Earlier this week, I caught this item on MetaFilter about how the Independent Press Association had kicked the bucket, and how magazines were on the down and down. (That's like up and up, just the other way). Of course, as big a tech-head as I am, I know that magazines aren't a totally dying breed, just one that's on a much sped up evolution, declawing, or whatever you want to call it.

At the time, I figured that Rex Hammock, of Hammock Publishing and rexblog.com, would have something to say, since that's his bailiwick (ed: I've used that word entirely too much in the last month). Tonight, I had a chance to catch up with Rex via IM and ask him what he thought about this, and he was more than happy to point me in the right direction to some things he's said in the past, offer some new thoughts, and point out something he blogged about just this week.

About two years ago - February, 2005 to be exact - Rex took part in an interview with Media Life's Lorraine Sanders where he talked about why magazines matter. I won't rehash what he said so much there as that outside of his obvious love for the industry and the medium, but I can't agree more with his thoughts about how things such as JPG magazine offer something that just can't be recreated online, at least not yet, even though it's all about digital photography.

Rex also pointed me to this item from just two days ago, where he linked to a review of a new book, The Last Magazine, which talks about this very topic. You'll get a kick out of his quote, too.

"Magazines that people display on coffee tables will exist as long as there are coffee tables."

Ain't that the truth.

While chatting tonight, Rex told me that "magazines will have a long goodbye." That's important, because he's intentionally non specific, nor should he be. I brought up a magazine that I'm a big fan of, one that I not only love to read on planes, but love to keep around, Dwell. On that topic, Hammock said that he "think(s) that the aesthetics of magazines will grow more important -- the "experience" of something like Dwell is what makes the medium unique." If you've ever picked up that publication - or a number of others at its level - you'll notice there is something to every little nook and cranny, including the paper's feel on your fingertips. At least at the moment, you can't replace that. "Experience" is just the right word for it. Sure, Dwell can do a lot online, and they have a big, fresh site - but it isn't the same thing as the paper pub. On the other types of magazines, including "information" focused ones, he says that they "will (are) be supplanted by the Web.) We've seen that particular thing happen over and over again, but that probably won't stop people from opening those publications anew.

So are (will) magazines die off? Sure. Is it any different from a lot of other spaces and types of publications? Not so much. It's all about if the publishers of said publications can adapt and provide the great content they currently do to their readership in a fashion that the readership wants, can use, or needs. If it needs to be bite sized, some people will figure that out and do so. Others won't, and will vanish, probably quickly. As for the rest of it, I would say that, and did tonight with Rex, that those who are the most technologically hardcore, of which I'd consider myself party, might be the ones who "save" some of the publications on paper that are hurting right now, because we might be the ones who don't take them as much for granted when we pick up a publication and sit down and pour through its pages.

For those of you into social bookmarking site Digg, you'll appreciate this comment from "actionscripted" back on August 24, 2006:

"Who cares? Our drug laws really haven't changed and Macs haven't gotten much cooler, but they both make front page all the time."

Taking a page out of the slacker handbook this week is apparently The Australian's Frank Devine, who finds that sources are much more easy to get quotes from when you just Google the topic you are looking for, make a few key changes to the exact quotations and information that someone else acquired, and print them in your own article. Some people say that journalists are getting information and topics to write about from blogs, and I don't doubt it, since it works most of the time in the other direction - but I think this is just a bit silly. What follows below comes to me via a colleague of mine, who figured it was right up my alley and thought it wise that more people are made aware of it.

Way back on January 19, Arabisto.com contributor Rima Abdelkader published this item entitled "FOX TV Show '24' Angers Arab/Muslim Fans in the United States and Abroad," featuring comments from New York-based law student and Arab-American Sawsan Zaky, who expressed horror towards FOX's hit show because of how it showed Muslims in America - and that's just part of the quality story that Abdelkader had put together. Here's where Devine fits in. Seems that he thought the same about the work from the Arabisto site, and used slightly altered quotes in this commentary, published on Feburary 2 under the hed of "There's no villainy in reflecting the truth about terrorists." It seems that Sawsan Zaky is either the most quoted person from the Arab-American community when it comes to 24, or his quote is just really really good and it's no big deal if we tweak a few words here and there. Devine also did a really good job of sourcing information about Dr. Jack Shaheen, who told Abdelkader about his research on film and television and its portrayal of Muslims - but never spoke with the Australian staffer.

As it turns out, Crikey's Jane Nethercote was able to get in touch with Devine, something that the folks at Arabisto unfortunately weren't able to do when they wrote about how this all went down, in an item by Nadia Gergis on Feburary 2. Devine apparently told Crikey that he found Abdelkader's item in Google, and used it "as a reference" because it was "among the more up to date." How quaint.

In my eyes, this is just as lazy as people who use Wikipedia as a flat out source, rather than a strong starting point that has excellent links to original, [we hope] reputable sources of information. I mean, if you read it on the Internet, it must be true, right? Frank Devine may be penning under the world of being a columnist, but after being editor at the Chicago Sun-Times and executive editor of the New York Post two decades ago, you'd think he would know better. It's not so hard to say "In fact, one outspoken blogger found out firsthand from Arab-Americans in the New York City area that..." in your column, now is it?

Another tsk, tsk is the least of Frank Devine's worries at this point, and I seriously hope that I've done my part to spread this story on this side of the globe.

Just got the heads up about something that might interest those of you who have a thing for NPR's Wait Wait show - that now, you can check out what the fine folks behind the current events quiz show have to offer on a daily basis, with the Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Daily News Quiz online.

And, for those of you who want to look elsewhere, I'll give you a hint - the answer to the first question, today, is exactly what you think it is at first glance. That's good stuff, for those of you who like to have a little fun with your current events.

In case you hadn't noticed, Flickr today moved into "Gamma" mode, with some nifty little changes, dropdowns, font adjustments, etc. You can get much more skinny on this here at the Flickr Blog.

Also, I just had to share this exchange from IM today:

[16:04] Tom: did you notice that flickr was in gamma
[16:04] David: yeah, i didn't know if they were just fucking around or not
[16:04] David: google can't compete now
[16:04] Tom: heh

Most of you will probably get the joke. Or not.

Now I most certainly don't know anything about this particular story, but after commenting to a pal on IM this morning about how some of us bloggers would get slapped around for posting something like this, even if it were 100% for real, and then I came across this teaser from Tim Mullaney over at BusinessWeek Online's Deal Flow blog and couldn't help but to notice a similar theme. Am I speculating too much now?

A few days ago, I started hearing that 660AM WFAN out of New York City would be streaming live over the Internet soon, and as it turns out, it's true. On Friday, I received an email from the station's marketing deparment stating that the streaming would go live at 3pm on Tuesday, April 11, where the "Mike & The Mad Dog" show would be broadcast while the New York Mets game would be played over the actual airwaves. (Major League Baseball teams are a subscription-only service through David Singer's favorite online stream, MLB.tv)

I'm psyched mostly that the "Imus in the Morning" show is going to be over the 'net now, because my office location isn't exactly getting me great AM reception, depriving me of my WFAN fix for the day. Considering it's like one of the most widely-broadcast stations on the AM dial, this has some big implications. Now how many streams do you think they'll make available? My bet is: not enough.

This morning, Dan Gillmor published an open letter to the community of Bayosphere users, along with the rest of us who are interested (and part of) the citizen journalism community. It's a must-read, IMHO, and can shed some light on the ins and outs of putting together a successful community of newsgatherers, interested readers, and others.

Well, at least I'm not the only one who thought it was amusing that Google's Gmail change to add a "delete" button to the menu was a little bit late. Frankly, I'm so used to using the drop down to delete now after so long that it's screwing up my speed of use.

My suggestion? Put it back in the dropdown, too - shouldn't hurt anything.

ESPN.com has changed its look, in case you didn't notice. David Singer noticed, and wrote up a pretty solid view of the changes - which he likes for the most part - but that doesn't mean he thinks the site is necessarily better. I'm definitely with him on the auto-playing video ads. As great as video ads are, and the fact that they get such "rave" reviews are possibly because of stats like what the "open rate" is for video ads that show up automatically and play.

As for the clutter, I'm definitely in agreement on that. The page is just "spread out" a little bit differently, and it definitely does the job. What do you think?

If this isn't the funniest (and yet strangely serious) thing I've read all year, then nothing is. CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh writes this morning that according to a piece of a new law that President Bush signed last week, you cannot while away hours on the Internet "posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity."

That's right - no more annoying people - anonymously, at least. So the next time you begin getting IMs from someone whose screenname you don't recognize, make sure you cite the Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. And yes, that's where it's buried. No wonder government frustrates the average person.

Wow, I must have missed this story last month, and it's interesting that it didn't get more play. Randy Dotinga writes at Wired about a court ruling in Florida saying that a woman involved in a case should be considered a "public figure" - much like an elected official or celebrity - because she had been vehemently discussed on the Internet, perhaps changing how various discussions on the Internet would be considered "media" for the masses.

[update] Check out Doug Fisher's comments as well.

Wanna bet that broadband is so ubiquitous that the big businesses are starting to see how it can work for them? Well, it looks like CBS has decided to offer up its March Madness action for the NCAA basketball tournament, online, for nada. Well, not every game, but the out-of-market action. As the Hollywood Reporter article mentions, the games have been online for years through CSTV, but that's certainly changed now that CSTV has been purchased by CBS. The games will be ad-supported, and will definitely grab viewership. Additionally, it might even change what the numbers of people who go to local bars and restaurants at lunchtime to see the games look like, if people know that now they can at least listen to the games through their office Internet connections (sorry, productivity - not like you were going to win out that month anyway).

Just was reading through some posts on AdJab, and was looking through an item Chris Thilk wrote about Google supposedly testing print advertisements in Chicago-area newspapers. After doing a little digging, we came up with much more details on Google's efforts in the area, currently called Google Publication Ads, running off the AdWords platform - by invitation only.

Keep it tuned over at AdJab for more on this, as it comes out.

This morning, David pinged me about Private Radio's Google News Report. I had forgotten all about it after seeing it on Jeff's site back in June, but I think it's definitely worth keeping under your hat, or at least in your bookmarks. At the very least, it's perhaps helpful in figuring out a bit of the logic behind what stories stay and go on the Google News portal, and what sources are used more regularly than others. Just thought I'd file a followup, as it's definitely a useful tool if you're into this sort of thing.

Just read over at Lost Remote that PR Newswire has (finally) gotten up to speed with regard to its RSS feeds. Intead of just one fire hydrant-hookup RSS feed with the last (n) press releases, you can now subscribe to a number of nifty feeds broken up by news type, industry, or drill down within an industry.

Of course, this page also includes a subscription option to PRN's "podcast" of press releases, (they're calling them ANRs - audio news releases) through MultiVu, wherein the wire service is also distributing much more multimedia content, from audio soundbites to video clips and more.

Okay, so our pals over at Pegasus News are about to get the ball rolling on their news service, which will roll out in Dallas-Fort Worth on February 14, 2006. If you're interested in what kind of service this will be, and would like to see it pop up in your market - or one near you - then why not drop by and sign up for a lifetime subscription to the service - which will cost anywhere from $12-$75/year. However, if you sign up now (well, until October 3, 2005), you can get all that for $1.

Now obviously none of us knows what Pegasus News will ultimately end up being, or how huge it could become. But if you've ever wanted to get in on the ground floor of something without dropping $120/share at an IPO you don't have access to anyway, then this is probably one of those moments. Plus, it's like....$1.

[via A Little Pollyanna]

In what is the ultimate testament to the intersection of Internet usage and television watching, I present the Saturday, September 10, 2005 Site Meter statistics, through 8:01pm Eastern time, for The Media Drop.

This is probably a bit light for the site for most of the day, but a nice Saturday in September is probably good for sending at least a few folks outside, or at least getting them to stow the laptop. Well, that is, until ESPN mentioned the death of former sideline reporter Adrian Karsten, which I posted about earlier in the week. Both Yahoo! and Google have this site ranked pretty highly for Karsten's name, hence a staggering number of people who hit the site in a short period of time - about 350 in just a couple moments around 7:25pm. While that's not staggering in Internet numbers overall, it's a lot more than this site normally gets at a moment's notice. Additionally, this is traffic that is 100% search engine originated, and this site wasn't mentioned on-air.

So what does this mean? Well, based on the widely-dispersed locations of the persons visiting the site, it means that ESPN's college football has a pretty big audience that is literally all over the country. Second, it means that when people are looking for more backstory on something they see or hear, the Internet is clearly readily available to much of the masses. If you don't think this is where television providers are looking to improve upon their interactivity, then you might want to reconsider your position.

For those of us who commented on FEMA's website where victims of Katrina could apply for aid was allowing for the use of the Internet Explorer browser only, it's good to hear that the organization is beginning to address the issue. TechWeb's Gregg Keizer reports that the landing page for this section is now stating that they are aware of the problem and are working to correct it.

MarketingVOX posts details about MTV's plan to show all the post-Video Music Awards video content on the music network's Overdrive Internet component. Unfortunately, you still have to have Internet Explorer to run it - Firefox, Opera, and other browser-preferring users aren't able to use the video playing tool, which uses Microsoft technology.

On Tuesday, Ziff Davis Media made public the decision to name John McCormick editor-in-chief and Anna Maria Virzi as executive editor of Baseline magazine, one of Z-D's that focuses on IT solution measurement to help companies make strategic decisions about their overall infrastructure.

On Wednesday, MediaPost's Gavin O'Malley covered BusinessWeek Online's new Innovation & Design section, recently added to the publication's website. It's a place where interactivity will reign, and readers will not be left out in the cold. Just as MSNBC.com and the New York Times have made multimedia an important part of their online presences, BusinessWeek is looking to do the same with this effort.

Customer service is always big, no matter what industry you're in or how minor the Interaction may be. The Internet used to be somewhat poor, overall, at giving good customer service, but not any longer - or, I should say, the ability to give good service is no longer hard to grasp. Check out this post from the folks at Flickr if you need an example. It's tough to say that you're not doing what your customers might be looking for on a daily basis, and as you can tell, most people enjoy that.

