Silicon Valley Watcher - reporting on the business of technology and media

Foremski's Take: Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI) are directly impacted by the financial crisis. Their journalists are part of the real-time financial information systems that are sold to traders and analysts on Wall Street and elsewhere.

It is not known yet how many seats for the Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters terminals have been lost as a result of the financial crisis but they must be substantial.

Bloomberg's web site reports:

. . . more than 2,300 reporters and editors in 135 bureaus, Bloomberg News publishes more than 5,000 stories on an average day syndicating to over 400 newspapers worldwide, with a combined circulation of 73 million people.

Thomson Reuters has already been cutting journalist jobs as a result of its merger earlier this year. In May it said it wanted to cut 140 editorial jobs out of about 2400. Reuters Media Solutions:

Over 2,400 seasoned Reuters journalists report from 196 bureaus across the globe, bringing you fast, accurate, objective and comprehensive coverage of important international and domestic news in multiple languages.

The impact of the financial crisis on the two organizations is certain to lead to cost cuts in editorial, especially since the editorial side of the business was subsidized by the financial services side of the business.

The financial crisis is just the latest blow to journalism. Analysts have painted a bleak picture for ad supported newspaper and television companies in 2009.

The UK Guardian reports:

'Horror show' year ahead for media firms

The worsening state of the global economy will make 2009 a "horror show" for advertising-dependent newspaper and television companies, with some analysts predicting that businesses may have to wait until 2011 to see positive ad growth.

Valleywag reports that entire US newspaper business is valued at $20 billion. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are worth about $16 billion each.

Foremski's Take: US newspapers didn't realize GOOG is a media company until it was too late. Google was able to scrape its content virtually for free, from newspapers and other web sites, and sell advertising around that content. Newspapers spend huge amounts of money to create their content.

Newspapers, and other media companies, have allowed Google to commoditize content, and retain the value in the aggregation and distribution.

Yet the technology for aggregation and distribution is a commodity -- content is not a commodity.

Once the content creators and owners realize that simple fact, then we might have a turnaround in the media sector. If not, then the media sector is next for a bailout--it is too important to fail.

For nearly four years I've been warning about huge changes in the media world and why the old media can't make it into the new media world.

There is an American expression that I love to use: "You can't get there from here." It seemingly doesn't make sense but it makes perfect sense in this context.

You can't get there from here. When I left the Financial Times four years ago to become the first journalist to leave a top newspaper job to become a "journalist blogger" I could see the economic model of the old world, and the new economics of new media.

I could see that pageviews and clicks could barely support me--a chap with a laptop and a cell phone. How could the economics of the new world support the legacy cost structure of the old, with its office buildings, printing presses, pension plans, etc?

I could also see that the transition of the media's business model would be tremendously disruptive. And that this disruption would accelerate over the the next few years, as indeed has happened.

I asked then, and I ask now: What happens if the old media dies before the new media learns to walk?

What will happen to journalism and to the hundreds of years of best practices created since newspapers were born from Guthenberg's moveable type machine, if old media can't transition to the online Movable Type of the new media world?

And it won't be able to transition. Because the economics of new media -- pageviews and clicks -- can't support it.

New media is defined by a machine-based economic model. It is cheaper to plug in a bank of servers and run software to publish content than it is to hire editors, manage journalists, and carry all the other employee related expenses of healthcare, pensions, offices, etc.

Google is machine-based media. It uses servers and software to harvest and publish content and then sell advertising around it.

Google and other machine-based media companies such as Yahoo, AOL, etc can cover their costs by selling ads cheaply. And that's what sets the price of online advertising--machine-based media companies.

Media companies that require people to generate their content can't compete. Their costs are far higher than machine-based media companies--yet they have to sell their online advertising at the same rates.

That's why "You can't get there from here."

What happens if the old media dies before the new media learns to walk?

It won't be pretty. It'll be ugly and we'll have to relearn our best practices. And there will be considerable damage done to society.

