New Media News Every Morning
The future of media driven by search. Unfortunately, old folks grew up in a time when “search” meant walking down to the local newsstand and browsing for dead trees to buy. To them, finding stuff on Google is “stealing“. That’s why News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch plans to block Google from indexing his media conglomerate’s newspaper content, in an effort to put it all behind a paywall. [Read more…]
Originally posted on November 10, 2009 @ 3:17 am
As early as nineties, people were already playing music from their browsers instead of traditional media players. Despite its eventual fall from popularity, I brought a client to the top of her local pop charts on MP3.com. Despite its current stagnation as Yahoo Music, I have fond memories of listening to Launch.com at work.
Between services like Imeem and Pandora and Last.fm, music has been going the way of almost every other computing application: to the cloud. Google, of course, wants to be your gateway to the everything in the cloud. That’s why they’ve introduced Google Music Search.
Google’s approach to music stands in stark contrast to their approach to video. With video, they bought the world’s number one video destination site, then used it as a testbed for video search, recommendation, and monetization across the Web. With music, they’re skipping the testbed phase entirely. Given the litigious nature of the RIAA, the relative simplicity of music compared to video, and the preponderance of major music destination sites, perhaps that’s the best approach: let partner sites worry about rights clearing. That way, Google can focus on what it does best: search.
In the meantime, let’s hope Google works its algorithmic magic to take this feature to awesome extremes. Right now, I’m imagining song recommendations, genre searches, and predictive playlists. Now that would rock.
Originally posted on October 29, 2009 @ 12:12 pm
A pre-revenue startup, built entirely around artificial character limits, reliant on celebrity users, with no business model, boasting a billion-dollar valuation? I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty frickin’ scary to me. Heck, it’s enough to give me nightmares about the dotcom crash.
That’s why I agree with The Joy of Tech’s trick-or-treat costume suggestion for Halloween: come as the Twitter Bird!
While you’re at it, have your morbidly obese friend walk around as the Fail Whale. Whenever that thing appears, Twitter addicts scream in terror.
Originally posted on October 28, 2009 @ 9:44 am
I hear a lot of old media types whine about how newspaper and magazine closings aren’t “fair” to veteran journalists, about how search engines don’t provide media outlets “fair” compensation.
Well, guess what: life isn’t fair. Adapt.
Technology doesn’t care how hard you worked to climb the old media heirarchy. New media maven Gary Vaynerchuk said it best in a recent talk: tech has no feelings.
Originally posted on October 30, 2009 @ 9:02 am
They say life begins at forty. As we stand at the cusp of the semantic Web, that adage certainly holds true for the ‘Net. To mark the fortieth anniversary of the Internet, the Computer History Museum brings us an eyewitness account of how it all began. [Read more…]
Originally posted on October 31, 2009 @ 12:55 pm