Credit card usage is slowing. Revolving credit largely made up of credit card debt fell by nearly 20% in November, the largest drop on record, according to the Federal Reserve, reflecting less borrowing by consumers and banks' tighter lending standards. Through October, the number of new credit card accounts was down 46% from the same period in 2008, according to Equifax.

But abandoning credit cards is a much more radical step than using them less. Consumers who don't own a credit card often have a hard time renting a car. Some hotels won't book rooms to travelers who want to pay with a debit card or cash. Those that accept debit cards may place a hold on several hundred dollars in the customer's bank account, which could cause checks to bounce. And many consumer experts say that responsible use of credit cards is one of the most effective ways to build a good credit record.

It will be interesting to see what the long term implications of this will be, because I sense a lot of people now run with the baseline perception that banks and credit card companies exist only to screw their customers.

When the folks at Netbook Navigator first asked me to write about the company's new 9 inch tablet PC I had a hard time getting past the high price tag of nearly $1200. But that price was for an early model that packed 3G capabilities and was intended for early adopters. Now Netbook Navigator has updated the pricing for the Nav 9 tablet and the base model costs just $799. Yeah, that's still enough money to pick up 2-3 netbooks, but here's what you get for the money:

• Display: 8.9 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel multitouch display
• CPU: 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU
• Graphics: Intel GMA 950
• Storage: 16GB SSD
• RAM: 2GB
• OS: Windows 7 Home Premium
• Connectivity: 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth, LAN, optional 3G HSDPA or CDMA
• I/O: 3 USB ports, MiniSD card slot, SIM card slot, port replicator w/VGA/LAN adapter, 1.3MP webcam
• Battery: 3 cell, 1700mAh (2.5 hours max)
• Dimensions: 10 x 6.6 x 0.8
• Weight: 2 pounds
• Other: car charger

The 3G module will cost you extra, as will a higher capacity battery which is good for up to 4 hours of run time. You can also get the Nav 9 with a 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB SSD. The most expensive unit will run you $1399, but the $799 starting price is certainly much more appealing than the $1200 the company was charging earlier.

Netbook Navigator has also put together a handy chart comparing the Nav 9 tablet to the upcoming Apple iPad and the already-on-the-market Archos 9 tablet. The long and short of it is that the Nav 9 supports multitasking, supports USB peripherals and SD card expansion, and comes in more varieties. Oh yeah, it can also run most Windows applications. On the other hand, it's thicker and heavier than the other tablets.

Post from: Liliputing

Netbook Navigator's Nav 9 slate PC gets affordable, guns for the iPad

LittleSis API: LittleSis is a free database tracking the key relationships of politicians, business leaders, lobbyists, financiers, and their affiliated institutions (also described as an involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited). The LittleSis API exposes the raw data used on the LittleSis website. The data consists of basic information about people and organizations, and the relationships between them. It uses a RESTful interface and responses are formatted in XML and JSON.

Mixpanel API: Mixpanel is a web service that lets companies track how users engage with their websites in real-time. The Mixpanel API allows users to post and access the data that Mixpanel is analyzing. This is a RESTful API and responses are returned in JSON format.

Mood of the Nation API: Mood of the Nation API allows clients to retrieve the raw trending data associated with the free Mood of the Nation iPhone application. The application collects mood information (physical, mental, emotional) from users and trends over day, week, month.

Motime API: The Motime Open Access platform is an affiliate program based on the APIs of the Motime service which allows partners/affiliates to advertise Motime ringtone content on their own web or mobile sites and earn money for each referral given to Motime. The search API offers a REST protocol to allow developers to link their content with Motime's catalog of ringtones.

Muselius API: The Muselius API can be used to display information on up to 99 museums in an area on your own web site. The information about museums can be used to enrich your art related sites, hotels and tourist sites. Muselius is a global directory of museums. Our mission is to facilitate the information you need for visiting museums all over the world. Muselius is created and maintained with the help of many users who update and complete the data we have about each museum.

OpenSRS API: OpenSRS API is intended for resellers who offer domains and supporting services to their customers. Resellers can provide functionality to their customers by integrating data from the RESTful API functions (includes SSL support). Developers can use the API to run queries or automate tasks that would otherwise be performed manually using the Domain Name Control Panel.

Dallas Lawrence is Chair of the Social and Digital Media Practice at Levick Strategic Communications, the nation's top crisis communications firm. He blogs on emerging digital media trends and best practices for social media engagement on Bulletproof Blog. Connect with him on Twitter @dallaslawrence.

Social networks have truly come of age in the last year. No longer viewed as lonely outposts for youthful college slackers, the reach of these platforms has grown exponentially. Today, more than two-thirds of the world's Internet users visit the social networking sites that reel in billions of eyeballs every 24 hours.

Yet, despite the staggering growth of social networking, determining how to monetize social media platforms remains a tough code to crack for even the savviest of companies. As such, identifying new revenue models will be instrumental in kicking off the next cycle of the social networking phenomenon in 2010.

If Anyone Can Do It, Facebook Can

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Facebook, social networking's acknowledged leader, has surpassed every platform on the market today, corralling more than 350 million unique users globally. If any social network is poised to design a winning formula for successful revenue streams in 2010, it's Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has set an aggressive agenda for the company, publically stating that he expects social networks to become as essential as web browsers and operating systems, and he has set the lofty yet entirely realistic goal of 1 billion users worldwide.

In the less than five years since it expanded beyond scholastic audiences, Facebook has not only grabbed the lion's share of users, it has engaged them like no other platform on the Internet. The average Facebook user visits the site at least once a day and spends an astounding 55 minutes engaging friends and family - statistics that another Zucker (Jeff) would probably kill for over at NBC.

While translating such popularity into dollars and cents isn't easy - especially in an industry whose users have grown accustomed to getting something for nothing - Facebook could potentially provide a monetization template that would revolutionize social networking as we know it.

The Next Level of Advertising Revenue

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Advertising has traditionally provided the simplest means of generating revenue. PricewaterhouseCoopers reported in October that Internet advertising revenues totaled $10.9 billion for the first half of 2009. It's been estimated that Facebook alone took in $435 million of that total. But for a site with nearly half a billion users, a quarter of which spend more time within the network than watching television, these numbers represent just the beginning potential.

First, Facebook needs to admit to itself that it is in the business of selling ads. By better managing its advertising network, intelligently expanding its marketing options, and developing workable social ads that leverage the branding power of friends and connections, Facebook can begin to capture its rightful share of online ad revenues. The final piece is to increase awareness and understanding of Facebook ads among corporate decision makers.

For example, every executive in America today understands the value of purchasing Google ads - and that didn't happen by accident. Google understood that what caused it to dominate online search wasn't going to ultimately position the company as a global corporate powerhouse valued at nearly $200 billion. Google's aggressive marketing, communications, and lobbying shops have worked to ensure every ad buyer, political campaign, marketing executive, and public relations flack knows the value of the service and has direct and easy access to account executives who explain the much worshiped ROI Google ads provide.

Today, Facebook stands on the precipice Google inhabited just before it became a top money-maker. By taking a page from the Google playbook, and aggressively marketing and explaining its power to influence buying decisions, Facebook ads could become as essential to 21st Century marketing as the yellow pages were in the 20th Century.

E-Commerce Stop Sending Customers Away

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The launch of Facebook as a true e-commerce site holds immense potential as a business solution and could forever change the way we shop. Online purchases through the first three quarters of 2009 totaled $98.3 billion according to the Department of Commerce. For the majority of companies selling products online who are also engaged on Facebook, opening Facebook fully to direct e-commerce transactions will dramatically change how businesses advertise and how consumers buy goods online.

Consumers and companies would flock to a Facebook storefront for one simple reason: We do everything else there. Imagine an integrated, one-click solution whereby your friends see your recent purchases (because you were incentivized by the brand to share your information) in their feed and are able to simply point, click, and purchase the same item.

With a few adjustments, companies can make timely offers of birthday gifts for friends, travel arrangements for event items, or the latest music from favorite artists - and make the sale without forcing the user to leave Facebook or put in new login information.

Rather than driving their 350 million users away from the platform to close the deal with retailers and purchase the item on an external platform, Facebook could benefit financially by charging companies a percentage of sales, a fixed rate to have a storefront, or from increased advertising opportunities.

Premium Subscription Options

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Finally, whether users like it or not, Facebook will do itself a long term disservice if it does not consider premium subscription options. Users (whether they are corporations or teenagers) are amenable to paying for even the simplest features and functionality, as evidenced by the success of Facebook gifts.

Nothing good in life is free. It's a stark, mature reality that Facebook (and its users) need to face in 2010. By leveraging economies of scale, Facebook can churn a sizable profit without alienating users. Would you pay one dollar a month to share higher-resolution photos or upload higher-quality or longer videos? Last month, 2.5 billion photos were uploaded to Facebook. Even if only a quarter of the site's active users opted for premium options, this one change would generate more than $1 billion in annual revenues.

Improving advertising, developing an e-commerce platform, and adding subscription services will not only generate the revenue necessary to make the transition from highly adopted to highly profitable, it will open revenue streams as Google did before for the next generation of digital developments.

More business resources from Mashable:

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- Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right
- 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Avoid Social Media Panic
- HOW TO: Take Advantage of Social Media in Your E-mail Marketing
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- 18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, peterspiro

Tags: advertising, business, e-commerce, facebook, MARKETING, monetization, monetizing, money, social media, social networks

I cant wait to get my hands on the IPad. Its going to be a HUGE hit.

You can book it right now that it will be the product that kids of this generation grow up with and look back on with affection just like we did with the first video games. Video games changed how we grew up. The IPad will change how kids grow up.