But it is not just media companies that are at the center of this disruptive tempest. Many new startup companies are in the cross hairs too.

(Continues here...)

I'm a big fan of Techmeme, the news aggregator run by Gabe Rivera. Gabe has been following old and new media for several years and has created an algorithm that does a great job in filtering up the top stories of the day in the mediasphere. Instead of using customized RSS news aggregators, many people in the tech industry use Techmeme to guide their daily news reading.

I ran into Gabe last week at an event at the St. Regis in San Francisco and asked him about the state of the blogosphere. I pointed out that there seem to be few "real" bloggers left. Original bloggers such as GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, etc now all seem to be just online news sites and they read like an "old media" news site.

Gabe agreed, he said:"Techcrunch and the others used to link to each other and now they don't--they only link if they have to."

That's very much like the old media, which hated to link or give credit to any rival news organization. I remember at the Financial Times, we would always try to "stand up" a story ourselves based on our contacts and would only give credit where credit was due when we couldn't write the story based on our information.

Gabe said that in this way, new media sites were very much acting like old media. And with fewer links, that means he has had to continually tweak his algorithm. "I get around the problem by looking in many places for links or references to news stories, in places you might not normally look."

Gabe is very secretive about how his algorithm does the filtering because he doesn't want others gaming his system. A story on Techmeme can generate a lot of traffic for a news site.

He says that there are new bloggers coming online and they have audiences as large as the A-list bloggers had in 2005, and they do link to each other. They tend to be in specialist software engineering circles. But that's where blogging first grew to prominence, amongst the software engineers.

Maybe blogging, that highly personal style of news delivery, is coming back to its roots. I'm thinking of starting a blog...

Innovation journalism is a concept that has been popularized by David Nordfors, who leads the Innovation Journalism program at Stanford university. The subject just received a big boost from the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation with the award of a 900,000 euro ($1.31 million) research grant to a Finnish research consortium that will work with the innovation journalism program at Stanford.

If you have about a minute, here is David Nordfors explaining, "What is innovation journalism?"

More details from David Nordfors: The Innovation Journalism Blog: Finnish Innovation Journalism Research Gets 900.000 Euro

The main aim of the new research project (acronym as Ginjo) is to enlarge and deeper the knowledge of global innovation journalism, and also develop new working methods and tools for news media. Case studies will concentrate on topics such as “green tech” and eldercare innovations.

PR is such sensitive profession. Anytime anyone criticizes any aspect of the practice of public relations the industry pays lots of attention along with a lot of mea culpa. If journalists did the same we'd never get any work done.

Jennifer Leggio over at ZDNet has a good account of the latest PR bashing incident: Bloggers vs. PR - the broken record continues to skip | Feeds | ZDNet.com

It seems to me that the PR industry takes on criticism in two ways:

1 - it agrees with the criticism and pledges to do better accompanied by donning of hair shirts and self-flailing blog posts that go on and on for pages.

2 - It dismisses the criticism as massively ill informed and the ravings of an idiot..

It is usually 90 per cent number 1.

Whenever I come across such behavior in a friend I know that something is up, that there is a self-esteem issue at work, maybe, and that there must be something deeper going on. . .

The deeper stuff is that things have changed in the PR industry, and they've changed forever. Yet sometimes things look the same as before. And that can be a confusing time.

Some of my friends in the PR industry get upset with me for saying that things have changed. But my saying that things have changed didn't cause it, I'm just saying what I see.

It is similar to when I became a journalist "blogger" 4 years ago. My friends at the Wall Street Journal, San Jose Mercury News, SF Chronicle, Forbes, Fortune, Reuters, AP, etc would sometimes shoot me cold looks as if, as a "blogger," I was responsible for making their lives a misery, because they now have work longer hours, and live under the threat of job cuts, and they can't go home at 5pm every day, anymore.

The trends in media have nothing to do with me, I'm swept up in the dynamics of this industry the same way as everyone else--I'm trying to deal with the disruption.

