Monthly Archives: June 2005

Business Week on MySpace

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Hey, Come To This Site Often?

…MySpace has become one of the hottest properties on the Web. Only 20 months old, it already has 14 million unique visitors a month, according to market researcher comScore Media Metrix. That makes it far and away the most popular of what are known as social-networking Web sites. Friendster Inc., started three years ago and at one time the clear leader, has a mere 1 million unique monthly visitors. “We’re crushing it,” says MySpace Chief Executive Chris DeWolfe, 39.

The draw? It started with music. DeWolfe’s co-founder is president Tom Anderson, a 29-year-old musician and entrepreneur, and from the beginning the site has catered to musicians. Bands can create home pages, with photos, tour dates, and as many as four songs — all for free. Marquee names like the Black-Eyed Peas, My Chemical Romance, and ex-Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan joined. That pulled in fans and their friends, who all found that MySpace offered loads of options that other sites lacked. Now, MySpace has become something akin to the hottest bar in town, teeming with musicians and models.

Web Designer’s Toolbox for Windows

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A nice list of of free and open source software for various purposes at Digital Web Magazine.

Also: Check out Rafe’s ongoing series at rc3 comparing various blogging toolsets as he weighs the decision for his personal site.

Rafe, if you’re reading this, let me add a few more to the mix:

  • Bloxsom – Perl (why is that a dirty word these days?), file system based simplicity.
  • Roller – Java, huge developer community, used by Sun, and overall nice architecture.
  • Blojsom – Java, cam use file system datastore like Bloxsom, used by Apple, clean architecture that looks easy to extend.

I may post some thoughts on this myself. The last time I attempted I got into a… ummmm.. interesting cross blog conversation.

Rafe, let me suggest you look at the health and growth of various developer communities working on these toolsets/platforms and at licensing. Licensing, in particular, cuts both ways.

The War On Reality

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WashingtonPost – White House Web Scrubbing (via Think Progress – The White House’s White-Out Problem):

“The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and USAID have removed or revised fact sheets on condoms, excising information about their effectiveness in disease prevention, and promoting abstinence instead.”

NYTimes:The White House Stages Its ‘Daily Show’ (via MyDD – The War On Reality):

The pre-fab “Ask President Bush” town hall-style meetings held during last year’s campaign (typical question: “Mr. President, as a child, how can I help you get votes?”) were carefully designed for television so that, as Kenneth R. Bazinet wrote last summer in New York’s Daily News, “unsuspecting viewers” tuning in their local news might get the false impression they were “watching a completely open forum.” A Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence, intended to provide propagandistic news items, some of them possibly false, to foreign news media was shut down in 2002 when it became an embarrassing political liability. But much more quietly, another Pentagon propaganda arm, the Pentagon Channel, has recently been added as a free channel for American viewers of the Dish Network. Can a Social Security Channel be far behind?

TomPaine.com – Why George Went To War (
via Dan Gillmor – The Downing Street Memos, in Context):

Bush wanted a war so that he could build the political capital necessary to achieve his domestic agenda and become, in his mind, “a great president.” Blair and the members of his cabinet, unaware of the Herskowitz conversations, placed Bush’s decision to mount an invasion in or about July of 2002. But for Bush, the question that summer was not whether, it was only how and when. The most important question, why, was left for later.

Eventually, there would be a succession of answers to that question: weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Qaeda, the promotion of democracy, the domino theory of the Middle East. But none of them have been as convincing as the reason George W. Bush gave way back in the summer of 1999.