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CBS to Acquire CNET For $1.8 Billion

CNET and its array of Internet properties have been acquired by CBS in a $1.8 billion acquisition. Paid Content says the deal is expected to close in Q3.

Said CBS CEO Les Moonves in the statement: "CBS stands for premium content and unparalleled reach, and CNET Networks will add a tremendous platform to extend our complementary entertainment, news, sports, music and information content to a whole new global audience. Together, CBS and CNET Networks will have significant additional exposure to the fastest- growing advertising sector and can accelerate our growth through a number of new content, promotion and advertising initiatives. We could not be more pleased with the prospect of adding CNET Networks and its tremendous team of people to the CBS family. I look forward to working with Quincy Smith, Neil Ashe and the considerable combined talent at both companies, as we build upon our success."

Among the sites in the CNET family that will be part of CBS Interactive pending approval: CNET, ZDNet, GameSpot.com, TV.com, mp3.com, CNET news.com, UrbanBaby, CHOW, Search.com, BNET, MySimon and TechRepublic. The company has also been building out its China operations, with sites devoted to womens content and auto.

The press release can be found here. CNET has a lot of blogs and websites with a considerable amount of traffic. CBS should be able to use these blogs and websites to help drive traffic to other CBS properties.

ReadWriteWeb calls CNET the "the granddaddy of all the blog networks on the web." They run a number of well-known blogs including Webware, The Iconoclast, The Social and Crave. You can see all of CNET's blogs here.

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Ne-Yo Blogs to Promote Upcoming Album

Vibe reports that singer/songwriter Ne-Yo has turned bloggy for his upcoming album.

R&B; singer/songwriter Ne-Yo has launched his very own blog called "Year of The Gentleman" to promote his album of the same title. In his blog, Ne-Yo writes about his experiences on his latest tour alongside R&B; diva Alicia Keys and newcomer, Jordin Sparks. He also posts pictures with fans and writes about all of his favorite things, from cars to cologne.

The singer also gives his fans the ability to send their mothers a personalized greeting for Mother's Day, encouraging them to get "Closer" (the title of the first single off of The Year of the Gentleman) to the women who raised them.

But how close will Ne-Yo be getting with his fans through this blog? Pretty close. He has added personal pictures from his tour as well as videos. He even admits in one entry that he thinks Jordin is "kinda sexy in person."

The blog can be found on the Year of the Gentleman website. That's also the name of Ne-Yo's upcoming album. The blog includes permalinks, photos and comments. Ne-Yo blogs about his concert tour as well as some of his favorite things - such as his favorite fashions and favorite cologne.

Sorry, it's too late to send Mom a Ne-Yo Mother's Day Card -- maybe he will have a new one for Father's Day.

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Twitter Apps and Tools Becoming More Plentiful

The number of new Twitter tools and services launching seems to really be accelerating. In the past couple weeks we have seen the launch of tools like TrackThis, a useful tool that tracks package deliveries, and TwittEarth, a 3-D model of the Twitter universe that uses cute avatars to represent Twitter users. Here are some of the new apps and tools recently added to the Twitter tools list.

Autopostr.com, Autopostr.com lets your twitterfriends automatically know you posted a new photo on Flickr

FuelFrog, FuelFrog provides a way to track gas mileage on Twitter

Intwition, Intwition shows popular links on Twitter broken into will be popular, is popular and was popular categories.

Prayer Requests, A Twitter account that lets you broadcast an anonymous prayer.

Summize, Summize is a real-time tweet search engine.

TrackThis, Track your packages on Twitter - supports FedEx, UPS, USPS and DHL tracking codes

TweetShirts.com, Service will make t-shirts out of popular tweet ideas submitted and voted on by users.

TweetWheel, The TweetWheel helps you find out which of your Twitter friends know each other.

Twist, This service creates charts that let you compare trends in Twitter. The charts can be embedded onto your blog.

Twistori, A social experiment tracking tweets using I love, hate, think, believe, feel and wish.

TwittEarth, A mashup that shows live tweets from all over the world on a 3-D globe as they happen.

Twitter Ratio, Twitter Ratio returns your TFF Ratio (Twitter Follower-Friend Ratio).

