's the same Fox Interactive Media (the arm of News Corp. that controls MySpace) whose Chief Revenue Officer Michael Barrett said last year, "We probably should have stopped YouTube. YouTube wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for MySpace. We’ve created companies on our back."

And it's the same MySpace that famously blocked widgets (such as YouTube and Photobucket -- the latter of whom it eventually bought) that competed with products of its own.

But a lot has changed in the past year. Not only has MySpace embraced the idea of an application ecosystem and launched a developer platform, but they also announced plans in January to create a startup incubator. Is it too little, too late, though? Will MySpace's platform be as successful as Facebook's has been?

Apps in the News Feed ... Er, Friend Subscriptions

Yesterday, MySpace also announced that it would begin pushing notifications of app installations to its Friend Subscriptions -- their equivalent of the Facebook News Feed.

Interestingly, while MySpace is just rolling out this feature, Facebook has recently begun to impose restrictions on how applications interact with the News Feed in an effort to combat information overload and growing noise. It will be interesting to see if MySpace repeats the same mistakes Facebook has made, or learns from them and implements tighter restrictions on it Friend Subscriptions from the start.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_pushing_new_apps_hard.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_pushing_new_apps_hard.php Product Reviews Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:25:53 -0800 Josh Catone