Red Herring, the tech industry’s essential source for Silicon Valley venture capital news and buzz during the go-go ‘90s but since fallen on hard times, has just rolled out a new beta online platform that it hopes will reduce computing costs and attract new readers and advertisers through the addition of a number of social […]

Is Linkedin in play? 
Most of the recent flurry of reporting about Facebook has focused on the impact that its wildly successful foray into the world of adult membership is having on MySpace but there are signs that it is also having an effect on LinkedIn, the original social network for business users. 
The signs are there, […]

Now it can be told.  For the past few months, one of my favorite social software startups, Blogtronix, has been working with publishing giant Reuters to create a new online community around environmental markets called ReutersInteractive, which quietly opened in beta last week.   For those of us who are fans and charity users (Social Media […]

Jigsaw is a fast-growing, controversial online marketplace that lets people trade their business contacts for more contacts or cash.  Co-founded by veteran sales executive Jim Fowler, Jigsaw aims to become the world’s largest Rolodex.  Before Jigsaw, Fowler spent more 12 years selling marketing and collaboration software.
1. What is Jigsaw? Give us the elevator speech.
Jigsaw is the world’s […]

Let me give you the verdict first:  Ning is a game changer, as important to the mass adoption of social networking as Blogger and Wordpress have been to blogging.  Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreesen’s new network-building platform is so totally DIY your grandmother can go live in about ten minutes and has features that big corporations pay boutique design firms beaucoup dinero to build […]

Way back on February 9, 2004, I wrote a famous (well, Doc Searls
linked to it) post called The Internet Does Not Scale/The Internet Is Not Random (scroll down)  on the collapse of Howard Dean’s mostly internet-fueled campaign in the cornfields of Iowa.  It said, in part:
The Internet is a peculiarly self-obsessed, inwardly-looking little world so […]

For the past year and a half or so Connectbeam has been wandering in the wilderness telling anyone who will listen that social bookmarking was not simply popular applications like del.icio.us or Furl that allow web addicts to mark and share their favorite links online but an enterprise tool with real potential to help companies […]

It’s a familiar story.  An occupying army is bogged down in hostile territory threatened on one side by a well-armed, well-financed insurgency and on the other by a group of innovative and resourceful fanatics.  Is the wisest course to begin a phased withdrawal or should you pour more troops and resources into the trouble zone in […]

Pew Internet & American Life Project just released a survey on social network usage that confirms what we had assumed:  social networking is a giant and genuine sociological phenomenon among American teenagers. More than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, according to a new national survey of teenagers.  MySpace is […]

If you want an idea of what’s ailing America these days, shuffle over to Digg and check out the top posts for the past 24 hours.  Top of the pile as I write this is a little self-reverential ditty called “Digg.com “Site Down” Feature Suggestion (for Digged-Out Sites” which has garnered 3394 gestures of affection from […]