We received an interesting email today from Business Wire, a press release wire service that Warren Buffett bought in March 2006. Currently Business Wire is ranked about #32 on the Techmeme Leaderboard, which puts it above some top tech blogs (but not ReadWriteWeb, which is ranked #6 currently). The email claimed that companies and marketers can use Business Wire to bypass journalists and bloggers to get into key news sources like Techmeme and search engine results too. Is this true?
"People don’t read anymore," said Steve Jobs last month. Try telling that to users of his company's iPhone and iPod Touch devices, many of whom seem to be using the device as an eBook reader. Our network blog last100 theorized that what Jobs' really meant was, who needs the Amazon Kindle when you've got an iPhone that does a lot more? "Will a developer write an app to read books on the iPhone or Touch?" asked last100's Daniel Langendorf. Actually, a few developers already have, and at least one is doing very well.
By Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder of PubMatic
There has been a lot of coverage about the potential Yahoo! acquisition by Microsoft over the last week. This coverage has looked at issues such as deal mechanics, antitrust implications, and the impact on advertisers. One aspect of the possible blockbuster deal that has not been adequately examined is the impact on web publishers, in particular the medium and long tail publishers who are almost wholly reliant on ad networks to monetize their ad inventory.
For some, the term "dark web" simply means all the online data that search engine spiders can't reach, crawl, or index, but for the University of Arizona's AI Lab, the "Dark Web" refers to a research project where the social phenomena of terrorism is studied via various techniques including social network analysis, content analysis, link analysis, web metrics, video analysis, data and text mining, sentiment and affect analysis, and authorship analysis. Through the use of sophisticated, mathematical tools, the project aims to collect all web content generated by international terrorist groups, including content found on web sites, forums, chat rooms, blogs, social networking sites, videos, virtual worlds, and more.
GumGum is a new license management solution for content owners that its founders say solves a serious problem with online content distribution. "Offline, content is licensed for a finite period of time to a predictable audience. These parameters enable content-owners and publishers to come up with reasonably good pricing arrangements," writes GumGum's founders, Ophir Tanz and Ari Mir, on the company blog. "On the Internet, however, content lives forever and usage is unknown. And herein lies the problem: How do you fairly price a license when circulation is unknowable?" The pair say that GumGum provides the solution via per usage licensing agreements.
You may recall a previous post we did listing several web-based fiction writing resources...well, here's another one to add to that list: Protagonize. The Protagonize web site is an online creative writing community dedicated solely to collaborative fiction. At Protagonize, one author begins a story, and others post different branches or chapters to it.
Prelaunched social RSS reader Assetbar calls itself the first application built on the company's new “Media Participation Platform” and has a number of remarkable features already that you'll want to check out if you can get in. (invite code below)
The experienced team of entrepreneurial engineers behind the application says its goal is "to open the platform to other developers around the world so they can create new apps with features that wouldn't be sane with traditional stacks."
R.E.M. today released 11 videos for the first song from their forthcoming album, all in MP4 format in HD and under an open source license. "Supernatural Serious," is the first single from the band's next album, "Accelerate," due to be released April 1st.
Viewers are encouraged to remix the videos and share them on the song's YouTube page. The band will not be doing a Radiohead and offering the album for free, but this is an interesting twist somewhere in between that approach and the standard industry practice.
Our third daily Comments Competition winner is rick gregory, for his comment on our post Facebook Makes it Easier to Delete Your Account, Sort Of. Congratulations rick, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. rick claimed that despite all the talk of data portability from bigcos like Facebook, it is merely lip service. He wrote:
Traditional resumes are boring. They become stale and out-of-date, they can't really showcase your work or achievements, and they end up just sitting in the bottom of someone's inbox. A paper resume, while professional, doesn't really let an employer get to know you. Many sites are trying to solve the problems of traditional resumes by providing job seekers a new way to stand out in the crowd.
