Media analyst Clay Shirky says that the list of things that the Internet has killed — or is in the process of killing — includes media syndication of the kind that the Associated Press is built on, which he says is next in line for widespread disruption. Read more »
The Atlantic magazine took a radical approach to surviving in the web era: It set out to deliberately disrupt its own business, rather than letting someone else do it. Traffic has climbed, revenues have almost doubled and it is profitable for the first time in years. Read more »
Although 2010 isn’t over yet, Twitter has come out with the top trending topics for the year, and surprisingly enough, Justin Bieber — the guy who is so popular that Twitter had to modify the way it calculates trending topics — didn’t take the top slot. Read more »
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff says the company tracks activity on Chatter, its internal Twitter-style social network, and gives employees who provide valuable information via the network extra compensation, in the same way executives are given bonuses for hitting sales targets. But is that a good idea? Read more »
As WikiLeaks fights to remain online and solvent, the organization seems to be part of what could be a new form of media emerging: not a journalistic entity specifically, but a kind of investigative middleman or clearinghouse for the traditional media to use as a resource. Read more »
We often take smartphones for granted — the ability to instantly find information, get directions, take photos and share them, and so on. Doing without one even for a day is a good way to be reminded of just how much they have changed our lives. Read more »
Social tools such as Skype and instant messaging, along with social networks that help workers connect with each other, can make it much easier to manage remote teams than it used to be before the web came along — and doing so has become even more necessary. Read more »
Technology has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, but human beings and the way they work and manage each other has not evolved and adapted nearly as quickly. That is one of the major challenges for businesses today, according to Allen Delattre of Korn/Ferry International. Read more »
As the U.S. government and a series of corporations such as Visa, MasterCard and PayPal keep up the pressure on WikiLeaks, a rough alliance of hackers and supporters have taken it upon themselves to wage an ongoing cyber-war in defense of the document-leaking organization. Read more »
Since they are both giant web companies with a search engine at their core, the assumption is that Yahoo competes primarily with Google. But the truth is that Yahoo has more to fear from Facebook — and Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz admitted as much on Tuesday. Read more »
While Google moves onto Apple’s turf by launching a Chrome OS store for apps, many of which cost money and only work properly if they run in Google’s browser, some companies such as Twitter are instead spending their time and resources making their websites more app-like. Read more »
Visa, MasterCard and PayPal have all cut off support for payments to WikiLeaks, saying the organization has been involved in illegal acts — but is there any real justification for this? Not really. In fact, it’s not clear that what WikiLeaks is doing is even illegal. Read more »
The Tumblr blog-hosting platform has been down for more than 17 hours, in what appears to be the longest outage in its history. Twitter has shown even a problem-plagued service can continue to grow if it is popular enough, but does Tumblr fall into that category? Read more »
Google today launched its long-awaited electronic book store, called simply Google eBooks, with more than 3 million titles and 4,000 publishers participating as partners. The move is likely to ramp up competition in the e-book market, which until now has been dominated by Amazon and Apple. Read more »
We may not like its methods or its leader, but WikiLeaks is a publisher — a new kind of publisher, but a publisher nonetheless — and as such it deserves to be protected from government interference, just like any other member of the traditional or mainstream media. Read more »
According to multiple reports, Groupon has walked away from a rumored $6-billion acquisition offer from Google, and is choosing to go it alone, and possibly file for an initial public offering. The two-year-old company is said to have annual revenues of close to $2 billion. Read more »
Rebecca Jacoby, chief information officer at Cisco, says if it wasn’t for new collaboration tools such as video telepresence, blogs and wikis, the networking-equipment maker would never have been able to grow as large or move quickly into as many new markets as it has. Read more »
WikiLeaks has been kicked off Amazon’s cloud-hosting platform and had its domain-name service cancelled by a second company — all of which raises the question: Does the world need a stateless, independent data haven to protect the kind of freedom of information that WikiLeaks represents? Read more »
It isn’t just the nature of work that is changing thanks to the web and a generation of increasingly mobile and inter-connected workers, says John Hagel, co-chairman of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge — it’s the entire way in which many companies operate. Read more »
As newspapers struggle to stay afloat and remake themselves for a web-based world, many debate how much emphasis they should put on digital vs. their traditional print operations. John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register group of newspapers, says the time for debate is over. Read more »
