Mathew's Posts — GigaOM

Mathew's Posts

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is stepping down to become executive chairman of the web giant, and Larry Page is taking back the chief executive position he had until Schmidt arrived in 2001. But does the Google co-founder have what Google needs right now? Read More »

Techmeme, the news aggregator that is like CNN for geeks, says individual tweets will now be highlighted on the site if they are newsworthy enough. But will this new feature give the site more news to choose from, or just more produce more noise? Read More »

 
 

The way that NPR uses its Facebook page to connect with listeners and build community around its content has a number of lessons for other media entities, including the fact that they should focus more on engaging with their users and less time worrying about ads. Read More »

Thanks to incidents like the revolution in Tunisia and the recent shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, most people have come to grips with the fact that Twitter is effectively a real-time news network. But what happens when that real-time news network is spreading mis-information? Read More »

New York City has launched a “crowdsourcing” effort aimed at getting ideas from city employees to help the city function more efficiently. The program, called Simplicity, is being powered by Spigit, which makes a software platform that companies and governments can use to crowdsource ideas. Read More »

Groupon may be getting all the headlines lately, but competitor LivingSocial launched a gift-card promotion with Amazon today that shows the kind of marketing power the group-buying company now has at its disposal, as a result of the recent $175-million investment from the online retailing giant. Read More »

A study from the Pew Research Center found that Internet users are much more likely to be socially active offline as well as online, and that those who use social media and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are even more likely to be so. … Read More »

Cheezburger — the blog network that brought you I Can Has Cheezburger, the Fail blog and many other similar humor-oriented sites — today announced that it has closed a $30-million round of funding from a group of venture capital firms including Foundry Group and SoftBank Capital. … Read More »

The news that Steve Jobs is taking another leave from Apple to focus on his health is almost certain to rattle investors, and could put continued pressure on the stock as the markets try to figure out what Apple might be like without its charismatic leader. Read More »

Even as protesters were still cheering the downfall of the government in Tunisia on Friday, the debate had already begun over what role social media had played in the event. Was it the first real Twitter revolution? The correct answer is probably yes and no. Read More »

Hashtags on Twitter occasionally take off and become trends that dominate the network, like the recent #lessambitiousmovies tag. The Twitter media blog did a forensic analysis of that trend, but the interesting thing is just how random — and short-lived — these Twitter storms can be. Read More »

The web continues to disrupt the media business, both in terms of distribution and monetization, and publishers are desperately trying paywalls, iPad apps and anything else they can think of to cope. Bradford Cross wants to help change all that with his new startup, Woven. Read More »

More Must Reads

Wikipedia, which turns 10 this weekend, has taken a lot of heat over the years. But it has become a crucial aspect of our lives, and in many ways it has shown us what all information online is becoming: social, distributed, interactive and (at times) chaotic. Read More »

Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament and an early supporter of WikiLeaks, said that despite having had a falling out with leader Julian Assange, she is willing to “stand up and stick my neck out for him,” and believes everyone should support the organization. Read More »

A study that looked at the use of social media, text messaging, interactive maps and other online tools during the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake says they helped co-ordinate rescue efforts and aid, but that more work needs to be done to make them fully effective. Read More »

MySpace today confirmed that it is shedding close to half of the company, or about 500 employees, including virtually the entire international operation, in a dramatic restructuring that is aimed at saving the ailing social network. But the reality is, Facebook has won. Read More »

Google has come under increasing pressure from those who believe the government should investigate the company for antitrust violations, just as it did Microsoft and AT&T. But would doing so help make the tech sector more competitive? A recent study suggests that it would not. Read More »

As expected, Groupon announced today that it has completed a gigantic financing of $950-million from a group of high-profile funds, including Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins. Now all it has to do is prove that it can carve out a long-term business amid escalating competition. Read More »

Klout — one of a number of services that are trying to measure influence in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter — has closed an $8.5-million funding round from Silicon Valley powerhouse Kleiner Perkins, and adding Kleiner partner Bing Gordon to its board of directors. Read More »

The US government’s move to order Twitter to disclose information about users involved with WikiLeaks confirms the network’s status as a real-time information network, but also makes it obvious how much we have come to rely on it, and the implications of that dependence. Read More »

A chorus of complaints about spammy results in Google searches highlights a growing problem the search company is going to have to solve — and doing so will inevitably bring it into conflict with Demand Media, currently planning a high-profile IPO for later this year. Read More »