TwitterSnooze, Allows you to temporarily silence your noisy Twitter friends.

TwitterSoap, Twittersoap is a mashup of Mobypicture and Twitter.

Twitturly, Twitturly is a service for tracking what URLs people are talking about as they talk about them on Twitter.

Twixxer, Twixxer is a photo and video sharing component for Twitter.com.

Who Should I Follow?, Helps you find other interesting people to follow on Twitter.

You can find the complete list of Twitter apps, tools and services here.

Posted in Twitter

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Tom Cruise Launches New Website Sans Blog

Can you think of anything crazier than launching a new website in 2008 without a blog? Leave it to Tom Cruise's web team to do just that. Last week the people that work for Tom Cruise (scientologists and hollywood pr experts) were busy buying up Google Adwords across the Internet to promote his new website at TomCruise.com.

ITEM: Tom Cruise is buying Google Adwords. His Scientology handlers must be working on his SEO optimization; type in "Tom Cruise" in Google Search - and his paid sponsored ads pop up at the top of the search results. It directs surfers to a new official TomCruise.com launching soon... Some of the google ads say "Get the real scoop from Tom Cruise. Stay Tuned For Official Site Launch" "The Countdown is On. TomCruise.com launches May 5th. Get the scoop!" and "The Official Site Launches Soon. You'll Never Guess What's Coming!"

Tom Cruise is clearly looking for an image makeover with this new website and the recent appearance with Oprah. The new website, which launched today, contains photos, biography, filmography as well as trailers from 27 Tom Cruise films. The site celebrates Tom Cruise's twenty-five years in the movie business.

The sad thing about this exciting new website is there isn't a blog which would have made the website much more interesting. Instead, there is a "Message From Tom" section which is similar to what other stars like Britney Spears have on their websites. The message was created in Flash. Tom Cruise's message basically says that he really enjoys making movies and he hopes to bring us yet more excellent movies. It would have been useful if bloggers could have linked people directly to this message but they can't because Tom Cruise's webmasters think Flash is more important than function.

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It's RSS Awareness Day

Bloggers and people in the Internet industry are aware of RSS but it's reach seems to stop there. To inform more people about the benefits of RSS the RSS Awareness Day campaign was launched by Daily Blog Tips. You can find the RSS Awareness Day website at Rssday.org. The website has a page with buttons and banners for bloggers who want to spread the word about the RSS holiday. This page also contains information that shows how few Internet users know about RSS.

Feedburner recently reported that they track around 60 million RSS subscribers. Even if we bump that number to 70 million RSS users (counting people that use RSS with other applications or platforms) this would still convert to a meager 5,4% of the Internet users around the world, as of today.

What is the takeaway message? Only a very small percentage of the Internet population is aware of the RSS format and its benefits, and that number is growing slowly over time.

By creating the RSS Awareness Day and celebrating it every year we should be able to get the general public exposed to this format, hopefully increasing the usage of RSS feeds and related applications among Internet users.

While knowledge of RSS may not be breaking into the mainstream there are apps and widgets using RSS behind the scenes. Many people may not be aware of RSS that regularly use and benefit from it. Blogs used to have a similar problem - people were reading them without realizing they were blogs.

Some other blog posts promoting RSS Awareness Day can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. There are also people tweeting about RSS Awareness Day.

Below is a helpful video that explains RSS for anyone who is new to the technology. You can also find information about RSS on the Rssday.org website. MamaBlogga also explains RSS technology here.



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U.S. Transportation Secretary Launches a Blog

The Associated Press reports that U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters launched the DOT's first blog on Tuesday. It is called Fast Lane. In the blog's launch post Secretary Peters admits the need for twenty-first century communication.

I want the Fast Lane to be a true on-line community, and I encourage you to submit your comments and thoughts. After all, if I'm going to insist on twenty-first century solutions for our transportation system, I better communicate in a twenty-first century way!

The AP says the blog was already receiving about as much traffic on as the main DOT website on the first day.

The blog has received about 11,000 site visits since 10 a.m. compared with 13,000 daily visits to the main DOT Web site, the agency said. Comments are reviewed to make sure they're free of personal attacks, slurs or inappropriate language. If a topic attracts hundreds of comments, an agency spokesman said a representative sample of them may be posted instead.

