Google is negotiating to buy Digg for around $200 mil. Why? Because they can. Let’s see if this deal goes through, as Digg has been an acquisition holdout for years.
And, finally, there’s an argument in Congress about Representatives ability to use tools like YouTube and Twitter. Supposedly, a Democratic contingent wants to limit usage of commercial sites that generate ads. A proposal for guidelines was made by Michael Capuano that “intended to prevent members from using public money to communicate on outside Web sites featuring commercial and political advertisements.” John Culberson of Texas thinks it would limit free speech, and is worried that it will apply to things beyond YouTube, like blogs and other Web sites. Culberson uses Twitter. When Congress starts using these things, you know it’s hit the mainstream.
At the beginning of class today, I relayed the story of one of my students from last semester and her quest for a job. I hope she’ll be blogging about it soon on WebPubNET, but basically she was successful in securing employment for working a personal network. She made a point to come to a guest speaker engagement (consisting of one of my former students and her employer), asked questions during the session, introduced herself afterward, traded contact info. Had a few followup conversations, received an invite to a lovely party, and then ultimately found herself getting called in for an interview. She is now gainfully employed by Trademark Media as a Design Technologist! Participating in a community really works. And, this isn’t a random situation or one-shot deal. I have been constantly impressed with the power of tapping my former students to place my current students.
We talked about the frenzy for the new iPhone and Apple’s processes to handle the demand come the release of the 3G version on Friday.
Google just announced its own entry in the virtual space with Lively. It’s sort of a Second Life competitor, but right now, it is different in that it is not one cohesive “world.” Here’s the YouTube video we looked at for Bobcat Village, TX State’s Second Life island.
We looked at an article on Microsoft’s Vista, the much criticized operating system. Apparently, Microsoft is going to take a harder line, not letting customers purchase new hardware with XP on it, the old, reliable OS. This looks more like a PR move, in combating criticisms from competitiors (read “Apple”). Good luck with that. Anyone I know that has used Vista thinks it is a piece of junk, a big step backward. Now that Bill Gates is gone, I think you will see more of this hard line approach to customer issues via the management style of Steve Ballmer.
Finally, we discussed YouTube’s strategy for adding pre-roll and post-roll ads to some of their videos. Most of my students felt that it was something that was bound to happen eventually, the free ride was going to be over sooner or later. As we know, Google owns YouTube. They are only going to be placing ads on a small percentage of videos that are preapproved by advertisers. That does two things, insures advertisers that their products/services won’t be associated with potentially questionable material in some YouTube videos and it limits their liability for potentially generating revenue on copyrighted material.
Great article from Mashable on How to Live Blog a Conference. Good tips, definitely something I will discuss with my classes next time we do a project like that.
Article from Forbes.com and what will happen to Apple when Steve Jobs is gone, entitled Jobs 2.0. All companies have a succession plan in place for top leaders, and Apple would be no exception. But, how do you replace someone as brilliant and charismatic, and whose leadership has been tightly wound with the company image itself? It’s something that occasionally occurs to me, then I try to block it out, because I don’t want to think about it.
Not sure what is the best place to get Apple info today. I’m following the twitter feed on Summize and checking the Fortune blog . Silicon Alley Insider says they are live blogging, too. It all goes down at noon our time (10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern). I’ll post first images from the Apple Store as soon as it goes live!
This is what’s on the Apple Store right now!
Update: Just found this site at iphonealley.com that claims to be doing a live audio stream from WWDC. Hopefully it will work.
