Though many were disappointed yesterday in Representative John Culberson's (R-TX) partisan scapegoating via Twitter, he did sort of fall backwards over an important issue. The issue wasn't that Democrats were seeking to abridge Congressional freedom of speech as it related to Web 2.0 applications, but that Congressional freedom of speech had already been abridged via previously established draconian gag rules.
2008 will be the year of business networking, says Bernard Lunn, who offers six predictions about some of the social networks that are getting a lot of attention at the moment - Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing and Plaxo.
A recent commentary piece by Alice Mathias in the New York Times says Facebook should really be called “Fakebook” — at least for the student users who first made the social-networking site popular. As she describes it:
The newest feature on Google News - comments solicited from participants in a news story - won't be part of anyone else's news.
My fellow FutureLab blogger, danah boyd, wrote an interesting and controversial essay about the social network migration of high school students: Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace. (Boyd blogs at Many-to-Many and Apophenia about social networking and related topics.) She sums up her point:
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t get most of the reaction to Steve Rubel’s little Twitter-related gaffe (Twaffe?), in which he said that he throws his PC Magazine in the trash, and now has had to apologize to the editor-in-chief of PC Mag, etc. First of all, you mean they still publish PC Mag? Who knew. I stopped subscribing years ago, and so did anyone else with any sense.
PayPerPost offers bloggers payment for writing reviews of products or services. Their business model has drawn criticism from sites like Valleywag, which just happens to be under the Gawker Media umbrella with Gizmodo.
Last month's anti-astroturfing initiative by Australian PR bloggers Trevor Cook and Paull Young got off to a good start with plenty of commentary in support of the idea.
I'd intended to title this post "more twists in the Jupiter tale" but I think the actual title is far more appropriate.
Some of the blogosphere commentary following Robert Scoble's news that he is leaving Microsoft to join Podtech in July is on who will be the next Scoble at Microsoft.