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AOL Hell
"This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes," goes both ways.
The Best Thing We Have Ever Posted: Reader Tries To Cancel AOL - Consumerist
One Red Paperclip
"My name is Kyle MacDonald and I traded one red paperclip for a house. I started with one red paperclip on July 12 2005 and 14 trades later, on July 12, 2006 I will trade with the Town of Kipling Saskatchewan for a house located at 503 Main Street." (one red paperclip)
Friendster vs MySpace
"People were hanging out on Friendster before they hung out on MySpace. But hanging out on Friendster is like hanging out in a super clean police state where you can't chew gum let alone goof around and you're told exactly how to speak to others. Hanging out on MySpace is more like hanging out in a graffiti park with fellow goofballs while your favorite band is playing. That said, there are plenty of folks who don't want to be hanging out in a graffiti park and they are not sticking around on MySpace as a result." (Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?)
The Subtext of Tagging
"Tags have a place beyond taxonomies and classifications and categorization. They are a beautiful, wide-open opportunity to add subtext to your writing. To sew meaning into the fabric of someone else's reading experience.
I like to tag based on emotion, inference, subtleties, in a way that make tags PART of my post, not an afterthought way to plug them into Technorati and what everyone else is talking about. I want you to get to the bottom and look at my tags and laugh, or wonder, or say Ah HA! That's what she's pissed at, or that's what happened, or, I wonder what other people have written about those "rough-edged stones" that get caught in my tires."
Crowdsourcing
"Every business has customers who are sure they could design the products better themselves. So why not let them? Crowdsourcing is the unofficial (but catchy) name of an IT-enabled business trend in which companies get unpaid or low-paid amateurs to design products, create content, even tackle corporate R&D problems in their spare time." (Crowdsourcing: Consumers as Creators)
Digging Alexa?
"In mid April, Digg approached the worldwide reach of Slashdot, formerly regarded as the most widely read tech site on the net. People had been speculating about the event for some time. Then, on April 19th, "it finally happened," writes ejoyner. "Digg overtakes Slashdot" is posted and the story instantly hits the Digg front page.
Hundreds of thousands of Digg readers follow a link to Alexa en-mass to see internet history being made. Some percentage of them install the Alexa toolbar that very day, and the head-count that this percentage represents is huge enough to significantly skew the Alexa demographic from that point forward..."
-OR-
"Something you've got happening is a negative number of slashdot readers - something that is impossible. You're assuming a continuous amount of users kept the Alexa or A9 toolbar installed. I'd actually think that slowly the numbers would reduce as more and more people ran spyware checkers that delete Alexa components, or otherwise removed the Alexa software once they realised what was going on.
This seems to happen more with slashdot readers than digg readers. Does this mean that slashdot readers are smarter than digg ones? Arguably, digg has a much younger demographic who are more likely to run Windows, and are more likely to fall in the "wannabe geek" category.
This is why Alexa is useless and anyone basing their web traffic stats (particularly geek-oriented ones) are hitting the lowest common denominator - a group who don't know what spyware is or how to get rid of it."
(Digging Alexa - how the geek demographic doubled overnight | BlogCadre)