Apple was brilliant in how they cultivated apps for the IPhone and Touch. With so many apps for kids, any parent with young kids and either of these 2 devices will tell you that their kids use and love them. In fact, it was this very reason that I helped create Puzzle Palace for the IPhone. It allows my kids to take the pictures they take and turn them into puzzles. My 3 year old loves it.

The IPad will take this to the next level. I recognize that its very expensive for most families right now. Hopefully that will change over time. If it does, you can bet every home with kids will have an IPad. And the first person to create the kidproof covering will make money as well (Hint to entrepreneurs) On the flipside, the minute these devices hit critical mass in families, the DVD market for kids, who watch the same movie over and over will end as we know it. Download Scooby Do one time and the need to hassle with all those DVDs for the kids at home or on trips becomes a distant memory. A relic of an older generation.

Thats big.

Whats also big is the exclusion of flash. The reason is obvious. No flash. Far less streaming over 3G. Less streaming over 3G means less bandwidth consumed. Less bandwidth consumed means ATT can offer a GREAT price on the 3G data service. I personally have never had problems with the ATT Network. The limits on 3G streaming probably means I wont going forward either. Thats a good thing.

Its big that there is no USB port. As a content producer thats not a good thing. It means that Apple wants to force us through ITunes to sell content. It will be the path of least resistance for consumers to add content to the IPad and a HUGE source of revenue for Apple. Im sure there will be work around alternatives, but they wont be able to match the simplicity of the ITunes Store.

Outside the Apple Universe, the company that should be licking its chops is Dish Network. Their SlingBox product just became a grand slam. I absolutely LOVE the sling box app I run on my IPod Touch to watch NBA League Pass games, HDNet in a hotel room and other shows that I record on my DVR. I cant wait to put it on the IPad and its big screen.

And finally, if i was just out of school and fluent in all things Wi Fi , networking and wireless, I would immediately go door to door offering to fine tune your home's wireless network. With new HDTVs coming out with Wi FI, the IPad, SlingBox, Netflix Streaming and other applications consuming tons of bandwidth in the home, it is an ABSOLUTE certainty that 99pct of home networks can be improved and perform significantly better. Be that kid in your neighborhood that comes in and fine tunes everyone's wi fi in their home for 50 or 100 bucks (or more if you live in a fancy part of town) and you will make some good money.

ShareThis

With that in mind, I decided to filter the barrage of iPad coverage through a publishing lens. What follows are intriguing ideas culled from all sorts of sources. Most revolve around content applications the iPad may provide.

There's no way I'll catch all the good stuff -- there's just too much out there -- so please use the comments area to post links and commentary that grab your attention, publishing-related and otherwise.

Ebook pricing could get interesting

The iPad's release portends a price-point battle between Apple and Amazon. That's ebook pricing, not hardware.

The Wall Street Journal says Apple is pushing book publishers to set two ebook price points, $12.99 and $14.99, with Apple taking its customary 30 percent cut from any sales. They key word in all this is "set." The big kahuna of ebooks, Amazon, controls its pricing. Most bestsellers are parked at $9.99, which is below what Amazon pays a publisher for a title. Amazon is subsidizing its low price point.

But that's the present. The future is a different matter. The thought is that Amazon is taking a short-term loss on ebooks so it can solidify its position as the dominant channel. Once it owns the ebook market, Amazon can ditch the subsidy and force publishers to renegotiate pricing.

That's the fear, and Apple appears to be playing to it by giving publishers an option: get a measure of pricing control through Apple, or make more with Amazon but pray they don't rewrite the rules later. (Apple could always rewrite rules, too ...)

What's really interesting about this -- and kind of bizarre -- is that the binary Apple-or-Amazon thinking obscures an important point: mobile devices already offer publishers plenty of pricing options.

What about e-reader applications?

Steve Jobs famously quipped a couple of years ago that "people don't read anymore." Well, I guess Apple changed its stance on that one. The new iBooks app -- and accompanying store -- is a big ol' cannonball in the ebook pool.

Early discussion on a back-channel publishing list I follow has focused on how Apple will treat its new ebook competitors. Will established applications, like Stanza and the Kindle app, be removed? Kirk Biglione, co-founder of Medialoper, thinks competitors will remain in Apple's universe. Just don't count on sharing titles across apps:

Look for books to be added as a new media type in the device media library. The other reading apps may be able to co-exist as long as they don't access books stored in that library. So, for example, you probably won't be able to use Stanza to read iBooks. [Note: Kirk gave me permission to post his comments.]

One thing to consider here: Past inquiries from the Federal Communications Commission may soften Apple's competitive instincts. At least for a while.

Of course, FCC heat doesn't preclude Apple from a little friendly rivalry. Digital Trends picked up on the backhanded compliment Jobs gave Amazon during the iPad presentation:

... [Jobs] basically told the online retailer that we'll take it from here.

The reading/viewing experience

Apple has already shown what it's capable of on the music and video front, so I'm curious to see how it handles the book experience. Early word is positive from folks who've had a chance to demo the iPad. Here's Gizmodo's take:

It's an optical illusion, but just seeing the depth of pages makes the iBook app feel more like a book than a Kindle ever did for me. The text is sharp, and while the screen is bright, it doesn't seem to strains the eyesbut time will tell on that.

The iPad is backwards compatible with existing iPhone applications. That seems useful on first blush, but Joshua Topolsky of Engadget called out a big issue with "old" apps:

It's kind of silly looking. A lone app in the center of a black screen.

More to come

I'll be adding to this post in the coming days as more analysis bubbles up. Again, please use the comments to point out interesting or informative links you come across as well.

As anticipated, the operating system is best thought of as an evolution of iPhone 3.0. That means that apps are running the show, with the same tray at the bottom and the same accelerometer capabilities.

To access the screen, you slide to unlock, just like on your phone. The display is practically identical (though biggie-sized, obviously), with a Home button situated at the bottom. You call up apps the same way you do on your phone, and they automatically go to full screen. You can also swipe through pictures and pages, again just like on the iPhone.

But how does it feel in the hand? Well, it's an inch thin and weighs just 1.5 pounds, so it's definitely easily portable. And since it's intended to be a portable device, it's got a pretty crazy proposed battery life: ten hours of video playback, and one month of standby charge.

A primary concern has been how the keyboard will work. Our money was a split-screen keyboard, but it turns out they've opted instead for to copy the iPhone again here, with a keyboard taking up the bottom half of the display when called up. It's not meant for your thumbs, apparentlyyou're expected to type on it as you would a physical keyboard.

For web surfing, the page renders just like a browser, with navigation buttons on top. For email, you can bring a pull-down menu of the inbox.

So basically, it looks like the user experience is going to be just like a big ol' iPhone, for better or for worse. I'm especially curious to see how intuitive the keyboard is. But otherwise, all the multitouch features and app arrangements should feel like old hat.

It won't.

I was talking not long ago with editorial folks at an unnamed media company that rhymes with The New York Times. There was some possibility of my blogging over there. They were intrigued, but couldn't fit it into their grand plan, at least not right away. The problem was resources were already allocated and such an endeavor takes months to mount and costs tens of thousands of dollars.

No it doesn't, and that's the problem with Big Media.

When I was at PBS we did occasional redesigns and I never knew what they cost because for most of my 11 years there I was just a paid contributor. But toward the end of my tenure I became a producer which means I was finally exposed to budgets and was, to some extent, even responsible for paying some of them. And I was shocked to learn that my final design for a Moveable Type blog over there did, indeed, cost tens of thousands of dollars many tens of thousands of dollars.

PBS isn't a company that rhymes with The New York Times but it still qualifies as Big Media, so the pricing was more or less confirmed.

Now look at the screen you are reading right now, my Wordpress blog at cringely.com. It cost me NOTHING to design. I did it myself in a single night with the help of an experienced and generous friend, Benjamin Higginbotham of Spacevidcast.com. This blog is hosted by Media Temple in Los Angeles and costs me $50 per month, which is a lot compared to most blogs, but then I'm getting more than a million page-views per month. One more Christmas card or IBM column and I might bump up to $100 per month just to get some more resources, but I think I've made my point: a good Internet media product doesn't have to cost a lot of money. This is my living, remember, that's putting three kids through school. What are my gross margins 10,000 percent?

While those are my gross margins they aren't the gross margins at PBS or at a company that rhymes with The New York Times. Those outfits have overhead I don't. They have legacy relationships and obligations I can't even imagine. They can't just go from there to here in an instant even if they wanted to.

Which brings us back to the iSomething to be introduced tomorrow. No matter how great it is, it can't support the legacy infrastructure of Big Media, which includes mid-town office buildings and business lunches (hence my picture of New York's 21 Club, if you hadn't already figured that out).

Big Media wants revenue approaching what they could charge if a web site was a printed magazine. Remember the original lure of the Internet for publishers was the idea that there would be more profit without the expenses of printing and distribution. But it didn't work out that way because Internet users won't generally pay for content.

But Apple has the mojo. Steve Jobs has been firm from the start that content should be paid for and his generally is, except of course for my podcast on iTunes. Big Media likes the way Steve thinks. And so they can with one breath condemn him for killing the music album, yet in a second breath they can see him as the savior of magazines, newspapers, and good-but-thinly-watched TV series.

And Apple CAN be that savior, but only after a rationalization and severe downsizing of Big Media overhead, which I am not at all sure Big Media is really ready to do.

Based on the rumors I've heard so far I'm guessing the new Apple product will be like the Apple TV a hobby, a critical success but a business failure, though one with enough potential that Apple will give it a few years to succeed. It's in giving those few years where Apple really can save Big Media, which will undoubtedly by then be not so big.

At the end of a failed 15-year experiment in giving away its product, the press (newspapers and magazines) has begun to renounce free. It's slow in starting, because of the inertia of this decade and a half, but the New York Times announced recently that it would begin charging for its Website, and others are sure to follow.... But payment for Websites alone won't be enough to change newspapers' and magazines' bottom lines from red to black. Apple's tablet, however, will.

