Bloggers and User Generated Content Creators should be proud. We are the Time Person of The Year. You can be sure that I’m going to be putting that on my resume.

To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn’t make enough PlayStation3s.

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

It’s been a great year. I reached peak by being named Person of The Year. Will it get any better than now?

Source: Time Magazine

Originally posted on December 16, 2006 @ 8:28 pm

Technology firms are beginning to use prediction markets as a method to save money by harnessing the collective wisdom of their employees.

At a micro-conference that Yahoo convened at its headquarters here on Wednesday evening, representatives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard described their experiments with prediction markets.

The companies are using these markets to answer questions like: ‘When will this software ship? And what will memory prices be like in a few months?’

Cnet has more information on each company’s individual efforts.

Originally posted on December 15, 2006 @ 2:03 pm

While I certainly think you should be transparent and open with what kind of advertising models you use on your blog, and most definitely if you’re paid to post about something, I still feel that this is a bit over the top. Still, why not I guess, if you really want to be transparent on everything then the Disclosure Policy Plugin by Andy Beard might be something for you.

It’s probably a good plugin technically, but I won’t install it since I don’t see the need. If I want to disclose, I can do that easily enough anyway. Do check it out though, that never hurts.

Hat tip: Weblog Tools Collection

Originally posted on December 14, 2006 @ 2:18 pm

John Mccain has introduced legislation that would make blogs come under the same legislation as Internet Service Providers. Here’s a powerful summary of how that would affect blogs and other new media, socially-driven sites:

• Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.”
• ISPs are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain’s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face “even stiffer penalties” than ISPs.
• Social networking sites will be forced to take “effective measures” — such as deleting user profiles — to remove any website that is “associated” with a sex offender. Sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and blogs like DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries.

[Read more…]

Originally posted on December 15, 2006 @ 7:27 am