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media file 11.16.09 | Why all great digital firms will build or buy an ad network

Why all great digital firms will build or buy an ad network

On the Advertising Age site, ad network exec Todd Sacerdoti confidently forecasts the future for his profession. Just as all major digital firms have either built or bought some form of email, communications, or social networking technology to unify their customer base, so too will they build or buy an ad network to unify the commercial marketplace for these customers.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for November 16,2009:

Why “lean” is the future of innovation

Can innovation initiatives succeed in business environments that stress efficiency and effectiveness? Sure, write the editors of Knowledge@Wharton, because lean processes force innovators to size up opportunities quickly, and move on if there’s no clear path to success. Companies typically waste a lot of time and money on product development because standards and processes for accelerating the best ideas and killing marginal ones are often implicit or nonexistent. Lean innovation works because it subjects new ideas to feasibility and marketplace tests much earlier in the development cycle than is typical for more white-coat development efforts, with the result that the greenlighted innovation already has an existing following among staff and customers.

Why innovation efforts usually fail

On the Forbes site, growth strategist Peter Hartung explains why corporate innovation initiatives have such a dismal success rate. Easy, Hartung says: Innovation is an inherently inefficient, messy, and disruptive process; whereas most corporate innovation efforts strive for the efficient and effective use of capital to leverage and preserve existing revenue streams. Such wishful thinking leads to a predictable result: Not only does the innovation effort fail, but at the end of the process the organization often finds itself on a downward spiral, with no new growth opportunities in sight to offset declines in its core business.

Why innovation is the engine of green business

Innosight’s Strategy & Innovation site documents a discussion between Innosight partner Mark Johnson and sustainability consultants Andrew Shapiro and Lewis Perkins on how innovation is jump-starting and sustaining the green economy.

Will “augmented reality” change how we know our world?

On the Harvard Business site, management consultant John Sviokla argues that while “augmented reality”--the novel technique of layering digital content on top of ordinary reality--holds the potential to spark the next revolution in business creativity, further accelerating the digital transformation of traditional industries such as media, advertising, health care, and consumer services--it also has the power to ultimately reframe our relationship with such basic concepts as information, knowledge, learning, and memory.

media file 9.28.09 | Collaboration 2.0: A new paradigm for sustainability

Collaboration 2.0: A new paradigm for sustainability

On the Harvard Business site, global outsourcing executive Vineet Nayar says that smart companies everywhere are recognizing the need to reinvent and realign their relationships with stakeholders along democratic lines, creating in the process a new ethic of shared vision, risk, and reward that will render obsolete traditional attitudes about competition. Nayar labels this new paradigm “collaboration 2.0.”

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for September 28, 2009:

Four rules for constructive competition

Observing the current political scramble to avoid real innovation in health care, Havas Media Lab’s Umair Haque offers four rules he thinks will increasingly define the competitive environment of the 21st century. These include: Innovation over protectionism; “thick value” over “thin value”; awesome products and services over clever business models; and ethics over expedience as the foundation for strategy. Haque writes in his Edge Economy blog on the Harvard Business site.

Introducing “web squared”

On the Forbes site, web 2.0 promoter Tim O’Reilly reaches into the future and names it “web squared”: a just-dawning era in which the building blocks of web 2.0--open platforms and social networks--are married to new technologies that provide a sense of place and belonging to users currently overwhelmed by the Internet’s undifferentiated abundance. Among these new advancements: GPS, which turns every smart phone into a place-based directory of friends and potential experiences; and the “smart grid,” which makes it possible to update one’s current and emerging interests in real time. The combination of these advancements, plus others, will geometrically increase the importance of digital technology in our daily pursuit of a fulfilling life.

Inside P&G’s new values-based strategy

On the Harvard Business site, professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter tears the wrapper off a new strategy that consumer giant Procter & Gamble has introduced to jump-start global growth. Taking a cue from the socially responsible business movement, P&G has adopted a “purpose-inspired growth strategy” with the goal of “touching and improving more consumers’ lives in more parts of the world... more completely.” As company insiders see it, the new strategy is not a departure from previous practice but an advancement of it, reflecting P&G’s 171-year effort to deliver superior customer value. What has changed? The company’s definition of “value.”