It's time for free to end. Newspapers and magazines made the mistake, in the early days of the Web, of giving away their content for free, in exchange for revenue from Web advertising.

In the past few years, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, and newspapers and magazines are cutting back and folding all across the U.S.... Yet we need the press: the fourth estate is a necessary check for our government and business. As long as free thrives, the press can't do its job correctly. Free may be good for freeloaders, but it's bad for society. Those who want things to be free forget that there are still people doing the work they get for nothing, and those people need to be paid. As the old saw goes, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

What news agencies can't do is the added-value reporting, the analysis, opinion and in-depth reporting that we want to read to better understand, and that we need for society to thrive. It may be a coincidence, but in recent years, investigative journalism was severely lacking at a time when it was needed the most. Only when people pay for news can we have quality reporting.

To those who protest that "no one will pay for a newspaper on the Web", consider some very successful experiments in paid online content. The Wall Street Journal charges around $100 a year for full access to its Website, and plenty of businesspeople pay for this. This is because the Journal provides the kind of news that is not plentiful; people pay for the quality of the business news and analysis that they can't find elsewhere, as well as its timeliness.

I'm betting that Apple will get it right, as far as features, interface and usability are concerned. It will also be an excellent tool for reading the news. Newspapers and magazines will be able to package their content in multimedia bundles (either as apps or something similar to the iTunes LP) that will be designed for reading on a portable screen; this won't simply be web pages viewed on a smaller screen.

The key to hardware being successful is the software that supports it. One of the main advantages to Apple's tablet, as far as the press is concerned, is the iTunes Store. Since Apple already has this platform to sell and deliver that content, even on a subscription basis, readers will be able to easily buy their favorite newspapers and magazines and get them delivered instantly. They'll be cheaper than the print versions, and they'll be a lot greener too. And the iTunes Store will be able to provide a better selection than readers can find by going to individual Websites. Whether by subscription or by single issue, it'll be extremely simple to buy newspapers and magazines to read on the Apple tablet.

What would a world be like without the idea of heaven? How would people behave? What would they live for?

Of course, it is not as if the world that we live in, where the notion of an afterlife or some form of continuing existence is prevalent, is all that great. No, there are lots of wars and disagreements in contemporary life. But perhaps we are able to escape a sense of desperation in the belief that modern medicine, prudent behavior, and the possibility of an afterlife will allow us to continue our existence for a while at least, and perhaps permanently.

The ancient, pre-literate Greeks of Homer's day could not so easily apply the balm of eternal life to their troubled psyches. They had no notion of a heaven of the type that Christians believe in, no sense of reincarnation such as the Hindus expect, no Muslim vision of paradise, no anticipation of a reunion with relatives and friends who had predeceased them. Instead, death led to a trip to Hades, the underworld, where existence was a pale and not very attractive shadow of earthly life, not something to be eagerly awaited. So if we want to know how men live when the notion of heaven doesn't exist, we might well look to these people.

Remember too, that the life of the pre-literate Greeks (the Greek alphabet is thought to have come into existence somewhere around 800 B.C.) was painfully short. Even at the turn of the last century, around 1900, the average American lived only about 50 years. The brevity of life was certainly known to the ancient Greeks.

Greek literature and philosophy point to two driving concepts that motivated men. (And I speak of men, because women were extraordinarily disadvantaged in that period, seen as having almost no function or status other than for sex, companionship, rearing children, and domestic handicrafts). Honor and glory were what men sought. Honor tended to come in the form of goods, precious metal, slaves, concubines, and the like; in other words, mostly material things or things that could be counted or displayed or used. Sort of like today, perhaps you are saying to yourself. In our world, honor is conferred by status and very similar material thingsthe size of your house, the amount of money in your bank account, a trophy spouse, the car or cars you drive, a gorgeous vacation home, etc.

Glory (the Greek word kleos) is another matter. What might glory have consisted of in a world without heaven? It took the form of a reputation or fame that continued beyond death. And, since there was no written word, you and your accomplishments had to be sufficiently great to generate discussion, song, and story once you were gone. This was usually achieved by being a great hero or warrior. In war, then, one could hope to grasp both of these things: the honor that came with sacking cities and accumulating wealth, slaves, and sexual partners; and the glory of having the fearlessness, strength, and tenacity to carry out that accumulation via battle; sufficiently so that people would (sometimes literally) sing your praises after you were dead.

As I mentioned, today's world doesn't strike me as much different from yesterday's on the point of achieving honor, although we are a little more discreet about our sexual conquests and have largely risen above keeping slaves. On the subject of glory, however, we seem to do everything we can to avoid death, which in the ancient Greek world was the only path to glory; a path that required both risking one's own death on the battle field and inflicting it on others in the same place. So, whether you believe in heaven or not, it would seem that the idea of heaven has had some civilizing effect. There are, after all, more ways of getting to heaven in our cosmology than killing people, despite what some terrorist/martyrs might tell us.

To me, even apart from the question of a civilizing effect of a particular religious concept, is the human need to conquer death as revealed in the heritage that the pre-literate Greeks have bequeathed us and, of course, in our own religious behavior. Both the ancient Greeks and most of us seem to hope that when we breathe our last, we are not finished forever. It is not a new idea, even if our solutions to the dilemma of mortality are (in part) different from those of our ancestors.

Unless, of course, you are such a brave soul that you have dispensed with the idea that you will live on in any form much beyond the time of your earthly demise: not in words or writings, not in great buildings that bear your name, not in photos or videos, not in businesses that survive you, not in the students you have taught, not in your artistic creations or inventions, not in making the world a better place for those that succeed you; not in the biological output of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who continue your genetic line.

Clearly, it is pretty hard to give up the idea of glory, some sort of posteritythe hope for an afterlifeisn't it?

(Footnote: this essay was prompted by rereading The Iliad and The Odyssey for the first time in many years, and by listening to The Iliad of Homer by Professor Elizabeth Vandiver of the University of Maryland. This course and many others are offered by The Teaching Company. Professor Vandiver is a wonderful lecturer and I have relied heavily on her discussion of honor and glory in the pre-literate Greek world in this essay. I can strongly recommend courses sold by The Teaching Company. I should say, however, that I am in no way affiliated with that organization or benefit from any purchases from them that you might make; I'm simply a satisfied customer).

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

The world was shown a lot of new electronic products this year at CES.

This is a list of the top 5 products that are actually usable or will be in the near future when they are released.

These are what we wish we could pick up at the store today.

Enjoy the videos as well.

5. Sprint Overdrive

This is MiFi on steroids with 3G and 4G coverage. This beast is ready today. However, it is limited to certain cities and metro areas in the states. See if you're on the list and if you are, drop that cable company or DSL provider like they're hot.

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

4. MSI Android slate

This was the closest I found to a slate that was responsive and accurate even for a dude with fat fingers. Maybe the others aren't up to production mode yet but they lacked the same experience, until the MSI would freeze.

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

3. Vizio wifi TV's

This iteration of 3D is a huge fail. Like bad movies this should have seen limited release or straight to DVD, if you know what I mean. What is awesome are the Vizio wifi TV's that will be hitting the shelves. They've embraced almost every type of TV widget that can be made and I would expect to see some brilliant hacks coming our way.

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

2. Asus T101MT

There isn't a whole lot to say that I haven't said already. This is going to be a great, usable device that I wish was running Mac OS. I used a Toshiba tablet PC back in 2006 for my job and loved it. This size would be incredibly useful and mobile.

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

1. Intel Infoscape

Only exists for trade show purposes but will soon be finding its way into other displays. Look out hotels, shopping malls and people with money to burn.

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Wins and Fails While Covering CES 2010 (jkontherun.com)
• Dell chalks up tablet PC (reghardware.co.uk)
• Video: Highlights, Lowlights From CES 2010 (wired.com)
• Ballmer shows HP slate/tablet PC in CES snooze-athon (guardian.co.uk)

Our CES 2010 Top Picks is a post from: TechStartups.com

If you're just starting out or a WordPress hack from way back, the new book from Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr titled Digging Into WordPress could be a good addition to your shelf.

Coyier and Starr have been plugging away on WordPress installs for a few years and now sharing their intimate knowledge of the blogging platform.

The book comes in two versions spiral bound and PDF. The spiral version looks beautiful and the PDF, if anything like the sample, should please with its colors and page layout.

The real question about this book is the $67 price tag for the spiral bound version. Is it worth it?

Yes, slices of tree with pretty ink aesthetically pleasing. Yes, it will lay completely flat on a surface next to a computer, unlike traditionally bound computer books. No, it won't every question you have about WordPress. I'm not sure anyone or any book could do that.

If I were in the market for a WordPress book I would take a different approach to justify spending the money on this book consulting. Not that I would buy it and become an instant WordPress consultant. Nor should you, unless you're already a Social Media Expert and have it all figured out.

I mean consulting in the sense that you are getting the best that Coyier and Starr have to offer because their names are on the line with this publication. If the content is not good or they don't add value to solve your WordPress conundrums their names will be mud.

This book should be viewed as an insanely cheap consulting session with two guys that really know their stuff and can prove it with their client work. At $67, you're already halving the rate for most WordPress gurus worth the money and getting two for the price of one 24 hours a day.

They're also offering an affiliate program for those interested in helping sell some copies and to put some extra bucks under that mattress. Check it out if you're into that whole affiliate thing.

I have no material connection with the publishers of this book or am a part of their affiliate program. All links are to standard pages. I am basing my opinion on a sample chapter (PDF) that is available from their sales page.

