This week, web publishing focuses on the ways digital media is making headlines. From the mobile web to new careers, digital media is at the forefront of the media business model.
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Web Publishing Roll-up: Digital Media is Hiring, Mobile Web Gets New Tools
LONDON–Could Twitter Labs prevent drunken tweets like Google Labs hinders drunken e-mails? Here’s hoping.
Britt Selvitelle, Twitter’s user experience and front end engineering lead, said here Friday that the company will soon launch Twitter Labs. The service will let developers create add-ons and other functions for the microblogging site. Of course, developers can already do this with Twitter’s API, but this will make Twitter a formal participant in the process.
Selvitelle announced the project at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. He did not offer many details, but it sounds similar in function to Google Labs. Google Labs, for example, launches every few weeks (or sometimes days) new experimental functions for Gmail. The Undo Send feature, which lets people recall an e-mail within seconds of sending it, is one example.
Will Twitter Labs do the same? One can at least hope. In which case, I will be able to recall Tweets like this.
Originally posted at News – Digital Media
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Twitter experimenting with a lab of its own
Sony Music Entertainment’s catalog is coming to indie music retail site Amie Street, in the New York-based start-up’s first major label deal.
But here’s the catch: Sony’s catalog will not be participating in the “dynamic pricing” model that’s been Amie Street’s trademark–unpopular songs are the cheapest, and the price rises as a song is downloaded more. Instead, Sony songs will be available for a flat 69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.29 based on popularity.
“It wasn’t a hard decision for us,” Amie Street co-founder Josh Boltuch told CNET News. “This isn’t affecting all the other dynamically priced music on the site.” He noted that RED, the indie music distribution company owned by Sony, already offers its songs on Amie Street through the dynamic-pricing model. “Sony Music obviously has the option to experiment with dynamic pricing at their discretion,” Boltuch added. “Clearly we would love to do that with them.”
This isn’t the first time that an indie music retailer has had to compromise to ink a major-label deal. Sony was also the first major label to bring its catalog–well, its “classic” back catalog–to subscription site eMusic. But the deal resulted in eMusic raising some of its prices in tandem.
Amie Street, which pitches itself as a way to discover as well as purchase new music, made major headlines last year when it was the only place on the Web to buy songs recorded by Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the call-girl-slash-aspiring-pop-star at the center of the Eliot Spitzer scandal.
Originally posted at News – Digital Media
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Sony catalog comes to Amie Street–with fine print
Wikipedia will soon be adding a feature to its English-language site that assigns an experienced editor to sign off on any changes to articles on living people, according to Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the user-written online encyclopedia.
Confirming a story reported Monday by The New York Times, Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh said the “flagged revisions” feature is already active on the German site, but needs some fleshing out before it goes live to the public on the English site.
The plan is to deploy the feature on a test wiki soon so the Wikipedia community can play around with before it goes public. The test wiki is expected to go live soon, but no specific time frame has been established, Walsh said.
The feature was debated earlier this year in the aftermath of a false entry that was posted by a user, saying Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd had died after an inaugural luncheon in January.
It’s intended to provide some additional “protection” and to “prevent vandals” from messing with living-person articles, Walsh said. Until approved by the volunteer editor, any changes to such articles will sit invisible to the public on Wikipedia’s servers.
This is a big job, Walsh added, and ultimately the community will decide whether to make it a permanent feature. It’s bound to be controversial for those who passionately believe in the site’s motto as “the free encyclopedia anyone can edit.”
Staff writer Daniel Terdiman contributed to this story
Originally posted at News – Digital Media
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Wikipedia to add editing safeguard for the living
Facebook most’s popular music application comes from iLike and soon the service will try to turn that social-networking cachet into song sales.
Seattle-based iLike, a social music service, is expected to launch a music download store in coming days, perhaps as soon as Thursday, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal. Last month, CNET News reported that iLike was in talks with the top four recording companies about securing licenses for downloads.
The new store will debut as a beta version and will feature songs from at least three of the four top major recording companies, according to the sources. On Tuesday, iLike changed the name of its Facebook app to “Music.”
iLike CEO Ali Partovi was not immediately available to comment.
This is a strange time for ad-supported music services, and iLike’s foray into downloads comes as skepticism about the business model is higher than ever. Earlier this year, Ruckus shut its doors and Imeem, which is also testing a download store, faced a financial crisis before securing a round of funding and better licensing terms from the big recording companies.
A CNET examination of SpiralFrog, the first ad-supported download site, which went out of business in March, indicates that advertisers just aren’t willing to pay such sites premium rates. Music listeners, as it turns out, don’t want to stare at ads when they’re listening to songs.
As the ad-supported music sites cast about for ways to generate revenue, some of them are turning to selling downloads. This means they hope they can entice iTunes users, which represents the vast majority of the digital music market, away from Apple.
Others have tried this this tact, including Microsoft, MTV, and Wal-Mart and all have ended up either scurrying away or were forced to scratch out a living by servicing a niche market. By all appearances, Apple continues to be an unstoppable force in music.
Nonetheless, Partovi impresses me as someone who’s not afraid of a fight. Last week, I interviewed him via e-mail and while we didn’t agree on many of the questions surrounding the ad-supported model, there’s no doubt in my mind he thinks he has it figured out.
Partovi on downloads: “Everybody in our business is talking to the major labels almost continuously (about downloads), and for good reason. The licensing landscape has evolved a lot, and it continues to evolve. If and when a deal is available that can offer an even better experience to our users at reasonable costs to us, we’ll always be interested. I can’t discuss any specific negotiations, product ideas, or rumors.”
Partovi on the ad-supported model: “I think the jury is out as to whether ad-supported music consumption will work. However, I think it’s important to remember that there’s much more to music. At iLike, we’ve built a self-sustaining ad-supported business (positive cash flow over the past 8-month period), and that’s with only one full-time ad sales person.”
“What’s our secret? It’s simple: we’re not trying to help consumers get unlimited music without paying for it. Instead, we’re focused on music discovery: we deliver all the other things that music consumers love without risking a lawsuit or paying high royalties. Besides sampling music, people use iLike to get concert notifications, recommend new bands to friends, see video messages or tweets from their favorite artists–all of which has built iLike an audience of more than 120 million uniques per month across all our apps and widgets while maintaining very low costs.”
Updated at 10 p.m. to correct spelling of iLike CEO Ali Partovi’s name.
Originally posted at News – Digital Media
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Is the next iTunes challenger iLike?
