If you’re still trying to work out that bloggers union deal, especially the ‘work from home work out’ $tarbuck$ part of the contract, and finances are rather limited and you don’t manage it to squat days long that posh franchise with the thousands varieties of coffee-imitations… fear not.
Especially not if you’re UK based.

McDonalds comes to your rescue. Starting today.

With the launch of free Wi-Fi access in McDonald’s restaurants from Monday, we can provide the ultimate work break for UK employees to conveniently access the worldwide web. From the comfort of our restaurants, Brits will be able to come out of hiding and surf freely, for free.
[emphasis: waldorf]

I can perfectly imagine how it will feel to blog from home, sat on a hard wooden bench with a clinical table, fries and a tray in front of me. Not to mention the oh so del.icio.us iceberg salad and in ketchup drenched cucumbers falling on my keyboard. No, I don’t want my menu to be maximized, but do you have a power outlet where I can plug in? And maybe a cushion too, because those benches are so comfortable.

Soon coming near to you, 4 Dell equipped bloggers, hosted on blogspot, downloading their free music thanks to McDonalds FreeFi and Ronald ‘Beta’ McDonald 2.0.

Lets be honest, things can’t get better than this can they? First you get YouTube, MySpace and Youtube (both things to forget as soon as possible), but then the real platforms launch and they generate some brilliant content.
Forget about the Scobles, Arringtons and Calacanis’s, today it’s all about Valleywag and anonymous twitterers.

Forget even FSJ, this is brilliant. A striking and snarky analysis what exactly is going on on the internet:

Q to Session 2 – would any of the panelists use the apps they have seen today? Not one “yes”

Despite grounbreaking advancements in search technology, I still can’t find a female in this room.

wow…you would think the techcrunch40 web site would not have DDoS just because Arrington is on stage

Having spent a few moments with the 40 list, I am not sure how I feel right now to think we didn’t make the top40.

This is live reporting, interesting live reporting! A worthy Cowboy!
[via Valleywag.]

Steve Rubel, power marketer raises a good point in yesterday’s entry, Building an Online Identity Through Lifestreams.

Where I will publish in a year’s time is anyone’s guess. However, what you can bank on is that I will have even more community accounts than I do now.

Right now, just as most other bloggers, the number of online profiles I have reminds me of the early days of domaining. You never have enough of them and any semi interesting, or worse even hyped, platform soon has you as member too.

But what’s the point of all those profiles? Agreed, there’there’s Facebook, where one can add almost everything. Or just stick to a Facebook profile and MySpace-ify the formerly geek cyber space of students.
But does exclusive Facebook networking alone satisfy the blogger or does one have to jump the bandwagon and spend valuable time on every possible network? And how much time does all this cost?

But most of all, where will you blog next year? Will any of those profiles, or services such as tumblr, replace your blog?

I never thought it were possible, but there actually is something positive about Facebook!

It’s perfect for catbloggers. Take people such as Calacanis and Scoble, those who pee their pants and then blog about it. We also call them A-Listers.

Advantage Numero Uno of Facebook it that it offers anything every catblogger might desire to whore out itself. The blogging narcist.
The eternal entertainer. Entertainer for people who don’t care about any value. Value other than Geek Big Brother.

The positive thing about Facebook lays in it’s platform alikeness: everything all together. It’s microblogging³.
Scoblers and Calacanis’es can import all their stuff at Facebook, without needing any other platforms, profiles anymore: blog feeds, tweets, contact details, facebook messaging can replace their email, aso. But more even, Facebook offers them picture and video upload. A blogging platform with notes and the twitter clone ‘Status updates’.
Anything a blogger needs? Facebook has, Facebook is the microblogger’s myspace. Perfect for kicking out your thoughts at anytime and apps allow you to spice them up. Facebook is a dream for the Scobles among you!

And best of all… most shite bloggers will love FB and forget their blog in the long run. Blogging soon will be for the freaks again, the people who try to add value, but your cat will have moved to FB. And so will have the Calacanis’es, because FB is much more appropriate for blogging emos to win some sympathy, than feed readers are!

Leave the blogs for the people who really spend time at entries. Maybe some day I might be part of that group!

To everyone who felt the need to add something to Hugh McLeod’s whine about the A-List (link condom out of principle), let me tell you that the reason behind the entry not falling traffic was, but a blog eons old strategy. If twitter is so March 07, this strategy was so Fall 06. We call it linkbaiting.

When do you linkbait?
If you’re not as whorish as our bestest friend [tag]Scoble[/tag] and prefer not to loose time on every new network platform, gathering exactly the same list of friends you already have in your other 2 months old profile, or if you’re a member of … lets say a popular blog directory which has more than quadrupled the number of rulers. Add to that almost 20 times as much of members to the newest and designographically [sic] most elitist network and your shortage of time to write note after note in their community… then you whine linkbait.

And over the next days you admire the sudden flux of new readers. Readers who just discovered a graying A-Lister, a blogger trying to cope with the cruel reality of not being discovered anymore like in the old days, not having found a Blue Monster Sequel^TM and who’s still waiting for the next PR gig to go viral.