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Ready to Dig WordPress? is a post from: TechStartups.com

The week before Thanksgiving, I attended an unusual symposium sponsored by the University of Denver Law Review entitled Cyber Civil Rights: New Challenges for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in our Networked Age. The symposium covered standard Cyberlaw topics, but the raison d'tre was University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron's two recent articles on online harassment of women: "Law's Expressive Value in Combating Cyber Gender Harassment" (Michigan Law Review) and "Cyber Civil Rights" (Boston University Law Review). It is unusual for a law school to celebrate another school's professor and her research, especially when the professor is fairly junior. Nevertheless, Danielle's participation brought together academics from both the Cyberlaw and civil rights communities, which provided a rare and interesting mix of folks..

First Panel

Danielle Citron started off by recapping her two papers. Online participation, such as blogging, is essential to professional standing, and employers are reviewing online profiles of prospective employees as part of their hiring considerations. However, women are being targeted for abuse online. These attacks are harming women by changing their online and offline activities, reducing their job opportunities, and causing women to change their gender representations online. Further, folks are trivializing these problems. Women are underreporting the attacks, and law enforcement only intervenes when there are offline harms. New laws can serve an expressive function to communicate that online attacks against women are socially unacceptable. The new laws can validate women's feelings that they have been harmed and encourage law enforcement to pursue more cases.

Commenting on the papers, Robert Kaczorowski of Fordham Law (and Danielle's stepdad) made an extended analogy between the Ku Klux Klan and cybermobs.

Wendy Seltzer asked if we could deemphasize the effect of words rather than prohibit them. Danielle responded that we don't know how seriously to take any particular threat.

An audience member asked if is there a difference between mobs and individual actors who are just taking advantage of being anonymous. Danielle answered that groups can become more extreme online. I think this point deserves more exploration: a series of uncoordinated individual decisions to pile on to an attack can look like a coordinated attack to the victim. This is part of why I thought the KKK references were puzzlingKKK activities are clearly coordinated, while online attacks against women can succeed without any coordination or ongoing connection between the attackers.

Paul Ohm argued that that legal solutions are better for cyber civil rights problems than technological solutions. Paul discussed what he labeled Felten's Third Law. (He doesn't know of two earlier laws named for Ed Felten; he just assumes they exist given Ed's impressive and influential oeuvre). As articulated by Paul, Felten's Third Law is that in Cyberlaw conflicts, lawyers love technical solutions and technologists love legal solutions. In other words, we love the solution we don't know because we assume it has to be better than the one we do. As both a law professor and technologist, Paul picks law over technology for these problems.

Paul categorically rejects any technical solution that would create a fully identified Internet. For example, we should not mandate server log retention because we know the logs will be co-opted to regulate other forms of unwanted content, not just online harassment.

Wendy Seltzer discussed the unintended consequences of legal intervention. For example, mandatory Internet filtering in school libraries hasn't stopped kids from bypassing the filters, but it has facilitated a marketplace for improving filtering technologies that has benefited repressive regimes. Another example: anti-circumvention technology fails to restrict copying but has reduced innovation around DRMed content. Wendy also noted how norms can help curb abuses. For example, while there are online cesspools, she praised Wikipedia's evolving guidelines for living people's biographies.

In response, Danielle admitted that her solutions need to be more surgical. She said she might consider moving from a notice-and-takedown model to a notice-and-preserve model for intermediaries.

Second Panel

This panel was composed of three women academics from the civil rights community, so it was a noticeable shift from the typical Cyberlaw academic discussion.

Mary Anne Franks is a University of Chicago Bigelow Fellow and soon-to-be full-time law professor. She expresses our collective disappointment that cyberspace isn't a utopia that allows people to escape offline discrimination and harassment. She laments that women can lose control of their identities online, such as when someone creates a fake online profile in their names.

She then addressed how cyberspace is unique/special/different with respect to gender harassment. Many commentators try to duck cyberspace exceptionalism, so it was refreshing to see her tackle the issue squarely. Existing offline discrimination/harassment laws assume interactions between repeat players at work and school; online harassment can be divorced totally from any existing social networks. However, because the online activities still harm targeted individuals at work and school, we should treat the harms the same. Offline, there are switching costs to changing jobs or school; online, search engines' consolidation of results for search on a person's name creates a different type of switching cost. In terms of supervisory power, she thinks web operators have analogous control to employers or school administrators. Thus, when web operators receive notice of online harassment, they should have a duty to do something about it. Offline, employers can develop a variety of responses and policies to combat workplace harassment. Web operators should have similar latitude; for example, they can delete offending posts or suspend/ban accounts.

Helen Norton, a University of Colorado law professor, did not share Danielle's optimism (expressed in her first article) that existing discrimination laws can curb online harassment. Instead, Helen thinks a new civil rights statute is needed, but she might limit its remedies to exclude money damages. Helen is pessimistic that there will be regulation any time soon, noting that it can take years to enact civil rights legislation. Helen would also like to see more precise definitions of the exact harms that women are experiencing only online.

Nancy Ehrenreich, a Denver University law professor, began her talk by saying that we should not overstate the Internet's benefits. She then clarified that we should not assume that disadvantaged folks can overcome barriers online. For example, we impose cultural categories on people in every interaction, so even if people try to mask their identity online, they can't really escape. She wondered why we aren't talking about an anti-discrimination law for the web. Her concern is that discrimination denies individuals access to the Internet.

In Q&A, Paul Ohm observed that civil rights scholars often invoke free speech as the countervailing concern to their desired regulations, but Cyberlaw scholars are often more interested in other generative effects of the Internet, such as new business models, new labor models and new modes of production.

Panel 3

James Grimmelmann (see his slides) started with the Skanks in NYC case. In that case, the defendant criticized someone else in her social network on a blog, calling the plaintiff (among other unflattering things) a skank. The plaintiff sued to obtain the blogger's identity. After a successful unmasking, the plaintiff dropped the lawsuit, having successfully publicly shamed the blogger.

James hypothesized that this unmasking and shaming was an appropriate remedythe blogger got shamed (like an eye for an eye), and unmasking is a better outcome than other legal remedies like damage suits. James then posited a thought exercise that provided plaintiffs with an expedited unmasking procedure if they drop any damages claim. This would have a number of benefits. Unmasking curbs online harassment is especially effective at busting online mobs. Also, an unmasking remedy avoids messy debates over the First Amendment's scope, and it may be more desirable than trying to hold online providers liable.

Having advanced his own strawman, James then cut it down. In some cases, defamation remedies may be more desirable, and plaintiffs may not know that until they learn the putative wrongdoer's identity. In other cases, plaintiffs who just want unmasking would appreciate a lower legal hurdle. Also, we provide legal protection for anonymity for good reasons.

James' lessons from the thought exercise: we should consider ways to decouple an unmasking remedy from litigation. At the same time, we need to protect defendants from pretextual unmasking; in some cases, retaliation is a big concern, and we should incorporate this concern into the unmasking decision.

From Chris Wolf's talk (see his full remarks), the most interesting thing I learned is that 18 states have laws banning wearing masks in public, enacted to suppress KKK activities. This was the second speaker's KKK reference of the day, and it made me wonder if we were experiencing some variation of Godwin's Law.

Panel 4

Viva Moffat observed that secondary liability issues generate the most heat in online harassment discussions. She expressed concern that imposing legal duties on third parties may not help law's norm-shaping effect, and it's not appropriate to impose liability just because the provider has deeper pockets or the direct actor can't be found. She also suggested that imposing liability on third parties creates a greater risk of collateral damage than direct liability. [Note: I would like to know more about this last assertion. I suspect we cannot make a utilitarian calculation a priori]. As a result, she favors focusing more efforts on sharpening direct liability.

Ed Felten talked about identifying and anonymizing online activity. He explained the usual sequence of events in chasing bad online content:

log file => IP address => identity => justice

But the IP address => identity step breaks down when users use an anonymizing proxy or the user's network uses network address translation (used by home wireless routers or in coffee shops) and all connected devices' requests share a single IP address. He said that a majority of Internet connections use NAT.

Because IP address tracebacks can dead-end at the intermediary, an IP address can reveal too little information. However, even when users aren't investigatory targets, IP addresses can reveal too much information, such as geolocation. This paradoxIP addresses simultaneously reveal both too much and too little informationreflects that the IP address system was built for routing, not identification. So could we design a better authenticating technology?

He then conducted a semi-realistic thought experiment of a new technological tag that could be used instead of IP addresses. This tag could have the following attributes:

* can be placed by any intermediary
* conveys no information about the sender unless unwrapped by the intermediary (presumably for good legal cause)
* unwrapping the tag yields the best identity information the intermediary has
* the tag's use is voluntary as a technical matter
* the tag is removable as a technical matter

I then batted clean-up. A summary of my remarks:

Today's conversation has revisited long-standing Cyberlaw issues, such as:

* anonymity v. accountability, and who should be responsible for online content and actions
* cyberspace as a physical place. See, e.g., Noah v. AOL (an online discrimination case), National Federation of the Blind v. Target (also an online discrimination case) and Estavillo v. Sony
* cyberspace exceptionalism and cyberspace utopianism (on the latter point, see my article on search engine utopianism)
* when is the optimal time to regulate rapidly evolving technology? Early, when the technology is still in its infancy, or later, when market forces and new technological evolutions may have cured the early problems?

Danielle's articles convinced me that women are experiencing serious harms online that menincluding mecould easily trivialize. Danielle's articles also convinced me that online harassment has strong parallels to the 1970s legal evolution of workplace harassment doctrines, where a big part of the battle was to get people to take the harms seriously.

While I find a lot of descriptive value in Danielle's work, the normative implications are not as clear. As usual with attempts to regulate rapidly evolving technology, there are many important but overwhelmingly hard definitional challenges, such as who is an intermediary, what are online mobs and what constitutes online harassment. For example, I do not think the Skanks in NYC incident is an online harassment case or an attack, but James Grimmelmann's talk assumed those characterizations.

