Advertising firms buying into blogging technology companies

It also seems BEBO has turned down $550M in  financing and. Looks like we should be looking at Ad agencies who want to "buy" into the new "online newspapers" eg - blogs.

Original post is here.

WPP Takes Stake in Social Neworking Firm Live World [by Rafat]

On of the biggest ag agency groups in the world, WPP, has struck a joint venture with Live World, a social-networking service, to build out blogs, buddy lists, message boards, chat rooms and community sites for its clients. As part of the deal, WPP has the option of purchasing a $2.1 million stake in the company if it exercises a warrant to purchase one million shares at $1 each and another million at $1.10 each.
Live World, based in Los Gatos, CA, was launched ten years ago as Talk City, an early community and chat site, and nwo provides community building platforms to companies/sites.
The deal coming after the recent announcement about IPG Media purchased a 0.5% investment in Facebook and agreeing to spend $10 million as part of a media buy on behalf of its clients.
And on cue, a related story from BusinessWeek about why ad agencies are taking stakes in these social networking and community building platform companies.

feedburner “feed of me”

And FeedBurner intends to make that ecosystem even more complex. For some time the company has been developing a feed-splicing tool to let users create what Costolo calls a "personal content network" - a "feed of me."

"You put your tags in Del.icio.us, your photos in Flickr, your friends in AIM; you have a blog, a podcast, etc.," he says. "And we splice it all together into a single feed."

There are, of course, plenty of folks with personal websites. But with a "feed of me," subscribers would be able to track changes in your data at the atomic level - being notified instantly when you add a new photo set or playlist, not just when you update your site.

original post here:

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skype phone for mac

Who: Bambi Francisco, Columnist, MarketWatch

What: VOIP With Benefits Ipevo Free.1 Skype USB phone; $30; ipevo.com

Why: I love using VOIP to save money on phone calls, but I don't like being tethered to my computer via a clunky headset. I need all the functionality of a proper desk phone, which is why I use Ipevo's Skype phone — it makes VOIP much more useful. I just plug the phone into the USB port of my computer and dial as if I'm using a regular handset. It's lightweight and comfortable, and it provides all the features I expect, such as speed dial, volume adjustment, and a mute button. The sound quality is great, and because the phone is so compact, it's easy to take with me on the road. An extra bonus: While many VOIP phones work only with PCs, Ipevo offers software that makes this one Mac-compatible.

pushing content to mobile phones

it'd be interesting if we could push blog RSS feeds, photocasts, podcasts, and videocasts to the mobile phone (and the feed varies depending upon who is doing the requesting).

original source here:
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youtube worth $1Billion?

this is why calliope is great. Users can post videos and photos, and ads can be displayed before the photo or video based on the content of the video/photo (which you get from the tag).

Original story here: http://money.cnn.com/blogs/browser/index.html#115381173993334004
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Posted by Owen Thomas 6:57 PM 7 Comments  | Add a Comment

youtube and Myspace licensing brouhaha

originally from http://www.boingboing.net/2006/07/20/youtubes_new_policy_.html

Thursday, July 20, 2006

YouTube's new policy says: we own your content. UPDATED
UPDATE: See response from YouTube at end of post, and more analysis here.

The newly revised Terms and Conditions page at YouTube raises important questions for anyone who uploads videos there. Eliot Van Buskirk at the Wired News music blog "Listening Post" writes:

Musicians such as Billy Bragg have been complaining about networking/music site MySpace's terms of use – and rightfully so. MySpace is said to be changing its tune, and should be posting updated terms soon (currently, its About page is offline).

The video site YouTube constitutes an equal or larger threat to small content producers. Before you upload that video of your 19-person indie rocker reggae band, for instance, you may want to read the fine print. YouTube's "new" Terms & Conditions allow them to sell whatever you uploaded however they want:

"…by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business… in any media formats and through any media channels."

Among other things, this means they could strip the audio portion of any track and sell it on a CD. Or, they could sell your video to an ad firm looking to get "edgy"; suddenly your indie reggae tune could be the soundtrack to a new ad for SUVs. The sky's still the limit, when it comes to the rights you surrender to YouTube when you upload your video. Perhaps even scarier is the idea that anyone who might eventually buy YouTube would automatically obtain these same rights. Since YouTube is so popular, with 100 million videos shown each day, it's an attractive acquisition target for any number of companies.

Read the rest of the post here: Link.

Author/podcaster/robot-handler Violet Blue has a related post here, and Andrew at PuppetVision blog has a related post here.

Reader comment: ttrentham says,

As a musician whose band has music on MySpace, I did a little snooping after reading Xeni's post today about YouTube's terms. It does look like MySpace has altered theirs to more favorable terms as of June 15th.

"MySpace.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post to the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose. By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the MySpace Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the MySpace Services."

