Will New Media Have its Lord Blacks?

Canadian Conrad Black, once a media mogul, will be on trial in Chicago in a few weeks. Lord Black and others previously associated with Hollinger International are charged with fraud, racketeering and money laundering. Black could face life in prison. Now, new media doesn’t have too many mega powerful moguls, although there are a few rising stars. But look forwards twenty or thirty years. Who knows what’ll happen, how new media moguls will behave.

Are You Sick of the Presidential Candidate Coverage Yet?

David Bauder of the Associated Press writes

The 2008 campaign is already playing out so intensely that it dominates airtime at a point where only political junkies usually pay attention. Remember: it’s 20 months before voters will make the ultimate decision.

True. They’re everywhere on old and new media, especially on blogs. I mean, how else could political bloggers be earning $20,000 -$30,000/m in ad revenue? This could be one of the most important elections in US, nay, world history. Regardless of who you are rooting for, go blog the vote.

Another Mag Bites the Dust

As a film connossieur, I’ve read many a copy of Premiere magazine. But the Hachette Filipacchi media empire is shutting down the print edition of the magazine. April is the last issue, which is probably on newstands now. The website edition will continue to be published, however.

This makes a great deal of sense, since a web version can include new media content such as audio and video clips, which would enhance film reviews and interviews immensely. I just hope that this type of content does replace text altogether. Of course, if you miss the feel of a print mag, you can always produce a PDF of the site and print it out.

That said, this is obviously a way for all those niche print mags that are barely surviving to actually find their niche audience and live another day.

Originally posted on March 6, 2007 @ 3:48 pm

Recently, Kevin Rose felt compelled to speak out and explain Digg’s stance behind blocked sites and the so-called “bury brigade” which has been the subject of much attention lately in the blogosphere. The blogosphere regularly and often unreasonably attacks Digg with inaccurate evidence and unfounded claims because of their failure to look at any “scandalous” situation from another perspective. So it’s time to cut through the spin and explain why Digg won’t make buries transparent.

I was the first advocate for the transparency of buries back when Digg first implemented the bury button, because of my philosophy that if you are to disclose who is digging stories, then you must disclose who is burying stories. My reasoning being that one bury report was clearly carrying more weight in the promotion algorithm than one digg was. I realized that buries by users not only carried the convenience of anonymity but furthermore the veil of secrecy, which made the feature a haven for irresponsible and abusive actions by community members. Because of the secrecy behind buries, the community lacked the ability to monitor and expose bury abuse, like they can with digging abuse. However, it wasn’t long before I realized that making buries transparent will do more harm than good as Digg crosses the chasm into mainstream culture.

Transparency is a term that is to quickly tossed around by many, as the end all solution for everything in social networking, without actually looking at the ramifications it may have on each particular issue. I’ve long known the reason Digg does not make buries transparent is because it further exposes the logic behind their promotion algorithm. Further understanding, by the community, of their promotion algorithm will inevitably lead to greater manipulation of their system, and makes it even more difficult for them to prevent such malicious gaming attempts that they find themselves battling on a daily basis.

Kevin’s words reinforce my contention:

For the same reason that we don’t expose all of our back-end methodologies for the Digg promotional algorithm, we also don’t expose the details of how the burying algorithm works. We spend a lot of time analyzing our data and understanding how people Digg and bury content. We have spent the last 2.5 yrs building systems that ensure a diverse group of users promote or bury stories.

Ultimately, the greater transparency Digg permits for their promotion algorithm, the easier it will be for Digg gamers to develop stronger methods of promoting content to Digg’s front page illegitimately without detection.

Originally posted on March 5, 2007 @ 1:40 am

Now that my overly sensationalized title has grabbed your headline, here’s the point:

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.

For the longer story (I don’t know why you would) click here.

Originally posted on March 2, 2007 @ 5:31 pm

The Guardian reports that Reuters i planning to launch their very own MySpace. The community will only be available to Reuters subscribers, all 70,000 or so of them. In other words, they’ll probably not have any real problems getting the word out there.

“You will see us, later in the year, launch a version of MySpace for the financial services community,” said the chief executive, Tom Glocer. “It won’t have the latest hot videos and the ‘why I am into Metallica and the Arctic Monkeys’ blogs. Instead we are going to give our financial services users the ability to post their research or if they are traders, their trading models.”

No launch date was given, but chances are you’re not welcome anyway.

Originally posted on March 2, 2007 @ 8:23 am