Blogger not eligible for media shield law, hit with $2.5M judgment
Timothy B. Lee An Oregon judge has ruled that a Montana blogger is not eligible for the legal protections afforded to journalists, letting stand a $2.5 million defamation verdict. The blogger, a Montana woman named Crystal Cox, had become a thorn in the side of an attorney named Kevin Padrick. Padrick is the principal of … Continue reading
The Unlikely Event
Avi Steinberg Because I do not want to die in the brawny arms of an industrial-kitchen-fixtures salesman from Tulsa—at least, not one I’ve only just met—I don’t much care for airline travel. During a recent trip from Salt Lake City, my Boeing 757 began to lurch and heave and make dreadful noises. At times we … Continue reading
How Do You Run a News Portal?
Tim Carmody ABC News President Ben Sherwood, left, and Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo’s Executive Vice President of Americas, address a news conference in New York, Monday, Oct. 3, 2011. Photo: Richard Drew First thing Monday morning Yahoo and ABC News announced a new distribution deal — familiar stuff, albeit between two big partners. It will encompass … Continue reading
After 50 years of the most lavish welfare state on earth?
Peter Hitchens Bitter laughter is my main response to the events of the past week. You are surprised by what has happened? Why? I have been saying for years that it was coming, and why it was coming, and what could be done to stop it. I have said it in books, in articles, over … Continue reading
The truth is in there
When we realize everyone might be lying, most of us just give up. For Errol Morris, that’s just the beginning. By Leon Neyfakh IT USED TO BE that Errol Morris would come into his office in Inman Square every morning knowing more or less what he and his staff were going to do that day. … Continue reading
Speed Up Your WordPress Site With Google’s New Page Speed API
By Scott Gilbertson Google’s Page Speed testing tool, which recently went from a browser add-on to a web-based tool, now sports a new API. The Page Speed Online API allows outside applications to send URLs to Page Speed and get back a list of things the site developer can do to speed up the page … Continue reading
Texting and the turnpike
By Nate Anderson As someone who 1) uses a computer all day and 2) is not a teenager with a featurephone, I’ve never been much for text messaging. Lots of Americans are, of course, but a recent reporting trip surprised me with how intense the topic of texting has become. Far from being just a … Continue reading
Digital legacy: The fate of your online soul
Sumit Paul-Choudhury We are the first people in history to create vast online records of our lives. How much of it will endure when we are gone? NOT long before my wife died, she asked me to do something for her. "Make sure people remember me," she said. "Not the way I am now. The … Continue reading
Unpaid Blogger Hits ‘Slave Owner’ Huffington With $105M Class Action Lawsuit
By Sam Gustin Arianna Huffington appears as a panelist for Tavis Smiley’s America’s Next Chapter in January in Washington. Photo: Earl Gibson III/AP Arianna Huffington is like a “slave owner on a plantation of bloggers,” according to the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit that seeks more than $100 million in damages on behalf … Continue reading
Jack Dorsey Biography
( 1976 – ) Computer programmer and entrepreneur. Born November 19, 1976, Jack Dorsey is best known as the creator of Twitter. He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. Dorsey became interested in computers and communications at an early age and began programming while still a student at Bishop DuBourg High School. He was fascinated … Continue reading
Twitter Takes Flight
March 21, 2006 By John C Abell 2006: Jack Dorsey sends the world’s first (non-automated) tweet: inviting co-workers The expression is as uninspiring as Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,” which was uttered 130 years and a few days earlier. But it also heralds a new means of communication whose impact … Continue reading
With Google’s Top Search Engineers
By Steven Levy LONG BEACH, California — Google announced a new update last week to its search engine that addressed the growing complaint that low-quality content sites (derisively referred to as content farms) were ranked higher than higher-quality sites that seemed to be more important to users. This major change affects almost 12 percent of … Continue reading
Google engineers help good sites harmed by search result cleanup
By Ryan Singel, wired.com When Google updated its algorithm late last week to weed out low-quality content factories from the top of search results, the changes didn’t sit well with all. Many of the most well-known sites that pop-up in search results despite having little good information, including Associated Content and Mahalo, were downgraded, according … Continue reading
Chicago Punk Rock Journalist Dan Sinker Revealed as @MayorEmanuel Author
By Sam Gustin Psychedelic candy corn. Hallucinogenic baby food. A mustachioed, singing duck with a penchant for the Beastie Boys. The multiverse, containing an infinite number of Chicagos. A trans-dimensional time portal inside City Hall. Celery Salt. A beat-up Honda Civic with poor man’s air conditioning. Journey. A giant champagne slide. A gin jacuzzi. (Whiskey … Continue reading
Keeping up e-ppearances: How to bury your digital dirt
Embarrassed by what search engines report about you? The answer is to reveal more about yourself, not less by Sally Adee THE mistake that left my online reputation in tatters began with some innocent office banter. It was 2003, and I was working as an office drone. Bored out of our minds, a colleague and … Continue reading
AOL Content Chief David Eun Out as Arianna Settles In
By Sam Gustin AOL content chief David Eun, the former Googler tasked with transforming AOL into a premier content destination on the web, is leaving the company, he told staffers Thursday. Eun’s departure comes as Arianna Huffington is preparing to take the reins of AOL’s sprawling content operation, following the company’s $315 million acquisition of … Continue reading
How Aaron Barr revealed himself to Anonymous
By Nate Anderson Stian Elkeland Aaron Barr, CEO of security company HBGary Federal, spent the month of January trying to uncover the real identifies of the hacker collective Anonymous—only to end with his company website knocked offline, his e-mails stolen, 1TB of backups deleted, and his personal iPad wiped when Anonymous found out. Our lengthy … Continue reading
HuffPo’s Achilles Heel
Search engine optimization won’t work forever. By Farhad Manjoo Arianna Huffington Are you wondering, "will AOL’s acquisition of the Huffington Post be successful?" I bet you are, as that’s been a common search engine query since the announcement earlier this week that AOL will buy the Huffington Post. Other ways you might phrase the question … Continue reading
Should U.S. intelligence be paying more attention to Twitter?
