By now, most of us have heard Wired editor Chris Anderson's theory of the long tail. It boils down to the fact that search and other technologies are making it easier for consumers to find more obscure items that they really want to buy, rather than heavily marketed items that companies push on us. Since technology can also enable businesses to offer more (usually digitized) items at a lower cost, the business wave of......

PodCamp Boston 2 Friday, October 26 through Sunday, October 28 Boston Convention & Expo Center Free, but registration required Official Site PodCamp Boston 2 promises to teach you more than how to bedazzle an iPod, as witnessed on the reality-show I Love New York 2. The days are packed with practical seminars on creating your own web-media empire. Seminar titles include "Web 2.0 Tools That Are Actually Useful" and "Intellectual Property Law for the Creative......

In a move that boggles the mind, Mitt Romney has declared that he won't take part in the Republican version of the CNN/YouTube debate in December. Why? Here's the reason: Asked about the [YouTube] format, which featured video questions submitted by the public, Romney said "There is a degree of respectfulness that ought to be associated with the process for selecting a nominee. From what I've heard, that level of respectfulness was breached." But......

Banner week for SFist as the site's new editor introduced himself -- hooray for Brock! While the NY Times weighed in on SF's mayoral race, only SFist had the (insert tongue firmly into cheek) hard-hitting latest on candidate/activist Josh Wolf. Coverage of a protest vs. gentrification spawned a fantastic debate amongst SFist's readers. Finally, from the sublime to the ridiculous: video of a man that confused a Board of Supes meeting with "open mic......

We've seen the design. We've seen it play doom. We've heard that it's in the production process. And now we get some sugar. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, spun off from the MIT Media Lab, has an operating system for the XO machines they've dubbed "Sugar." It's safe to say that the look and operation is completely different than anything we've seen before. And you thought Vista was different than what you were......

Web 2.0 has been established as a way of life for many users of the vast network of tubes internets. From social networking sites, wikis, to tools of collaborative authoring, the web has become a different beast than it once was. Perhaps a better web than it once was. Personal relationships in that thing called "real life" or unwired relationships are touched by email, MySpace, Flickr, instant messaging, among others. So what happens when......

Justin Long as Mac, John Hodgman as PC. The serial ads illuminating why the Mac is so much hipper than the PC have left many with mixed feelings about their preferred platform. Hodgman is hilarious, no matter if his platform is books, the Daily Show, or comedy tours. It's hard not to like him, even if Apple Computer, Inc. wants to play him off as the bad guy who's prone to virus infection and poor......

The internets ungulate more than any other of our friends. There seems to be a new kid on the block every other day with others just disappearing. It’s nice to know that some friends stick around for a while. Exploit Boston officially turned five years old today. That means it was post-boom, pre-web 2.0, and, oh, does any of that nonsense even matter? In the last five years the website has served as an events......

It's like some bastardized version of the "five things you don't know about me" meme that's making the way around the blogosphere, redesigns are happening all over the internet. The MBTA redesigned their website last week. In a somewhat embarrassing move they had to pull the new design due to poor performance. But it wasn't really that surprising that the T would make such a move given their track record of delayed trains, buses, and,......

While you were waiting in line for the CharlieGate to open the MBTA has been hard at work. Fixing escalators? No. Running busses on schedule? Of course not. Giving their website a complete overhaul? You got it. This morning browsing over to the MBTA.com website brings up a whole new page. Compared to the last 2002-esque design of the T website of yesterday the new implementation is in the flashy web 2.0 vein. For......

It's summer. You're on vacation. Just reading Bostonist isn't enough fun for you. You want to participate. Well, here's your chance to engage in a Web 2.0 experiment of sorts. This week we launched Bostonist Labs with some new features to engage you in what's going on in our corner of the blogosphere. We've finally finished off our spring cleaning and released two new sections to explore: Bostonist Labs: Contribute Share Links: Using del.icio.us,......

The internets were abuzz yesterday with the launch of Flickr: Gamma Edition. They've been living in Beta as the site has been growing exponentially recently. Flickr is owned by Yahoo!, it was purchased in March '05. Since then Yahoo! photos have migrated to Flickr, a bit more storage and a few more features added, and the servers moved from Vancouver to California. But they've yet to roll into Flickr 1.0 as promised, yesterday they took......

A sly mention earlier this week of the wonders of Creative Commons licensing in a post about the Free Culture movement might have been a clue. Perhaps the repeated italicized credits for photos from Flickr users at the bottom of other posts were the tip off. Either way it is clear to us that Flickr is a great Web 2.0 application and a wonderful resource for us poor bloggers looking for great imagery without......

First off, we know the headline is misleading. This post is all news about citizen media - we're not going to be bold and try to claim that it actually is citizen journalism. Some say Dan Gillmor is the father of citizen media. Regardless of whether you believe that, he did, in fact, write the book on it. This year he’s a non-resident fellow at the Berkman Center and lectured there earlier this week.......

Bostonist used all the cyan in the color cartridge (which, at the time, still came bundled together) some five-odd years ago when we thought it really important to print ourselves the NASA Astronomy photo of the day from November 27, 2000. Type “earthlights” into google and the NASA image is still the first hit. In the web 2.0 world it was only a matter of time before someone showed us what a google map......