How come I can’t decide for myself what influence on the web means to me? Who died and left Klout king? How about an influence tuner to let me decide what kind of influence matters most?
Category Archive: Connection Technologies
Will Mobile Devices Usher in a Renaissance in Local News?
Mobile devices will usher in a renaissance in local news. With Google, Facebook, Yelp and others building services to help us buy more local goods and services, there will be natural pressure for other kinds of location-based information and news as we layer millions of small posts, tags and comments onto our physical surroundings.
Why Google Sparks Matters
Sparks is critical to protecting Google’s golden egg – its search business – from Facebook. With Sparks, Google is trying to get you to share interesting content with people using Circles rather than Facebook. Facebook gets social, but Google really gets information – so here are a few speculations on where Google is likely to take Sparks:
Social Networks and the Renaissance of Local News
The new economics of local news distribution rests on linking and networking behavior, and that requires a whole new type of relationship with readers – one that treats them less like passive consumers and more like proactive partners in disseminating news.
Social Enterprise and the Renaissance of Local News
The old business model for local news is deep in debt and essentially running on fumes. The notion of a truly mission-driven news entity is quite compelling. We see examples of it running quite effectively in the nonprofit world in entities such as YES! Magazine, Grist, and High Country News. While these organizations have editorial voices and geographic territories that make them operationally quite different from a local newspaper, they do paint a picture of what could be possible on a municipal level.
The Great Unbundling and Collapse of Local Newspapers
The web’s unbundling of the local newspaper business model didn’t occur all at once, but as a one-two punch of vertical marketplaces for easily aggregated data like car buying, and crowd-sourcing platforms to get at the fragmented, more difficult to aggregate information in local markets. In essence, what the Internet did was enable web-based businesses to cherry-pick the profitable pieces out of the local newspaper’s business model. When that happened, the flow of money for reporter salaries came under increased pressure and newsrooms across the US were slowly eviscerated.
The Information Needs of Communities
This is the first in a five-part-series on the decline, fall and possible renaissance of local news. In this first installment, I share key excerpts from a very interesting report on the state of local news by the Federal Communications Commission. The report is called “The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age” and it’s not your typical government bureaucracy report.
“Square” Pegs Mobile Payments – Round Hole Still Not Filled
The latest issue of Wired has an interview with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on his latest venture – Square. If you’re not familiar with Square, it’s a simple way for merchants to accept credit card payments through a little device that plugs into their phone. Square has now shipped a half million card readers and is already …
The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing
I just finished reading Lisa Gansky’s The Mesh and there’s much to like about the book. There are a few places where it gets a bit repetitive, but she does share lots of interesting anecdotes and she’s telling an interesting and very important story here – the story of better sharing through technology. The mesh is the …
Wikipedia Now Crowd-Sourcing Article Ratings
The Wikipedia community is well aware of the criticisms of its reliability. So that’s why I was so interested today to stumble on a relatively new article rating system within Wikipedia. You can see it in action on the Dan Gillmor page, and here’s a close-up shot of the ratings: First word of this move …