The story of homeless radio announcer Ted Williams became an Internet sensation this week. But the video that started it all is no longer available on YouTube, in yet another example of a newspaper that can’t see the forest for the dead trees. Read More »

Quora, the red-hot Q&A startup, depends on high-quality answers — and has deliberately kept things small in order to cultivate a knowledgeable community. But can it keep those virtues when its membership base is exploding and not everyone wants to play by the site’s rules? Read More »

As Goldman Sachs lines up investors for its Facebook fund, numbers are beginning to leak out about the social network’s finances. Based on the growth in revenue and in the bottom line, Facebook could stand to pull in close to $1 billion in profit this year. … Read More »

Imagine what the police could find out about you if they had the ability to search your phone and all it contains, from your browser and photo history to your Foursquare check-ins. Police in California now have the right to do this — without a warrant. Read More »

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster says Google has “given up on social,” because it doesn’t stand a chance of competing with Facebook. The problem with doing this, he says, is that as advertisers continue to chase the social graph, Google will have little to offer them. Read More »

A brush fire has been swirling through the blogosphere of late over whether RSS is dead or possibly dying. But is it actually doomed, or even ailing? Not really. Like plenty of other technologies, it is just becoming part of the plumbing of the real-time … Read More »

Firefox has taken the number one spot in browser market share in Europe, pushing past Internet Explorer for the first time, according to StatCounter. But the real battle for Firefox is with Chrome, the Google browser that continues to gain market share at a rapid pace. Read More »

Steve Case, the founder of AOL and architect of the disastrous merger with media giant Time Warner in 2000, has been using the question-and-answer site Quora to respond to critics of that deal, and also to share his thoughts about the new AOL. Read More »

Goldman Sachs is reportedly investing $450 million in Facebook, giving the social networking company a theoretical market valuation of $50 billion and positioning it for what seems like an inevitable IPO. That may be good for Facebook and Goldman, but will it be good for investors? Read More »

The enthusiasm iPad users had for magazine apps seems to be waning, according to some recent numbers that show sales of many apps slipping. Hopefully some publishers are starting to realize that simply having an iPad app doesn’t qualify as a digital content strategy. Read More »

Here are some of the best and worst iPad apps from media companies and publishers, including some of the familiar names — Wired, The New Yorker, Esquire — as well as some less familiar ones, with what they are doing right and what still needs work. Read More »

The fact that even journalists and media professors can’t seem to agree on whether what WikiLeaks does is journalism emphasizes just how deeply the media and journalism have been disrupted by the web, to the point where we aren’t even sure what they are any more. Read More »

According to a new survey of the online video market from Brightcove and TubeMogul, newspapers as a group overtook broadcasters in terms of the total number of video minutes streamed in the third quarter. Newspapers also led in terms of total number of videos uploaded. Read More »

When it comes to real-time responses from your social graph, Twitter has a lot going for it that even Facebook can’t duplicate. And it looks like the company plans to do more to support that kind of feature, since it just bought Q&A startup Fluther. Read More »

After being rebuffed by Groupon, Google is reportedly looking at acquiring another player in the group-buying space — and there are good reasons why it should do so. A marriage of local advertising and social shopping could fill a big hole in the web giant’s portfolio. Read More »

Fans of Groupon note that it has more than 100 writers, editors and fact-checkers on staff — more than a lot of medium-sized newspapers — and is continuing to hire and train writers, many of whom are (or were) journalists. But is that really something worth … Read More »

The European Union is broadening an investigation into Google that was originally launched following complaints the web giant was giving its own assets preferential treatment in search results. Google has also been coming under increasing pressure in the U.S. as a result of similar allegations. Read More »

After Twitter CEO Dick Costolo wrote on the company’s blog about its funding round from Kleiner Perkins — which values the company at $3.7 billion — the blog post was edited to take some of Costolo’s witticisms out. Is Twitter too rich to have fun? Read More »

Terms like “cyber-war” have been used to describe the denial-of-service attacks waged by anonymous hackers against the companies that cut off support for WikiLeaks. But the attacks were nothing like a real cyber-war, security experts say, and calling them that could have unintended consequences. Read More »

A Washington Post columnist argues that Google has grown so large and dominant it should be prevented from buying new companies, even those in completely new markets it doesn’t have a presence in. But is that really what we want antitrust laws to do? Read More »

At least one senior technologist thinks that Amazon removing WikiLeaks from its servers could raise red flags about the utility of cloud computing, while programmer and open-web advocate Dave Winer believes the incident reinforces the need for an open cloud host to protect our content. 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 »

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 »

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 »

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