In what has to be the best thing I've seen all week, the last half hour of my life has been spent watching a few episodes of This Spartan Life, a talk show done via the world of Halo 2 - yep, the video game. And this isn't some "record the game then voice over it later," either - it's a live-recording of people playing a video game while doing interviews, blowing people up, and having a good old time.

For those that aren't familiar, the concept is called machinima, as in machine + cinema, if you will. MTV2 runs a program here and there that calls them "Mods," or video game characters engineered to look like they are performing in a music video - this is like that, but to a whole new level.

Thanks to Rex for pointing this out to me.

On Thursday, PR Newswire notified its members via email that it would be opening up its US1 and UK newslines to entities "whose operations or personnel have been directly affected" by the bombings in London, England. In other words, companies who wanted to announce certain things about their businesses, missing staff, found staff, or anything else related could do so at no charge.

The Associated Press details the success that America Online had in webcasting the Live 8 concerts last weekend, and how the world of online video broadcasts have become more and more successful over the last few years.

TVGuide.com said this week that it would be releasing a regular 'podcast,' available on their website. Each download will contain "Entertainment News," "Watercooler," "Ask Ausiello" - an audio version of Michael Ausiello's column, "FlickChick" by Maitland McDonagh, and "The Week Ahead." Also expected are interviews, voicemail from listeners, and more. The feed is available here. (BW)

On Thursday, news came out that Topix.net would carry headlines from Forbes.com within its Business section - a feature that went live on Wednesday, actually. There will now be a "News from Forbes.com" box present at the top of that page, allowing for "top of mind," or at least top of page, presence for Forbes content.

On Thursday, the Gallup Organization made public its RSS feeds, which will encompass both free and premium content on their website. The feeds include: Government and Politics; Business and Economy; Health and Healthcare; Religion and Social Trends; Education and Youth; The Nation's Pulse; PollTalk; and Gallup Poll Daily Briefing video segments - which will feature Gallup EIC Dr. Frank Newport.

It's clear that RSS is the method of distribution of choice for just about everything, and it's great to see Gallup join the club.

Last week, I was wondering if anyone else saw differences in their Gmail accounts, specifically seeing "Google Mail" instead of Gmail. At first I thought it was just a lucky thing that I was seeing as a heavy user of the service, but now it doesn't appear to be the case.

My office Internet access, which flows through a proxy in Europe, sees "Google Mail," just as I get Google Deutschland when I go to that site initially (before changing the settings). When at home, in New Jersey, "Gmail" comes up. Kind of interesting.

Anyone else notice that in the Gmail interface, the familiar "Gmail" in the corner is now "Google Mail?"

Here it is as of April 26

And here it is as of this morning. Not sure if it changed in the last day or two or not.

Wonder if there's an update to the lawsuit situation and I missed it.

[update] Steve Rubel tells me via IM that his still says Gmail. Very odd.

[update: 5/12/05, 11:46 p.m.] Okay, so much for that. It's back to "Gmail" when logged in.

Has anyone successfully installed and used ESPN's new ESPN360 software and gotten it to work properly? Mine is crashing ridiculously on two machines running two different Windows OS packages.

FeedBurner says that they'll be all over the provision of Google AdSense via RSS feeds once "the trial expands beyond the initial pilot group of publishers."

Tres bien.

[Thanks, David]

MTV recently went live with its Overdrive broadband-only channel to run advertising-supported programming like music, movie trailers, and more. It's obviously targeted at young people who actually like to see music, something you don't get a lot of unless you have MTV2. Additionally, it's an opportunity for the network to kick up their broadcasting of movie trailers and other entertainment, such as the first ten minutes of the new XXX: State of the Union movie, starring Ice Cube.

So imagine my surprise tonight when I went to the site and found that I wouldn't be able to visit the site due to my browser choice, Mozilla.

"Detecting Browser...
WE'RE SORRY!

PC Users with Netscape, Mozilla or Firefox: you need to run Internet Explorer to use MTV Overdrive.

You can download the latest version of Internet Explorer for free by clicking HERE."

Or, not. There's no way I believe that MTV couldn't make their Overdrive systems work properly through Mozilla at the very least - if they wanted to. I'm not even going to step into Opera at the moment. Sure, they're using whatever features for encoding and high quality that Windows Media Player 9 offers, but that doesn't mean it works for everyone. It's about the user experience, isn't it?

It truly amazes me that a company who thinks they are on top of what is hot or not these days could be shortsighted enough to think that people are just going to download IE or use it as their main browser to view content like this. MTV, your first mistake was believing that what the masses "wanted" was all-entertainment and a few hours of music along with a "top 10" show that no one could really vote on because they never got to see any videos in the first place. Don't make the underestimation of the loss of a whole lot of users who could make a whole lot of money for you through the ability to sell advertising at a higher rate be your next mistake.

PaidContent's Rafat Ali reports that CNET has purchased TVTome, and will incorporate it into its network of sites.

On Monday, The New York Times Company announced that nytimes.com received 555 million pageviews for the month of March, breaking the previous record set in January of 553 million pageviews. Most prominently, the National section of the website had a 96% increase year-over-year, and the RSS feeds for the site led to 5.9 million pageviews - 342% more than March 2004 and 39% more than this February.

Niche is good.

It's a statement that many a blogger has mentioned to me when they were trying to figure out the best way to build a following as a writer online. Okay, maybe they rambled on and said something like "I wasn't getting any traffic until I focused on one industry / topic / idea / area" or something like that, but you get the picture.

So while many a television station has cropped up in recent years, further fraying the overall ratings table in a million different directions, the Web has a similar growth pattern. Fortunately, this seems to be a model that works - not just for website operators, but television stations as well. And as bandwidth continues to get cheaper and broadband connections reach ever higher levels, video and "bigger" content continue to grow in number online. That seems to be the strategy behind HGTV, the Scripps television channel that has kicked off quite a bit of online content in 2005. The AP's Duncan Mansfield writes about the HGTVPro.com website that now carries "dozens of three-minute videos" for consumers to snap up.

Outside of the advertising and marketing opportunity that this could provide, a la ABC's "Extreme Makeover Home Edition" with Sears, it provides evidence of linkage between the television programming and the online presence of the channel - something that content providers are clamoring for.

The WSJ's Vauhini Vara profiles Wikipedia and the newest venture of its founder, Jimmy Wales - Wikicities.com.

Last week, Motley Fool's Tom Taulli called the Topix.net purchase by Knight Ridder, Gannett and Tribune "the very tip of the iceberg as investment goes."

And if you're looking for ideas, o investors, then be sure and drop by PaidContent.org - they're keeping tabs on who should be next.

The AP's David Kravets writes about a big of a conundrum that the legal system is in surrounding free speech rights on the web, and who can "govern" them. At the center of the situation is a court ruling in France that said that a U.S.-based company (Yahoo!) was liable for Nazi materials that were available to web surfers in that country. In a way, it's like the start of a discussion about whether companies providing web content would be liable under multiple jurisdictions, internationally and nationally. If it sounds unbearable to even think about, it is.

Well, after a few months of avoiding the upgrade to iTunes 4.7.1 software, it appears that download and installation of it is necessary to download free songs via the Pepsi promo, or some of the "free" songs that are up weekly. This is the first time this option came up forced in the purchase menu, and there doesn't appear to be any way around it. Anyone else come across this?

Susan Mernit offers insight into the use of RSS in today's world, specifically how newsmakers/distributors have begun to jump on the bandwagon as they realize that there is a demand for such a transmission method. Mernit cites the research done at TMD last fall, when one list of RSS feeds for newspapers, business journals, and college/university newspapers were indexed, as some evidence of adoption (I, in turn, point to the wiki-style Sidewalk Theory list, too) of RSS by publishers. But her point that "few have comprehensive strategies for distributing and monetizing the feeds" is glaring.

The difference between small (read: most blogs) and large (read: most news sites) publishers using RSS as their main distribution form is that the latter are currently selling their advertising based on current levels of traffic, who have always have to come to their site just to find out about the news (except those with "news alert" emails, etc.). Bloggers, on the other hand, have a readership that is mostly based on people who read RSS feeds and in turn click through to the site - their advertising, if they have any, is sold on that basis, not typically that of the RSS readership (although this may be handled separately). So major publishers are forced with looking at their business in a different fashion. Readership, as they know it, will change slightly on their "front" page, at least as far as those currently using RSS to gather news would begin "reading" the sites. Those not using RSS at all would have it as an option, and that population would eventually grow up a bit. The challenge is still keeping your site full of well-paid advertisements even though your everyday readership might diminish, at least as far as site statistics go.

On Thursday, San Francisco-based Business Wire quietly launched two new features in their online service, both related to RSS feeds. PressPass users now have the opportunity to receive the latest stories in "My PressPass" via an RSS feed, which is available after logging into the system and scrolling to the bottom of the page - each individual's RSS feed will be different, based on their subscriptions to Industry and Subject selections.

Additionally, an RSS feed is now available under the "Photos & Multimedia" heading, at the bottom of the "Smart News Releases" section. This feed is exclusively made up of releases that contain images or audio and video.

Business Wire's closest competitor, PR Newswire, has had an RSS feed for about a year now, but it appears to be limited to "Today's News," not any subscriptions that a user may have. In September of 2004, MarketWatch.com columnist Frank Barnako wrote that "BusinessWire [sic] doesn't get it" on his weblog, which he was probably right about - then. At the time, PR Newswire was indeed the only one of the two sites to have a feed. And yes, it appears that the individual at Business Wire that he traded e-mails with did not know what an RSS feed was. Fortunately, they quickly caught on, publishing five industry-specific feeds in November, and progressing to the point they are at today. As of today, Business Wire does get it - the only question remaining is whether they're moving at the pace that today's media needs to receive information. Early reports would say yes. So, as they say on the playground - "Tag, you're it!"

Laura Sturaitis, Business Wire Vice President, New Media Development explains the strategy behind the further adoption of RSS, stating, "Business Wire is committed to using the best technology tools for the job in our effort to serve the media and get them our members' news in the fastest and easiest way they can use it on deadline, so naturally we wanted to make RSS part of that mix.

Business Wire's strategy towards making RSS a part of their business was to get it right the first time, hence the aforementioned launch of five industry feeds in November and the evolution into what exists today. Those five (Automotive, Entertainment, Health, Sports Business and Travel) are set to grow into the eighteen individual industry categories that are available to PressPass users under the "News by Industry" option - Communications, Construction & Property, Consumer, Education, Energy, Government, Manufacturing, Natural Resources, Philanthropy, Professional Services, Retail, Technology and Transport.

Also included in this week's launch are RSS feeds for "Hot Topics," which are located at the top of the left-side menu bar. These are determined based on "what's going on" in the news at the time, such as "Politics" during election season. Currently, feeds exist for Tsunami and Nanotechnology topics.

Sturaitis also informed TMD that the "Smart News Releases" feed was created in response to journalists' requests for an quick and easy way to find news releases that contain photos, graphics, logos, slideshows, or A/V content. She confirmed that Businss Wire is committed to help PressPass subscribers successfully manage the news and information in a manner they are not only accustomed to (through e-mail and the website) but also through this new transmission method, on their customers' terms - RSS.

[editor's note: this post was updated Friday, 2/18 to include comments and additional information from Business Wire's Laura Sturaitis]

Just saw over at Buzzmachine that the Washington Post was purchasing Slate from Microsoft. WaPo's Howard Kurtz writes about the paper's announcement, informing that "Post executives said they would keep Jacob Weisberg as editor and most of the 30-person staff."

Jarvis, who talked with Kurtz about the deal, said "it's a good thing for both; they fit well together, not unlike Dow Jones and Marketwatch."

As this "old" and "new" media world come together, it will be interesting to see how soon it is before Slate items appear in the print edition of the Post - if ever.

ESPN.com now features RSS support, with quite a few flavors to choose from. Feeds are available for both professional and college sports headlines, plus oodles of columnists. And yes, there is a feed for Bill Simmons.

Steve Rubel has some scoop on Pegasus News, a company that is working to create a new "model of local market content and advertising." It's like hyperlocal media on a macro- level. I'm intrigued, to say the least.

They're looking to do the local newspaper a one-up, but with a pay-for-play model that, at least based on their hopes, will be fair to everyone involved, from the readers to the advertisers. And considering the plan says "We will distribute content via a website, e-newsletters, RSS feeds, a daily print edition, SMS messaging and any other medium we can think of," one would imagine you'd get your money's worth if you were involved.

ESPN.com staffer and freelance blogger Reemer is looking for some comments from readers of that site regarding their Insider product. Says Reemer:

• If you are not an Insider, why not? Do we need to do a better job of showing you what Insider offers? Or, is there not enough that has compelled you to buy? What content or tools would be worth it to become an Insider?
• If you are an Insider, what do you like about it? What would you like to see more of?

I've toyed with the product before, and have seen what's "behind the curtain" a bit through friends - there's some good stuff back there, indeed. But the product itself isn't made clear in the upfront. Take the ESPN.com homepage, for instance. I can understand while "realtime" stats/scores would be considered a premium product, but when it comes to news/content, it becomes a little tougher. The right side of the page has the "ESPNews Headlines," which are bulleted out and are open to the public - then there are one or two items that have the 'in' logo signifying that only Insiders can view the content.

Why are those articles given a pricetag while others aren't? Are they "better" articles? Is it merely that the content will be paid for a day or two, and then go above the firewall later in the week?

Promote the 30 day trial more. Let word of mouth settle in.

Many readers of the ESPN.com site are probably, or at least were at one time, Sports Illustrated subscribers. The SI site has access for print subscribers, offering either the same content as can be accessed via snailmail plus some more. Promote this in the same way to the casual ESPN reader - "If you like what you see in ESPN Magazine, then Insider is for you." But don't pitch current customers, pitch the same target market that you would for the potential print customers. Many more people are getting their content online - the cost isn't prohibitive if you consider what people pay per month on a sports weekly - so make it worth their while.

PUSH the wireless alerts and things, but not stuff that people can already get for free. I can get the Yankees scores for free delivered to my phone through my wireless provider - trades and other "breaking" news are the key.

