There’s a little brouhaha brewing on the blogosphere with bloggers Duncan Riley and the folks over at Mashable calling out John Reese for advocating Twitter as a branding/promotion mechanism to aid their marketing efforts.

And John has posted a response at his income.com blog.

So what do the bloggers think about Jason Calancanis’ twitter posts that he has 9,000 twitter followers?

Is he “gaming” twitter?

I would think that since Jason’s post is appearing in their “related posts” widget, it’s an implicit show of support for the post.

And correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’re following thousands of your followers, I’m pretty sure you’re not reading EVERY update.

And if you’re not reading EVERY update, isn’t that insincere to follow them in the first place?

But back to John Reese “breaking” twitter.

Blaming John for the abuse of twitter is like saying handguns are responsible for killing people.

Last time I checked, people were responsible for killing people. Twitter is just a tool.

–

On another point, I think John is wrong when he calls the 2 bloggers “journalists”.

Journalists reporting news create content based on facts and attempt to present a balanced perspective.

At best, the reply pieces are opinion/editorial pieces, which give you license to go outside editorial objectively and present a wholly subjective view.

I’m not the greatest fan of John’s other project, BlogRush, as you might tell from my previous posts. It’s just a tool, a piece of technology, not any kind of miracle cure by any stretch of the imagination.

–

I don’t think John’s tactics are going to break twitter, but there’s certainly a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) being sowed on the blogosphere.

• social networking
• 12 Comments

In the aftermath of an aborted takeover of Yahoo!, Microsoft continues to remain the 800 lb gorilla in the tech industry. The question is where does it go from here?

There’s still talk about Microsoft working with Yahoo! on a collaboration for its search services, but really to leapfrog search engine leader Google, requires a paradigm shift. One possible avenue? The social media game.

Witness the fact that Google hasn’t done much with Blogspot/blogger in the last couple of years.
Services like Google’s Blog Search seemed like a half-hearted implementation.

That’s not to say that Microsoft and Yahoo! are exactly leading the field either.
The Web 2.0 space is still littered with their dying or dead blog services and communities.
A search at Microsoft’s Social Computing Group shows a number of interesting projects, but none really earth shattering to shift the field.

A couple of years ago, Microsoft spun off its own social network Wallop, to fanfare from Mashable and TechCrunch.
So what happened?

For sure, “cloud computing” still seems a distant reality, hobbled by a lack of compelling applications (in contrast, the Japanese with NTT Docomo’s I-Mode service do just about everything with their 3G phones which fold origami-like into small objects of art. Elsewhere in the world, cell phone users rejoice when they get restaurant recommendations or proximity locaters on their phones…).

It could be a good couple of years till (more…)

• Internet Marketing
• 1 Comment