Here’s another selection of things I’ve come across but haven’t had time to write full posts about (but might if time allows):
- There are plenty of video-sharing sites out there, and more every day given the success of YouTube.com, but Revver is different according to Rafat over at PaidContent: It inserts ads into the stream and shares revenue with the creator — and it just got $8.7-million in second-round financing. Interesting idea. Sidenote: one of the co-founders is Ian Clarke, founder of the Freenet Project.
- Do you love Apple and everything it stands for? Then you might want to read a bit more about Jason O’Grady, the guy behind PowerPage and Apple Insider — Apple rumour sites that are being sued by the computer company for divulging “trade secrets,” otherwise known as rumours about future products. Jason has written a piece at ZDNet, and some of the responses in the comments are worth reading.
- Benjamin Cohen is a former teenage dot-com millionaire (former teenager, I assume, not former millionaire) who has had his account with Google’s AdSense repeatedly cancelled for click fraud, but the search company refuses to say how it determined he was “guilty” or what the evidence consists of, citing “proprietary algorithms” and rules against disclosure.
- David Kirkpatrick, an editor at Fortune magazine, has some thoughts about “old” media’s self-flagellation over its own failings and the superiority of “new” media. His point is that content wins, regardless of where it appears, and old media has as good a chance as new media, if it smartens up.
- Samuel Freedman is a journalism professor at Columbia who writes on the CBS blog Public Eye that the whole concept of “citizen journalism” devalues professional journalism and that it ignores the skills and attributes that make professional journalists worth having. My friend Stowe Boyd disagrees rather strongly and I can see his point.