I’m writing for the online news site, Examiner.com as the Boulder Startup Examiner. Why? Am I insane? Don’t I have enough to do? I felt compelled to do it. Boulder is a wonderful town, with a fantastic tech community of people. It’s a really big community, for a small town. It’s exciting, vibrant and smart. It’s full of incredible people. And they’re all doing their... 

Sometimes I get reminded why I’m doing this. There’s so much going on right now. I’m exhausted a lot of the time. I have no idea how Jed keeps this relentless pace up. No wonder I’ve called him robot boy for so long. Today I managed to squeeze in coffee with my good friend, Mark (@soctechnologist) after my first meeting for the day, and before I came home to hit more screen... 

By now even your grandma knows about the race to a million. Ashton Kutcher, old-media celebrity turned digital insider with various multimedia projects and Twitter groover challenged CNN to a race to a million followers on Twitter. And after a nice little campaign, last night he won. It was really fun to see the video of him crossing the victory line. He was really, truly excited. That’s impressive. What’s... 

There are some very interesting psychological theories used in Marketing and Business which explain why people behave the way they do. Put simply, people buy different brands and products to fulfill external and internal needs. These needs reflect their sense of self. And people can generally be placed in one of three categories: 1. Affiliation needs – people who primarily want to ‘belong’.... 

Twitter is a curious beast. It has morphed as it grows, due to the community of people who use it. And in researching the online social sphere for my graduate thesis, there are some key aspects of how people use Twitter that are indicators to how this is going to go. Twitter is a tool used by a community. The tool of Twitter is no different to any other tool. The tool of Twitter exists as an infrastructure,... 

In discussions with people who view the media climate as being a binary between big media and bloggers, many times the exclamation rises, “Well, if MSM didn’t exist what would bloggers talk about? All they do is talk about ‘real media’ stories.” But how the tables have turned. The last couple of weeks across the US and Australia has seen a great rise in MSM’s coverage... 

I joined Twitter on my first trip to the US, in 2007 at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. And I remember thinking it sucked. I had no connections other than the conference channel – which was tweeting  basically nothing. That sucked. Segway (does it have a ue?): I’m a tertiary level teacher of marketing and journalism in Oz, and every Christmas break (5 weeks long) I commit myself... 

Traditional print media’s attempts to embrace an online presence has been lacklustre, and in fact has helped kill their brands. Most print MSM have incorporated blogs as part of their delivery mechanism. They have made their existing, print-trained reporters produce content for a medium they are not familiar with. It’s like having a trained print journalist produce television. There are... 

Following my previous post about unhappily swimming in the B Pool, I’m pleased to have been able to scramble my way through to a bit of a splash in the A pool. You know, that place where the cool kids are?   My final paper for Media Ethics,  Twittering a Funeral: Social media’s challenge to professional journalism received a final A grade. I think my professor was just as relieved and... 

The Rocky Mountain News has taken a lot of my attention this week. Primarily because it is one of the first MSM outlets which I’ve come across attempting to incorporate a greater range of Web 2.0 usage as part of its general reporting effort. Virtually all MSM now features online sites with reader polls and reader comments. Those have their own incredible issues which are related, but I...