Bloggers On The Take

With the rise of blogging has come blogger relations: the efforts of PR and marketing types to get bloggers, some influential with large audiences, some obscure with niche ones, and everyone else in between, to write about their companies and clients' products.

In many ways there's nothing new to this development. ...

Politicians, Advocacy Groups and Social News Sites

We’ve written often here about social news sites like Digg, Reddit and Netscape that give users control of what appears on the sites’ homepage through voting.  Until a few months ago, these sites were really geared towards techies, so they were largely ignored by politicians and advocacy groups. 

Now that these social news sites have built an audience and expanded their focus beyond technology news, ...

Give Vox a Try

I understand the appeal of the big online social networks (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, etc.) conceptually but have never really embraced them personally.  I just don't use them. 

Part of it is that I'm too old for most of them.  But mostly I find them  uninteresting. 

So I'm sort of surprised by my own interest in the social networking site Vox.   What makes Vox intriguing to me is that it isn't really a social networking site –...

The Story of a Failed Submission to Digg, Reddit and Netscape

The last year has seen the rise of social news sites that give users editorial control of the sites' homepage by voting on their favorite stories.   Users submit stories which are then voted on by other users, with the most popular stories appearing most prominently on the sites.  The key to this concept is users spending time reading through submissions to find the most compelling stories. ...

Research review: Metropolitan Websites as Urban Communications

If you needed information about your city, it makes sense to head over to the metropolitan website to begin figuring out what's what. A research study by Cleveland State's Leo Jeffres and UConn's Carolyn Lin appears in Indiana University's Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. The study examines how the websites of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the US represented their cities and how well their websites communicated with the public,...