Online Media Cultist

For anyone that will give me the smidge of a chance, I’ll be happy to talk your ear off about Mad Men, a glorious and cutting and masterful drama centered around a fictional advertising agency in New York City circa 1960. It’s easy to miss as it’s on AMC, but I highly recommend this show. [...]

It turns out that the hype about Facebook this year ain’t just hype. In the UK, Facebook has surpassed reigning global social networking champ MySpace for the first time, with a whopping 541% increase in audience since December 2006 (MySpace rose a relatively sedate 20% during the same period). Meanwhile, Bebo, a company you don’t [...]

I consider myself a web cultist (or web geek if you like), a distinct difference in my view from a gadget cultist or hardware cultist. Don’t get me wrong: I bow at the altar of all things tech, but I consider the computer or device merely the means through which to access the magical interwebs. That [...]

Call me crazy (and people do!) but there’s something that happens when you hang out at a Starbucks. Not so much when you just run in to grab a mountain of caffeination before work or a roadie, but I’m talking about those times when you happen to on an outing with friends, drinking coffee (I [...]

There’s been some chitty-chatter through the weekend about alleged leaked reports that Google has plans to deploy a “Facebook-killer” social networking platform that will allow users and developers to tinker and manipulate a new web platform to their heart’s delights. Tony Hung makes the great point that the real killer app is the ability to get [...]

I noticed recently a few people using Jott – a service that translates voice to text – to post to Twitter, and the web geek that lurks in my soul (he rattles his Dickensian chains in the dark hours of the night, hauntingly) smiled with admiration and delight. But I always wonder if this kind of [...]

In what may be coincidental but is nonetheless interesting timing, stories involving both ABC and NBC making broadcast shows available online (at least for an increment of time after the show premieres on television) have caught the buzz over the last 24 hours. ABC’s deal with AOL locks in distribution via AOL and features advertising embedded [...]

Online Media Cultist hit a milestone today that I’m very proud of: 105 rss subscribers. As these things tend fluctuate in peaks and valleys, we may not see triple digits again anytime soon, but for the moment I’ll take a moment to celebrate… and to thank everyone who has thought enough of this site to sign [...]

I predicted that 2007 would be an explosive year for social news sites, but it really hasn’t been. With the exception of Reddit getting gobbled up by Conde Nast, not a whole lot has happened to interfere with Digg.com’s absolute dominance of the space. Netscape, an experiment in social news coupled with editorial involvement that [...]

If you enjoy reading The New York Times’ columnists online like I do, but don’t like the idea of paying for it (same!), you’re in luck: it was announced today that The New York Times will end its TimesSelect program, opening up a number of areas of the site, including some of its vast archives, [...]