PUSH the webcasts.

PUSH access to ESPN.com (or even ESPN TV) personalities and writers.

Take out a BlogAd. I'm *sure* Henry Copeland will be more than happy to help you put together a proposal. Realizing that people on the 'net are slick (I know you do, Reemer) is the best thing you can do. If people feel that your paid content is inferior, they will just sit it out and wait until someone gives it to them for free. Create demand. Heck, get the Sports Guy to do an online radio show or something.

I'm sure there's more, but this is what I can think of right now.

[via Off Wing Opinion]

The Santiago, Chile-based segment of Indymedia, santiago.indymedia.org, announced its departure from the Indymedia network on Saturday, citing differences in opinion on various topics. It seems that the Santiago group's hardline beliefs apparently don't mesh with the core Indymedia standards or values.

Mary Hodder provides a great rundown of the new PubSub site, which just went live. She and I both attended the kickoff party last night in NYC. It was a fun event, as I learned a bit more about PubSub (check it out if you haven't already - really!), and finally got to meet up with Steve Rubel and his CooperKatz colleagues. Good to see you again, Mary!

On Monday, Sarah McBride reported in the Wall Street Journal that Evan Harrison, AOL music & radio chief, had taken a position at Clear Channel Communications, where he will be in charge of online radio.

Andrew Ross Sirkin details the deal by Dow Jones & Company to purchase MarketWatch, creator of the CBS MarketWatch financial news site. Lost Remote has more, including the official announcement.

Is this Dow Jones' big step into "open" content that isn't a paid model, like WSJ.com?

In August, BusinessWeek Online announced an "facelift" of sorts to improve the usability of their website. On Monday, the new SmallBiz portion of the site was unveiled. The section will now be edited by Rod Kurtz, whose work was previously seen at Inc. magazine.

In addition, specific changes have been made to the on-page content - items can now be found in Viewpoint, Smart Answers, Success Stories, The Pulse, Offbeat and After Work categories.

In April, it was reported that Lloyd Braun was out at ABC as head of the television division. This week, Yahoo! announced that they were bringing Braun in to head up their media and entertainment division - starting November 15.

Michelle Malkin points to an interesting find by some blogs and Free Republic posters (not sure of the original source just yet) about some images of President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush on the CNN / Netscape website that had filenames that are, irrelevant of your political leaning, inexcusable to have on a news organization website. The fact that some employees may have gone out on their own to do this does nothing but cause harm to CNN's brand and viewer opinion of their ethics.

At this time, at least one of the images that have been found have had a name change - but not all. This one is still up.

[update: 12pm] This file is now gone, too.

I have reached out to Time Warner Corporate Communications today, but have not yet received a response.

[update: 1:55pm] Drudge leads us to Tabloid Column, who has screenshots of the CNN site.

[update: 11/5 1:38pm] Steve Rubel posts a link to a Register article on the subject, where CNN has stated that it was purely a Netscape issue, and was nothing placed on the CNN.com website. Also, the employee who named the photographs has apparently "been terminated."

Mediabuddies.com has announced that they have teamed up with VAR International Limited to put together a survey of journalists, PR and advertising workers, worldwide, in order to find out one thing - what these people are really like.

This is believed to be the first study of its kind to get a bit of information together about people who work in the media. In a press release on November 2, Mediabuddies founder David Davis said “As an industry, journalists, broadcasters, advertising and public relations executives are often involved in talking about and commenting on the lifestyles of other people. But there is very little information about the people in our own media industry”

In the MetroWest Daily News, guest columnist Bruce Spitzer writes Wednesday about "new" media and its effect on the people who pay attention to it. He makes an interesting point -

"Ever wonder why George Bush and most other politicians never admit to a mistake? In this juggernaut of new media, 24-hour news, and media-one-upmanship, only one sound bite -- or primal scream -- is needed to sink a politician."

And he's probably right about that - while it's tough to agree with the idea of not responding to questions about mistakes, you can understand that we live in a world where now, people (and the media) can and will focus on one little thing, causing everything else to stop in its tracks. We have enough issues to deal with rather than to be burying candidates and politicians based on one stupid thing that is said. They're people, just like the rest of us. Unfortunately, as a lot (not all!) political discourse has gone more towards the discussions found in supermarket tabloids rather than the issues themselves, the name calling has reached a volume that it has actually changed how our political process and the way news is filtered out work.

If the "new" media wants to stand pat and continue to gain influence, then it needs to realize what it is doing, and make sure it is transparent. The one thing about most political blogs is that they do "state their case" up front - this is good. Unfortunately, these blogs are also always on the defense, because anyone with a differing opinion who makes a comment or gets a word in is usually attacked vehemently, justifiably or not. This can be very frustrating, especially when a site that has an opposing view to what you believe, as a reader/voter, is a good source of information on a particular topic. If you're "afraid" or "offended" to go visit that site, it could cause you to possibly not see the other side of a particular discussion.

Of course, there is hope. The rise of "personal" media is promising -- if we can digest it all. Some bloggers are teaching the traditional media to stay on its toes (right, Dan Rather?) And we can pressure the media to get it right.

And that's the whole thing - "digesting" it all - there is just so much information out there and so much time to go around. At the very least, let's try and make sure that the next generation of media is as fair and balanced, to borrow a phrase, as it can be.

If you happen to be a user of Business Wire on the Internet, then you might have noticed something new today on your "My PressPass" page - RSS Feeds for five categories. The feeds currently available are for Automotive, Entertainment, Health, Sports Business, and Travel News.

Other than the fact that I have to use RealPlayer to watch the ABC News Now feed off of Comcast's website, it appears like a viable online streaming option to use while I have something else on the television.

This looks like it's an HD broadcast - is this the case with the feed? It's *very* crisp.

Nine University of Florida journalism students are taking part in an "experiment" of sorts with the help of Cingular Wireless and Textamerica in order to set up a moblog at uf.textamerica.com. The students have been covering the 2004 election season as well as other events taking place on their school's campus. The point? Well, this statement tells it all for me:

"[The students] have become 'embedded reporters,' unobtrusively placing themselves in situations and getting inside stories without a lot of intimidating crews, cameras, microphones or lights. With mobile technology, they don't change the event just by being there to report."

More details available here in a press release.

Pravda reports that the Chinese government has shut down 1,600 Internet cafes in just six months this year, mostly for the allowance of "violent or pornographic content."

In early October, a story came out that two Rackspace servers that contained Indymedia websites had been seized in the UK, and many bloggers and Indymedia writers wondered why there was no pickup on this story by traditional media sources. After a few days, the discussion grew to a few Internet-focused publications, but that was about it.

Today, the Associated Press' Ellen Simon writes about the situation, including Indymedia's claim that this seizure amounted to "censorship." I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a lot of people failed to pick up on this story based on their opinions of what Indymedia has to say in its content - but they're missing the point. If we're all trending towards an online environment for news sources, what's going to happen when you're getting a lot of your news from an "alternative" source that doesn't have the backing of a New York Times or Tribune Company? Those companies aren't about to have materials seized from the Internet, but that doesn't mean that your favorite blogger or alt-site couldn't be shut down just like that.

[AP story via Drudge]

The International Journalists' Network has information on a one month course being offered to journalists from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan who want to know the ins and outs of "how to organize, launch and operate an online news site."

This is excellent news.

Chris Feola is looking into "the value of the content in newspapers," asking whether or not today's media companies have what it takes to survive in the long term. He makes the point that given that news has been "commoditized" quite a bit, (wire services, etc.) what differentiates one news outlet from another is minimal when it comes to original reporting.

Think about it, do you go to one news outlet because they offer more "Only on News X!" stories, or do you go to an outlet that you are used to for some other reason? If you had three local papers of equal price, size, and stature in your market, how would you choose which one to read? Would the editorial pages be your differentiator? The comic strips? Howabout the sports section?

Feola's point is that in today's world, the current costs of doing business as a major print media company are probably going to be hard to keep everyone afloat if company practices stay static. This is followed up with a counterargument to Frank Barnako's column from October 15, "Blogs: much ado about very little." Using Daily Kos as an example of a business model that attracts a ton of visitors per day, Feola extracts what kind of revenues that site could derive in today's dollars to show what kind of revenues are supporting an opinion/political-based site. Obviously Kos' "newsroom" is made up of a bunch of people who aren't paid for their time, and are dedicated to writing about certain topics and creating discourse. A newspaper has a completely different model, and it isn't totally apples to apples here - but it shows that, given a smaller amount of effort, a major impact as far as readership is feasible. Is it possible that, given that many people get most (or all) of their news in an online environment, that a print daily could move almost exclusively online and not look back? Using the statistics that Feola provided about pickup of commoditized stories plus newsy happenings that are "known in advance," i.e. press conferences, government announcements, and the creation of a small amount (15%?) of "reporting" being original and germane to that publication - all for much less than they operated on before - an online shift isn't so crazy. But of course, we will all long for newsprint, right?

This isn't meant to preach the dearth of news sources in print form. It's just a quick and dirty analysis of how the business models of websites - including blogs - work as compared to traditional media outlets. Remember, most blogs live off of sourcing these traditional media outlets in order to create entries. But the day is probably not so far where blogs are networked up and can afford to be utilizing the Associated Press, news photo sites, and are reprinting articles just like their publication counterparts are. It's a symbiotic relationship, not a "versus" one.

Fast Company is running its third "Fast 50" challenge to its readers, and is looking for your entry. They're trying to find the 50 individuals that made a difference in the last year, and you've got until 11:59pm Eastern on December 1 to tell them about yourself, your boss, a colleague, your parent, or anyone you think deserves to be in this group. Fast Company says they are "looking for courageous leaders, energetic innovators, problem solvers and troubleshooters, trend and agenda setters -- readers who are fueled by courage, integrity, passion, and a commitment to results." That's a pretty wide swath, and I'm expecting to see some amazing stories be included.

Oh, and if you've got writer's block or want to see what others think qualifies to make the cut, you can check out the 10 most recent entries, too.

On Monday, the U.S. Navy announced some new uniforms that servicemen and women could be wearing in the near future. Definitely an good story. But was it worth hotlinking to an image on the Navy's website, Mr. Drudge?

More here and here.

Last Thursday, news came out that servers in the UK containing Indymedia websites had been seized as part of an international investigation, and details have been sketchy on the "why" portion of the story.

Wired's Wendy Grossman provides followup, stating that the servers were returned to Rackspace, and the sites were all expected to return to full functionality shortly - once it is confirmed that nothing has been removed from them.

[update] At Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, John Hanrahan asks the same question I did a week ago - Why isn't this a big story?

Damian Penny points out that CBS News is obviously harkening back to the olden days, when red was bad, and the red, white, and blue were good. Haven't heard much of the Soviets of late - but now they're off to space, apparently.

The Washington Post's Leslie Walker points out a new service offered by The Gallup Poll - an online webcast featuring daily news and views related to the company's current polling, five days a week.

Over at The Washington Dispatch, C.K. Rairden writes that people are using new media - blogs, the Internet - as a replacement for old media, because bias in those mediums is perceived to be less. New media isn't meant to replace the way news and information is brought to our attention, it works with it. Sure, it does the "stop and think" that perhaps old media can't do, but it's not a standalone, and is subsceptible to bias in the same fashion.

It is true that many of us don't watch the evening news like we used to - future generations might never watch it. But to say that talk radio, Drudge, FOX News, and blogs are as transparent as we would like the media to be is naive.

Thursday night, I received a heads up that two servers that contained Indymedia websites had been removed by the FBI from a UK location of Rackspace, a hosting company, but there were no details on why they were taken. Slashdot had picked up on the story in the afternoon, and further details have come forth, with many comments centering on the possibility that information regarding delegates at the Republican National Convention was the cause.

While there are many posts containing reasons why these sites were removed, this post at Slashdot is by someone claiming to be the registered agent for one Indymedia site - who says that he/she had FBI agents come to visit on October 1, asking questions about an Indymedia branch in Europe. The FBI agents were told that this was not the correct place for discussing that site, and were referred to the correct authority for an overseas Indymedia server.

Indymedia has since issued a press release that doesn't offer many more details than what posters on Slashdot have been able to uncover. Rackspace is mum on the subject, and the FBI is obviously not announcing anything.

My question is, why is this Sydney Morning Herald article one of the only news items about the subject? Typing "indymedia servers" into Google News nets these minimal results, including the article referenced above. Technorati doesn't do much better, providing 16 results for the same terms. Considering it's been almost a full day since news hit the shores of the U.S., one would expect that some publication would pick it up - or is that asking too much?

[update] Dan Gillmor: "If this had happened to a "mainstream" U.S. news organization, the wires would be melting with the news."

CNET features an article Thursday by NYU economics professor Nicholas Economides (talk about appropriate naming) that, while wishing the Internet a happy birthday, begins to bid adieu to methods and businesses that have been altered forever in recent years.

Over at The National Debate, Robert Cox informs us that CNN is pursuing legal action against his site for this fake poll story about ratings for President Bush and Senator Kerry prior to their first debate last week. The network has filed at DMCA complaint with his host, ZUBR Communications, and they temporarily halted access to the poll article. This has since been reversed when Cox filed his own counterclaim to the webhost. Earlier this year, a similar situation was rectified when The National Debate featured a parody of the New York Times' site.

Since this may continue to be an issue for Cox and The National Debate, a few other bloggers and website owners have chipped in to mirror the site. You can find a list of them below:

Moorelies
Bill Hobbs
TJIC
RatherBiased.com
Smarterspam.com

If you know of any more, or are hosting one yourself, drop me an email, post a comment, or trackback to this post!

[update: 10/7/04 10:50pm] TND's page is down again, and CNN is pursuing legal action. I've also updated the mirror list above.

The UK's Independent has an item that blasts Google's news aggregation service, Google News, for "undermining those who break stories." Is this putting too many eggs in the aggregator's basket? Is the "exclusive" ruined by a service that seems to put the most recently updated story within a topic at the top of a search result for news on that topic? I know, I know - lots of questions. But I can't say for sure that just because Google News has a habit of doing something that it will be the dearth of credit for whomever breaks a story first.

