New Media

Early last month, John Hodgman, the bulbous-headed, bookish comedy writer who plays the PC in a popular series of Apple commercials, was at The Daily Show offices introducing the program’s producer, Miles Kahn, to Twitter: the “microblogging” platform that in 2008 became the latest social networking craze for geeks, writers, celebrities and media types. “Producer miles Kahn thinks twitter is a waste of human time and resources,” Mr. Hodgman “tweeted” on his account, titled @hodgman, from his iPhone. “Obviously I agree with him, but I still like him,” he added.

A few minutes later, Mr. Kahn gave in and started his own account:  read more »

What will be the next big thing in tech this year? How will start-ups grapple with the economic crisis? What's gonna happen to Google? Will Twitter take over the world?

Charlie O'Donnell, co-founder and CEO of career-building site Path 101, asked a bunch of tech-savvy New Yorkers and others to make a 7-second video of their predictions are for 2009. He spliced together the spots in the video posted above. Sam Lessin, CEO and co-founder of Drop.io, predicts a major personal data breach in the U.S.; Nate Westheimer, new leader of the New York Tech Meetup, predicted "location-based everything." Fred Wilson, managing partner of  read more »

New York-based consulting firm Herman Blackbook is offering seed funding for developers making applications for open-source platforms like Twitter, the iPhone, Boxee, AppNexus and more. With their "New Platforms Fund," the company will give up to 10 "cutting edge" ideas (they're not talking iFart here) $1,000-$3,000 each to develop into the alpha stage, and take minor equity stakes as they grow, too.

"The fund will focus on innovation that has low barriers for mainstream adoption as we find that all too often, innovation is too far ahead of the adoption curve," said Darren Herman, principal of Herman Blackbook, in a statement. "We know we cannot fund every idea through our door and our investment philosophy is not for everyone, but should that golden egg exist that falls beyond our investment scope, our Hb network of angel investors and venture capitalists will come in handy."  read more »

Jordan English Gross can usually tell within five minutes of meeting someone whether they’ve given up on their childhood dreams. “It usually just takes a short conversation," Mr. Gross said, sitting in a small conference room in the office of his new Web project, Dorthy.com, whose purpose is to enable people to “do their dreams,” according to its slogan. “It’s something we really look for in the people who work here,” he said, meaning the retention of youthful hopes.

It was a snowy winter day and Mr. Gross, who is 27 and grew up between two cornfields in Sandyville, Ohio, was wearing a gray zip-up sweater, two diamond earrings, along with a second ring in his left ear, and a fancy watch.  read more »

In a Dec. 15 interview with David Rose, the prominent angel investor as chairman of the New York Angels, the founder of Rose Tech Ventures explained why the New York Tech Meetup has become a crucial opportunity for the city. "With the financial crisis, there was a beginning of a movement, realizing that the entreprenuerial sector is really important, more than when it was when it was being drowned out by Wall Street," he told the Observer by phone.

In October, Mr. Rose testified before the city’s Committee on Economic Development that the tech industry needed a “technology community manager,” a point person to bring together city organizations and tech media types, more than money or new programming.  read more »

Around midnight on Dec. 12, just a few minutes after being elected leader of one of the most influential tech groups in New York City, Nate Westheimer was winding down in his Lower East Side apartment with some Wii Bowling. Earlier that night, Mr. Westheimer, 25, had a few beers with various blogger types, recently laid-off Radar writers and other 20-something tech scenesters, like Tumblr founder David Karp, at Sweet & Vicious, the Nolita dot-com drinking and dating hole where Gawker videographer Richard Blakeley was hosting the last of his infamous Media Meshing parties. Mr. Blakely decided to shut down the monthly networking event, since, well, there isn’t much networking to do in the job-hemorrhaging media business these days.  read more »

Nate Westheimer, founder of BricaBox and entrepreneur-in-residence at Rose Tech Ventures, will take over Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman's position as organizer of the New York Tech Meetup. After a little controversy, candidate presentations and a voting poll, which closed at 11:59 p.m. last night, Mr. Westheimer snagged the spot by a landslide 48 percent vote. Out of more than 7,500 NYTM members, only 630 voted.

Mr. Westheimer proposed creating a board of "egoless community organizers" to organize and evangelize their niche of the broader New York Tech Community.  read more »

A new Intel survey reports that women would rather Tumblr than take a tumble in bed. An online survey of more than 2,000 users last month found that almost half of the women (46 percent) would rather go without sex for two weeks than give up the Internet for that long.

Only 30 percent of the guys surveyed would make the same choice.