What I understood four years ago was: the business model for media had changed forever and it wouldn't return to the old ways, and that is the future for PR too.

The same forces that are dramatically changing, and remaking the media industry, will do the same for the PR industry. Yet that change isn't very visible yet, it is masked. This is because PR is making money with traditional services plus making money selling "new media/social media" services, these are boom times for PR. Change only happens when it hurts to do things the old way, that's why the media industry is changing.

It sometimes seems as if the PR industry is Wiley Coyote chasing the Roadrunner--all is well as long as no one looks down and notices the road has gone, and there is nothing there but gravity and a distant canyon floor.

- - -

Please see:

Chris Anderson's PR Blacklist Backlash - The Long Tail of Bad PR

Raining on the PR industry's parade...

I spent part of my afternoon catching up with advertising network of ad networks, Adify, which was sold to Cox earlier this year for $300m. That was a super smart move for Cox and it gives Adify a large media company as a partner that can leverage its technology across borders and across industries.

Adify has a great front-end for controlling and placing ad inventory by advertisers and publishers. And what isn't appreciated, a great back-end for handling invoices, 1099s and all the other daily paperwork and reports that needs to be dealt with.

Adify enables publishers to run their own vertical ad networks and to recruit other sites to their ad network, and it takes a cut of the ad revenue. This year it is on target to move as much as $80m in ads, next year it plans to double that number.

I met with Russ Fradin, president and Joelle Gropper Kaufman, VP marketing. Most of my questions were on the trends in online advertising--a key interest of mine since I'm an online publisher but also because of my interest in what will be the new business models for online content.

Here are some key notes from our conversation:

- If you are doing brand advertising, large ads are more effective than small ones even though focus groups say people prefer small ads. It's about creating an immersive experience.

- There is a shortage of quality content. Ad prices are good for sites or ad networks that offer quality content.

- Personalization of advertising on the web isn't happening. Ad agencies want to make large buys. I pointed out that an ad agency might buy a 20m page view site but it really just needs to reach 10,000 people in that 20m. Why not make buys that target that 10,000 people? If ad agencies were to do that, it might mean dealing with dozens of seperate buys and dealing with dozens of invoices and reports and other paperwork. That won't happen. Personalization in any form isn't happening, ad agencies are still buying broad demographic profiles. It will never happen, ad personalization is a myth that has been talked about since the mid-1990s and it continues to be unrealistic.

- Social networks are offering low quality ad inventory and there is a lot of it out there. It is cheap because people are doing things rather than consuming content, they aren't interested or paying attention to the ads. Adify believes that this will always be the case, Facebook, MySpace etc will continue to offer huge amounts of low quality advertising inventory.

Adify says it has signed up 40 new networks in the past quarter and will soon announce its first overseas deal.

- - -

Please see:

News Analysis: Cox Acquires Adify For $300m Cash - Will Others Follow?

The future battle between ad networks and publishers… | Tom Foremski: IMHO | ZDNet.com

The recent New York Times article "Is Google a Media Company?" reports on Google's recent launch of Knol, a Wikipedia-like service launched last month.

While Knol is only three weeks old and still relatively obscure, it has already rekindled fears among some media companies that Google is increasingly becoming a competitor. They foresee Google’s becoming a powerful rival that not only owns a growing number of content properties, including YouTube, the top online video site, and Blogger, a leading blogging service, but also holds the keys to directing users around the Web.

“If in fact a Google property is taking money away from Google’s partners, that is a real problem,” said Wenda Harris Millard, the co-chief executive of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

A Google spokesperson, Gabriel Stricker says, "We are not interested in owning or creating content." This is a strange statement to make since the article points out that Google owns YouTube and much more.

Foremski's Take:

For the past four years I've been saying that Google, Yahoo and many other large Internet companies such as AOL, and eBay are media companies. They publish pages of content with advertising around it.