The agency also plans to start hosting Web chats with Peters and other senior DOT officials as well as building a YouTube.com video page some time this year.

In Peters' second post, she announced from Chicago that the city was awarded a $153 million federal grant to reduce traffic congestion and pollution. Guest blogger Mayor Richard Daley followed with a post of his own thanking the department.

Darrell West, a public policy professor at Brown University, said that government blogs represent an opportunity for officials "to shape and be shaped by public opinion."

"Blogs inherently are interactive and help agencies learn what is on people's minds," he wrote in an e-mail. "I see this as a plus for agency responsiveness."

There will be some interesting guest bloggers on Fast Lane giving their perspectives on U.S. travel. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley guest blogged on Tuesday. The DOT is also working on a YouTube site according the AP article. There is no Twitter or other social media account to go with the new blog. Maybe this will change in the future because the State Department's Dipnote blog does have a Twitter account.

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Services and Tools Emerge to Fight Twitter Spam

If Twitter is not yet in the mainstream maybe someone should tell that to the spammy folks who are desperately trying to get their messages distributed on Twitter. Some Twitter users are launching tools in an attempt to fight the rise in Twitter spam. There are a few spam methods that are bothering Twitter users. One is follower spam where a Twitter user attempts to follow an exceedingly large number of people. Twitter sends out email notices when a new person is following you but there is scant information in this new follower email so people have to visit the new followers Twitter to see who they are. Another type of spammer is one that sends out lots and lots of tweets (often using popular and topical keywords) and clutters up Twitter search services like Tweetscan.com. Yet another variety of Twitter spammer tries to send numerous @replies to many people in an effort to get attention.

A couple Twitters have been set-up to track spammers and Twitter spam. @OddFollow is an aptly named Twitter that watches for people following lots of people and for Twitter users following just women. @Stopthespam has been doing an excellent job tracking the Twitter spam problem. StoptheSpam also has a website: stoptwitterspam.com.

A new service called Twitter Twerp Scan (@TwerpScan) (via Download Squad) will scan the list of people you follow to look for users that have a following-to-followers ratio that is equal to or greater than 1.5 to 1. You can then unfollow these "people" if you think they are spammers.

A recently launched website called the The Twitter Blacklist has made a list of "known spammers and other morons on Twitter." The site uses a scale tweeted by Twitter user @evan.

The ratio idea doesn't always work and at least one noob was caught on The Twitter Blacklist. A new person may come on Twitter and follow a couple hundred Twitterers. It doesn't take long to get to that number if you are also adding Twitter news services (that generally don't follow back) and the Twitter accounts of some of your favorite blogs. It may take a while for a newbie's ratio of following-to-followers to get close to 1:1 so they may temporarily have a ratio that appears spammy. One Twitter newbie caught up in the was Chris Needham. Needham loved the attention and made a tshirt.



Note: The Twitterblacklist tweeted that they aren't using titles like "Worthless Attention Whores" to indentify possible spammers any longer.

Follower spam may end up being the easiest type of Twitter spam to solve. Simply adding more information about who has followed you in the emails Twitter sends would go a long way towards curbing the annoyance. Others have suggested a weekly or monthly list that contains information about new followers. Twitter could also allow people to sort their list of followers in new ways. The big future problem that will be much more difficult to eliminate are the spammers that try and fill up the Twitter search engines with spam tweets. As more and more people use search engines like Tweetscan and Summarize it becomes easier for spammers to spam Twitter - and they won't even have to follow a single person to do it.

Posted in Twitter

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Marketers Should Make Things Easy For Bloggers

Novelist and Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow has some excellent tips for marketers wanting to reach bloggers in an article in Information Week called "17 Tips For Getting Bloggers To Write About You." To most bloggers these tips are common sense but a surprising number of marketers don't follow them. Some of Doctorow's best suggestions have to do with linking.

Have a link. Seriously: if you want bloggers to link to you, you need to have something linkable. Your upcoming TV show, protest march, product or soccer tournament is literally unbloggable unless you put it on the Web somewhere first.

