Tag Archives: Virtual communities

Strangled by the Grassroots

 Steve Outing writes a bittersweet eulogy to his failed startup, the Enthusiast Group, which tried to build a business around grassroots media. His conclusion: with the exception of one or two sites that make it big (YouTube, Flickr) user generated content is not strong enough to stand on its own. In my view — and… Read More »

Web 2.0 Ain’t About the Technology

Scoble makes some good points in a blog posting about why Microsoft, and more specifically his old boss Steve Ballmer, doesn’t get Web 2.0. I don’t agree with everything Robert says, but he has an understanding of this era of the web born of living and working in its eye the past seven years: “There… Read More »

The Unsocial Web

A piece by Donna Bogatin on why many more people read web sites liked digg.com rather than contribute to it has in itself spawned enough responses to become something of a summary of why the social web, citizen journalism, user-created content etc may not be quite the revolution it appears. Here’s how I see the… Read More »

BlogJet Goes Commercial, But Is It Ready?

BlogJet, one of a handful of programs designed to make editing and posting to blogs easier, is now officially out of beta. BlogJet 1.0 works with Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, Blogware, MovableType, b2, .Text, pMachine, DasBlog and others. It uses a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that “enables users to insert bullets,… Read More »

Kazaa Gets Tough — On Copyright Infringement

The irony is not lost on those writing about it: Sharman Networks, owner of the music-swapping program Kazaa (a Napster imitatator) is closing down Kazaalite K++, a version written by other folk that was designed to do what Kazaa does without all the spyware and adware. They complained about it infringing copyright, or something. The… Read More »