This is my blog’s Worlde.
“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.”
Should I be worried that I obviously use the word ‘want’ a lot? Does that mean I am needy? I’d better keep this hidden from the local shrink… I’m quite sure that this would provide a “window into my soul” that I’d prefer to keep hidden. Or maybe not.
I suppose it would be wrong to criticise this [too much] as we’d all call them outdated and out of touch if they didn’t try engage with people in accordance with the tools of the 21st century. However… the choice of peers in the video seems to be trying just a bit too hard and I think that it is no surprise that the coolest looking Lord of all (Lord Adebowale) makes an appearance. I’m just not convinced that the selection in this video are truly representative of the whole of the upper house. Certainly women and ethnic minorities are disproportionately represented – not a bad thing in itself but maybe a little disingenuous..?
Kudos to the drive-through restaurant waitress who tracked down a couple of nasty youths that had thrown a 32oz cup of soda at her in a “fire on the hole“, happy slapping-type attack. The Dummkopfs posted a video of their crime on YouTube (brilliant) and the victim managed to track them down and befriend them via their MySpace accounts before shopping them to the law… Full story here.
The two boys were sentenced to 100 hours each of community service and ordered to pay $30 each to the restaurant in cleaning fees. But most importantly, the judge ordered them to post a follow-up video on YouTube, apologising for their actions and demonstrating that they have seen the error of their ways.
I remember when Compaq’s (ill-fated) $9.6bn acquisition of Digital Equipment Corporation was the biggest of its kind in the IT industry… and now news has just broken that Microsoft has offered nearly $45bn for Yahoo!
I wonder if the Google folks are genuinely worried or laughing into their cornflakes? Yahoo! hasn’t managed much of a fight against Google in recent times but this would bring together two enormous giants.
Interesting times are ahead of us…
As is often the case, dot.life’s take on this is very insightful:
“…as companies like Yahoo and Google, as well as thousands of garage start-ups have shown, from Facebook to Joost, the battle was never really about the browser – it was about services. From instant messaging and online advertising to social networks, blogs, communities, and IPTV Microsoft is not out in front in any of these areas. Microsoft is attracted to Yahoo because a purchase would take a key rival out of the game in one swoop.”
I don’t get it… How? Why? They are nicking ‘virtual’ stuff now. If I leave some toenail clippings lying around, will they nick that too?
I blogged a couple of months back on social networks being walled gardens and the need for greater interoperability between networks – and it seems that the clever folks at IBM and Linden Lab (creators of Second life) are doing something about it and are working on universal avatars that can travel between worlds.
If we can learn anything from the tech industry’s pre-pubescent days in the 1990s, it is that proprietary is generally very limiting and bad – and interoperability and open is a good thing as consumers benefit from their own exploration and other people’s ‘tinkering under the bonnet’.
And having the ability to wander in and out of networks without having to change ‘bodies’ or ‘personalities’ will be the very least we demand as citizens of the online world. We wouldn’t accept it offline and neither should we have to tolerate it for too much longer online.
I have very little sympathy for those that ‘crow’ on social networks and don’t expect that their bragging of sordid antics will get them in trouble in the real world. This story caught my eye and it struck me as being another example of the height of stupidity.
“Two of Britain’s top (tennis) juniors have been suspended for “unprofessional behaviour” and “lack of discipline”… The LTA took the action after being alerted to photos and confessions on the Bebo social networking website.”
When newspapers we launched many, many years ago, did these people’s equivalents take out ads telling of what they got up to in their dodgy private lives..? Probably not.
According to a US study, a news agenda formulated by citizens would be radically different from that put together by journalists. Isn’t that stating the bleeding obvious..? The study, conducted by a wing of the US Pew Research Centre, compared what made the headlines in the mainstream media with that of three user-driven news sources – Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit. While mainstream media wrote about the war in Iraq and big political issues, “users were more interested in the release of the iPhone and the news that Nintendo had surpassed Sony in net worth”.
Surely that is the whole point of citizen journalism? We write about what interests us, individually, rather than trying to represent the mass market. We then find like-minded individuals and engage with them – actively or passively. I have very little interest in writing about the war on terror or the race for the White House but I do want to read about it, which is why I read newspapers, watch TV and listen to the radio.
Maybe this ‘piece of research’ will actually explain that there is still a huge need for mainstream news and that consumer generated media will not kill off old media – as so many have suggested. Instead, people are adapting how they consume information. For me, the authority on what’s happening in Iraq may well be the BBC or The Times, but if I want to buy a new phone, I’ll turn to the blogosphere and newsgroups that I know and trust.
I am feeling very smug about the fact that Times Online has finally covered something that I wrote about in May… They are, like, so web 1.0..!
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Whole Foods‘ founder and CEO John Mackey posted many messages on Yahoo’s stock forums for about eight years, ending around August 2006, where he routinely cheered Whole Foods’ financial results, trumpeted personal gains on the stock, and bashed rival Wild Oats. Mr Mackey used the pseudonym “Rahodeb,” an anagram for Deborah, the name of Mr. Mackey’s wife.
Looks like the folks at Edelman weren’t the first to try this sordid approach to communicating with audiences…
N i c k n a c k P a d d y w h a c k 