Change your mind, and the rest will follow

On Seth Godin’s blog, the marketing guru describes what comes first. Is it great execution, as so many business authorities have declaimed? No. It’s proper attitude, without which tactics and execution mean nothing. After attitude come approach, goals, and strategy. Then tactics and execution. Get the order of values right; you can make a lot of mistakes along the way and still come out smelling sweet. Start from the bottom of the hierarchy, and sooner or later your work will stink.

Emerging markets will surge post-crisis

Emerging markets will emerge from the global economic crisis in a position to put huge growth numbers on the board, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute. While developed economies will still be recovering from the drop in global equities to almost 50 percent of their 2008 value, and the reduction in cross-border capital flows by almost 80 percent during the same period, emerging economies will have largely avoided the root causes of these problems, and as a result will be well positioned to gain share as markets rebound.

What both sides are missing in the pay wall debate

On MediaShift Idea Lab, Knight News Challenge winner Martin Moore pokes holes in the ideological barriers erected by both sides in the increasingly divisive “pay wall” debate. On one side, corporate media executives want to turn back the clock to a time when media profitability was driven by scarcity and control; on the other side, technologists, media activists, bloggers, and others seek to position information abundance as an emergent human right. Entrenched in their positions, neither side seems capable of recognizing the opportunities that exist to add value to both the customer experience and the public good by extending the findability and usefulness of content through enhanced metadata, mashups, and other readily deployable techniques.

More proof that the Long Tail exists... only in Chris Anderson’s mind

Knowledge@Wharton gives yet another drubbing to Wired editor Chris Anderson’s much trumpeted, but still completely unproven, Long Tail theory. For a $1 million prize offered by online movie distributor Netflix, Wharton researchers analyzed whether or not Netflix sales data--which Anderson used to justify the theory in his 2004 book--could actually support the claim that the virtually unlimited choice made possible via digital commerce would lead consumers to select niche products in greater numbers than they do in the offline world. Not true for Netflix, said the Wharton wonks. Instead, the Pareto Principle--aka, the 80/20 rule--applied with a vengeance to the Netflix data. The problem with Anderson’s theory, said the researchers, is that products get into the Long Tail for good reasons... nobody’s ever heard of them, and nobody cares. Recommendation engines can only reflect tastes, not fundamentally change them.

media file 9.10.08: The semantic web, for real

Introducing Ubiquity

On the Mozilla Labs blog, Head of User Experience Aza Raskin discusses Ubiquity, a natural-language interface for Mozilla browsers that gives users the ability to create their own mashups on the fly, tapping existing open APIs that developers currently employ to create site-hosted mashups. Raskin says that the experiment promises to usher in a new era of “user-centric” browsing, in which users tell the browser what tasks they want to accomplish, rather than what information on the web they want to find.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for September 10, 2008:

Six Degrees of Separation Is Now Three

TechCrunch reports on a study by French mobile firm O2 that updates the “six degrees of separation” meme. According to the study, the average person is now connected to others by three degrees of separation or less, via social networks of work, family, and friendship. When the “six degrees” concept was first promulgated in 1967, mobile phones, online social networks, and other fixtures of contemporary wired society had not yet been invented.

How the Music Business Spent the Summer Killing Itself

To read Advertising Age’s Simon Dumenco describe it, the music industry has formed yet another circular firing squad, placing streaming-music sites Muxtape and Pandora in the center. By securing rules forcing streaming-media sites to pay steep “performance royalties,” the music industry threatens to snuff out a venue that encourages users to sample a broad range of songs and artists, beyond the single-download mentality of iTunes or the narrow, hit-driven repertoire of most terrestrial radio (which is not saddled with performance royalties). The problem, Dumenco writes, is that music industry executives are delusional--clinging to a past that is gone and not likely to return, instead of exploring paths to future revenue.

Magazine Web Traffic Continues To Rise

Unique visitors to magazine web sites rose 8.5 percent in the second quarter of 2008 versus the same period in 2007, according to a report released by the Magazine Publishers Association and summarized on MediaPost. Based on site traffic data compiled by Nielsen Online on 314 consumer magazine brands, the report states that total magazine web site reach rose to 69.7 million people or 42.2 percent of the US Internet population, compared with 64.2 million people or 40.5 percent penetration in 2007. Average time per visitor rose 12 percent to roughly 29 minutes per month, said the report. This figure is meaningful because publishers typically report magazine usage figures in terms of minutes or hours spent reading per issue.

