Posts with tag "TechCrunch"
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Braindead TechCast EP 124: So bad it’s freaking awesome

This has to be consider one of those non sequitur type shows where everything stems from tech talk but has absolutely nothing to with tech – well at least the closer we get to the end. From dead kid in the street to sneaky quadrotors to really bad tacos we cover it all not to mention that Sean gets his revenge and blinds me with a website so bad that it is actually awesome in a GeoCities way.

Posts referred to in tonight’s show.

And Sean’s give to web designers around the world a gift to haunt your nights – don’t blame me if you eyes bleed

Enjoy the show.

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TechCrunch: Analogy Hell

WWII analogy Michael? Seriously?

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wtfcat

Facebook and the imaginary “it’s complicated” crap

So. How many words does it take to totally confuse everyone?

2121 words, and one really screwed up movie analogy, is all it takes.

At least that is how many it took for MG Siegler today in a post today at TechCrunch where he tried to explain …. ….. well ….. I’nm not really sure what he was trying to explain.

I think he was trying in some long-winded fashion why he thinks that Facebook’s changing privacy settings are the right thing to do (oh boy another Scoble everything should be open adherent) it’s just that they went about doing it the wrong way.

He suggests that it is a complicated situation because Facebook is trying to become Twitter and Twitter is trying to become like Facebook.

Wha?

Hmmm … somehow I don’t think it is all that complicated. Let me put it in bullet form to make it easy for you.

  • Facebook is a growing company that needs to make a lot, and I mean A LOT, of money
  • Facebook needs to con convince as many suckers people as possible to share everything
  • Zuckerberg thinks that Facebook users are dumb fucks
  • Facebook will do whatever it has to in order to make as much money as possible
  • Facebook will rip off copy from other services anything that it thinks will bring in more suckers members and/or drive those services into the deadpool
  • Facebook will stab its users in the back at every opportunity if it means they can make more money
  • It’s all about the money.

Let’s see that’s 250 words and one less stupid ass movie analogy – not bad

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MG Siegler brings the facts to the table – Buzz isn’t a blogger’s friend


I’ve written a couple of posts about how I feel when it comes to Buzz and how it treats a blogger’s posts that we pipe into the baby social network. In the first post I wrote the following

There are times though where as a writer, or content producer, who uses Buzz as an auxiliary notification system I really get pissy with you. Unlike the Friendfeed or Twitter; or even Facebook, practice of either just posting the headline or the headline and an excerpt Buzz takes all our content and posts it .

Now how can I say this nicely: NOT!

Seriously DeWitt, Google doesn’t even do that to newspapers in Google News why would you do that to content producers in Buzz. And it’s not just the text either. This also extended to images included in posts. On one of my other blogs - Braincell Soup – I post a lot of art and illustration type posts which Buzz blindly pulls out all of the images and posts them.

Where is the initiative for readers to click through and actually read our blogs or God forbid sign up for our RSS feeds? Simple – there is none.

Now it is one thing to write about what one perceives as a problem but it is another when you actually get some data to back up one’s supposition. Such is the case with this problem of Buzz removing any incentive for people to click through and read the originating post as MG Siegler proves after digging into the numbers around posts at TechCrunch.

In a comparison to what Friendfeed still manages to send TechCrunch’s way MG writes

Looking over a handful of popular stores on TechCrunch over the past month, Google Buzz is nowhere to be seen anywhere near the top referrers. This, along with conversations I’ve had with others about their referrals leads me to believe that Buzz is actually quite horrible at doing the job it set out to do: share information. What’s the point of sharing links on Buzz and having other people comment and like it if no one is actually reading any of the content itself? The TechCrunch account has some 7,700 followers (and when you added in individual author accounts that also share our posts, we have well over 10,000 followers) and yet we’re seeing hardly any traffic from the social service.

Of course none of this will matter one bit to the majority of people but from a content producer’s point of view this is not good news. If I hadn’t already removed my blogs from being aggregated by Buzz this would have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

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CobWEBs Daily Edition podcast: TechCrunch, content & retweets stacked like MacDonald fries

cbn1-podpost Ya gotta love shit-storms and beside Robert Scoble no-one is better at starting them than Michael Arrington and as per usual his recent pontification about how content is becoming like the stuff served up in fast food restaurants has stirred things up. It is into this messy maelstrom that Sean and I step and have our say.

From the whole content argument and where it really started through to Sean ‘Gilmor’ing’ himself over retweets we both look at it all as technically unimportant bloggers. It’s a discussion that covers a range of areas of the idea of blog content as a whole.

Posts referred to in the show.

The End Of Hand Crafted Content – TechCrunch
Demand Media – the Myspace of online content, or blogging by the numbers – The Inquisitr
The supersizing of content; or how we are turning the Web into an obese mess – The Inquisitr
Techcrunch as the Content Strip-Mall – SiliconANGLE

Enjoy the show.

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Zynga shows just how slimy advertisers can get

slime Over the past week Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame has been leading the charge to try and get Facebook and advertisers to clean up their act and to stop ripping off customers.

With some pleasure Arrington has been posting follow-ups to the original post that started a bit of a firestorm but that isn’t really the topic I want to talk about right now. Rather what I think is even a more important issue to come out of this mess is something that Arrington posted about this past evening.

You see it appears that that Zynga has been displaying an entirely different page to Michael Arrington than was being displayed to other readers checking out Zynga’s new game – FishVille. As you can see from the screen capture that Michael took he is seeing something entirely different than another person on exactly the same page.

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Could Digg be holding on to an AdSense threat?

digg-ads For as long as there have been blogs the most common ad you see on them has been the Google AdSense text and image ads. They are almost synonymous with blogging it seems with just about every new ad network that comes along looking to take a bite out of them. This works for the larger big name blogs but when it comes to the midlevel and starting blogs AdSense still rules.

However something I read the other day makes me wonder if we could be seeing a possible alternative starting to dip its toes into the murky water of ad networks.

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Washington Post’s Twitter ruckus exposes social media bubble

bubbles I am probably going to get slammed for this, maybe even be referred to as a dinosaur again, but I’ve never been one to not express my opinion just because some people might not like it. As well I want to also state this right off the bat ….

I do not agree with The Washington Post’s recent policy guidelines regarding social media.

We clear on that?

Yesterday I wrote a post about WaPo’s issuing of guidelines for its journalist to use when it comes to social media services like Twitter or Facebook. It was a result of what turned out to be a snippet post by Stowe Boyd that left the impression that WaPo had basically outlawed the use of Twitter for its journalists. In the comments Stowe suggested I read his follow up post regarding the subject – which I did.

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