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Tag Archive for 'technorati'

Riya being bought by Microsoft?

Published

on 17/11/2005

. 2 Comments

Riya is a company I have mentioned previously - they have an incredible application which combines text and facial recognition with photo uploading, so that once you tell Riya who is who in your photo albums, it will recognise those people from then on out in any photos it sees! Riya also has tagging built in to the application - like any half-decent web 2.0 application. Riya is due to launch tomorrow.

Now comes the rumour/news that Riya is being bought by Google - before it has even launched! I have to stress the news that this is still just a rumour - and the way rumours grow legs on the blogosphere (remember the Technorati buyout rumours?), it may well be completely untrue.

However, given Yahoo!’s purchase of Flickr, Google needs a cool photo app like this to maintain a presence in this space - then again, so does Microsoft! Anyone want to start a Microsoft is buying Riya rumour? Funny, Robert Scoble didn’t mention it in the interview of him which I podcast yesterday… then again, he wouldn’t, would he?

UPDATE:
I see Michael Arrington and Dave Winer and others have picked up on this story as well.

10 blogging tips

Published

Tom Raftery

on 15/11/2005

in Blogging, Business blogging and Technology

. 0 Comments

Steve Rubel has written a Ten Blogging Hacks post.

There are some interesting suggestions there like using Writely as your blog editor (I have written about Writely before) - Writely has a spell checker and allows for online collaboration in writing so if you want to collaborate in the drafting of a post, Writely could be a useful blog editor for you. One disadvantage for me is that I use a WordPress plugin called Ultimate Tag Warrior to add Technorati Tags to my posts - this functionality is unavailable within Writely.

Some of the suggestions are a bit trivial - like the “Blog from your cell phone” suggestion - how often do you need to do that?

Still the list is well worth checking out as at least one or two of the suggestions are likely to appeal to you.

A lynch mob of 20 million?

Published

Tom Raftery

on 28/10/2005

in Blogging, Business blogging and Technology

. 9 Comments

Technorati recently announced that they are now tracking some 20 million bloggers and the number of bloggers is doubling every 5 months!

Now Forbes Magazine has a cover story titled “Attack of the Blogs” (registration required but thanks to Steve Rubel’s article I found that the bugmenot login/password “forbesdontbug” worked for me).

The article almost comes across as a spoof - indeed if it were not in Forbes magazine, I would have assumed it was a spoof, so outlandish are some of the claims in it. For instance it says:

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.

And it goes on to elaborate:

Google and other services operate with government-sanctioned impunity, protected from any liability for anything posted on the blogs they host. Thus they serve up vitriolic “content” without bearing any legal responsibility for ensuring it is fair or accurate; at times they even sell ads alongside the diatribes.

The article’s main thesis seems to hang off the case of one Gregory Halpern who was hounded by a blogger called Timothy Miles. Mr Miles wrote some allegedly defamatory posts about Mr Halpern under a pseudonym and has now fled legal proceedings against him to Slovenia. The salient point here is that the blog was seen as libellous and was taken down and the author had legal proceedings taken against him (from which he fled!).

Dan Gillmor says it best when he says:

Do bloggers sometimes go too far? Of course. But if the best-read bloggers typically did work of the lousy quality shown in the Forbes stories, they’d be pilloried — appropriately so.

As the article itself points out, Microsoft has 2,000 bloggers - does Forbes really believe that Microsoft is partaking in a lynch mob? And what about the other 20 million bloggers? Are we all part of this lynch mob “spewing lies, libel and invective.” to which Forbes refers?

I think Forbes owes bloggers an apology for this lazy reporting and these sweeping generalisations.