The Social

The Gawker Media-True Blood party last week: They even rented a tent.

(Credit: Kate Miltner)

Last Thursday night, entertainment blog network Gawker Media held a rooftop party at its downtown headquarters to commemorate its advertising partnership with HBO vampire drama "True Blood"--as well as to toast to an edgy publicity stunt in which a fictional "True Blood" blog, Bloodcopy, passed itself off as an actual vampire news blog that Gawker Media had acquired. At least one reporter had been fooled.

As guests left the open-bar soiree, they had the option to sign up for a mailing list to attend future Gawker Media events. It's a far cry from just a few months ago, when Gawker founder Nick Denton was slashing budgets, laying off bloggers, and consolidating underperforming titles.

The city's digital media crowd, at long last, appears to be coming out of hiding.

As New York's tech industry gears up for its second annual Internet Week this week, a seven-day, city-sanctioned hodgepodge of conferences, parties, and the Webby Awards ceremony, there's a vague sense of relief about: things just haven't turned out as badly as everyone feared they would.

"Anecdotally, things feel a little different," said David-Michel Davies, Internet Week chairman and Webby Awards executive director. "It feels better. It feels like the market sort of loosened up a bit. I'm not really sure if that's because it became so hard to be hunkered down for so long and people just had to relax, or if it seemed like the bottom had come and people started to stress out a little less."

Not so long ago, more than a few people around town were wondering if companies were even going to be willing to stretch their budgets enough for a Webbys entry fee. But this week, the concerns appear to be limited to whether it's possible to catch both an Al Gore keynote at Digitas' NewFronts '09 event and a subsequent panel across town featuring both Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, or what costume to wear to Wednesday night's CollegeHumor party, which has a theme that seems to be vaguely inspired by comedy troupe Lonely Island's much-blogged video "I'm On A Boat."

Nobody's pretending that there hasn't been a rather brutal recession humming along in the background. The administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose Office of Film, Television, and Broadcasting co-organizes Internet Week, has put several initiatives into effect to attempt to get laid-off Wall Streeters back to work at finance or tech start-ups. There are about a half-dozen Internet Week events where employment is the clear focus. Events with entry fees have been advertising discounts, and some parties feature drink specials rather than open bars.

David-Michel Davies said he still expects an upbeat climate.

"The interesting thing to me is that all the conversations I've had with people running internet companies is that a lot of them are doing well and still trying to hire. If ever there was opportunity somewhere, it's in this industry," Davies said. "There's a ton of opportunity in this sort of industry, and it's always been hard to have any great engineers in New York because they were so well paid in financial services."

And the across-the-board difficult financial climate could, in fact, be the catalyst for a more productive week of tech networking, eliminating some of last year's evident gulf between scrappy start-ups and seemingly invincible stalwarts of Gotham finance and media. The big guys, these days, are in need of some ideas.

"We have more participation from companies and organizations than we did last year, and to be honest, at the beginning of the year we were all pretty worried," Davies said regarding the health of Internet Week. "It's 100 percent dependent on the energy and participation of the city at large."

We'll see if they have their game faces on.

(Credit: Twitter)

In observance of Good Friday, a New York church has been Twittering the story of the Passion--the biblical tale of the hours leading up to Jesus' crucifixion. This means that subscribers will receive 140-character updates coming from a set of Twitter accounts run by people playing characters in the story.

Trinity Wall Street is an Episcopal church in Manhattan's Financial District that live-streams its services on the Web, encourages members of the congregation to send video e-postcards to friends and family, and produces its own podcasts. The church's thinking behind offering a Twitter feed of the Passion is to offer a way to bring the day of observance into modern life and technology: While Good Friday is one of the most important days of the church year for many Christian denominations, there are plenty of devout Americans who don't take the day off from work.

But edgy interpretations of the Passion are nothing new. This is the same subject matter depicted in "The Passion of the Christ," the controversial Mel Gibson movie from a few years ago in which the dialogue was presented in the languages of the time without subtitles.

Also worth noting this week: a Passover haggadah depicted in the form of a Facebook news feed.

The city of New York is about to step up its efforts to help nascent businesses and laid-off professionals, CNET News has learned.

