I hate to do this, but this Friday I am closing Threadwatch. I don't think the site died at any specific point, it has been more of a process, which I will outline below:
Has the power of user driven sites just turned the new web into a witch hunt led by the few?
Andrew Keen Founder of AudioCafe seems to think so
“Instead of a dictatorship of experts, we’ll have a dictatorship of idiots,” says Keen, who finds classic signs of totalitarianism in Silicon Valley. “Anyone who disagrees is wrong. These people manifest some of the symptoms of 19th century Russian idealists and utopians, who think that their vision of the world is going to change everything for the better.”
Mike Grehan recently joined Bruce Clay as VP of international business development.
Man Described as Top Spammer Arrested
Quote:
Robert Alan Soloway is accused of using networks of compromised "zombie" computers to send out millions upon millions of spam e-mails.
...
He has been living in a ritzy apartment and drives an expensive Mercedes convertible, said prosecutor Kathryn Warma. Prosecutors are seeking to have him forfeit $773,000 they say he made from his business, Newport Internet Marketing Corp.
In a long expected move StumbleUpon have announced that it has joined eBay:
As a blast from the past, there will be an SEO gathering tonight at the Cittie of Yorke. Not an old-school PubCon™, but the next LondonSEO gathering.
A new digg-api based tool (Digg Entourage Tool) takes a look at the consistency among votes from digg users. Take a look at a user like p9s50w5k4gud2c6 or top user DigitalGopher to get an idea of how the big users on digg are essentially guaranteed 20+ diggs on every story.
Neil Patel at Pronet Advertising published an expose on how Digg is using unseen and unamed moderators to control which stories get promoted to it's homepage.
We've all had this love hate relationship with Jason Calacanis for quite some time. However there's a time to stop giving him attention as Danny points out in From My Inbox: More Defense Of SEO
Since the Getting Brainwashed By Google commentary got rather bogged down let's try something different. How would you undo the Google brainwashing and overall FUD campaign. How would you educate the web publishing community and maybe even the more sophisticated users that what's in Google's best interests isn't necessarily in their best interest, and just maybe they should look the Google trojan horse in the mouth.
So for those of you who aren't frequent visitors to Digg, there's a story that's been circulating all week on Digg and other hacker websites where HD-DVD decryption keys were posted.
Techcrunch takes a look at how nofollow on all outbound Wikipedia links is being selectively applied, noting that the for profit Wikia sites are given direct links.
Barry noted that WMW Vegas and SES Chicago overlap in December.
SES Chicago starts on December 3rd and runs through the 6th. PubCon starts on December 4th and runs through the 7th.
Which will you be attending?
YouTube wants to know: 'What issue matters most to you?
I am officially resigning as a Threadwatch editor. I have a hard time relating or writing for this audience. I write things as I learn them and to most Threadwatch readers they are more like a "duh".
The Onion added video news, which is fun, but most of this interactive stuff is garbage. MarketWatch added a stock predictor which allows you to vote if a stock will go up or down that day - wow.
In a market where people will do anything for 15 seconds of fame some people take it a bit too far.
- By: Gilad - 12th Mar 2007
via techcrunch:
Consumating ( the worst men to women ratio community online ...)
will release all of its code:
"The problem with the global village is all the global village idiots." Paul Ginsparg
Mob rule overruns Reddit
Crap, I liked reddit, too.
Yesterday a guy was sentenced to prison for 14 years for using MySpace.com to set up a sexual encounter with an 11-year-old Connecticut girl. Today Connecticut lawmakers introduced a new bill that would require MySpace.com and other social-networking sites to verify users' ages and obtain parental consent before minors can post profiles.
