Flipping Web Sites

I read an interesting article in Business 2.0 this month (June 2006) entitled “Flipping Web Fixer-Uppers” regarding a new trend in online entrepreneurship – purchasing underperforming sites, improving the content, infrastructure, and/or marketing to build traffic and revenue, and then selling them for a profit. This has been facilitated by sites such as SitePoint and eBay where whole sites and the businesses built around them are auctioned off.I took a look at SitePoint,...

Podcasts: The Teachers of the Future?

An article on the BBC reported Friday that a college professor at Bradford University in the UK has replaced classroom lectures with podcasts.  Professor Bill Ashraf feels that the quality of his lectures is compromised by the large size of his classes, some of which contain as many as 250 students. ...

Is the Internet Really Leading to Better Discourse?

Among many, there seems to be a belief in the intrinsic value of online conversations. The world is flat. Ordinary people are being empowered. Governments and corporations are being held accountable.

It is all true to an extent. But I think the story that isn’t being told enough is how divisive and pointless much of the online conversation really is....

A Broadside Against Collectivism

Wow. Just read a great essay on Edge called “DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism” by computer scientist Jaron Lanier. The essay is a massive broadside against the trend towards collective editing and decision-making that is taking hold online (the Wisdom of Crowds trend). Lanier takes aim at the use of collectivism in venues as diverse as Wikipedia (and all Wikis really),...

Serving Others…Online

A little more than a month ago, Todd devoted a post to Blogswana, a project centered on blogging for AIDS Education. The project centers around a university student blogging on behalf of a person afflicted with HIV or AIDS and telling their stories to the Internet audience. It’s a good and necessary project and one that I think will touch the lives of so many people....