Kikabink News

Facebook announced last week that users of its mobile site, m.facebook.com, have increased from 5 million to 15 million during 2008.

While this number constitutes less than 10 percent of total Facebook users, the growth indicates strong interest in mobile social networking.

Source: Marshall Kirkpatrick, “Facebook Mobile Sees 3X Growth to 15 Million Users This Year”, ReadWriteWeb, November 11, 2008

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged billionaire web entrepreneur (and Dallas Mavericks owner) Mark Cuban with insider trading.

Mark Cuban, who co-founded Broadcast.com, a leading provider of multimedia and streaming on the Internet which was later sold to Yahoo, is accused of using inside information back in June 2004 to dump his 6.3 percent stake in meta search engine Mamma.com. Cuban sold his stock just hours before the company announced a round of fund raising that caused the value of stock in the company to plummet.

Evidently, the CEO of Mamma.com called Mr Cuban on June 28, 2004 to let him know about the capital raising. Cuban was, according to the SEC, unhappy with the plan and subsequently sold his stock before the new fund raising was announced to the public. The SEC alleges that by selling when he did, Mark Cuban avoided losses in excess of $750,000.

For his part, Mark Cuban says the SEC’s case has no merit and is “a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion.” He plans to contest the allegations and demonstrate that the SEC’s claims are “infected by the misconduct of the staff of its Enforcement Division.”

Said Mr Cuban in response to the charges:

“I am disappointed that the Commission chose to bring this case based upon its Enforcement staff’s win-at-any-cost ambitions. The staff’s process was result-oriented, facts be damned. The government’s claims are false and they will be proven to be so.”

Sources: Marshall Kirkpatrick, “Mark Cuban Charged With Insider Trading of Search Engine Mamma.com”, ReadWriteWeb, November 17, 2008, Mark Cuban, “The SEC”, Blog Maverick, November 17, 2008

A survey of around 200 respondents by copy editing service, GooseGrade has found that blog readers are somewhat turned off by typos, grammatical errors and poor writing.

Those surveyed - a diverse group of respondents who spent some time reading blogs but generally used “mainstream sources” for news - indicated that finding errors on blogs makes them less likely to share the content they find with others.

Specifically, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors harmed a reader’s opinion of a blog and their willingness to share the content on that blog with others. Interestingly, the survey also found that most respondents believed such errors to be common. Only 20 percent of respondents said it was “not often” or “never” that they found such errors.

Bottom line: try to write well, and strive to eliminate spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. (I will too!)

Sources: Marshall Kirkpatrick, “Errors By Bloggers Kill Credibility & Traffic, Study Finds”, ReadWriteWeb, October 30, 2008, GooseGrade Reader Perception Survey Results

One of my favorite sayings is: ‘There are lies, damned lies, statistics… and interpretations of statistics”

I added the last bit. And here’s why: two people can take the same data and claim it has entirely different meanings.

And this is what seems to have happened with Technorati’s latest report on the state of blogging. Last week Technorati released its 5th Annual State of the Blogoshpere Report. While it apparently reported that the numbers show that blogging is now mainstream, tech blog ReadWriteWeb saw the numbers as painting blogging in quite a different light.

Technorati says there are now approximately 133 million legitimate blogs, up from 70 million in 2007, and dramatically up from the 4 million in 2004. Yet ReadWriteWeb points out that only 1.5 million (1.1 percent) of those blogs had been posted to in the last 7 days.

Actually, Technorati also says that 7.4 million blog posts were made in the last 120 days. If posting a blog post within 120 days - or 3 months - is considered ‘active’ that would suggest that only 5.6 percent of all blogs are active. And that’s being generous with the word ‘active’.

Why won’t anyone just come out and say it? The vast majority of people who start blogs probably do so with the best of intentions, but just can’t commit to writing blog posts on a regular basis… and then they just give up.

Nothing shameful about that. It’s probably similar to the number of people who start a diary or try to write a novel.

Anyway, check out the ReadWriteWeb article for some more interesting interpretations of the numbers. You can find the link to Technorati’s report there as well.

==> ReadWriteWeb on Technorati’s report

Source: Source: Marshall Kirkpatrick, “State of the Blogosphere 2008: Technorati Numbers Indicate Blogging Is Niche and Slowing”, ReadWriteWeb, September 22, 2008

Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has launched the ‘World Wide Web Foundation’ to study how the web works and to help expand Internet access to those currently going without.

With $5 million in initial funding from the Knight Foundation, the World Wide Web Foundation will focus on three key areas:

1. Web science and research;
2. Web technology and practice; and
3. Web for Society

Source: Marshall Kirkpatrick, “Tim Berners Lee Launches World Wide Web Foundation - Will it Be Effective?” ReadWriteWeb, September 15, 2008