A discussion that has been going on for a while among the tech bloggers and Twitterati is the idea that RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is dead. A study published last October found that 78% of U.S. online adults did not use it and only 19% of those who didn’t had any interest in using it […]

An inordinate people are coming in to view my four-year-old post “Google Shut Down for 15 Minutes, Thought Hacked.”  A couple minutes of digging reveals the likely cause. Michael Arrington reports, in a piece with the odd title “Twitter Mania: Google Got Shut Down. Apple Rumors Heat Up,” that there are rumors that Apple is […]

Steve Rubel points to what I hope is a trend. Interesting discussion overnight between my friends Robert Scoble and MIke Arrington over whether Robert’s personal brand diminished because of his love for Friendfeed. How refreshing and retro that this conversation is actually taking place via blogs instead of just on Twitter and Friendfeed, where I […]

Stilgherrian has attended one too many Future of Media conferences and he has a long tirade for Old Media journalists whining about bloggers and professional standards. What’s tiring about this false dichotomy is that it compares the highest ideal of journalism with the lowest grade of personal blogging about what the cat did yesterday and […]

Good line, purportedly from Jon Stewart: Obama is not upset about the cartoon that calls him a Muslim extremist. Who gets upset about cartoons? Muslim extremists. via Steve Garfield. See “New Yorker Obama Terrorist Cover” for background and commentary on the story. UPDATE:  Amusingly, I see via Memeorandum, the hubbub goes on.  Obama is continuing […]

Bruce Ackerman has read a novel and heard unsubstantiated rumors and from these concocted a Constitutional crisis which he’s convinced the folks at Slate to publish. New Yorker writer Jane Mayer’s new book, The Dark Side, opens with a shocker. Apparently sometime in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan issued a “secret executive order” that in […]

Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman camped out overnight in front of a Washington, DC Apple store in order to be among the first to get one of the new iPhones.  Megan assures us that this is a mere sociological exercise for her: “I feel no desperate urge to get my hands on one of the […]

Some gas stations are secretly charging credit card users more, ABC News reports. (Video here.) Many Americans have taken up a new hobby — hunting for the gas station with the lowest prices. But the hunt has gotten exponentially harder as the price of oil has skyrocketed and the posted price may not even be […]

Friend of OTB Aaron Brazell was on NPR very early today talking about the controversy over Congress and social media. The cause of the Twittering representatives has been taken up by bloggers like Aaron Brazell of Technosailor. “Frankly, we’re in 2008, and we have a government for the people and by the people,” says Brazell, […]

Daniel Strauss sat through a session at the center-left New America Foundation yesterday and came away with an epiphany about John McCain’s campaign: “It’s what he’s saying, not how he says it.” Jeremy Rosner observed, A lot of people have noted he’s just very incoherently between the right and the center, between offshore drilling and […]

Duncan Riley laments the demise of the blogroll. Once upon a time in the land of the blogs, the blogroll reigned suprmeme. Everyone had a blogroll, and it was a great way to discover new and interesting blogs. But somewhere along the way blogrolls fell out of favor, and you don’t seem them much at […]

Louis Gray believes the importance of blog linkage is declining, noting that, “I’ve seen traffic from other blogs to be driving an ever-declining percentage of visits to my site, swamped by social media tools, aggregation sites, and of course, Google search.” He offers three likely explanations: 1. People are relying on aggregators to find them […]

Mark Glaser calls attention to one of the strange dilemmas of modern life: deciding whom to “friend” on various social media sites like Facebook and MySpace. Is the person a friend, a real friend, or someone who wants to be a friend? Should I add them as a friend because it’s polite, or ignore them […]