Category: BlogStreet

NewTeeVee talks to Podtech CEO John Furrier:

The key to reaping rewards from programs on niche topics like automotive news10 is appealing to microcommunities, Furrier said. Advertisers want to put their content in front of audiences that they know are contextually and behaviorally what they want. By involving and engaging a particular community, he said, lines of communication between the advertisers and the influencers can be opened up. It will be interesting to see if the same principles will apply to the entertainment and comedy channels Podtech is planning on adding soon.
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Were not really publicly talking about it. Were just out there doing it, he said. Were creating a media network, in a new way, in a different way. By treating media creators more like software developers, letting advertisers directly access potential customers in a compelling way and giving their users what they want, Podtech could do just that.

SplashCast reviews 10 RSS Readers. The dream: “If I could piece together the various options available to me now, what Id like is this. Id like an online reader with the speed and media handling of Google Reader and the river of news functionality of Newsgator Online. Id like it synced with a desktop reader that combines the stability, 3rd party tagging and river of news of NetNewsWire with the aesthetics of FeedDemon and the media handling of RSSOwl. I dont believe that anyone has yet nailed the cross platform mobile reader that syncs with web and desktop readers.”

Mark Cuban writes:

If Google or Yahoo are immediate gratification for everything and anything globally, Newspapers can be the library for everything and anything locally. The attraction of Youtube isnt the quality of its content, its the breadth. You can find anything and everything. Your website can be the same. Its what we did at broadcast.com . We drowned them with volume and alternatives. We didnt care if it was audio or video of a cat screeching, 2 people playing bridge or a cousin telling jokes. We figured if there was enough choice, people would come back out of curiousity to find out what was there. Only your newspaper can do the same thing locally.
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Put in URLs around reporters/columnists/whatevers along with the orangamajiggi, and teach your users that your newspaper is now putting up everything and anything that they do. Get it first, get it best with the Heralds LiveLink. Just go to this webpage, click on the Yellow and then click on Bookmarks Toolbar Folder. The Herald will then automatically send you headlines of every story we put on the net by category. We bring the news to you ! No more having to search through Google News, or searching for the latest stories, we bring it to you !

Kevin Maney asked techies how to reinvent newspapers:

Other than getting out of paper, the techies almost universally came up with two main suggestions: turn newspapers into models of Web 2.0-style open media, and go super local, essentially becoming the town Yahoo.

Newspapers are wading into both strategies, but the techies would dive in whole hog. Early this month, Gannett — which owns USA TODAY– announced a major initiative to quickly turn its community newspapers into “Information Centers” that can deliver content to any device or medium 24/7 using multimedia information-gathering tools and more content generated by readers.

“The media brands that will be successful will open their content to the masses and participate heavily with everyone else, including their competitors,” Hot or Not’s Hong says. “I would do everything I could do to embrace the new world rather than fight tooth and nail to protect my old business models.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick provides some insights: “RSS feeds make it possible to consume far more information at a faster pace than would otherwise be possible for the human brain. That said, many people experience a new level of information overload once they begin reading feeds. Here’s an overview of how I read thousands of RSS feeds without breaking a sweat.”

The Economist writes:

Now, however, a third category is emerging: the mom-and-pop blog. In the old days, we used to be called newsletter publishers, says Om Malik, a technology writer who quit his job at Business 2.0 magazine in June to work full-time on his blog, GigaOm. He has hired two other writers, and his blog now attracts about 50,000 readers a day, generating tens of thousands in monthly revenues. Costs, including salaries, are around $20,000 a month.

One big reason why his blog works as a small business, says Mr Malik, is that an ecosystem of support is appearing. Like Ms Armstrong, he farms out advertising sales and administration to a firm called FM, launched last year by John Battelle, who once ran magazines such as Wired and the Industry Standard. In his old business of magazines, says Mr Battelle, the cost of acquiring an audience was stupendousat Wired it was about $100 per subscriber. The cost of building a readership for a blog, by contrast, is nil. Once you have a lot of readers, however, the bandwidth costs become significant, and most medium-sized blogs cannot afford to hire the sales people needed to generate sufficient revenue. So FM’s 15 sales people negotiate with advertisers on behalf of blogs they represent, keeping 40% of the resulting revenues.

Google Blogoscoped has a collection of some of the best blog posts ever: “I asked several bloggers about their most popular, or one of their most popular, blog posts the kind that made an impact on people, had skyrocketing traffic numbers, or triggered a meme or changes. Here are their answers.”

From an article in Business Standard:

Corporate blogging, though in its infacy, has got a shot in the arm with this post. It is estimated that 40 Fortune 500 companies publish corporate blogs, allowing CEOs, employees to bypass the public relations department, journalists and industry analysts and speak directly to the public. Amazon, Cisco and Oracle were early adopters with AMD, Dell, Kodak, GE, Intel, Microsoft, Sun, Yahoo and Xerox following suit.

Not much is happening in India on this front, though. Of course, Infosys has its weblogs called infosysblogs.com and Rajesh Jain (one of the pioneers of the Internet in India) has his emergic.org. But we dont have a Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani or an Azim Premji blogging like Schwartz.

Steve Rubel points to an AP article: “RSS brings the Web to you, rather than you having to go out and find things on the Web.”

BlogHerald writes:

It appears that Digg has changed their stance towards their economy.

The Digg economy is the reward system for the users who contribute to the website by submitting content. This ultimate reward is the glory by way of user rankings, calculated as a function of total stories submitted by a user that made it to the front-page.

Keeping this economy in mind, you could say that the recent algorithm upgrade at Digg is actually a shift from a capitalist free market state, to a socialist state of equality.

Prior to this change, the Digg economy was a capitalistic one. One that emphasized fairness and allowed each individual user to create his own fate. Under this system, each user was rewarded appropriately, based on their level of contribution to the system. This economy has now become a socialistic one (not to be confused with communistic economies), which emphasizes equality over fairness.