By Joshua Keating Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says the U.S. missed what was coming in Egypt because intelligence services were not paying enough attention to what was happening on the Internets: "There was a good deal of intelligence about Tunisia [but] virtually nothing about Egypt," Feinstein said in an interview … Continue reading
AOL, Arianna ‘Aligned’ Over $315 Million Huffington Post Purchase
By Sam Gustin AOL is buying the Huffington Post for $315 million, the companies announced late Sunday. The deal puts Arianna Huffington in charge of AOL’s growing content network, and burnishes AOL’s credentials as a new media network. Huffington is to be president and editor-in-chief of a newly formed division called The Huffington Post Media … Continue reading
Twitter Revenues Set to Triple in 2011 Says eMarketer
By Sam Gustin Twitter, the micro-blogging platform turned international communications phenom, will see its revenues triple this year, according to a new report from research firm eMarketer. Twitter will earn $150 million in 2011, more than three times the $45 million it earned in 2010, according to the firm’s estimates. In 2012, Twitter’s revenue could … Continue reading
Porn worm extorts money from 2,500 victims
A fast-spreading Russian ransom worm that locks people out of their files has found at least 2,500 victims willing to pay up to get back control of their PCs, researchers have discovered. John E Dunn A fast-spreading Russian ransom worm that locks people out of their files has found at least 2,500 victims willing to … Continue reading
5 reasons your website isn’t attracting leads
– Lisa Barone So, what are your big Internet marketing plans for the New Year? Will you be investing more in social media? Will you start blogging? Will you take a more proactive stance with self-promotion? Whatever your online marketing plans, the end goal is likely to attract more people to your website in the … Continue reading
The Unknown Blogger Who Changed WikiLeaks Coverage
Alexis Madrigal When historians look back at WikiLeaks and how the world’s pundits tried to make sense of what was happening, they’ll see a familiar list of sources: Foreign Policy’s Evgeny Morozov, The Guardian’s John Noughton, The New York Times’ David Carr, several people from the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, and various … Continue reading
Blogging ‘Peaks,’ But Reports of Its Death Are Exaggerated
By Ryan Singel Have we hit peak blogging, the point where blogging slowly becomes as antiquated as the CB radio, a niche hobby like woodworking, a musty, ungainly verb that falls out of the popular lexicon? Hints of that appear in the new Pew Internet report that finds that blogging by teenagers has fallen by … Continue reading
Twitter Now Worth $3.7 Billion after $200 Million Raise
By Sam Gustin Twitter, the micro-blogging startup turned internet phenomenon, has just closed a huge investment round, which values the company at an eye-popping $3.7 billion, according to multiple reports. Twitter has received a $200 million infusion led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the premier venture capital firms in the world, and … Continue reading
Search and Destroy
Nick Denton’s blog empire. by Ben McGrath “I don’t have a huge amount of time for noble failure,” Denton says. Photograph by Max Vadukul. For years after starting Gawker Media, the online publishing network, in 2002, Nick Denton ran the company out of his apartment, in SoHo. “He said, ‘If you run it out of … Continue reading
Pepsi spill causes sticky mess in science blogging ecosystem
By John Timmer The potential for blogs and other new forms of communication to reshape the media landscape has almost certainly been oversold, but there’s one corner of the landscape that has been transformed by blogging: scientific communications. As science blogs have grown in number and credibility, their ability to take scientific results directly to … Continue reading
Blog del Narco gets the drug war scoop
By Suzanne Merkelson Score another one for new media: an anonymous, twenty-something blogger has become Mexico’s go-to for information on the country’s deadly drug war. Blog del Narco, launched in March, includes postings from both drug traffickers (such as warnings and even a beheading) and law enforcement (crime scenes accessible only to the police and … Continue reading
How Black People Use Twitter
The latest research on race and microblogging. By Farhad Manjoo As far as I can tell, the Twitter hashtag #wordsthatleadtotrouble got started at about 11 a.m. Pacific Time on Sunday morning, when a user named Kookeyy posted this short message: "#wordsthatleadtotrouble ‘Don’t Worry I gotchu." A couple minutes later, Kookeyy posted another take on the … Continue reading
Graphomania, Blogs, and Masturb8tion
Rebecca Bates. “In the era of graphomania…everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.”—Milan Kundera Our world is saturated with blogs. They’re easy to start, even easier to abandon, and are often no less masturbatory than Kundera’s wall of mirrors. Even photo blogs. Take, … Continue reading
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