Reader comment: David Gulbransen says,

I hate to be put in the position of trying to defend an onerous license… but the excerpt you posted on BoingBoing is a little misleading. It continues, "…The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the YouTube Website."

That last little bit is pretty important. It means that if you remove the work from the YouTube site, they have to stop using your work. So there is some protection for users who have uploaded original content. If YouTube were to sublicense your content to an advertising agency, for example, and you were to remove the content–thus revoking the grant under the terms of the agreement–then the agency's license would be revoked as well. That's not really a tenable situation for advertisers or businesses, who are unlikely to sublicense content with such strings attached.

Upon reading the entire section, in context, it's pretty clear that YouTube is trying to ensure they are covered from attacks by users if they use videos featured on the site for promotional purposes, and also to allow the sharing of video content on other's blogs, sites, etc. My first inclination when seeing something like that is to recoil in horror, too. However, sometimes actually reading the license and parsing what the real impact is can be useful.

Hm. I'm not so sure that the scenario described above would protect a user — what if they only find out that a video has been sold or used in an ad after the fact? Taking the video down from YouTube won't change that, if the sale or republication has already taken place.

Either way, I won't be uploading any of my content to YouTube under these terms — archive.org, revver, and other services offer more uploader-friendly terms, and Creative Commons licenses with those services and others allow you to specify more precisely what forms of reuse you're okay with.

I'd welcome further analysis from folks versed in this area of law, and will gladly post any reply from YouTube, too.

justin wood says,

you-tube's terms and conditions are eerily similar to att/sbc's new conditions re: their dsl/internet service. how a company can "own" your content by you using their service, especially if you pay for it, is beyond me.

Jason Kottke blogs,

The longer term question is, can YouTube find a business model that won't completely screw up their wonderful offering or will they ultimately go the way of Napster?

Update: Jennifer Nielsen, Marketing Manager for YouTube, writes:

To clarify, YouTube never intended to sell, and never obtained any rights to sell, any User Submissions on CD or other physical media. The sentence you quoted was intended to enable YouTube to syndicate all or part of our website through third party websites (including to enable our embed functionality), in mobile contexts, and similar types of syndication. (…) The sentences that were omitted in the paragraph quoted are [italicized] below in context:

For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service. The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the YouTube Website.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:07:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

why our RTE word processor needs to be good.

Google bought Writely.  So blogger will one day have a very nice word processor.
 
see http://www.ft.com/cms/s/373b76e4-b00f-11da-82fe-0000779e2340.html

Google buys online word processor

By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco

Published: March 10 2006 03:00 | Last updated: March 10 2006 03:00

Google on Friday said it was buying "Web 2.0" start-up Writely, an online word processor, for an undisclosed sum.

The move might be seen by Microsoft - whose Word program is the dominant application in word processing - as a threat to its market share.

ADVERTISEMENT

Google has challenged Microsoft in areas including search technology andemail.

Google and other internet companies such as Yahoo have been focusing on making applications, commonly run from a computer's hard drive, available remotely over the web.

Web 2.0 is the name being given to a wave of web services that offer more interactivity in the browser and "social software" such as photo-sharing and public tagging of web pages.

Writely allows users to compose and print text from inside a web browser, as well as collaborate with other users on a document.

Google revealed its acquisition in an entry in its official blog by Writely co-founder Jen Mazzon. "For the last five months, I've been part of a Silicon Valley start-up called Upstartle, which makes Writely," she wrote. "As of Monday, I'm happy to say that I and the rest of the Writely team are now part of Google."

Writely is in a developing "beta" stage, like many of Google's products, and is "far from perfect", according to Ms Mazzon.

But it will be expected to join a suite of applications being made available by Google through the browser. They include the Gmail email service and an online calendar.

Bloggers on Thursday speculated that Google would next be looking at browser-based spreadsheet applications as it sought to mirror Microsoft's Office suite of software applications.

Yahoo has followed a similar strategy of buying up Web 2.0 companies to fill gaps in its online offering and strengthen its services.

how to use collaboration sites in the corporate environment

collaborative sites i would create:

marketing(webhosting, nz, domains)

• nz specific news
• competition in NZ
• pricing of competition
• our actual sales
• targets + rewards
• actual profit
• correspondence w/ problematic clients
• readers: group members, CEO
• post: group members, CEO, secretary

support

• threatening clients
• good feedback from clients
• readers: group members
• post: group members

engineering

• bugs found (comment or trackback: fixed)
• programming orders
• walkthrus  posted.
• readers: group members
• post: group members

newsletters

• readers: intl clients, local clients, public.
• post: authors.

personal uses of blogs

my test post

this is a test post. please ignore for now.

samoens is great!

pics from cornimont

my test post

another test post

Hello world!

This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!