The fact of owning or not owning the content is a red herring. Either way, Google publishes pages of content with advertising around it. How is that not a media company?

GOOG is not a technology company. What technology can you buy from Google? I can buy a database from Oracle--that's a technology company. I can buy microprocessors from Intel--that's a technology company. What technology can you buy from Google?

Google is a technology-enabled media company. It won't create its own content. It mostly scrapes its content from the Internet, or collects it from users of Youtube, etc, and sells advertising around it. How it gets its content is not important, it is still a media company.

Why does Google insist it isn't a media company? Because large media companies such as the New York Times outsource a large part of their online advertising to Google.

Would the New York Times outsource its advertising to another media company such as Tribune or Gannett? Certainly not.

But Google can get away with it provided it is not viewed as a media company but as a technology company.

Again, I'll ask, what technology can you buy from Google? Google publishes pages of content with advertising around it. How is that not a media company?

Earlier this week the Churchill Club hosted a very interesting panel in San Francisco with some of the most successful producers of webisodes — episodic online videos.

Webisodes are the best way to attract sponsors and advertisers for video content rather than one-off content. The panelists gave out lots of great tips on how to integrate brands into video content, the length of videos, and some do's and don'ts.

Brent Friedman also talked about the Gemini Division, one of the most ambitious webisode projects created so far.

The panelists left to right:

Nathan Coyle, Co-head, Digital, Creative Artists Agency Brent Friedman, Executive Producer and Head Writer, Electric Farm Entertainment/Gemini Division Jordan Hoffner, Head of Content Partnerships, YouTube Ziv Navoth, VP of Marketing and Business Development, Bebo - Moderator: Frank Rose (not in photo).

Here is an 8 minute extract talking about brands and how to, and how not to, integrate them into webisodes.

Here is the full one hour version of the talk — it's packed with great content.

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Hat tip to Adam Zand: Utterz - AdamZand's Discussion

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) posted a transcript of a speech in which it recommended "that the Commission issue an interpretive release to provide additional guidance and greater certainty on how companies can use their web sites to provide information to investors in compliance with the federal securities laws..."

Four main topics will be addressed:

• When information posted on a company web site is “public” for purposes of the applicability of Regulation FD;

• Company liability for information on company web sites – including previously posted information, third-party hyperlinks, summary information and the content of interactive web sites;

• The types of controls and procedures advisable with respect to such information; and

• The format of information presented on a company web site, with the focus on readability, not printability.

Adam Zand speculates that press releases distributed through wire services might not be required. He says that the SEC's "interpretive release" probably won't be available for about a week or more.

Demise of Wire services? SEC on Web disclosure

Please see the full text of the SEC speech at the end of this post.

Foremski's Take:

If a company's web site is RSS enabled and it releases financial information and any other material information through that web site, that should satisfy FD requirements. This is because financial analysts and investors can opt-in and subscribe to that information through RSS news readers, or choose to have that information emailed as soon as it is published.

This form of distribution is much broader than through a wire service such as BusinessWire or PRNewswire. Distribution through RSS and email takes advantage of the full breadth of the Internet and does not require an intermediary such as a wire service. Yahoo Finance and Google News would provide additional free distribution services in those cases where investors are not subscribed to a company's financial information.

Companies will be able to save considerable amounts of money in bypassing those wire services, where a single release can cost at least $1200 and often more.

The SEC might mandate a transition period in which RSS and email distribution runs in parallel with wire service distribution.

For many years wire services have made considerable revenues from carrying FD information because companies were scared that they might face SEC penalties if they didn't disclose material information in the right manner. FD has suffered from not having clear rules around what is considered best practices.

The SEC appears ready to change or more clearly define those rules to reflect the broad distribution offered by the Internet and a company's web sites.

- - -

It's interesting that the SEC wants company web sites to focus on "readability, not printability." This speech is anything but readable:

One of the best panels at the recent Fortune Brainstorm conference was the "Blogger Showdown" panel at the Monday evening dinner. Adam Lashinsky does a great job moderating the panel. This is the only video of the panel.