Amazon has removed WikiLeaks’ website from its servers, a move that appears to be a result of pressure from the U.S. government to not support the document-leaking organization. Senator Joe Lieberman said he planned to ask the company about the extent of its involvement with WikiLeaks. Read more »
The FTC has released a draft report that says online advertisers and publishers have been too slow to adopt appropriate privacy rules, and recommends a “do not track” mechanism built into web browsers. But the agency admits new laws would be required for such a move. Read more »
As companies add social software to help employees work together more efficiently, and software makers add more and more social features to their products, there is a growing risk that workers could get overloaded, says Jive Software chairman and former CEO Dave Hersh. Read more »
Virgin billionaire Sir Richard Branson has jumped into the iPad magazine sweepstakes with a new entry called Project, which takes advantage of video, motion, interactivity and plenty of other features that the Apple device allows, but mostly winds up being flashy and confusing to navigate. Read more »
According to multiple reports, Google is considering an acquisition of Groupon for as much as $6 billion. Why would the web giant want to pay so much for a two-year-old startup? Because social advertising — and especially local advertising — is the company’s future. Read more »
Groupon is growing faster than virtually any other tech-related company in history, including Google and Facebook, and is expected to close the year with revenue of more than $500 million. What then, are the lessons retailers and other companies can learn from the such incredible ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A 17-year-old resident of one of Rio de Janeiro’s biggest slums has become a quasi-celebrity reporter in Brazil and elsewhere after using Twitter and a network of friends to do real-time live reporting on the drug raids by police in the city and the resulting violence. Read more »
In response to a question on the Q&A site Quora, Foursquare founder and CEO Dennis Crowley provided his top five tips for entrepreneurs. He also threw in a bonus answer that suggests how he feels about critics and the arrival of competitors such as Facebook. Read more »
Author Tim Wu, the law professor who came up with the term “net neutrality,” argues that Google, Facebook and Apple are information monopolies and this is just as bad as the monopoly AT&T had in a previous era. But Wu fails to make his case. Read more »
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone caused a stir when he mused during an interview about the company helping to create a “Twitter News Service” for major news organizations. But the reality is that Twitter is already a distributed news network — it just needs better filters. Read more »
If you were searching the Internet for information on heart disease, would you find it helpful to see an ad for medication, or would you see that as an invasion of privacy? That’s the question at the core of a privacy complaint launched by advocacy groups. Read more »
Thanks to email and instant messaging and smartphones and iPads, virtually any time is work time — and that includes family-oriented holidays like Thanksgiving, according to a recent survey. Almost 60 percent of people said they checked their work mail while they were on holiday. Read more »
Hunch, a startup trying to build a “taste graph” of people’s like and dislikes that can act as a recommendation engine, has partnered with Gifts.com to make suggestions about what kinds of presents your Facebook friends might like, based on their Facebook profiles. Read more »
Billionaire Rupert Murdoch has spent the past few years misunderstanding how the Internet works, railing against its most powerful features and failing to take advantage of its potential. The News Corp. founder’s new “iPad newspaper” idea sounds like yet another example of this unfortunate tendency. Read more »
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who created the web 20 years ago next month, says there are threats to the freedom of the web all around us, and we need to fight them in the same way we fight to protect our freedoms in the real world. Read more »
Tumblr, the web-publishing platform that has seen spectacular growth over the past several months, has landed a huge new round of funding led by veteran Sand Hill Road VC firm Sequoia Capital that values the three-year old, New York-based startup at about $135 million. Read more »
During an interview at the Web 2.0 Summit, former CEO and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams said that the network "lowers the barriers to publishing about as far as they can go." Not everyone sees this as a good thing, but the impact of it is enormous. Read more »
Myspace took another step down the road to full integration with Facebook today, with the launch of what the site calls “Mashup with Facebook,” which allows users to import their profiles and favorites into Myspace and then customize their content based on that information. Read more »
Twitter co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams admits the company “screwed up” its relationship with third-party developers in the past, and told Web 2.0 Summit attendees today this happened mostly because the startup didn’t originally plan to become a platform company. Read more »
NewsTrust, a non-profit startup aimed at improving the credibility of media, ran a week-long project called Truthsquad earlier this year that crowdsourced fact-checking of political statements, and founder Fabrice Florin says while the effort was a success, it was also a lot of work. Read more »