Have a permanent link. Don't just change the front page of your site every time a new speaker for your speaker-series in announced. A blogger who links to the front page of your site today in a post about the upcoming address by Philo T Farnsworth, wants that link to stay good for in the future, and not point to the upcoming address by Paris Hilton when you change it next week. Put up a separate, permanently linkable page for everything you want to get blogged.

Have a link for everything. Don't have a single page with ten items on it. Blogging a link to the top of your fifty-screen-long page with a blurb about something halfway down generates 200 e-mails from readers who can't find the referenced item.

Use real links. Don't have links with expiring session-keys that are no good if someone revisits the URL later. If a blogger can't send the URL to a friend or put it on the Web, then that blogger can't send people to go look at your stuff. Likewise, avoid the giant, 800-character gobbledegook URLs filled with junky alphabet-soup GUIDs -- if it can't be pasted into IRC without linebreaking, there's some group of compulsive communicators who'll be unable to get to it.

Doctors also tells marketers to avoid using Flash and PDF. He also tells marketers not to worry about things like losing bandwidth due to hotlinking. Doctorow writes, "Dear site operators: Here's a quarter, go buy a terabyte from Amazon S3 and stop complaining." Post nice high-res images and don't use annoying javascript code that tries to block bloggers from downloading the image.

More and more marketers are doing the things Cory Doctorow suggests in his article. They are providing permalinks and easy-to-grab images and video downloads. This will make the marketers who don't get it even more obvious. They will stand out like a soar thumb. (via Boing Boing)

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Is It Acceptable Behavior to Tweet and Run?

People use Twitter in many different ways and there is no standard way to use it. There isn't a rule book about how to use Twitter. Most of us even ignore the question Twitter asks us "What are you doing?" most of the time. Because it is an evolving community it can be complicated to determine whether a specific behavior is appropriate or not but you can find behavior and usage patterns emerging.

Earlier on the bloggersblog twitter (using PollDaddy's nifty poll feature) I posted a poll asking "Is it okay to Tweet and Run? How long should someone remain on Twitter after posting a tweet?" The responses have varied but most people don't have a problem with someone tweeting something and then disconnecting from Twitter. There are many people who connect to Twitter with mobile devices who post to Twitter in short bursts. Some of these users are almost always tweeting and running. However, if you have posted a question or tweeted a message that invites responses it might be appropriate to linger for a few minutes to see if anyone sends you a response tweet. There are Twitter users who prefer people to linger a little while after they post a tweet.

You can see the poll and comment on it here.

Posted in Twitter

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Tear-Water Tweets

The latest Twitter problem would make a perfect addition to the tear-water tea Owl makes in Arnold Lobel's short story "Tear-water Tea" - from the children's book Owl at Home.

"Tweets that no one ever sees because they never arrive," said Owl. Owl was crying. Many large tears dropped into the kettle.

This happened with much greater frequency in 2007. It happened multiple times that year as Twitter struggled with rapid growth and it was always very confusing and frustrating. Much of Twitter's growth this year has been during a period of very good uptime.

Paris Lemon calls the partial tweet outage Twitter Fail: Day 3 and points to the Twitter Status Twitter. There's also a @Twitter Twitter but Twitter doesn't seem to be updating this one. Mathew Ingram notes that the last entry on the Twitter blog is from five days ago. He also links to the Get Satisfaction entry about the problem where there are now 300 comments. Twitter also has all of our email addresses. Twitter has several options for letting people know about the progress they are making on fixing major problems. They should make better use of them.

It would have been nice if Twitter had worked through this bug over the weekend. Twitter will eventually be working again. As we have said in the past there isn't much you can do but wait. You can cry about it like Owl and make your own pot of tear-water tea or you can find something else constructive to do with the downtime.

Posted in Twitter

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Time-Relevant Widget Needed?

Author and designer Jeffrey Zeldman recently left an interesting comment in a post where he discusses removing the Ma.gnolia bookmarks feed form his blog. In this interesting comment Zeldman discusses the need for a time-relevant plug-in that could unite content from Flickr, Twitter, bookmarking tools, etc.

