Fans of comments on tech sites win one, lose another

enabled The Mac-oriented technology blog Daring Fireball has never allowed comments, but some clever bastard decided to add them on their own. This will probably end well.
disabled After a rough battle with trolls, super-popular gadget blog Engadget decided to shut off comments for a while, partly to ban certain ungrateful users.

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

one Newspapers are wasting their time covering time-sensitive information long after it happened.
two Websites should do some of their own reporting instead of relying on newspapers to do it for them.
three Both sides should stop being angry at each other and find some freaking common ground. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

$42,548 the amount that the average blogger takes home each year; hobbyists bring home around $14,777
$122,222 the amount that professional bloggers take home; very little of that comes from the blog itself source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

Regulating every last one of us in our tiny, imaginary boardrooms (in my mind, mine is mahogany-paneled and has a Häagen-Dasz fountain) is as ludicrous as not skipping past the advertisements on one’s DVR.
TheAwl.com co-founder Choire Sicha • Discussing in the New York Times why the FTC’s blogger marketing disclosure regulations are silly. His argument? We’ve reached a point where everyone is a marketer without even realizing it. Really? We thought it was to keep these guys in check. • source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

100,000 copies the sales of the book from the creators of the popular “I Can Has Cheezburger?” humor blog
13 weeks amount of time Lolcats took over the New York Times bestseller list; they’re not alone source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

We’re only using AP content tomorrow. Consider it civil disobedience. The Associated Press has made a lot of questionable decisions lately, what with that whole going against bloggers and Google News thing. But the latest takes the cake – they went after a radio station and AP affiliate for embedding a YouTube video on their site. (WTF?) AP put up the embed code on YouTube for people to link. So, as a protest, tomorrow, we’ll only post news from AP sites. We want them to get hits from us because they’re great. We hope the AP understands. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

The dispute The Associated Press, one of the most-quoted and most-highly-regarded wire services, wants to battle Web sites who use their content – even under commentary and fair use standards – head-on. “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under some very misguided, unfounded legal theories,” said AP chair Dean Singleton, who we cited directly from an insightful AP article on the topic.
Our suggestion The wire service currently is still debating how to do this, but here’s how we think they should handle it. They should set up a satellite, AP-1, put it into orbit, implant mind chips into their audience and whenever someone even thinks about reading a newspaper article anywhere besides a newspaper, they’ll get a small, corrective electric shock. Sound idiotic, malformed and unrealistic? That’s because it is, just like this stupid idea.
We’ll just use ReutersIf this crazy idea that a bunch of out-of-touch newspaper publishers conjured up gains legs, it’s OK. There are lots of other places to gather content. And to blame this on blogs and Google News, this is beyond unwise; you could speed up the very road to irrelevancy that you’re trying to prevent with a move like this. Only people who don’t understand the Internet would suggest this idea. Good job screwing it up, old guys. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

02 Feb 2010 23:01