Tag: Social software

If you’ve never heard of The Red Herring it might be a bit late for you to catch up. For most of the nineties and throughout the tech boom, the Herring was the absolute dead centre of the entrepreneurial universe, typifying a distinctively Californian attitude to business – one-third boundless optimism, one-third intellect and one-third nitrous oxide, I think. The magazine survives but has suffered along with the whole sector and may never regain its preeminence. I mention the Herring because its founder and publisher (and now publisher of Always On) is among us. He read my sarcastic welcome for Always On and has commented the entry.

Jim McClellan surveys early attempts to commercialise weblogs in The Guardian. Good article with lots of useful links at the end. This is one of those pieces that produces a kind of buzz of anxiety in anyone with a mind to have a go for themselves – it seems to say “hey, come on guys, the latest revolution’s half over. Get your skates on!”. This is where you have to get a grip and remind yourself that we’re still right at the beginning of whatever the blogosphere is going to become. Like one of those TV programmes about the history of the universe, if the lifecycle of the emerging weblog business is represented as 24 hours, then we probably still haven’t heard the first tick of the big clock. Also worth noting that Jim was also present for the last big arrival – the web itself – a decade ago, at iD Magazine and The Face.

Simon Waldman, a pioneer interpreter of the Internet to UK Plc (and the man responsible for The Guardian‘s absolute pre-eminence in cyberspace – perhaps also for its voodoo doll status among the warbloggers), has upgraded and redesigned his weblog. It’s got loads of good stuff in it.

Found this in my referrer logs. Weird.

Blogging live via T-Mobile wi-fi from Star bucks in Wardour Street (about which I am, of course, very excited). Hotfoot from lunch with a headhunter who thinks all this blogging lark is so much self-obsession. What can she possibly mean?

Or is it just completely trivial? My referrer log suggests I made it onto the Top-100 Most Linked-To Pages in the Last Three Hours page at Weblogs.com. I think this means that quite a lot of weblogs listed at Weblogs.com have linked to Bowblog. Sounds like a good thing to me.

Milverton Wallace, the NetMedia man, sent me this interview with the man who apparently coined the phrase ‘thin media‘.

I’m pretty sure that if I ever actually meet Ben Hammersley he’ll be a kind of wild-haired, pop-eyed genius type with a pencil behind each ear and a short attention span. Whatever he looks like (and the photo on his web site is inconclusive – although the pipe should be a clue), he’s obviously a true hacker and he’s come up with another clever application of Movable Type that leverages the blogging groupmind to produce actual, living, breathing stuff. This time, he and some of his friends have turned the concept Lazyweb into a clever web site. Now everbody can tap into the Lazyweb (a privilege historically reserved for high traffic types). Ben explains how it works better than I could so check it out. He wrote an article about it in today’s Guardian.

Listen, I don’t know much about Cory Doctorow and I haven’t read his book (although I have downloaded it for nothing) but I know for certain that Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is going to be a bestseller. There’s something going on with this book, a murmur in the blogosphere. It could easily be the first blockbuster made entirely by bloggers.