Neomeme

The New York Times has a fawning article today about Pownce, Kevin Rose’s new startup. Pownce is called, among other things, “the hottest startup in Silicon Valley”, with “coveted” invitations- the author has clearly never heard of a private beta-

Digg was disruptive (though perpetually unprofitable). Google was disruptive. MySpace was disruptive. Pownce is a glorified Twitter clone with file sharing. If it did not have Kevin Rose behind it, it would have faded into obscurity, just like a Digg story that is not dugg by top Digg users. Let me restate that. The exact same “disruptive” and “coveted” technology would have certainly gone completely ignored without this: Read more »

Perpetually-in-private-beta online TV startup Joost has announced it has reached 1 million users. That’s a pretty impressive number for a product that still lacks much truly compelling content. But do these numbers matter? And are they even real?

One miiiiilion users!

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This is too funny- Digg today announced that Microsoft would be serving their ads. I opened Safari (I have AdBlock in Firefox) to see what the ads looked like, and was greeted by this:

(click image for full size)

1. The ads are mixed up- the leaderboard ad is on the right side, and the right side ad is on top. Thus both are cut off. This screenshot is not cropped on the sides- the ad was cut off.
2. That ad is the default Digg ad- meaning there are no advertisers.

I refreshed a couple times, and the ads were back to normal. I opened another story on Digg, and they were messed up again.

Not to reinforce any stereotypes about Microsoft…

Since it is, after all, politics season, in the interest of fair coverage, I turn now to the other darling of the Internet long shot presidential candidate, Republican-but-really-a-libertarian Ron Paul. Despite polling under 2% in traditional polls, Ron Paul has won every major Internet poll. His supporters have dominated the Internet- they may not be the most numerous, but they sure scream the loudest. Ron Paul has a monstrous amount of blog mentions, dwarfing even Barack Obama on some days, and dominates all other “Web 2.0″ social media sites. And did I mention that he has the most YouTube subscribers in what may be becoming a surprisingly YouTube-centric election. Read more »