Archive for January 4th, 2007
The much-buzzed-about news site Daylife is now up and running. It combines Web 2.0 elements with conventional news aggregation into a visually unique format. Craig Newmark of craigslist fame is a top investor, as is the NY Times, Mike Arrington (who is apparently not pleased with the outcome), Dave Winer and others. This is not a review. I thought I’d encourage you all to check it out and review it here yourselves. Jeff Jarvis, a longtime friend of LR, consulted on the project. Jeff explains his role and the site’s mission here. Again - I’m not reviewing it, but I will offer two immediate observations: The cover page with rotating “big pictures” is very cool, and the graphical choices are quite good. But I’m surprised the site doesn’t offer RSS, commenting or other key social networking features. (UPDATE: Jarvis now notes that RSS and other features will be forthcoming.)
January 4th, 2007
I’ve always looked to the music industry as a rough guide of what lies ahead for broadcasting and video. Last year, album sales dropped 4.9 percent while digital downloads jumped 65 percent. The top-selling album for the year sold fewer units than the top-selling albums over the last 15 years. While download sales were spread around to many different artists, the bar for a “hit” has been reduced and the return on investment for a label is smaller. Can anyone say, The Long Tail?
January 4th, 2007
How does Edelman PR simply not learn from past ethical lapses? As the PR firm for the Vista launch, Edelman sent selected tech bloggers a free Acer Ferrari laptop complete with Windows Vista installed. It was apparently “up to the blogger” whether they wanted to keep the $2,300 laptop or test and return it. Microsoft blogger Long Zheng reportedly broke the news, quite happily, last week. Edelman took heat, deservedly, and then asked the bloggers to return the laptops. You may remember that Edelman is the PR firm that engineered the Wal Mart flog disaster. Richard Edelman blogged about it, and even listed changes being made at the company as a result. Backpeddling is, apparently, ethical. Writes one of the bloggers who received - and then was asked to send back - the computers: The original email read “you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away to your community, or you can hold onto it for as long as you’d like.” Then, after the firestorm began, that blogger received this “clarification”: Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding of our intentions I’m going to ask that you either give the pc away or send it back when you no longer need it for product reviews. Mr. Edelman has yet to blog about this latest miscue. (I have posted a request at his last entry, but the comments are moderated and, as of this writing, it’s not up yet.) But fellow PR firm Pierce Mattie thinks the idea is swell, and is even lecturing bloggers who disagree: “Bloggers: Be professional and human, don’t crucify a company for deeming you worthy of free products to review and own! … Honestly, if you’re a Blogger and you get to keep a product like that, the human thing to do is say thank you.” Yes, you little ingrate bloggers, take our bribes and love them! Gee. Thank you for the advice. UPDATE, SAT AM: The question that I posted at the Edelman blog has still not been “approved” for public eyes. Mr. Edelman is out with a new posting - which does not address the laptop giveaway. So I posted my question again on his new entry. Credit, however, to Pierce Mattie who posted my comment, pointed out an error I made and respectfully disagreed with my points.
January 4th, 2007
Mendota Heights, MN
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Mendota Heights, MN
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Mendota Heights, MN
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The New York Times Company has agreed to sell its nine television stations to Oak Hill Capital Partners for $575 million. “We believe… that our focus now should be on the development of our newspapers and our rapidly growing digital businesses and the increasing synergies between them,” said Janet L. Robinson, president and CEO of The New York Times Company. The stations are WHO-TV in Des Moines, KFSM-TV in Ft. Smith, WHNT-TV in Huntsville, WREG-TV in Memphis, WQAD-TV in Moline, WTKR-TV in Norfolk, KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City, KAUT-TV in Oklahoma City and WNEP-TV in Scranton. Oak Hill Capital Partners is a private equity firm. “We look forward to maintaining the standard of excellence that The New York Times Company has achieved over the last 30 years,” said J. Taylor Crandall, a managing partner of Oak Hill Capital Partners. Press release…
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Testers running Vista’s “release candidate 1″ were surprised when the Media Center decided to quit working with their TVs on December 31st. Microsoft says the license for the video decoder expired at the end of the year. Ooops.
