Yoick - Hightechwire

The New York Times has a piece regarding the rise and rise of widgets and points to what we’re calling Widgblogging - blogs that are predominantly made up of widgets and for which the posted content is relatively peripheral. Widgblogs are, like any mashup, the sum of their parts, and - like any mashup, it’s the mix that determines if the sum resonates with the blog’s readers or not.

 Jeremy Liew, over at Lightspeed Venture Partners, has a great post on the NY Times article. We’ve also Techcraunched Jeremy.

Thanks for all your attention - courtesy of which we’ve come to the attention of WordPress and are now featured on their Growing Blogs list.

Keep it comin’!

Linden Labs has gone and open sourced their Second Life client software. Michael Arrington asks whether they’ve gone far enough -

At current growth trends, SL could be a real economic force in a few years. When things really start to hop, SL will look more like it’s own private Internet. Or a privately held virtual nation. At the point that millions of people spend most or all of their waking hours within the SL world, we’ll know this has happened.I think people (and governments) will start to get a little nervous at that point. It will be impossible for SL to put both its shareholders and users first, and history suggests that users will get the shaft. I can image the most bizarre anti-trust lawsuits in history being fought in courtrooms around the world.What might make more sense in the long run is more of a Wikipedia-like approach to Second Life. A non profit organization running open source software where people can add their own island just by plugging in a server in their living room or the hosting provider of their choice. Whoever builds that and provides a serious alternative to the SL experience could help the world at least as much as Wikipedia has.An interesting take, Michael. Certainly one to be taken seriously.

What we need to be cognizant of is the fact that SL is not about to upset the status quo and allow anyone to plug in a server and create their own real estate in world. This would cause a major issue with SL residents who have invested time and money to build up a real estate portfolio.

So SL has only open sourced its client software, not the actual grid. This means that their viewer is now open source under the GNU Public License, but their underlying infrastructure remains proprietary.

I recently did an interview for a financial publication on the state of blogging and its impact on business. One of the points I focused on was how bloggers have become far more influential as immediate news sources. Picking up on this point Andy Abramson has a great post about “Creative Video Blogging and the New Instant Journalism”.

Andy looks at CES, which is happening this week in Las Vegas, and postulates that it’s going to be the independent news sources, not the main stream media where a lot of the ‘breaking news’ and more interesting stories get told. With blogging, podcasting and video blogging from anywhere there’s an IP connection, we have entered an era of “Instant Journalism” and of “just in time” distribution of news content.

This is a point well made and Nicholas Carr calls this the “New Instantaneousness” - and says that Instant Journalists cannot be overly concerned with punctuation, grammar and spelling — they are all about getting the story out and so need to write as if pursued by a cheetah across the Serengeti.

Nice analogy, but from my point of view getting the message out does not mean getting it out sloppily. Firstly an iJournalist can hone his or her skills to ensure they minimalise their mistakes, and secondly, use a spell check function and get a colleague to read your posts and point out mistakes — you can always go back in later and edit.

Andy notes the initiative that Benjamin Higginbotham is bringing to CES - you can send Ben a video mail or skype voicemail of burning questions you have for manufacturers and he will get their answers and blast them out on his daily netcasts. Cool!