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Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has the scoop: Breaking: Condé Nast/Wired Acquires Ars Technica.
Ars Technica is really more of an online-only tech magazine rather than a blog, but they've long been an independent voice so certainly qualify as "new media" (whatever that means!).
Here's how they stack up against Wired's existing blogs, per Technorati:
| # | Blog | T Rank | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ? | Ars Technica | 7 | ||||
| 2 |  | Threat Level | 46 | ||||
| 3 | | Gadget Lab | 70 | ||||
| 4 | | Wired Science | 74 | ||||
| 5 | | The Underwire | 169 | ||||
| 6 | | Danger Room | 182 | ||||
| 7 | | Epicenter | 402 | ||||
| 8 | | Game|Life | 425 | ||||
| 9 | | Compiler | 577 | ||||
| 10 | | Listening Post | 733 | ||||
| 11 | | Autopia | 1,422 | ||||
| 12 | | Geekdad | 4,148 | ||||
| 13 | | Beyond the Beyond | 6,630 | ||||
| Legend | |||||||
| Link directly to the blog | ||||||
| ? | Arguably not a blog (what do you think?) | ||||||
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Unwritten rule #1 of blogging: link to your source. We caught CNET breaking the rule last month. (They actually agreed, and added a link.) Yesterday, MG Siegler thinks he caught Ars Technica:
I saw the map and thought of one thing: the game Risk. As such I wrote a short article on VentureBeat on Friday with that as the main crux: The iPhone is winning at the game of Risk.Today, Sunday, 2 full days later, Ars Technica comes back with an article, with their own picture dubbed "iRisk."
This case is in a gray area: it's not hard news, just one particular approach to a story.
A commenter is not so sure any copying was done:
You don't seem to be quite as original as you think you are, either. Some site called the iPhone Blog (which I found by Googling iPhone world domination risk after reading your piece) has been playing iPhone Risk --complete with stylized map-- since February, including an update with all this latest info on May 7. Could it be that you and Fortune ripped them off, or could it be that lots of people make the "entering new markets is kinda like Risk" association?http://www.theiphoneblog.com/tag/iphone-risk/
Matthew Ingram got an explanation from Ars Technica's founder:
[Ken Fisher] said that Siegler wasn't the only blog to make the comparison between the iPhone and the game of Risk...and that therefore he didn't deserve a link ... Ars didn't see Siegler's post and wrote its own version at about the same time (the site said it was published later because editors were busy).
An update to Siegler's post claims lots of support by email:
I'm not at liberty to share many of them, but lets just say A LOT of people, well respected and well placed people working in the industry out there have the exact same thoughts.
But isn't that exactly the kind of (non) evidence that blogs are rightly skeptical about? Ars may well be a repeat offender, but until the evidence is out in the open, I'll stick with "innocent until proven guilty".
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Leading VC blogger Fred Wilson posted some advantages of the Disqus comment plug-in that his firm invested in (based on his usage on the blog!):
1) Threaded discussions2a) Email Replies
2b) Email Replies for Commenters
3) Shared profiles
(Read the post for details.)
In the comments, Abe Murray noted some missing features that are a showstopper for him:
1. Trackbacks. a huge deal, and totally missing.2. Seamless data portability. Grab all wordpress / blogger comments on setup and create the Disqus comments for these. If I want to leave Disqus, create wordpress / blogger comments so my blog is still complete.
You should win users by being the best, not by being sticky.
Another commenter ("Andy C") linked to his April 9 post of 25 reasons you should use disqus.
Douglas Karr raised an even bigger showstopper in a comment to that post:
One GIANT REASON not to use Disqus: Your site isn't able to capitalize on User generated content since the comments are loaded via JavaScript. Commenting is a powerful tool for search engines - and you're missing all of it!Now - if someone builds some robust API blog integration where the comments are loaded server-side, that may make up all the difference. For now, though, DISQUS is hurting blogs by hiding this priceless content from the engines
Despite these issues, the plug-in seems to be gaining plenty of converts.
We covered some alternative comment systems back in September: SezWho, BigSwerve, coComment, Co.mments and Intense Debate.
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Blogging provides a platform for anyone to cast their views out into the world, whether to share with a few friends, be found by strangers via a search engine, or to build an audience.
Marc Andreessen started blogging last June and has written several posts that are a "must read" for tech entrepreneurs (among others). Today's post is useful for any investor who ventures beyond index funds to choosing specific stocks: In praise of dual-class stock structures for public companies.
A few highlights:
I used to be an absolutist against dual-class stock structures
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After 15 years in the technology industry, though, I have done a complete 180-degree turn on the topic -- with some caveats.
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the markets in which companies operate, and Wall Street in particular, throw up all kinds of short- and medium-term noise in the face of every public company, all the time.
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The huge advantage of a dual-class stock structure is that it lets the company's core management simply ignore most of this stuff and stay focused on the long-term goal.
If you're not convinced, read the whole thing.
Andreessen applies his thoughts directly to current events.
How would you apply this to the drama unfolding around Microsoft and Yahoo?Well, clearly, if Jerry Yang and David Filo had dual-class-powered voting control of Yahoo, the whole situation there would be playing out very differently.
Microsoft would have been forced to negotiate a purely friendly deal from the very start, and at a price that would have caught Jerry and David's attention from the start. Hostile threats would have been meaningless. ... And the company could have been entirely focused on current operations the whole time -- no distraction.
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(An aside: sorry for the long gap between posts; we're scrambling to hire a bunch of people for Blogcosm and other projects.)
Clay Shirky is a noted speaker and consultant on "Economics & Culture, Media & Community". He recently posted a lightly edited transcript of a talk he gave at the Web 2.0 conference.
Jeremy Zawodny posted the video: Explaining the Cognitive Surplus. It's interesting, but here's a shorter version for those who prefer a summary:
Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
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Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.
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Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?
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I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."
Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
It would be interesting to look back and see how much of this essential idea was in Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. Here's a reading list:
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