Disqus - Latest Comments for Simon Owens

Re: reddit still not as popular as porn

Simon Owens — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 23:49:51 -0000

It's weird to see Vonage and xanga on the decline. I was sure that millions of 13-year-old girls would continue to populate xanga for years.

Re: VPs coming soon (Scripting News)

Simon Owens — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:58:44 -0000

I hope McCain picks Romney. Not because he's a good candidate, but because who else is going to dish out hilarious lines like that he wants to "double Guantanamo." Romney will add some much-needed (though unintentional) humor to McCain's already-suffering campaign. Especially since McCain will have to let one of the people who continuously hit him below the belt onto his sinking ship. Watching them go down together will be a fitting and instantly- iconic ending to the Bush years.

Re: Sarah Teen USA Palin (Scripting News)

Simon Owens — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 01:51:00 -0000

oh that was good.

Re: Nicholas Carr, Clay Shirky, and the web as liberation

Simon Owens — Wed, 14 May 2008 22:58:06 -0000

Perhaps the web isn't the end-all for harnessing the "cognitive surplus," as Shirky puts it, but it certainly makes a convenient amplifier. It takes small groups and gives them a lot more punch, and that's why the web has given rise to the uber-niche -- you have create a profitable blog, for instance, on something as specific as microbreweries in NYC. The cost of production is driven down and the value of a small crowd (not everybody, as Shirky implies in his title) becomes very powerful.

Re: PR industry: Still grasping for a clue

Simon Owens — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:37:17 -0000

He seemed to show some apprehension that PR people are sometimes able to bypass bloggers or journalists all together, but I really have no problem with this if the PR release really is a worthy piece of news. I mean, what's the major difference between a press release and a company blog? Nothing, really? So what's so bad about directly linking to a press release?

Re: eBay to Craigslist: Oh no you didn’t

Simon Owens — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:44:02 -0000

It's interesting to compare the conflict between ebay and craigslist to the conflict between the newspaper industry and craigslist. While the newspaper silently takes a beating ebay decides to go on the offensive.

Re: The News Hole

Simon Owens — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:53:31 -0000

Hey, I saw that you linked to my International Delete Your Myspace Account Day post earlier. Well, starting at midnight the celebration begins. I put up a new post with detailed instructions of how to delete a myspace profile.

Re: McCain's Campaign of Silence

Simon Owens — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 14:20:22 -0000

If there is a bury brigade at Digg for McCain, it doesn't do a very good job, because several negative stories about him show up on the front page every day. Maybe Diggers are just suffering from McCain-bashing fatigue just as they suffered from pro-Ron Paul fatigue several months ago.

Re: Internet Community Catches a Car Thief: Superb Coordination!

Simon Owens — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 19:20:52 -0000

I agree completely -- someone should create a website specifically for utilizing crowd sourcing to solve crimes. They could even get local police stations to help promote it -- though judging from the article some police agencies don't exactly encourage this sort of rogue detective work.

Re: Today is my 1 year anniversary of going solo

Simon Owens — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 12:43:24 -0000

This is great. I too quit a secure job back in May to go full-time on my own, and though the first three months were incredibly frustrating and sometimes downright terrible, I've finally picked up enough of a client load that I think that the ship has almost righted itself. I hope that within three more months I'm at a very happy place in my career.

Re: The Tumbl Project • How to use Twitter Vote Report

Simon Owens — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:01:12 -0000

Yeah, the Twitter Vote Report is a pretty cool way of aggregating the election day twitter

data. I've been working on a similar election project that utilizes Twitter:<a

href="http://www.anorangeamerica.com/">Freshly Squeezed Tweets. It aggregates tweets

like Twitter Vote Report, but it creates a more abstract visualization of the aggregate

conversation on Twitter showing frequency and context of election-related words. The site

will pull a continuous stream of tweets mentioning Obama and McCain, representing the

most-used terms as a series of bubbles. The bigger the "bubble" the more frequently the

term is being used. You can hover over each word to see a graphical breakdown of each

word's use.

Re: Is “Is” A Throwback?

Simon Owens — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:52:57 -0000

I've definitely been annoyed with how the word "is" limits what I can write in my status. I think it was a good initial method of stressing to members what the status feature is for, but now that we have the hang of it I think they should get rid of it.

Re: How Is Facebook Worth $15 Billion?

Simon Owens — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:55:42 -0000

I don't know if this has been brought up yet, but I think that Facebook should create its own email system that ties in with its inbox message system, so that in addition to being able to send messages internally to your friends on facebook, you can also send messages externally to non-facebook users. that could make it a competitor with gmail

Re: Democracy at it’s finest - TwitterVoteReport.com

Simon Owens — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 10:54:09 -0000

Yeah, the Twitter Vote Report is a pretty cool way of aggregating the election day twitter data. I've been working on a similar project Freshly Squeezed Tweets. It aggregates tweets like Twitter Vote Report, but it creates a more abstract visualization of the aggregate conversation on Twitter showing frequency and context of election-related words. The site will pull a continuous stream of tweets mentioning Obama and McCain, representing the most-used terms as a series of bubbles. The bigger the "bubble" the more frequently the term is being used. You can hover over each word to see a graphical breakdown of each word's use.

Re: 2008/01/24/is-the-blogosphere-being-gamed/

Simon Owens — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:44:41 -0000

I've seen many arguments over the last few days that I should have just deleted my account and moved on with my life, but I think this ignores one basic fact: It took me a whole five minutes to write the post.

It then quickly spread to several facebook groups and then the rest is history. Now I have interview requests with several journalists and one radio station, and I'm just going with the flow. Either way, just deleting an account doesn't do anything to highlight the problems with Myspace -- the very fact that a spokeswoman has mentioned it shows that Myspace is watching this event and taking notice.

A lot of people have pointed out that I should just install adblock. But I'm not against online advertisements, in fact I actually prefer being able to see advertisements because I find the industry fascinating. What I object to is intrusive advertisements -- ones that talk to you or try to move into your field of view.

Besides, the advertisements were just one of many issues. These are issues that Myspace has never addressed. Maybe now they will. Or they won't. We'll see?

Is the blogosphere being gamed? Sure, every diday. just look at digg, it's gaming central

Re: 2008/01/24/is-the-blogosphere-being-gamed/

Simon Owens — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:26:21 -0000

As far as I can tell, the only way to block the music is if you're logged into your account, but many of the times I've followed a link to a myspace page when I'm not logged in, something that I'm sure happens to a lot of people.

Either way, I return to my initial point: This post took me all of 5 minutes to write. I was venting my frustrations that I happened to be feeling at that exact moment. All of sudden a ton of blogs started running with it -- set off mainly by a reaction from your original post. Did it come off as whiny? That's because it was meant to be -- the fact that it struck a chord with so many people just shows that I'm not alone in my frustrations.

Re: For the faint of heart, Archive Binge

Simon Owens — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 15:08:34 -0000

I got a chance recently to interview Howard Tayler for a PBS piece about how web artists are monetizing their content and whether newspaper cartoonists could emulate them: