FriendsReunited, At a Price

  Before Facebook, we had to find our friends on FriendsReunited, a very successful UK site that achieved critical mass but had one flaw: users had to pay to communicate with each other. It only struck me now that there’s something a little unethical about that. Take, for example, what just happened to me: someone … Read more

When Old Media Buys a Community

MSNBC, owned by MSN and NBC, has bought Newsvine, a sort of citizen journalism, blogging and news-sharing site. But who stands to lose from the deal, and what does it tell us about the equity of Web 2.0? One commenter on the page that announces the news hits the nail firmly on the head: In … 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

Overloading a Brain

I’ve written too much of late about PersonalBrain, so I’m not going to do so anymore — at least here. Instead I’ve started a Google Group for those of us interested in exploring how to use the tool, but not necessarily so excited about it we want to follow all its ins and outs. For such folk there are the PersonalBrain forums … Read more

The Rise and Fall of Blogging, Twitter and Facebook

A lot of people ask me whether they should blog. Usually I give them the stock answer: blog because you’ve got something to say, because you feel you’ve got to write, and because you want to connect to other people on the same subject. But now I think I’d add another suggestion: don’t bother. Here, in a nutshell is … Read more