For about six months, I've been trying to figure out how to create a plug-in that would associate any stream (such as Flickr, Ma.gnolia, and Twitter for example) with a given post, so that a post from a particular day in April 2008 would have photos and Tweets and links from that same day, or a user-determined close time frame.

The idea is to collect time-related objects, as one can easily do when hand-rolling a blog post in HTML, but as one presently cannot do with automated blogging software and social networking applications.

Imagine a blog post from five years ago that talks about your band, and is associated with Flickr photos of you and your band as you looked five years ago-not because you manually inserted the photos, but because time-linkage between web applications is possible.

Imagine a blog post from five years from now that talks about your wedding and is associated with Flickr photos of your wedding-not because you manually inserted the photos, but because time-linkage between web applications is possible.

The social feed aggregators like FriendFeed or Social Thing should be able to do something like this. Personal blogs especially might be more interesting if the day's blog posts, tweets and Flickr photographs could be shown together. This would give a great view of a what a person was doing on a specific date. On the other hand if people use their blog, Twitter, Flickr and other tools for completely different reasons then a time-relevant plug-in or widget would not gel at all. A category or tag oriented plug-in might work better for some blogs.

It does seem like a unifying widget of somekind is needed - something that is more advanced than your typical widget that sits in the sidebar. On FriendFeed, Twitter and elsewhere there has also been discussion of widgets or plug-ins that could bring comments and other data back to people's blogs again. In this era of rapidly launching web 2.0 sites you usually don't have to wait too long before someone develops the widget you have been waiting for.

Update 4-21-08: There is a Yahoo Pipes entry called RSS Filter By Date that pulls in time-relevant RSS entries. You can see it in action here on author Sonja Foust's blog.

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Profane Blogging Gets Washington Post Writer Fired

Washington Post journalist Michael Tunison was fired for blogging at Kissing Suzy Kolber, a humorous sports blog. Apparently, the Post was unhappy with the language Tunison used in the blog. Tunison used the pseudonym Christmas Ape while blogging and was fired not too long after revealing his journo job in this post where he says he works for a "dying medium."

Editor & Publisher posted this email from Tunison in a recent article.

"There was no conflict of interest between my writing for Kissing Suzy Kolber and my work for The Washington Post. The blog is not a journalistic endeavor and it is not something I was paid for until I revealed my identity. It is a humor blog about the NFL, whereas my job for the paper was to cover local news in a suburban county outside Washington, D.C. It is beat that has nothing to do with a professional football league.

"I also find it troubling that I was summarily fired for engaging in something that is core to the spirit of The Washington Post: full disclosure. Even if editors had a problem with the language used in the blog, they should have been able to respect that my goal was not to defame The Post, but to be forthcoming with my readers."

It certainly doesn't sound like the blog clashed with his Washington Post writing.

There's an update on the KSK blog called Ape Got Dooced. Dooced referring to when blogger Heather Armstrong was fired from her job in 2002 for writings in her blog Dooce.com.

More coverage of this story at DCAbloob, Foul Balls, Fanhouse and Deadspin.

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PollDaddy Makes It Easy to Create Twitter Polls

PollDaddy has launched a clever new service called PollDaddy Twitter Polls (via Webare) that lets you set-up an online poll and send out a tweet that informs your followers about the new poll. Here is an example of a poll we made about what Andrew Baron should do with the money he makes from auctioning off his Twitter on eBay. You can see the poll and participate in it here.

So far it looks like most people think Andrew Baron should donate the money to charity like Karoli at Odd Time Signatures suggested. Giving the money to his followers is in second and keeping it all for himself is third.

The polls are easy to use. The poll includes a descripton of the Twitterer who posted the poll. There is also a comment form where people can comment or maybe add a write-in suggestion. There are quite a few people testing PollDaddy's new Twitter tool out on Twitter today. As with any service if it is overused it could become annoying.

Posted in Twitter

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Twitter Account Auctioned Off on eBay

Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron is auctioning off his Twitter account @andrewbaron on eBay. He has about 1,400 followers. Initially Baron's follower count dipped after he announced the sale last night but now his follower account has climbed to about 1450 because of all the discussion about the auction on Twitter. As Andrew Baron explains in the eBay listing the new owner of the Twitter can change the name to a new one - providing the new name doesn't already exist on Twitter.

