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,...

Senate Campaign Study on CNN.com Blog

We got a short and sweet mention of our campaign study on CNN’s blog, the Situation Report.  Here’s the relevant snippet:

“An extraordinary study examines how well candidates for Senate are utilizing online technology in the 2006 campaigns.”

You can view the study here....

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. ...

Global Cyber-Campaigns: How does the US Measure up?

After finishing our 2006 study of political web campaigns, we became curious as to how American politicians’ campaign websites compared to those in other countries.  We looked at similar studies conducted in the UK, Germany, Australia, Finland, Hungary, and Sweden, and drew some conclusions:

Countries with parliamentary systems of government tend to have websites that are highly centralized. ...

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....