On Wednesday, the city's Economic Development Corporation (NYC EDC) plans to announce a new initiative to partner with a number of local start-up workspace companies. These office space providers rent desks, cubicles, conference rooms, and other resources to new and small businesses that aren't yet ready to take the full plunge into office space in a notoriously expensive market.

According to a source in the city's venture capital community, the agreement means that participating workspaces will provide discounted services and event space access to the city in exchange for promotion and publicity. Basically, this means that instead of actively developing rival shared work spaces--which could undercut existing private ones--NYC EDC will primarily collaborate with the ones that are already there.

A media relations representative from NYC EDC confirmed to CNET News that there would be an announcement on Wednesday but declined to provide any details.

The source said that initial partners in the agreement include Sunshine Suites, Nutopia, and New Work City, among others. But the partnership's first hub will be at 160 Varick St., in the SoHo neighborhood, which had already been selected by NYC EDC as a collaborative workspace.

It goes without saying that New York's business sector has been thoroughly shaken by the Wall Street crisis and ensuing recession.

In his State of the City address on January 15, Mayor Michael Bloomberg--himself a billionaire entrepreneur--announced that NYC EDC would work with the city's Small Businesses Services agency to help laid off workers find new employment at start-ups and entrepreneurial efforts, as well as devote more resources toward attracting new private investors.

In June, as part of the city's inaugural Internet Week New York festivities, Bloomberg announced a separate initiative called NYC Seed: a venture fund to provide up to $200,000 to local technology start-ups.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos holds up the Kindle 2 Monday in New York.

(Credit: David Carnoy/CBS Interactive)

NEW YORK--Were there an anthology of gadget launch announcements, the unveiling of Amazon's Kindle 2 e-book reader would have one of the more anticlimactic storylines.

It started out like any other big press conference, with a line of reporters and photographers streaming out the door onto the chilly sidewalk outside the historic Morgan Library & Museum.

The Kindle 2's arrival had been preceded by the usual blog blitz of leaked photos, rumors, and breathless wish lists. (A color screen! Better PDF support! International versions of the Kindle store!) Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took the stage, Steve Jobs-style, with a slide show recap of the original Kindle's success before making the big debut.

But the announcement itself was underwhelming. The price, $359, remains the same. The battery life's been improved by about 25 percent. The Kindle 2 is much skinnier than its predecessor, slimming down to 0.36 inches in thickness from 0.7, but it's only a tenth of an ounce lighter. The storage capacity has jumped from 256MB to 2GB, or about 200 to 1,500 books, and the electronic ink display has improved from a 4-shade to 16-shade grayscale.

The layout of some of the buttons has been restructured, and the new Kindle also has a text-to-speech reader. In short, the improvements seem worthwhile, but there was no real curveball to give the Kindle a mainstream appeal.

This MacBook at the 14th St. Apple Store in New York could load Facebook just fine. Taken, naturally, on my iPhone.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

NEW YORK--It involved three shopping districts, two subway lines, and a whole lot of walking in the freezing cold. But I completed my mission to hit up all three Manhattan Apple stores to see if it was true that the retail outlets' computer stations had blocked access to Facebook because too many people were using the popular social network to waste time. (Editors' note: at publish time, the link above was experiencing a network time-out error.)

The verdict: An Apple Store representative told me in a phone call later on Friday, "We have not blocked Facebook from our stores." But it looks like some stores may have put a block in place on their own accord.

Apple retail stores are famously stocked with Internet-accessible workstations that, while intended to be used as demonstrations for prospective buyers, are also free for the public to use. That's led to some problems with nonshoppers monopolizing the machines and taking up space: in mid-2007, Apple blocked access to MySpace, which was then the world's biggest social-networking site.

I hit up Apple's Fifth Avenue flagship store in midtown (you know, the big glass cube), the 14th Street store in the Meatpacking District, and the store on Prince Street in the downtown neighborhood of SoHo.

At the Fifth Avenue store, I was able to access Facebook from one laptop, but on another, the facebook.com domain redirected to an Apple Store page. In the Meatpacking District store, meanwhile, two laptops loaded Facebook without a problem, but a desktop computer brought up a message explaining that the parental controls feature in the Safari browser had blocked it.

