Category: TechCrunch

Justin Bieber and Why Social Media Rocks

I’ve haven’t listened to the radio in 5+ years and so have never heard a song by music sensation Justin Bieber but read about the interview with his manager at TechCrunch Disrupt.   He talked about how Justin uses social media.  Apparently, he has 2.7 million Twitter followers.  Here’s a key passage…

He noted that there may be a random girl in Iowa who never thought she’d ever talk to Justin Bieber, then he responds to her on Twitter. “That’s something she’ll remember for the rest of her life.”

Social media has broken down the wall that would have prevented people from connecting before and that’s awesome.

TechCrunch Redesigned – Who Knew?

Wednesday, TechCrunch wrote a blog post say essentially, “as most of you have already seen, TechCrunch launched a redesign.”  Well, I didn’t notice.  I read TechCrunch in my RSS reader.

The TechCrunch audience is pretty technically savvy.  I can imagine a majority of their readers use RSS.

I wonder how many noticed the redesign before they said something.

Could you stop international clones of your Web app by globalizing it from the start?

TechCrunch has an interesting article acknowledging how Web apps are getting started up in the United States but cloned by others in countries across the world and sometimes vice versa.

For example, Kevin Rose started the very popular Web site Digg in the United States.  In Canada, they have Verydig.

How much of this could be avoided if the Web application were to design itself for a global audience from the beginning?  I wonder how many more customers Flickr is picking up because they globalized the reach of their site. 

This Isn’t Journalism; Slate and TechCrunch Should be Embarrassed

Recently Slate wrote a story about how Rudy Giuliani’s daughter had listed on her Facebook profile that she had supported Barack Obama for President.  Michael Arrington also covered the story on his Web site TechCrunch.

Does anyone else find it slightly disturbing that two well respected online publications would think it important enough to report this story?   Who gives a rats ass  what Rudy Giuliani’s daugther has on her Facebook page.  She’s 18 years old.

This is just cheesy American tabloid style journalism which I think is beneath Slate and TechCrunch.  You publish this story not because you think its important but because you want to score a quick shot at Rudy Giuliani.