If you have any interest in pop culture from the 60's to the 90's, then Mr. Pop History may be the for you. The site is full of Q&A on topics ranging from music to television news, and lots in between. You can also send an email with your question to askmrpophistory@mrpophistory.com and it might appear on the site with an answer.

Apparently, Mr. Pop History also makes his commentary on various topics available to publications for use on a regular basis. Not a bad idea, actually.

I know you're digging up your questions on Jim J. Bullock right now.

Jim Chisholm at Newspapers & Technology writes about the decline of newspaper circulation in recent times, and how this will affect publications in the future. Chisholm cites a drop of 1 to 3 percent per year for newspapers, but points out that television news programs have dropped by half - though he doesn't clarify over what time period.

Further on, the idea of print news moving to a different business model - let's call it the "short and sweet" model - comes along. The gist of it is that papers might move a lot more of their coverage into this "short and sweet" publication, one that is handed out on streetcorners in business centers or on public transportation, etc. Just as subscription and newsstand sales don't make up the revenues needed to put the publication together in the current media economy, removing them completely from the process won't be as brutal as it sounds because the printing cost will dramatically change. Advertisements will still make up for the cash flow needs of the publishers. Will this ultimately replace all daily newspapers? Probably not. But is it a way to stay relevant to dedicated readers? Probably.

But let's get down to brass tacks. This article is missing something - something big. Changing distribution methods isn't the savior for declining readership of print materials. Newspaper readership will continue to slow. Along the same lines, television, while it continues to grow in technological ability, still loses viewership in certain avenues to one thing - the Internet. I think that while this article makes some super-valid points, not mentioning the Internet as THE distribution method of choice for most people who consider themselves "well informed" is short-sighted. The "short and sweet" newspaper will help offer people a way to read the news in the manner they're most used to while checking it online - quickly - but with the prevalence of WiFi, PDAs, and data-enabled mobile phones, it is very possible that generations of people (not just Americans) will get most of their news without ever getting newsprint on their fingertips.

Cyberjournalist reports that Mediabistro editor Jesse Oxfeld is leaving the company to take on an editor role at Editor & Publisher Online.

On Tuesday, online content provider Audible announced that they had teamed up with Verlagsgruppe Random House and holtzbrinck networXs to create Audible.de. This joint venture will provide both German speaking individuals and residents of the country with audiobooks and other spoken-word media for downloading.

The website, Audible.de, is tentatively scheduled to go live in Q4/2004, and will have much of the same "feel" and all the functionality of the U.S.-based Audible.com. Along with German content, all of the material currently available on the parent website will be available for download.

[update: 9:29pm ET] This evening, I checked in with Audible on this, and unfortunately, it does not look as if current customers of the company will be able to use their accounts on the Audible.de website - though this is not finalized as of yet.

Over at DMNews.com, Mickey Alam Khan covers the recent changes at BusinessWeek Online, which may help the site attract more readers. According to Khan, not only has clutter been straightened out and overall navigation been changed, but more focus is being put on the fact that the site has plenty of regularly updated news stories - not just content related to the weekly magazine.

The Lexington Herald-Leader picks up a Washington Post article from a few days ago, where Leslie Walker covered Vogue's September issue - all 832 pages of it. More specifically, that the issue will be "shoppable" - meaning that 480 of the advertisers have a section on shopseptembervogue.com.

On that site, visitors can search up by advertiser, type of product, store, etc. in order to figure out how to make the purchase of that item they just saw. Click the product you're interested in, give it your ZIP code, and watch the site pull up stores near you that carry the product. This strategy is quite interesting, and one that has surely been tried before, though possibly not to this level of effectiveness.

[sarcasm]
Dear publications and other image-hosting websites,

Thank you for letting us know that it is okay to use your bandwidth in order to put images up on our pages. I had been worried that I would go over my own bandwidth limits for the month by placing images on my server, but now I realize this won't be the case.

Sincerely,

The Internet
[/sarcasm]

____________

For a few months now, I've been following up on this story from June, where I covered the constant hotlinking being done by Matt Drudge from his Drudge Report website. Since the original post, Drudge has linked to hundreds of images hosted on servers other than his own, primarily Yahoo!'s yimg.com domain.

On August 12, Drudge used the image in the center of this first screenshot, the "red footed falcon," from the New York Times. After almost two weeks of followup on this, I was told "We took at look but Mr. Drudge had no photos up in the manner you had described in your e-mail." from a Times spokesperson this evening. So it doesn't look like my screenshot of same is enough, and obviously they're not checking their server logs to see how the images were used. Plus, by the time someone looked at the page for themselves, the image was gone.

I have also found instances of hotlinks to boston.com, who have yet to respond to my inquiry about this John Kerry photo. That was from August 19. This is the second time I've seen an image from boston.com on Drudge's site, but the first time I managed to take a screenshot of it, unfortunately.

Then came this Sunday, August 22. Drudge put up a story about Pat Buchanan's new book, "Where the Right Went Wrong." That item is still functioning, and can be viewed by anyone. There was an image up on the main page of the book's cover (see screenshot), from Amazon.com. You can find the image here, on the same page where the book is being sold on that site.

I contacted Amazon.com's media relations department Sunday evening and followed up with a telephone call yesterday afternoon. I have yet to receive any response, Drudge's site with the hotlink is still functioning as of 10:22 Eastern on Tuesday evening.

Bandwidth theft is apparently something that is acceptable to these companies. Unless - and no one has commented saying this is true - Drudge has a deal with all of these random publications, Yahoo!, MyWay.com, etc., then he's "stealing" bandwidth from everyone. This is possibly the worst example of this tactic that I've ever seen. If publications start seeing huge rashes of hotlinking to their images, then it truly serves them right for not doing anything about it. They might not be hemming and hawing over their bandwidth bills every month, but just because another site sends a lot of traffic their way, giving more pageviews to advertisers, doesn't mean it's right. If Drudge is going to do this, what is stopping anyone else from doing the same, as long as we're leading people their way. Want to open the door on Fair Use? Well, it might have already happened.

For those of you who are concerned about your bandwidth and hotlinking to your images, then take a gander at this article by Thomas Scott over at A List Apart. If there is anything I wish I could start a campaign against, it would be this - perhaps my voice isn't loud enough for these publications and websites to hear or react to. Hotlinking is a horrible way to do business, and something that us "little people" will generally get booted off of our webhosts for.

[update: August 25, 7:37pm Eastern] Well, it seems that this is happening again. As of right now, there's an image from MSNBC from this story about a Florida man's attempted suicide after hearing about his son's death in Iraq. The image can be found here.

Hans Kullin at Medai Culpa leads us to NameProtect, a company that "provide[s] protection of brand assets, recovery of diverted revenues and detection of online identity theft and fraud in today's global economy," according to their website. The point? NameProtect is searching the 'net for misuses of trademarks, more or less - so be on your best behavior!

CNET's News.com has an article up Friday by David Becker that details some of the interesting pieces of audio that online audio site Audible has put up in the past few months, including the 9/11 Commission hearings and speeches from the Democratic National Convention. Becker includes an informative Q&A with Audible CEO Donald Katz, which covers the evolution of downloadable content, market impact of the iPod, and more.

From the "service I really love that I hope doesn't get kicked off their webhost" category, check out this online stopwatch, courtesy of the Shodor Education Foundation.

[via Virginia Postrel]

A recently released report by AccuStream iMedia Research states that broadband video streaming is growing at a very high rate, with the first six months of 2004 following a trend 42.6% higher than that of the same period a year ago. AccuStream's research director Paul A. Palumbo said in a press release on BusinessWire that "Broadband users on ad-supported sites now watch over 30 minutes of streaming video per month from home and work." The average number of streams viewed per month, per site across the Internet is 15.4 - on sites where more than 90% of the users are connected via broadband.

The report also offers trends from 1998 through mid-2004, and includes details about provider-specific information such as AOL as well as figures regarding music and sports streaming.

Debra Galant points out that Audible.com is carrying the speech given by the (soon to be ex-) Governor of New Jersey, Jim McGreevey, last week. You can download it here for free.

[update] In the comments, Aaron informs that you can't follow the original link to the file at Audible - just go to their website and search for "McGreevey" if you don't see a link on the main page.

CNET's Dinesh Sharma confirms that online auction site eBay has purchased 25% of listing site Craigslist. No details on whether branding or other eBay information will appear on Craigslist, but Sharma quotes both companies as saying they would come together on "expertise, resources and creativity." On August 5, CNN/Money's Eric Hellweg speculated on Craiglist going public [via Techdirt], a move that many folks on the web thought was pretty unlikely. Looks like the "where there's smoke..." rule was partially right on this one.

[update] If you happen to read the CNET article linked above, make sure you check out Craig Newmark's post on the subject, too. It wasn't really clear in the CNET piece, but it looks as if this wasn't as simple as eBay walking in and asking for a slice of the pie.

Instapundit points out his "Registration Still Required" column at Tech Central Station, which adds yet another pile-on to the long-winded discussion about the number of registrations necessary to read various newspapers on the 'net today.

Publishers absolutely need a way to figure out demographics and get their content paid for, but I do agree that it's unreasonable to think that people are going to register at every single site out there, and keep the logins straight. I'm of the general opinion that if the publishers who run multiple web properties could just aggregate logins so that signing in at one publication gets you in to all the publications, reading news would be a lot less painless. (I believe at least one publisher is already doing this...) If media consolidation does anything for us, this should be it?

[update: August 12, 8:37am] Belo Corporation, owner of Dallasnews.com, Projo.com, and other news companies has this implemented on their websites. I know there is at least one other publisher that has done so - feel free to comment with any others that people are aware of.

In case you missed this story from yesterday afternoon, it appears that a book critical of Sen. John Kerry, Unfit for Command, had the cover altered on the Barnes & Noble website. On the book's jacket, a picture of Kerry pointing his finger had been replaced with a photo of Kerry on a boat with military personnel, and the title was changed to Fit for Command. You can read more here at Human Events Online where a screenshot and large versions of the book covers are viewable. No details are available at this point as to who changed the cover.

Robert Cox over at The National Debate has lots more.

Over at PaidContent.org, Rafat Ali offers his thoughts on how news sites should be doing things when crediting bloggers for a scoop.

According to a press release by Twentieth Century Fox on Friday, the studio has come to an agreement with online auction site eBay where site visitors would have access to "Alien vs. Predator" trailers, downloadable wallpapers and images, and more. In addition, eBay users will have the ability to "skin" their listings on the auction site, and exclusive items related to the movie (props, numbered posters) would be up for sale.

Gary Dillabough, vice president of eBay Strategic Partnerships said that "This agreement with Fox represents the first of its kind advertising sponsorship by an entertainment company on eBay." The "AVP" site is one of four Fox films that will be featured on co-marketed sites. The others are "I, Robot," and the upcoming "Taxi" and "Fat Albert" films, planned to be released between now and the end of 2004. (BW)

Tacking on to last week's antics with the use of a photograph taken by Tom Tomorrow on the Drudge Report website, another development has come about. Rules still don't seem to apply for the webslinger.

This time, Drudge has begun offering Google's AdSense advertising on his site, on the left hand side. (see image) That's all well and good, and he probably has a pretty good clickthrough rate. Unfortunately, one of the major rules of the AdSense rules is: Don't talk about AdSense....errr, don't tell people to click your ads. (Sorry, Tyler Durden flashback) Specifically, you cannot provide the following:

Incentives

Web pages may not include incentives of any kind for users to click on ads. This includes encouraging users to click on the ads or to visit the advertisers' sites as well as drawing any undue attention to the ads. This activity is strictly prohibited in order to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs. For example, your site cannot contain phrases such as "click here," "support us," "visit these links," or other similar language that could apply to any ad, regardless of content.

I'd have to say that "Support The DrudgeReport; Visit Our Advertisers" would probably qualify as violating this policy, wouldn't you? Also, not sure if that semicolon is the correct grammar - you might want to look into that.

I've been using Google's Gmail product for a while now, and I'm pretty pleased with it. Once you get used to the "conversation" style of looking at your emails, it definitely changes the way you look at threads. After a few weeks of being a little bogged down, it seems to be sending/receiving very fast, and I like how it automatically adds email addresses that you type in into the "data" it stores.

I only have two suggestions at this point - when opening an email, there should be a Reply button at the top of it. Sometimes messages scroll just barely below the bottom of the screen, and you have to scroll to get to it - most people are used to having a button at the top of their menu/screen, or at least on the side. The second thing is a "draft" bin. I've had tons of times where I would love to toss something to finish later but can't. And with a webmail client, there comes a point where you'd need it, especially if your connectivity is a little sketchy or you're on the road.

Just my two cents. Otherwise, I'm very happy about the service.

Steve Rubel has the scoop on the Topix.net changes that went live today. If you haven't used this news aggregator, now might be a good time to start. The navigation is significantly better on the left-hand side, and the way content is being sorted/filtered has definitely improved.

Gawker points out that Matt Drudge isn't making any friends by using other people's photographs on his site. This time, Drudge seems to have taken a photo by Tom Tomorrow, altered it, and posted it for consumption.

So outside of using the bandwidth from other sites such as Yahoo!, The Smoking Gun, and others, Drudge is now actually taking other people's photographs and altering on his site for his use, with no credit being given to the owner of the photo.

Am I missing something here? The average Joe (website owner, blogger) has been known to catch major flack for taking other people's photos or using someone else's bandwidth, but Drudge's site does this on a massive scale, if his statistics are any indication - and no one is saying anything about it.

[update] As of Tuesday evening, August 3, no response has been returned from Yahoo! media relations, but I did hear back from the Associated Press, whose copyrights I would assume are being passed over when images are being used - let alone bandwidth from image hosts like Yahoo! and others. The AP's official response from Director of Media Relations Jack Stokes was "We decline to comment at this time."

[ed: Post updated for clarity on 3 Aug 2004. I was trying to state the case of constant misuse of photographs on the Drudge site, whether it was bandwidth-related or just the alteration of images.]

