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Warner Music announces Last.fm deal

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lastfmWarner Music Group and Last.fm, one of the leading Web 2.0 social music sites, have signed a deal to allow Warner’s entire music catalogue to be played legally on the Last.fm streaming service.

Last.fm is similar to Pandora (my personal favorite in this space) in that it recommends songs by tracking your music-playing habits and suggests and plays new music based on other users with similar tastes.

According to Reuters, Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel said the site was in were in talks with the other three major labels and content holders.

 

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Originally posted on February 6, 2007 @ 4:59 pm

“Lustful gentleman” and friends result in Vietnamese blog investigation

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vietnam“Black Blogs”, blogs that partake in “questionable materials” such as “sexual images and language” have resulted in a new investigation into this perverted form of internet abuse by the Investigation Agency of the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture.

According to Vietnam Net Bridge, Mr. Vu Xuan Thanh, Chief Investigator for the Ministry, said that blogs in Vietnam are growing too fast for the Ministry of Culture and Information to manage and that consequently, the agency has recently dispatched a team to research blogs in order to find out ways for the Government to manage them.

He noted that although blogs are not illegal in Vietnam, that Regulation 55 and Circular 02 issued by the Ministry of Culture and Information prohibits Internet content that are the opposite to social and Communist Party values.

Blogs noted as containing “questionable material” include a blog by “Lustful Gentleman”, who is rather impartial to sex, and another blog by the name of “conxion’s world” who has “sexual pictures” some of which “are too much for words”.

 

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Originally posted on February 6, 2007 @ 2:41 am

Hands up if you’ve heard of Wretch?

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Anyone heard of Wretch? I hadn’t until today either, check the bottom right hand corner of this chart from the ebuiquty report on spam blogs:

chart2

Wretch.cc. Some sort of social networking/ blogging outfit that is registered in Taiwan and seems popular in the Chinese community, although their main page is in English. An Alexa ranking of 30! 15-20% of all legit blogging content being created according to the chart above is coming from Wretch.cc! If anyone knows anything more about this site, share in the comments…I just hate it when something gets this big and I’ve never heard of it before :-)

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Originally posted on February 4, 2007 @ 8:59 pm

Flip to give users control of advertising

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Flip.com betaCónde Nast’s upcoming MySpace competitor, Flip, which we blogged about before, is taking user control a step further. Users will be able to use advertiser images in “Flip books”, which is the way that Flip users express themselves. This from MediaWeek’s coverage:

Thus far, CondéNet, the Web arm of Condé Nast, has signed on five premiere sponsors for Flip—which officially goes live on Feb. 6—including PacSun, Nordstrom, Clean & Clear and Vera Wang. While CondéNet executives won’t say how much ad revenue the new site is commanding, sources familiar with the negotiations said packages were being offered between $300,000 to $500,000. Those numbers indicate the site is likely to pull in close to $2 million before launch.

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Originally posted on February 2, 2007 @ 5:13 am

It’s official! Technorati has lost the plot

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Technorati has joined the “online Superbowl Commercial” craze with this ad.

 

WTF? rather than give my own thoughts, I’ll share some from Jeremy Schoemaker, who totally hits the mark (you can read more on his blog):

You have this wicked cool product, were collecting marketshare for blog search like mad and you just sit on it for like a year while Google/Yahoo/MSN Blogs comes along and totally kills your marketshare and you spend ZERO on advertising then you go and spend millions on a superbowl commercial about your new WTF product well I got some WTFs for you.

What the fu*k are you thinking with the Big Lebowski. Ya I dig it… But I am 32 years old. I doubt the majority of the kids you are trying to attract….

Spot on Jeremy.

 

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Originally posted on February 5, 2007 @ 5:49 pm