NowPublic Blog

Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal and and an advisor to NowPublic has started up an interesting new venture. Dries is an exceptional guy and this business will do well with him behind it. Good luck Dries.

Only a few days ago did Dries Buytaert, the Belgian developer behind Drupal, the open-source content management system, decide to launch a start-up to take parts of the effort commercial. Today, Acquia, the company formed to pusue that effort, has gathered together a $7 million first round investment. The round was led by North Bridge Venture Partners as well as Sigma Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

Buytaert put Acquia together to be “a company that is to Drupal what Ubuntu or RedHat are to Linux. If we want Drupal to grow by at least a factor of 10, keeping Drupal a hobby project as it is today, and taking a regular programming job at a big Belgian bank is clearly not going to cut it.”

Source: mashable.com via mtippett

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Tags: Bridge | going | Acquia | AlphaTech | belgian | commercial | content management | developer | Dries Buytaert | Drupal | factor | formed | gathered | hobby | investment | keeping | Linux | Money & Stuff | NowPublic | open-source | programming | project | pusue | RedHat | sigma | start-up | ubuntu | Venture Partners

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - “Don’t Tase Me, Bro,” a phrase that swept the nation after a U.S. college student used it seeking to stop campus police from throwing him out of a speech by Sen. John Kerry, was named on Wednesday as the most memorable quote of 2007.

Source: news.yahoo.com via mtippett

The phrase ‘don’t tase me, bro’, was captured on video by an accidental bystander during a John Kerry rally. We will continue to see participatory media gain in cultural influence as people have a greater ability to record events they witness. This is just the beginning.

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Tags: Angeles | Campus | college | Florida | Florida | police | Andrew Meyer | citizen_journalism | Culture | Don’t Tase Me Bro | Fred Shapiro | John Kerry | Journalism | memorable quote | named | NowPublic | quotations | Tase | Wednesday

In Ad Age’s yearly review of trends they’ve identified ‘Brand Swarming’. 

Marketers will move decidedly in the direction of DDB CEO Chuck Brymer’s “swarm theory” — the notion that people and their opinions coalesce to form critical forces that massively influence marketplace ideas and concepts. “Swarm theory” will elevate social networking to new levels, confirming the immense impact that consumers have on each another. Marketers that embrace this trend can form consumer brand “advocates” and drive brand loyalty and trust to new heights — if done responsibly.

Source: adage.com via mtippett

Facebook has already dipped its toe in the water with Beacon with disastrous consequences.  Hopefully their next foray will be done less ham-fistedly.

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Tags: economy | Audiences | Brand Swarming | brand-marketing | Brands | consumers | facebook | growth | MARKETERS | Money & Stuff | online | Politics | spending | Trends

This week was another biggie for us–we rolled out a bunch of new features and tools that will add speed, style and substance (the three S’s!) to your NowPublic experience.First there’s our new comments:

They’re sleeker, easier to read, and closer to the top of the story. Now when you want reply to a comment, all you have to do is hover over it. Also, comments posted by new users who contributed a photo from Flickr will have a link to that photo in the comment:

One reason the comments have moved up on the page is because we rolled out our new Crowd Power tool. It’s now a layer that pops out when you choose, so you can request photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube to your stories when you want to, or just go right to the comments if you don’t (but you do, of course).

Clicking on the button beside Crowd Power opens the new layer, which now shows more photos at a time and has a better, friendlier interface. And, since it lives on top of the page instead of in it, your page loads faster. Check it out:

Whew. Yes, we’ve been busy, and made a lot of changes in an effort to improve your NowPublic experience. Take a look at a story page, see how these changes effect you, and let us know by commenting here. We’re listening.

This study focuses on Satellite services but TV will also face challenges from IP based TV like iTunes, YouTube and Veoh:

Satellite TV services and other subscription TV alternatives to wire cable continue to gain share. Wired cable penetration fell to 61.3 percent of all TV households from 62.1 percent a year ago, the lowest its been since Feb. 1990.

Source: mediaweek.com via mtippett

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Tags: albuquerque | cable | Santa Fe | alternative | gain | HOUSEHOLDS | lowest | penetration | Percent | Satellite | services | subscription | Technology | television

There was a time when Walter Cronkite was the most trusted person in America.  That he was a news anchor made him a perfect candidate for that position.  But these days the news business is becoming a less influential part of people’s lives.  Is Oprah the new Cronkite?  Does the evening news even matter anymore?

How do people know what other people think? The sad truth is that it doesn’t come from talking to one another; it comes from the media. And the media, for reasons ranging from mercantile to ideological to laziness, frame every issue, including the Iraq war, as (at best) a battle between two plausible sides, or (at worst) as a crusade of the Right against the Wrong.

That’s why no journalist can today occupy the place that Walter Cronkite did when, at the end of a CBS documentary about the 1968 Tet offensive, he said the U.S. was in a stalemate in Vietnam and should get out. That moment, it’s said, caused LBJ to tell an aide, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” But today there’s no MSM journalist who channels Middles America. Whatever their other virtues are, the ABC, CBS and NBC anchors are paid their multimillions not to tell the truth, but to sell the truth-has-two-sides story, which is also how you maximize audiences. (Drop a coupla zeroes from the salaries and viewerships, and it’s true of PBS, too.) Bill Moyers, Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert actually do tell the truth, and they mercilessly deconstruct the biases of “fair and balanced” faux news and fatuous “narrative” narratives, but their audience sizes limit their impact, and their matter is more than matched by Republican media anti-matter.

Source: huffingtonpost.com via mtippett

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Tags: America | Iraq | Iraq | Media | stewart | audience | Barack Obama | Bill Moyers | channels | Cronkite | Culture | frame | journalist | Keith Olbermann | Majority | narrative | news | Oprah | overwhelming | Politics | republican | Stephen Colbert | TRUTH | Vietnam | WALTER | winfrey

Is this the beginning of the end of Facebook?

Facebook has turned all the people who rooted for it into a lynch mob. In the space of a month, it’s gone from media darling to devil. The most interesting thing about Facebook right now is who will replace it.

Source: techland.blogs.fortune.cnn.com via mtippett

NowPublic

Tags: Beacon | facebook | Money & Stuff | shark

It’s a big one this week, friends–we introduced an entirely new welcome page for people coming to us through Flickr requests.

If you’re a member of NowPublic, your first contact with the site is likely through Flickr. If you had a great photo we wanted to use to add context to a news story, we’d contact you and ask you to share it. Joining and sharing your photo was the gateway to being a member–posting stories, sharing more photos, making comments, and flagging other peoples’ work.

This is all still true, but now first time users sharing their Flickr photos are greeted by our fancy new welcome page:

As you can see, this shows you your photo in the story page and allows you to make a comment on the story or tell us how you managed to get that great shot. This way, you’ll be more engaged with the story and the site.

And if you’re puzzled as to what this all is about, have no fear–you can click on the “Questions?” bar on the right hand side of the screen, which will open a tab that allows to you to ask an on-duty editor a question and get a speedy response. Voila!

Cool beans! Got questions? Post ‘em here (as comments), and we’ll answer them!