Remember when Facebook was called Thefacebook and looked like this? I can’t believe I’ve been on it for almost six years, since summer 2004.
reblogged from wearethedigitalkids
reblogged from somethingchanged
I think I’ve just figured out why it annoys me when people trivialise the conversations that take place on Twitter and Tumblr as merely ‘talking about what you had for breakfast’. Mostly I find these are the same people who quite happily sit around for hours and hours engaged in the most inane, insufferable real-life small talk. Where they ate dinner last night, what their hotel in Noosa was like, how their favourite sport team is going.
In contrast, the conversations I encounter online tend to be more interesting than most of the conversations I have in real life. At their best these conversations are far from small talk. They explore issues that don’t belong in mainstream discourse, in far more depth than real-world social interactions normally allow. They show an intellectual curiosity that defies the shallow expectations of our culture.
Trivialising these online conversations as merely being about early-morning epicurean tendencies reflects a naivety and disconnectedness that I’d suggest says more about the speaker than his subject.
Me (after, well, a few glasses of wine)In Retrospect - Executives on How the AOL-Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong - NYTimes.com
MR. LEVIN I used to think at the time it was a clash of cultures and a misreading of the dot-com bubble, but I now upon reflection believe that the transaction was undone by the Internet itself.
I think it’s something that no one could have foreseen, and to this day, whether Apple is going to dominate entertainment or whether Amazon is going to dominate publishing, all the old business plans are out the window. How do you get paid for content? And the consumer has access to everything and now it’s going to be on a handheld device, so what I call the rolling thunder of the Internet started actually to eat its own, which was AOL. AOL was the Google of its time. It was how you got to the Internet, but it was using some old media business ideas that were undone by the Internet itself, and that’s why Google came along.
MR. PARSONS The business model sort of collapsed under us, and then finally this cultural matter. As I said, it was beyond certainly my abilities to figure out how to blend the old media and the new media culture. They were like different species, and in fact, they were species that were inherently at war.
In Retrospect - Executives on How the AOL-Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong - NYTimes.com
reblogged from fluffynotes
THE VICE GUIDE TO ICELANDIC ELF SEX
Iceland is a country where the majority of people believe so firmly in elves extreme measures are taken to avoid upsetting them. Sometimes that means changing a road’s path to avoid elven territory, for Hallgerdur Hallgrímsdóttir, it means boning them. Hallgerdur claims many Icelanders have been doing elves in secret for centuries. There’s even a myth covering the inter-hominid couplings. Hallgerdur receives a lot of flack from her countrymen for spilling the beans on elf sex, so we hope you appreciate her act of smutty treason.
reblogged from vicemag
reblogged from lanipauli
formspring.me
How do Web 2.0 platforms like formspring make money?
Mostly they don’t make money. Keep in mind that even Facebook didn’t turn cashflow-positive until last year and they have their own full-blown advertising platform running and a couple of hundred million users.
Most Web 2.0 startups keep themselves afloat with money from the founders, angel investors or VCs (or some combination of these). The idea is that once they achieve a certain scale, a viable ongoing commercial model will emerge. Or they plan to sell the business to someone else and let the new owners figure out the commercial model.
Some of them no doubt have a pretty clear idea what their commercial model will be right now but haven’t reached the scale needed to make it work yet. No doubt the smart guys & girls at Tumblr have a better long-term plan for making money than selling t-shirts.
I love this photo! What better symbol of the decline of old media and the rise of new media? Yes, that’s Anna Wintour perched in the front row between the bloggers. (via this New York Times article)
reblogged from somethingchanged
I’ve noticed that people who read a lot of blogs and a lot of books also tend to be intellectually curious, thirsty for knowledge, quicker to adopt new ideas and more likely to do important work.
I wonder which comes first, the curiosity or the success?
Seth Godin asks us in his blog post “Thirsty” (via lanipauli) reblogged from lanipauli
reblogged from somethingchanged
