February 08, 2005
Bloglines acquisition official
Ask Jeeves' acquisition of Bloglines became official at the stroke of midnight this morning, with a press release and FAQ posted to the Bloglines site. No financial data was released. Here's the meat of a letter to subscribers from Bloglines founder (now an AskJeeves VP) Mark Fletcher:
...We're excited about becoming the newest member of their portfolio of web services. We view this as a huge step forward for Bloglines, and a chance to achieve our mission of making RSS news reading and blogging a part of everyone's internet experience. You can learn more about the transaction by reading our press release or reviewing our Frequently Asked Questions.We want to assure you that the Bloglines service will continue to grow and thrive. Like other companies in the Ask Jeeves portfolio, we will operate as a standalone, separate service -- the Bloglines name will remain, as will our URL, www.bloglines.com. We will support our current features and services, so please continue to log in to Bloglines to search, subscribe, publish and share RSS news feeds and blogs. All users will continue to be governed by the Terms of Service you agreed to when you registered for Bloglines.
We have a great roadmap on how to integrate some of the many innovative technologies of Ask Jeeves, including its Teoma algorithmic search technology. As always, we will share news of our progress on our blog, Bloglines News. And we encourage you to participate in the conversation. Our users have been amazing help in guiding the evolution of Bloglines, and we hope you will continue to give us input so we can remain the gold standard in blogging, search, and news aggregation.
via Blog Herald
dk0851
| Posted toFebruary 03, 2005
It's Coming . . .THE BLOG! More Notes from the New Communications Forum
BLOG. It's an awful word. Clunky and unsexy, for me it conjures up images from the '50s sci-fi film The Blob. The Blog is coming to get you, or maybe it's a blog monster clamoring up a slick green slope . . .
We'll have to get used to it. THE BLOG is here to stay, and if you believe what you read (yes, here and elsewhere) it will revolutionize online communications to the point of affecting the very core of our social fabric.
Having just attended the New Communications Forum, it is quite clear that corporations are going to have to get with it and incorporate both internal and external blogs (and wikis), or quickly fall behind in the game. Neville Hobson, an articulate gentleman who presented the "Blogs and Employee Relations" session (of which I missed the first 20 minutes--sorry Neville!) had some startling things to say:
Dresdner Keinvort Wassstein, a German bank, has 120 internal blogs (as first reported in the Financial Times).
A new Forrester study entitled "Blogging: Bubble or Big Deal?" concludes, among other things, that the new direction of employee relations dictates that all employees run their own blog.
Even more startling: Neville thinks the report's 18 pages are well worth their $350 price tag! Clearly, something big is brewing.
Andy Lark, a big man in many ways, gave a provocative and entertaining keynote address entitled "Participatory Communications Revolution, or 'The Really Wicked Blog Revolution That Killed the Media and Changed Everything.'"
To emphasize the point, he opened with EPIC, a 1984-type video that tracks the trajectory of media development to 2014, a year in teh NYT becomes a print-only newsletters available for only the elite and elderly*. His core message was that blogs are a social movement that demonstrate the higher value of conversation, over just publishing information.
I agree with him when he says, "we have become appalling at communications, though excellent at talking." And that the blogosphere, with its democratic means of disseminating information, will kill the hype and BS “so inherent in media as a business."
Instead, we have the powerful notion of media as community, as bloggers become advocates for many causes.
*This reminds me of the blue sky sessions I had the privilege to sit in on with Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Bill Atkinson, and other very smart media people back in the heady early days of multimedia.
I was the project manager of the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog -- we excitedly discussed how hyperlinks would change how people would view and gather information, and how the printed book would become rare. Come to think of it, it seems many of us now display symptoms of ADD as a result of being able to jump all over the place by hyperlinks . . .and I heard a recent stat that less people are reading literature than ever before.
LINKS
Neville Hobson's Weblog
Executive Summary of
Fewer People Make Time for Literature, NEA Study Shows
rk1934
February 01, 2005
Distributed Journalism in Action
If you want to see why blogs really are the future of journalism, head on over to The Daily Kos, where you can see distributed journalism in action. The story in question is who is "Jeff Gannon" and what is the "Talon News Agency." It was Gannon, you see, who was the sole reporter with access to the memo exposing Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent.
Enter bloggers. Daily KOS is contributors are fanning out across net researching who Jeff Gannon and Talon are, why they were leaked the document, and what connections they have with other conservative information bureaus. Here's a look at how the work is being spread around:
- Tomatoobserver is researching Time of Grace Ministries
- Mnemosyne is checking and running phone numbers
- conntexdem is researching Bruce Eberle
- baltimoretim is researching precisely what the process is for obtaining a White House press credential
- fauxreal and ladydawg are researching morning gaggles here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/29/215946/913
- sean mykael is looking into Free Speech Foundation. Myrkury has graciously stepped in to advise on legalities of non-profit status (thank God). We may need people in a couple different states to physically pull paperwork soon. (Diary here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/30/14024/9923)
- mlk and Marisa are constructing a sort of visual database "family tree" of relations, groups and individuals. This is a big project and someone might want to volunteer on that diary: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/30/152558/079. Additionally, Marisa is asking for data entry help.
- spiderleaf is creating a timeline about the CIA memo leak/Novak/who knew what when, references to it in press, and analysis (Diary here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/31/122222/689)
- NYBri is preparing to start the FOIA request process and could use some volunteers (diary here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/31/153513/309)
- Louise volunteers to match timeline of Gannon at press briefings with his written "scoops"
- Radically Bitter is compiling very, very useful DNS data
- KansasNate is making sure important stuff is getting fed into dkospedia
- Nonemptysubsets (gotta love that handle) is downloading web sites since they're disappearing so fast. Requests taken.
- Sidinny will set up a diary called "Altered Realities" that will keep track of what's been changed on the visited sites, what's been scrubbed and what it all means. However, he's on kidwatch and can't do much more than set the diary up, so needs help with volunteers who will do the analysis.
- London Yank is looking into any connection with NORTHCOM/Psyops
There's also this intriguing statement from the project editor: "Jeff Gannon IS a pseudonym. I'm absolutely certain of this and when we're done with this whole thing I'll explain how and why I'm certain. For now, please just take my word for it."
These folks may or may not turn anything up, but it's a fascinating display of what distributed journalism looks like, and is quite possibly scratching the tip of a rather fishy iceberg.
Reach Richard Koman at rkoman (at) gmail (dot) com. Personal blog: richardkoman.typepad.com
| Posted to Top Stories
