I'm a big fans of blogs and blogging. But Slashdot pioneered open source journalism - in all senses of the term - long before the blogs gained momentum. Tech journalists have been getting story leads from Slashdot for years. Now political reporters are getting story leads from blogs, and suddenly it's a revolution!
The model for open source journalism exists, right here. The blogs are simply broadening the installed base of participants.
LokiTorrent listed itself for sale on the domain auction site Sedo back in January, so there's no shock that the site has had a "transition." They were down for eight hours yesterday, which was a sign that something was afoot. Curiously, the Sedo listing is still online. Is it still for sale? If it sells, who gets the money - the MPAA? Hmmmmm....
What Buffington is doing is hardly new. Bloggers have been chasing high-paying keywords from the day AdSense was announced. The trend accelerated last year when the Wall Street Journal did a front-page feature about how much lawyers were paying for asbestos-related keywords. Tons of webmaster-related web sites offer tips on similar AdSense strategies, and there's even companies offering to sell databases of high-paying keywords for $199. This guy is actually way late in adopting a widely-used strategy. But by discussing his motivations so directly, he got linked on Boing-Boing and Slashdot. He's an accidental marketing genius. Go figure.
Back in September Microsoft blogging evangelist Robert Scoble warned that RSS is broken, saying the sky was falling and RSS bandwidth usage was forcing Microsoft to skinny down its feeds. Turns out it wasn't quite true. Microsoft's IT folks thought 400KB feeds were excessive, and RSS feeds are no big deal compared to 106 million downloads of the 75MB SP2 update.
But the ensuing debate produced some useful discussion among RSS enthusiasts about ways to make clients smarter and give more server-side control. See the writeup at Netcraft (Slashdot is noted as an early adopter).
Don't laugh. There are firms whose entire strategy appears to be an intellectual property land grab by being the first to submit a patent application for a widely-used business concept. It's a big issue in web hosting, where a patent squatter has been awarded a patent for the subdomain and applied for a bunch more. Even SCO had an actual business, once upon a time. For some companies, patents are the business.
It's not a head-to-head "war," but a battle for different niches. With PSP, Sony doesn't want to steal all the Gameboy users so much as expand the user base of portables. Most Gameboy users will probably gravitate to the DS, while Sony hopes current Playstation gamers who don't currently use a portable will buy the PSP.
Media controversies about game violence are said to be bad for the industry, but they often seem to be good for game sales. Manhunt sales surged following highly critical media attention when it was believed the game contributed to a nasty teen-on-teen murder in the UK. It turns out the media accounts were mostly wrong off-base (the cops said it was related to drugs and theft), but by then the game had been mentioned in news stories around the world.
No game maker wants to see their work implicated in a violent tragedy. But game publishers know what presses the media's buttons, and I think some of them count on that to generate buzz about a game. GTA San Andreas is a good example, as the NY Times is already writing about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a big fans of blogs and blogging. But Slashdot pioneered open source journalism - in all senses of the term - long before the blogs gained momentum. Tech journalists have been getting story leads from Slashdot for years. Now political reporters are getting story leads from blogs, and suddenly it's a revolution! The model for open source journalism exists, right here. The blogs are simply broadening the installed base of participants.
LokiTorrent listed itself for sale on the domain auction site Sedo back in January, so there's no shock that the site has had a "transition." They were down for eight hours yesterday, which was a sign that something was afoot. Curiously, the Sedo listing is still online. Is it still for sale? If it sells, who gets the money - the MPAA? Hmmmmm ....
What Buffington is doing is hardly new. Bloggers have been chasing high-paying keywords from the day AdSense was announced. The trend accelerated last year when the Wall Street Journal did a front-page feature about how much lawyers were paying for asbestos-related keywords. Tons of webmaster-related web sites offer tips on similar AdSense strategies, and there's even companies offering to sell databases of high-paying keywords for $199. This guy is actually way late in adopting a widely-used strategy. But by discussing his motivations so directly, he got linked on Boing-Boing and Slashdot. He's an accidental marketing genius. Go figure.
Back in September Microsoft blogging evangelist Robert Scoble warned that RSS is broken, saying the sky was falling and RSS bandwidth usage was forcing Microsoft to skinny down its feeds. Turns out it wasn't quite true. Microsoft's IT folks thought 400KB feeds were excessive, and RSS feeds are no big deal compared to 106 million downloads of the 75MB SP2 update. But the ensuing debate produced some useful discussion among RSS enthusiasts about ways to make clients smarter and give more server-side control. See the writeup at Netcraft (Slashdot is noted as an early adopter).
Don't laugh. There are firms whose entire strategy appears to be an intellectual property land grab by being the first to submit a patent application for a widely-used business concept. It's a big issue in web hosting, where a patent squatter has been awarded a patent for the subdomain and applied for a bunch more. Even SCO had an actual business, once upon a time. For some companies, patents are the business.
It's not a head-to-head "war," but a battle for different niches. With PSP, Sony doesn't want to steal all the Gameboy users so much as expand the user base of portables. Most Gameboy users will probably gravitate to the DS, while Sony hopes current Playstation gamers who don't currently use a portable will buy the PSP.
Media controversies about game violence are said to be bad for the industry, but they often seem to be good for game sales. Manhunt sales surged following highly critical media attention when it was believed the game contributed to a nasty teen-on-teen murder in the UK. It turns out the media accounts were mostly wrong off-base (the cops said it was related to drugs and theft), but by then the game had been mentioned in news stories around the world. No game maker wants to see their work implicated in a violent tragedy. But game publishers know what presses the media's buttons, and I think some of them count on that to generate buzz about a game. GTA San Andreas is a good example, as the NY Times is already writing about it.