Here are all of the pages and articles I talked about in this (extra long, sorry) podcast:
-Keeping news of David Rohde’s kidnapping off of Wikipedia: How the NYT and Jimmy Wales kept a secret from the public and anonymous Wikipedia editors. This is the Wikipedia page in question (now updated, I should note, with the information).
-Danah Boyd says the transition to Facebook from Myspace is “white flight.” She says that MySpace is now a “digital ghetto” and that we should be scared that real-life prejudices and classism/racism have reared their ugly head even in digital social environments.
-Marco Arment, developer of Instapaper, dropped support for Internet Explorer. Here’s his stats (IE makes up only around 3% of his traffic, and according to my logs, it makes up only around 2.89% of this website), and here’s the interesting discussion on Hacker News.
-Finally, I make up for lost time with a nice long interview with Brigitte Dale, video blogger extraordinaire. Here’s a great recent example of the kinds of videos she makes (for ABC Family, anyway — we also talk about her video here, which is a little different than usual). And we also talk about how she is a Ford Fiesta agent, which is a marketing program put together by Ford in which they give free cars to lots of people who are very socially connected on the Internet, and have them doing “missions” which result in them posting lots of media, including videos and tweets and so on. Will it work? No idea.
I mention that my friend is also a Ford Fiesta agent — his name is Alex, and though he doesn’t know it yet, I’m planning on interviewing him on the podcast as well. Not that I want you to buy a Fiesta, but because I think it’s a pretty intriguing way to run a marketing campaign.
Update: The NYT published this followup to the Rohde story this past weekend. They all pretty much agree with what I said: that there are certainly some gray issues here, but that given the outcome, they did the right thing. I agree as well — you can’t really argue that they made a mistake, given that the guy is safe (and apparently his captors even did some fishing for publicity and came up empty because they had squelched the story). But the fact that, even in the world today with all of our news channels and news outlets and citizen journalism, they were able to squash the story at all, is somewhat troubling.
Posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 12:10 am. Filed under general.

