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22 Feb 2010 21:20

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Biz: Vudu: Walmart decides it, too, wants a spot in your living room

  • It bought set-top-box maker Vudu today. Walmart isn’t exactly known as a living room fixture other than the fact that you can buy all the crap for your living room at a Walmart. Well, until now. With the purchase of Vudu, it now has a way of distributing entertainment directly to the consumer outside of the loss-leader format it relies on to sell DVDs. “The real winner here is the customer,” said Walmart vice chairman Eduardo Castro-Wright. Suuure. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

21 Feb 2010 01:43

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Biz: The AP’s using Twitter to link to stories on Facebook. WTF?

  • What they’re doing The AP has been linking to all of their stories on Twitter through their Facebook page, which is something Sarah Palin would do. But the world’s largest news organization?
  • Why it’s smart Because it allows people to easily comment socially on the stories Facebook posts. It centralizes an often-decentralized presence in online media.
  • Why it’s stupid Dudes, you realize that you can easily do something similar on your own site using Facebook Connect and Disqus, right? Then you get to keep all the ad money! source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

15 Feb 2010 09:11

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Tech: Facebook’s starting to eat some of Google’s traffic-directing lunch

  • 13% of all Web traffic to major portals comes from Facebook
  • 7% of trafficcomes from Google; eBay is better, even! source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

10 Jan 2010 22:09

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Politics: We’re going to cut down an Atlantic story about cutting down stories

  • 89 ShortFormBlog’s word count
  • 1,844 Michael Kinsey’s word count
  • one Newspaper stories are too long and filled with too much flowery language.
  • two Too much space is devoted to attributing quotes and trying to balance the story.
  • three People are often quoted saying obvious things to push the story’s main points.
  • four Back in the day, journalists used inverted pyramid writing style; now we don’t.
  • five Michael Kinsey wrote a long story about how stories are too long. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

04 Jan 2010 12:53

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Politics: Bono’s busy schedule: Stop file-sharing, defeat AIDS, save Africa

  • Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product.
  • U2 lead singer Bono • Regarding file-sharing’s danger to the content industries. As crazy as this quote is, it starts out even crazier: “But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content.” This guy is just as arrogant and full of it as the glasses and haircut (and crappy recent music) suggest. He compared file sharing to child porn and free speech. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 2 Comments • Permalink

02 Jan 2010 15:38

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Biz: Time Warner and News Corp. come to a deal, freaking finally

  • We’re happy to have reached
    a reasonable deal with no disruption in programming for our customers.
  • Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt • Regarding the deal made between his company and News Corp. over content. News Corp. wanted a dollar per subscriber for its content each month; Time Warner wanted to pay them closer to twenty cents. They found a happy medium or something. Customers still lose because it means higher cable prices either way. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

13 Dec 2009 22:29

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Tech: SEO, Demand Media, “fast food content,” and the loss of quality

  • These models create a race to the bottom situation, where anyone who spends time and effort on their content is pushed out of business. We’re not there yet, but I see it coming. And just as old media is complaining about us, look for us to start complaining about the new jerks.
  • TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington • On the rise of “fast-food content” – information that’s turned into commodity, with no thought put into quality but focus put into SEO alone. Don’t believe us? It’s already here, kinda. It’s called Demand Media. Where everything is recycled so many times that the good content goes away and we’re stuck eating crappy, good enough media burgers. With genetically modified URLs. (ReadWriteWeb also noticed this trend.) Our thoughts: Wouldn’t it be great to know you’re surfing the Web and getting more than snake oil? Because, hey, SEO is nice and all, but content with a clever approach is even better. Also, we’re convinced that Google and Microsoft will fix the SEO problem someday and figure out quality-based algorithms to curb the rise of crap content. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 3 Comments • Permalink
 

23 Nov 2009 22:34

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Tech: Robert Scoble calls web curation a “billion-dollar opportunity”

  • Here’s a test. Take a tweet of mine in your favorite reader like Seesmic or TweetDeck, click a single button on your iPhone and then type or leave some audio right underneath that Tweet and click another button to post it. Hint: you can’t. That, to me, is opportunity.
  • Super-blogger/tweeter/nerd maven Robert Scoble • Discussing one of his super-brilliant ideas – real-time Web curation. He suggests that people should be able to take what’s put in front of them and organize and add commentary to it simply. And it needs to be simple like and well-integrated with Facebook and Twitter. We couldn’t agree more. (Disclosure: We’ve been using news-specific curator Publish2 of late to post on ShortFormBlog, and it’s a pretty good link-organizing tool for journalists.) source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

12 Nov 2009 21:58

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Biz: Die in a fire, Cablevision: Newsday’s charging for stories

Dudes, if you’re going to completely block off your content like this, take your stuff off Google News. OK? Dead to us: Newsday. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

10 Nov 2009 20:57

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Biz, Tech: Google to News Corp.: Come on, we dare you to block us

  • Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.
  • A statement from Google • Describing its stance on the whole Rupert Murdoch thing we posted about yesterday. That sounds like a dare to us. Will News Corp. match Google’s dare with a double dare? Will Murdoch then pull out a double dog dare, or will he go straight to the triple dog dare? We don’t know, but we’re glued to our seats in excitement. • source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
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