I was in my element last week basking in the presence of grassroots media organizations, nonprofits and cause campaigns at the NetSquared conference. Here are some impressive efforts that I hadn’t heard much about: • Freecycle.org ("changing the world one gift at a time"). With 5,253,000 members across the globe, it’s a grassroots nonprofit movement […]
Greatest hits of consumer justice on the Internet
Chris Ladd in the latest issue of Good magazine: Consumer Justice Online. Some great examples here of the power of the Internet to redress the balance of power between corporations and citizens. Excerpts: Dave Stolte, the guy with the $3,000 iPhone bill, struck out dealing with AT&T’s service representative. Stolte would have to pay, they […]
Ballmer: No more newspapers in 10 years
Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, predicting the future of media, predicts that all print publications will die within the next decade. He couldn’t be more wrong, but that’s not surprising, given Microsoft’s track record of late. When I worked for Microsoft in 1997-98, I found a lot of Microsofties who didn’t read any print […]
Pandora: the site for personalized radio
At the Digital Hollywood conference last month I appeared on a panel with Jessica Steel, vice president of business development for Pandora, and afterward she spent a few minutes talking about how Pandora’s music recommendation system works. Pandora is my favorite music site (Last.fm is another), and they’re constantly serving up artists that I hadn’t […]
Mashing up public records
In this 8-minute video interview I conducted Wednesday at the NetSquared conference — notice the venue: Cisco, not a media company — founder-CEO Michael Schnuerle discusses Louisville-based YourMapper.com, a young startup that hopes to make a business in part by helping the public gain public access to public records. The company has already licensed its […]