A fair bit of controversy about over allegations that Mike Arrington of Tech Chruch fame takes kick backs for favourable reviews.

I don’t know the basis for these rumours, and I’m only an occasional Tech Chrunch reader, mainly because I personally find that Mike Arrington’s reviews tend to (usually) be nothing more than blind cheering for Web 2.0 startups without any objective analysis of whether these startups actually have depth in terms of a business plan and potential, literally the issue of solutions without problems.

Having said all of that though, Mike Arrington has become a poster boy for the Web 2.0 movement with Tech Chrunch, and there is little doubt that the site has been highly successful.

And with success comes the knockers, the tall poppy syndrome. I personally experienced it at times whilst writing at The Blog Herald, and I even occasionally get it now with b5media, although less so now personally as I’ve taken a more behind the scenes role (one could argue that the target has become smaller in terms of public perception).

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Just reading this article about Martha Stewart setting up a MySpace style social networking site aimed at women aged 25-45 and I immediately thought of something I wrote the other day for a paper on Consumer Behaviour and Blog hosting services in a section on Subculture. What follows is only part of the paper, but it makes some interesting points in terms future marketing directions, enjoy.

Subculture

Subculture is the distinct cultural group that exists as an identifiable segment within a larger, more complex multicultural society (Schiffman et. al. 2001:406).

Subculture has played an important roll in the development and expansion of blogging, and will continue to do so into the future.

Blogging itself first arose from a sub-culture commonly referred to as “geeks”, a group dominated by technologically informed men. (Riley 2005).

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What a brilliant idea, from ISP Planet:

M2Z’s goal is ?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?Ǭ¶ provide free high speed connections to 95 percent of U.S. consumers without any recurring fees. This is a grand undertaking.”
-M2Z FCC request

Kleiner Perkins, history’s most successful venture capital firm, is backing John Muleta and Milo Medin’s offer to unwire the entire United States. 384/128 will be free while they’ll sell higher speeds, ads, voice and much else. In return for 20 megahertz of spectrum, M2Z will pay a 5 percent royalty to the U.S.

It will be interesting to see if the US Government backs the proposal. Could it ever happen in Australia? Not while the Government still owns Telstra, but imagine it, free wireless over 95% of the population of Australia…you could take your laptop anywhere (with a half decent population centre) and get online….ok, I’m dreaming, it will never happen here as long as both Political parties remain the lapdogs of big media.

Social Networking remains very, very hot. Just a day after the E-Commerce Times ran this story about kiddies starting to turn away from MySpace because it’s become a bit to mainstream, and that they are moving to sites such as bebo, Paid Content reports that bebo has just raised $15 million in VC from Benchmark Capital.

What I also found completely amazing was their membership numbers: 24 million registered users and rising. That’s about 35-40% of MySpace, but in a marketplace in which quite recently MySpace was said to have over 80% of the market, I’d think NewsCorp and Rupert would want to watch their backs with this mob.

Tags: bebo, social networking

Wise words from the old man of blogging:

How to compete with FeedBurner….First, I’d either do a deal with a registrar, become a registrar, or merge or partner with one. It’s absolutely essential that the user own the domain that their feed is hosted at, so that, in case of emergency, they can switch to a different hosting service. If they don’t own the domain, it doesn’t matter how many promises the vendor makes, or how well-intentioned they are, an act of god could result in a blackout of a huge portion of the RSS network. It’s irresponsible to host a large percentage of the net’s RSS feeds at one domain. I would set it up so it’s the other way around. My hosting service won’t host your feed unless you own the domain.

My thoughts exactly, and the very problem I have with Feedburner, I don’t like the idea of giving up control of my feed.

Great thinking Dave.

Tags: Dave Winer, Feedburner

Lots of debate emerging over the new feed service “feedpass“, a new service that allows your feed to have essentially it’s own multi-faceted feed subscription page, mainly because they allow you to create pages for blogs you don’t own, and earn revenue off it.

I won’t get into the whole copyright/ theft issue some are claiming, but essentially I like the idea, and I’ve dropped my buttons on the right hand side of duncanriley.com (at the time of writing at least) and put up the feedpass subscribe button. Click on it to check it out.

Michael Arrington at TechChrunch argues that feedpass does nothing:

In the end this just can’t compete with Feedburner, a much more robust solution for publishers. Feedburner provides stats and other tools that Feedpass doesn’t have at this time.

But I’d argue there is a reason I’m more attracted to feedpass as opposed to Feedburner, and that because feedpass doesn’t hijack my feed. There’s no need to change my feed details to a feedpass URL to use feedpass, as there is with Feedburner. Every link on my feedpass page is my RSS feed, not one delivered by another party. Sure, Feedburner provides a whole lot more in terms of extras, but I’ve always remained weary of basically signing away control of my feed to a third party. In this regards, feedpass fills an as yet uncatered for hole in the market, and I’m willing to give them a shot….at the end of the day if I decide I don’t want to use feedpass, I drop them, no problems with URL’s for feeds or anything of the like.

Tags: feedpass

Looks like Mike Arrington got into a whole pile of trouble whilst I was away after shafting his web designer. Lot of coverage here, here, here, here and here.

Personally I don’t particularly dislike the design, the layout itself isn’t too bad, although I’m not a huge fan of some of the whitespace, fonts and sizing, but the fundamentals are there of a reasonably good layout. What I absolutely can not stand on the site is the Green. The Green just doesn’t work. It’s not even a solid green. Yuk.

Given the Google Blog Search was never really that exciting to start with, this isn’t before time, from WebProNews:

Google Blog Search [now] allows users to narrow their search according to the span of dates in which they’re interested. And according to the company’s announcement, they “also incorporated some improvements in search quality that should make your blog-search experience even better.”

I haven’t had a chance to check out the changes yet, anyone notice them yet?

Tags: Google Blog Search

The 360 reports on a proposal to form essentially a commodities style market for advertising in the United States:

A consortium of some of the biggest advertisers in the United States has plans to move the ad industry out the era of the cattle exchange and into the internet age. They’re looking for someone to build an ADSDAQ – an online exchange similar to the NASDAQ where advertisers and media owners can trade.

Interesting idea. I wonder if blogs could play a role?

Every one raves about Seth Godin. Personally, I’ve always thought the hype was way out of control, and as much as a lot of what he says makes sense, I’ve always thought most of it was common sense as opposed to anything ground breaking, and perhaps very well articulated, but nothing really more than this.

Seth of course, seems to lap the hype up. Instead of down playing the hype he’s allowed it to bubble, and like any bubble it’s eventually bound to burst. Techchrunch predicts that Squidoo is going to burst the Seth Godin bubble…well at least give it a rather large leak.

Of course the mettle of the man will be surely tested once Squidoo fails (as it seems it’s going to….I mean $30 is your top payment after 6 months? If we were running b5 like that no one would be working for us any more). Lets see how Seth Godin handles failure. If he pulls through and handles it with style and panache, then I might consider joining the fan club.