Monthly Archives: June 2011

The Big Boys’ Mea Culpas

I find it interesting that companies can get things so wrong. News Corp just sold off Myspace for a fraction of its original price today, effectively admitting it didn’t get social media. Microsoft famously came late to the table with the Internet, and then has been late to more or less every party since. It’s… Read More »

Media: Reducing Story Production Waste

In trying to change news to match the new realities of the Interwebs, media professionals are still somewhat stuck in old ways of doing things. One is to fail to address the massive waste in news production–or at least parts of it. So what potential waste is there? Well, these are the obvious ones: Gathering:… Read More »

Getting Paid for Doing Bad Things

I have recently received half a dozen offers of placing links in my blogs to reputable companies’ websites. Think of it as product placement for the Internet. It’s been around a while, but I just figured out how it’s done, and it made me realise that the early dreams of a blogging utopia on the… Read More »

Gay Lesbian Syrian Blogger? Or a Bearded American from Edinburgh?

Here’s a cautionary tale about how hard it is to verify whether someone is who they say they are: Syrian lesbian blogger is revealed conclusively to be a married man Tom MacMaster’s wife has confirmed in an email to the Guardian that he is the real identity behind the Gay Girl in Damascus blog Syrian… Read More »

Podcast: The IMF’s Bad Dream

(Not tech related, this, so please skip if the IMF and Indonesia don’t float your boat. The BBC World Service Business Daily version of my piece on the IMF’s role in the Asian financial crisis of 1997/8 .  (The Business Daily podcast is here.)   Loose Wireless 110607 To listen to Business Daily on the radio, tune into BBC… Read More »