The Wall Street Journal (via Silicon Alley Insider) reports that Intel has some obvious goals to show how important the Internet is to all of us—especially during tough economic times. And volunteers for online surveys probably already have unhealthy addictions to the Internet and might make imperfect proxies for all Internet users.

Regardless, as the WSJ reports, those results are pretty unsexy.

Details are beginning to leak out about this past weekend's summit of President-elect Barack Obama's key organizers during his campaign. They met in a Chicago hotel this past weekend to brainstorm on what to do with the huge grassroots network and how they can continue to mobilize their online and offline organizers during the new administration. Micah Sifry of TechPresident.com points us toward a post on the YesWeCanRacine website from Tony Loyd, an organizer from Racine, Wisconsin:

Here are the outcomes of the meeting.

1. There is a process that is still forming, based on your input. Let’s be honest: we’re making this up as we go along. We want to take the time to get this right.
2. The process has been and will continue to be open and transparent. We’re trying to make sure you hear about this from us instead of read about it in the press, though I understand that word is already starting to leak out.
3. The first step was to gain feedback from the field about what you want from this organization. We have already heard back from over 500,000 people. The first steps of forming this organization are being strongly influenced by the survey results.
4. Please be patient. You may have heard the president say that he is going to move with “deliberate haste” in the transition. In the same way, we’re moving with deliberate haste in forming the new organization.  read more »

On December 9, 10 candidates presented their case to take over the New York Tech Meetup at Barry Diller's glittering IAC Building lobby in Chelsea. The room was half-empty, a curious scene for the normally packed New York Tech Meetup. But this time, no five-minute infomercials for new Web-based companies would be made. Instead, attendees saw short video and PowerPoint presentations of local community members who want to take over one of the most well-attended events in New York Tech and turn it into an organization.

Candidates included a mishmash of well-known community members and relatively unknown folks. They are all running to replace Scott Heiferman, the CEO of Meetup, who founded the monthly meeting of entreprenuers, venture capitalists and various geeks and stepped down in November. Voting began at midnight last night. Members of the New York Tech Meetup have 24 hours to cast their votes here. They'll have nine candidates to choose from since Richie Hecker, who founded the BootStrapper Group and works as a business consultant, dropped out late last night.

The poll will close at 11:59 p.m. tonight. Who is in the lead?  read more »

Talk about revenge of the nerds! If President-elect Barack Obama actually fulfills his promises to bring the White House into the Web world, the techiest among us may have the loudest voices of all when it comes to influencing our government. Because let’s face it: It took a year to get used to Facebook. We use our iPhone to talk. If whitehouse.gov looks anything like Mr. Obama’s transition Web site, change.gov, how long will it take us, not to mention your average Joe, to navigate his new, shiny “citizenship account”? The geeks are gonna get there first. In fact, they already have.  read more »

Jeff Rosenthal, co-founder of hip-hop comedy sketch site itsthereal.com, sent us an email this morning about the group's new web video titled "Saved by the L: The New Class." Reminds us of the Williamsburg: A Campus Guide we did this summer. It's a "Message From the Brooklyn Tourism Board" featuring Williamsburg "hipsters" opining on how they "go hard" in Brooklyn, with the new Santogold/Jay-Z track "Brooklyn (Go Hard)" playing in the background.

"If Biggie's Brooklyn was Notorious, what's Jay-Z's like? We explored..."

Your third-favorite 'Person You May Know' on Facebook,
Jeff Rosenthal

The Pulitzer Prize Board announced today that they will now consider online-only newspapers for the big honor. Since 2006, online content from a print newspaper's homepage were allowed to submit entries, and online-only entries were permitted in just two categories: Breaking news coverage and breaking-news photography. But now that print is slowly crawling into its deathbed, Web-based news services, like the Huffington Post, can submit entries in all 14 Pulitzer journalism categories.

According to the press release, the Board stressed that entries should come from news organizations that publish at least weekly and are "primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories," and that "adhere to the highest journalistic principles.  read more »

More than 1 million Facebook users have signed up to boycott Facebook on December 15th, in retaliation to the service's recent changes. "Friends account deleted, Limited in sending message or poking, stupid new layout! Administrators don't care about what we think," according to the Facebook Blackout cause page on... um, Facebook. "[W]hat will happen if we all decide to stay off of facebook for 1 day"?

