Before I go on, let me stop and say a couple of more important things: Aol, Aol Acquires Huffington Post, Aol Buys Huffington Post, Aol Buys Huffpo, Aol Huffington Post, Huffington Post, Huffington Post Aol, Huffington Post Aol Merger, Huffington Post Media Group, Huffington Post Sold, Huffpo Aol, Huffpost Aol, Media News.Meantime, Felix Salmon says AOL-HuffPo will eventually beat the New York Times and compares the former site to walking through Times Square while the New York Times is like going to the library - and finding out it costs to check out a book. Here's Salmon's concluding graphs:
One of the paradoxes of news media is that most of the time, the more you’re paying to use it, the harder it is to navigate. Sites like HuffPo make navigation effortless, while it can take weeks or months to learn how to properly use a Bloomberg or Westlaw terminal. Once the NYT implements its paywall, it’s locking itself into that broken system: it will be providing an expensive service to a self-selecting rich elite who are willing to put in the time to learn how to use it. Meanwhile, most Americans will happily get their news from friendlier and much more approachable free services like HuffPo.
Rather than learning from or trying to emulate HuffPo’s hugely valuable editorial technology, then, the NYT is sticking its head in the sand and retreating to a defensive stance of trying to make as much money as possible from its core loyal readers. There’s no growth in such a strategy. Indeed, the opposite is true: the NYT is making it both hard and expensive to become a core loyal reader. Meanwhile, the open web will become ever more accessible and social, with friends pointing friends to news in a site-agnostic manner. The NYT is distancing itself from that conversation, standing proud and aloof. It’s a strategy which is doomed to fail.
Las Vegas–based Righthaven was formed this spring for the sole purpose of acquiring copyrights and suing to financially benefit from allegedly misappropriated intellectual property. It has filed more than 180 suits on behalf of Stephens Media’s Las Vegas Review-Journal, and has now begun suing on behalf of Denver-based MediaNews Group, which owns the San Jose Mercury News, the Denver Post and about two dozen other outlets.The crackdown promises to get more aggressive as MediaNews prepares to build paywalls around its newspaper sites.
Righthaven’s initial lawsuit on behalf of the Denver Post, first reported by the Las Vegas Sun, came three weeks after the paper published online a “notice to readers about Denver Post copyright protections.” The five-paragraph notice said the newspaper’s work “is illegally reproduced everyday on websites across the country.” The company wrote it was acceptable for blogs to “reproduce no more than a headline and up to a couple of paragraphs or summary of the story.”
Sorry, I don't use the word "media." I don't use the word "news." I don't think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like a horseless carriage.Anderson then proceeded to dig up their bones to further his point:
I read lots of articles from mainstream media but I don't go to mainstream media directly to read it. It comes to me, which is really quite common these days. More and more people are choosing social filters for their news rather than professional filters. We're tuning out television news, we're tuning out newspapers. And we still hear about the important stuff, it's just that it's not like this drumbeat of bad news. It's news that matters.Maybe we should let those social filters work a while longer before we change the dictionaries.
What started out as an attempt to overload a small set of official sites has now expanded, network security consultant Dancho Danchev notes. News outlets like Raja News are being attacked, too. The semi-official Fars News site is currently unavailable.
“We turned our collective power and outrage into a serious weapon that we could use at our will, without ever having to feel the consequences. We practiced distributed, citizen-based warfare,” writes Matthew Burton, a former U.S. intelligence analyst who joined in the online assaults, thanks to a “push-button tool that would, upon your click, immediately start bombarding 10 Web sites with requests.”
But the tactic of launching these distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attacks remains hugely controversial.
-snip-
Other online supporters of the so-called “Green Revolution” worry about the ethics of a democracy-promotion movement inhibitting their foes’ free speech. A third group is concerned that the DDOS strikes could eat up the limited amount of bandwidth available inside Iran — bandwidth being used by the opposition to spread its message by Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. “Quit with the DDOS attacks — they’re just slowing down Iranian traffic and making it more difficult for the protesters to Tweet,” says one online activist.
After the [Craigslist] announced last month under pressure that it would no longer publish erotic ads, sales of erotic ads in local alternative weekly newspapers have soared, according to the Washington City Paper.So how much does an ad offering to, say, "put you to bed backdoor" cost?The paper reports its own sales of adult ads was up 38 percent in the first week of May as criticism against Craigslist was heating up, compared to the same time last year. Minneapolis’ City Pages says its adult ad sales have almost doubled. And SF Weekly in San Francisco had 160 adult ads the week before Craigslist’s policy went into affect but clocked in with 910 ads last week.
An adult-services ad in the Washington City Paper starts at $150 per week. The Chicago Reader charges $50 for online-only ads; $100 for online and print. Craigslist, by contrast, charged only $5 until it was forced to implement its manual monitoring of ads. It now charges $10 for ads placed in its adult category.
Posts
All Comments
