Director = David Gordon Green; flop = The Sitter RT @huffpostent: Director defends notorious flop huff.to/15R746x
— HuffPo Spoilers (@HuffPoSpoilers) April 25, 2013
Annoyed with all the click-baiting on Huffington Post? @HuffPoSpoilers has got you covered. This is one of the more genuinely useful gimmick accounts we’ve come across; it’s been around since August but just seems to be gaining traction today (its follower count was around 1k this morning; now it’s over 5k). To their credit, the folks at Huffington Post are being good sports about it. source
But still, because of my habit of linking to my own site where I post my own original content, I’ve been labeled a spammer and have been banned. I’ve messaged the admins twice in the last two weeks, but haven’t gotten any response. It seems that the only way I could avoid this is if I were to relinquish any rights to my original content and post it exclusively to Imgur.Modern Primate blogger Chris Menning • Writing a tough criticism of the Reddit community, particularly in regards to the tendency of the system to be rigged against original content creators in favor of people who share content without necessarily giving credit. (Menning actually got banned from the site.) This has been an ongoing frustration for a number of humor blogs such as Slacktory and The Frogman, with these bloggers pointing out that it’s easier for a stolen, uncredited version of their content to go viral on Reddit via an uncredited Imgur link than it is for a blog post by the same author with the exact same content to do the same. Sites like Tumblr have a system that at least encourages sourcing content — do Reddit and Imgur need to do the same?
A second source close to Mashable confirms that executives have been working on a deal with CNN. This source speculates that the deal is 80% likely to close.
We don’t know if the deal has closed yet, nor do we know price. Obviously, it may fall apart. This report, for example, won’t help negotiations. We only know that Mashable executives are preparing for a sale.
This has actually been rumored for a while — Reuters’ Felix Salmon suggested this was going to happen back in March, though there’s no word if the $200 million acquisition price he suggested will actually pan out. Word is that some of the site’s sections would merge into CNN proper.
“So like there’s nothing for you to curate without creation? This precious bit of dressing-up what people choose to share on the Internet is, sure, silly, but it’s also a way for bloggers to distance themselves from the dirty blogging masses. You are no different from some teen in Indiana with a LiveJournal about cutting. Sorry folks! You’re in this nasty fray with the rest of us. And your metaphor is all wrong. More likely you’re a low-grade collector, not a curator.”—
Choire Sicha: You Are Not a Curator, You Are Actually Just a Filthy Blogger
Gonna curate some links in the meantime.
Saw this yesterday, found it to be a bit of a talker, wanted to write up a response. First up: Choire has been at this long enough (he worked at Gawker nearly a decade ago) that he’s arguably an elder statesman of blogging, along with folks like Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall and a couple of others. That automatically makes his opinion valid enough that we should listen, but I’m sure in a lot of ways it gives him a different take on this whole thing than someone who got into this in, say, 2008 or 2009.
So let’s take on this term. “Curation.” The first time I ever heard someone use the term in relation to Web content was in 2009, when Robert Scoble wrote this great piece about how “curation” was going to be a billion-dollar industry, once someone figured out a killer product that made it really stupidly simple to organize our thoughts into one piece. Not long after that, we got Storify, and, separately, Tumblr sort of became the place for this style of link sharing. I don’t see a billion dollars yet, but the basic idea seems to be catching on. (And no, it’s nothing like curating art. Big deal.)
But here’s the thing: I don’t think anyone is actually trying to “class up” their work by using this term. (Well, maybe except for the dude quoted in Choire’s piece.) These “curators” are just using different techniques than people were using a decade ago, and someone threw out that term one day, and it stuck.
And it’s happened before, too. Do you know how long pre-digital journalists bristled at the term “blogger” around 2004? I’m sure there’s some middle-aged newspaper columnist somewhere who once wrote a column titled “You Are Not a Blogger, You Are Actually Just a Terrible Journalist.” Do we need to rehash the purist’s argument every time someone does something a little differently? I’m sure the telegraph guys were pissed when they were shown the telephone for the first time.
So let’s get down to it: You’re not a curator, but then you’re not a blogger, either. You’re just a person with an internet connection who uses it to communicate. The quality of the information you share, report, or comment on is what matters. Not the term. — Ernie @ SFB
“We don’t have any interest in selling TechCrunch or Engadget,” he said firmly. “Our number one goal basically has been to scale them up. At this point, it’s likely we’ll just end up investing ourselves.”
TechCrunch itself covered the rumors, saying that the situation was rooted in a stunted spinoff and suggesting PandoDaily, run by former TC staffer Sarah Lacy, got caught up in its own issues when reporting the story: “We figure this story got skewed because PandoDaily is going through its own troubles, and looking for a target to project its drama onto; Sometimes not wanting to seem weak makes you seem weak.”
Memeorandum Colors 2012: Visualizing Bias on Political Blogs
Faint pink sounds about right for Mediaite. But that said, Gateway Pundit needs to be way redder than it is. This is a useful idea, either way.
I’m thrilled to announce that ReadWriteWeb has been acquired by SAY Media, a digital publishing company headquartered in San Francisco. ReadWriteWeb will anchor SAY Media’s growing Technology channel, which reaches more than 75 million global consumers each month.
ReadWriteWeb is going to get bigger and even better. Our plans include widening ReadWriteWeb’s editorial scope and expanding our team. That starts from today, with the addition of SplatF’s Dan Frommer to our team as an editor-at-large. We will also be doing a re-design, utilizing the sophisticated designers at SAY Media. With SAY’s technology and services, we’ll be able to scale ReadWriteWeb in ways previously unavailable to us. So I’m very excited about our team joining SAY Media. We’re going to take ReadWriteWeb to the next level!
Congrats to RWW, a blog that’s largely kept its integrity as it’s grown to a massive size. They wrote a piece on SFB a few months back which put a lot of attention on the cool work that the Tumblr community is doing with journalism at large. Hope they can keep it up.
Everyone starts somewhere. So, where did these bloggers start? You know, the really great ones that have such great content on Tumblr? Just for kicks, we did a little bit of investigating, and came up with this cool little bit of navel-gazing into the past of some of our favorite bloggers ever. In order, top to bottom: inothernews, kateoplis, soupsoup, brooklynmutt, pantslessprogressive, newsflick, thepoliticalnotebook, mohandasgandhi, azspot (who is like a pioneer or something) and … us. What did your first post say? Find it and link to it in a reblog.
BuzzFeed’s top 90 Tumblrs of 2011: Did you make the list? Why don’t you click and find out? Also, do you agree with the picks?
Advice for aspiring bloggers from Nicolas Lazaro of The Bengal Stripe
Whatever blogs you read now, don’t try to emulate them. Know yourself, know what you like, and build an online identity based off of that. Keep away from fads and anything that doesn’t fit with who you are, and create some real content; don’t just post pictures that you think are cool. …Lastly, there will be a dry patch at first unless you’ve had a running start, just stick with it and if it’s something you truly enjoy, eventually other people who enjoy it will find it too. None of your favorite blogs started out with thousands of readers, they got to where they are by being real and by being smart.”
Via Om Malik.
This is really good advice. Do what you do, be yourself, create cool things, and don’t worry about the other guy.
Watch: PCB gets a visual shout out on GMA’s Yahoo/Tumblr...
Wrote a thing.
Hat tip to this headline writer.
Congrats Tumblr!
Don’t screw this up Yahoo.
In 2007, I was...
I started tumblr when I was at one of the lowest points of...
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