Many of the online news portals have a wealth of advertising that seems to come from various places. Some sites use their own advertising "network," while others use affiliate or external programs to develop their advertising space. The FOXNews.com site seems to use a combination of these methods, including some advertising through MaxWebLinks.com (which I believe is a service of NewsMax.com). You can see an example of the MaxWebLinks ads here, towards the bottom of the page or in the right navigation bar - they typically have a blue background in the box of textual ads.

On Tuesday, the FOXNews.com site had an advertisement for "Cialis Viagra Levitra" which leads to online prescription vendor NetDr.com.

After doing a little digging, it turns out that NetDr.com is registered as follows:

NetDr International Ltd.
1754 Avenida Paulista
48th Floor
Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo 01310-200
Brazil

Looking further into NetDr's site, it looks like you can order all kinds of prescriptions there - Viagra, Levitra, Propecia, Cipro, Xenical, Vaniqa, Celebrex and Cialis. You can get 30 tablets of 500mg Cipro (in case of Anthrax) for $280! So let's see. While the site repeatedly states that your "application" will be reviewed in order for the "physicians for a consultation," it's not apparent anywhere that a customer would have to get a doctor to give a formal prescription. The physical server for this website seems to reside in the southwest U.S., though by some of the items written on the site, it would appear that the business does operate out of Brazil. [note: generally, American websites don't write "US$" on their pricing. "$" is usually sufficient.]

Still offering the benefit of the doubt, it is worth a look at the United States Food & Drug Administration website to see if this is legit or not. The FDA has put together a website that contains a list of "do's and don'ts," along with advice on how to see if what you are purchasing is a) legal and b) really what you think you are ordering. Furthermore, the FDA leads individuals interested in purchasing pharmeceuticals online to the NABP - the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy. Scrolling a little bit down the NABP's homepage, you'll find an item entitled "Find a VIPPS certified Pharmacy" - with VIPPS meaning "Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites™." NetDr.com is not one of the pharmacies verified by the NABP. In fact, there are only 14 that are, a few of which are national chains in the U.S.

The legality of ordering online is pretty plain, it seems. According to Aaron Larson at ExpertLaw.com, it can be legal to import a prescription drug - with one rule - you have to be "a United States resident with a valid prescription" (emphasis added). Most of these sites don't ask for a prescription, and the "examination" you receive from the "doctor" on the other end may be no more than a brief order form.

There is the distinct possibility that the advertisement "slipped through" whatever methods are in place to check out various vendors, but one would assume that offshore pharmaceuticals are probably not something an outlet like FOX News wants to be associated with. As of post time, FOXNews.com, NetDr.com, MaxWebLinks, and Bill O'Reilly had not responded to phone calls or emails on the subject. Further details will be posted as they become available.

[ed: Take a look at the logo for NetDr.com next to the one for WebMD and see if you notice anything in particular. At least change the colors!]

[update: 7/21/04, 11:15pm] As far as I can tell, the FOXNews.com website has removed all MaxWebLinks.com advertising from its site. The MaxWebLinks.com site still mentions FOXNews.com as a site available for ads, however. Here's a new image of the same URL discussed above:

As of this evening, there has still been no official response to multiple inquiries sent to FOX personnel/personalities. I'm still pursuing this, and will post an update as soon as more details are available. Thanks to Robert Cox at The National Debate for pointing me to the right contact persons at the network. I'm glad I made a PDF of the original page now...

CNSNews.com's Dawn Rizzoni wrote Thursday about about a "bot" on America Online's Instant Messenger service that likes to play politics.

Reportedly, a "bot" named "Smarter Child" on the AIM system would give answers like "No way. George W. Bush is way uncool" when you would type in something like "George Bush is awesome." Conversely, it would say "Absolutely. John Kerry rocks" if you typed "John Kerry rocks" into the system.

As of the time Rizzoni posted this article, the bot seemed to still have a bit of bias one way or another - as of Friday morning, it seems to be staying out of politics. When bringing up George W. Bush or John Kerry, it only responds with "Robots don't really get involved in politics.."

According to an Associated Press report, the New York Times announced Tuesday that CNET would offer technology-focused information to the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites.

Jonathan Dube over at CyberJournalist.net informs that CNN has 6 million online video subscribers through AOL, Real, Roadrunner, et al. Obviously there's no proxy to work against, but six million sounds like a pretty solid number, so we'll take their word for it that it's a good thing.

This definitely lends creedence to the network's announcement CableNewser's scoop in May that CNN would be launching "NewsStream Live" in 2005.

HispanicBusiness.com picks up today's announcement that describes how cable provider Cablevision and broadband media company Planeta Networks have teamed up to bring a Spanish-language online experience, "Optimum Latino," to customers of Cablevision's broadband Internet service, Optimum Online.

Okay, lots of people are still looking for a gmail invite, and I've got one to give away. I'm putting out the suggestion box to anyone who can provide me with a great idea for something here at the The Media Drop. I'll choose the best one, implement it, and will provide the lucky winner with a gmail invitation.

Some bright ideas might be:

-A suggestion on a person/company that should be interviewed/profiled

-Site improvements

-A regular feature that could be added

Your idea(s) could be anything in between - or way out of the box.

It's about 2:30pm Eastern on July 1 right now, and I'll give until midnight tonight, Eastern time, to accept suggestions. Comments are closed on this post, and all entries should be sent via email to themediadrop AT gmail.com. Good luck!

Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher points out that the feed aggregator has been named one of Time mag's "50 Coolest Websites" since they did this list a year ago.

While Fletcher is "shrieking like a little girl," as his post states, I'll go a bit further and point out that not only is Bloglines on the list - but it's the first site profiled.

Alice Marshall from TechnoFlak writes in the comments here that CMP has stated that they are not blocking Google News from scraping their sites (as widely reported yesterday) for items to add to their service, and that it was some sort of mistake or oddity.

Dan Gillmor has more, including a note from a CMP editor in chief Fredric Paul, confirming that their sites only block links from competitors, not news aggregators. Paul says "we're not just old media, and we're not completely clueless."

Jonathan Dube has the scoop on why CMP Media links aren't working when clicked through from Google News.

[Google News] has chosen to reproduce a significant amount of our content in a manner that we deem to be outside the bounds of fair use on the World Wide Web.

The Associated Press reports that Spokane, Washington is the proud parent of a 100 block "hot zone," giving Internet access to anyone in the downtown area for up to two hours a day - for free.

The network is also set up for police and government use, allowing for parking tickets to be written up faster and letting police run license plates right from their in-car devices. But most interesting about the announcement is about how it works - the story reports that less than 10 antennas are in use for the whole network.

I was just watching the Drudge Report site load, as it refreshes every so often if you keep it open, when I noticed a delay and saw the URLs in my browser's status bar for images that were loading very slowly on the page. First it was one for Yahoo! images, then it was one for The Smoking Gun. How odd.

So I pulled up the source for the page and rightclicked all the images in question and found that four of the six images on the whole page were hosted elsewhere. Details on three of them below.

The first image of Senators John Kerry and John Edwards goes to photo #1 at yimg.com. The image to the lower left of the screencap leads to this photo at iWon.com's imgfarm.com site. And the "teddy bear" in the middle goes to this image at The Smoking Gun. None of these photos are hosted on Drudge's server.

Now Drudge *could* have some arrangement with MyWay, Yahoo!, and The Smoking Gun stating that they would host images he was going to have on his page - it wouldn't be the first time something unexpected had happened on the Internet. But if Yahoo! images were to be hosting pictures for anyone who wanted to use them, especially someone with nine million visits a day, it would be a very unexpected thing.

So, I gave a call to The Smoking Gun - they weren't aware of this specific instance, but knew it had been happening. Their rationale: lots of people are doing it, and "taking" far bigger things than what Matt Drudge was using, so they aren't saying anything about it. I asked if they were concerned about the bandwidth for someone getting 9 or so million visits a day and was informed that it the effect was "minimal." I also contacted the public relations office for Ask Jeeves (the parent of MyWay) and Matt Drudge himself - but have not received responses as of this point.

So how does this work - if Drudge thinks a site will get bombarded with requests and be shut down based on using one of my hosted images, he'll copy it for placement on his server, but if he thinks that no one will notice/care, he doesn't?

While businesses across the globe have been using free instant messaging for work-related discussions for quite a while now, it was only inevitable that the world's largest ISP would get their hands around a business application for this concept. That concept is AOL's AIM@Work portal.

USA Today has a story today that describes how Time Warner's AOL arm is teaming up with online meeting manager WebEx and telecom solutions provider Lightbridge to offer what will be known as AIM Business Services. From voice conference calls to web meetings, AIM Business Services is looking to offer cost efficient communications tools through a medium that may already be utilized by a company's staff.

AOL has even taken the instant messaging username selection up a level with their Identity Services platform, which allows authentication of users who have a username@companyname screenname through the AIM product in order to add credibility and identity security to the system.

The only question remaining is whether companies will move their off-net telecommunications needs to a paid model on the Internet through AOL. The partnership with WebEx lends a significant amount of creedence to the service, IMHO, as many corporations have been using their web conferencing in conjunction with telephone conference calls in order to have meetings where people are in various locations, significantly lowering travel costs - but will companies leave their current "safe" telephone bridge away anytime soon?

You know how it goes, you start popping syndication feeds into your reader, and soon enough you've got 582 of them. How to keep up? You get a hang of it, but perhaps you miss a beat here or there.

Maybe that won't be the case in the future. Microsoft is working on some processes where your computer would cruise through all the media you have an interest in and pull out just what you're looking for. Sounds like jive at first, but according to News.com's Ina Fried, it's a possibility. I'm not holding by breath, though.

MSNBC has an article from the Washington Post's David Vise that attempts to shed some more light on the Google/Froogle "Father's Day gifts" topic. Unfortunately, Google isn't commenting on this, and Vise states the "quiet period" the company is technically in due to its upcoming stock offering is the reason.

While I don't have a problem with Google putting Froogle at the top of search results that don't have ads, I do have a concern about them doing so above paid advertisers. I don't think sellers should have to "outbid" Google, in essence, and they are probably not even given the ability to do so.

While no comment will be forthcoming from Google, I have contacted the media relations contact at RedEnvelope.com, the company whose ad was put below Google's in the original exchange. I'll post any further details I learn.

According to KFMB-TV out of San Diego, SBC announced yesterday that it will be handling Wi-Fi connectivity in up to 6,000 McDonald's restaurants by sometime next year. SBC's marketing and sales boss stated that "The agreement will help us create the industry's most extensive Wi-Fi footprint," which will make it interesting to see what the next step in the hotspot "war" is. With Starbucks and McDonald's becoming wired nationally and taking hold of customer dollars, is it possible for another player to come in and cause such a stir by signing a deal with a brick and mortar company of some sort?

Bookstores and restaurants are the obvious targets, as the "sitting down" aspect is key to this relationship. But will wireless Internet access become so ubiquitous that non Internet surfing customers start to get annoyed by the amount of technology in these locations?

If you've been looking for news articles prior to 1995 at the New York Times, you've probably been disappointed. Now, thanks to the paper and online info company ProQuest, you can put down your tissues and fire up the laptop.

The fine folks at ResearchBuzz lead us to a new search page at the Times which indexes the paper from 1851 up to 1995. The part I find most interesting is the ability to search advertisements - not just articles.

According to this article by Chris Richardson at WebProNews, Google's Froogle shopping comparison site is taking the first position in the paid search result area for "fathers+day+gifts" , at least as shown in the screenshot that is included in the article. [ed: on some occasions, nothing shows up as a search result item, including Froogle, so I've included an image here.]

Interestingly enough, RedEnvelope.com is not included in that search query anymore (at least the one from the WebProNews article), but if you type in "father's day gifts" without the "+" symbols, you get the Froogle and then RedEnvelope links. Even if RedEnvelope didn't have to outbid anyone for this, should they be given second billing to Google's own product?

I've sent a note over to Google, and will report back with any details I learn.

A lot of what media outlets are doing these days is focused on bringing content to the Internet, or tying print/broadcast content to related information online. In fact, many more sites that have broadband and dial-up options for content have begun to diverge a little further with what is offered to broadband visitors. I would expect with the ability to create better video quality and transmission capabilities, more and more things such as video blogging will become mainstream over the next 1-2 years.

One of the keys to this growth is the expansion of broadband usage, obviously. There has been an incredible amount of cable modem/DSL subscribership over the last year or so - worldwide, not just in the United States - which is great. Unfortunately, the slowdown in broadband rollout (yes, there is a slowdown in some areas) might hinder the ability to keep the United States in a prime position when it comes to the broadband market. Carol Wilson at Broadband Edge reports this week on a new book, entitled "The Broadband Problem, Anatomy of a Market Failure and a Policy Dilemma," by Charles Ferguson that makes some pretty heavy statements about a need for better competition in the broadband rollout in this country. Ferguson believes that if our current deployment of broadband continues at the pace it is at (he quotes us at being 20th fastest worldwide), other technology will not be able to continue as it is currently moving.

The article spins into a need for political change at the highest level and within the FCC - noting that the administration should keep this concern in mind as they create/change legislation regarding telecommunications and Internet usage. While Ferguson doesn't seem optimistic that the Bush administration would make any solid adjustments that would help, I do specifically remember President Bush stating something about broadband growth in this country, wanting to have it for every man, woman, and child.

The interesting thing here is that the ability to publish/create new content seems to exist already, but the ability to convey this content could turn out to be a problem. It's not as simple as the creation of the printing press or telephone here - the "medium" exists (don't come yelling at me about how the Internet isn't a "medium") already - the ability to receive the information is hindered. It's almost like the newspaper will be too wide to put the rubber band around, so the newspaper delivery person can only carry ten newspapers at once, instead of thirty.

So, before I have deja vu back to my 1200 baud modem days, let's see what the rest of you have to say about this topic.

With a quality title, "Its books are never out of stock," USA Today's Jefferson Graham begins an article that gives online audiobook seller Audible some decent cred.

Just like the blogosphere, political information/reads are a huge leader in downloads at Audible (which I'm definitely not surprised about). According to CEO Don Katz, the Richard Clarke testimony before the 9/11 commission brought 100,000 downloads to the site - and Bill Clinton's upcoming book, My Life, is expected to be hot in print and in the digital world. But can any of this translate to profitability for the Wayne, New Jersey-based company?

Alice Marshall makes a great point in response to an article in Advertising Age that describes Google's impact on trade publications. She answers the question of "What do you need a trade publication for?" with "Well, er, original reporting?"

I definitely agree about that, because while trades may lose their deftness at pointing out "obscure content for highly specialized audiences" due to Google's complicated algorithms, they still have something that Google doesn't - specialized reporters. (Well, at least not today) It becomes purely an economic race - can the trade publications continue to charge their subscription and advertising rates and stay afloat as the Internet gobbles up their readership?

Hear Music, a subsidiary of Starbucks, has come out with another of the compilations that you come across in the coffee shops - but this time, there's a twist. The fourth addition to their "Artist's Choice(tm)" series has come out, and this time it's Sarah McLachlan choosing the tunes. Okay, so that's not the twist.

If you happen to be a T-Mobile HotSpot customer, you can also access content via Wi-Fi connectivity in the shop once you purchase the disc. Upon connecting, you "can watch the exclusive video content, access digital liner notes and listen to sample songs from the CD," according to the official press release.

Will offering additional content online be able to spur a little bit of growth in selling music in a brick and mortar sense? What's most interesting is that Starbucks is keeping you in the shop, you're buying music from their subsidiary, and using T-Mobile's service, of which Starbucks is surely receiving a piece of the action from. (BW)

Tonight I came across this post over at J-Log, which talks about the newspaper habits of younger people - or, more specifically, lack of newspaper reading habits. What bothers me most about this is the ignorance of how the younger set has embraced the Internet as a channel to receive news and information.

Individuals aren't reading the newspaper's content less, they're just getting less ink on their fingers. Until someone starts utilizing the demographics harnessed by sites like nj.com and parent advance.net, studies like this will not be relevant, in my opinion. You can't just sit there and make a blanket statement about readership being down, circ is down, newspapers are dying, blah blah blah. Yes, print readership is down. Yes, circulation has dropped significantly over the last 10-14 years. But it's not like people have gained a stupidity level or something. If anything, I would venture to say that people are more informed than they were before. Not only the Internet as a whole, but sites like Google News and Topix make news from everywhere available to everyone. Blogs filter content for readers, and readers match themselves up with blogs they like. More and more people have obtained subscriber based television services like cable and satellite. Audio and Visual content has replaced a lot of print content for many people. While the loss of newspapers as the medium that provided so much news to so many people for so many years may seem harsh, it is reality in a sense. I don't think you'll see them going out of business or stopping all printing processes in the near future, but the declines will continue.

Australia's Daily Telegraph has an article by Christine Pouget that talks about where the newspaper industry stands from those present at the 57th annual World Newspaper Congress. The overall gist is that while circulation is declining for paid publications, advertising revenue is up. This could be for any number of factors, including some publications going out of business, causing a much more tight selection of outlets for people to read. Or, that the folks "still" reading the newspaper at this point can be more highly targeted by those wanting to advertise. The point is, companies are advertising and publications still exist. Most folks still like to have a little bit of print in their hands at some point - so don't expect your children to never hold a newspaper in their lifetimes.

For the last day and a half, I had heard that the mysterious man (yes, we knew the author was a man) behind CableNewser would be revealed this Thursday in the New York Times. Turns out that it was Thursday, just not in the Eastern Time Zone. Lisa Napoli at the Times has the skinny on CableNewser.

Why all the hiding and secrecy, you might ask? Well, for good reason - at least at first glance. As it turns out, CableNewser is actually Brian Stelter, 18-year old sophomore at Towson University. While juggling some jobs at newspapers (off and on campus), doing web design, and working on the Towson news television show, Stelter was able to follow enough cable television news to be a very serious contender in the cable news coverage world. Some might consider Stelter and his site the cable news source right now. You can read some more details, straight from the source, here in the post he put up this evening.

Think this is going to hurt the site's traffic and followers? I don't. While a few people might be staring at their screens tonight or at the newspaper tomorrow morning (though if they're reading this firsthand in the paper tomorrow, they're probably not reading CableNewser regularly) saying to themselves, "Whoa, what am I thinking?", I think the credibility is built and there is no reason it should go away. What do you think?

This isn't the first time someone has had some pretty good credibility and turned out to be a surprise. Back in February of this year, I did an email interview with Marisa Hoheb, who is a senior (actually, has probably just graduated in the last week or so) at the University of Virginia. Marisa is also known as "Rachel" - the person on the other end of the "Rachel Speaks" column at Media Life Magazine. It's an advice column for people in the media world.

What does this mean for the world of media? Well, not only are the web and business savvy continuing to get younger and younger, but those with some industrious abilities are making a mark on the world, in a big way. There are probably dozens of Brians and Marisas out there that we haven't realized yet - or maybe they haven't realized it yet, either.

[update] I've been corresponding with CableNewser off and on via instant message for a bit now, and was able to corner him this evening to ask him a few things. Details below:

TMD: Hypothetical - someone offers you a media column at a publication - do you think you would take it, and do school at the same time? You've pretty much shown you could do it.

CN: Absolutely. I can juggle 7 balls in the air at the same time -- why not 8?

TMD: So why cable news - where does the fascination come from?

CN: It's a lot more influential than most viewers realize. I was in a newsroom today when Ashcroft spoke. Everyone stopped and watched CNN. Last week, I noticed FOX on TVs in a health club, at the bookstore, and a Starbucks. It's everywhere! And it shapes the news we see on the networks and in the newspapers.

Stories like Kobe or Laci or Chandra would have never been covered by network TV (or even the morning shows) ten years ago. It's because of cable. It's more influential than we think.

TMD: Do you think the stories would have been "national" like they are now, outside of television, without cable news networks?

CN: Not to the extent they are today. Some nights, Peter Jennings will introduce a story by saying "as Americans watched on cable this afternoon,..."

TMD: So what do you bring to the table to differentiate yourself from the usual media following suspects?

CN: An outsider's view. I'm just a viewer -- albeit one who views quite a bit.

TMD: Great answer. So you intend to stay on "this side" of the fence, at least to the best of your ability. So what happens when news co's start sending you their press releases?

CN: Well, I get their press releases everyday. And I get tips from all the networks from time to time. Certainly, I aim the site toward insiders and outsiders. It's a balance between the two.

My dream job hasn't exactly been invented yet. I'd like a job where I can write a news story for the newspaper, put an advance version online, do a package about it for the evening news, stream that package online, record a radio spot about it... I don't think it should just be "broadcast journalist" or "newspaper reporter," it should be Journalist, for many platforms.

Don't be surprised to see that type of role appear in the next two or three years - because if someone else doesn't invent it, Brian Stelter just might do it himself.

CableNewser has a scoop about some interesting developments at CNN. Reportedly, the news network will unleash a broadband-only news channel, entitled (at this point) CNN NewsStream Live - in early 2005.

Is this the first real step towards Internet-based video subscriptions for our media monstrosities?

James Surowiecki of The New Yorker writes, "A Google bomb goes off when people conspire to have a particular phrase link to a given Web page, effectively tying the phrase to the page."

We're all familiar with Google Bombing - a recent example would be "Joogling," which was discussed here - wherein the term "Jew" in Google would lead one to an antisemitic website - The "Google Bombers" were attempting to sway the search engine by leading people to the Wikipedia entry for the term, and Google even responded with some thoughts of their own on the "offensive" search results.

The question is, does the "easy" manipulation of a search engine invalidate it as the "search engine of record" for many people? Easy is a relative term, but as a blogger, I realize how easily something of interest can spread through the medium, effectively rendering something obsolete or unavailable. In a world where you can be "slashdotted," can something as simple as search results cause the behemoth of engines to lose its grip on the masses?

As Surowiecki says, "if Web users think Google isn’t a clean game, eventually they’ll stop playing." I can't say they are as shortsighted as that, because web users are pretty savvy folks - and the future crop of Internet users, the elementary school students all the way up through the college graduates of this spring all know what they are doing when they use Google, Yahoo!, and others.

While reading a few blogs this morning, I noted that Jeff Jarvis seems to have some issues with Audible's services. And after following the thread over to Jeremy Zawodny's site, it seems he's not alone.

I've not had the problems that Jeff and Jeremy speak of, but after reading some of the comments in the posts, it looks like bloggers feel that the customer service tendencies at Audible are lacking somewhat, especially in a weekend/after hours kind of way. The point of contention by most is that you can't cancel your service online - only via telephone - and this seems silly because, as Jeremy points out, they say they won't let you do this online because it involves "a change in the financial status of an account." Except that it's only a negative change in the financial status of the account. You can increase your subscription online or purchase new media, but you can't cancel.

After further investigation and posting by commenters at these sites (and others who've trackedback to Jeremy), this seems like a definite issue which might have an easy solution - but none seems to have been found just yet.

CNET's News.com site announced yesterday that they had won a National Magazine Award for "general excellence" in a category that included Slate and National Geographic Online.

This is yet another in the long line of accolades the site has received in the past year - they continue to raise the bar for themselves!

Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion posts about the idea PBS is currently bouncing around - video blogs. This would coincide with the launch of a new public affairs channel, as discussed here in Current this past January.

According to the article, a report is due to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (which provides public television funding) wherein "audience needs and options for programs, revenues, costs and distribution of the channel" are to be described. Why public affairs, you ask? Steve Behrens writes that while the audience may not be huge as compared to, say, children's programming - it "is closely linked with the objectives of many philanthropists." That point is huge for public television, which, as you know, needs funding from sources outside of advertising in order to broadcast. Put programming where the dollars are, and you could have a successful idea.

If you're into some partisan debunking of statements made by the other side of the political world, then you might want to check out Media Matters, a site created by David Brock to "monitor the conservative media and correct erroneous assertions in real time."

Looks like they've already started by going after Linda Chavez at Fox News. Enjoy!

[via Atrios]

For weeks now, everyone has been talking about Google's Gmail service, and how it was infringing on everyone's privacy all over the place. Most people who are "in the know" realize that a lot of the things people are complaining about are things that are commonly out there. But since the other companies that offer the free email services never came out and said it, they're not bad in the eyes of privacy activists. Remember the "Don't be evil" tenet that Google talks about? Well, it's for real, obviously.

Thankfully, the folks at Marketing Vox have put up some proof for everyone to check out that describes what goes on at other services. Not competitors are as innocent as some would like you to believe.

Charles Wright at Australian publication The Age wrote earlier this week about the music site operating out of Russia that seems to have gained a bit of popularity - allofmp3.com. The site, which of course isn't working as I write this, was apparently selling music downloads by the megabyte. Or, more specifically, US$5 for 500 megabytes worth of tunes. And the kicker - you get to download it in whatever encoding mechanism you want - MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, you name it.

Today, the site says:

Dear users! Due to a technical works you may experience instability while working with our site. Encoding and downloading are now disabled. Our services will become available at 10:00, 1.May.2004. We ask to excuse us for the inconvenience.

So I guess I'll have to wait until about 2am Eastern tomorrow morning to start binging....errr....yeah.

The Western Publications Association held its annual Maggie Awards event last week, with CNET and its News.com division taking home a combined four awards, including Best Online Publication and Best Online Article, Interview, or News Story. You can read all about this year's winners here.

News.com took the Best Online Article category with its "Mother of invention: How the Mosaic browser triggered a digital revolution" piece by John Borland, Paul Festa, David Becker, and Mike Yamamoto. The article describes how Mosaic, the first "browser" as we know it, celebrated its 10 year anniversary last year - and how the browser has changed the way the Internet works.

Congrats to the CNET crew, and to all of this year's Maggie winners.

[via BusinessWire]

Kevin Drum at Political Animal is venting about the proliferation of logins at newspaper sites. We have heard that this is going to be the way things work, and I still hope we can come up with a centralized registration process, at least within news site networks.

So what are the next steps out there, people? I think that while bloggers are in a unique position on this matter as they are very likely to land on many, many more newspaper sites than the average online reader, the gap between those individuals and a person who gets most of their news online but isn't a blogger is probably not that far - so it's a widespread issue. The key here to realize is that while it is annoying for you to have to come up with a login/password at every single newspaper, the folks on the other end of the content are in business to provide you the news, and the "free-ness" of the Internet has a very real cost that is just transparent to the reader (well, unless you don't have a popup blocker).

[update: 11:15pm, 4/28/04] Robert Cox at The National Debate writes about an idea of how to coordinate some sort of "easy" registration through blogs where access to newspapers would be available. While it wouldn't be the alpha and omega of simplifying access to news sites online, it could be one solution that at least helps for blog readers and publishers alike.

Well, I just donated $10 through Dorkafork to Spirit of America for a new logo for the site, so look forward to that showing up in the next week or so. Join in the fun, help a good cause, and if you are lucky, you'll find something that the great folks out there are doing on behalf of the cause to get people involved!

And while you're at it, you can read more about SOA here at A Small Victory - where Michele is using her great abilities to push a cause to meet tonight's goal for $50,000!

Thanks to Instapundit for pointing out the article that William Booth of the Washington Post wrote last weekend about something that web surfers have known for years - that marketing through this channel grants a level of "word of mouth" that is beyond anyone's expectations.

The examples that Mr. Booth covers are a website that offers human cloning - that looks and seems totally 100% real - but isn't. It's part of the marketing plan for the upcoming film "Godsend," that comes out later this week. While this isn't a new idea at all for those people who spend a lot more time on the 'Net than reading paper publications, it's gaining steam. Both Lions Gate Films and New Line Cinema are embracing the idea, and have seemingly realized that the costs are lower and the "bang for the buck" is much more effective. Why wouldn't you participate in this?

