Online Media Cultist

TechCrunch rolled out a redesign of its site today. Lots and lots of white space, super minimalist. Now, I get wanting to strip down design to get a really clean look, and Mark Hendrickson notes that the idea was to move toward a less bloated looking and faster loading site. I get all of that. I’m not [...]

Huge congrats to Blogcritics! It was announced today that Blogcritics – an online magazine-meets-blog community that I have a long and continuing relationship with – is being acquired by Technorati: Today, we’ve announced the acquisition of Blogcritics.org. If you’re a blogger, you might be familiar with them (and they’ve been part of the Technorati Media network since [...]

There are a handful of really good places to discover books and interact and share with other booklovers. Amazon is the titan of this space, of course, but there are other scrappy contenders that serve some cool functions, particularly on the social media side of things. Shelfari has long been a standout in terms of its [...]

Speaking of no brainers, CNN.com is getting on board with other major online news outlets in providing embed code for video clips. There’s almost no use in not providing this standard feature. Attention video producers: If someone takes the time to grab your video and put it up on their blog, they are in effect promoting your [...]

Technology is revolutionizing the ways in which content can be distributed and consumed. That’s a fancy-ish way of saying that more stuff can now be seen in more places than ever before. That turn has increased the desire for consumers to demand more of what they want when and where they want it. Therefore, the [...]

It’s counterintuitive. Fewer people can accomplish more than more people. Simple ideas are more powerful than complex ones. This is the basic argument of a great little piece called The power of small teams, by Avi Muchnick, and in terms of the web worlds, I very much agree. Muchnick relates Jeff Bezos’ concept of the “two-pizza” team, [...]

Stumbled across some interesting data (via Lost Remote) running down the top 30 “Online Current Events & Global News Destinations for July 2008.” MSNBC rolls in as the top destination, with Yahoo! News coming in at a close second. CNN, AOL, and the New York Times round out the top 5, with Google News sitting at [...]

Weird news item #1: Fox News is expanding its presence on Facebook Fox News Channel, which is part of the same company (News Corporation) as MySpace, is expanding its social networking presence on MySpace’s leading social networking competition, Facebook. The New York Times speculates that the reason may be due to MySpace’s “existing partnership with MSNBC. Weird [...]

I spend a lot of time reading blogs. Part of the fun of that is sharing what I’ve learned and what I think via Google Reader shared items, FriendFeed, Twitter, and of course here at the old Online Media Cultist stomping grounds. Living in Los Angeles and working as a web producer for 3jane IndieClick, I [...]

I hear Alexa ranks thrown around with regularity, and I do it all the time myself. Everyone knows that its ranking system is far from perfect… and yet it still plays an important role in how websites are thought about, and even valued. There are a number of other third-party website traffic analytics tools that [...]