It's unofically offical : The Dow Jones Pwnd by Rupert Murdoch!

According to MSN Money, The Bancroft Family has accepted Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation's $5 Billion bid for the Dow Jones companies and venerated news brands including The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, and More.

"The Bancroft family has accepted," John Prestbo, editor and executive director of Dow Jones Indexes, told reporters earlier today in Chicago. "Dow Jones will be part of News Corp."

Consumers (and publishers) of Fine Financial News, Meet your new Daddy:

I hope he doesn't make them "Fair and Balanced"

It would also be nice if the WSJ editorial board sets up a MySpace page or something (In the spirit of corporate camaraderie.) I can't wait to leave animated .gif comments for Dorothy Rabinowitz!

Conflicting Memes on the Wisdom of Crowds

(er, their comments anyway)

The Old School:

Internet Pioneer Marc Andreessen has made a splash by (re)joining the blogosphere. I think he may have inadvertently touched off a meme on the value & pertinence of comments in personal blogs, by turning his off. RSS inventor and Blog pioneer Dave Winer wrote an old post cited by Joel Spolsky that comments don't make the blog; after all, it's the personal space of the author & her/his viewpoints. The ability to leave a negative opinion on someone else's site is not, after all, a God given right.

Joel did take it a little further -- I get the sense that he pretty much feels all comments are garbage.

I've noticed Nick Carr has disabled his, leaving a message that he's on hiatus for the summer (yet he's still posting to the blog -- I guess it's a "comment hiatus")


The New School:

Is All about community & comments! They want to tap into the conversation and thusly, the "wisdom" of the crowd. Although, sometimes, they just want to know what their friends are doing too. It's really about about connections, social networks and information/news through the social context.

What I really like about Kevin Rose's new service, Pownce: Messages can be replied too and seen by everyone. Doing that promotes further conversation and connection making, but subtly.


Sites like Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, and even Digg are all about the comments & conversation of the crowd.


So What do you think?
Old Curmudgeons, Young Dilitantes, or just a bit of both?

If 10,000 Monkeys typing can (theoretically) reproduce Shakespeare, then what can a 100+ Bloggers create?

It's an interesting project that was started by top bloggers' Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton

The Fast Company Blog says this about it:

"it's a a precedent setting collaborative book-writing effort between 100+ bloggers and other new media types. It is a model for how information will be produced and shared in the future. Oh yeah, and its a book."

Click on the book to purchase the download or hard copy
(*all the proceeds go to charity*)

Yes, in meta fashion, there is an official blog for the book.

Digg this story!

Breaking the Internet, a quadrillion RSS feeds at a time...

The only thing better than getting all your RSS feeds imported, organized and even shared with Google's Reader (following suit of modern-day blog legend Robert Scoble) is getting your favorite digg submitters' feeds set-up as gadgets for your google homepage.



No sooner will we get all this organized then will something like this happen:

Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash

Using Google to Search Digg Part 2

In our last installment, we looked at using Google to search Digg.com - particularly one's own account history covering comments, submissions, and more. The only drawback to this is that it's a manual "command line" approach and requires some extra steps. (Opening tabs or windows, etc instead of being able to search in site)

As promised, I've got a little hack that a helpful coder whipped up! It's a great little greasmonkey script that allows you to use Google to search digg.com, right from the actual Digg.com search box.

Here's how it works:

(Preface: it's assumed that you are using the Firefox browser, if you're not, you need to for this, and ought to be anyway. You can get it here. Next, Download and install the Greasmonkey add-on for Firefox. Greasemonkey is kind of like a little "environment" that runs inside Firefox and allows for custom modifications/mash-ups of web sites -- just for you and only you, inside of your browser. I am not going to get into all the details, but there are all kinds of cool scripts out there that allow you to do tons of neat things with sites that the owners never even intended. It's harmless because all the "hacking" is taking place on your machine alone. For the faint of heart, don't worry installing scripts is really a snap. Point, Click, Install, and Refresh the page and suddenly your favorite site just got a new feature)

So lets get to the meat and potatoes of the "Googlefied" Digg search:

If you're already on board with Greasemonkey,
Download the Script here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7402

Restart the browesr to activate it, head back to Digg and the first thing you'll notice is that the digg search box field has now gone from white to yellow.

When you do a search, its now calling google & automatically adds the "site:digg.com" operator to the query for you and displays the results on a new page.

What I really like about this script is that is doesn't completely hijack digg's search box.

If you double click in the yellow field, it goes back to being white, and thus it's back to Digg's native search. Double click again and it's Google (yellow)

You can compare the results and see that, at least at present, Google's index yields much better results than Digg's. An exception may be brand new stories too. While Google's spiders crawl & index the web fast, they're not "real time" fast. So, if you can't find what you are looking for using your new Googlefied Digg search (and you know it's on there somewhere) you can always go back and find it in the digg search. The digg search also can tell you if a story was buried or not (more on that next time).

Enjoy and Digg on...

Google, Carnegie Mellon, and The Grand Unified Social Network.

Socialstream is the result of a Google-sponsored project at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. For Google, it's directed to improve their online community Orkut, but the project's scope is much broader - to rethink and reinvent social networking - enabling social content sharing / interaction across multiple networks (!)

Socialstream would be based on a unified social network (USN), a single network that provides social data to other sites as a service. A service model allows many social networks to be linked together, letting them share both content and the nature of the relationships of the people who use them. A USN would, in practice, be invisible. All participating sites would simply share information through it. While the centralization of social information would enhance all applications that use it, the USN's own interface would be very simple, perhaps only focusing on preferences and privacy controls that applied everywhere. Socialstream represents one possible way of accessing the information spread across participating networks.

I guess this is what happens when Facebook is actually a class project instead ;-)

read more | digg the project here