26 Results

Once upon a time reporters gained stories through their contacts, by wearing out shoe leather or burning up the telephone lines. These days, they are just as likely to suck the content off social media, which blurs regulatory and ethical lines.

In the Age of Twitter, everyone has become a syndicated film, music, restaurant and book critic. So do newspapers still need to publish the pontificating of “professional” critics? asks Howard Kurtz.

Forget “guru” and “evangelist” — the trendy new buzzword for what we used to call “expert” is apparently now “ninja”. In less surprising news, most of these self-appointed neo-warriors are white IT nerds.

Like watching your dad explain hip hop: Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner says “the government wants to blog” and use Web 2.0 tech to better engage with voters. What a n00b.

How times have changed: once derided as inaccurate and unreliable, Wikipedia is now being cited as a source by no less than the New York Times. Is it time to start more seriously vetting its editors and contributors?

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.

The latest move of Gawker Media blog empire monarch Nick Denton is to let readers post videos and pictures and tag their own comments, effectively turning the site into an anarchic version of Facebook.

Can an open source government work? An electorate in NSW has $300,000 and an online public vote system for choosing which local programs get funded. Want a new oval? Get voting.

Traditional video games take years to develop and market. Which is why social gaming (think, at a basic level, Scrabble over Facebook) is so appealing. Quick and cheap to build and with a massive potential player base.

Hearst, publisher of Cosmo and Marie Claire, is launching an ambitious beauty-focused website that brings together original content with articles from its own magazines and reader contributions, tailored to the reader’s age, ethnicity, hair color and product preferences.

The Hype Cycle for 2009 places microblogging services like Twitter at the start of their descent into the Trough of Disillusionment — along with green IT and e-book readers, where they’ll join public virtual worlds like Second Life and online video.

John Borthwick reckons the “real-time web” — embodied by microblogging and social networking tool Twitter — is the Next Big Thing on the internet, and he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is: building and investing in 21 other “real-time” companies. Will the gamble pay off?

True/Slant talks to Jennifer Preston, the New York Times’ newly appointed web 2.0 czar.

A study has found that over 60% of people who sign up to Twitter have stopped using the service a month later.

Sites like YouTube and Facebook are seeing unprecendent growth in the developing world, but these countries drain their servers and generate little ad revenue. What is the socially minded Web2.0 to do?

Digg founder Kevin Rose gives his State of the Union on the popular aggregation site.

Just when you thought virtual world Second Life was sooo 2007, user numbers have been on the rise again.