While we can debate what should be the right level of regulatory intervention, we should not overlook that Congress already enacted a law squarely governing intermediary liability for online harassment: 47 USC 230. The angst that prompted this conferencebad behavior onlineis the logical consequences of 230's broad immunity. The statute enables websites to adopt policies that they will not police user content or retain server logs of user activity. These choices aren't a surprise or a per se abuse of the immunity; instead, they are the unavoidable implications of Congress' action.

We might question Congress' wisdom in adopting 230, but we should not diminish its potential importance to the Internet as we know it. [In Q&A, Chris Wolf asked about the comparative experience in countries that don't have such broad immunity. In those countries, we know that websites take down user content much more freely, and I believe that the most interesting UGC innovations are all taking place here in the US, not countries with more restrictive UGC liability.] I can, at most, only prove correlation and not causation, but I believe 230 is one of the main causal reasons why the Internet has succeeded so well.

When I speak around the country about 230, I often encounter folks who generally accept 230's immunity scope but want just one new exception, i.e., their pet topic. If everyone got their just one exception, the law would be eviscerated. (I said it would be Swiss-cheesed to death; maybe I should have said it would be overcome by a thousand duck bites). I'm not rejecting new exceptions categorically (they should be each considered on their own merits), but in aggregate 230's immunization benefits are actually quite precarious. I believe 230 works precisely because of its strength and simplicity, so adding more exceptions could significantly reduce its efficacy.

I concluded my remarks by observing that online harassment is a subspecies of bullying and incivil behavior in our society. While we can and should work to curb online harassment, I am more interested in addressing bullying and incivility in all its forms, wherever it takes place.

In this regard, I have been impressed by how my son's school is proactively addressing bullying. See more about this effort, called Project Cornerstone. The school is teaching kids not to bully or to tolerate being bullied, and the project gives bullied kids tools to go on the offensive against bullies. There's no guarantee that anti-bullying programs will work in the short or long run, but I remain hopeful that online harassment today partially reflects that many current Internet users never got any anti-bullying education. Perhaps, then, online harassment issues will naturally abate (without any regulatory intervention) as new generation of Internet users, better educated about bullying, come onto the Internet.

Following my remarks, we had more Q&A.

Paul Ohm Q: Some cyber folks argue against secondary liability because they believe that a victim can pursue a direct action, but Ed's talk suggests that user anonymity will continue to be possible.

Mary Anne Franks: civil rights isn't about individual claims because victims have to bear too high a burden to pursue claims. Instead, civil rights are about changing large-scale social norms. The goal is to achieve anti-discrimination by any means necessary. Thus, civil rights scholars have already discussed and concluded that it's appropriate to impose liability on intermediaries like employers and schools.

Danielle: intermediaries are the lowest cost avoiders.

James Grimmelmann: no, the harassers are the lowest cost avoiders. Civil rights folks would get more support from the Cyberlaw crowd if they focused their regulatory desires towards intermediaries who are in active concert with the bad actors.

Danielle's Wrap-Up

We all agree that:

* education can make a big difference
* online communities need to self-police
* there are numerous limits to using the law as a solution, including that lawsuits don't make sense and 230's immunity.

We don't agree on what to do next. There are First Amendment limits, and technology doesn't offer any panaceas.

FRANK SINATRA

May 4, 1976

Mr. Mike Royko
"Chicago Daily News"
401 No. Wabash Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60611

Let me start this note by saying, I don't know you and you don't know me. I believe if you knew me:

First, you would find immediately that I do not have an army of flunkies.

Secondly, neither myself, nor my secretary, nor my security man put in the request for police protection. It is something that's far from necessary.

It's quite obvious that your source of information stinks, but that never surprises me about people who write in newspapers for a living. They rarely get their facts straight. If the police decided that they wanted to be generous to me, I appreciate it. If you have any beefs with the Chicago Police Force, why not take it out on them instead of me, or is that too big a job for you?

And thirdly, who the hell gives you the right to decide how disliked I am if you know nothing about me. The only honest thing I read in your piece is the fact that you admitted you are disliked, and by the way you write I can understand it. Quite frankly, I don't understand why people don't spit in your eye three or four times a day.

Regarding my "tough reputation" you and no one else can prove that allegation. You and millions of other gullible Americans read that kind of crap written by the same female gossip columnists that you are so gallantly trying to protect; the garbage dealers I call hookers, and there's no doubt that is exactly what they are, which makes you a pimp, because you are using people to make money just as they are.

Lastly, certainly not the least, if you are a gambling man:

a) You prove, without a doubt, that I have ever punched an elderly drunk or elderly anybody, you can pick up $100,000.

b) I will allow you to pull my "hairpiece"; if it moves, I will give you another $100,000; if it does not, I punch you in the mouth. How about it?

(Signed, 'Sinatra')

cc: The Honorable Richard J. Daley
Supt. James Rochford

Mr. Marshall Field, Publisher
Mr. Charles D. Fegert, Vice Pres.

FS:d

This material has been copyrighted may not be reproduced unless used in its entirety and sets forth the following copyright notice:

(c) Frank Sinatra 1976

Linking words together online is an hobby. Creating context from those words is an art. Making them work in harmony is a gift. The team at Thomson Reuters have done this for some time with their Calais project and the first consumer product from it OpenCalais.

OpenCalais is a monster database filled with linked data that can be accessed by anyone via a special API. Currently it works on an individual application level and as plugins with other popular CMS and blogging platforms. In tandem they create a more powerful experience for the publishers of new content by allowing the integration of linked data for linking, tagging and finding optional third-party resources for inspiration.

Word on the street and from a trusted source is that the Calais team has something new on the horizon their own CMS. A release of a CMS that has semantic technologies built right into is a powerful addition to the marketplace. Many blogging platforms and CMS products available today have stagnated under the weight of their own popularity.

It is hard to innovate when you are leading the pack or trying to figure out how to make money from your product that is free. Time and resources become devoted to maintaining the status quo, patching holes and community relations and support. Not to mention that many of these tools have crept out from the minds of developers and not publishers.

The same can't be said for Thomson Reuters Calais Initiative. With a business model built in from the inception of the project they have the ability to create value from the wealth of content that is entering their system. It is treated to some natural language processing, machine learning and prepared to link with other content. As the initiative currently exists it is the side car to better publishing as there is no status quo or hole patching. They realized this.

Throwing a CMS on top of this type of foundation is a logical move for OpenCalais to extend development and create publisher relations. There has been so little innovation in core CMS offerings that most rely on third-party developers to create additional functionality or implement API's like OpenCalais, Zemanta and other discovery products.

An OpenCalais CMS, blogging platform or whatever comes from this group is going to be a welcome addition to the choices that publishers have available today. The closest opportunity today to creating a true semantic experience in a publishing platform that is readily available would be to install the Zemanta plugin in WordPress. It transforms the writing experience. An offering from Calais could transform the writing and CMS experience.

Update: Krista Thomas (@kristathomas) from OpenCalais got in touch to say that there is a fully integrated CMS based on Drupal called OpenPublish available now.

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CMS Innovations from Thomson Reuters? is a post from: TechStartups.com

The feed yard is a place filled with rusted out digital representations of days gone by. It is home to the lost feeds of blogs and corporate sites that once used them diligently to share their ideas.

Like any scrap yard there is money to be made in this yard. It has been quite a surprise to me that a market for dormant or abandoned RSS feeds hasn't sprung up. The opportunity to engage subscribers within a niche without being required to go out and earn those subscribers is has been hanging around for years.

The concept was first introduced to me by a failing at Current TV years ago. They had a master feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/currenttv that I was subscribed to.

For nearly 6 months not a single update came through the feed. Then one day it was firing off 20 updates every few hours. Only the updates weren't for Current TV, they were for items on eBay with current' in the title.

Surprised, I got in touch with a friend that I thought might have contacts at Current to see if their feed had been hijacked. My friend did get me in touch with the right people and we traded a few emails. However, they were less concerned with the content in the feed than they were that it was still active.

At the time their FeedBurner account was currenttv and all other feeds were labeled currenttv/topic. This legacy feed was the only one that was cranking out eBay data so it went under the radar. I'm sure if you click the link for the feed above you were able to see what goodness was left inside.

I'm not sure whether this type of feed yard would lead to genuine commerce or nefarious activities but that isn't for me to decide. My guess is that it would be a gray area shunned by many and praised by others as an opportunity to extract value from failed properties. I think this is a revenue stream worth exploring for the right startup that doesn't mind a little rust.

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The Feed Yard is a post from: TechStartups.com

Friend, smart dude and all-around good guy Micah Baldwin wrote up a post yesterday that hurt me a little bit quite a bit, if I must be honest. It bothers me because he's right.

On every account of where the failure to find funding comes from us, me, you he's right. Whether it's not searching in the right spot, pitching the wrong story, a flawed product or the inability to get over ones self-importance, the blame can go to one person, you.

Let's break this down . . .

I want to focus on one section from the post and give it a bit more fleshing out for those that might need it. This is especially important for those that are preparing to go out for funding the first time.

If you are struggling to raise money, look back at the decision points:

1. Does your idea excite the people you are talking to;
2. Do you excite the people you are talking to;
3. Are you talking to the right' people (not the easy' or big name' people)?

Three

I'd like to speak to them in a new order with number 3 being first. This is the hardest one to get right and the most important. Being enamored by the big name' will only lead to heart break and misery when the big name' investors tell you no. That no could be for one of a million reasons but most likely number 1 or 2.

The right people are those that don't already have portfolio of companies that can do what you are looking to do, they could be someone that you strike up a conversation with at a conference or the seat next to you on a plane.