I remember back in 2001 when Steven Spielberg's "A.I." was coming out, and websites and a huge amount of "underground" marketing was going on. One website claimed to be a site built by supporters of the "anti-robot" campaign. And if you signed up to hear more about what they offered you, and entered a phone number, you received a telephone call, days later, from a robotic voice threatening your life, saying that they now knew who you were, and that they had manipulated you into believing the site was created by "people like you." I remember getting the call like a week after I visited the site, and had just sat down on the couch on a Friday night - only to be totally confused by the call. It actually took me an hour or so to search up any other people on the Internet who had received the same calls to confirm my suspicions.

So while you might see advertising in "traditional" media going forward, expect less of it overall and more of a "jump" notion to it - sending you to websites to find out more. And the messages will continue to get more and more cryptic and blend into what you might think are real commercials for real businesses. But just as the article asks - "Will this stuff keep fooling people?" I think so - technology always wins.

Jim Hu at CNET writes about the deal that AOL has struck with sister company Time Warner Cable, in which Road Runner (the product name for TWC's broadband service) users would be able to purchase the "AOL for Broadband" product, otherwise known to some as "BYOA" - or "Bring Your Own Access". And vice versa - then the companies will exchange funds for signing individuals up for each other's services.

What I find most intriguing about this is how AOL has been running an ad campaign talking about how users that have broadband are only using a "standard broadband connection" or something close to that, and they've almost been slamming that product as inferior as to what you could have if you had your "standard" connection plus AOL for Broadband. All the while this has been going on, Time Warner's own product has been, in essence, insulted by another company in TW's portfolio. Fascinating.

Well, your content is online if you have AOL's broadband service, that is.

According to a press release on BusinessWire from earlier today, AOL and the ATP have teamed up to put multimedia tennis content online for their fans.

Details are as follows, from the release:

Video Highlights Package: Up to three minutes of match highlights for 20 ATP Tournaments, press conferences, and other non-match related video content;

Audio Clips: Up to two audio clips per tournament from players
at 25 ATP Tournaments;

Tennis Timeouts: One-on-one interviews between award-winning
host Roy Firestone and top ATP players.

Hopefully, Roy will not cause tears in the eyes of the players on a regular basis.

This is a fantastic move as yet another sport moves towards online content. Baseball, Football, Basketball, and Hockey have had various forays into this, and now tennis is taking a pretty confident first step into the market.

Reuters' Lisa Baertlein has a piece in today's USA Today about the recent outcry against Google for the first search result for the term "Jew" coming up as "Jew Watch", an anti-semitic website. While a huge amount of people have participated in a petition to have the site removed from Google's index, it's just not going to happen. The real campaign should be behind the attachment of the term "Jew" to the Wikipedia entry. The second part of that should be for people to realize why the "Jew Watch" site happens to be first in the search from the USA. Isn't that more of a concern, frankly?

Last week, when many sites started participating in a "Googlebomb" to move "Jew Watch" out of the top spot - I had noticed that depending on where you search from, you get the Wikipedia entry or "Jew Watch". So out of curiousity, does that mean that in the States, "Jew Watch" is more "relevant" a first search result than if you are coming from Germany or Sweden? Anyone know specifically how relevance works when you go global?

Also - check out Deb's post on the subject. She has the explanation from Google on the topic.

Later this week (Friday, to be specific), radio show host Cam Edwards will take the helm of a 2-5pm EST Internet-based show at NRAnews.com. Mr. Edwards describes what he'll be talking about as "politics, the culture war, media bias against guns, and highlighting some of the stories that the mainstream media doesn't cover."

Remember all that stuff you've been reading about the Internet projects that survive being the specialized ones? This is a great example which I expect will have legs. (I wanted to say "target audience" but it just didn't read right...)

[via BlogRunner]

According to this article on Fox News, "good times are here again and should stay" when it comes to the "advertising dependent Internet companies." I don't know if we should all go running down the street screaming like banshees, but things are probably shaping up somewhat. People are recognizing the value of content, and advertisers (okay, some of them) are realizing how to create advertisements that are less intrusive and more valuable and directed towards their audience.

On the flipside, this will probably cause all kinds of random Internet companies to have their stocks go flying for no apparent reason. So partying "like it's 1999" will probably be a valid excuse for some people.

Last month I had posted about the iPod/Audible.com deal where you could receive $100 off your iPod device if you signed up for one year of Audible's services through retailers such as Amazon.com. After doing so, I have had a few conversations with the company, culminating yesterday with a short chat with CEO Don Katz.

We spoke about how Audible had a lot of success with a "test" promotion of the iPod/subscription deal in Q4 of 2003 when they worked with J&R Computer World to promote the rebate. According to their statistics, 1 in 5 iPods sold at J&R during the holiday season went with an Audible subscription. I don't know about you, but to get a 20% response to a promotion is a big number. Typical advertising might only bring in 2-3%, and I'd say 10% would be a huge promotion. But for that number of people to check out Audible's services is a big deal. I could see how it was a no brainer to roll out the program with retailers such as Crutchfield, Amazon, J&R, and others.

Also of interest is the opportunity to download - for free - the 9/11 Commission Hearings from Audible's site. By going to http://www.audible.com/911hearings/, you can download the sessions by individual speaking to the Commission. It's very simple to sign up to download these items, no credit card information is needed, and it takes less than five minutes to set up and account. As a marketing person, this is a great thing if you are able to show people the value of your business while providing them with a service of this type - and as the 9/11 Hearings are of interest to many, it will probably be a successful move for them. In addition, MSNBC.com and NYTimes.com are linked to Audible's recordings of these sessions, which are surely driving readers of articles on the topics to download the items so they can hear them in their entirety.

Another feature that Audible is currently hosting are reports from two individuals who are about to scale Mount Everest. The climbers had met with students in New Jersey before the trip, and Audible had planned on having the items online because it would be of interest to some. Instead of having just the students who met with the climbers monitoring their progress, they have their customers downloading the items because it's something novel and very different from other content to be found out on the Internet. You, too, can download these reports from http://www.audible.com/everest/.

My personal interest in this company is mostly driven because I was an investor a few years back in a semi-competitor of Audible's, audiohighway.com. Since those days, audiohighway.com has folded and Audible has lived on. And the content keeps growing. I was amazed to hear that they have gone from having 250-300 hours of new content per week just six months ago - up to 500-600 hours of new content per week now. It's not just supply of content that shows growth - the demand is there. And with opening up their content for free in some cases, they must be gaining some regular customers who find their site from MSNBC or the NY Times and choose to sign on. In fact, word of mouth is apparently one of the biggest ways that Audible has gained customers, as stated by both their CEO and Director of Public Relations.

Mr. Katz stated that Audible was "a service in our customers lives," and reiterated that their regular customers were making a point to really utilize their subscriptions, with many of them ordering content in excess of their regular subscriptions. That seems like a pretty solid value statement if I've heard one.

This week some folks have been Google Bombing to move the first Google entry for "Jew" to contain the Wikipedia entry. Yesterday, I prematurely thought this had been completed when I posted about it, but I was sadly mistaken.

As it turns out, depending on where you are, you get different results. I had thought this would be significant in the advertising scheme of things (Adwords, etc.) but I figured since I'm using the Google.com site that it wouldn't make a difference.

For instance, at work I am going through a proxy based in Germany. When I go to Google and search the term "Jew", I get the following (click to make bigger).

So I had gotten in touch with Debra Galant to ask what she was getting, as I thought it was peculiar that she, (and me at home - 50 miles north) was getting the "Jew Watch" site as first. She sent me this (click to make bigger):

Perhaps it's part of the search algorithms or something, but I'd like to know how many other countries come up with the Wikipedia entry first, and how many people get the "Jew Watch" site first. So if you're in another country, try this out and let me know what you get - post results in the comments or send me a screenshot via email if you can.

The Modesto Bee picked up this AP article by Brian Bergstein that talks about some changes that AOL is looking to bring forth, namely the opening up of some of its content to non-AOL subscribers.

The article states that the new AOL.com site to be unveiled will be more "portal"-ish, as a way to attract non-subscribers to AOL-based sites. This should allow them to widen the audience their advertisers are promoting towards, and help lagging revenues in that area.

Well, in response to this post from earlier today, it looks like all the Google Bombing has worked, and now going to Google and searching for the term "Jew" comes up first with this entry for Jew on the Wikipedia.

Props to Michele at ASV for pointing this out first to me and to Debra Galant for posting about it and promoting the cause.

[update]: Debra posts in the comments that she's still getting Jew Watch. I tried it earlier and got Wikipedia on two browsers, both from the toolbar and from the web page... Must be either really really close or something's screwy. So keep linking!

Ooh, ooh, if no one's trademarked that, I want it! VGOD!

Anyway - I just read on BusinessWire that Atari and Exent have teamed up to bring the world Atari On Demand, where you can play stacks of Atari titles online for a monthly fee.

The service is $14.95 a month, and you don't have to buy anything in the store - all the software is downloaded through Exent's EXEtender(TM) technology, allowing you to play your heart out. You know you love Missle Command and Pong.

In what will probably turn out to be one of the more mainstream-realized Google Bomb efforts, the "Joogle" situation seems to be gaining steam.

It all started after someone realized that the first site that comes up when you search the term "Jew" in Google is "Jew Watch", a site mostly described as Anti-Semitic by most folks involved in this cause. So the effort was hatched.

Heretofore, if you see posts about Joogling and frequent use of the word Jew, you'll know what it's all about. Like Debra says - even if you're not Jewish, it doesn't hurt to click on wikipedia links about being a Jew or perhaps opening up your religious databanks a bit to find out more about the Jewish religion as a whole.

Cheers!

Mike at Techdirt makes some points about why the 'net isn't the broadcast medium that some outlets think it is - at least not yet.... The key statement is that the Internet and World Wide Web are definitely "complementary" for most true broadcast entities, and we aren't at the point where we can do everything over 'net connection.

Just read earlier today that The Legal Intelligencer, billed as "the nation's oldest legal journal," has re-launched their website targeted at legal professionals. The site mostly covers "legal" news issues and is put together by the folks at American Lawyer Media. (BW)

If you've gone to college, then you're probably familiar with the "facebook" concept. It's the little book you get at the beginning of the year that contains photos, names, majors, and other tidbits of information about students in the class you are entering with. Some have more information than others, some are "quick and dirty" publications. It was created, most likely, as a way for incoming students to figure out who the people were in their classes, and work as an icebreaker of sorts.

A few minutes ago, I found this article by Deborah Arotsky at the Princetonian that talks about thefacebook.com, a site created last January by some Harvard students for the purposes discussed above. In essence, they created a "FOAF"-type infrastructure for the purposes of connecting college students.

Now, the site contains over 30,000 students from 11 schools - and growing. While it is seemingly linked across mostly Ivy League schools, that is part of the system based on who started it - many Ivy League students know other Ivy League students, creating natural growth in that way. This is a pretty cool idea, and would love to see how it grows over the next months and years.

No sooner am I back 24 hours from Brazil, and I've already received a spam from the folks at www.hospedesite.com.br, who have decided that I definitely need hosting in Brazil. Talk about contextual advertising.

MediaSavvy's Barry Parr posts that he's been spammed by automotive.com in his comments, apparently multiple times. In fact, that spammer posted a link to Edmunds, who happens to compete with automotive.com.

Now I've seen spam FOR mainstream products sold by second tier retailers/websites, but never really heard of anything by a site of any real size.

[via Kinja]

Be sure and read Doc Searls' take on Jeff Jarvis' "citizens media" idea.

It's great to see the concept drawing some interest from multiple directions. It's a wave of the future which already has a decent start, if you ask me. I think the hyperlocal blog idea is a great place to begin, and I expect to see more of the same in the coming months.

David Weinberger at Joho makes an interesting point that the Internet is not a medium in the common use of the term.

I don't think I can add anything more poignant than what he had to say, so definitely read his post.

For those of you who read Marketing Wonk, you'll remember the layout was a little quirky sometimes... Well now it's new and streamlined and clean and fancy and easy to read andandandand well I don't have anything else to say about it. Go look!

For those of you who haven't read Marketing Wonk before, then go do so now. You'll thank me later. Or not.

Oh, yeah - it's now officially "MarketingVOX | The Voice of Online Marketing".

Debra Galant posts about Audible making the 9/11 hearings available for free download at their site. She is a customer of theirs and received an email news-item about this, and let me know via email.

You can go to http://www.audible.com/911hearings and download the items, although I think you have to "open" an account with them to do so. But for the amount of content, I'd say it's worth it.

[update] Okay, I just set up an account, took about 90 seconds. Definitely worth it.

According to this story, Reuters is using web filtering technology to "go after sites that post whole articles, or portions or paragraphs, without specific permission."

Wow. That's pretty wide-ranging, right? I totally concur with Rafat Ali from PaidContent, who posted this today and said, "It'll be interesting to see if [Reuters] goes after blogs..."

I've sent a question in to Reuters directly addressing the issue - let's see if we hear anything good back on this topic. I know that most bloggers try and make reference to what they're writing about, but know that everyone isn't as clear all the time as they could be - just by the nature of blogging. I'll post anything I hear.

Well, at least that's what California CPA Mark Maughan is saying. Some information he found when "Googling" his name caused him to file suit against Google, Yahoo!, AOL and Time Warner. His lawyer is claiming that Google's PageRank caused some "misinformation" to come up when searching Maughan's name, which would, in turn, tarnish his image.

(Amusingly, the whole top of this page is a Google AdSense ad)

This is the only instance I've seen of this article, but if a judge ruled against Google, it would be a pretty big deal, right?

After "Googling" "Google Sued Over PageRank" without the quotes, I got 2,390 results. Looks like various PageRank issues have come up in the past, including here where a site called SearchKing was dropped in the ranking system, leading its webmaster to sue Google. This is the most prominent result, and was referenced in a ton of places.

However, this case is different. That case had the owner sort of saying that Google had fudged with things - this latest suit brings to light the "media company" aspect of Google. Mr. Maughan seems to consider how he is portrayed in search results as Google's doing, and therefore, they are the channel (or medium) by which the statements (true or false) are conveyed. Like a newspaper reporting some libelous statements, is Google responsible for doing so when things come up in their search results? If the end-party (newspaper, blogger, whatever) said something about Mr. Maughan, and Google showed that result to a searcher, are they causing whatever defamation Mr. Maughan is experiencing?

