racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

Mad Pengiun features an interview with uber-cool social bookmarking / tech news site DIGG founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson.  DIGG is basically a Slashdot-type news site, but here the users/readers dictate which content will be featured by voting or “DIGGing” for the news they like.

In essence, Digg has turned its readers into news editors. Doc Searls has famously said that “open source is what happens when the demand side supplies itself.” Digg has been applying that concept to the news since its birth day on December 5, 2004. As the two lead Diggers, Digg CEO Jay Adelson and Digg founder Kevin Rose, explain in this interview, by February, 2005, the mainstream media were already calling Kevin and Jay on the phone, wondering why they were getting spikes in traffic from Digg.com.

…

Digg is “Disrupting the Fourth Estate” by doing the news cheaper, faster, and more narrowly tailored to the tastes of its individual readers. Kevin Rose started Digg with only about $1,000.00 USD in cash expenditures. Big media no longer is the sole owner of the printing presses. If Kevin can start Digg with only $1,000.00 and enable his millions of daily readers to become news editors, what does that mean for the future of big media?

Note that DIGG recently got US$ 2.8 million in venture capital funding (DIGG comment thread here)!

That’s an interesting business model.  Shell out a thousand bucks.  Build a great community site.  Get approached by angel investors a few months after.  And then get to celebrate your first birthday 2.8 million bucks richer.

Did you know you can rearrange your browser tabs in Firefox 1.5?  You can simply drag a tab to the desired new position, and it will move there!

Very cool when you’re (like me) fond of browsing a lot of pages at the same time.  Not only are you able to view your sites in one browser window, you can actually now better organize the way you browse.

More new features as reviewed on NewsForge.

Check out explorer destroyer, a nifty little tool that will help you, ehem, nudge your IE-using readers towards Firefox.  Recall that Google will give you US$ 1 for every user you’ve helped switch over to the light side of the force (a.k.a. Firefox).

You can choose among three levels of “encouragement”:

• Gentle encouragement
• Semi-serious
• Dead-serious

I’m not too fond, though, of the not-so-subtle way of reminding IE
users that Firefox is the better alternative by not giving them access
at all, with “dead-serious.”  I’d rather write about the benefits
of Firefox than force people to use it with annoying
splash-screens.  An educated decision is always better than having
something forced down upon you.

(via I.T. girl and Yugatech)

Check out this post by Anton at Pinoy.tech.blog.  According to the PICS, the Philippines only has 1.1 million regular internet users, or roughly a 1% penetration rate.

Compare that with a 20-30% mobile phone penetration rate; you can see that Pinoys favor mobile over ‘net applications.  Why?  Perhaps it’s because mobiles are so darn cheap nowadays (at least the lower end or older models), and they’ve become a necessity!  Heck, even poor people have the tendency to prioritize buying a mobile phone or prepaid credits over other necessities.

You’ve got quite a challenge if your business is focusing on internet-related solutions for Pinoys.

Either you’re an optimist or a pessimist, and I’d rather look at the brighter side.  So the challenge for me would be making the Internet more accessible to more Pinoys.  Let’s bridge the gap, so to speak.  Why not also focus on doing business with the higher-end market–exactly for the 1% that are regular Internet users?

After all, it’s either you build a market or work with an existing one.

My post for today at Pinoy.tech.blog:

Netopia, one of the larger chains of Internet shops recommends that the Senate pass laws that will filter Internet traffic for p0rn.

Will we be the next China?

What will these people think of next?

Read more at Pinoy.tech.blog.