In the SoHo store, meanwhile, I had no problem accessing Facebook from any of the random computers I checked out. Ironically, it was in the SoHo store that was populated by the most people who clearly weren't customers; by the time I swung by, it was lunch hour at a local high school, and the computers were occupied by teenagers checking out games and music.

So, what it looks like is that even if there is no nationwide ban of Facebook at Apple stores as some had speculated, a few individual stores have chosen to go their own route.

This post was updated at 1:05 p.m. PT with comment from Apple.

Google Maps and Google Earth are the centerpiece of NYCGo, a new information and reference project launched by the New York City government to provide resources to both visitors and locals. Wednesday's launch announced the debut of NYCGo.com, a Google Maps-fueled local search and reference site, as well as the unveiling of the renovated New York City Information Center a few blocks north of the tourist-heavy Times Square district.

NYCGo.com contains not just Google map and search data, but also travel deals from Travelocity and local content from what-to-do powerhouse Time Out New York, nightlife culture magazine Paper, the New York Observer, and eco-living guide Greenopia.

The information center, located on Seventh Avenue between 52nd and 53rd streets, is equally Googly. The city's technocratic mayor, Michael Bloomberg, even contributed a guest post to the official Google blog to announce it: "The Information Center features interactive map tables, powered by the Google Maps API for Flash, that let you navigate venues and attractions as well as create personalized itineraries, which can be printed, emailed or sent to mobile devices," the blog post explained. "Additionally, there's a gigantic video wall that utilizes Google Earth to display a 3D model of New York City on which you can map out personalized itineraries."

Bloomberg has been aggressive about promoting tech initiatives during his time in office, from a wind power plan (part of the much bigger "GreeNYC" project) and a city-run venture firm. Under his watch, the Mountain View, Calif.-based Google opened its New York satellite office, taking over several floors of the historic former Port Authority building downtown.

A side note: the video provided by Google shows the "interactive map tables" in the new information center, and they look a whole lot like Microsoft Surface units. But they aren't, a representative from NYCGo tells us. They're custom-made.

Dennis Crowley (top) created a mobile app called Dodgeball and sold it to Google. But its base never expanded beyond quirky blogger kids like those shown here, and now Google's shutting it down. Nobody's surprised, but some of us are sad.

(Credit: Dennis Crowley)

The irony was a little too much.

A who's who of New York's new-media set were packed into a surreptitious basement bar on Bleecker Street in downtown Manhattan on Wednesday evening, braving rapidly plummeting temperatures and an overnight snow forecast in order to make an appearance at the 35th birthday party of one of the city's blogger elite.

Like so many things involving young bloggers, it was a quirky, albeit cliquey affair: there was a password at the door ("tacos"), the drinks were thrown back a bit too liberally, and someone had used a scarf to hang an oven mitt shaped like a chicken from one of the chandeliers. (That's an in-joke.) It was also quite possibly the only place in the world where 16 of those present had used mobile where-you-at service Dodgeball to announce their presence. Yes, a few people are still using Dodgeball.

It was, as a result, also quite possibly the only place in the world where a sizable number of people really cared about the news that Google, which acquired Dodgeball in 2005, was shutting down the little-used service as part of a belt-tightening measure. Dodgeball founder Dennis Crowley was in the room, in fact, and said he'd just heard the news via a phone call from his former business partner, Alex Rainert. Harry Heymann, the lone Googler still keeping Dodgeball up and running, was there too. He hadn't been told about it.

To be sure, Google had every reason to put the kibosh on Dodgeball. It didn't make the company any money, and its user base had shrunk to a small cadre of digital-media enthusiasts based primarily in New York. It's sort of the Arrested Development of Web apps: not particularly popular, and most people don't even seem to really understand it, but those loyalists sure are loyal. And much like a TV show with a small fan base, the corporate parent pulled the plug.

'John C.' uses Dodgeball to announce his nefarious intentions at Dodgeball founder Dennis Crowley's Christmas party.

(Credit: Dennis Crowley)

I will out myself: I am a Dodgeballer, albeit late to the party since I didn't really use it much before last year. I was there at that Bleecker St. bar on Wednesday night, and yes, I "checked in" (Dodgeball's term for text-messaging your location; the service then finds it in a directory and tells your friends on the service). Dennis Crowley, whom I initially met when I interviewed him for a CNET News story way back in 2006, lives a few blocks away from me. He threw a great Christmas tree-decorating party this year. And I, too, was sad to hear Wednesday night's news--or rather, see it pop up in my iPhone's browser. Because with the death of Dodgeball goes one of the trademarks of New York blogger culture.

