Archive for Internet

7 Ways a Blogger Can Add Value to News Conversation

// July 13th, 2010 // View Comments // Internet, News

First of all these are not my ideas but I wanted to share them with my readers as well. These tips are courtesy of Marshall Kirkpatrick, technology journalist for Read Write Web. I frequently listen to his “audio thoughts” podcast or cinchcast. I highly recommend following him on twitter and cinchcast. You will get an insightful look on his thought processes   In his most recent recording, Marshall discussions the seven ways a news blogger can add value to a news conversation.

1. You can be First

If you are first to comment or write about a breaking topic or news event, you are sure to get lots of traffic assuming its a topic people are interested in reading.

2. You can be Funny

Oh yes! Funny is the Number 1 thing women look for a man and there are more women on the planet then men. So there you go :)

3. Synthesize / Summarize / Clarify

Do so in a way that the conversation can be really used. This is key, especially for topics that are not easily digestible to the average reader. If you can take a complex topic and summarize it into layman’s terms, other news sources will go to you or at least copy you. Especially if you are First and Funny.

4. Curate other high quality perspectives

Curation seems to be all of the buzz today. Many of us out there don’t want to scour the net to find every single source over a single topic so we go to certain blogs that do all of the grunt work to find the best sources and put them all together.

5. Add new details

Add new details to an existing conversation.

6. Add a new perspective to the story

Find a new angle to a story that all the other stories out may have overlooked.

7. Writing in a more compelling way

Mechanically you put the writing together in a more compelling way than anybody else.

I’m sure Marshall was “thinking out loud” with he recorded this for an upcoming blog post so expect a more detailed writeup from him on Read Write Web. At the end of his recording he asked the audience for more tips, so if you have more tips for him, be sure to send him a reply on twitter.

Below is Marshall Kirkpatrick’s cinch

Woot! gets Acquired by Amazon and Celebrates

// July 1st, 2010 // View Comments // Internet, News

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, you’ve heard the news of Woot being acquired by Amazon. Well woot didn’t waste any time celebrating. Here is a video woot made to commemorate the occasion in true woot fashion!

I love the “no more rolling into work with our pajamas on” line. :)

Congrats Woot! Keep bringing us the funny and deals.

My Digg Version 4 Impressions

// June 28th, 2010 // View Comments // Internet, News

How did I get my hands on an invite to try out Digg‘s latest update to their site? I was one of the lucky ones listening to This Week in Tech‘s live show with Leo Laporte. He was interviewing Digg founder and CEO, Kevin Rose as he made the announcement that all of the TWIT listeners could have first time access to the Digg Version 4 beta site! This was a small time window too. The invites were only for one hour on the show.

I was as gitty as a little school boy when I got the news. As Kevin Rose points out during the show, “there hasn’t been any changes to digg in the last two years.” This is a major facelift and retooling of the site. Kevin says this will fix a lot of the major problems people have been complaining about in the past. One of the issues that has plagued many users as Leo brought up during the show, digg has never just shown the stories from the people you care about or as Leo puts it:

I want a twitter style situation. Where I get to choose who I care about and they can curate my news for me.

Keep reading for screen shots and more information about the new features in digg version 4.

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Digital Spring Cleaning

// April 16th, 2010 // View Comments // Internet, Software

Using the tips in the these articles on lifehacker, I’ll be spending the weekend going through various facets of my digital life clearing out what I don’t need. From Email, Contacts, Social Networks, Google Reader, and even my desk itself.

Fun with Chat Roulette

// March 3rd, 2010 // View Comments // Internet

DISCLAIMER: Chat Roulette is an adult site. I wouldn’t venture to this site unless you are the adventurous and ready to be shocked. You might be offended by the pics in this post.  You’ve been warned.

So me being the adventurous type, I decided to mess with the people using Chat Roulette. I won’t go into a huge description on what Chat Roulette is, google can tell you. My plan was to have fun with Chat Roulette  by displaying some disturbing images instead of my face and see peoples’ reactions. Most people that are going here are looking for, naked chicks, penises, or trolling for attention. I wanted to see their reaction to something besides “the norm.” Needless to say I captured some amusing moments. Keep reading to see all the pics.

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Posterous wants to be like Tumblr with Post.ly

// January 21st, 2010 // View Comments // Internet, Social Media


Posterous has done a relaunch of their URL Shortening site Post.ly. This site was used previously to shorten URLs from your posterous blog before sending to Twitter. Going to http://post.ly did not have this slick interface in the past. Now you can interact with the site directly as a quick and easy way to post to Posterous and Twitter.

This new simplified site’s look is a complete 180 from the normal posterous site seen below:

This may be an answer to the simple look and feel of Tumblr, posterous’s direct competitor. Is this article written by Peg on Tech, one of the reasons for Tumblr’s popularity is the landing page is much less cluttered. Here is a quote from the article about Tumblr’s landing page:

Sign up is dead simple. Can you imagine the conversion rates they get out of that page? Moreover, they have one of the best taglines of any service: the easiest way to blog. What else is there to explain? They don’t brag about features like “like”, “reblog” or (ugh) “tumblarity.” Tumblr is the easiest way to blog. Anyone, your mother included, can understand that.

Posterous with their new Post.ly page is trying to bring that simplicity to them as well. Techcrunch has an article on the announcement. I personally have a tumblr and posterous account. I seem to use posterous more because I like their feature set. I will definitely give this a try and see if I like it better than using their main site.