Yesterday on Rush Hour, Cameron, Neil and I talked about Google’s confirmed acquisition of Feedburner, the Technorati redesign, a really good segment (middle 15 minutes-ish) where Cameron and Neil shared some great tips for legitimately building your Digg profile and getting your stories to the front page, and we also discussed ways some people are making big bank with MySpace. We closed the show with a brief discussion about to what extent a site owner is liable for user contributed content — discussion prompted by some interesting conversations I’ve had over the past couple weeks with some local restaurateurs.
Side note from the MySpace discussion… Since we’re all (and by “we’re all” I mean people who are reading this) pretty savvy, and most online ads don’t “work” on us, it’s often hard (at least for me) to remember that there are tools people out there who believe EVERYTHING they read online. If you ever feel like readjusting your sense of scale, get a few 11-13 year olds in a room with a few laptops and wireless and just see how they use the web. Everything you know not to do online… they totally do it. If I didn’t think it would be ethically questionable, I’d secretly video my daughter and her bff cruising MySpace just to show how many of the ads they click on and what types of things incite them to follow links. On the one hand it’s really interesting from a behavioral point of view. On the other hand, it makes my head hurt and forces me to have to completely reinstall the operating system every so often to clean off all the crap they download. 🙂
