Wired offers a sobering story about the power of blogs, or rather the tendency of political bloggers to swarm (Howard Rheingold’s word). I would call it Salem-style witch hunting crossed with good old-fashioned conspiracy nuttiness. Academic David Hailey stepped into the debate about the Texas Air National Guard memos suggesting they might have been produced… Read More »
This week’s Loose Wire column is about how to get RSS feeds without too much palaver. Full text at the Far Eastern Economic Review (subscription required, trial available) or at WSJ.com (subscription required). Old columns at feer.com here. Here’s some other stuff I wasn’t able to include in the column for reasons of space (I’ve removed… Read More »
For Mac fans, there’s a new RSS and Atom News Reader for OS X, with an interesting new twist. Mesa Dynamics today said it had released Tickershock, “an interactive RSS and Atom news headline reader inspired by the news crawls of 24-hour cable news channels”. Tickershock, it says, is “a departure from typical RSS applications… Read More »
A new blogging website was launched yesterday which includes one or two interesting features that might catch on elsewhere. JoeUser.com, launched by Stardock Corp, is basically a free blog service. But it also: Automatically posts the newests articles on any JoeUser.com site on every other JoeUser.com page; Has a ‘SlashDot-style’ Peer review function. Readers can… Read More »
Robert Scoble, the Microsoft blogger whom I wrote about in a recent column, has scaled back his accessibility to the media (thanks Steve Rubel). From now on, journalists’ requests for interviews are forwarded to Microsoft’s main PR company, Waggner Edstrom. Robert and the other bloggers at Microsoft have been a breath of fresh air for journalists… Read More »