DISQUS

This post inspired me to write this http://mashable.com/2008/07/07/2019-the-evening...

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Hello, thank you for reading and replying to the article. I'd just like to emphasize that what I'm talking about here is not keeping it simple for simplicity's sake; I'm talking about keeping it simple and letting the community create the extra features for you. Twitter would be nothing without its API and all those wonderful little apps based on it.

Heh. Surprisingly similar to my blog post, although I haven't read your coverage before. I agree, this is desperation; Yahoo pretty much has no choice but to accept.

Well, it's hard to say, but the line should be drawn at linking and not linking. Personally, I like to link in text, but the via link was starting to emerge as a standard; I honestly thought that for some reason people may like it better. Of course, everyone would prefer a big fat bold link at the beginning of the text, but you can't always do that. I think I link fairly (I was not the author of any of those three article Louis mentioned), but some people may have too high expectations when it comes to crediting their work. BTW, I once reacted when my entire story was practically stolen on a high profile site, without any credit, and you know what I got out of it? A nice little via link at the end of the article.

Hey, Mathew. Although I wasn't called as one of the great writers at Mash (j/k, nhf), and although I'm late to the game, cause I've been ill, I'd like to shortly comment.

It is, in my opinion, unfair to call out Mashable for not linking/not attributing the stories to the source. Mashable always links. There are dozens of sites out there, big sites, that don't link (like Ars Technica) and sites that are basically linkblogs, with most of their material being taken off other blogs with a short comment (Lifehacker). The fact that someone in some text (and Mashable produces dozens of pieces daily) didn't attribute a quote (although he did link) doesn't prove much else except the fact that Mashable is a blog. Yup, that's it: it's no NYT (yet (: ), and people writing there are bloggers, and that's why there are no strict rules about things like that.

Personally, I am a professional journalist and I do not consider myself a blogger. I write for several publications in several languages, and if someone finds such an unattributed quote in my text (anywhere), it's an error on my part. But calling out Mashable for being some sort of evil blog that doesn't link or attribute stories is not fair, because, as I've said, Mashable takes great care to link to the source.

You should see the article I've written about the whole deal. But I'm afraid I'm not going to publish it, someone might get offended (;.

I've read that Last.FM post just now, and pity I haven't done it earlier, because I have something to say about it.

Their explanation of why they're not participating in the "day of silence" is satisfactory to me. They're a UK company, with a wider scope than just online radio, etc.

But, there's a big problem in that blog post. Nowhere does it say that the increase in price is a bad thing. In fact, they use the good old RIAA lingo: "artist make a living out of this; we want to pay the artists; it's only fair". Well, artists were paid before, too - now they're just paid more. Hell, why not triple the rates, then? Why not give all your revenue, and whatever change you have in your pocket, to the artist?

Because it's not about the artists. The RIAA has created an artificial economics of scarcity, and thus they can set the rules as they please. Why doesn't bread cost 100 dollars? Because no one would buy, that's why. And someone else would make cheaper bread. But the RIAA is arbitrarily setting the price of their "bread" and suing everyone who doesn't comply, while at the same time controlling the media which create the demand. It's all much better explained at the many great articles over at Techdirt.

My point is that Last.FM did not only fail to support their fellow internet radio companies; they fail to criticize RIAA's bullying and arbitrary price-setting; in fact, they seem fine with it, which is a much worse offense.

I got to level 80 at the one hundred challenge. After that it gets freakishly hard, and I chose to have a life. But, the game took a couple of days of my life, and I'm never getting them back (:

And yes, very good article by Om.

SMS is (in most cases) one-to-one. Twitter is one-to-many. In my opinion, Twitter is not going to go far, simply because all of its functionality could be easily replaced by any Instant Messaging program. I honestly wonder why haven't any of them reacted yet.

That's one nice storey (;.

I'm trying to remember one instance when the corporate heads managed to beat something like YouTube that got popular virally (without buying anything) and I can't. History repeats itself (;.

I think that the biggest "offense" by Wired here is simply pushing the subject too hard for their own good. It's a big publication, it shouldn't be spending 2 stories a day and 5 stories a week just to make the competition look bad. And I don't mean that just from the ethical standpoint, I mean that from a professional standpoint: do readers of Wired really care about the bury brigade so much that they want to read about it twice or thrice a day?