SiliconBeat

Google Buzz is here. And the big question is this: Can Google finally get in the social game? After playing around with Google Buzz for a bit today, I’ll say the jury is out for me. But I have a few thoughts, and will have more after I’ve played with it for a few weeks.

The first impulse I have is to fight is the despair over creating and learning a new social networking tool. Facebook and Twitter work well for me, despite some imperfections. I won’t say there isn’t room for improvement. But any new service has to clear a pretty high barrier to become part of my daily routine.

After digging in and following a few friends on Google Buzz, the next thing that strikes me as interesting about Google Buzz is how much it mirrors the approach to social that Yahoo is taking. And there’s something I wouldn’t expect to be writing: How Google is following Yahoo. Read the rest of this entry »

We learned in late December that Yelp turned down an acquisition offer from Google reported to be worth $500 million. Yelp then raised $25 million from Elevation Partners, with another $75 million possibly coming down the road.

It may need that money to ward off Google, which is ramping up its local advertising offerings. The new service places Yelp directly in Google’s scope. And I wonder if it won’t lead Yelp to regret not selling when they had the chance.

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I’m at the Berkeley Center for New Media attending the Future of the Forum: Internet Communities and the Public Interest. A lot of great speakers today, and I’ll be tweeting at #FOTF. There’s a live video feed available through the conference site.

On Friday, I’ll be attending a Digital Think In hosted by National Public Radio and Frog Design. The goal of the gathering is to brainstorm ideas about the future of NPR. I was honored to be asked to join. And my self aside, the line-up of participants is very exciting:

Craig Newmark, Founder of craigslist; Reid Hoffman, Chairman and co-Founder of LinkedIn; Roger McNamee, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Elevation Partners; Chris Beard, Chief Innovation Officer of Mozilla; Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist and creator of Google News; and Sue Gardner, Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation, among many others.

Tim Leberecht, frog design’s vice president of marketing and communications, sets the stage with this post today: Read the rest of this entry »

About a year ago, I started using a service called SlideShare. The idea is pretty simple. You can upload PowerPoint presentations and it converts them into Flash presentations. These new presentations can then be shared and embedded just about anywhere. It’s all very Web 2.0.

I’ve uploaded a few of my presentations here. Very modest stuff, nothing world changing. And over the months, I’ve embedded dozens of presentations over at The Next Newsroom Project.

Since I’ve been using SlideShare for awhile, I was happy to get a chance to chat on Monday with SlideShare co-founders Rashmi Sinha and Jonathan Boutelle. The company is announcing two new services today that are noteworthy, if for nothing else, because they will move SlideShare into earning revenues in ways besides advertising. And since I think ad-supported business models are mostly doomed to fail, I applaud them for moving into new revenue models.

But as we chatted, and as I thought about presentations, I was struck by just how important such presentations have become in our culture. Indeed, corporate presentations have improbably become a form of entertainment. It says a lot about how our relationship to business and celebrity has been transformed in the digital era. Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago, I wrote a column calling the Federal Trade Commission’s attempts to regulate blogging a mistake:

“I have no doubt the folks at the Federal Trade Commission have all the best intentions when it comes setting out disclosure guidelines for bloggers in order to protect consumers. But it’s an effort that’s doomed from the start.”

I can’t link to the column because it’s behind our paywall. But I figured no good would come of it.

Well, I didn’t expect the FTC to listen to me, and they didn’t let me down. On Monday, the FTC released new rules to regulate product endorsements in advertisements and blogs.

I could offer up an extended rant on this, but I’ll just point you to Jeff Jarvis’ stinging rebuke instead. Jarvis writes: Read the rest of this entry »

I was reading a post on Daily Kos today,the progressive political blogging site, through my Bloglines feed reader, when the ad below popped up:

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So now we know: The Great Obama Twitter Revolution was an illusion.

At the moment when Obama needs his vast social media army to support him in the debate over health care reform, they are nowhere to be found. No spontaneous meetups. No big Facebook followings. Hardly a tweet on Twitter.

Instead, the dominant images of the health care debate are people shouting down Congressmen at town hall meetings. It’s talk show hosts on cable news channels blustering about the evils of socialized medicine. And it’s radio show hosts pushing the usual propaganda.

Obama has lost control of the debate. And the fight will be soon be lost if the trajectory of the shouting match doesn’t change.

This may be the most critical policy moment of Obama’s presidency. And Obama’s Twitter posse is sitting it out.

What are they waiting for?

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Facebook just announced it has acquired FriendFeed of Mountain View, a social media aggregator built around a news feed similar to its new owner’s.

I think Yahoo missed a big opportunity here. I had written a couple times that Yahoo should buy FriendFeed and make it the centerpiece of its new homepage. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a piece by technology editor Damon Darlin under the headline, “Serendipity, Lost in the Digital Deluge.”

As the headline suggests, Darlin laments that the digital age is robbing us of those wonderful moments of serendipity. I couldn’t disagree more strongly. In fact, I’ve found myself discovering more through serendipity than ever, in large part thanks to the rise of social media.

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