Entries Tagged 'Social Media' ↓

So Microsoft tries to make a bid for Yahoo in a move that is being ridiculed on numerous blogs. When will companies stop trying to buy their way into being cool? It doesn’t work. If you aren’t Apple, don’t try to be. Arthur Mitchell says it better than I could.

1. Your friends routinely throw sheep at you. You do not find this at all disturbing.
2. You start dreaming your friends are all werewolves and you’re a vampire. You do not slayall of them as you need at least one to play Scrabulous with.
3. You’ve groped, dry-humped, licked and trout-slapped 190 women that you’ve never met in person.
4. Your Facebook profile has more apps than your computer does.
5. The majority of the text messages you receive are friends’ status updates.

Originally posted on Davezilla

I don’t know how I missed this. Haven’t seen anyone talking about it. Yahoo Photos is set to shut down on September 20th. It’s certainly understandable. Yahoo Photos gets zero publicity. Their other media property, Flickr, makes the press almost daily.

Bloggers face several ethical issues, but one that is among the most confusing is that of disclosure. Not being members of the press, most bloggers are not given a set of ethics to read and sign. Journalists do and failing to abide by them can cost them their job.

Morgan Webb, formerly of TechTV is under fire from a few loud members of the blogosphere right now for that very issue. While it seems that certain people are taking this way out of context, and blowing it out of proportion without learning all the facts, they are right to bring attention to the issue of disclosure.

Read/WriteWeb’s Josh Cantone sums it up nicely:

Disclosure is a tricky business and as a practice is still ill-defined even in the realm of traditional journalism. The general idea is that anything that might be seen as a potential conflict of interest between a writer and the subject of his story should be disclosed to the reader. If I invested in a startup I am writing about, for example, or if the CEO is my best friend, I should disclose that fact. But it’s not always so cut and dry.

Josh also points out the times when you should disclose:

1. financial association
2. employment
3. competition
4. and personal involvement

The second point, employment, is of concern to the authors of Buzz Lounge. As employees of an ad agency, we feel we must be honest and upfront about who we work for whenever we are responding to comments on other blogs. Besides, it’s so much easier to be honest, isn’t it?

According to Mashable, Treehugger, the largest and most popular green site, has been purchased by the Discovery Channel’s parent company (Discovery Communications) for US $10 million. This really marks a turning point in mainstream media taking social media seriously.