Bjorn Tipling

It’s confirmed, I’m an award winning troll!

This afternoon I check my email and I see this:

“Hey Bjorn Tipling,

In case you didn’t see this post yet, you are the biggest troll this week!

As you probably know, “At the end of each week, we’ll reward the snarkiest troll with a $100 voucher for iTunes, the Apple Store or Amazon, depending on your trolly preference. But since you really need no excuse to lob insults our way, we’re also happy to send the money to a charity of your choosing.”

So Bjorn, just let me know your trolly preference and I’ll send it over!

Hope you had a great weekend.

Adam A. Hirsch

Community and Marketing Director

Mashable

www.Mashable.com“

Looks like I finally get what’s coming to me! I’m going to pick Amazon, as Itunes doesn’t work on linux. I’ve been spending money like crazy on the Amazon MP3 store anyways.

Wow, I love this quote from Garret Rogers at Googling Google, a zdnet blog:

” Even great companies like Ask have been spinning their wheels for years while spending millions on advertising — and in some ways, you can argue that they even have superior search technology. ”

I’m biased though - I work at Ask (and I love it) .

Breaking news this morning, by the way of Valleywag, was that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg cashed out on $40 million dollars worth of Facebook stock. Turns out that wasn’t true. It was a rumor, but because Valleywag covered it, it quickly spread to other notable blogs like Silicon Alley Insider, Mashable!, and many many others. It’s because they all basically read each other and the moment something breaks nobody wants to be the last person to talk about it.

This might spell trouble for robot aggregators (which I personally love) like Techmeme and Blogrunner. They just automatically pick up on the latest discussions. By early this afternoon Blog Runner had changed its headline and removed the other (editors?), Techmeme had not (I don’t see a way to link to a Techmeme discussion). I’m always checking these sources several times a day (mostly because I’m bored), but for some they may only check it once and get the wrong info. Despite having the backing of the authority of The New York Times Company, Blog Runner basically lent its credibility to what turned out to be a false rumor. How could a robot know what’s a rumor or not? This wont lead to me not using such sites, I think they have tremendous value, but it is something to keep in mind.

You’ve probably read about this already. It’s covered in the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, also top on the lists of Techmeme and Blog Runner.

Where did CompUSA go wrong? It’s hard to tell. I have a few nostalgic recollections of buying my first PC game from a CompuUSA in Hawaii’i. When the original Diablo and Half Life, and StarCraft were new games, CompUSA was the place to go. That was long before I had ever heard of a Best Buy.

In my mind CompUSA sits somewhere in between a BestBuy or CircuitCity and your local small business computer store. That’s not bringing Fry’s into picture, but not many places have a Fry’s. CompUSA sells motherboards and CPU’s, which a store like BestBuy does not. But unlike a small computer store, they have big box store return policies. For me it was the best of worlds. Their prices weren’t always the best, and the stores weren’t always the best looking, but it had (and still has until the final stores are closed) a special niche for me.

I suppose Fry’s is the closest thing to a CompUSA. Those places are dumps, but you can’t ignore that they have a lot greater options when it comes to esoteric pc parts and cables. I suppose I’ll do most of my computer shopping online now.

Read More:

Gizmodo: CompUSA Throws in the Towel, Sells to a Liquidator.

Engadget: RIP, CompUSA: 1984 - 2008

CruchGear: CompUSA closing, assets to be sold

If you haven’t tried it, The New York Time’s Blogrunner is pretty fricken sweet. I don’t know too much about it, it seems to be sort of generated sort of editorialized. It’s basically like Techmeme (which is also awesome) but more categories and more content. Techmeme is completely algorithm based I believe. Sometimes I think The New York Times is one of the very very few old media types that “get’s it.” They removed TimesSelect, they’ve started some very excellent blogs like bits (I wish David Pogue was a blog and not a column, but alas someone out there is still reading a paper). Now they need to get rid of that stupid registration requirement. Los Angeles Times recently had a redesign that I think is pretty wonderful. These newspapers are finally realizing what we knew about 5 years ago: they’re in for the fight of their lives. I hope NYT, the WSJ, and some other top notch publications survive. I love blogs, I do, but sometimes that rational tone and professional editorialized content retains some of that authority and integrity that’s hard to come by (and also easy to lose).