Creates an interesting question....

I've been checking up on this thread over at Dan Gillmor's blog today. Dan is following Google's Eric Schmidt's speaking slot today at a PC Forum, and was discussing who Google's actual customers are. Are they the searchers, or the advertisers?

I decided to include this link because, as Dan so nicely points out, both John Battelle and Schmidt himself seem to be calling Google a "media" company.

This is part of the reason I decided to start this blog, truthfully. Look at what you do/see/hear/read on a daily basis - a lot of it is "media". What is this "media" we all speak about?

Dictionary.com defines media as simply as A plural of medium, which, logically, makes sense. In turn, a medium has a few definitions, with none being unimportant when it comes to the definition of what I'm planning on covering. I like item 2, "An intervening substance through which something else is transmitted or carried on."

Obviously we could talk about the "mass communication" aspect in more depth, but I thought this selection gave a much broader view.

So while people might look at Google, and, at first glance, say "they're not a media company," and shrug their shoulders, I'd suggest that they re-think that. This is a medium, Google is a medium, your radio is a medium. All of these are the "substance" through which "something else is transmitted or carried on".

Be sure and check out Michael Shields' article at MediaPost about the tough tasks that online media planners face when it comes down to getting into the search-term advertising world.

From choosing the right words and outbidding your competition to seeing which search term companies are powering searches on which site, it's a complicated game to be playing.

I saw an ad over the weekend (which is now showing up here) for Pluck, makers of a new RSS reader that fits directly into your Internet Explorer browser. When you click on the link to a post/article in the preview, it actually pulls up the web page in a second preview window pane. I've just started using it, and it seems to be okay. Comes preloaded with a few things and I haven't figured out how to do a "Mark All Read" type gesture yet, but that's okay.

It's not replacing Bloglines for me, which is my fave of all of the aggregators. But I thought it would be worth my while to test something else out. Has anyone else tried Pluck yet?

If you like the "breaking news" aspect of The Drudge Report but don't like Matt's politics, you can check out The Raw Story.

The site's founders and content providers are John Byrne and Jesse Kanson-Benanav, recent graduates from Oberlin College, and they strive to provide news to the "left leaning market," according to this article by Cambridge Chronicle correspondent Lesley Savage.

Well, after a few minutes on their site, I will be adding it to my list of sources. Good luck with the site, guys!

According to this article in the New York Post, "critics worry that RSS will be used to bypass advertising the way TiVo is used to skip commercials."

Except in this case, it's not meant that they're directly skipping the advertising on purpose. Sure, there's a "speed" factor into skipping commercials on your DVR/PVR, but you're making a point to remove advertising. RSS not only skips over advertising, but it skips over tons of other content. It's a pure speed driver, and allows readers to quickly scan their favorite news sites and blogs for things that interest them, without having to open a browser window for the software based-sites, or just going to a site like Bloglines, which has amassed a huge user base and feed list. I, for one, use Bloglines for my own reading, and am able to scan a massive amount of information in a short amount of time, figure out what I want to read/blog about, and move on. It makes lunch hours much more productive (at least in terms of posts!)....

There are some advertising/sponsorship based models out for RSS feeds at this time, and I'm sure someone will figure out how to make the perfect balance between the need for a revenue stream and the need to make your users happy.

The BBC chimes in about the recent announcement that Apple's iTunes will sell somewhere in the 70-75 million songs range by April. Originally, Apple's Steve Jobs had speculated they would sell 100 million tracks by that point. Jobs also said that there were slower amounts of downloads in the Pepsi promotion currently going on. I'm guessing those songs don't count in the sales number? (I've only downloaded 12 so far, BTW)

In any case, it's a big number.

If you're one who supports Creative Commons, then you might be interested to hear that Lawrence Lessig is stating that he'll send a copy of his last book, The Future of Ideas to you if you make a donation of at least $5.00 to the Creative Commons fund. And if you ask nicely, he'll even autograph it for you.

I just made a donation, as I wholeheartedly support the CC efforts and the folks that make it work - so if you've got a few bucks, and are interested in Mr. Lessig's book (or even if you don't want the book and just want to help), then maybe you should check out Creative Commons and drop some coins on them.

Thanks to JD Lasica for the heads up.

Ryan over at Dead Parrot Society has come up with quite a good idea in the wake of The National Debate's battle with the New York Times over the "corrections" page they were creating a parody with. Howabout centralizing the process and putting together a website where people put together posts as "fact-checkers", and it's for every publication that could be included? It's kind of like wiki-fying fact checking, but all in one place....

I'm for it. Anyone else third this motion?

From the "feel good story" file, independent news website Surfsantamonica.com reaches a milestone - its fifth birthday today. Santa Monica's site was formed just a year after 123-year old The Outlook shut down six years ago, leaving Santa Monicans without their own down home news source.

The site has no major print-publication backing, and has put itself together, in essence, to create a well-read site that keeps the city's residents "in the know". Thankfully, it some of The Outlook staff members helped get the site up and running, creating what the locals seem to feel is a local treasure. Definitely something to be proud of.

You know those songs that come up on the iPod commercials that you just don't know? Well there's one I had been trying to figure out for months. Finally this week (or maybe it was last week?) they added an "iPod Ads" section to their site, and it links to the four songs that are currently on blast.

The kind of funkdafied, reggae-ish track is Black Eyed Peas' "Hey Mama" and it was worth all $.99 I spent on it. The garage-rockish track is Jet's "Are You Gonna Be My Girl." Third on my self-ordered list is N.E.R.D.'s "Rock Star", and last, but not least, is the jazztastic "Channel Surfing" by Feature Cast.

Keep on the lookout for your favorite commercial and then go get the tunes. Great inter-divisional marketing on the Apple side - though I wouldn't expect anything less.

Alice Marshall writes "In a world where everyone is a journalist, everyone is a public figure."

And that's absolutely the truth. My "day job" has a partial responsibility of working in PR, and as such, when reporters call pitching a story, or an ad salesperson brings an editor with them to meet with me, or an executive I'm with at a tradeshow is having a coffee-break chat with an analyst or reporter, we're all "on the record" the whole time. This is true in the mainstream journalism world, and is *definitely* in full effect in the blogosphere. Think about the stuff that someone posted somewhere in their blog that would be huge news if they had the readership of Instapundit? Forget about the gossipy-stuff, think about the corporate-secret type stuff that's out there!

Want to gain acceptance, you think about having some integrity in your blog. Want to talk gossip and just gain readers? That's fine too, just don't get upset when the Washington Post doesn't return your calls when you're applying for a beat job. On the flipside, just because you're talking to a certain group of people who aren't front-page authors doesn't mean that what you say isn't going to get out there, somehow.

Thanks to Ed Cone for the link.

Vin Crosbie checks back in on the charge-for-content issue posted about here earlier this week. Looks like Knight Ridder isn't going to start charging anytime soon for online access to its news.

Early in February of this year, I had posted about RealNetworks and Major League Baseball seeming to "part ways" over the exclusive broadcast rights to all baseball games over the Internet. No firm resolution had come to light since then, from what I could tell.

Today, Real announced that it was filing a lawsuit in federal court to force Major League Baseball Advanced Media to make the games available in the Real format when the season begins. According to the release, another contract was "entered into between the parties in February 2004 that requires MLBAM to make its Internet broadcasts of live baseball games on MLB.com available in RealNetworks media format."

I just spoke via telephone with Mr. Greg Chiemingo, VP Corporate Communications for RealNetworks, Inc., and here's the situation from their end: The aforementioned 2001-03 contract had indeed expired on February 7th of this year. According to Mr. Chiemingo, as of February 8th, an agreement was in place for Real to still be an option for Major League Baseball's Gameday Audio product. There was not an exclusivity clause in this agreement, which had been the case previously. Mr. Chiemingo and I walked through the online process to listen to games online, and when you follow through the system, you are never given the option for anything except using the Windows Media Player to listen to a game. In fact, you don't have any idea what player is going to load until you click on the link for the particular game you want to hear, and no company logos are present from Microsoft or RealNetworks.

[ed: I have an email in to Major League Baseball Advanced Media, but have not heard back at this time. I will update this post if I hear anything further.]

Yahoo! announced this week that it would be adding a cost structure and cost-per-click setup for companies that pay to be indexed in the site's search results. By paying into this system, you would be able to be re-indexed more regularly by the system, and would, in turn, "move up" in the rankings because of you relevance.

Has this turned Yahoo! into a pay for play getup? Some people think so, and it seems that small businesses aren't happy.

But the last paragraph is the tale of the tape, for me at least... Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy says that while Yahoo! would lose users, it could mean 100 million a year in revenues. So again, the question is - what's more important - loyalty to your customers or loyalty to the dollar? When you're a publicly held company, the latter is the primary focus, as making money for shareholders is the goal. But at risk of what? This only makes Yahoo!'s results more "relevant" in the eye of the beholder. If you choose not to pay, you in turn become "not relevant", which, in my opinion, invalidates their search results as on par with a high quality result engine.

Thanks to PaidContent, I've been using Topix today, which will be yet another quality aggregator of all things newsworthy on my scan list. It has a local feature, something I really like and is lacking elsewhere.

According to Vin Crosbie at Digital Deliverance, Knight Ridder is planning to start charging for their online content at their newspaper sites. According to Knight Ridder's site, they have 31 newspapers / content sites, including the Detroit Free Press, the Kansas City Star, the Miami Herald and the Philadephia Daily News and Inquirer in Philadelphia.

I'm not really surprised if this is true - a lot of people have wondered about the longevity of surviving for "free" online, and with some of the statistics talked about yesterday, I could see why this would happen.

[via PaidContent]

Wondering what newspaper sites are doing with all that nifty information they ask for when you "register"? Susan Mernit has a post about statistics garnered from the "Power Users 2004" study.

In a related story, OnlineJournalism.com has an abstract up that talks about print being on the "path to extinction and taking the online media with it." The reason? Young people no longer reading the newspaper and the fact that that the online iterations of these newspapers aren't adapted enough "to the individual interests and tastes of every reader." Bummer. I think we'll see what happens with things like Philips' version of digital paper [via Rewrite!] become a little more feasible. It's not inconceivable that this revolutionary product could end up being some sort of savior to the newspaper industry, right?

And finally, Online Journalism Review's Vin Crosbie writes a piece entitled "What Newspapers and Their Web Sites Must Do to Survive". Thanks to Hypergene MediaBlog for pointing it out.

[update] Okay, I was wrong. Editorsweblog.org tells us that more people are reading newspapers these days, but reading them for less time. Again, age is a factor.

PaidContent informs about AOL's new music download service, where tunes will cost anywhere from .79 Euro to 1.79 Euro.

We've all been to our favorite online newspaper sites and been startled one day when it asks us to provide registration information or demographic information. We've all probably felt, at least a little bit, that it hurts their readership. I know that I do get annoyed sometimes when I'm up to like fifteen registrations and some have usernames, some have passwords, and so on and so forth. (Okay, so it's probably more like thirty now)

All this time, I think I felt it shied a lot of people away. I know a lot of sites "share" logins with their users - some posters on MetaFilter do, James Joyner does on Outside the Beltway, and I have as well on some web projects I've worked on. I really never thought that it would get that popular that it would actually work. At least not yet.

But according to this Joanna Glasner article at Wired, not only does it work - but it can even exceed what a publication puts together as far as circulation goes for its print counterpart. Wow. The article details how newsOK.com, The Oklahoman's online site, decided to do so a few years ago with great results. It also speaks briefly about other examples like a short version that just asks for zip code, age, and gender - which I've seen much more commonly, especially when following "deep links" into a newspaper site.

So if you're surprised that your local daily's site has gone the way of registration, don't be. It's obviously well beyond just some trend, and will probably become the norm before too soon. Now if only the larger publishers with multiple sites could "unite" the logins, we'd be set.

Check out this CNN article about Guy Philippe, who you might know as the leader of the rebellion in Haiti to take out current President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

It seems that Philippe uses his satellite-driven Internet connection from the Hotel Mont Joli in Cap-Haitien, Haiti to check out what the current plans are from countries like the U.S. and to gauge reactions through news sources.

Who knew. I think I'm glad Napoleon, Hannibal, and Alexander the Great didn't have the Internet is some tent somewhere are they created empires, howabout you?

After reading Lionel Beehner's article entitled "9,000 Google hits can't be wrong - or can they?" in the Christian Science Monitor, I can't help but agree on most of the issues involved. I've always thought that Google was the tool of the layman (at least in media terms) to finding out about anything and everything. We know it's not the perfect tool, but it generally works out. Don't have Lexis-Nexis at your disposal? Google it. No interns to make some phone calls on your behalf? Google again. You get the picture.

According to Beehner, journalists are following the same trend, using Google "statistics" to create value for the stories they are reporting. Heck, if I were an editor and someone came in to me saying "Look, this article about stale bread is gonna be huge! There are 26,200 references on Google to the topic, as opposed to only 615 for stale crackers!", and I didn't know how Google worked, I would probably at least think about it, right? Wrong.

If every single mention of something is caught on Google, and it's someone's name, like Britney Spears, or Pamela Anderson, we should be wary. Not only to people use things like this unscrupulously to lure readers to their sites, but some totally unrelated sites put terms in their "meta tags", or part of the HTML coding that makes up their web pages. You can skew things all you want - create 500 pages that link to a particular site, and you instantly create value to the algorithms that make up Google's brain - among other search sites. I love Google as much as the next person - I use it 99% of the time I'm looking for things on the Internet. But it's not a perfect science, and unfortunately, it seems to be something that so many people have bought into that they consider it their perfect research buddy.

According to BBC News, Microsoft has announced that it is removing pop-up advertisements from its sites across the globe. It's good to see that they've decided to do something which we have all wondered about for a long time. It was surprising to me the first time an MSN-based site had a pop-up while I was surfing on it. I hadn't thought that MS "missed the boat" on that with their customers and Internet-viewing public, but apparently I was incorrect.

One would imaging MSN's global sites make up a decent percentage of overall advertising on the 'net, and impact will be seen as "new" ways to advertise come about.