Today's Most popular News

Source:Valleywag

Despite Wikipedia’s growing sophistication and greater scrutiny placed on content manipulation, individuals and organizations are still tempted to edit Jimmy Wales’s online encyclopedia for personal gain by posting under the veil of anonymity. But that veil just became a little more tattered. Virgil Griffith, a Cal Tech graduate student, has an eye on you, Wikipedia tinkerers. He’s developed Wikipedia Scanner, a database that correlates the IP address of anonymous posters with the owners of the associated block of IP addresses. That data does not identify individuals, but it’s usually good enough to pinpoint organizations from which they make the edits.

Although newly launched, and currently down due to traffic directed from a Wired story, the database has already revealed that Diebold employees really don’t want you to know how insecure their e-voting machines are; that Congressional aides have mostly ceased making edits since being busted last year; that Wal-Mart, surprisingly, understands Web public relations by leaving negative content but buffing its image with minor tweaks; and that CIA employees, rather than being guided by self-interest or politics, are much like ordinary Wikipedia users, obsessed with the most extensive and accurate entry for Buffy the Vampire Slayer… no wonder they want to remain anonymous. (Photo courtesy of Virgil Griffith)

Source:Valleywag

As MySpace was to social-network pioneer Friendster, Doppelganger Studios hopes vSide, a virtual world which launches today, will be to Second Life: A hipper, slicker, music-focused copycat. It’s even raised $11 million in venture capital to fund its quest to supplant the 3-D-environment pioneer. [Worlds in Motion]

Source:Valleywag

NBC has relearned, at great cost, a valuable lesson. The Web is more than the Wild West. One doesn’t profit by simply squatting on land; it actually has to be developed. Beth Comstock, NBC’s president of integrated media, dazzled the Net with NBC’s acquisition of women’s health site iVillage. She boasted how the purchase gave NBC “scale and a profitable, established platform to expand [its] digital efforts.” It would allow the company to connect “more deeply online, on mobile and on demand with key consumers throughout their various life stages.” Now, Comstock admits she bet wrong, to the tune of $600 million.

It’s a masterful mea culpa, the best way to spin bad news. “Few people at NBC Universal are boasting about iVillage now,” says The New York Times, which slams the whole iVillage deal as a rather embarrassing affair. The Times chronicles NBC’s attempts to latch iVillage onto its existing properties through promotion on the Today Show and the creation of companion TV show “iVillage Live.” These failed.

“You assume in the beginning that a mention on the ‘Today’ show will drive tremendous traffic, but it’s not that easy,” said Comstock.

You’d think that some folks at NBC would remember NBCi, the company’s failed 1990s-era broadband portal. Like iVillage, NBCi found that on-air promotion didn’t count for much on the Web. But that lesson clearly didn’t stick. And, as with NBCi, which it cobbled together from several Web startups, NBC found that iVillage’s technology, far from cutting edge, would need to be expensively updated. So much for providing a platform.

Comstock, of course, maintains that all is now well and NBC has righted its worst mistakes. And iVillage has longstanding relationships with advertisers that NBC has managed not to burn. So the deal can clearly be salvaged. But it’s an expensive way to learn things that NBC should already have known.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 1:45 pm and is filed under nbc, deja vu, Beth Comstock, Ivillage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.