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Beyond Free – The Cutting Edge Of Business Modelling

By Chris Gilbey

Over the last year or so, we have looked quite deeply into P2P and how it impacts content owners. We take the position that P2P is in many respects no different to radio or TV. It provides a great platform for doing promotion on a new title. For back catalogue it represents a more complex [...]

The Unreasonable Persistence of Performance – Digital Music Futures Part 1

By paul bambury

Last year, on FirstMonday, I wrote: “Many bands and artists take advantage of the net by using it to advertise their performances, at which they sell their CDs. This can be very effective and the major record companies are becoming less relevant to artists. However, despite the apparent success of aggregators like iTunes, few independent [...]

AOL opens up

By Richard McKinnon

AOL is going to open up the walled garden. Instead of paying fees to access their exclusive material they will now become a portal or aggregator.  But AOL still has a dominating position in the market despite techie sneering. They've been an easy  default choice . They pioneered web access for many middle Americans. The [...]

John Battelle aggregates blogs into Federated Media

By Richard McKinnon

Federated Media is a aggregator of some really interesting blogs. Blogs that are strong voices with useful things to say; as well as quirky blogs; informative blogs. Federated puts together 'Federations' of these blogs and sells space on them to advertisers. Federated have now moved from seed and angel funding, to a series A round [...]

How will Podcasts make money?

By Richard McKinnon

Rocketboom has sold advertising rights on its 3 minute podcast/vLog for 40,000 US Dollars for one week. The winner, TRM Corporation, was the largest seller of ATM machines in the world. Rocketboom also sold a second week to Earthlink, a leading American ISP. (started by Skye Dalton, now the guy behind Boingo) At 1 million views a [...]

3GSM Congress

By Chris Gilbey

I am in Spain for the 3GSM Congress – in Barcelona this year. They moved from Cannes because the infrastructure could not deal with the demand – over 50,000 people attending. This is the hottest area of convergence on the planet. Obviously phone and network companies, but the number of content aggregators and what they [...]

The video internet keeps arriving fast

By Richard McKinnon

Strmz.com (‘streams’) is the latest aggregator/instigator of video to arrive. The site is a mashup of free Internet TV/video programming from major media outlets; popular video-blogs and podcasts; plus new/top-rated content from video upload services like Google Video, YouTube, Blip.TV, etc.  Registered members on Strmz.com can subscribe to favorite channels, as well as create and share playlists [...]

Why aggregators matter to business everywhere.

By Richard McKinnon

The number of websites and web companies that matter deeply. As the volume of content rises exponentially consumers and users keep looking for fast, key ways of getting to what they want. Hence the rise of Delicious, digg,  and others, like tech aggregators, where content is collected sorted sometimes analyzed and rated. Essentially, and collectively, [...]

Yahoo consolidates del.ic.ious

By Richard McKinnon

Yahoo bought del.ic.ious yesterday. Predictable. A VC delight. A pity. Delicious was a tag aggregator. Tags, search and feed are the way the web is starting to organize itself. On the net, it's increasingly hard to find things because there's so much “stuff”. So Google and Yahoo and others are search. There a ton of feeds [...]

How Americans Get Their News

By Chris Gilbey

A new Pew research document has just been released. It shows that after Hurricane Katrina 50% of Americans went on line to get information on the disaster rather than using traditional media. But more importantly what happened was that as people started to recover from the storm and its aftermath, they went and posted information [...]