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Currency Of The Revolution, Or Tool For Online Vendors? The Many Faces Of Bitcoin [Feature]
It's become an annual event: the fall of Bitcoin. You've probably read about it multiple times, and maybe even believe that the online, decentralized currency is already gone forever. It isn't. Created by a mysterious, anonymous entity back in 2009 – when the recession was at its worst – Bitcoin is a completely digital currency with no central servers. Transactions are distributed across the network of users, and developers claim counterfeiting to be impossible. We've taken a deep look into this virtual, but oh-so-real, currency.
The Art Of Creating A Successful Blog – Tips From The Pros [Feature]
In an effort to understand the magic ingredients that make up the recipe of a successful website, I went out in search of successful bloggers that have formed popular, profitable websites. The fruits of that search turned up two big names in the blogosphere. Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Magazine, and Joshua Topolsky of The Verge. I've interviewed both of them at length, and here are their thoughts about the two different paths a blog can take to become wildly successful.
Killing the Man: Making A Living As an Artist Online [Feature]
Can you really "kill the man" and make a living on the Internet as a creative professional? I spoke to a quartet of creatives recently, each proudly working for themselves in different ways. Read on to find out more about a freelance writer forced into his dream career through redundancy, a photographer who stumbled upon a means of making money through her ability with Photoshop, an artist who followed her dream instead of processing card payments and a journalist who found himself offered a six book deal by a major publisher!
When Kickstarters Fail [Feature]
Crowd-funding has finally transformed from niche idea to mainstream concept. Credit for this surge in popularity can be thrown at the feet of Kickstarter and its contemporaries. Some highly publicized projects have raised millions of dollars within a few weeks, transforming idea into reality at lightning speed. These success stories make it easy to forget that projects don’t always go as planned. Many flop badly. But how, and why? Kickstarter intentionally makes failure a hard thought to stumble on, so we've set out to find some failed projects on our own.
Eating Only Dessert: Why Your Information Diet Is Probably Terrible [Feature]
Email. Social networks. Blogs. Online video. People today consume more information than ever before, and typically only consume the things they really, really like. Clay Johnson compares this to a bad diet. "If you only ate what you want then we'd probably put the dessert section at the top of the menu, rather than at the bottom," he says. "I think the same thing is happening with journalism: we're going straight to dessert every time." Tech-savvy people are no exception.
The Fading Games Of Yesterday, And How We Preserve Them [Feature]
What is your favorite video game of all time? If you’re in your twenties, or older, there’s a good chance that you answer to this question isn’t a recent title. It may be a classic RPG like Baldur’s Gate. Perhaps it’s Halo, a benchmark against which all other console shooters are compared. It could be X-Com, a brilliant strategy that is now repeatedly ruined by spin-offs. Or maybe you’re a fan of Elite, a founding game in the space trading genre, which today is nearly extinct. We did a thorough investigation into the afterlife of gaming, and where it's headed.