Online Media Cultist

I don’t mean to pick on Salon.com. I really don’t. It’s been one of my favorite online magazines for just about this entire decade. But I just can’t help pointing out… oddities where I see them. My attention is not focused on the site content at all, which is consistently high quality (this Heather Havrilesky roundup [...]

New post up over at louisgray.com: Goodbye 2008, Hello 2009 On the Social Web. Here’s a clip: Whatever happens, we know there’s going to be no shortage of things to talk about, hash over, debate, and bitchmeme about in the year ahead. One of the most interesting topics I came across that in some ways combines [...]

It’s A Wonderful Life is one of my favorite movies of all time, so it’s bizarre, hilarious, and mildly disturbing all at once to see this headline on The Consumerist: Was George Bailey A Subprime Lender? Quoting Portfolio (link not available for some reason), we get the following rationale: But consider this: Perhaps Mr. Potter wasn’t [...]

It’s been a great year overall here on the OMC. Though there were a few lengthy periods where I was not able to post a lot due to work commitments and other projects, I really feel that I’m hitting the end of the year strong. I’m also thinking a lot about the future of this site. [...]

I’ve published my first column over at louisgray.com, called Social Media Advertising: Crossing the Streams, thanks much to Louis for the opportunity! Here’s a quick excerpt: I think allowing users to vote on ads that they like and have them “bubble up” to the top, social news-style, might be a rather clever addition to the Digg platform. [...]

Free online music service Pandora has amassed an impressive 20 million users in its three years of existence, according to TechCrunch (citing Twitter!). Back in July, I gushed in an article entitled I’ve fallen in love… with Pandora, noting the killer combination of attributes included the fact that it’s easy, powerful, addictive, and info rich: This is [...]

The Flatliners are amazing, rocked out to them the entire ride into work this morning. I’m a sucker for an aggressive ska/punk beat, and these guys are tight, melodic, and know how to write killer hooks. This is Freds Got Slacks.

I’ve been spending a lot of time over on Twitter these last several months, and it seems like a growing chunk of the social media-addicted earth populace is as well. The number of stories pouring out about Twitter each day seems to at least rival the buzz that the microblogging phenom received coming out of [...]

The short (URL) answer is yes… sort of. I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter lately. In order to share links efficiently on Twitter, you need to use link (or URL) shortening tools, which quickly take URLs that typically have a large number of characters and translate them to a shorter form that can [...]

I’m a little under the weather (southern California turned our version of “freezing cold” over the weekend, who knew?) so just want to quickly point out a fantastic bit within an interesting piece by Louis Gray titled My 2008 Tech Predictions Look Bad As Year Nears a Close. I’ve been ruminating lately over the brilliant possibilities [...]