Crowley, now 32, started Dodgeball as a side project nearly a decade ago while he was working as an analyst at Jupiter Research during the dot-com boom. One of his colleagues, a fellow named Andrew Krucoff, went on to become the writer behind early local blog Young Manhattanite and one of Dodgeball's most prolific users; earlier this week, Krucoff was using Dodgeball's "shout" messaging feature to inform his friends on the service that he held them responsible for the swift downfall of his New Year's resolutions.

As Crowley puts it, Dodgeball's total expenses were $20 per month for hosting and $100 on promotional stickers. It eventually became his thesis project at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Shortly after Google acquired it in 2005, it experienced a flurry of interest among digital-media mavens on both coasts. But in the rest of the tech world, it faded from favor, especially when the more open-ended Twitter took off as the mobile group-messaging service of choice, and Crowley left Google in 2007 on less than pleasant terms. But a few dozen people clung to Dodgeball as their companion for navigating the dark, hectic, and cold (this time of year) grid of New York's streets, and Google kept it ticking.

According to Harry Heymann, Dodgeball's No. 1 most-checked-in venue is actually in San Francisco, a bar called Zeitgeist. But in New York, its top venues are a roster that wouldn't surprise avid users: Brooklyn video game bar Barcade; Lower East Side media hangout The Magician; a bar called Loreley, where seemingly every Dodgeballer was dancing into the early morning hours for longtime user Kevin Kearney's birthday in November; and East Village hipster music venue Lit Lounge. (The only surprise? No karaoke bars. New York bloggers have been known to adore karaoke.)

There are the hilarious anecdotes, like the time when someone stole Krucoff's cell phone and used it to mischievously "check in" to bars where he'd be afraid to show his face (all-male revues, anyone?), or the time very, very late at night when six bloggers were in such a state of intoxication that none of them remembered that they'd been to an East Village nightspot until they saw it in their Dodgeball feeds the next day. There's also the running joke about that guy that nobody liked, and how everyone else would avoid bars where he'd checked in.

But clubby and insidery does not a business model make. And when Google chose to cut costs, Dodgeball was an easy target (pun intended). Crowley has been working on its successor for months, a slick iPhone app that he's calling FourSquare. He wants it to be ready to make a splash at this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March. Lucky for him, no other location-based networking app has taken off like wildfire yet. But there are plenty, like Loopt and Brightkite, that are vying for the market.

Maybe it was fitting that the demise of Dodgeball, the engine behind a few dozen bloggers' drunken New York nights, surfaced while its most active users were all together to celebrate a 35th birthday, one of those milestones that can make us all awkwardly aware that we're not getting any younger. Location-based networking, like the rest of digital media, will evolve. Dodgeball never grew beyond a tool for a clique of young urban bar-hoppers, and no one can be a young urban bar-hopper forever. So with its failure the digerati move onward to the next burst of innovation, to the next cool geek toy, to the next chapter in life.

And we'll miss the Dodgeball days.

East Village Idiot blogger Chris O'Leary sounds off.

(Credit: Twitter)

Hey, guys, news flash: Twitter is good for something.

This morning, I crawled out of bed and headed to the kitchen to make coffee, but upon turning on the faucet, I noticed that the water flowing out of it was a sketchy brown shade. Not good--especially since New York is one of those cities that prides itself on having a water purification infrastructure so advanced that you can drink right out of the tap.

My roommates weren't around. My landlord had no idea what was up. And an hour later, the water wasn't back to normal. So in an attempt to find an answer to my most important question ("When can I take a shower?"), I turned to the Web.

All things "hyperlocal" were irritating the heck out of me. I found nothing on Outside.in or its neighborhood aggregator ilk, or on city blogs like Gothamist. Consequently, I posted a Twitter message saying I thought there was rust in my tap water.

I've been on Twitter for a while, have plenty of real-life friends who use it, and as a member of the digital-media press, I've managed to amass a few thousand followers. Sometimes, I'm not sure what to do about that, why the heck they want to listen to me, or even if I want to have that many people tuned in. But as I learned this morning, it can be darned helpful when you just want to know the answer to something.

