Author: admin

  • 90% chance that Google is in talks to acquire YouTube, 10% chance it will happen

    I mentioned in passing, in this post, my theory on leaks. You see, in this post I used the figure that 50% of all leaks are authorised by the company involved as either a way to talk up/ hype a launch, or as a way to market test an idea or product. I used that figure because I thought it would be close to tangible, in that it would be hard for many people to argue with it. However my gut feeling tells me something else. I actually really think that the figure is 90%, but I can’t prove it, and I think that this whole Google/ YouTube negotiation stuff fits into the 90%. It’s controlled. Way to controlled. I don’t for one second believe that somewhere along the communications chain that some one has leaked without authority. Case in point: the b5media VC funding. Sure, we are only small fry, but get this: we told all of our bloggers hours before it became public. Of 90 odd people, none of them leaked it. Sure, Google is a whole lot bigger again, but Google employees are loyal. So to are their lawyers. So to would be the Youtube inner team and their lawyers. Mark my words, they would have swarn everyone involved to a strict cone of silence. The chances of someone leaking is about 1 in 10, so it’s not impossible, but 9/10 chance it’s unlikely, which is why I totally think the Techcruch rumour is true. Some one got the green light to leak this news, so that Google could see how the market would react. And hence, after days of free market testing (feedback) Google now has a decision to make. On what I’ve read, if they thinking about buying YouTube, they will. Sure, there’s been some negative stuff, but hey, no one really knows who Mark Cuban is outside of the United States anyway!. It’s a developing story, but one that will no doubt end up as being one of those stories that will last 20-30 years in folklore 🙂

     

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  • There are no rules

    Sometimes I find it’s difficult to know what to write for my weekly column at The Blogging Times, and then I just threw out the rule book.

    Here’s a side thought though, is there a word to describe this style of writing? Chartreuse does it best, I’m literally a pale imitation, and yet it’s somewhat liberating. It’s fun even when I poke fun at myself..the hidden part is the “functionally illiterate” part, it’s one of she who must be obeyed’s favourite ways of describing me, but hey, I’m not the PR guru she is. For starters I tend to be too honest with people, even when it’s probably to my own detriment. 🙂

  • Al-Qaeda ‘planned Ashes attack

    I’d normally make a joke about Shane Warne and drugs at this stage was this story not serious, from News.com.au

    THE Australian and English cricket teams were to be killed with sarin gas by some of those responsible for the July 7 attacks in London, a friend of a terrorist claims.

    The man, known as Ahmed Hafiz, has told The Sunday Times newspaper in Britain that two of the suicide bombers involved in last July’s attacks were to have been part of an al-Qaeda plot to kill the two cricket sides, News Limited papers have reported.

    Hafiz claims the men, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, were instructed in 2004 to get jobs as stewards at Edgbaston, the venue for the second Ashes Test on August 4 last year.

    They were then to pump sarin – a highly toxic nerve gas – into the two teams’ dressing rooms during the game.

    Struth. Remember that Sarin is the gas used by those whack jobs a couple of years back in the Tokyo subway. Not nice stuff. I’m sure there will be more on this story in the days to come.

     

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  • The new Firefox is lightning quick

    Just read Scoble saying that the new Firefox, currently at RC 2 is quick. He’s right, just downloaded it then, I’ve immediately noticed the different.

    Also a tip for Firefox users, if you haven’t downloaded it yet, get DownThemAll.

    From their page:

    “DownThemAll is all you can desire from a download manager: it features an advanced accelerator that increases speed up to 400%, it allows you to pause and resume downloads at any time and, last but not least, it’s fully integrated into your favorite browser!”

    I’ve actually had it installed for a while but wasn’t using it for my downloads. I started about 2 weeks ago…downloads are just that much quicker. For example, the download of FF RC2 which was about 5.8mb downloaded on my 2mb cable connection in about 7-8 seconds at an average of 200kb/s…incredibly quick compared to the standard FF download feature…indeed, it looks like the Mozilla team hasn’t done a thing in the new version to improve this feature of Firefox either, which is a shame,anyhow: DownThemAll is highly recommended.