Participatory Philanthropy, Part I

In the first of a two-part post for MediaShift Idea Lab, Global Voices’ David Sasaki examines how so-called “crowdsourcing” strategies can give philanthropic organizations the ability to effectively vet a much broader range of charitable opportunities than is feasible through traditional project selection processes.

Participatory Philanthropy, Part II

In the second of a two-part post for MediaShift Idea Lab, Global Voices’ David Sasaki examines how so-called “crowdsourcing” strategies can give philanthropic organizations the ability to more effectively measure the social impact of their charitable activities than is possible through traditional project evaluation approaches. Crowdsourcing can supplement or potentially replace professional, consultant-driven evaluation methods with approaches that give the target beneficiary communities themselves the tools to judge the success of development and philanthropic projects.

CIA, FBI push ‘Facebook for spies’

CNN reports on A-Space, a Facebook-like, classified social network created for analysts within the 16 US intelligence agencies. The site was designed to ensure that crucial bits of intelligence data or analysis produced by individual analysts don’t get lost in the sea of information collected the various agencies. Analysts can highlight a specific piece of intelligence and share it with their “friends”--analysts working for the other agencies.

media file 9.9.08: Platforms are markets

What Apple Knows That Facebook Doesn’t

What does Apple know that Facebook doesn’t? That platforms are markets. In his Edge Economy blog on the Harvard Business site, strategist Umair Haque offers this insight: Whereas Facebook is treating its platform in the traditional way, as a mechanism to be manipulated and controlled, Apple is treating the iPhone platform in a next-gen way, as a market to be made. The result: Facebook is turning something good (the open web) into something evil (a closed system), along the way destroying the value of its platform. Meanwhile, Apple is turning something evil (the notoriously closed mobile industry) into something good (a radically open market), along the way altering the very nature of competition in the mobile space and driving up the value of its platform.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for September 9, 2008:

Designing the Future of Business

On BusinessWeek, design guru Marty Neumeier ponders the notion that design is fast replacing strategy as the key driver of business innovation and growth. In a social and economic environment characterized by relentless and disruptive change, design--with its inherent emphasis on creativity, improvisation, and innovation--confers the ability to explore and invent the widest possible range of solutions to the problems facing organizations, markets, and the world.

How to Win by Studying Culture

On the Harvard Business blog Real-World Innovation, Scott Berkun interviews anthropologist Grant McCracken about why marketers should add cultural studies to their professional toolkits. Culture supplies the infrastructure for thought and feeling in a group, including how consumers relate to a company and its products and services, and how companies relate to their market and stakeholders. Organizations that understand culture gain an extraordinary advantage, McCracken says.

Google Launches Cloud Operating System “Chrome” And Calls It A “Browser”

Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodgett writes that Google’s strategy for its new Chrome web browser eerily resembles the game plan Microsoft used to gain dominance in the web browser and desktop application software markets: Tie its new “cloud”-based software lineup (such as Google Docs and Google Gears) to its search engine and browser, and leverage that tight linkage into top market share.

Google’s Strategy In Japan: Avoid Yahoo And Take Over The Mobile Web First

How is Google coping with Yahoo’s overwhelmingly dominant position in the Japanese search engine and portal market, one of the world’s most lucrative? According to TechCrunch, the company is effectively backburnering its desktop efforts in favor of pursuing a number one position in mobile search, via (1) strategic partnerships with Japan’s top mobile carriers, (2) promoting mobile Gmail to subvert Yahoo Mail’s grip on the email space, (3) amping up its Android open mobile software business development activity, and (4) pouring development dollars into turning Japan’s relatively closed mobile environment into a testbed for breakthrough mobile applications that could eventually go global.

Why Yahoo Japan Is Worth Nearly As Much As Yahoo

TechCrunch analyzes why Yahoo Japan’s market valuation is nearly as great as that of the parent US company, and asks if its strategy is an anomaly or a model for going global on the web. Key strategy elements: (1) partner with a local powerhouse; (2) get super-localized; and (3) extend your reach through your entire value chain, via mergers, acquisitions, and strategic partnerships.

