Archive for September 20th, 2007
There’s a temptation when an online experiment fails to engage in the “I Told You So” game, which generally doesn’t do anyone any good. The New York Times tried its luck with its Times Select subscription service. It didn’t work. I don’t penalize people for trying, especially online. But I do like to take what lessons I can from failure. One of the lessons from the Times Select experiment may not be so obvious.
Read the full post September 20th, 2007
A quick kudos to NYTime’s Brian Stelter for getting it right. All morning I’ve seen articles talking about Think.MTV, a new site from MTV that aims to help teens do good things. The problem? Think.MTV takes you no where. .MTV isn’t a web domain. Luckily, Brian correctly posted on his new blog TVDecoder that the new site is Think.MTV.com. See what happens when a person who “gets it” writes about the Web? They don’t make mistakes.
September 20th, 2007
BreitBart’s new video site features a bunch of news clips from local TV stations and the networks, and you can bet it’s not part of a distribution agreement. Right now on their home page, the top story is from CNN and the next big three stories are from WNEP, WKMG and KLAS. Scroll down the page and there are clips from KOMO, KCRA, KCBS, WDAF, KING, ABC News… the list goes on and on. And they’re surrounded by ads. So how are they doing this? They’re just embedding players from YouTube, LiveLeak, DailyMotion and other video sites that are hosting this copyrighted material. Now, I don’t have a problem with blogs that embed copyrighted clips from YouTube because they don’t attract that much traffic in the whole scheme of things — they tend to be very niche. But Breitbart.com is a rather popular news aggregation site (Drudge links ‘em all the time) and now they’ve created a video news site embedding content they don’t own. Hmmmm.
September 20th, 2007
Yeah, yeah, I’m back to promoting myself, but this is pretty cool. Our blog aggregator, CitizenRain.com, has expanded to add local news aggregation. At the top of the site, we post links to the most interesting stories we can find from all of the Seattle news sites, TV competitors included. As you can see, we’re not necessarily picking the big stories of the day but the most interesting, clickable stories.
Then we still have our own blog, the blog aggregator divided by topic and our Seattle blog search tool. So in a nutshell, we serve up the day’s most interesting links from 236 Seattle community blogs and the news media all in one place.
As far as I know, we’re the only local media company with an aggregation site, and for some reason I find it very entertaining to link the competition.
September 20th, 2007
ABC will start to have its primetime shows available for viewing on AOL Video. The shows will be available on AOL Video one day after airing. From B&C:
ABC will offer the shows on AOL Video one day after they premiere on TV through an “ABC.com on AOL” player, which will also display identification from the local ABC affiliate station. While AOL offers primetime programming from the other broadcast networks, this partnership is its first to stream ABC’s shows and represents the first time that a network will co-brand its own online-video player with an online portal.
As Michael Gay wrote about yesterday, NBC will go a step further by offering its programs for free downloading (with some DRM limitations). Full press release after the jump.
Read the full post September 20th, 2007
