“My name’s Scott. I’m 13 and have launched a web startup.” So began an email exchange over last weekend which culminated with me chatting to Scott’s mum today to verify, that, indeed, he was actually 13 and really had launched a blogging site for people in Scotland. ScotBlog.net is essentially a social network for people in [...]

One thing that didn't make a lot of sense about the 33 celebrity Twitter accounts hacked this morning - the messages left on the various accounts weren't consistent and were clearly written by different people with different agendas. Fox News got “Breaking: Bill O Riley is gay," and Rick Sanchez from CNN got "I am high on crack right now might not be coming into work today." But other Twitter accounts had links to sites to generate affiliate revenue. Facebook's Twitter account had a message pointing to getlaid.info (now shut down), which redirected to a porn site ...

Since Bernie Madoff has put Ponzi schemes back onto the front pages, it's worth considering whether we are all complicit in the biggest Ponzi scheme of them all, the idea that the global economy can grow indefinitely. I grew up on the idea that humanity would grow out into space, and that resources were for all practical purposes infinite. It...

In March 2008, Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails released the first part of Ghosts I-IV via BitTorrent, and released all four albums under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Even though fans could easily get free versions of the album, Ghosts actually went on to become the best-selling album of 2008 on Amazon's MP3 store.

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Radiohead's In Rainbows, another high-profile album which was available for free for a limited time in late 2007, ended the year just outside of Amazon's Top 10 for 2008.

Why Pay for Free Music?

Trent Reznor himself questioned the viability ...

Social browsing is a loosely defined phrase that means many things to different people. Because of the confusion about what social browsing is, people have strongly differing opinions about its relevance. Some think that social browsing is nothing new, others believe it will be the next big thing, while still others believe that social browsing is a market doomed to fail.

To make predictions about the success of the social browsing market, you must first be able to accurately define it. To be considered social browsing, a product must contain at minimum the following prerequisites:

1) Portable
The product must ...

Summary This post documents an analysis of 10.2 million tweets containing 2 million links. Those links were analyzed to understand which domains are most used. The analysis shows that: tinyurl.com is the most used domain name; cli.gs is the 18th most used domain name; Of the top 50 domains used in links, 18 are URL shortening services; Of the URL [...]

One of the most effective ways of using Socialbrowse is to grow your audience of followers and increase your reach. The more people following you, the more people see the links you share and the comments you submit.

Since many of our Socialbrowse users are also avid bloggers, we have now created a way to increase your Socialbrowse audience while simultaneously personalizing your blog and improving its community.

The new Socialbrowse embeddable widget provides a simple way of broadcasting your latest Socialbrowse activity to all your blog readers, and promotes your profile to them to increase your audience.

It's ...

Responding to a blog I posted earlier about governmental preparations for peak oil, one self-labeled “alarmist” commented with a plug for his own resource, a networking web site called Bright Neighbor. I thought the site was worth checking out.

According to the peak oil experts, we need better personal and collective plans for fossil fuel depletion. Randy White, an early member of Portland, Oregon’s Peak Oil Task Force, agrees. His Bright Neighbor is taking on the practical functions that he believes should be executed by the powers that be—were they up for the job.

Read more of this ...