“Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault.” - Henry Grunwald | Time Magazine

Open Source Media Company launches their new site tomorrow that is a little bit newspaper and a little bit blog. The idea behind OSM’s new site is to take traditional, stylized journalism and mix it up with the open form, personal journal style of blogs.

Roger Simon and Charles Johnson co-founded OSM, formerly Pajamas Media - uniquely named based on the idea that blogging is an activity that can be done anytime, even at home in your pajamas. Since its founding a year ago, Pajamas Media has raised $3.5 million from venture capitalists; the new OSM will be supported by ads on the site.

OSM has commissioned 70 professional web journalists to begin writing articles on the site. Some of these writers have well-known blogs, others have experience writing for online news sources. The site will center around current news discussion panels featuring blog and non-blog writers. Bloggers and journalists will be evaluated and paid based upon the traffic their articles generate. The site will also link to postings on other blogs, highlighting editor picks.

Eventually, the new site will have a feature for “citizen bloggers” to write and post original, first hand accounts and news during national crises and disasters. This could greatly influence the public, perhaps promoting individuals to get more involved and aware of the world outside of their own.

Essentially, OSM will feature traditional journalists, reputable bloggers, talk radio specialists and “regular” people all contributing facts and opinions about, well…everything.

So what inspired the new project and name change?

“As we have gone forward putting together this company, it has become clear to us that we do not wish to be defined merely as gadflies in opposition to mainstream media. We owe our readers and our colleagues something bigger, an alternative to the structures we have lived with all our lives. It’s not enough to criticize. We also have to build something new.” - Pajamas Media

The idea behind OSM is interesting. If successful, OSM could propel the latest style of news sharing, research and reporting that blogs have already begun to change. However, I have to wonder if this blur of traditional journalism and blogging will further move journalists away from their positions as society’s watchdogs producing fact-based reporting, and instead solicit a more editorial and biased-style of informing the public.

Vist Pajamas Media
Read more: Website to Blend Journalism with Blogs

Google personalized search is now available. Here is a quick overview from SearchEngineWatch. At first glance this seems like a useful functionality for those who search a lot. Google is embracing the ‘tagging’ concept for future searches and also has some enhanced bookmark features. They are embracing features provided by other social networking sites; del.icio.us, shadows, etc.

Read the SEW article carefully. The benefits of this service involve keeping a record of your search activities. Make sure you are comfortable with that before you sign up.

AOL Time Warner (or TIME WARNER aol, whichever you prefer) will soon launch broadcast content online. The long promised AOL TV that was a main impetus for the failed merger will finally make its debut as In2TV, out of fear that Yahoo and Google may beat them to the punch. Old shows such as The Fugitive and Eight is Enough will be available on demand. The merged companies will have an advantage over the other portals in that they have an extensive library of shows to draw from via Warner Brothers.

With the increasing ubiquity of highbandwidth, web content can effectively compete with broadcast content. PC vendors and major computer retail stores are also selling plasmsa TV’s as part of their standard offerings. A time is quickly approaching when TV’s will simply be large monitors for your home computer network.

Will the major broadcasters (ABC, NBC, CBS) lose viewers en masse as the major news papers have lost subscribers? The Drudge Report, consisting of one guy in a house in Florida, has a better Alexa ranking (266) than sizable institutions like The Christian Science Monitor (3136), MSNBC.com (1330), and The Wall Street Journal (485). Will micro-production companies be outmaneuvering the big three with their home grown broadcast content? Most likely. Dinasours like the networks will be caught flat-footed and no more adapt than a brontosaurus would grow hair and figure out how to start a small fire.

What about the motion picture industry? Will Indy movie cafes with films transferred in via FTP start replacing the major studio’s (whose real power is derived from their distribution channels) releases and the mega theatres they’re shown in?

Reuters
New York Times

“The easier it is to communicate, the faster change happens.” - James Burke

I just read an article in my Web Pro News newsletter about the growing popularity of Instant Messenger use in the office. The article pulls data from the third annual AOL Instant Messenger Trends Survey, which reports an overall 19% increase in IM usage year after year.

Of those surveyed about IM use in the workplace:

1. 58% use IM to ask coworkers questions.
2. 29% use IM to interact with clients.
3. 12% have used IM to avoid difficult face-to-face conversations ( I don’t know if this is such a good idea).
4. 38% claim to use IM more than their email.

Read the rest of this entry »

(An email to John Naughton of the Observer, London in response to his article.)

John,

Microsoft has been moving away from the DOS platform since the release of .NET. The underlying vision of .NET is precisely: a world without Windows. The Google model is certainly the future, at least to an extent. The only technology that provides a comparable capability to .NET is J2EE. Yes, a lot of the basic concepts behind .NET were lifted from Java. Microsoft has made most of their money taking the innovation of others to another level. With .NET, applications are written for the framework, not the underlying OS. Therefore, the issue of Windows dominance has already been addressed by MS long before the public would contemplate moving to another platform. While Java is one language, many platforms; .NET is many languages, many platforms. The most important part of having the dominant OS, is the vast development community producing titles for it. Why do persons buy Wintel machines when they would like to by a Mac or try a Suse machine? Because they have nothing to run on it.