The group encourages members to not log in for 24 hours on December 15th. But before logging off, they request that users replace their current profile picture with the "Facebook Blackout" logo.   read more »

Boxee, the free open-source software that could change your living room experience forever, got busy during the Thanksgiving break and just released a new alpha version, adding Netflix, The WB (Buffy fans, rejoice!), MTVMusic and other features. Boxee users can now play, browse, and queue 'Instant Watch' movies through the application.

In a survey of their alpha users last month, Netflix topped the most-wanted list along with HBO, ABC and Discovery shows. Avner Ronen, Boxee's co-founder, said HBO won't be coming any time soon. "the BIG issue with HBO is that they don’t offer full episodes online… :(," he wrote in a blog post.  read more »

TiVo has taken a step toward building Living Room 2.0 by partnering with Blip.tv, the New York-based online videoblogging and production company. TiVo will distribute shows including Golf Girl TV, a biweekly golf news and gossip segment, Political Lunch, which includes "cold cuts" from the world of politics online, and DadLabs, a funny tips and stories show for fathers.

Advertising Age reports that "4.2 million subscribers, and test whether the genre has legs off the PC."

Here's more from the article:

But do TV-scale audiences await? And will advertisers respond? Andrea Kerr Redniss, managing director at Optimedia, sees the shows as opportunities to do product integrations on the cheap.

 read more »

Hillary Clinton: powerful, reliable, classic. These are the ideas that Ms. Clinton seems to want to convey about herself with her Facebook profile picture. In the black-and-white headshot, she’s looking off to her right, and all of her signature attributes are there: Big smile, pearl necklace, American flag pin. This picture presents the ur-Hillary. She had changed her photo briefly last March—during the Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont Democratic primaries that would make or break her presidential campaign—to a snap from a February rally in El Paso, Texas, in which she towered in her tan suit, looking unbeatable; red, white and blue confetti rained around her.  read more »

Ah, now that Michael Wolff has released his new biography on Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, it was just about time for him to babble some highly quotable comment and drum up some press for it: like, say, "MySpace users are [expletive] cretins."

His friend, Jon Fine of BusinessWeek, took the author out to dinner and discussed a subject he doesn't go into depth in his new book: MySpace.

Apparently, Mr. Murdoch and pals aren't too happy with it.

MW: ...I think it is--if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor.

 read more »

Howard Gardner has been taking the Internet to task for quite awhile now. He is best known for revolutionizing education in the ’80s with his theory of multiple intelligences, which challenged the idea of a single human intelligence that could be measured by an IQ test. As a psychology and education professor at Harvard, he has been studying the ethical questions posed by the Web through his GoodWork Project and its Developing Minds and Digital Media arm, which examines how today’s youth think differently based on their obsessive use of digital media.

In 2007, he released his  read more »

Apparently, Britney Spears took a stroll on the streets of New York last night while her newsless, yet somehow touching documentary For the Record aired on MTV.

She updated her Twitter just a few minutes ago:

britneyspears I enjoyed a relaxing walk last night around NYC. Even though it was raining, it was a lot of fun! ~Britney

This might actually be the real Britney too. Her assistant Lauren, usually signs off on posts she writes, and Brit has been updating as herself for awhile now.

Last week, Scott Heiferman, C.E.O. of Meetup, announced when and where candidates could announce their interest in replacing him as organizer of the New York Tech Meetup. So far, several candidates have stepped forward, including Greg Magarshak, founder of social media company Lucky Apps; Joe DiPasquale, founder of CollegeWikis.com and self-described Meetup fanatic; Rich Hecker, an organizer of Bootstrapper.com and co-founder of The Connectors Group, a new angel investment group, and Groupable.com, a site that works a lot like Meetup; Joshua Sherman, an organizer of Personal Democracy Forum and founder of BuycottForChange.org; among others.

What does the tech community think so far? The blogs are abuzz.  read more »

Twitter stepped into the spotlight this week, not only as a charity organizer and possible advertising goldmine during the holidays, but as a legitimate news aggregator.

Lots of tech blogs have been touting Twitter's potential since its inception, but on-the-ground reports from the Mumbai terror attacks put the idea in motion. In some cases, Twitterers were able to be on the scene long before TV and newspaper reporters could get there.

CNN reports that an estimated 80 messages, or "tweets," were being sent to Twitter.com via SMS every five seconds, providing eyewitness accounts and updates.

Many Twitter users also sent pleas for blood donors to make their way to specific hospitals in Mumbai where doctors were faced with low stocks and rising casualties.

 read more »

Scott Heiferman, C.E.O. of Meetup, released information today on how people can declare their candidacy to replace him as leader of the New York Tech Meetup. Mr. Heiferman stepped down in November.

