Are You An Intelligent Writer?
Call yourself a writer? Consider yourself intelligent? The Atlantic needs the world’s 300 smartest humans to write essays for their websites. This would be one serious gig. It’s not precisely blogging, but it may further the profession of blogging as a result. That is, other media outlets are very likely to follow suit, opening up even more opportunities.
Analyzing Digg
Three Georgia Tech students have done what appears to be a fairly indepth study into Digg, interviewing a number of top Diggers about their socializing and digging behavior. It is a fairly long paper, and I’ve admittedly only scanned it. Most of the Diggers they interviewed seem quite young, with maybe the exception of blogger extraordinaire Om Malik.
The paper seems to focus on the socializing amongst top Diggers, not so much on things like the Digg effect. There is a section on “Deviant Behavior”, referring to the small group of increasingly nasty commenters. It also mentions that the Diggers interviewed cover a spectrum of religions and locations around the world (and ages, too, though the majority of the top Diggers mentioned appear to be under 30.
If you read between the lines of the report, I at least get the impression that while there may not be an actual “Digg mafia” burying posts, it almost seems that there really are a few subgroups who are intentionally promoting certain causes. (I’m not saying these are bad causes, just pointing out a concerted effort.)
Sidenote: While 901am’s Muhammad Saleem is not mentioned in the paper, he is in the bibliography.
WebEx Now Part of Cisco
WebEx, the web conferencing software that you’ve probably used at some point, to view a software or other demo online, is now part of Cisco. So Cisco is going beyond networking hardware and software and getting into the telepresence market [via PaidContent]. The business could generate a billion in revenues. WebEx already had US$380M in sales, so Om Malik thinks that the $3.2B Cisco spent is a smart move, and possibly a competitive gambit against Microsoft.
Originally posted on March 15, 2007 @ 9:57 pm
David, I am actually in the paper, and if you look hard enough, it is easy to tell which one I am, the names were just anonymized. There are enough inaccuracies as far as I’m quoted that I didn’t want to point myself out.