AOL doesn’t have the time,money, or patience to deal with the Long Tail. Atleast according to Valleywag. For whatever value that holds in the real world. That’s like Marketwatch quoting Jack of All Blogs. Oh that’s right they did that.

My guess is AOL would rather funnel its money into highly profitable ventures like Engadget, TV Squad, and Joystiq.
Most likely this signals the end of AOL’s short lived local blogging experiment as well.

Originally posted on January 20, 2007 @ 4:51 am

An Egyptian blogger has gone to trial on the charges of insulting Islam in his blog.

Abdel Kareem Nabil often denounced Islamic authorities and criticized Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on his Arabic-language blog. He has been in detention since November and faces up to nine years in prison if convicted.

This is not the first time a blogger has been arrested for having a liberal and pro-democracy point of view. While others were simply released without formal charges, this is the first time an arrested blogger has been put on trial. Egypt has been heavily criticized in the past by human rights groups for such arrests.

In Thursday’s court session, Abdel Kareem Nabil was charged with the inciting sedition, insulting Islam, harming national unity and insulting the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak.

The Assyrian International News Agency has more.

Originally posted on January 20, 2007 @ 3:22 pm

The infamous Perez Hilton of Hip Hop Mix Tapes has been arrested under the RICO act. You might be wondering what this has to do with New media. Well mix tapes are a form of ‘new media’ one of the earliest. They are hip hop versions of fast slinging hip hop that hasn’t hit the shelves yet. Mostly they have the support of the artists who are on them.

They are often sold at street corners by people asking if you like hip hop. Sometimes you can find them in stores. The RIAA doesn’t like them. As they cut down on record sales. So they say. The RIAA doesn’t believe you have the right to remix even your own content and distribute for sale. Whether its a no label operation or not. In fact the RIAA want 100% control over all music sales. Legal or underground. Prosecution like this is a sure sign they want to be known as the Grand Daddy of All Music Distribution.

In the world of hip-hop few music executives have more influence than DJ Drama. His “Gangsta Grillz” compilations have helped define this decade’s Southern rap explosion. He has been instrumental in the careers of rappers like Young Jeezy and Lil Wayne. He appears on the cover of the March issue of the hip-hop magazine XXL, alongside his friend and business partner T.I., the top-selling rapper of 2006. And later this year DJ Drama is scheduled to make his Atlantic Records debut with “Gangsta Grillz: The Album.”

Source: NY Times

Originally posted on January 19, 2007 @ 3:06 am

The number of people reading Internet blogs on the top 10 U.S. newspaper sites more than tripled in December from a year ago and accounted for a larger percentage of overall traffic to those sites, according to data released on Wednesday.

Steve Rubel, of Edelman points out how this will change the PR Game:

Now, as journalism moves to a two-way modality it’s going to force a lot of PR professionals to change their game plan. Stories won’t be written and “put to bed.” They will be co-written and re-written by journalists and readers together. This will either take place within a journalist’s blog or over the ether as a conversation that travels across many of them.

Personally I think more and more blurring will take place until Newspapers are a large part of the blogosphere and we see more interaction with the editors. I still haven’t interacted with a newspaper blogger. They seem so distant. Although we did get a nice link back from CBS News recently. So maybe the winds are changing.

Source: Yahoo

Originally posted on January 18, 2007 @ 5:01 am

I missed this news while doing some SysAd work over the last day or so. Normally I would be all over it. But since I don’t have any hosted MT versions lying around, or clients that still use MovableType I’m a bit behind the times. Sorry about that.

The biggest thing I can see in this is the switch to FastCGI. This would make a huge performance improvement. Not sure why they hadn’t already strongly recommended users do this previously. It seems to really work IMO.

Last night we released version 3.34 of the Movable Type Publishing Platform. Movable Type 3.34:

* Fixes important potential XSS vulnerabilities
* Is a free and recommended update for all Movable Type users
* Enables simple use of FastCGI which yields a 15x performance increase

We encourage all of our users and customers to upgrade to this latest release of Movable Type because it addresses a hand full of important XSS security vulnerabilities. In addition to security enhancements, this release introduces a feature enhancement that has increased application performance for a number of users by over an order of magnitude.

Source: Six Apart

Originally posted on January 19, 2007 @ 2:03 am