Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were mysteriously dropped for days at a time, have led many people to challenge the centralized control exerted by companies running social networks.
Web developers couldn’t stop talking about HTML and its evolution during the 1990s.
Google sometimes finds itself at a difficult crossroad of wanting to make as much information available to as many people as possible, while still trying to obey the laws of the countries they operate in.
There’s a lot of excitement about ebooks these days, and rightly so. While Amazon doesn’t release sales figures for the Kindle, there’s no question that it represents a turning point in the public perception of ebook devices.
No corner of modern American life is untouched by technology. And no technology is more transformative than the Internet. The simple reason for this is that the Internet is, at bottom, a communications network, and communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world.
Are iPods changing our perception of music? Are the sounds of MP3s the music we like to hear most? Jonathan Berger, professor of music at Stanford, was on a panel with me at a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Mountain View, Calif., on Saturday. Berger’s presentation had a slide titled: “Live, Memorex or MP3.”
Have you voted? Are you having problems voting? Are the lines at your polling station short or long? Let your fellow voters know via Twitter Vote Report. The site will aggregate all tagged tweets (use #votereport) and share the results publicly. The tweets are being analyzed and displayed on maps. Waiting times are also being plotted and analyzed.
In my talks this year, I have been outlining some of the world’s great problems, highlighting some of the things that are being done by technology innovators to solve them, and urging my listeners to “work on stuff that matters.”
If you’re a Web developer or recent computer-science graduate, these are most certainly the best of times. With the groundbreaking launch of Facebook Platform last year, and the subsequent emergence of multiple new [open] social platforms this year–MySpace, Bebo, hi5, Friendster, Ning, Meebo, LinkedIn, etc.–we are experiencing a Geek Renaissance the likes of which the software community has never before seen.
The instant-analysis business is a tricky one. None of us have working crystal balls; any attempt to predict the future, even the five-minutes-from-now future, is risky. For example, on Jan. 31, mere hours before Microsoft made its unsolicited $44 billion-plus offer for Yahoo, Forrester Research, my alma matter, posted a research note with the following headline and deck:
Microsoft Will Make Small Acquisitions
Its Size, Visibility To Antitrust Bodies And Strategy Rule Out Big Deals
Last Sunday’s Grammy Awards ceremonies were even less relevant than usual, no small achievement. The TV broadcast began with a “performance” by that cutting-edge new artist Frank Sinatra and fell down from there. The only real emotional charge of an evening celebrating the most emotional of media came when we viewers were confronted with the disparity between the preternatural confidence of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” and the shaky, shell-shocked manner in which Winehouse accepted her award for it. Alpha geeks had a moment to celebrate, too, when one of the winners behind Historical Album of the Year (Woody Guthrie’s “Live Wire”) turned out to be a mathematician. But, those and few other brief moments notwithstanding, the action in the music industry is elsewhere.
At O’Reilly conferences like this week’s Money:Tech, where businesspeople outnumber developers, the tool of choice to enable continuous partial attention is a mobile device, not a laptop. To my surprise, roughly 80% of my Money:Tech rowmates had iPhones in hand. I expected New Yorkers to be a BlackBerry crowd, but it looks like Tim was on to something when he predicted that the iPhone will beat the BlackBerry.
The Industry Standard ably chronicled–and, eventually, mirrored–the Internet boom that began a decade ago and died a few years later. (Disclosure: Despite its occasional excesses, I am honored to have been associated with the magazine.) After years of noticing that thestandard.com was still receiving ample traffic and–with one brief exception a few years back–not doing much about it, IDG, which was the Standard’s lead investor and picked up the carcass in bankruptcy court, has relaunched the site this week.
This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."
We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.
The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.
That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.
So here is exactly what we do: Read more »
Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
Don't miss a post! Sign up for our Daily Email and get AllThingsD.com delivered each day.
Get columns, blogs and video from D and All Things Digital on your iPhone. Download now »
