Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins
Latest from Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins
FTC Social Media PR Regulation Update: Blogger Catch-22 or Loophole?
[Update: Steven Hodson, Sean P. Aune and I all spent a good half hour discussing this topic on the CobWEBs podcast, delving into more of the details I learned after this item was posted. Our general take? The FTC isn’t fully aware of the ramifications of their actions. Click here, or below to listen to ...
Twitter Succumbs to Marketer Attack [Toldja So]
Update: Robert Scoble spurred a lively discussion on this topic over at Friendfeed. Embedded below the post. Earlier today, Adam Ostrow noticed a trending topic on Twitter, and on further investigation, it was as a direct result of an MLM marketer’s efforts to cash in on the perceived naïveté of Twitter: It might be starting ...
Wolfram-Alpha Isn’t the Future of Search, It’s Much More
I’ve been one of the lucky few to have been getting updates and insider information about Wolfram-Alpha since it was mostly a concept. Right around the time Nova Spivak was penning his first contribution for SiliconANGLE, I was hearing about the promise and potential of Wolfram from insiders. Despite all the proclamations in the press ...
Google to Newspapers: “Have You Heard of ROBOTS.TXT?”
All day long, I’ve been publishing or pointing to stories in which for some reason the subjects of the posts have been ignoring or avoiding the simple solutions (like this one, with journalists wanting their old work to go away). Andy Plesser just posted video today of another great example: newspaper publishers. Wall Street Journal ...
Craigslist the “Biggest source of prostitution in America.”
"Craigslist is the largest source of prostitution in America," Cook County sheriff Tom Dart told ABC News. I picked up that quote from Owen Thomas’s writeup of Craigslist and prostitution a couple weeks ago over at Valleywag. Given that Craigslist today has finally caved to political pressure and ended the “erotic services” category on the ...
Righteous Indignation Round-Up [@twitter]
Update: Twitter’s Biz Stone let slip the real reason why the @reply functionality was scaled back: The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt—it wouldn’t have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever. Nevertheless, it’s amazing to ...
NighTline: ABC’s New Twitter Show
A week or so ago, occasional SiliconANGLE contributor Michael Sean Wright and I engaged in a friendly debate on FriendFeed. He had noticed that CNN was continually plugging Twitter as if they were a partner in the Time-Warner empire, and theorized that they’d soon either be acquiring the micro-blogging network or at least launching a ...
Good Advice: “Do it Wrong Quickly”
Mike Moran was recently invited by IBM Denmark to speak, and in remarks to IBM on camera after his talk, he spoke a little bit to the title of his second book, Do It Wrong Quickly. The whole video is below, but the part I found most interesting is the first sixty seconds. When it ...
Twitscoop Shows a Strong Start in Trend Monitoring
Twitscoop was just profiled over at Techcrunch by Leena Rao, and quite frankly even though the site is so new it’s Alpha edges are showing, it’s the closest thing to the “real-time web” memetracker I’ve always wanted in my pocket. The graphs on current trending topics are pretty eye-candy for breaking up the page maintaining ...
Harry McCracken’s Journalism Senses are Tingling
This morning, Harry McCracken was (as he put it) “stressed out” by an ad campaign being run at the New York Times website today. McCracken went on at great length as to how his sense of journalistic ethics was deeply offended, or at least stretched past the point of comfort: Yup–it’s a fake New ...