All those conditions combined, bring out the best blogging techniques in any A-Lister, and suddenly they remember that every columnist lurks.

Now Whine is the device!
Whine, sit back… and enjoy how everyone falls into the trap.

I guess exactly that is what makes an A-Lister. Knowing how to play the audience, the lurkers.
Well done, Hugh

Yesterday’s cat fight between Nick Denton and Robert Scoble seems to have deeper foundations. Although The Scobleizer denied that he’s looking for a new job, this seems to become the biggest public secret.
Why would anyone otherwise suddenly remind the whole blogosphere plus his wife of all the social networks he is present at? With a bonus mention to LinkedIn as well

No, I still don’t do LinkedIn or Plaxo and I rarely use Skype anymore. I’m going to Plaxo on Tuesday to look at a new version coming out. But LinkedIn is close to getting me back.

LinkedIn only because he really tries to ignore all those platforms???

Damn, it seems like everyone in the world wants me to join it. I try to ignore these things, I really do.

I guess the Zooomr flirt with Sun didn’t work out for Scoble and the team around Zoho are an experienced bunch and already have an evangelist.
Certainly no blogger who forgets his work in favor to read feeds. If only I could find that entry I read yesterday, where Scoble mentions he is addicted to feeds. 31000/month isn’t it, Robert?

It must be sad if you’ve already blogged for half the technical blogosphere, gotten presents from Intel (I still wonder what happened to disclosure and the Intel notebooks!) and your content really isn’t that compelling.
I wished I just knew as many people.

Nevertheless Robert, I’m sure you’ll find something appropriate for your needs and if not… there’s always PPP.

Sincerest,

Franky.

The other day I gave a talk at a forum hosted by a nearby university’s Mass Communications department. It was about social news, and how it’s changing the media landscape. At the start of the talk, I was asking who had been using social news sites such as DIGG and the like. I was a bit surprised to learn that out of the dozens who attended, only a couple were familiar with DIGG. Of course, most were familiar with social networking sites such as Friendster (which was part of the discussion, actually).

So this gets me thinking. Is social news ever going to become popular here in my country? I would say there are structural and cultural reasons that keep social media from being popular here. For one, the strong presence of the mainstream media would probably be one big hindrance to that. We are a country with two dominant players in the broadcast industry, and they span various media—from television, to cable, to radio. And we are a country with a relatively low Internet penetration rate. Most of those who have Internet access usually have to do so using public terminals, at ‘net cafes and libraries.

So how could people give a damn about social news, if they don’t feel the need to be part of the new media landscape? Social news is about the users being prosumers of information, after all (that is Toffler-speak for being a producer and consumer at the same time). But without the infrastructure, how could people contribute, then? And if you cannot expect your audience to be able to access your contributions to the big picture, then what’s the point?

I would not lose hope, though. Social news, after all, is only beginning to transform how information is shared and consumed around the world. And while I will probably be unable to influence my compatriots to suddenly adopt social media rather than stick to the old media, I would say we can still consider social news very useful. Our audience, after all, transcends geography and even culture. While social news is about the society, the Web has broken down the barriers set by geographic distance. My contributions can be consumed from faraway lands. My audience is not limited to whom I am physically close.

Is social news meant for the masses? Perhaps not today. But that’s not really a problem, is it?

Together with a design overhaul TIME Magazine started a new concept today : TIME The AG

Get a concise summary of the day’s most important news stories on …

In other words, a link blog. TIME The Ag [the Aggregator] is an element of a much nicer site to spend time on and read. The alignment of the whole online edition (not every part has been overhauled yet) has become much better and the TIME user experience is not that claustrophobic anymore.

PORN is Early Rich Media Adopter.
Pornotube is according to Alexa among the 250 most popular sites online.

Yesterday Techcrunch did it once more. After Marshall Kirkpatrick’s entry on Smutvibes some months ago it was MA himself who created the bang : Eroshare, user generated porn.
Porn 2.0.

After the controversy around the Smutvibes entry, Michael Arrington surely knew what would happen in the comments and even participated actively. With some brilliant pieces of commentary

Chill out on the evangelism stuff. God needs to focus on ending war, poverty and disease. Then we can talk about the evil of pictures of 20 year old European girls making out with each other.

He was assisted by no one else than podtecher Robert Scoble, who defined Porn 2.0 better than anyone ever could do.

participant generated

I strongly suggest you go to read the entry and comments at TC, because I had a good laugh.

And I’d rather see pictures of European girls making out online, than the video of a hanging.
But I am European and I have lived in the Netherlands.

I think Mr. Bloggy needs some crunhporn.

This month has proven how easily bloggers become the victim of the tactics of old media.
While trying to be informative and critical it is very easy to grab all the nice pieces of bait the old media use. There have been several examples of journalists playing with the blogosphere.
Surely there were the more positive ones such as TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year, NY Times embracing social bookmarking and more recently the John Edwards Youtube case. But more traditional media have not hesitated to hit either. The WSJ attack on blogs was the most recently hyped anti-blog story.

And there was quite some truth in it.