Nov 9th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Ego alert: I was on The Agenda with Steve Paikin — a current affairs show on TV Ontario — on Wednesday night, along with my friends Mark Evans and Om Malik, as well as Jesse Hirsh, a CBC commentator on media and technology, and Nancy Baym, a University of Kansas professor who writes the always excellent Online Fandom blog.
We were talking about Facebook (of course) and the Microsoft deal, but also about privacy and “social advertising,” and whether online social networking is a replacement for real face-to-face networking — stay tuned until the end to see Nancy lay into Om on that one 
The video clip is here, or you can click on the image of yours truly below.
Oct 19th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Google announced something kind of cool: a Facebook app for Google News, which allows you to choose categories or feeds based on your own keywords, and then share those stories with others and see what stories your friends have shared. Okay, it’s not a cure for cancer, but I think it’s a pretty useful app as far as Facebook apps are concerned — although that’s not exactly a high bar to clear.
I share stories I come across through either a del.icio.us feed (which is on my blog in the sidebar) and/or my Google Reader shared items (which are also in the sidebar), but lots of people don’t use those things, and may never use them. Google’s Facebook app gives them another way to see what stories their friends think are interesting, and to share their own picks from the headlines.
It will be interesting to see whether Google — which is about as data-obsessed as its possible for a company to be — will come up with any cool numbers based on what people have shared.
Aug 15th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
The question in the title of this post is meant to be facetious — sort of. I know that Kara works for the Wall Street Journal, or at least for Dow Jones (and ultimately for Rupert Murdoch now). The only reason I ask is that she broke a story about Facebook on her Boomtown blog, which is located at All Things D, the site that she and WSJ gadget guru Walt Mossberg run. That story appears nowhere at the Journal site, as far as I can tell.
All Things D started as an online adjunct to the similarly named tech conference, which Swisher and Mossberg have put on since 2003, and which regularly features geekosphere luminaries such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and a few other people you might have heard of. The website was recently relaunched as a news/blogging site with regular posts from Kara and John Paczkowski (and somewhat less frequent posts by Mossberg). The site is owned by Dow Jones but “run autonomously as a small online start-up,” according to the About page.
I guess what I’m driving at is that I think what All Things D is doing is an interesting experiment. Some of Kara’s video interviews show up at the Journal site, but her blog appears to only be at allthingsd.com — and the Facebook story is only there (at least for now), perhaps because it’s just a management shuffle at a non-public company, and therefore might not merit a full WSJ story.
In any case, it will be interesting to see what happens if Kara breaks more stories there rather than the WSJ site — it’s possible that the Journal won’t even care, since it apparently sells ads at All Things D as well.
Update:
Kara’s rather long disclosure statement (in which she also talks about the fact that her partner Megan Smith is the director of new business development at Google) notes that she is no longer on staff at the Journal but is employed as an independent contractor. I still think the model the Journal is experimenting with at All Things D is an interesting one.