According to Mr. Heiferman, a new organizer will be elected on Dec. 11th, after candidates give a five minute presentation at the Dec. 9th Meetup. "Then, with the new Organizer, Dawn [Barber] and I will establish a Board for the NYTM made mostly of other NY tech-related group Organizers," Mr. Heiferman wrote on the New York Tech Meetup's message board. "If the new Organizer wants to make it a full-time paid gig, it's up to her and the Board to figure out how to do so. Self-organized, baby!"

Interested candidates to take over the chair need to state their candidacy here by Dec. 2.

Full memo after the jump:  read more »

Fred Wilson watches television in a modern living room, but it probably isn’t quite like yours. Call it living room 2.0. As managing partner of Union Square Ventures—which invests in budding tech start-ups like Twitter, Tumblr and 10gen—he often brings the latest gadgets and social networking whats-its into his West Village home. He says his big “‘aha’ moment” came last year, when he plugged his Mac Mini, Apple’s tiny desktop computer drive that’s about half the size of a toaster, into his 60-inch television display. Suddenly the Internet, the whole World Wide Web, was in his living room.

 read more »

Will you be spending Thanksgiving online? Maybe you prefer some social-networking to spending so-called quality time with your crazy family. Or perhaps you're just too much of an Internet addict to give it up for a few days.

Here are some resources for you to give thanks on the Web this Turkey Day.

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade site - Get all of your info. about the most famous Thanksgiving Day parade. Here you can find a preview of the balloons and floats. You can download a widget and get up-to-the-minute updates on parade happenings and events. You can even get a Facebook application and upload all your videos and photos from the big day.  read more »

Shaquille "Kobe, Tell Me How My Ass Taste" O’Neal wasn't going to let some troll front as his 7-foot-1 basketball behemoth on Twitter. So he started his own account. First tweet: "This is the real SHAQUILLE O’NEAL," came from The_Real_Shaq, early Tuesday morning. It has been a "shaqalicious" romp ever since.

The New York Times' Howard Beck spoke with Mr. O'Neal yesterday to make sure it was him.

“Somebody out there was trying to use my language and trying to speak for me,” he told The Times in a telephone interview. “Rather than have that happen, I thought I’d do it myself.  read more »

• 0 comments

Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke directs us to this great Funny Or Die video that purports to show Variety Writers Sling The Slanguage.

The video is a satire of Variety's semi-impenetrable Slanguage, including new definitions for Geek Meat (n., "a movie that's based on a video game") and Ben Silvermandering (v., "when a studio executive doesn't show up for work because he's too busy partying"). Watch the whole thing to see how they rename the Oxygen Network. (Warning: Language NSFW.)

Of course, most of the satire's bite is mitigated by the fact that Variety is proudly hosting the video on its own site. Allowing one's targets to feel like they're in on the joke out of a spirit of generosity and/or fear? Call that SNLing.

Following Jerry Yang's departure from C.E.O. of Yahoo!, The Wall Street Journal's Jessica E. Vascellaro and Joann S. Lublin are reporting this morning that Yahoo!'s board is searching for the "anti-Jerry" to fill his roll. Sources say Yahoo!'s co-founder just couldn't make the tough decisions.

Per Ms. Vascellaro and Ms. Lublin:

"This company has shown a failure to execute," said a person familiar with the situation. Yahoo's next CEO "can't be just a thinker."

Will Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg meet his fate? The kid has big ideas about mapping our emotions and making the world a better place. Despite recent moves to make profit, his employees seems frustrated with his inability to find (and accept) financial opportunities.  read more »

On Nov. 11, Scott Heiferman looked small standing in front of the glowing, 11-foot-high video walls in the lobby of Barry Diller’s glittering, $100 million InterActiveCorp building on West 18th Street. “There’s a great President-elect Barack Obama line which is: We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for,” he said, microphone in hand, buttoned-down shirt unbuttoned.

Mr. Heiferman, the charasmatic co-founder and chief executive of social networking site Meetup.com, was pacing on a stage in front of 400 Internet entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, developers and miscellaneous geeks. The at-capacity crowd shelled out $10 each to attend the New York Tech Meetup, the monthly must-do event for the city’s technology community, where budding start-ups have five minutes to pitch their new projects.  read more »

Organizers announced today that Internet Week New York will take place from June 1 to June 8 next year. This will be the second year for the event and, in 2009, the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea will serve as the official headquarters. Hey, geeks, rejoice (and feel the hangover)! Internet Week New York is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences in cooperation with City of New York and The Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting. This year, they are partnering with Time Warner, Tumblr, Google, the New Museum, Columbia Business School, NY Tech Meetup and The Webby Awards for various events.