The winner of this auction gets my account with all of my followers. The account is in my name now, but the winner of the auction can pick any other name that's available on Twitter for the transfer. For example, you could have http://www.twitter.com/x where x=any name thats not already taken. You can change it yourself at anytime too, one of the cool features about Twitter settings.

So basically it's like getting a new account with your own name, but having a pre-installed audience.

The first sign of value to most people would be the number of followers I have (the audience size). At the beg. of this auction, there are 1397 followers and I am actually quite proud of the actual quality of these followers, moreso than the number. Feel free to explore everyone to see who's there.

Also, as with any dynamic group, there is obviously risk. My followers could jump ship at anytime. There is no guarantee on this part. People will come and go, thats just the way it is. Whether you represent a company, a group or just yourself, this group will not want to be sold to, Im sure. The successful winner will share a reciprocal value with the followers.

Finally, I'd just like to give props to all of you out there who are following me on Twitter. No offense what so ever - we can easily find each other again.

The auction, which has reached $510 after 26 bids, has already exceeded price expectations. The big questions are how quickly will the Twitter bleed followers once the sale is complete and how much will this damage Andrew Baron's credibility on Twitter? He has called it an experiment and he does have the @rocketboom Twitter to move to after he sells the @andrewbaron Twitter account. Twitter spam has become a bigger issue as of late and a lot of people don't like the idea of a new user taking over the account and spamming them even though they can easily unfollow. Another issue is privacy - people might have sent @andrewbaron direct messages that they don't want someone else to read.

Some MySpace accounts with tens of thousands of dollars sell for $100 or more. You can see an example here. This particular Twitter account auction is surpassing the value of the MySpace accounts that have tens of thousands of followers. There is a lot of discussion and some interesting comments about the Twitter auction on Chris Brogan's post. There are also posts on Stowe Boyd, TechCrunch, Jennifer Navarrete, Rice Blogger, Tame Bay, Steve Saylor, IZ Reloaded, PatPhelan.net, Marketing-SEO.com and Ewan's Musings. You can also follow the discussion here on Techmeme.

Posted in Twitter

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Hugh MacLeod Terminates Twitter Distraction

Writing books is a noble goal. Author, blogger and cartoonist Hugh MacLeod feels the need to delete his Twitter account so he can focus on writing them.

It's no big deal. I liked Twitter. But I found it too easy.

I think my time would be better spent drawing cartoons and writing books.

That's just how I feel.

If it's no big deal then why not just go on a Twitter hiatus instead of pulling the account? Twitter accounts can be reactivated but it hasn't been an easy process for some.

You could also turn off the Internet as Robert Scoble suggests in a post today.

Want to get something done? Turn off Twitter. Turn off Facebook. Turn off blog comments. Turn off FriendFeed. Turn off Flickr. Turn off YouTube. Turn off Dave Winer's blog and Huffington Post. Turn off TechMeme.

Turn off the distractions.

Hugh MacLeod is off Twitter (at least for now) but the Twitter distraction continues for the rest of us.

Posted in Twitter

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Use Stealth Bloggers Suggests Study Written For U.S. Special Operations Command

Wired's Danger Room has an interesting post that says a study written for U.S. Special Operations Command suggested "clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers." Here's an excerpt from the report.

Information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence... to pass the U.S. message. In this way, the U.S. can overleap the entrenched inequalities and make use of preexisting intellectual and social capital. Sometimes numbers can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.

An alternative strategy is to "make" a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect. Still, there are people in the military today who like to blog. In some cases, their talents might be redirected toward operating blogs as part of an information campaign. If a military blog offers valuable information that is not available from other sources, it could rise in rank fairly rapidly.

Blogging could be used by the military as an effective information or disinformation strategy. The process of "making" a blogger would be a very time intensive one. It can take a while to be vetted in the blogosphere and other bloggers might be suspicious of a new blogger that appeared to be being propelled by an unknown outside force. If Special Ops wanted to have "stealth bloggers" for use on some mission they would need to have them already in play long before they needed them.

Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

A List of Twitter Apps, Services and Tools

Twitter is rapidly becoming one of the most popular services to create applications and mashups for. New Twitter apps and tools seem to be launching daily. Graham Langdon at the Entrecard Blog recently blogged (via Adrants) that Twitter will be bigger than Facebook. Useful applications and tools created with Twitter's API could eventually be enough to propel Twitter past Facebook. Some of these Twitter tools may even become small businesses. Seesmic recently acquired the Twhirl Twitter client app - see Mashable's report.

We recently created a Twitter Tools List that contains links and descriptions of some of these Twitter apps, services and tools.

Here are few highlights from the list.

Commuter Feed, Commuter Feed is a free service that lets you post reports on traffic and transit delays in your local area using Twitter.

Ego Twitter'in, A ridiculous Twitter app from Snoop Dogg's web peeps that shizzolates your tweets.

iWish, iWish is a twitter wishes aggregator

News Services, A list of Twitter news services. Great for staying informed while you are using Twitter.

Qwitter, Qwitter is a social tool designed to help you quit smoking.

Remember The Milk, Add and interact with your rtm tasks by direct message. Also get reminders.

Timer, Timer is a Twitter bot that helps you set an alarm for things you need to remember

Tweet Scan, A fast Twitter search engine.

Tweetburner, Tweetburner tracks the clicks on links posted to Twitter - requires use of the Twurl url shortener.

TweetClouds.com, Make a tweet cloud from a public Twitter stream

Tweetgift, Tweetgift lets you send virtual gifts to your Twitter friends.

Tweetwhatyoueat.com, Lets you create a Twitter food diary.

TwitPic, TwitPic helps you share your photos on Twitter

Twitsig, twitsig.com allows you to display your current twitter status as an image.

Twittercal, Twittercal is a free service that connects your Twitter account to your Google Calendar.

Twitterholic, Twitterholic shows the twitterers with the most followers, friends and updates.

Twittervision, An addictive Twitter and Google Maps mashup showing the latest tweets and where the twitterer is located.

You can find many more on the list. You can also find links to more Twitter tool lists at the end of the Twitter links page.

Posted in Twitter

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New York Times: Blogging is Dangerous

The New York Times has a story about how deadly blogging can be.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

The New York Times deserves credit for stirring up the blogosphere but to pick on blogging as being dangerous to your health is unfair. Sitting for long periods of time isn't very good for the human body. That's what bloggers do. It's what writers and journalists did long before computers. It's also what millions of people around the world now do in the information age. The human body doesn't cope well with what people need to do to make a living in the information age - sit and type and move a mouse. This isn't a blogging problem - it is a widespread result of the information age. Even so there are many industries such as mining or foresty that put workers at far greater risk than blogging does.

Larry Dignan at ZDNet makes this point as well.

Let's put a little perspective on this blogging thing. You could be getting shot at in Iraq. You could be a single mom working three jobs to stay afloat (Happy Birthday mom). You could work in a coal mine. You could be in a life and death battle with Leukemia. You could be doing any one of thousands of high-stress jobs. Sure, the Web has a lot of stress but let's get real: If you're stressed out over 5,000 RSS feeds chances are good you'd be stressed by any profession you chose.

Careerbuilder has a list of the most dangerous jobs - blogging isn't on it.

What the Times article is really about is overworking - getting so caught up in your work that you ignore your health and damage your body. Hard workers in any industry tend to not sleep enough, not exercise enough and not eat right. This happens to lawyers, CEOs, accountants and bloggers. It's easy for a doctor or New York Times journalist to tell people they need to take it easy when they are trying to make a living - when they are trying to provide for their family. Still it is a message that resonates and it doesn't do you any good to work yourself so hard to you get seriously ill and/or die.

Om Malik - a blogger mentioned in the article who recently survived a heart attack - blogs about the Times story in this post titled " Relax, Chill and maybe Blog." It is worth reading for anyone that may be pushing it too hard.

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Craigslist Launches a Blog

Craigslist has launched a new blog at http://blog.craigslist.org. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch notes that Craiglist founder Craig Newmark used to put Craiglist news on his personal blog before the launch of this new blog.

There are already several posts up on the new blog all posted by Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster. There is a funny entry that says a Monster.com truck has been playing loud music outside their offices - probably not funny if you are trying to get work done at Craiglist. Another post discusses the company's green efficiency. They also have a post that says Craiglist is hiring.

