When Rolling Stone dropped into my mailbox this week, its cover promised a feature story on "The Most Hated Girl on the Internet." I wondered who it would be: perhaps the Bosnian girl caught on video drowning puppies or the "religious" girl who posted a YouTube video thanking God for answering her prayers [...]
Twitter is staying in San Francisco and will be moving to the Mid-Market neighborhood, the company announced on its blog today. read »
The crash of Amazon's cloud services for web sites, EC2, is now in its second day. read »
Activists pushing wind and hydroelectric power. Trying to steer Web away from coal, nuclear. read »
Talk about competition for attention: There are 1.5 million registered nonprofit groups in the U.S. Beyond the well-known names like the American Red Cross and the American Cancer Society, the struggle to stand out is enormous. That's where Jumo comes in, said Chris Hughes, Jumo's founder and executive director and a cofounder of Facebook. The company is a Facebook-based social network for nonprofits. "We enable organizations to have a dynamic and social presence on the web for free," Hughes s[...] read »
Note: This is the In Brief item I wrote for the May 9 issue of Forbes, featuring the Global 2,000 Best Companies list. A broader discussion around some of the same points can be found in a post I wrote about re-imagining Forbes magazine. read »
President Obama's tour stop at Facebook headquarters yesterday was a great media moment for the obvious symbolism it lent to the occasion. Social media was a big part of Obama's election strategy in 2008, and Facebook is the ultimate social media platform. read »
Travelzoo (TZOO) shares are trading sharply higher after the online travel information provider posted better-than-expected first quarter results. read »
Jesse Jackson, Jr. recently claimed that the iPad is “eliminating thousands of American jobs.” The Chicago Congressman and the son of a civil rights icon argued that people no longer need to go to Borders or Barnes and Noble because after all, they can simply download books and read them on mobile devices. He asks about the fates of the bookstores, the publishers, and all the other “jobs associated with paper.” Mr. Jackson’s claim exemplifies a fundamental problem with politics, namely, that someone[...] read »
WikiLeaks has taken pains, over the last several months, to cast itself as a journalism outfit. Julian Assange refers to himself as a publisher or editor-in-chief. He recently wrote an essay in the British magazine the New Statesman on WikiLeaks' place in the history of the radical press. The "about" page on its website uses the words "journalism" or "journalist" 19 times. read »