Better in Beta

Posted by Mike Walsh ON 7/7/05 5:38 AM

Blogs are the new black. Whether you are a Fortune 500 CEO, an ambitious engineer working the late shift or a promiscuous Singaporean teen – you’ve got to have one. For the uninitiated, the prospect of adding yet more words to the ocean of information on the web may seem futile. But fame and power await those who manage to break out of the mass of hyperlinked opinion.
No wonder that media companies are also starting to get religion. Readers secretly want to be moguls too.

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CATEGORY: Media, Marketing, Culture

2.0 Outakes

Posted by Mike Walsh ON 7/4/05 6:19 AM

Robert Cringely had some interesting things to say today about the Supreme Court's ruling on P2P filetrading networks Grokster and Streamcast, and its implications on the emerging Web 2.0 meme.

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CATEGORY: Culture

Rights Remixed

Posted by Mike Walsh ON 6/30/05 12:27 AM

As they say – no new tunes in the key of C. But in an age of Tarantino,hip hop sampling and Google API mashups – the remix is generally better than the real thing. What should be a headache for intellectual property lawyers, is becoming fertile ground for legal innovation with
the rise of the creative commons licensing regime. But does copyright altruism really add up to new economy affluence?

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CATEGORY: Media, Culture

Little Green Men

Posted by Mike Walsh ON 6/27/05 3:40 AM

If you want to know where degree zero of the Web 2.0 world is - it is Gnomedex 2005 and you have just missed it.  The blogosphere is going crazy with speculation and comment, driven largely by Microsoft's announced plans to deeply integrate RSS technology into Longhorn. Exciting news, certainly. But also, a bit like getting a smile from a crocodile.

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CATEGORY: Marketing, Culture

Fire In The Hull

Posted by Mike Walsh ON 6/24/05 4:15 AM

If you think TiVo has got the network advertisers running scared, imagine a world in which not only advertising but the configuration of your product itself becomes a matter of choice for consumers. The genius of the Firefox browser is not just that it is wickedly fast, but that it also allows third party developers to extend its functionality. As you can imagine, when the world’s ubergeeks contemplate hotting up their browsers, ad skipping and site modification are at the top of their list. But this is not just a web fringe phenomenon. With global Firefox adoption rates now gaining momentum, publishers will soon have to accept that it will be readers and not editors who will decide not only what they look at, but also in what form and at what cost. 

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CATEGORY: Strategy, Culture

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