On stage is Robert Scoble, Kara Swisher and Om Malik. The panel soon gets off to a raucaus start.

Hear Kara saying that she's loving being a Rupert Murdoch employee!

Hear Om repeating my mantra that Silicon Valley has turned into media valley!

Hear Robert Scoble saying how his mistakes are fixed by his readers!

Hear Adam Lashinsky say how Fortune avoids mistakes by getting it right the first time!

See Fortune report the "Blogger Showdown" and issue a correction!

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I'm at Fortune's exclusive invite-only Brainstorm conference in Half Moon Bay, California. The content of the panels is really dull . On the breaks everyone is complaining about it. There is little involvement from the audience (except Vint Cerf!) and the moderators talk way too much.

All the action is off-podium. I've been chatting with Vint Cerf, Michael Capellas, Jeff Bezos, Sophie Vanderbroek and many other tech luminaries. Also, Richard Edelman, Frank Glass, Ross Mayfield, Matthew Greeley, and other local entrepreneurs.

The corridors are much more fun than the deadly dull monologist moderators. Maybe the afternoon sessions will improve.

UPDATE: Fortunately the afternoon sessions have improved -- I'll be reporting on some of the sessions later.

I popped over to the start of Fortune's Brainstorm conference primarily because they said Sir Martin Sorrell, who I consider to be one of the world's savviest media executives along with Rupert Murdoch, would be there.

Unfortunately, Sir Martin couldn't make it because he is engaged in a multi-billion acquisition. Too bad, this is someone worth watching. Check out Reuter's Eric Auchard's interview with Sir Martin. I love the end part when Sir Martin tells Eric "good luck with your merger." He was reffering to Thomson Financial's acquisition of Reuters, which had just closed a few weeks before.

Eric says, "it's over, we are the survivors."

Sir Martin says: "Sorry. It’s not done, it’s just starting. The easiest thing is to do the deal. The most difficult thing is to make it work."

It's a great interview and I love that Eric left that quote in there, both are class acts.

Please see full interview: Summit Notebook » Blog Archive » Q&A with WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell | Blogs | Reuters.com

Despite my disappointment the left over pickings weren't that bad...

Coming up on SVW:

Vint Cerf on Internet Neutrality . . .

I got a fantastic interview with Vint Cerf, father of the Internet and chief Internet evangelist for Google. Coming up: Vint Cerf tells me how he was misquoted over net neutrality in full page ads on WSJ and elsewhere! He talks about how the government needs to stop the Telcos from controlling access to the Internet.

First Data wants to be first in consumer data . . .

I also got a great interview with Michael Capellas, co-founder of Compaq Computer, former head of Worldcom and now chairman and CEO of First Data. Mr Capellas tells me about First Data's plans to become a consumer data powerhouse. He says "Right now data is just ten percent of our business I want it to be 50 percent within two years."

It's a Media Valley...

I have exclusive footage of the "Blogger showdown" with Robert Scoble, Kara Swisher, and Om Malik. It was difficult to get Kara to shut up but Om got a few words in edgewise and I'm glad that he did because he seems to be an avid reader of Silicon Valley Watcher because he repeated my line of "Silicon Valley is now a Media Valley."

I've been saying that for nearly four years. I was on the front cover of Nikkei Magazine last year on this topic, Japan's top business magazine. And I had a Japanese TV crew in my living room earlier this year interviewing me on this topic.

In fact, just Google "Media Valley" and see who pops up?

Here is my first mention of how the center of the media industry is moving to SIlicon Valley in September 2005.

I hate blowing my own horn it's better if someone else does it, but...

Unfortunately, his Omness didn't give me any credit for media valley :-( But maybe he would have if Kara would shut up for a bit :-)

Video of the "blogger showdown" is coming...

Behind the Scenes: Japanese TV Crew First Stop In Silicon Valley (Media Valley...)