MS saw the writing on the wall after being beat to the punch by Netscape’s browser and Sun’s Java. They saw that between these two technologies, a high-bandwidth day would come when the OS was a non-issue. .NET will be the Phoenix that rises from the post-Windows ashes. Now the layer between the OS/browser and the Internet is the issue. The .NET languages will retain the dev base, including disenchanted Java developers. They also wanted to leverage the free development of the Open Source Community by letting them write their own implementation for other platforms, namely Linux. If you have followed the Mono Project (http://www.mono-project.com), you know that a fully functional implementation is already being deployed for Linux, OS X, Solaris, and UNIX. MS can also do this without hastening the end of Windows, which will still be dominant for years to come, since they are not signaling its end by recognizing publicly the relevance of the other platforms. They just let the OSC develop behind the scenes, without condemning or endorsing (or funding).

I have never been a big fan of MS, but learning more about the real strategy behind the .NET framework has given me a newfound respect for them. If you have written any Java, you know that it takes hundreds of lines of code to perform simple tasks. (See: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/beyondjava/) Visual Basic programmers have been spoiled by a helpful amount of required functionality for an app being built into the language. The conveniences that have kept coders writing with MS technologies will be carried over into .NET, almost flawlessly.

With a comprehensive framework in place on the net, and its accompanying legions of developers, MS is in a very strong position to continue to dominate. Google, after all, is still just a good search engine. They will need to partner with or purchase companies for their online offerings and services if they are going to be anything other than a text page with information on it, or a map. or an email address.

Roger Blackmar
LevelTen

Inside sources say that media giant Time-Warner is seeking to sell all or part of their America Online division. While both Yahoo and Google have been mentioned as possible suitors for such a divestiture, it appears now that Microsoft has entered the arena. Such an acquisition would further consolidate Microsoft’s bid to dominate the Internet, especially regarding their seriously flawed browser, Internet Explorer.

AOL and their subsidiary, Compuserv, have some 22,000,000 customers between them. The default browser supplied to them has been a proprietary version of IE until recently. With the expiration last year of a contract with Microsoft, AOL began rolling out to their Compuserv customers a new version of Netscape, which is owned by AOL. Presumably, with an ownership change, AOL and Compuserv customers would then be forced to use IE.

Internet Explorer has come under fire in recent months for serious security flaws which can allow Cross Site Scripting (XSS attacks), remote execution of arbitrary code, and other issues, which Microsoft has declined to address.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Microsoft_to_buy_AOL_/0,2000061733,39212223,00.htm

The United Nations and the European Union are pushing for international management of the Internet because critics are uncomfortable with — and jealous of — what is viewed as an American monopoly, when in fact, the U.S. does not control the Internet. It simply oversees it, but with very little input. And for good reason: the Department of Defense (not Al Gore) invented the Internet, and the Commerce Department assigned the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to serve as the Web’s technical coordinator.

ICANN is on course to expire in 2006, which could present an opportunity to transfer control to the private sector.

Some third-world countries, notably Cuba and Syria, are seeking the ability to restrict the free flow of information to their citizens.

In the meantime, the Bush administration has promised not to make ICANN the “I-CAN’T” organization by ceding Internet management to foreign authorities.

Story here

Microsoft is venturing out of its “shrink wrapped” business model into an online/on-demand service such as Google and other competitors have positioned themselves in. Gates is billing it as “a revolution in how we think about software”. Windows Live and Office Live will be an evolution of Microsoft’s traditional system of distribution for its market leading products, following a “service + software” strategy. Google and Yahoo’s services have grown in complexity and functionality over the last year, offering calendars, planners, journals, voice services, etc. as well as standard email and messaging. Sun Microsystems has recently partnered with Google to provide a service based version of OpenOffice, an increasingly popular and cost effective alternative to MS Office. As with the .NET Framework, Microsoft boldly plots a strategy that sidesteps their cash cow, Windows, through browser based hosted software. They envision the current $15bn market of service based software to grow to $150bn in ten years.

An online/on-demand model has become a practical alternative to “shrink wrapped” distribution through wider adoption of high bandwidth connectivity and the dependence of desktop applications on continual patches and updates from the web. Microsoft will generate revenue through three options: free services with advertising, standard subscription, and fully-featured premium subscription for power users.

This more than likely represents a “testing the water” first step for MS: Windows Live will debut as, essentially, a re-packaging of Messenger, Hotmail, antivirus functionality, browser functionality, and other features; and Office Live will debut offering entrepreneurs there own domain, website, and email services, as well as the online project and document management tools. However, it is a fairly dramatic recognition that the success of Google’s business model (and the portal model in general) represents a threat to the foundation of the traditional shrink wrap model. And the contexual advertising opportunities are enviable. Is is not difficult to envision a tax filing firm’s advertisement contexually placed with an Excel service being used to calculate a user’s income taxes. (Is this the first stage of Windows becoming more of a portal than an OS?) Here is a screen shot of how the new “Live” offerings fit into the MS line.

What does this mean to us?
LevelTen is uniqueley positioned to capitalize on the tectonic shifts the sofware industry will be experiencing in the coming years. As desktop functionality makes its way to a revolutionary new form of distribution, they will require a revolutionary form of marketing and PR. Will bloated, bureaucratic “full service” ad firms be agile and adaptive enough to meet the challange? Are they adaptive enough to meet today’s challenges? Large companies, even the Microsofts, will need fresh ideas from lean, up-and-coming organizations keenly attuned to the vicissitudes of the web marketplace.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4399018.stm
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9897607/
http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/001050.html