     

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  • News.com.au in very bad taste

    News.com.au reports on Lauren Huxley, a women severely attacked last year returning to the Spring Races. Simple story you might think, if it wasn’t for the caption under the picture:

    news

    An alleged attack?

    WTF? Was it a love bite that put Lauren in hospital? Did she do it to herself? Alleged?!?! Someone call Media Watch Now! This is bloody disgraceful.

  • Viral Marketing 101

    Credit where it’s due, Quadszilla over at SEO Black Hat might just be on to something with this post.

  • Big Brother is alive and well in England

    The Guardian reports on a chap getting two years and eight months in prisons for the crime of “hate speech”. Apparently the goose wrote some racially offensive stuff on a website. Get this, he got an additional 6 months for possession of kiddie porn! Yep, apparently in England using racial abuse is over 5 times worse than possession of kiddie porn! Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m not condoning for one minute what this guy wrote, but nearly 3 years in jail for it? There’s something very, very wrong in a society that jails people for speech, no matter how offensive it is, and at a rate 5x longer than a truly hideous crime against society: kiddie porn. Big Brother is here, and it looks like he’s a paedophile…and most likely black as well.

  • Tesltra sacks Blogger for being some what honest

    Cam has a scoop. Idiots. Good help someone that they write the truth, and in this case it was only in part the truth, after all, we all know how completely and utterly up sh*t creek Telstra are as a Telco 🙂

  • Technorati launches Vlog, but wouldn’t it be nice if they actually focused on the core product first

    Technorati has launched a daily Vlog. Great. Great way to promote the service, but I can’t help but ask the question: why spend time doing a Vlog when your rank service is still broken? Case in point:

    technorati

    Notice the 862 incoming links down the bottom, and yet it’s ranked on 628 links? There are 37% more links than is showing in the rank line. But it’s not just my own personal blog either:

    lohan

    Indeed, I can go through just about every single blog by b5media and get the same result, as well as thousands of other blogs as well. The rank index isn’t being updated. Please, make the video blog shorter, and use that time to get someone to press the magic button once a day! People trust you Technorati: they use your statistics to judge their own sites and those of others. You’re not repaying this trust because you’re not paying attention to one of the core features your users like to use. Indeed, you’re making video blogs instead.

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  • Liz Strauss joins the Opinion section at The Blogging Times…and yes, I still dig this as a business plan

    Congrats to b5’s Successful Blogger (literally) Liz Strauss on news that’s she’s joined me and the party that is happening at The Blogging Times.

    I’ve got nothing to disclose at this point about the site, I don’t own a share in it, but I do get paid a small retainer to write a weekly column at the site…but I digress. As a strategy Minic and Char keep bringing in cool people to add to the site, and as a value ad strategy for me it works. Got to say I’m enjoying Mr Angry’s angry rants, Howard’s posts (when he posts) and Erin continues to improve like a fine wine. I also might be a bit old fashioned when I say this, but I actually like the idea also in terms of it mimicking a MSM publication which has it’s set opinion section..although I’m still not sure Minic what you’re doing with your URL structure set…for example I’m not sure why each post seems to have two actual entries and comment sections therein…but you can’t win them all.

    Over at my old stomping ground The Blog Herald Matt’s going really well with the podasting side of it. Touch wood I’ll be, if and when we sort a time out, next weeks guest on the podcast. Different strategy to The Blogging Times, but as a consumer it works for me as well, both blogs have different styles and in many ways have become more complimentary to each other.

    And for the record, no. b5media isn’t interested in (ever) reentering the blog reporting space. Personally I don’t want to die of a heart attack at the age of 31. After years of playing that game I just enjoy seeing others do it now.