Why Silicon Valley is Media Valley: And Why Japan Is Interested...

Silicon Valley = Media Valley: The MashUp of technology and Media

Silicon Valley has become Media Valley - someone should tell NYC

Twitter...

I was Twitting like a maniac during the conference despite not Twitting much at all the last week or so. My view is that you shouldn't Twit unless there is something to say.

Do I need to know that Loic is having another beer? That really is a Twit of a Tweet imho. Keep it real, don't take up bandwidth with crap like that...

Media not allowed in to eat...

There was a bunch of disaffected journalists/bloggers that were banned from the dinner at the Fortune Brainstorm. I won't name them but they are huge in their sectors.

They vowed not to come back the next day and wondered how I got one of the main (eating) badges. I couldn't answer that question, you'd better ask David Kirkpatrick, he invited me.

I was late strolling over to the dinner and had to pass by the disgruntled media pack who clearly had been sharing bile about the organizers, (and their blood sugar was very low), and said "Hey, I'll see you over at the dinner!" A howl arose of curses and laughter...

I think some of them got in in the end :-)

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I'm a big fan of Pat Phelan, one of Ireland's top entrepenuers and also one of Ireland's top read bloggers. Pat just set a cat among the pigeons in one of his latest posts: Flixwagon pay bloggers, non disclosure from bloggers or Flixwagon

Pat is of the opinion that blogging will be harmed if bloggers don't disclose who pays them to post. I agree (my money currently comes only from Intel.)

I do agree with most of Pat's post but not about this:

If you receive one cent you must disclose you must go public otherwise we are all tarred with the same brush.

I don't think anyone can be influenced with one cent.

How about drinks, how about a meal? I often disclose in my posts that I just had lunch or dinner with a company. I get T-shirts, and backpacks, and pens, and I almost always leave them on a street corner near my apartment or use the T-shirt to wash my car. I don't think a single one of my reader's will be judging my coverage by how clean my car is from the use of those T-shirts.

Companies cannot buy me with lunch, it would take far more than that, and then I would disclose it anyway.

Should readers of newspapers and magazines be informed about every tsotchke or meal anyone receives? I see journalists from Fortune, Forbes, WSJ, Businessweek, San Jose Mercury, San Francisco Chronicle etc, all the time, drinking and eating and carting off backpacks filled with pens and T-shirts. Should they be disclosing all of that?

I've written about Pat's company before, and he bought me several drinks. That wasn't why I wrote about Pat's Cubic Telecom. Please see: The Man Who Broke the Telco Cartel . . . and Bridged the Global "Voice Divide"

I often meet with companies and there are usually drinks and meals involved and yet I don't write about them. I only write about companies if I feel there is something to say. It's about the content of conversations and the meeting not how good the dinner was.

A year ago I was at one media roundtable at a posh restaurant with top journalists from leading publications and one of the top VCs at the table didn't like where the conversation was going and he stopped everybody and said "Let's get back to discussing XXX I believe the journalists are getting their dinner for free."

I was livid, I reached into my pocket and was ready to throw my money onto the table and walk out before being stopped by a colleague at CNET. I don't go to evening events for meals or drinks, I can eat and drink at home, and often in much better company.

I and other journalists turn up to evening events for the content, for the potential story that can come out of such events. It is insulting to think that we turn up for food and drinks.

I think payments should be disclosed and that bloggers should disclose every tsotchke and meal they receive only if they feel they were influenced by that gift. Otherwise just disclose the payments.

Take a look at Pat's post and see if you agree: Flixwagon pay bloggers, non disclosure from bloggers or Flixwagon

- - -

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I'm a huge fan of Sam Whitmore and his Media Survey. Sam watches the media and spots all the early trends. I ran into Sam outside the Rockit Room Wednesday evening and just happened to have my video camera with me.

It was a fun and illuminating 8 minute chat, despite the low light. This time I'm interviewing Sam rather than the other way around. We discuss how traditional media is adapting to the new publishing technologies, and also Jason Calacanis' retirement from the blogging life.

