Today, Peter Rojas and Ryan Block - the masterminds behind Engadget and Gizmodo - launched gdgt, “a place for you to engage with your devices and hang out with people who are as passionate about their gear as you are.”

gdgt appears to be a church for gadget geeks, so it’s no wonder why the site came to a halt due to traffic shortly after its launch this morning. As proven by the success of their previous personal technology news sites, the gadget audience is lively and loyal. Read more…

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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MCDM’s Kathy Gill talks with Tim Reha at the Seattle Wine Awards in early June. The UWMCDM new media team working the event — Annie, Filiz, Meg, Rubi — helped Washington wineries get started with their Twitter accounts and live-tweeted the event (with text and photos). Ladies, we could not have done it without you!

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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Last night, MCDM launched Beyond the Fail Whale: How Twitter is Changing Organizations, “what may be the first university-level class dedicated to Twitter in the country.”

The class, taught by @kegill,

“explores the impact of Twitter on how organizations communicate (internally and externally) — from facilitating knowledge sharing to bypassing traditional communication gatekeepers, from social network impacts on content creation to new methods of conversational marketing.”

Students will research how Twitter is used in selected industries and compile their reflections in an ebook or print book.

As is the custom at MCDM, students will be using Twitter during class. Follow their tweets in real-time at #uwtwitbook, every Tuesday night from 6-10pm (PDT) through August 11, 2009.

Update: The hashtag for the class has been changed to #uwtwtrbook.

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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On June 3, 2009, Bing was introduced to the public.  Many call it a new search engine, however José Piñero, Microsoft Manager, stated that Bing is a decision engine to help people to make decisions faster, especially in the areas of shopping, travel and health.

Last Tuesday,  Piñero introduced Bing to the Hispanic community here in Seattle through a Spanish News Program (KUNS/UNIVISION). Bing is available in the Spanish language and currently Bing is investing in different languages in all parts of the world.  This multilingual section not only includes the languange, but local feature development that addresses the user habits and the user needs, in other words an engine with cultural competence.

Using the term decision engine when referring to Bing, will distinguished Bing from other search engines that do not offer the same feature as Bing does.  Innovation will continue in this area as more business get that there is a global market out there.  My question is, what would be next?

(2 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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I feel like I’m living on the cusp of the world Orson Scott Card created with Ender’s Game, a world where anonymous internet posters Locke and Demosthenes shaped global public opinion. Today, public opinion is increasingly shaped by discourse on the Internet, although we don’t have two clear antagonists in the online public sphere. Case in point: Iran and Twitter.

But what, exactly, do we know about Twitter and the Iranian election?

We know that opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi and his supporters have used Twitter as a platform to claim that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole last week’s election. We do not know if these claims are accurate, although the Guardian Council is investigating 646 poll complaints.

We know that Twitter has helped spread false information: that 3 million people protested Monday in Tehran (rather tens or hundreds of thousands, according to newspaper reports); that Mousavi was put under house arrest (he appeared at the protests); and that, last Saturday, the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid (not reported by any news organization although the committee is investigating hundreds of claims). Read more…

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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I watch amazed as the events in Iran unfold. Who knows how this will turn out. More often than not, the common people do not fair well when they stand opposed to a tyrannical regime but I have hope. The eyes of the world are upon them. My eyes are upon them. These are not my enemies. The people of Iran look all too human to me. They do not appear to be the ghastly nuclear bomb building “other”. When I see the pictures and look in their faces, I see my neighbors, my family. Their expressions of fear, hope, and defiance bind me to them. I am empathetic. I hope for their safety and well being. I yearn for their freedom. Read more…

(2 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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As I write this, irreverent social web headline service Fark.com is on its 8th thread about post-election Iran (”The Revolution will not be televised; it will be Blogged, Twittered, and Farked.”). Twitter feed #iranelection has replaced CNN as the go-to place for breaking news about this dramatic, heart-wrenching story (see #cnnfail).

Just last week, a Harvard study concluded (as breathlessly summed up by the BBC) “Twitter remains the preserve of a few, despite the hype surrounding it.”  Tonight, NBC’s “Chief Foreign Correspondent” Richard Engel is back in network’s NYC studio, banished by Iranian authorities, relegated to monitoring — as we are — firsthand reports on “Twitter…and other online sites.” [p.s. I worked with Richard in Baghdad in 2004]

Read more…

(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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According to Digitalmediawire, Facebook suprpassed the US Web traffic for the first time during the month of May.  Facebook had 70.278 million unique visitors vs. MySpace with 70.255 million.

It seems that Facebook is getting a worldwide attention. For example, in Chile, Facebook is the most used social media platform with 4,069,520 users, placing the South American country among the ten countries in the world the use Facebook the most. (Knol, 2008). According to O’Reilly Radar, among the other ten countries are, UK in second place after the United States, Canada in third, Turkey in fouth, Australia, Colombia, France, Norway, and Sweden.

This shows the power of the Facebook community, however this social media platform has not had the same results all over the world. This does not mean that it won’t in the future, but there is always the possibility that other countries will not follow the Facebook path. Only time will tell…

Side Note: Facebook overtook MySpace in worldwide unique visitors in April 2008. (Digitalmediawire, 2009).

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“No information is more valuable than experiencing an epiphany” – Epipheo Studios

Have you ever watched an online video that immediately compelled you to find the share tool? Thus born the viral video, a visual experience shared by millions within days.

Last month an entrepreneur, internet marketer and videographer, with a bond formed by shared childhood summers on Whidbey Island, Wash., banned together to introduce a new noun to the global network of shared online multimedia: epipheo (formed from the words “epiphany” and “video”).

Epipheo Studios (ES) launched a beta website epipheo.com to aggregate such works that are not only viral, but “turn a light on” and transform the way people think and live.

“It’s likely that a day will come when creating an epipheo for a new campaign will be as common as writing a press release,” said Jeremy Pryor, ES cofounder.

Pryor dropped out of graduate school in 2001 and put down $1000 to start his first ecommerce business TolkienTown (“store for the Lord of the Rings and other collectibles”), which reached more than $3 million in sales by 2003. In 2004 Pryor cofounded Marketplace Earth, search engine marketing Read more…

(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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moot, a skinny 21-year-old college student and hacker prodigy who looks about 16, runs a website out of his parents’ basement called 4chan, an adults only bulletin board where just about anything can be posted—with the exception of advertising. Oh, and anything that violates local or US law, or any complaints about 4chan of any kind. Under rule number two is a reminder that if you are under the age of 18 you need to “discontinue browsing immediately.” Since moot launched 4chan in October 2003 with his mother’s credit card, obviously he’s spent a fair amount of the time in-between breaking his own rules.
moot describes 4chan as “a simple image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images.” Because people can post anonymously—the comments and images–and subject matter–can get pretty raunchy. It has a simple, alphabetical (but coded) format with content that leans toward anime and Read more…

(1 votes, average: 1 out of 5)

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