One of our favorite iPad apps here at ReadWriteWeb just got a little more awesome today, as Flipboard now includes a special version of Rolling Stone. You can add the music magazine to list of other publications, blogs, photos and feeds you can view via the Flipboard app.
A confession: I am a long-time Rolling Stone subscriber. A long time. It's the one magazine I still receive in the mail. Go ahead and judge me. It's okay. I read it for the articles. Or something.
There are some bands and artists that just seem to get the Web. They push out viral videos and digital art projects like it's their job. (These days, it is their job.) OK Go is one of those bands.
OK Go, as we previously wrote, are "among the masters of the YouTube platform." Now the band has taken it a step further with a project that uses an iPhone app to track a user's GPS coordinates in real-time and plot them out on a map. The band has asked its fans to "be part of [its] global GPS art project" by using the app, taking pictures and video, and submitting it for compilation into "one big celebratory video."
Online payment company PayPal has opened up its micropayment solution to "game developers, media publishers, or anyone interested in selling digital content on a global scale." The solution was first announced last October when the company said that the upcoming feature would offer "a competitive fee structure for micropayments, with pricing at 5 percent plus 5 cents for purchases under $12."
Today, PayPal's two-click micropayment solution has gone public and it has the potential to change how publishers and other online merchants interact with their customers.
Local NBC stations in both New York and Washington D.C. have rolled out a new experiment incorporating news, local celebrities and everyone's favorite news add-on, Twitter.
Dubbed "The 20", the experiment attempts to surface to stories that people are talking about "by following 20 individuals who shape the local conversation."
Technology news aggregator Techmeme sent an email today to a select group of readers it has put on a whitelist of Twitter users whose short commentary about news of the day will appear automatically on the site. Techmeme has been a trailblazer in news technology for years and today's experiment is something other media outlets would likely love to implement in the future as well.
Site founder Gabe Rivera downplayed the news in a conversation with me, but I think it's a big deal. The leading technology industry news aggregator continues to move from nearly 100% automated link analysis at its birth five years ago, to half-human assisted with the hiring first of Megan McCarthy two years ago and later a team of editors and now this - a direct line to add smart quips to clusters of highlighted, long-form coverage of news events.
TV star Keith Olbermann will join Current.tv, the online and cable TV news media company co-founded by Al Gore, according to a report tonight by The New York Times.
Conservative critics are going to have a field day if the partnership is in fact a reality. The Times reports that Olbermann will take an equity stake in Current, likely the only way a man accustomed to contracts in the tens of millions of dollars range can be effectively compensated by a small, struggling media company. We've covered Current.tv's many innovations for years here at ReadWriteWeb; Current's Twitter annotation of the Presidential debates was incredible, for example. Launched more than 5 years ago, the company has got to be getting worried about turning tech smarts into money. Olbermann may or may not be able to help with that.
Last week Rupert Murdoch's iPad-only newspaper The Daily was launched. The Daily is a newspaper app available to U.S. users on the iPad for 99c per week (the first 2 weeks are free; non-U.S. people can download it for trial via this method). The Daily has been touted as the "future of the newspaper" by News Corp. Audrey Watters wrote our initial review of The Daily and she was underwhelmed. In my own testing, I've found The Daily to be inferior to my current iPad 'newspaper' of choice: Flipboard. Here's how I came to that conclusion...
In an informal breakfast news test, this morning I sat in bed with my coffee and peanut butter toast and browsed both The Daily and Flipboard. OK, it was also an excuse to lounge about in bed for an extra hour! But to the point: in both content and user interface, Flipboard served up most of the articles that I ended up consuming this morning. If it had been a paper product, I'd have flicked through The Daily in about 5-10 minutes and discarded the scrunched up newspaper at the foot of my bed.
After much anticipation, Rupert Murdoch's latest media project, The Daily, finally held its launch event today in New York City.
Originally scheduled for January 19, the event was delayed due to the announcement that Steve Jobs was taking a medical leave of absence. The participation from the Apple CEO was important as The Daily is pegged as an iPad-only newspaper, and the new product demonstrates both the "future of the newspaper" as envisioned by Murdoch's News Corp and "the future of subscriptions" as envisioned by Apple.
Rupert Murdoch unveiled The Daily today with a speech full of promise, arguing that new times call for new journalism. Murdoch argued that "the iPad demands we completely reimagine our craft."
A new report from GlobalWebIndex has some thought-provoking data about "social entertainment," a term for when entertainment is augmented by social media technologies. For example, the real-time discussion happening around TV shows on Twitter. In the GlobalWebindex report, entitled GlobalWebIndex Wave 1-3 2010, author Tom Smith notes three main trends. The first two are well known: the rise of 'real-time' in consumer entertainment and the growth of what he terms "packaged platforms." By the latter, he means services that live outside of the browser - smartphone and tablet apps, gaming consoles, eReaders and Internet-connected TV sets.
The third trend is more contentious. The report states that in the new era of social entertainment, traditional media holds the power - a change from the 'web 2.0' era, when the user ruled. The report argues that this will lead to a return to passive experiences by consumers.
