We've written a lot about content farms and in particular the largest of them all, Demand Media. Shares of Demand Media rose 35% today on the back of its IPO. Demand Media's market valuation now matches the scale of its content business, which pumps out more than 7,000 new articles a day. At the current share price, Demand Media is valued at $1.5 Billion - more than the New York Times is worth.
Demand Media's IPO is the largest the tech market has seen since Google's in 2004. Which appears to have stirred the giant grizzly bear in Mountain View. In a recent blog post, Google assured the world that it is dealing with content farms - which it describes as "sites with shallow or low-quality content." I'm not sure that the market fully appreciates how risky a bet Demand Media is, if Google decides to crack down on content farms.
The Sundance Film Institute announced today that it has partnered with crowd-funding platform Kickstarter and giant social network Facebook to offer its community of independent film makers resources and assistance in funding and promoting their work.
Sundance will highlight selected film projects on Kickstarter and Facebook has already begun offering training sessions in online promotion to film makers.
Although the mission of WikiLeaks is to "open governments," it's done quite a lot to make us think about how to open journalism as well. We've seen a number of new whistleblower sites crop up - OpenLeaks and Rospil, for example - as well as major news organizations - Al Jazeera, and perhaps even The New York Times - investigate ways to facilitate more whistle-blowing and leaking.
But why wait for local newspapers to roll out their own anonymous tips pipeline when a project from CUNY Graduate School's Entrepreneurial Journalism program has designed just that thing.
Using Localeaks, you can send an anonymous tip, including a file, to over 1400 newspapers in the U.S. through one online form. Choose your state. Choose the newspaper. Enter your information and submit your anonymous tip.
Every Monday evening we'll be looking at the latest in new media trends. The series is named after the title of one of my favorite books, The New New Thing by Michael Lewis. In that book, published in 1999, Lewis chronicled the dot com era startups that were attempting to re-make various industries. A similar upheaval is currently underway in traditional media - newspapers, magazines and book publishing. All are being radically overhauled by Web startups and tech giants like Apple and Google.
In today's post, we look at Apple's challenge to the magazine and newspaper industries. In particular, Apple is preparing a new subscription model for the App Store that will position it as a powerful intermediary between media publishers and consumers.
Is a post-TV future becoming easier to imagine, because of the Internet? That's one question raised by the news that SpongeBob SquarePants, the undersea mega-star of stage and screen, will premier his newest show first to his 16 million fans on Facebook and then only later on the old-fashioned boob-tube.
On Thursday January 27th, SpongeBob (or his people) will post a five episode anthology of episodes to his Facebook page, facebook.com/spongebob. The content will be simulcast on Nickelodeon's mobile platform. Facebook is the perfect place to broadcast new content to a large audience, considering its combination of market penetration, dizzying time-on-site, the newsfeed subscription model and the social notifications upon each subscription.
Seems like every new media iPad app these days wants to be a magazine. TweetMag is a new content aggregator based around Twitter users, lists and hashtags. It focuses on one of Flipboard's features (tweets as content) and expands that concept further. What TweetMag does is look for tweets that include links, then displays them in a magazine format. It starts by creating a 'magazine' out of your own Twitter account, but also offers a collection of popular Twitter users and lists in categories such as Entertainment, Art & Design and Music.
Each twitter user or list you see in the app is referred to as a "TweetMag" - that is, its own magazine. So the Music Biz list for example, a list of Twitterers in the music business curated by @vehementflame1, is essentially a unique magazine within the TweetMag app.
Yesterday we looked at the latest "social magazine" app to hit the iPad, called NewsMix. It's very similar to Flipboard, the innovator and leader in this small but rapidly evolving market. Social magazines is a term that Flipboard came up with. It's come to mean a News Reader type application for the iPad that has the visual appeal of a magazine, along with the social media features common to this era of the Web (integration with Facebook, Twitter and other social apps). Social magazine apps will become a key application for tablets over the next couple of years. Also we will see existing magazines on the iPad, such as Wired and TIME, evolve to become more like Flipboard - with better customization of magazine sections, whizzier UI, more social media functionality, and so on.
An important question for Flipboard, NewsMix and other such apps is: how will they make money? Wired, TIME and other specialist magazines will rely on the subscription model (once it gets sorted out for the iPad). However, Flipboard and its ilk face the same issues with monetization as RSS Readers did in the previous Web era.
The latest social magazine iPad app to hit the market is NewsMix, a $2.99 app that does much the same thing as the increasingly popular Flipboard. So how much chance does NewsMix have to usurp Flipboard? It's the same chance that online RSS Readers had of usurping Bloglines back in 2004-05, when Bloglines was first to market with a new type of news reading product. Virtually nil.
Just as Bloglines was the first browser-based RSS Reader to gain traction, Flipboard was the first magazine-style iPad reader to gain a following in 2010. Bloglines became the dominant RSS Reader in 2004-05, mostly because it was first to market with a decent product and it scaled well. OK, Bloglines eventually lost the plot when it got acquired by Ask.com and allowed Google Reader to usurp it. The same fate may occur to Flipboard, if/when it gets acquired. But one thing's for sure, it won't be NewsMix that beats Flipboard.
Wikipedia will turn 10 years old this weekend and its extended family is throwing it a birthday party in more than 300 different cities around the world. The full list of events is available at ten.wikipedia.org.
The significance of Wikipedia to the world can hardly be overstated. There was a time, not so long ago, when the most fortunate people in society would ride a horse for days to visit their nearest library, only to find a tiny fraction of the information that the internet makes instantly available to anyone today. Wikipedia is a primary place that information is neatly and collaboratively organized. That means you should take some time this Saturday night to make a toast to Wikipedia. How disruptive to our understanding of the world can Wikipedia be? Below, a particularly good example.
At the end of November, Android developer Howard Harte announced that he would give $1,000 to the first person who could jailbreak the Google TV. Just over a month later, the $1,000 has been collected and Harte says he is now "having a lot of fun" coding on his hacked unit...and likely watching some free Hulu.
A group of developers called the GTVHacker dev team cracked the code on January 5, opening up the Google TV platform to brave, screwdriver-wielding developers everywhere. (Video proof inside.)