Believe me on this from when I went through it, the people I should have focused on pitching were right in front of my face and asked for more of my time. I was too enamored with big names and brands to see these opportunities.

The right people also don't have to be early investors in other up and coming startups. There are plenty of investors in the fringe that might be able to help even more. It is a matter of finding them.

One

On the account of number 1, Does your idea excite the people your are talking to? It must if you've gotten your foot through the door. If you haven't haven't, don't be disheartened with a quick no from a potential investor. They are respecting your time by not wasting it.

To maintain this excitement, prepare like you have never prepared before. Take the time to analyze your business, role play your presentation and be certain to understand the investor you are pitching. If a friend helped to put you in this position, ask them for some advice. Cover your bases.

Two

On the account of number 2, Do you excite the people you are talking to? The answer is really up to you. If you get number one right and convey the passion that you have for the startup then the answer is yes. If you get elements of number one right but not all of them, you'll definitely lose points. Those points could cost you the funding and more importantly a future relationship with the potential investor.

Conclusion

Micah's post is brilliant. Any entrepreneur that is looking to raise capital should study, answer all of the questions he asks and fill in any other missing components that they see fit. It is a blue print for how to be a digital hustler and mean it.

Now that I think about it, there is another set of guidelines that combined with Micah's thoughts could be the ultimate startup cocktail Mike Dunn's Tech Due Diligence. That is a cocktail worth whipping up.

Photo credit: (cc) Kenneth Yeung www.thelettertwo.com

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The Right Investor and You is a post from: TechStartups.com

As the war of words ramps up between Google and some news publishers, the latest spin seems to be how worthless the traffic is that Google sends. In reality, the traffic probably does have value, but the newspapers are likely doing a terrible job of monetizing it.

I'll give some examples in a minute, but how about an imaginary story to illustrate the problem?

Let's say a newspaper executive opens a store. They put some story headlines up in their shop window.

Now one of those old fashioned newskids comes along. You know, the type that you'd see in movies selling papers on the street. Let's call the kid Google.

Google reads the headlines and then scampers off down the street, shouting out to people things like Senate's debating health care! or 1 out of 4 homeowners are in the red!

Some of these people are interested. They ask this Google kid for more information, and Google sends them back to the news store.

At the store, the news exec owner greets visitors by asking them what the hell they want. Perplexed, they visitors say they heard about these stories and wanted to know more. The exec shouts at them. Get the hell out of my store, you freeloader! This is for members-only. We don't need riff-raff like you in here.

That's a hell of a way to run a business, don't you think? But it's pretty much how News Corporation execs seem to view the world. Consider what News Corp digital chief Jonathan Miller said earlier this month:

The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.

Today, we got similar remarks from James Moroney, executive vice president of A.H. Belo, which publishes the Dallas Morning News and other papers:

This is traffic that's not being monetized to any great degree, Moroney said. It's akin to a person who drops into town, buys one copy of your newspaper and leaves town again and yet you spend a whole bunch of time building your business around that type of customer.

Let's be clear about one reason why these statements are coming out. This is round two against Google. In round one, some publishers said Google steals our content. Google's response was that it sends them millions of visitors for free. So in round two, it's time to make out like those visitors aren't worth much. That's especially important if you're an executive who, after floating the idea of dropping Google, comes under attack as stupidly cutting your own throat.

Me, I see visitors as opportunities. This is the internet, where you can tell far more about a visitor to your web site than you can in print. You can tell:

• They're visiting for the first time or on a repeat basis
• They came from Google
• They came from a specific page, or using specific search terms
• The geographic area they're located in

And the visitor who buys your paper printed on a dead tree out of a newsstand? You can tell you sold a copy. And that's it. That regular subscriber? You know they live in a particular area, maybe some demographic info, but you can't custom your dead tree version in any way to target for that.

Can you imagine what would happen if the Wall Street Journal did a one time promotion where for a day, they gave away 1 million copies of their paper? Since there's a real cost to doing so, don't you think they'd figure out a way to make that promotion count? They'd sell special ads? They'd have a super attractive subscription offer?

But on the internet, where they're not paying anything for all that traffic flowing from Google, there just doesn't seem to be any effort. Millions of people are just written off as worthless. If they're watching The Simpsons on Murdoch's Fox TV network, they're valuable (see Free Isn't A Four-Letter Word Offline, So Why Does The Media Hate It Online?). Put the exact same people on the internet, and suddenly they're net neaderthals.

The problem isn't with the people. They didn't suddenly change when sitting in front of a computer keyboard. They don't suddenly have less money. They aren't suddenly less attractive marketing prospects. The problem is with how you're targeting them.

Remember what Miller said? That most of these visitors read a story once and then leave? Well, clearly the WSJ has some analytics running to understand that. Someone, somewhere has churned a report to arm Miller with that information. But that same data can be used to target those visitors better.

Time for a real life example. Today, at lunch, in the hard copy of the Wall Street Journal that I pay $100 per year for, I read a story bout how 1 in 4 US homeowners are underwater or owing more than their homes are worth.

I guess I have at least $100 per year in value to the Wall Street Journal, since I'm a subscriber. But that's gross revenue. Someone's being paid to deliver the hard copy to my door. There are print costs involved with producing it. I doubt the $100 I pay per year covers all that. But the WSJ also convinces advertisers that I'm somehow valuable to them, which is why they pay to place quality ads in the WSJ like this in front of me:

Now that same story is currently being featured on Google. The minute I click from Google to read it, I'm transformed. My $100 per year value is lost. Instead, I become one of those people who Miller says that he doesn't make any money from.

Well, let's see what I get:

That's the beginning of the story. It is EXACTLY the same thing I see if I read this story by clicking through to it from a link on the WSJ's home page (they've made it free to anyone from there). It's also the same thing I see when I'm logged in using my paid account.

Why is the WSJ treating the one-time / first-time visitor the same way as a regular reader? See those two big arrows I've drawn pointing into the story? I'm pointing out that one of the top goals the WSJ would have for first time visitors is to get them to take that 2 week free offer to subscribe or to take one of the free stay connected via email or RSS options. And yet, these things are shoved off to the top and side of the page.

Place them in front of the reader! At worst, you lose nothing. But more likely, you've slightly interrupted one of those freeloaders in the same way you interrupt them when they watch News Corp TV shows and get commercials. And more of them will convert. They may buy more subscriptions, or they may register so you can do outreach marketing to them.

Meanwhile, money IS being made, even off the supposed freeloaders. There's a big ad sitting there off to the site, plus another one right above. Oh, there's too much ad inventory? Then find a way to convince your advertisers to buy more ads or pay more for them, which probably means showing that your ads perform well. And if they're not performing well, fix your problem. Why aren't they?

This is an article about mortgage owners being underwater. Can we assume some of the readers are attracted to it because they may want help with their mortgages? Are there no companies that offer this to type of service? Are there no ad execs who could figure out how to reach them?

Instead, I get served with an ad from Zurich about how to buy the right insurance for my business. Seriously? That's the ad you show me? This is targeting? Roll out one of those Get a mortgage for below 5% ads that I see offline everywhere.

Even better, here's another ad that also shows for this article:

Yeah, in an article about how people can't afford their homes, you show me an ad about buying an iconic residential masterpiece in Boca Raton. And when I don't click on that, because it has nothing to do with my interests, you call me a freeloader.

Your loss, I think. I've got money to spend. Plenty of your visitors do. You're just not figuring out how to get it from me.

That visitor from Google? Show them a completely different experience, if you want. Article and ad, perhaps embedded within the content (labeled as ads, but inline, rather than off to the side). Please, go hire someone like Jeremy Shoemaker or Jennifer Slegg, both of whom live and breathe how to make as much money out of visitors as possible.

Do something. Anything. Please. Survive. But there's one thing you shouldn't do. Blame others for sending you visitors and not figuring out how to make money off of them.

Last week at Webby Connect 2009 Steve Wax from Campfire NYC shared his knowledge of branded content and campaign development in a digital world. You know the one, where everyone is connected and online, offline worlds merge to create a hybrid that then becomes reality. Steve was able to describe it as the glorious disaster it can be.

The process of this merger is messy. It's not just messy for those trying to figure out how to make money from it with startups, boutique agencies or behemoth multinational corporations, but it is messy for those participating in the culture. Wax talked at length about a campaign that Campfire worked on where people that really wanted to participate in it were unable to. That the campaign wasn't designed as a conversation but as a Stalinesque experience to best tell the story that they had concocted about the product.

Needless to say it sounded better when the creatives were devising it that it did in production. He said that the campaign failed in certain key aspects but the brand didn't walk. They stuck around because with this campaign their was a risk, a calculated risk, but they knew it might fail.

By embracing risk and the chance that no matter how carefully planned out the campaign strategy and tactics may be that it could fail. Startups and the entrepreneurs are themselves taking a risk in putting forth an idea or a product. And what typically happens is that at some point their appetites for risk and failure acquiesce as they have a sense that there is more to lose by taking risks.

Campfire is in a unique position, one that I found myself in nearly five years ago as podcasting began to infiltrate agencies. They were telling clients left and right that they could deliver not only on production, but metrics. They couldn't.

What they could do was find a specialist like myself, a guy in Chicago working out of his basement studio, that could deliver on production, metrics and in-turn teach them the best practices of the medium. I was able to speak to the agencies and brands openly and honestly about their campaigns.

The agencies and brands that listened about taking risk with the content were the ones that succeeded. They were the brands that returned for business year after year until they had the digital capabilities and tools in house.

The current landscape for boutiques and agencies alike is currently an amalgam of that time five years ago with new technology, strategy and the integration of traditional pr, marketing and advertising. The opportunities that it presents are often missed by those less willingly to take the risks needed to stay in business.

