Web 2.0 Television

It's always interesting to watch an application become accepted by the Average Joe (I always liked the German term Otto Normalverbraucher better but hey not everyone speaks German).  Twitter is definitely one of those apps and despite knowing that, I just couldn't put my finger on exactly why this little one and not the hundreds of other useful apps out there.  Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence summed it up beautifully in a May 18 article in Advertising Age:  It's simpler than a blog, than setting up a Facebook or MySpace page.  It's very much like e-mail. And e-mail, from small-business standpoint, has been one of the most effective marketing tools.

As e-mail became adopted by pretty much everyone, up popped a bunch of services and tools to make it easier to use and to extend its application (e.g. Microsoft Outlook).  You can expect the same thing …

Those who are disappointed with the performance of Google AdSense can rest assured that they no longer have to rely on it to manage their advertising. Larry Braitman, creator of the advertising platform Flycast, has just launched Adify, an advertising management system designed for web publishers last week at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

Adify offers publishers an easy way of managing their advertising, without the huge loss of revenue associated with Google AdSense and other advertising management systems. While most of the other systems take 50% of the revenue that a site takes in, Adify provides the service for only 20%, meaning huge revenue gains for the publisher.

At the Web 2.0 Conference, Braitman’s new venture was compared to Federated Media, a hugely successful advertising platform designed for bloggers. Adify however, is intended for a much larger segment of web publishers. Any …

?

The recent announcement by Avenue A/Razorfish, a division of aQuantive, that it was promoting Bruce Woolsley to head-up its fairly new Advanced Marketing Solutions team, coupled with the subsequent announcement by Woolsley that he had added to dedicated team members, Jeremy Lockhorn and Patrick Moorhead, demonstrates the growing commitment of established agencies to understanding and embracing Web 2.0 as a way to deliver value to their clients.

Other examples include the Interpublic Group's Emerging Media Lab, Publicis Co.'s Denuo Group. Other companies such as Organic have name Emerging Markets executives.

While no one at Web2TV has met any of the named AMS executives, it would seem from their bios that Woolsley brings core client management experience with established online companies such as Expedia, while Lockhorn adds the online publisher contacts through his work with Clickz and Moorhead brings a free-spirit design …

I’ve noticed this problem creeping up lately, and it’s starting to get really bad.

Akismet is a great plugin for WordPress that catches spam automatically, and so far is batting a thousand, pretty much. I force myself to scroll through screens and screens of spam, to make sure any valid comments haven’t been misflagged (it’s happened once or twice).

I scroll pretty quickly, but I’m starting to see the same word repeat again and again: Infogami.

Infogami is a Web 2.0 service that lets anyone create a hosted Web site for free, easily. You can sign up with any email address, including a disposable one like Mailinator (see my example site here: http://jonathanacohen.infogami.com/blog/rwen)

The offending spam page I checked out (really, I only had the stomach for one) uses JavaScript from http://www.impliedscripting.com/js/ …

It’s not usually that much a big deal for Digg, but now journalists have picked up on another phony article.

Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion reports that Digg users read the post (”Just out from Reuters: 650,000 PS3s to be recalled”!) and predictably ‘Dugg’ (voted for) the story. In the echo chamber that is Digg, this quickly led to more and more Diggs, the story landed on the front page, and eventually it was determined to be a fraud perpetrated by someone as a gag. (The story has been taken down.)

Steve believes this is grounds for some kind of trust/authority rating system by a third party, similar to what eBay has done. I disagree. eBay’s reputation system works well because the range of behaviors it monitors is small …

The New York Times may employ some of the most incisive newspaper columnists out there, but the free access week doesn't impress John Burke much. And according to the "anything-but-scientific research" the Editors Weblog contributor did, the columns those stars produced didn't necessarily grow their popularity:

In four days of TimesSelect free trial (13 staff editorials in total from Nov. 5 to Nov. 10), only two columnists claimed the honor of most emailed, and one with a column written the previous week, not even close to the frequency the op-eders’ links were shared before the paywall.

It's my first glimpse over the pay wall this week, besides having read the print edition at various times, which has much of the same articles but not the Web-goodies. I've noticed a few things about …

Zune is dead.

Too big, too heavy, too expensive.

Not enough codecs or battery life, and no gapless playback or OGG/FLAC support.

WiFi is limited and DRM is onerous.

But what would the Zune look like if Apple had designed it?

Design Changes

• FM Tuner: Yes, but instruction manual tells you not to waste your time using it, because radio is passe.
• Wireless: Airport
• Connectivity: USB 2.0, Airport, Firewire (just because)
• Battery: Non-removable
• Input: Touch-sensitive clickwheel.
• Colors: White, black, red.
• What you get in the box: Zune, white headphones!, Zune stickers (”Don’t steal music. Share it.”), USB cord with magnetic seal, no power adapter.
• $249.00 U.S. initial pricing. $550 U.S. for a 3-Pack.
• Zune wireless booster accessory: $299 U.S.

Feature Additions

• Audio: AIFF (gapless)
• Video: MOV, H.264, FLC
• Images: MacPaint, TIFF
• Wireless audio: Wireless Zune-to-Zune sharing of audio files, limited listening of shared files while original sharer is within wireless distance.
• Wireless video: 10-second selection of …

This post has been updated.  

Reporters Without Borders lists China among 13 countries targeted for a 24-hour protest against Internet censorhip. China's response: "Groundless". ("What, we censor? Ridiculous.")  

Meanwhile, Japanese media outlets are shifting their coverage away from the U.S. and Europe and towards China, despite some of the information access and other restrictions journalists face in that country. (After the jump,) Editors Weblog reports: