Today's Reading
Here's some of what caught my attention today:
Umair's latest: It is this shared culture that is commoditizing media - not simply technology or the erosion of entry barriers. Shared culture is what makes the economic difference - it is what drives the superior attention economics of markets, networks, and communities - at least on the consumer side (whereas, on the supply side, the game is about achieving discontinuous productivity/efficiency gains a la AdWords).
Scott on The New Cybersquatters: Okay, this domainer thing is getting out of hand. Now the former CEO of research firm IDC is heading up a startup called NameMedia that just came out of stealth and owns 650,000 Internet domain names. A domainer is a company that owns a lot of URLs and populates them with search ads. When someone types in the URL instead of going to a search engine (perhaps because they think the URL box on their browsers is the search box), they go directly to one of these fake sites.
And the Bubblegeneration follow-up: In Scott's examples, entrepreneurs are finding ways to arbitrage Google itself: they are exploiting the fact that PageRank's expected value of attention and AdSense's financial value of attention are out of sync ... It is the expected value of attention of consumers which PageRank is supposed to, somewhat accurately, compute. But as long as there's no real competition in search (and let's be honest - there really isn't), Google can keep shifting the costs of this arbitrage on to consumers.
Wetpaint reviewd by TechCrunch: Seattle based Wetpaint has been in private beta since March. On Sunday night they launched to the world, allowing anyone to create a free wiki on any topic. — A good example wiki is this one around the XBOX 360. Like pbwiki, Wikia and JotSpot …
Marketplace Economy: RockYou, a popular tool for putting slideshows on MySpace, Friendster, Hi5 and Xanga, has taken $1.5 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital. The Palo Alto-based company is a great example of a lightweight 2.0 play: you can import images from your Photobucket account or MySpace profile and create a widget to post on any social networking site (see also Feeding the MySpace Beast).
Imbee (via Mashable) which launched last night, is a kid-friendly social network that aims to offer a safer alternative to MySpace, Bebo and Tagworld . The network was created by San Francisco-based Industrious Kid, which announced a $6 million funding round in March. Imbee is closed to non-members and the site offers various account types - a free account, a 90-day trial and a full account ($3.95 per month or $39.95 per year). The paid account gives users access to the blogging tools. It’s an interesting dynamic: kids can only network with people they know, and virtually every change must be approved by the parent.
MommyBuzz (also via Mashable), which launched last week, is a new social network for moms. Users can create profiles, post photos, join clubs, write blog entries and create classified ads.
The Bobosphere: AdAge reporter Bob Garfield has a new blog. He's using it to write a book and vent on topics where he can't come up with 600 words. Welcome to the blogosphere, Bob.
Ze Frank is thinking so you don't have to ...
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