The Downside

Just when you thought the Internet couldn’t become any more cynical, along comes Payperpost.com, a site that pays “professional bloggers” to pimp products and services. Here’s the deal: if you have a blog, you can pick from a list of products and services to write about, and each one has a bounty that you [...]

I guess Bezos is getting tired of the ecommerce biz - Amazon has just released their Askville Social Q&A service, a competitor to sites like Yahoo Answers, MSN Live QnA, and my own Answerbag(which predates all of them, incidentally. Not being snippy, just pointing it out so the title of this post doesn’t sound [...]

Many of us had imaginary friends when we were growing up. Many of us even gave those friends names, talked to them when we were lonely, and hosted tea parties with them. Some of us pretended they were our personal slaves and ordered them to rub our feet.
But this is 2006, and the [...]

That’s right, last week Demand Media bought my site, Answerbag, from InfoSearch Media, and I will be going along with it. It was just eight months ago that I sold Answerbag to InfoSearch, and now we’ll find a new home again on Santa Monica’s 3rd Street Promenade with Demand Media.
The deal is somewhat bittersweet [...]

Social Q&A site Yedda (competitor to my own site Answerbag), sent me an interesting email today. For some reason, “based on the information in my profile,” they think I know something about “that smell.”

I always wonder why people copy business models that haven’t taken off. If you’re going to improve upon the model, that’s cool, but if the existing model isn’t exactly a hit, why copy it with the exact same model?
Amazon apparently looked at barely-recognized mobile Q&A service AskMeNow and said to their collective selves, hey [...]

According to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo is rumored to be buying Facebook for 1 billion dollars. That’s right, 1 billion. (Full disclosure: I own stock in Yahoo.) Bambi Francisco confirms the rumor, but says a deal is still a ways off.
Why, one may ask, would Yahoo need Facebook? Perhaps [...]

Six years ago, those of us in the Internet industry saw a massive collapse. It was created by a huge influx of money into any company with a .com in its name as VCs hoped to take companies public based on their number of users and brand awareness rather than their basic business fundamentals. [...]

We are on the cusp of a complete paradigm shift in technology. Just as it took humanity many years to learn how to efficiently use the combustion engine to propel itself around the planet, we are just now learning what the Internet and wireless technologies can enable us to do. We’re just scratching [...]

Within 5 years, you won’t hear the word podcast. You’ll forget the word podcast. It will go the way of the fax machine because it’s not a technology. It is a black hole of technology, sucking in all that is truly interesting and innovative. It’s the 8-track of the Internet.

First off, [...]