Companies Abandoning Second Life

The LA Times had a story last week about companies abandoning their presences on Second Life due to poor return on investment. From the sound of things, many companies that have stayed may not be long for the world:

But the sites of many of the companies remaining in Second Life are empty....

Props to Mother Jones for Its Blog Outreach

When I referred to a post in which journalism professor Jay Rosen of New York University expressed concern over how Mother Jones addressed the political web in its package "Politics 2.0" I was surprised that Clara Jeffery, one of the magazine's co-editors, commented on my post (and then another time). ...

Mother Jones Questions Open Source Politics

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen harangues Mother Jones, the left-leaning investigatory magazine, for its feature package titled "Politics 2.0" in which it basically asks, "Are we entering a new era of digital democracy-or just being conned by a bunch of smooth-talking geeks?"

Rosen, an open source advocate, accuses that "The Mother Jones editors had a great story about politics and the web within their grasp,...

Ron Paul and Distributed Online Campaigning

In all the talk about the Ron Paul online machine, there has been very little discussion of his actual campaign website, which has recently undergone a facelift. His approach is novel. Instead of building an infrastructure on his own campaign website. like most candidates have done, Paul has created a portal to his presences on various third party websites....

Participation Inequality

Not everyone who reads blogs comments on posts or writes their own blogs.  That should not surprise anyone.  In fact, according to Jackob Nielsen's Participation Inequity: Encouraging More Users to Contribute post from last October, only about 5% of Internet users blog. (Hat tip: Suw Charman)

Nielsen explains that "In most online communities,...