Maybe this year Mr. Bloomberg will mention more New York-based Internet companies (you know, besides "Facebook" and "Google") in his kickoff speech...

More from the press release:  read more »

Ben Silverman, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and NBC Universal Television Studio and executive producer of NBC's The Office, The Biggest Loser, and ABC's Ugly Betty, appeared on Charlie Rose last night to talk about YouTube vs. Hulu, the iPhone, the awesomeness of The Today Show, and other yawn-inducing topics.

A quote from Mr. Silverman during the interview:

'Digital delivery has altered how entertainment is both produced and delivered forever. And it will continue to alter and evolve.'

Ho-hum. The interview left us nonplussed.

But he certainly agitated Nikki Finke. "Yes, I feel so much better about NBC bettering its primetime prospects now that I've watched Ben Silverman toss around phrases like 'disintermediated from my audience via technology' and 'trigger digital activation' on Charlie Rose last night," she wrote on her blog, Deadline Hollywood Daily. "Silly me for thinking that Ben was hired to program the network instead of parrot advertising-speak."  read more »

GQ names Facebook's 24-year-old Mark Zuckerberg "Boy Genius of the Year" in this month's issue. (Some guy named President-elect Barack Obama is on the cover.) In the article, writer Alex French examines his current dilemma: How will Facebook make money off all that private information we share with him every day?

Most of Mr. Zuckerberg's plans have blown up in his face (remember Beacon and the infamous engagement ring incident?). But since July, he's been simmering a new feature, Facebook Connect, which will allow Facebookers to share their information with other sites. But that would involve Facebook users giving up even more of their privacy and letting other websites make money off their web browsing.  read more »

Amy Poehler debuted her Web show, Smart Girls at the Party on On Networks today.

The first episode features "The Writer - Cameron," a young New Yorker who likes to write about "paranormal kind of stuff," as she told Ms. Poehler in the video. "Wow, mysteries and ghost stories. Scary stuff," Ms. Poehler replied.

The former SNL star plays Charlie Rose (with a dash of James Lipton) during the interview, which takes place at a round table where she asks Cameron about her process and how she deals with writer's block. Cut to clips of Cameron reading stories on a park bench and in her bedroom, surrounded by teddy bears and baby dolls.  read more »

Okay, so now it's a YouTube Presidency, too. In Chicago today, President-elect Barack Obama will video record his weekly Democratic address and post it on YouTube and his transition website, Change.gov, once the original radio address airs this Saturday morning.

"This is just one of many ways that he will communicate directly with the American people and make the White House and the political process more transparent," spokeswoman Jen Psaki told The Washington Post.

More from the Post:

In addition to regularly videotaping the radio address, officials at the transition office say the Obama White House will also conduct online Q&As and video interviews. The goal, officials say, is to put a face on government. In the following weeks, for example, senior members of the transition team, various policy experts and choices for the Cabinet, among others, will record videos for Change.gov.  read more »

Drop.io, which provides un-Googleable, private online storage space, has a new member of the team: Scott Schwanbeck, the former vice president of business development at Fox Interactive Media. According to drop.io's release, Mr. Schwanbeck was responsible for developing strategic partnerships, non-ad-based monetization, content and data licensing, audience development and international expansion for the Fox's IGN Entertainment network of sites, which includes Rotten Tomatoes and AskMen.com. He'll help drop.io lure more partnerships with businesses willing to pay big bucks for online, private sharing "drops."

Sam Lessin, C.E.O. of drop.io, said, “Drop.io is building a new vocabulary for simple private sharing on the web, and Scott’s deep expertise and leadership will be instrumental in the development of key relationships and in distributing our solution within specific verticals.  read more »

• 0 comments

Writing on The Big Money yesterday, Lesley M. M. Blume took a look at Condé Nast's Web layoffs and asked:

What is behind Condé Nast's bellicose approach to the Web? Other traditional media outlets properly regard the Internet as both destroyer and savior and have gone into overdrive to translate themselves into online brands. By axing its online properties, Condé Nast is revealing its apparent online strategy: looking the other way while Jaws devours the back of your boat.

It's a neat metaphor—you can almost hear John Williams' theme from Jaws in your head as you read it—but it doesn't have the staying power of the one proffered by an expert Ms. Blume consulted for the piece: "Right now we're still in the Wild West."

That particular truism is as worn in as an old saddle and hits the mark like a rusty pistol. See examples after the jump:  read more »