A ray of hope has been passed to Pandora and other web broadcasting services. Just yesterday, Pandor founder Tim Westergren issued a "call to arms" to its listeners. He pleaded with fans and supporters of the popular music-streaming service to urge their State Representative to vote for the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008. This Act would give web radio broadcasters more time to negotiate outrageous royalty fees that have caused some to go out of business and put many more under the same pressure. Today that bill has been passed in the House.
There are people out there in the worlds of PR and marketing who jump on the Cluetrain, order big pitchers of the Kool-Aid and start authenticating transparently like mad. God bless 'em.
But there's always one in every crowd who, well...
There are numerous complaints that customers have about Apple's App Store. You can't try an app before you buy it, no refunds on apps, false app reviews, and from a developer's standpoint, too many restrictions and rules. Apple is now trying to fix at least one of those problems. The App Store now requires users to purchase an app before they can provide a review of it.
The music industry is struggling to gain a foot-hold in the battle with online piracy. The options available for music lovers to grow their music collection digitally is tremendous and free. So much so that music companies and publishers have struck up agreements with some of biggest names offering digital music: iTunes, Last.FM., Amazon, Myspace, and Wal-Mart.
While the options are appreciated, a certain restriction that comes with the music files is not. To help music labels combat piracy, digital music providers such as iTunes and Yahoo introduced DRM restricted music files to consumers. Today, Wal-Mart has given consumers the number 1 reason as to why DRM was the worst thing ever.
Lately it seems that all the publicity in the world won't do Pandora any good. Last month Pandora's founder, Tim Westergren, talked about making a "pull-the-plug kind of decision" for the service. "The moment we think this problem in Washington is not going to get solved, we have to pull the plug because all we're doing is wasting money," Westergren stated.
For those who don't know, Pandora has been facing closure due to being hit with outrageous fees by a federal panel. Now Westergren is sending a plea to listeners of Pandora for their support.
Update: The House has passed the Webcaster Settlement Act. Please see Pandora Lives a Little Longer, House Passes Webcaster Act for an update on this story.
It's time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. This week we had two big product launches: the Google Phone and MySpace Music. We also looked at Favtape, a new startup aiming to shake up the online music market. On the trends side, we had another great podcast this week - on Data Portability. We also analyzed Technorati's State of the Blogosphere, checked out the world of barcode scanners, and investigated how some religious organizations are using the Web. Last but not least, we bring you the latest from our new Enterprise Channel.
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In 1960 seventy million people watched Kennedy and Nixon engage in the first Presidential debate ever broadcast live on TV.
And not a single viewer could post a comment.
These days things are different. Tonight, far fewer people probably watched the Current.tv and Twitter collaborative broadcast of Obama v. McCain - but scores of them participated, 140 characters at a time. It worked very well. You can get some idea from the 1 minute of video embedded below.
A team of leading bloggers from the early days of AOL-acquired Weblogs Inc. has come together again to build their ideal blogging software and raise a new network of blogs to challenge top sites in personal electronics, eco-awareness and other niches yet to be announced. Calling themselves Crowd Fusion, the company is lead by Weblogs Inc. co-founder Brian Alvey and has raised $3 million in venture capital from investors like Netscape and Ning co-founder Marc Andreeson and Ross Levinsohn, one of the key players in the Fox acquisition of MySpace.
The company's first site launched this week and we got a look at the blog software powering it - both are beautiful.
According to the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, 93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites and 85 percent believe that these companies should use these services to interact with consumers. Cone, a Boston-based consulting firm, also found that men are far more likely to interact with a company through social media than women are. 56% of consumers believe that a company is providing them with a better service by interacting with them on social media sites.
