http://www.glumbert.com/embed/traincoaster
Links that interest me and maybe you
Today’s laugh out loud moment is brought to you by John Biggs, the former Gizmodo writer who now does CrunchGear, the gadget blog that is part of Mike Arrington’s expanding TechCrunch empire. Biggs writes about the USA Today story featuring Mike and Om Malik, which talks about how they built their blogs into businesses, and his post just about made me fall off my chair:
“Now I don’t know who these people are or what they think they’re doing, but I think it’s bad to show people that you can make “real money†— how much, Om Malley? $5? HA! — doing this.
There are jobs that Americans should be doing — car repair, HVAC installation, dance instruction — that are going empty while these two jokers sit around all day pretending to work. For shame.
“B-logging,†like stamp collecting and religious observance, should be considered a hobby and nothing more. Let’s not encourage these bozos.”
That is gold, John. If I were Mike and Om, I would print your post, laminate it and hang it on my wall.
From Press Gazette comes news the the Beeb is sending reporter and techno guru Ben Hammersely to Turkey to cover the election using a number of social networking tools, including his blog, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook:
“The BBC has dispatched reporter Ben Hammersley to spend two weeks using new social media web tools to cover the run-up to the July general election.
He will visit four cities and report for BBC World, World Service radio, News 24 and BBC News online.
In what is a first for the BBC, Hammersley will file to his personal blog, he will upload photos to Flickr, video to YouTube, post snippets of text to the microblogging site Twitter, bookmark research on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us and network with people through Facebook.”
Should be interesting to follow this experiment in distributed media. If I were a large media outlet, I would paying very close attention. Ben has a bit more on the deal here.
There’s no question that Microsoft’s “surface” user interface is pretty cool, and I have no doubt that we will be using something much like it in the future — but this video with the sarcastic voice-over is still hilarious.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY&w=425&h=350]
Given the sudden departure of Terry “I Did My Best” Semel as CEO of Yahoo, and the installment of Jerry Yang as the new chief executive, there’s a lot of attention being paid to the deal to acquire Rivals.com, the college sports site. It’s a nice deal to come out with after all the uncertainty, if only because the site actually has revenues — about $22-million a year, according to Yahoo — and therefore isn’t a complete Web 2.0 Hail Mary pass.
The New York Times story on the deal says that it is likely to help morale in the media division at Yahoo, whose future has been somewhat up in the air since Lloyd Braun left and the company said it no longer wanted to create its own content. But personally, I don’t find the deal all that interesting. I still think, like many others, that Yahoo needs something dramatic to really shift the focus of the company — something like a Facebook.com acquisition (although it will undoubtedly cost a lot more than the $1-billion Yahoo reportedly offered last year). Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests asks “Where’s the peanut butter?”
Even if it did buy Facebook, however, I’m not convinced Yahoo would even know what to do with it. The company has bought social networks like Flickr and del.icio.us, but apart from doing some work on the back end to integrate them with Yahoo’s server farms, I fail to see what benefit the company has gotten from them. I think the bottom line is that Yahoo is just too safe, too tentative and too boring. It needs to blow itself up somehow.
For a great look at some more practical things Yahoo and Jerry Yang could do, have a read of Marc Andreesen’s tips on turning around a large company. Damn that Andreesen. Like my friend Paul Kedrosky, I find the fact that he continues to write such excellent blog posts irritating in the extreme.