Embracing failure to succeed is a necessity when culture and business change rapidly. There are very few times that there is solid ground under an entrepreneur's feet, so to speak. The time to stand still with a hand raised to ask questions about strategy and tactics is over. Move forward, fail, learn the lesson and apply it to the next success.

That is the story that you want to tell.

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Embracing Failure To Succeed is a post from: TechStartups.com

Update: Threadsy is offering Tech Startups readers access to the private beta get your access on! Thanks @dskendall.

The story here really is theory vs. utility. Wave is a tool that comes from a part of Google dedicated to R&D and future earnings, Google Labs.

Threadsy comes from a startup with an agenda like making money in the short term with its software.

Both applications are ambitious in trying to solve a couple of problems at once.

Centralize tools that we use to communicate

Online communication tools are decentralized because most of them are products of individual need. They are solutions to problems that certain users were having with other ways of communicating. It wasn't a lack of vision that caused this. It was market demand. The same demand that is making it necessary to begin to centralize these tools.

Twitter, Facebook and email are the dominant players right now. Sure I know email isn't really a player but it is a mode of communication that is decentralized. It is really a collective of the GMail, HotMail and Yahoo!

This new aggregation of the communication modes makes it easier for end users to locate conversations and friends across networks. Think of it as that nebulous space between AT&T and Verizon where there networks connect. The difference in this case is that Wave and Threadsy are destinations where these connections are made.

Organizing the diaspora of personal brand

Users of the social media tools that are integrated into Wave and Threadsy have worked countless hours building a brands on varying sites. By combining the communication mechanisms they essentially combine a users online brand by centralizing a the users identity.

A users communication styles do vary based on the tool they are using but when centralized into one application it forces users to organize their collective into a single brand. It is a necessity of using the tool, Wave or Threadsy.

At this stage of Google Wave vs. Threadsy, I'm placing my bet on Threadsy to produce a tool that quicker than Google that will meet market need simply based on utility.

Google has a long way to go with the theory of Wave, especially on the front-end if they choose to compete in this space. I would assume that they will continue down a path to make Wave the platform that powers other real-time applications like Pulse from Novell.

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Google Wave vs. Threadsy is a post from: TechStartups.com

There is hope. The Huffington Post calls this The Obama-Effect in Journalism, where small donations from a crowd is used to fund stories. If crowdfunding becomes the future of journalism, the editorial power will shift from an elite group of editors deciding on what is important to the community choosing which issues they care about most.

Several companies such as Kickstarter have figured out a way to fund the creative mind. Musicians and journalists can connect with fans to raise money for their projects. For example, Polyvinyl Records sold their overstock through Kickstarter and racked in $15,000. The donors received complementary DVD sets for their payments.

David Cohn founded Spot.us, a non-profit that recently had one of its community funded stories end up in The New York Times. Spot.us raised money for Lindsey Hoshaw's $10,000 trip to the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch. Hoshaw spent a month aboard Captain Charles Moore's research vessel, the Alguita, to report on the plastic trash floating in our seas. Eventhough The Columbia Journalism Review was underwhelmed by the actual reporting of the story, it is an example of how community funded reporting can be done.

Hoshaw's garbage patch story might be a one-hit wonder. Crowdfunding isn't going to save traditional media. The real issue is figuring out the best payment model for online content. Sadly, 80 percent of us admit that we wouldn't pay to read anything online. But if you're in the minority, these companies will collect your spare change.

Image: flickr/ Donncha @ InPhotos.org

Fund Your Stories and Projects With Small Donations is a post from: TechStartups.com

In keeping with the theme that content wants to be syndicated, not free I wanted to a bit more explaining.

I've been reading up on pay walls and the arguments against them. I haven't read one that has convinced me to the contrary that they aren't necessary for publishers to exist today and in the future.

Culture

The real issue at hand and the one that isn't being addressed by proponents of keep it free' is that they feel they are entitled to free content. It has become part of the culture of the web an ingrained in their psyche. I know that this is the internet that I participate in, where content flows. In fact it flows so freely, hardly anyone thought about putting a leash on it.

Business Models

Allowing content to cost nothing, see: free, for consumers is a viable business model . . . for the right the company. For most it isn't as they struggle to maintain their revenues. Regardless of a pay wall they will continue to shrink and find niche sources of revenue, spinning off divisions. Small is coming, and that's ok.

Audience

There is an audience for content that will pay. Anyone today touting their desire to have the largest audience by giving their content away for free is dizzy from their own self-indulgence or the fumes from a stack of freshly minted money they have to spend. This is a massive shift in media that can be summed up with the word above, small. The audiences will be smaller, but more engaged since they have a vested interest in value of content. The audience are consumers, users and patrons.

Technology

The technology to consume, use and patronize content providers grows every day with new opportunities for business models that capture the essence of it. The consumption devices are paid for. The services that keep them connected 24/7 are paid for like 3G, internet and GPS. They are paid for because they are exclusive to those that can afford them and their usage is measured.

Measurement

Syndication is about creating the necessary mechanisms to transfer content from one provider to another with ease. The primary mechanism for this today is RSS. As a culture of free has reigned, it has been neglected as the most powerful source of measurement for publishers. Even the great Feedburner, a RSS metrics company purchased by Google in 2007, had only begun to work its way down from the tip of the iceberg.

At the time of their sale and now partial mothballing by Google, it is not individual syndicated content that is measured, it was and is the feed as a whole. I would assert that a primary reason Google bought Feedburner was to squelch the growth in syndication metrics that would allow publishers to accurately track their content across the internet in a technical manner. Current technology and new tools that pick up where Feedburner left off are the key to better measurement of individual content.

Not Free

A culture is paramount in shaping the worldview of those that participate in it. Commerce that is created by this culture is determined by its practices and what it values. The audience for that commerce depends on the technologies that will deliver it be it a horse and carriage or gigabit ethernet. The item of value requires measurement to ensure that a provider can come back to the market another day.

Solutions

There are many opportunities for multiple business models to deliver syndicated content. What is takes is the open mind of publishers to the various ways that their partners will sell access to their content and better syndication metrics. As for business models ad supported models will work, patronage models will work and hybrid models will work. The successes of those business models relys on the content they can serve and the expertise of the people managing them.

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Content Wants to Be Syndicated, Not Free. Part 2 is a post from: TechStartups.com

What I am about to say is because I have been a long time member of the eBay affiliate program, now called eBay Partner Network. It is also of value to anyone that is starting or currently responsible for managing an affiliate program for a company.

My affinity for their brand is the result of being a partner for over three years, my wife being a seller on eBay for nearly ten years, API ease of use and the ability to earn revenue consistently for three years as part of the partner network.

But try as they might, eBay has not driven me away from the partner network . . . yet. They transitioned the program from Commission Junction to an internal program two years ago. The metrics and other monitoring tools suffered as eBay had to get their affiliate legs underneath them. No longer could an affiliate view the extensive reports for click monitoring, referrals, purchases, week to week comps, etc.

Then eBay transformed the program most recently from their CPA (where a partner was paid if their link resulted in a sale) program to a CPC program. This isn't your average CPC program with prices set per click it is based on an algorithm that calculates the quality of the clicks from a given link on a 24 hour basis and assigns them a monetary value.

With this most recent transition to CPC and a program controlled by an algorithm (see: bot) eBay developed a Transparency Team. This team has the task of reaching out to partners that have links that aren't performing in a manner that matches the eBay partner agreement (see: fraudulent).

This is a great idea in theory. However, this team wouldn't need to exist if the eBay partner network returned to the same type of reports that Commission Junction used. Instead, when reinventing the wheel, eBay eliminated any useful monitoring for partners. Thus making participating in their program as opaque as it can be. Metrics that provide a payout, ranking or trip the algorithm to send an automated email stating that a partner is somehow engaged in fraudulent activity are nonexistent.

Ebay has removed any substantive accounting for themselves in the process of monitoring or payouts, the crux of a developer or user becoming an affiliate. Hiding reports from users that are accustomed to them as part of other vendor programs.

The problem is a that is a basic customer service issue that has not been addressed by eBay. Reporting, prompt replies and useful feedback data would allow partners to build better programs that meet eBay's standards and can be crafted to drive more quality traffic to eBay.

This example says it all:

Two months ago I was contacted by the eBay Partner Network Transparency Team (see: bot generated email) stating that in their quest to be transparent I should do the same and that I was failing as a large percentage of my links weren't sending referrer data. Meaning that they don't have a record from these links of the website where the link was displayed and clicked on.

Fair enough to ask me about the links. Not fair or right, accusing someone of not being transparent when all of the click data is hidden away. Not fair is waiting two months to reply back with meaningless data stating that eBay is right. See below:

Ebay sure is right that I have a high non-referrer rate and that bots are removed. I guess I should stop questioning their authority . . . sure. I'd do that if I knew what the criteria were or what bots are being removed. Because for nearly two years they didn't remove a single bot from click data.

I've requested more data from the Transparency Team like IP addresses and user-agents of those clicks. Since I can't track the click that is actually going to eBay without breaking the user-agreement with eBay I will be at their mercy to figure out if the clicks are coming from mobile devices or and some proxy bot that has a lust for finding its way to eBay auctions. Maybe the bot master was blocked by eBay for not being transparent enough when scraping their auctions.

Ebay, this isn't how to be transparent or run a valued affiliate program. If my experience hadn't begun with your program on Commission Junction I wouldn't have such high hopes for how the current partner network could operate. As an affiliate, I want to make money, but I also want eBay to succeed.

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Ebay Partner Network and Transparency is a post from: TechStartups.com

So who is the best iPhone app developer? You.

Get your iPhone startup rolling by making it happen all by yourself well, with some help, but you can claim the blood, sweat and long hours needed to build your biz from the ground up.

What follows is a mock interview that I just had with you five minutes ago.

