John Batelle blogs about dealspl.us, a US site which combines shopping and digg-like functionality to bring bargains to users. Hot deals get to the front page by users votes.
It’s self-billed as a combination of Digg and BensBargains.net, for which one of the DP co-founders also serves as President. From the press release: “dealspl.us… is the first and only [community shopping] site [that] combines social bookmarking, user level, and non-editorial control over the posted content.
Indian bloggers are up in arms, says the BBC, following an apparent ban by the Government of various blogging platforms. Although the Government is not saying much, it is believed it is a response to the Mumbai bombing and an effort to curb the activities of terrorists. However, this is not how it is being seen:
Indian bloggers say that the decision is an attack on freedom of speech.
A number of them have started filing petitions under the country’s new landmark freedom of information law which gives citizens the right to access information held by the government.
Bloggers say the ban has meant that people do not even have access to blogs like the one set up to help the relatives of the victims of the recent train bombings in Mumbai (Bombay), www.mumbaihelp.blogspot.com.
According to the Associated Press for many youngsters email is now old-hat. They prefer the immediacy of instant messaging, texting and social networks like My Space.
“It used to be just fun,” says Danah Boyd, a doctoral candidate who studies social media at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now it’s about parents and authority.”
It means that many people often don’t respond to e-mails unless they have to.
Boyd’s own Web page carries this note: “please note that i’m months behind on e-mail and i may not respond in a timely manner.” She, too, is more easily reached with the “ping” of an instant message.
Gawker Media, Nick Denton’s blog empire, is terminating its traffic deal with Yahoo! Nick says:
The bald truth is that the deal, which we announced in November, garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic. A few new readers probably discovered Gawker, or one of the other four sites that we syndicated to Yahoo. I doubt many of them stayed. Yahoo has a mass audience; Gawker appeals to a peculiarly coastal, geeky and freaky demographic. And these people are more likely to come to our sites through word of mouth, or blog links, or search engine results, or Digg, not because of a traditional content syndication deal.
Jeff Jarvis has his own take on events. He says Yahoo! in trying to be a portal is more interested in locking people into its site than helping them find what they want elsewhere.
Contrast this with Google, which does still try to get you in and out quickly. It makes a fortune by putting targeted ads on many of the sites it sends you to. Thus its potential is unlimited, for the more content there is, the more Google has to organize, the more we need Google to find what we want, the more its ads can appear everywhere, and the more it earns. Yet Google still satisfies both traditional roles of the old networks in the content industry: It takes in money by aggregating audiences for advertisers, while it also pays out money to support content creators. Google is network 2.0.
The AdSense blog has some tips on optimisation.
Google has doubled its profits for the second quarter, taking analysts by surprise.
Says USA Today:
The search giant reported $2.5 billion in revenue, up 77% from the year-ago quarter. Net income was $721 million, or $2.33 per share, up from $342 million, or $1.19 per share, a year ago.
Analysts had expected Google to report per-share earnings of $2.22.
Interesting use of a map mash up showing news and blog coverage of the crisis in the Middle East. Gives an unusual perspective.
According to Micro Persuasion Google Video has added “in-stream permalinks. The move, which goes one better than YouTube, means that now you can link to a specific part of a video. All you need to do is append the time in this format (#1m35s) to the video URL.
Google Labs has a new product – Google Accessible Search. The site works by analysing the meta data and html on sites to bring back those most likely to be more readily used by the visually impaired – those which work well with images switched off, for instance. It is linked to Google Co-op so site owners can self-identify.