Tag Archives: blogger

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News cycle identified

lipstickonapSome glorious and fascinating reportage-porn at memetracker that shows how news stories are taken up and how long they last and what their impact is:

They found a consistent rhythm as stories rose into prominence and then fell off over just a few days, with a “heartbeat” pattern of handoffs between blogs and mainstream media. In mainstream media, they found, a story rises to prominence slowly then dies quickly; in the blogosphere, stories rise in popularity very quickly but then stay around longer, as discussion goes back and forth. Eventually though, almost every story is pushed aside by something newer.

There is something truly wonderful about seeing this information laid out in such an intuitive manner. This kind of analysis of the growth, spread, and retention of ideas is certainly an area that will expand and grow over time.

[via Physorg, from MemeTracker]

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Doug Rushkoff blogging at BoingBoing

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Douglas RushkoffThose of you who follow the Double-Boing may have noticed that they’ve started getting guest bloggers on board again. This week sees a visitation from Douglas Rushkoff; there are few thinkers and writers that I would recommend without reservation, but Rushkoff is one of them. [image from biography page of Rushkoff’s website]

He’s written (sometimes with great influence) on politics, cyberculture, religion, ethics, finance, viral marketing, reality hacking and all sorts of other stuff, and he never fails to come up with something challenging. So if you’re not a regular BoingBoing reader, I’d suggest grabbing the RSS feed, if only for this week. Here’s a snippet from his ‘Open-Source Democracy’ post:

Back when everyone was thinking about digital democracy as some sort of voting scheme or mass feedback polling operation, I wrote a short book called Open Source Democracy in an effort to extend people’s thinking beyond elections to include participation in civics. Yes, we have representatives, but they’re only good as their ability to respond to the needs that come from the bottom up.

Rushkoff’s a blogger in his own right, and a novelist too. More recently he did an excellent comic-format series on DC Vertigo called Testament – Old Testament fables meet dark near-future corporate dystopia. Recommended.