The blog has a very plain design much like the main Craiglist website. Download Squad says the blog "feels very 1999." There does not appear to be an RSS feed available for this new Craiglist blog. Fortunately, ReadWriteWeb created one - you can find it here.

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SciFi.com To Launch Gaming Blog

SFCrowsnest.com reports that that SciFi.com, the home of the Sci Fi Channel, plans to continue to expand its network to include a new gaming blog and website.

"Our growing network of sites - starting with the incredibly successful launch of DVICE.COM and continuing next with gaming -- is designed to tap into our audience's insatiable appetite for technology, games and entertainment," Craig Engler, Senior Vice President of SCIFI.COM told SFcrowsnest.com. "Our young, online demographic wants to be entertained as well as informed, and our new blog-style sites will do just that. On the entertainment side we'll also have online original series, webisodes tied to our hit shows, a new casual game center, all kinds of streaming videos and much more that hits our key demo and grows our core audience."

Powered by SCI FI and launching mid-April, their game site is the newest extension of the SCI FI brand and its growing portfolio of digital assets. The blog-style site will be a hub for reports on all things relevant to the gamer lifestyle. With multiple daily posts from an in-the-know roster of contributors, game players and reviewers, the site covers the best and newest games, reports and industry news plus spotlights on game players and their strategies.

Sci Fi is best known for its science fiction tv and films such as Battlestar Galactica. However, last year Sci Fi launched a gadget blog called DVice that is both well-written and popular. says Sci Fi is also planning a social gaming experience for Battlestar Galactica fans.

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2008 April Fool's Day Jokes

It's April 1st again and that means there will be stupid pranks, fake news and lots of links that turn out to be RickRolls. Many people are annoyed because April 1st has become overdone on the Internet. There is a lot of truth to this. It can be difficult to determine what is real and what is not. There are also a lot of jokes that suck - but it is only one day and it will be over soon. Below are a few Internet April Fool's Day highlights - both good and bad. If you want a longer list check out Wikipedia's exhausting list of April 1st jokes.

The BBC's Flying Penguin's - this one is the best April Fools' joke out there this year. You can watch the video here or below. The video is also aviable here. This one has been well-received on Twitter.

CNET has TechCrunch acquiring TigerBeat and renaming it CrunchKids.

Google and Sir Richard Branson launched Project Virgle and plan to colonize Mars. See also the Google Blog announcement.

TechCrunch is suing Facebook for $25 million. Meanwhile, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will be hosting SNL.

PizzaHut has become PastaHut.

Search the future with Google Australia's gDay technology.

Too busy to search? Let someone Google for you.

Catch up on your old email with Gmail Custom Time. You can only send mail back in time as far as 2004. "Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality."

ProBlogger has announced the launch of PayPerTweet. Now you can finally make money from all that time you spend on Twitter.

Scribd will scan all your documents and publish them on the Internet for free. (via Boing Boing)

Bungie's next project is a LEGO version of Halo.

PirateBay is relocating to the desert of Sinai.

YouTube rickrolled people clicking on featured YouTube videos. Valleywag says this has killed rickrolling once and for all.

The Nestle Butterfinger candy bar is now known as The Finger.

Coming soon from Xbox - Xbox Live the board game.

LiveJournal has added Rick Astley to its advisory board. (via Search Engine Watch)

ThinkGeek's ZapCam is a taser that transmits footage of your tasering directly to YouTube.

Orkut is now Yogurt.

Many more Google created or inspired April Fool's jokes listed here.

LifeHacker has a list of harmless geek pranks for those who want to prank their friends without causing permanent damage.

Search Engine Roundtable is now Search Engine Squaretable.

Search Engine Land has a list of search-related fools.

Conde Nast takes over Gawker's Jezebel blog.

Urlrurl - pretends to be a new URL shortner and redirection service but it really just rickrolls all the links. (via Webware)

Make a new airplane with Google Docs.

Westjet Airlines lets people sleep in the overhead compartments.

CNET has a roundup of April 1st jokes.

Our Previous April Fool's Day coverage: 2007 | 2006




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