[Many thanks to Christy Whitmore for the great camera work.]

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Kara Swisher got a great scoop last week with Guardian Media's $30m acquisition of PaidContent and now says that TechCrunch has been in talks with Time Warner's AOL.

So far Mike Arrington, the founder and major shareholder, has turned down $20m to $30m according to Ms Swisher's sources.

However, she says that a deal with AOL makes sense:

AOL would probably be a good home for a site like TechCrunch, since it has a blog focus from its own Switched site and sites it bought, like Engadget.

AOL acquired that popular gadget site in 2005 in the $25 million acquisition of Weblogs, which was founded by entrepreneur Jason Calacanis.

Calacanis, by the way, runs an annual tech conference with TechCrunch, now called TechCrunch50.

PaidContent’s Rafat Ali Speaks! So, Here’s Who’s Next… | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD

Foremski's Take:

The valuation of TechCrunch is not comparable with that of Weblogs or PaidContent. TechCrunch should be valued at a much higher level especially compared with the extremely generous Weblogs valuation.

But should Mike Arrington take the money and run anyway? Valuations of online news sites appear to be trending downwards. Weblogs valuation was very very good, PaidContent, which has much higher revenues than Weblogs had, has a comparably poorer valuation.

There are signs that revenues for online news sites are under pressure. Gawker Media, for example, recently cut pay rates for its writers. [Gawker Media cuts payrates… Again! : The Blog Herald]

Also, Mike Arrington has spoken about plans for TechCrunch to be the acquirer of other online news sites and to take on CBS's CNET. Taking $30m and becoming part of AOL would be anathema for Mr Arrington, even if the deal were sweetened.

On another note, it's a shame that Kara Swisher and colleague Walt Mossberg didn't have the courage to strike out on their own with AllThingsD.com. They have built up an excellent site but it is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

Maybe, AOL would have been bidding $20m to $30m for AllThingsD by now, instead of TechCrunch.

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[Wrapping up the week in three dots . . .]

Kara versus Walt . . .

Coming up at the DEMOFall conference in San Diego September 7-9:

Special Session: Walt and Kara: Head-to-Head

As the hosts of The Wall Street Journal's esteemed D Conference, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher have challenged the leaders of the digital world with tough questions and probing interviews. Their toughest interview isn't with Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, though. It's with each other. The Dynamic Duo of All Things Digital debate each other on their blog, AllThingsD.com, and now live on the DEMOfall stage. What lies ahead for the Digital Age? Walt and Kara go Head-to-Head.

[Here is Kara telling hilarious stories about Walt at SDForum Visionary Awards:]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6812621760915098674&hl=en

Euro Entrepreneurial Domination . . .

Wellington Partners, the $1.2bn European VC firm threw a party to mark the launch of their Palo Alto office. It was a stellar setting, the "cube" of the new Jewish history museum n San Francisco, and a stellar crowd of top journalists and bloggers. One of the Wellington partners made a speech about how Wellington was going to help Euro domination in the entrepreneurial field.

I spoke with one of the partners after the party as we were kicking around a soccer ball (one of the tchotchkies) outside. I said Euopean based entrepreneurs could be counted on . . . "the fingers of one hand," he finished my sentence with a laugh. Europe is not known as a hot bed of entrpreneurism. There are far, far more European entrepreneurs over here than over there.

Wellington Partners opens Silicon Valley office ...

SNCR Call for 2008 New Comm Awards . . .

I'm proud to be a founding member of the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) think tank, created by Jen McClure and based in Palo Alto. SNCR has put out a call for entries for the 2008 Excellence in New Communications Awards.

These prestigious awards honor corporations, governmental and nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, media outlets, and individuals who are innovating the use of social media, ICT, mobile media, online communities and virtual worlds and collaborative technologies in the areas of business, media, and professional communications, including advertising, marketing, public relations and corporate communications, as well as entertainment, education, politics, and social initiatives.