A Muckraker’s Slaying Leaves Russian Province Fearing Crackdown

The Wall Street Journal reports on the death of Magomed Yevloyev, the publisher of an independent online news site in the Russian province of Ingushetia. The site accused provincial authorities with using hit squads to silence political opposition. Yevloyev was arrested at the Ingushetia aiport and shot in the head shortly thereafter. Authorities say the death was an accident.

media file 8.13.08: Don’t calculate; innovate!

None of Your Business Model

On MediaShift Idea Lab, MIT Media Lab researcher Christopher Csikszentmihalyi posits that the current rush to find a business model to support professional journalism may be missing the point. The most disruptive trend in the recent history of information technology--the free software movement--succeeded largely in the absence of anything resembling a conventional business model. Instead, it began by reformulating the basic notion of how software development is done, and the business models that subsequently emerged inherited the transformative efficiencies that came with free software’s movement-based approach. Media could evolve in much the same way.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for August 13, 2008:

The innovation imperative

KMWorld interviews innovation guru John Kao on the moral imperative to introduce the concept of innovation to all aspects of the US economy. Why? A focus on innovation puts all stakeholders on an equal footing--and thereby advances a more just, equitable, competitive, and prosperous society.

Managing Corporate Social Networks

Here’s the news you don’t want to hear, courtesy of Harvard Business Review: When left unmanaged, corporate social networks inhibit innovation, rather than enable it. Company executives shouldn’t expect informal, interdivisional networks to spontaneously produce innovations; they must consciously manage the structure of these networks to promote innovation at all its various stages.

Japan’s super-advanced mobile web: Too unique to serve as a global blueprint?

Why has the mobile web taken off like wildfire in Japan, while in the US it’s still mostly found in Powerpoint presentations? Techcrunch identifies the key conditions that have resulted in 70 percent penetration in that market: Superior mobile web technology; great content; and a tech-savvy, demanding consumer base.

CondeNet Positions to Better Compete With Ad Networks

Feeling the hot breath of niche advertising networks like Glam Media close behind it, Conde Nast is unifying its CondeNet web holdings under a set of content-specific buys, according to Advertising Age.

Censorship: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google Agree on Code of Conduct

In the aftermath of civil liberties scandals that have tarnished their reputations in the global marketplace, ReadWriteWeb reports that the world’s three largest Internet content providers have agreed on a global code of conduct that focuses on three core components: adherence to the principles of freedom of expression and privacy; a set of common implementation guidelines; and a shared governance and accountability framework.

Green business: Scandinavia’s lateral thinkers

The Guardian dissects Sweden’s knockout success in creating a green economy with a double-digit growth rate. The keys: a consensus society that includes all stakeholders; and a commitment to profit.

media file 8.6.08: CNET founder adopts open media strategy for new content venture

Questions for Shelby Bonnie

ClickZ interviews CNET founder and former CEO Shelby Bonnie about Whisky Media, his new online media company that specializes in vertical content sites targeting young males. Whiskey Media uses open-source wiki software that allows small development teams to build community sites that can scale rapidly in size and reach by providing a structured framework for managing user-submitted content.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for August 6, 2008:

P&G Changes Its Game

BusinessWeek reports on what it calls “one of the most intriguing change management efforts going on in Corporate America today”: The introduction of “design thinking” into Proctor & Gamble’s business strategy. Design thinking involves applying design principles to business problems, developing several creative approaches to a problem and testing and refining these approaches with stakeholders’ feedback.

It’s Time for a Revenue Revolution

MediaShift Idea Lab’s Dan Pacheco proposes that local newspapers look beyond advertising--which typically attracts less than half of a community’s businesses--to “business marketing,” which all businesses need and online media are well suited to deliver.

Helping the Almost-Journalists Do Journalism

The Center for Citizen Media’s Dan Gillmor discusses the renaissance of so-called “advocacy journalism”: journalism-quality reporting, done by non-profit advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, among others, which is showing potential to fill the information gap created by the implosion of traditional journalism.

NAA: Newspaper Sites’ Q2 Traffic Up 12.2 Percent Over 2007; Numbers Are Flat Compared To Q1

paidContent reports on Q2 2008 newspaper web site audience statistics from the Newspaper Association of America. Newspaper sites now reach more than 40 percent of all Internet users, but growth has cooled off in reach, page views, and advertising, a trend that is complicating efforts to transition online.