January 4th, 2007
Here they go again. The Hollywood studios have agreed upon a complex digital lock standard that would “allow” us to download movies and TV shows, and burn them onto DVDs. The process, called Qflix, would add CSS (copy-locking) to DVDs burned on computers or at kiosks. Why won’t this work? Because there is no demand. And people can already share movies and burn DVDs without encryption. Any technology developed in the interest of the studios protecting their old models and not by the demand of the consumers will not work. (See DIVX rentals.) According to CNN, the DVD burner you currently have probably won’t even work with this scheme - some can be updated with software, but otherwise you’ll need to buy an external Qflix-enabled DVD burner. And if you go to a kiosk, it will take 10 - 15 minutes for it to burn the DVD. Imagine waiting for a season set while killing time at Walgreen’s. Not gonna happen.
January 4th, 2007
Cincinnati, OH
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Atlanta
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Poll time: who thinks Apple will/will not announce the long-rumored, previously-known-as-the iPhone? Macworld is next week. Predictions? I’ll start: Yes. And they will cut deals with all the major carriers so that it will be non-carrier-centric. Mind you, I was way off on my video iPod guess. Plenty of interesting ideas and mockups at the iPhone Concept Blog. (The funniest is below.) Your wild guesses in the comments below, please…
The Apple iPhone as tongue-in-cheekily designed by Matt Hoffman at iPhone Concept Blog.
January 4th, 2007
I can’t say enough about ClickZ, the essential website for industry ad data and articles. Not only is it RSS-worthy, it’s an RSS must. Today it links us to the HitWise list of the top news industry-related search terms from November. No surprise at #1: Weather. #2: CNN. #3: Gerald Levert (R&B singer who died). #4: Weather.com and #5: DrudgeReport.
January 4th, 2007
Google ads are even making money for browsers. ClickZ reports that Mozilla made $53 million in 2005 from a deal that sent traffic from the Firefox browser search box to Google’s search. Searchers don’t even have to click on a single ad for Mozilla to get money - it’s strictly a traffic-for-cash deal. Check out this jump: the deal netted the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation $2.4 million in ‘03 and $5.8 million in ‘04 before making that nearly tenfold jump in ‘05. Of course, the jump is also related to the Firefox release in November of ‘04. (Mozilla says there have been 279 million browser downloads.) Can’t wait to see the 2006 numbers…
January 4th, 2007
You can watch 20 minutes of the first episode of The Apprentice now on Yahoo and NBC.com. This show premieres this Sunday.
Plus: Netflix to offer NBC DVD with recap of first Heroes episodes
January 4th, 2007
Nielsen BuzzMetrics is the company’s latest foray into quantifying the ad value of the web. It’s the combination of various acquisitions involving the former standalones BuzzMetrics, Intelliseek and Trendum. The goal is to measure “buzz” on the web and in social media. It’s an absolutely worthy goal - but is it attainable? Mark Glaser at PBS MediaShift talks with Jonathan Carson, the CEO of BuzzMetrics who is also a blogger. Good questions from Glaser, including thoughts on flogs, the public availability of its own data at blogpulse, and just how the heck they intend to going to measure a moving target.
RELATED: New site Quantcast aims to measure sites’ audience demographics
January 4th, 2007
GM of Strategic Ventures for NBC Universal, Michael Steib is leaving for a position at Google, reports PaidContent. Steib was responsible for NBBC, which he founded, and NBC Weather Plus. No word on Steib’s new position at Google, “but we understand it is a new position and he could be heading a new group,” reports Rafat at PaidContent.
January 4th, 2007
OMG, could there, like, be a better match? The N, MTV Network’s offering for “tweens” has a deal with Sprint to deliver video clips to cellphones. Tweens. Video. Cellphones. Good deal.
January 4th, 2007
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