Facebook now worth $9.5 billionFacebook’s private shares are now for about $21 each — a 42% increase since July — valuing the company’s common shares at $9.5 billion. Will the company go public soon?
Social media
The 10 defining internet events of the decade
The folks behind the Webby Awards have named their 10 most influential internet moments of the decade, including the launch of Wikipedia, the closure of Napster, the 2008 US Presidential campaign, and more.
Tim O’Reilly: The War for the Web is just getting started
Murdoch’s threat to take News Corp content out of Google’s results in just the beginning, says tech publisher Tim O’Reilly: big players like Facebook, Apple, and, yes, News Corp, are breaking off bits of the Web for themselves — and they won’t always want to share.
Will Twitter be Time’s Person of the Year?
Twitter is emerging as the hot favourite amongst pundits as the hot favourite to be named Time magazine’s 2009 Person of the Year. We can just see the world’s social media experts wetting themselves already.
Hammertime for Sydney’s social media set
Rapper, preacher and Twitterati MC Hammer paid a visit to Sydney’s Social Media Club this week, explaining how he’s used social media to turn his image around from a ’90s has-been to cutting-edge entrepreneur.
The Vatican discovers LOLcats, Rick Astley and hax0rz
Ambassadors from the Web 2.0 — aka execs from Google, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia — are headed to the Vatican to introduce Catholic bishops to the mysterious ways of the internet. We think the Pope and his pals will fit riiiight in.
#PwnedNudieRun: How Jonathan Holmes got the internet to take its clothes off
Media Watch watchers may have had a giggle when host Jonathan Holmes said “pwned” on Monday night’s show — but they’d have ROFLed uproariously if they knew it was all a Twitter-led dare that would see bloggers forced to go on a nudie run in return.
How social media excludes people with social lives
ABC journo Lyndal Curtis would love to get into Twitter — but she’s a bit too busy actually having a real life to bang out 140 characters about it every five minutes (heresy!). Are busy people being left behind in the “social media revolution”?
Fort Hood: citizen journalists can’t handle the truth
The tweets, blogs and blurry mobile phone photos flooding the internet during the Fort Hood shooting did nothing but spread misinformation and breach the privacy of those killed or wounded in the incident, says Paul Carr.
Google’s next target: Facebook
Google is making moves into the social networking world with a bunch of improvements to its Friend Connect feature. It’s a blatant “declaration of war” on Facebook, says Douglas Rushkoff, and one Google will most likely win.
Stilgherrian: What do journos do better, exactly?
The “bloggers vs. journalists” debate is stupid, says Stilgherrian: of course journalists are better at journalism — they’re the ones doing it. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other important roles people can play in the broader media community.
The highlights and lowlights of Media140
Margaret Simons wraps up the recent social-media-types-get-together-to-tweet-about-talking-about-Twitter Media140 conference in Sydney. Where is social media headed in Australia? Can it save journalism, or will it just kill it faster?
Crikey Says: All locked away in our digital ghettoes
With the decline of the mainstream media, we’re also losing something social media cannot provide. What about the viewpoints that we don’t want to hear, but should?
Mark Scott on merging media professionals and their audience
The ABC will be experimenting with new methods of producing journalism through “pro-am” collaborations between media professionals and the audience, the ABC managing director Mark Scott said at the Media140 conference in Sydney this morning, writes Margaret Simons.
Corporate blogging: Telstra tries again
After its last disastrous attempt, Telstra is having another crack at social media. Full marks for effort, says Trevor Cook, but it’s still little more than a bit of gloss on a dull, besuited corporate empire.
graph pr0n The social networking boom
Focus graphs the boom in social networking sites over the last decade — from early pioneers like Classmates.com to recent innovators like Twitter.
The world’s first Twitter-only gadget. Er, why?
Tech company Peek has created a hand-held gadget that only does one thing: tweet. For US$199, you can’t make phone calls, send SMS or check your email, but you can tweet on-the-go. Perfect for friendless geeks with no need for a real phone, we guess.
How I made millions spamming Facebook: an insider’s confession
You know those ads on social networking sites saying “Inbox (5). Nick, someone in Sydney has a crush on you!”, with your name, profile picture, and city in the ad? Dennis Yu made millions off them. He explains how.
Is Twitter protecting celebrities from nasty tweets?
Blogger Mickey Kaus has found something sketchy happening on The Twitter: insulting tweets about celebrity twitterers are disappearing from search results. Grassy knoll territory? Or is the company protecting one of its most valuable asset, the Twitterati?
MySpace and Facebook to team up?
Facebook has well and truly bested MySpace in the social networking game, but MySpace still has one ace up its sleeve: music and entertainment. Instead of competing, the two are apparently putting their differences aside to share content across the two networks.
Why Twitter’s non-existant business model is brilliant
Don’t be fooled by Twitter’s apparently non-existent business model: by inking deals with Google and Bing last week, the social networking site has shown it has major money-making potential, and its experimental approach is all part of the genius.
Facebook: We see dead people
After a new feature on Facebook created a stir by inadvertently recommending users “reconnect” with dead friends, the site has decided to “memorialise” the profiles of users who have died as creepy online tributes to the deceased.
When online journalists moonlight as copy-writers
The (Dis)Information Age: how the internet is making us stupider
Despite the rhetoric of “openness”, the internet is actually making us more narrow-minded by allowing us to filter what we read to suit our own viewpoints, says a new book by academic Cass Sunstein. How else can you explain the absurd ideas of the “birthers” gaining a foothold?
The real-time web: a Brave New World or hideous dystopia?
Sitting at a Weezer concert, next to Twitterati who’ve never heard of the band, where everyone is too busy blogging about the show to actually watch it, Paul Carr wonders whether the real-time web isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
