Data from Disqus, which offers a comment-hosting service for websites, seems to show that the use of pseudonyms not only produces more comments, but also comments of higher quality. As interesting as the data is, however, it’s unlikely to settle the ongoing debate over online identity. Read More »
Tech
If Google wants Google+ to succeed, it needs to get better at communicating clearly with the users of its new community. But the company has consistently failed to do this, and in fact has made things worse. Is being transparent something Google is incapable of? Read More »
The Daily Dot wants to be the “hometown newspaper for the Internet,” but how many of its stories about Reddit photos or YouTube videos will be of interest to anyone outside of those communities? And does the newspaper metaphor make any sense for an online-publishing venture? Read More »
The Knight Foundation says it wants to help reinvent local and community-level media through the Center for Civic Media at MIT — the non-profit entity just announced new funding for the center, and a new director in online media pioneer and long-time Harvard University fellow Ethan… Read More »
Amid all the flailing around that media companies are doing to try and solve their revenue problems, with paywalls and iPad apps, too few are looking at how connecting with their community (or communities) of readers can help increase engagement and lead to new revenue models.… Read More »
Hyper-local site EveryBlock started out as an automated news aggregator, pulling in feeds based on specific locations. But founder Adrian Holovaty says he has realized that data is nothing without human interaction, and so the site has relaunched with more of a focus on community. 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 »
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 »
The anarchic online community known as 4chan isn’t known for doing things that are cute and heart-warming — it’s mostly known for posting sophomoric humor and graphic sexual imagery. But today, someone decided the Internet should wish 90-year-old WWII veteran William J. Lashua a happy birthday. Read More »
Eucalyptus, an open-source infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon’s EC2, directly using the Amazon command-line tools, was released today. For the full story, and a way to download Eucalyptus, head over to OStatic . Read More »
I’m one of the co-founders of two-year-old startup Marketo, a marketing automation company serving B2B companies. I’m also VP of marketing, meaning I’m under constant pressure to take Marketo’s own messaging to new heights. After all, if we can’t market ourselves like a world-class… Read More »
Amazon seems to be once again proving the naysayers wrong. Back in the dot-com boom, CEO Jeff Bezos piled on debt to build the biggest online retailer, one designed to keep customers happy. People said it would drive Amazon to an early bankruptcy, but the company turned… Read More »
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