On the web
By TIMES WIRES
Published November 22, 2006
Biz tidbits from the Internet, blogs and podcasts
Probably not the way to score some PR
Among the most popular posts on Digg.com last week was one headlined "Coolest Place in the World to Work." It linked to pictures taken inside Inventionland, a warehouse in Pittsburgh owned by an outfit that promotes inventors' products. It's an unusual workspace, combining stylish futurism with cloying, theme park imagery. There are waterfalls, castles and a giant walk-in cupcake. A Digg member discovered that they were just part of a series of posts by someone promoting Davison Design and Development, which operates Inventionland. Such "spamming" is a big no-no on Digg, and usually results in items being "buried" by the collective action of users. The Diggers did some digging, and quickly learned that the Federal Trade Commission recently won a deceptive-practices lawsuit against the company. Even more unfortunate, perhaps - given the allegations against the company - were some of the posts bragging about how much money CEO George Davison spends. The employee wrote that each office at Inventionland has "an Xbox, PlayStation, (soon Wii) not to mention a moat surrounding it."
If you want to get paid, attract readers
Josh Quittner, the editor of Business 2.0 magazine, this month defended paying his bloggers based in part on how much traffic they generated. "If my writers start to write about things that are off topic, that are of no interest to a business readership, people won't come back," he explained to Bob Garfield, co-host of NPR's On the Media (onthemedia.org). In a column on Huffington Post, the blogger and journalist Dan Shanoff called the setup "sketchy" (huffingtonpost.com). The new network of 17 blogs is free of shots of Lindsay Lohan in a bikini. But getting attention has long been Job 1 at Business 2.0, and the blogs are no exception (blogs.business2.com/beta). The Cynical IT Guy blog is written by an anonymous author who swears a lot and berates readers as he surveys the tech business. SINdustry Standard lumps together items about booze, tobacco, junk food, "and other sinfully profitable wares" like pornography.
The sad truth: Most of us are rich
If you make $75,301 a year, you are the 49,205,295th richest person in the world, which puts you in the top 20 percent worldwide in terms of income. This data comes via the Global Rich List, a Web site created by Poke, a British interactive media company (globalrichlist.com). Once the calculation is done, the site encourages newly wealthy-feeling users to give to charity.