Kris:

• That's right you. And I said it to your face.
• Okay, the criteria for best in this case being the most motivated, cheap and geographically close developer. Face it, you can't get any closer to your coder than yourself.

You:

• Kris, listen . . . I can't make an iPhone application or write a program in Objective C, let alone in any other language.

Kris:

• Shut up and teach yourself to fish.
• Learning this will save you the hassle of finding a developer, translating your idea and getting stuck because you don't understand the iPhone developer spec or limitations of the device before masterminding the next greatest iPhone app.

You:. . .

• You're crazy.
• Am I supposed to buy a book and sit a dark office after my kids are asleep and figure this out?

(You see where this is going, right?)

Kris:

• Sure, you can do that.
• But if you want to jump start this process and make your app a reality without paying $30k or spending that much of your time translating your ideas to a developer go to an iPhone Boot Camp.
• They're happening in major US cities.
• And, seriously, it might be something that you think is out of your league but taking a day to spend with the authors of two of the most popular iPhone development books will shorten the time you're going to spend in that dark room trying to sift through this.

You:

• How do I make it happen?

Kris:

• Find the iPhone Boot Camp nearest you or one that matches your schedule.
• Get the scratch to pay the registration fee (under $3k), flight, hotel and if Chicago enough for dogs and Italian beef sandwiches from Portillos.
• Sweet shit, I miss those.

This interview is over. I've gotta go punch a papper in the face, drool about a Portillos and look for money in my couch cushions to get myself to one of these events.

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Best iPhone App Developer is a post from: TechStartups.com

As the in-house SEO coordinator for CNN.com and the rest of Turner's news properties (including CNN Money, CNN International and iReport), he has overseen a 17 percent increase in traffic from search year to year and oversaw one of the single largest search traffic days in the site's history with the 2008 presidential election.

Editor's Note: We asked Topher to write this for Tech Startups because his work is impressive. SEO's of all types can benefit from his experience.

Now that the new CNN.com has been live for a while, I can sit back and say, yes, the SEO effort worked!

With that in my pocket, I wanted to walk you all through the path that I took to have as SEO-friendly a site as possible when it went live October 24.

Got involved with the process as soon as I could

They brought me in, and I inserted myself as much as I could during the wireframe stage. This was great, and I was able to ask a lot of questions about what items were on the page and what they would show the user.

After the wireframes, the next thing in front of me was the series of mockups that evolved into the final comps for the site. This was even better than the wireframes because I was given a real idea of the modules and items on the page, and then I could ask some tough questions about the technologies we would be using to build it out. I was able to have some really great conversations with them about the use of Flash and Ajax and the up / down side of using them in each case.

Finally, I was looking at the HTML reviews and was able to see the real world the code we were using and catch the little things that might be forgotten.

Do not forget about the little things

This was huge for me to be able to see the real-world code in HTML review and also final templates before launch.

This is the time I found all the little things that I might have overlooked or that were removed from the code in the final stages. I was not able to get it all in there at this point, but if it was just a mistake, this was the place to catch it.

Win the war, not the battle

Yes, things that I wrote about in the SEO requirements did not make it to the live version of the site. Yes, I wish they would have, but in the end, it is all about winning the overall war, so don't fret. Keep your eye on the big picture.

The ends justify the means

In the end, the big picture is to get more traffic to your site from search, and that is my goal at CNN. I wanted to have the new site give the editorial team and me a good chance to optimize it to get as much search traffic as possible.

This is not the end of the road

Now that the site is live, I cannot give up. I need to keep on with the things that did not get in by launch day. Remember also that SEO is not a stand-still kind of world, so there is always something new to try to get done on the site.

In-house SEO Tips From A Master is a post from: TechStartups.com

Uh, dinosaurs, silly!

I finally have a reason to blog about my most recent favorite movie, Land of the Lost, as scientists now debate if dinosaurs were ectothermic or endothermic. You know, cold blooded like a froggy in pond or warm blooded like Lassie.

So let's settle the debate and grow a pair of dinosaurs to find out. This is my new brilliant tech startup idea.

We've got to be getting close to having the technology and questionable enough ethics to hook up some cells in a petri and find a viable host. Seriously, to get this rolling I volunteer my body as the vessel to make this old life anew.

Okay, maybe I won't volunteer. But if there is an acceptable way of bringing dinosaurs back to life to settle the multitude of debates swirling about then it should be done. Debates that consume anthropologists about whether certain dinos were bipedal or down on all fours, if they could fly or were flightless and whether they were the missing link between species could all be put to rest with some synthetic growth hormone.

This newest hypothesis that T-rex was a warm blooded brute is just too much. Especially after watching Land of the Lost last night and witnessing Will Ferrell play a scientist that spewed his knowledge about dinosaurs endlessly to always be proven wrong early primates for that matter too.

I am teasing the scientists a bit on this because in a quest for definitive answers they build conventional theories that take root in texts and minds. Then one day when more information is gleaned from a long lost specimen and the computational power of the day expands just enough to run an outrageously expensive test a new answer arrives. Whether the T-rex was or wasn't hot, cold, upright or otherwise means nothing to me as I walk to catch the bus, subway or drink down this last bit of Sprite float that my daughter made me.

The bearing that these creatures had as evolutionary partners on this planet to our species in negligible. What is the answer really going to yield that is useful information for a modern human to use in their lives? I find solving puzzles as interesting as the next person but let's put this sucker to rest and grow us some dinosaurs if we want to know the answer!

Spark might put of the seed money for awesome dino raising startup. Bijan?

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Grow A Pair And Find Out is a post from: TechStartups.com

I wonder if they will look more their mom or dad? Which one is which in this situation?

Okay, that was lame.

Last week Focal Press, an imprint of Elsevier Books, announced that it has partnered with Variety to begin publishing books focused on the entertainment industry. What that really means is that these are books written in partnerhsip with Variety by media professionals that are now finding their way online.

This is for the record I haven't read either of these books and am strictly commenting on the press release itself.

The first two releases in the arrangement have focused on what has become the most important question in creating content today how to make money. One of the books, quite possibly has the most ambitious title filled with a bazillion keywords, The Business of Media Distribution: Monetizing Film, TV and Video Content in an Online World. I'm sure it's Amazon search hits are sky high.

Focal Press has a reputation for taking on new growth opportunities that are presented by technology. They have been very astute at following trends online and being able to cash in on them. A few years ago it was podcasting and now they have moved on to what became of the podcasting landscape the Media.

Now that Hollywood is arriving, with wise media faces and a neophytes sense of producing for the internet, they are ripe for education. You could say that they have been producing content for the internet for years and just haven't been paid for it. But let's not tell them that yet and let this illusion persist.

Collectively, with independent producers, the Hollywood crowd is helping to ease us into the next phase of Media. I'm using a capital on the word Media to make it the royal Media the one that we are all now participating in since the tools to create and distribute that media are so ubiquitous. Entertainment is simply an inherent element of this Media.

It makes sense for Variety and Focal Press to hook up and make beautiful books together. For now they will be cute and stuff. However, as they age, they'll start talking back and become insolent ne'er-do-wells that become a reckoning point in the history of media production.

So love these little babies while they have a shelf life and a twinkle of something new and shiny in their eyes. Because the Media is coming and soon enough it will take with it the idea that this newness is anything other than shifting distribution mechanisms that are no different any of the others that have caused this industry to quake in its boots.

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Variety and Focal Press Hook Up to Make Books is a post from: TechStartups.com

Like you, I've been a member and user of PayPal's service for years. They were early to the game and grew accordingly with a product that made buying online drop dead easy. With an exit to eBay they were integrated into a powerful money minting machine.

They also joined a culture of apathy and disdain for those that help them line their pockets developers.

Like their acquirer, PayPal continued to build a mediocre developer community, foster it with partial code samples, limited information and limited support. Now in kindness to PayPal they did begin providing better support a few years ago and are pretty good when it comes to engaging developers on the message boards offering solutions a problem that has plagued eBay for years.

Visit any eBay developer board and you'll find replies that focus on posting in the wrong thread topic instead of offering a solution. It shows the developers that they aren't a priority.

I was looking forward to the release of the brand spanking new PayPal X Developer Network. Hoping that my previous experience wouldn't hold true and that there would be a renewed focus on the developers that are integrating the PayPal gateways and API's into their platforms. But they let me down.

The new developer community site is plagued with broken links, the same old code samples and forums that stopped loading threads on October 28. The intention is there but the execution is hit and miss.

I can forgive them this time, though. Because it appears that their intention is to focus fully on their API implementations and integrate the legacy products like IPN and PDT into a more standardized solution.

Which will help PayPal as it moves toward working with developers to create a wider range of solutions like mobile and in application micro-payments.

Something else of note with the new PayPal X Developer Network is the improved site IA. Thank you to the person(s) that restructured the information and worked with the UI person(s) to highlight what developers want most . . . documentation.

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PayPal X Developer Network Same as it Always Was is a post from: TechStartups.com

This afternoon I noticed something funny happening with Google Reader shared feeds. It seems that feeds are now mixing namespaces for the main content of the posts.

Previously, all content was delivered via the 'summary' namespace. When I did a check after getting some null data fields in a database I took a look at the shared feed . . . sure enough there was a new namespace, content' for the main content. Makes sense. But it is a pain if you are expecting everything to be returned as 'summary'.

My guess is that they are saving time and money by not rewriting the original source feed main content namspace. However, it creates an XML namespace soup that is harder to navigate.

When stuff like this happens it makes me nervous, especially when I am building something on the back of it.

The last time this happened Twitter turned off pagination for getting recent tweets for your friends. It killed a really cool project that I spent more time working on than I care to recount. I'm hoping that Google will not do the same. Fingers crossed.

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Using The Magic API is a post from: TechStartups.com