Events . . .

Tech Women at the Churchill Club July 15

The event, moderated by Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, will feature the inspiring stories of four women technology leaders, the critical factors in their success and how have they overcame the obstacles of the fast-paced tech industry that is often considered to be dominated by men: Gina Bianchini, CEO of hot tech start-up Ning; Charlene Li, principal analyst at Forrester Research; Teresa Takai, CIO of the State of California, the 10th-largest economy in the world

http://www.churchillclub.org/eventDetail.jsp?EVT_ID=777

AlwaysON Stanford Summit July 22-24.

The AlwaysOn & STVP Summit at Stanford is a two-and-a-half-day executive gathering that highlights the significant economic, political and commercial trends disrupting the global technology industries.

Weekend Watcher:

San Francisco's premiere jazz composer and performer Marcus Shelby plays a free concert in San Francisco at the Yerba Buena Gardens Saturday July 12 at 1pm.

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The UK newspaper group Guardian Media paid $30 million for PaidContent, a media company founded by Rafat Ali and which publishes a popular newsletter and web site covering the media industry.

The Guardian newspaper is one of the top UK newspapers famous for its left of center position. It is also well known for its extensive coverage of the media industry, making it a good fit for the acqusition of PaidContent.

The Guardian has also been one of the leaders in using new media technologies such as RSS.

Will European Euros be used to buy more US media properties?

WSJ's Boomtown:

Guardian Media Group Buys paidContent for $30 Million

PaidContent:

ContentNext 2.0: Life With The Guardian Media Group

ReadWriteWeb:

Confirmed: PaidContent Bought By the Guardian - Here's How Media History is Made

GigaOM:

Why Guardian Media Bought paidContent for $30M - GigaOM

It was very good to see my very good friend Om Malik Tuesday evening at a reception for his Infrastructure '08 conference. Om recently launched Om 2.0 a slimmer and healthier Om. And an Om that is 50 lbs lighter than the prior version.

I said, "Surely that is Om 1.5?"

Om said "less is more." So let's call it Om 2.5 :-)

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Linking and quoting content from web sites is what makes the world wide web into a true web. It's a fantastic media technology that can publish content and distribute it to almost anywhere in the world in seconds.

Associated Press recently took steps to limit the web by preventing unlicensed sites from quoting from its news stories. This is a bad policy because it is restrictive and it lessens the value of the web, and in my view, it is uneccessary.

Fair use frustration . . .

AP's policy is born out of the general frustration felt by the media and other content creators when their content is used by others for profit or for publicity--and the content creator doesn't share in the value reaped by others.

Those that take large chunks of content from AP or from other sites under undefined fair use policies say that they are driving traffic to the source site. But anyone that has access to their server logs knows this is only slightly true. The problem is that only a small fraction of traffic goes to the source site. And only a small percentage of that traffic can be monetised by the source site.

So that means content creators, if they produce something of value that is widely quoted and distributed, are unable to benefit much from the value they create for others that use or reference that content.

Clearly, that's not fair use, because creating news content for example, is expensive. You need journalists, editors, pension plans, offices, administrators, and janitors... Google News and other news aggregators machines to harvest that content - that's a low cost of content--all harvested as "fair use."

Bloggers and others, do pretty much the same: they take and quote freely from content such as news stories and they benefit from that content--they create a personal brand and following that helps them in their day job-- they profit from it. But the content creators don't get to benefit from the value that is created by those that use or reference that content.

Meritorious support . . .

It doesn't have to be that way. And we don't have to lock up content and make the web less useful, as AP appears to be doing. There is potentially another way in which content can be created and distributed freely and which would support content creators to create more content.

My proposal is a voluntary system in which you quote freely from a site and you republish an "adtribution link" next to it that would help support the source site. An adtribution link would be a simple text link ad set by the source site. This would meritorious support because only good content gets quoted and the bad doesn't.

The adtribution link c