Knol is Google’s response to Wikipedia. It is supposed to be an online encyclopedia written for experts. Many techies are saying that Knol is no competition for Wikipedia whatsoever, but the search engine giant still wants to push the service. This is why they have launched a competition called the Knol for Dummies.com competition.
Knols are basically articles written by credible authors. Anyone can write a knol and there are templates that show how to get started. Media can be embedded and collaboration on articles is advocated. Whoever can put together a solid knol for the Dummies.com website will win $1,000. Five finalists will be chosen to have viewed on the Dummies.com website, but one person will be awarded the prize money stated Matt Ghering, Product Marketing Manager for Knol.
Submissions can be made up until March 23. The finalists will be selected on May 8. To enter the competition, visit http://www.google.com/landing/knolfordummies/.
There are some sick people out there and some of them even use Facebook. Edward Richardson, 41, was accused of killing his girlfriend Sarah Richardson, 26, at her parents’ home in Staffordshire, England. Richardson tried to kill himself after murdering his girlfriend, but ended up being sentenced to life with a minimum of 17 years in prison according to BBC.
“Richardson became enraged when Sarah changed her marital status on Facebook to single and decided to go and see her as she was not responding to his messages, stated Fiona Cortese of the Crown Prosecution Service. “He gained entry by breaking the front door window and made his way into the property.”
It is quite easy to jump to conclusions here regarding this incident. The first conclusion some people may make is that Facebook is being irresponsible for having a relationship status feature as it can emotionally toy with humans. Given that this is the first case I’ve heard of murder taking place based on a Facebook action, I don’t see how the social network can be seen as the catalyst here.
What happened is that Richardson clearly has mental issues that were not addressed at the right time. We as the media can’t read his mind so it is best to let the courts decide his fate. God bless the Richardson family during this difficult time.
President Barack Obama is making government spending more transparent by launching a new website called Recovery.gov. The website complements Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan. The goals of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan include laying out 3,000 miles of transmission lines, weatherizing 2.5 million homes, protect health insurance for 8 million Americans at risk of losing coverage, securing 90 major ports, renovating 10,000 schools, and tripling the number of science fellowships.
Obama stated that the government will be held accountable for results and money won’t be just thrown a problems. Investments will be made in what works and will be made public on the website.
Below is a video of the President discussing the new website and the Recovery and Reinvestment Plan:
The Zune may soon be a device of the past as it continues to plummet in sales. The almighty iPod and iPhone seems to keep consumers wanting more Apple and less Microsoft. According to a report filed with the SEC, the revenue of the Zune for the 4th quarter was less than half of the previous year. As a matter of fact the “Zune platform revenue decreased $100 million or 54% reflecting a decrease in device sales.”
Joel Comm has quite an extensive track record for making money on the Internet. In 1995, Joe launched WorldVillage.com and two years later sold ClassicGames.com to Yahoo! After that, Joel launched several online shopping websites and then wrote a book called The AdSense Code, a New York Times best seller. To top all that off, he came up with the iFart application, the #1 iPhone application for three consecutive weeks. Last year Comm hosted the first Internet reality show called “the Next Internet Millionaire.” Comm is currently working on a “Twitter Power” book.
Even after all this credibility, Facebook decided to kick him off their social network. Comm has 4,999 Facebook friends and then sent messages to about 30 of the 900 people that wanted to add him. Facebook maximizes the number of friends that you can add at 4,999. Facebook believed that the message that he was sending to the friend requests was considered “spam.”
Comm told Robert Scoble that he received a warning for sending the messages and stopped immediately after, but they still kicked him off two days later. The two messages that Comm sent to his friend requesters include:
“Thanks for the request! I’ve reached my 5000 friend limit on Facebook, but you can follow me on my fan page at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/pages/Joel-Comm/9907159309?ref=s
Hope to see you there!”
and
“hiya! I’m glad you had the opportunity to see me speak at Harv Eker’s event. I’m at my Facebook friend limit, but visit my blog and you can stay up to date on my activities. http://www.joelcomm.com”
Some people want to use Facebook as a marketing tool and want to reach out to as many people as possible without actually knowing the people in real life. Is this a fair use for Facebook? I believe if MySpace has no problem with it, neither should Facebook.
It seems like whenever a major event happens that shakes the blogosphere, the Twitter community is the first to respond. This is true for the Obama’s inauguration, the recent terrorist attack in Mumbai, the Hudson River airplane accident, etc. Twitter is also becoming a marketing tool for celebrities. Now that Twitter is garnering so much more attention, it is only natural for the company to raise more funding to keep the traction going.
A source at TechCrunch has it that Twitter has signed a term sheet with at least one venture capital company, including Institutional Venture Partners, to raise a new round of funding that will put the company at a $250 million valuation. It is pretty likely that the company will raise over $20 million in VC money. Last May the company raised $15 million and the year before that they raised $5 million.
The big question here is whether major corporations believe Twitter is worth at least $250 million. Apparently Facebook did as they offered the microblogging service $500 million in cash and stock options that Twitter reportedly turned down. Facebook’s actual value has been questioned multiple times by multiple companies so it was pretty logical for Twitter to hold off for now.
Another problem Twitter has is the lack of a revenue model. Twitter’s servers are being hammered by the five million plus users that they have. Of these millions of users, none of them have to pay to use the service. This is a niche that Yammer, an enterprise Twitter-like service, filled in. If Twitter begins to charge for premium services, then it is pretty likely that people will start paying because many of the users have already established a reputation.
One thing that is for certain is that this new round of funding will keep Twitter running through the weak economy and may see itself being acquired when the acquisition market begins to heat up once again.
The Vatican has announced that they are launching a YouTube dedicated to the Pope. Father Federico Lombardi, the S.I., Director of Vatican Radio, Vatican Television Centre, and the Holy See Press Office made an official gives an explanation why they chose to launch the channel [here]. The Vatican channel is available at http://www.youtube.com/vatican.
Even though the Pope will have a regular channel on YouTube, he also mentioned that social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace tend to isolate people. In the World Day of Communications, Benedict told people to be respectful online and warned not to avoid real interaction. The Pope also urged people to respect human dignity and “goodness and intimacy of human sexuality.”
My guess is that there will be some sort of admin on the YouTube channel for the Vatican as we all have read the type of comments that YouTube users make. It would be in their highest interest.
Although Digg has about 35 million users registered, they are bleeding money. Although the numbers reported from BusinessWeek earlier were false according to Digg’s CEO*, the company still has yet to achieve profitability. Therefore they are laying off about 10% of their workforce, or about 7 people. However, Digg CEO Jay Adelson reported that the company will be hiring a direct sales force and head of sales to help drive profitability.
This is the first time that Digg will be building advertising support structure. Digg’s deal with Microsoft will remain, but the company also plans to create a new advertising support structure. For example, Digg Dialog is a way for the community to interact with government officials and the company would be open for sponsorship of such events.
“It is true we have been focused on growth and user features. We had this Microsoft deal to take us to profitability, and we were definitely focused on the user experience. We didn’t focus on the ramp time to break-even. We never felt there would be any challenge to monetize Digg,” stated Adelson.
*BusinessWeeek reported that last year, Digg lost $2.8 million on $4.8 million in revenue and lost $4 million on $6.4 million in revenue during the first three quarters of 2008.
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