Media

MarketWeek: Social networks at crossroads: From mainstream to 'lame'stream?

A few years ago, social networking Web sites were just some newfangled technology that college students loved. But over time, they have metamorphosed into an unavoidable Internet phenomenon that is changing the way people of all ages keep in touch with friends, find long-lost acquaintances, explore new hobbies and even look for employment. And now Facebook is hoping to take its popularity and name recognition to the next level. But as social networks become more popular, especially among adults and potential employers, they may also lose some of their appeal.

Bill O'Reilly and Geraldo Rivera huge angry fight

Posted as an example of a "shouting contest", so common in television, which imparts no meaningful information but is entertaining and gets good ratings.

Video, 4 min 48 sec

Sex On The Brain (of the science reporters)

This post was a response to a decent (though not too exciting) study and the horrible media reporting on it. As the blogosphere focused on the press releases, I decided to look at the paper itself and see what it really says. It was first posted on August 09, 2005. Under the fold (reposted on July 12, 2006)... I saw this on Pandagon first - a response to an article on NeuroImage about gender-specific voice recognition. Actually, it was not a response to the article itself (behind the subscription wall), but to the MSM reporting about the article. Soon, other bloggers chimed in, notably Feministing, Blondesense, Lindsay and Amanda again.

Sex workers chronicle life in Indian brothels

"My dignity was torn to pieces. I used to cry a lot. But I soon learnt some things will never change no matter how much you cry," she wrote. Elsewhere, women wrote about betrayed love, bad marriages, their dreams of living a life of dignity, of owning a "house with lots of sky", and about the "frightening" world of prostitution.

Thoof attempts to improve on Web site linkages

Ian Clarke was a 23-year-old computer scientist living in Scotland in 2000 when he started a global controversy by deploying an online system called Freenet. The system was intended to make it possible to share information anonymously, and to make it virtually impossible to be removed from the Internet once it was placed there. Since then he has been engaged in starting three venture capital-backed companies. But he has not given up on his original goal: to engender democracy by making it simple to share accurate information. Clarke's latest project, a Web site called Thoof, is an attempt to improve on sites like Digg and Reddit, where communities of users filter and rank links to news articles and blog entries. Thoof began operating Friday in invitation-only mode and is set to open to the public next week. Clarke is obsessed with the fact that even when accurate information exists on the Internet, it often does not have the political impact that it should. "I'm concerned that most Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," he said. "All of the information is there, but people are still ill-informed."

The Legend of Trent Lott and the Weblogs

A new study from the Kennedy School pinpoints what happened between Big Media and the blogs in the case of Trent Lott. It does not portray weblogs as lead actor, but as reactor to a story that almost disappeared. A certain receptivity in the bloggers allowed judgment in the press to correct itself.