Microsoft DRM Talk

"Companies like Microsoft steer like old Buicks, and this issue has a lot of forward momentum that will be hard to soak up without driving the engine block back into the driver's compartment. At best I think that Microsoft might convert some of that momentum on DRM into angular momentum, and in so doing, save all our asses."

BBC to Open Content Floodgates

"'The Creative Archive is fuel for the creative nation,' said Paula Le Dieu, co-director of the initiative. 'It allows people to download these excerpts and be able to edit them and incorporate them into their own creative works.' "

Viral Movies

Digitalization is the root cause

"This lets people create whole new products, like mobile phones with photo messaging that you can connect to your TV to scroll through the pictures. Digitalization is the root cause of all of this. It lets you create applications you could never have imagined 10 years ago. The PC, TV, and mobile phone are all converging."

More Newspapers Sending Readers Elsewhere Via Registrations

"Assuming that your newspapers' site is so special that people will want to cough up all sorts of personal info in exchange for access is an increasingly risky bet - but more and more sites are taking it, believing (incorrectly) that by doing this they'll get better info for their advertisers. This is wrong, of course. First off, by putting up any barrier, they're scaring off a good number of potential readers who have plenty of other places they can go to get similar stories."

How Google Took the Work Out of Selling Advertising

"This sounds like nothing more sophisticated than a car magazine that runs car ads - but then, eBay at first looked like nothing more than a big garage sale. In each case, scale and automation give a familiar idea new effects. Just as eBay connects each seller to a universe of potential buyers, AdSense connects each blogger and local Webmaster to 150,000 potential advertisers. "

Teenagers reach out via weblogs

"He also found that not only did teenage bloggers write a lot more than would be expected, they were also using the blogs as a form of 'self-therapy'. 'Blogs are an area for self expression. It gives them a space to be candid or personal where they don't usually have. 'I thought at first it was about exhibitionism, but a less cynical view is that they are trying to meet a common human need of finding connection.' Most of the blog posts were about their everyday lives, and what was happening in their school. About 67% used the facility that allowed them to comment on blog entries."

Nike Tries a New Medium for Advertising: The Blog

"The company's first paid blog is for Nike. Called Art of Speed, the blog will spend about a month showcasing a series of 15 short films on the theme of speed, all commissioned by Nike. Gawker Media Contract Productions, a new division of Gawker Media, will supply layout, commentary, links and other features. Terms were not disclosed."

TheyWorkForYou

""TheyWorkForYou.com -- a project from the FaxYourMP team -- has launched today. This is the most amazing, subversive piece of political webware I've ever seen. It scrapes the Parliamentary record and makes the entire thing commentable, searchable and permalinkable. It compiles stats of which MPs vote against their parties most often, which ones speak most often, which have made the most motions and so forth. I've been beta-testing it and the code and UI are brilliant. It's like they've poured Parliament into LiveJournal -- and in so doing, have cutg overnment down to a human-addressable scale. We need one of these in every country in the world."

Virtual Real Estate Boom Draws Real Dollars

"'My vision is to buy real estate in Second Life with one or two other investors and make it available to new players as a business', and it seems that 'Large swathes of undeveloped online property, some bearing an uncanny resemblance to a palm-studded West Coast beachfront idyll, are selling for up to $550 an acre.'"

'Nerd Values' Help Propel Tiny Craigslist Into Classifieds Threat

"'God, I love (Craigslist's) simple interface and the way their software works,' Parr told me via e-mail. 'Everyone I've met through Craigslist has been someone I liked doing business with. It's so freaking wonderful. Newspapers' Web sites are unspeakably awful by comparison. They have too many masters to serve and virtually all of them don't understand how to make a Web site work.'"

'Nerd Values' Help Propel Tiny Craigslist Into Classifieds Threat

"'God, I love (Craigslist's) simple interface and the way their software works,' Parr told me via e-mail. 'Everyone I've met through Craigslist has been someone I liked doing business with. It's so freaking wonderful. Newspapers' Web sites are unspeakably awful by comparison. They have too many masters to serve and virtually all of them don't understand how to make a Web site work.'"

Fine-Tuning Your Filter for Online Information

"Called R.S.S. (the initials are variously said to stand for Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication and more obscure formulations), this increasingly popular online tool turns a morass of disparate information sources into an automatically generated and neatly organized index of the latest articles and postings. "

Abandoned shopping carts an e-tail challenge

"The number of shoppers who end up buying something has gone up from 3.5 percent in the last quarter of 2003 to 4 percent in the first quarter of 2004, online marketing company DoubleClick said in a report released Wednesday. But for every dollar sold, $5 was left in an abandoned cart, DoubleClick said. 'It's encouraging to see conversion rates increasing, although abandoned shopping carts still represent an enormous opportunity cost,' Court Cunningham, senior vice president at the company, said in a statement."

ING Bank: online internal branding

"Employees of ING Bank surfing the web will be exposed to highly targeted banners from the company the work for. Dutch web site Marketing Online reports that ING Bank is currently running an online internal branding campaign which aims to reinforce the new brand positioning. Advertising spaces have been bought on MSN and Lycos, banners and skyscrapers will be served with an IP targeting technique."

Will Gmail Now Lead To An Online Storage Revolution?

"Gmail is really about email (despite the storage ability) while another service may be about backups. Others could be about file sharing (legal or illegal, I guess) or the ability to create a shared archive... or whatever other kind of application you can build when storage is a lot less limited than with most online applications today. Right now, many applications limit the amount of data that can be stored, but Google may have broken down those doors, and basically have said online storage shouldn't be a limiting factor any more."