Second Life Tips and Tricks

When you get to Second Life, there are as many interface tips as etiquette advisories. The Grid helps us out with some good links…

Fourth Estate 2.0

The old days of 3 television networks and a homogeneous media may have been the exception rather than the standard. Take a look at the newpaper lies during the Civil War, for example - the spin was actually worse than today’s.

A globally distributed news media is probably better in potential than one global rag, no matter how scrupulous. How we sort the wheat from the chaff is still evolving, and memeorandum’s one piece of it.

Music Biz Loosens Up

Take the business model known as FREE (try selling THAT to the hard-bitten “realists”), add a better distribution system than anything ever developed by the labels, and see what’s happening to the music industry now.

Rapid Assembly of Facts During the California Fires

With the fires raging in California, which of the many ways of getting information stand out as the best in these times?

There is No Shelf

There is no shelf: the links alone are enough.

This video to me is THE outstanding clip of the year. It’s completely heartening, totally inspiring. By Michael Wesch, this is getting linked to by everyone. Every second is fascinating.

It’s about the revolution of knowledge, and what this really means to us as we inhabit it.

It’s about the growth of the Web, the ability to file everything under Miscellaneous, the power of the link, and the concurrent removal of the library structure (the shelf) from our knowledge systems.

Apple, Google, Cringely, And Carr

Today Robert Cringely has been goaded into writing about the future partnership of Google and Apple, from a piece on Wednesday by Nicholas Carr that purported to describe the architecture of said partnership.

Ah, but not so fast, says Bob. You’re forgetting the twisted nature of people, and anyway if it were that simple everybody could write about it. It’s much more complicated than that…

Facebook Advertising

Charlene ran an interesting test of Facebook marketing this week, sending a Facebook Flyer, personalized to her, asking for a response as a test. She loved the response…

Long Tail Fat and Thin

We love the long tail in my neighborhood, but arguments against it have produced a quote that makes me laugh from the sheer resonance of the words: “It’s the short fat part of the tail that matters.” Read on for two simple illustrations of the right and wrong way to view this famous tail…