Bright lights, brown water: Manhattan's East Village

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy)

The responses started flowing in (pun totally intended)--luckily for me, I live in a district packed full of bloggers. Toby Daniels, a digital-media dude who lives a few blocks away from me, replied that he had the same problem and that running "a whole bath's worth" of water didn't eradicate the issue.

Similar claims of mysterious brown tap water rolled in from Urlesque blogger Kelly Reeves, Dodgeball founder Dennis Crowley, Gawker Media finance guy Scott Kidder, as well as a handful of people I don't know who follow my Twitter account.

The dozen or so responses indicated that the tainted tap water had proliferated around Manhattan's East Side, with most of it in the downtown East Village, but with a few scattered claims in the Murray Hill and Upper East Side neighborhoods, further north.

One neighbor sent me a Twitter direct-message informing me that his landlord had said a water main was getting flushed out. Another response came from a woman who said she'd heard that some underground utilities work was responsible for the screwup that caused it.

Either way, within a few hours, the brown water was gone, for one reason or another. According to real-estate blog Curbed later on Thursday, this issue seems to hit the Stuyvesant Town neighborhood, due north of the East Village, every once in a while--and city authorities always assure us that it's safe to drink. Um, right.

Now I'll get to the reason for posting this boring urban anecdote to a blog that's ostensibly about social media. You'll hear the "social-media expert" types ranting a whole lot about the importance of building and maintaining an active network, a recommendation that's always seemed a bit canned and over-the-top to me (not to mention royally easy to mess up). But I'm not on Twitter to market a product or (shudder) "build a personal brand"--I'm there to keep in touch with friends and keep tabs on the industry.

Regardless, I've got to admit that having a solid pack of Twitter followers, both those I know and those I don't, helped a ton in this case, when neither my landlord nor the dozens of local blogs seemed to be saying a thing about it. And since all the digerati seem to tell us these days to "be part of the conversation" rather than just be a one-sided listener, I shot out another Twitter message thanking the random neighbors who'd passed tips along. Because I'm nice like that.

On an unrelated note: There's been plenty of media coverage concerning the emergence of Twitter as a teeming vat of citizen news in the midst of everything from natural disasters to presidential elections. But dealing with a situation involving water of questionable potability, it became pretty evident to me that the whole "Twitter as a news source" thing can be more than iffy.

Twitter doesn't have a fact-checking mechanism built in and probably never will; consequently, I wasn't about to take a "Don't worry, it's safe to drink!" message as gospel. And I hope that the hordes of starry-eyed new-media proponents who hail Twitter as an information revolution in and of itself will keep this in mind.

Oh, and New York City tap water: My confidence in you has been severely eroded. Maybe tomorrow I'll post to Twitter, asking for water filter recommendations.

In what's probably one part prank and one part ironic statement, New York society-pages site Cityfile announced Friday that over the past few months it has been quietly snapping up domain names corresponding to the people it covers.

You may not have heard of many of the people on the list: the obsessively name-dropping Cityfile's terrain is more focused on Gotham's business and media leaders than the likes of Britney and Paris. But among those on the list are Warner Music chief Edgar Bronfman Jr. (Cityfile now owns edgarbronfmanjr.com), Greycroft Partners' Alan Patricof, and Nerve.com founder Rufus Griscom.

Domain name speculation has been the subject of much debate for over a decade now, but the gossip site doesn't plan to simply hoard them (and there's no indication yet as to whether the site plans to sell them back to the notable people in question at a premium). The domain names now redirect to the celebrities' Cityfile-created profiles, which are rather comprehensive listings of all sorts of both savory and unsavory details pertaining to the person in question. That means more traffic--and ad revenue--for Cityfile itself. Quite shrewd of them. But there's also an ironic twist to it.

"Given the lengths to which prominent New Yorkers go to control their public profiles, you'd think they would have purchased their domain names by now," the site explained. "It's a $4 investment, which we're pretty sure billionaires like Jonathan Tisch, Steve Feinberg or Edgar Bronfman, Jr. can afford, even if this is the greatest depression ever."

Three words: Ha, ha, ha.