Category: Blogs and Blogging

Uber’s magic ingredient is inequality

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Leo Minari writing for Quartz: There are only two requirements for an on-demand service economy to work, and neither is an iPhone. First, the market being addressed needs to be big enough to scale—food, laundry, taxi rides. Without that, it’s just a concierge service for the rich rather than a disruptive paradigm shift, as a venture capitalist might say. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there needs to be a large enough labor class willing to work at wages that customers consider affordable and that the middlemen consider worthwhile for their profit margins. To compound this, it’s very (very) likely that once

Writing about feeling a great disturbance in the Internet

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Why does every online publication pile on and (re)write the same popular story, asks Pando’s David Holmes: If you’ve spent any time consuming “content” today, you know that a new trailer is out for J.J. Abrams’ “Star Wars” reboot. You know it because virtually every news site on the planet, including Huffington Post, CNN, the Verge, Wired, Forbes, and ABC News, has “written” about it in a mad dash for those delicious Internet clicks. Those “delicious internet clicks” are clicks you know you are going to get. As a content producer when you have stories you know are going to generate income that take a relatively short amount

When The Blogging Flag Drops…

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Veteran F1 reporter Joe Saward talks about the issues around blogging, wire services, quotas for stories, attendance (or otherwise), in the world of online F1 coverage: In part this is due to people called news aggregators. These are the bottom feeders of F1 who pick up stories wherever they can, in whatever language. They have no means of checking the information they gather and so they package up the stories in bite-sized chunks and pump them out to dozens of lazy websites that run the same stuff. This has two effects: the first is that they have deals for x

XKCD and the X-15 Astronauts

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There are moments when you can look at an XKCD cartoon and now exactly what the mouseover text is hidden. ‘Astronaut Vandalism‘ was one of those moments, although I was half-expecting the change from 62 to 50 to be done not be ‘retired USAF pilots’, but by Joe Engle, the last of the eight X-15 astronauts still alive.

The moment when a post about ‘audio not going viral’, goes viral

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An interesting article for two reasons on Digg about the viral nature of content and why audio doesn’t have the same viral velocity as an animated GIF or a flashy YouTube video: “Audio never goes viral,” writes radio and podcast producer Nate DiMeo. “If you posted the most incredible story — literally, the most incredible story that has ever been told since people have had the ability to tell stories, it will never, ever get as many hits as a video of a cat with a moustache.” It’s hardly a fair fight, audio vs. cat video, but it’s the one that’s fought on