Newspapers Think Locally for Online Ads

The Wall Street Journal reports that newspapers’ struggles to replace declining print advertising revenue with online ads is being thwarted by competition from Google, Craigslist, and other pure Internet plays. Newspapers saw their share of the online market decline to 27 percent from 36 percent in 2006.

Craigslist CEO: Our Real Estate Listings Are Booming

Silicon Alley Insider talks with Craigslist’s Jim Buckmaster about the state of the business. Top line: Worldwide, Craigslist now draws 50 million users and 12 billion page views per month; 2008 is the first year where compound annual growth has not exceeded 100 percent.

EBay Launches Dedicated International Ad Division

ClickZ reports that EBay has launched a London-based group to manage multinational advertising campaigns across the company’s international portfolio of sites, with a combined global reach of 80 million users.

Brandstreaming: What Is It & Who’s Doing It?

ReadWriteWeb discusses “brandstreaming,” a new marketing methodology that takes advantage of so-called “lifestreaming” applications such as Friendfeed and Twitter to deliver what it calls “a consistent flow of content created by a brand.”

media file 7.7.08: Social nets spawning a new era of global social enterprise

A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution

Havas Director Umair Haque writes in his Edge Economy blog that the next wave of business innovation will come from tapping the power of social networks to organize the world's main social and economic functions and thereby produce global social change.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for July 7, 2008::

The next step in open innovation

The McKinsey Quarterly discusses "distributed co-creation": a development paradigm in which partners, suppliers, and customers are directly involved in creating new products and services, and share in the rewards of those efforts.

Collaborative Filtering: Lifeblood of The Social Web

ReadWriteWeb looks at how a philosophy pioneered by Amazon.com is shaping the social web. The "Wisdom of the Crowds" and the "Law of Large Numbers" are two core memes that make the social web decisively superior to any expert-driven media environment.

Creative Commons Launches Global Case Studies Project

Creative Commons announces the launch of the Case Studies Project, a global community wiki showcasing successful implementations of the organization's intellectual property licensing system by CC copyright holders worldwide.

Three Obstacles to a Truly Global Conversation

In MediaShift Idea Lab, Global Voices' David Sasaki reports on the Global Voices Summit, where over 200 media activists discussed the primary barriers to creating truly global online community. Top barrier: censorship.

Another "Chinese YouTube" Raises Monster Cash

Silicon Alley Insider reports on youku.com, a Chinese video sharing site that has raised more than $80 million in venture funds, mostly from US firms, and has somehow avoided the censorship death grip stifling other similar Chinese sites, such as 56.com.

In Iran, blogging web could get you killed

iafrica.com reports that a bill has been introduced into the Iranian parliament that extends the death penalty to the crime of "establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy," as reportedly stated in the bill's text.

Bored With Web 2.0? Demand Change

ReadWriteWeb says that the developer community can beat "web 2.0 ennui" by building applications that harness the power of the social web to bring about social change.

media file 6.12.08: mobile music mashup uses Android and Google Maps

Tunewiki launches location-based music network for iPhone

VentureBeat reports on one of the first new products for the "mobile social web": a location-based music network for Apple's iPhone and Google's Android mobile platform. The network taps the Google Map API to find songs other users nearby are playing.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links daily as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for June 12, 2008:

Is Wikinomics only for rich countries?

First Monday author Morten Rask questions whether the benefits of collaborative content creation are reaching the developing world, or if the same macroeconomic factors that separate rich countries from poor ones are operative on the social web, too.

Paul Steiger’s ProPublica Opens For (Non-Profit) Business

paidContent reports on the launch of ProPublica, a non-profit, public interest journalism venture that will produce nonpartisan investigative reports for free distribution via mainstream news outlets.

Facebook to be Britain's most used website

The Telegraph reports that Facebook is poised to assume the top spot in web site usage in Britain, surpassing Windows Live, Google, and eBay.

Key differences between web 1.0 and web 2.0

Two AT&T Labs researchers offer a taxonomy to objectively describe the web 2.0 phenomenon, and compare the features of popular web 2.0 sites, in this article published on First Monday.

media file 6.10.08: iPhone platform may spur explosion in hyperlocal media

Will 3G iPhone Help Push Geo-Based News?

MediaShift Idea Lab explores the impact of Apple's new GPS-enabled iPhone on the development of location-based online services, mobile social networking, and hyperlocal media.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links daily as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for June 10, 2008:

Federated Media launches analytics tools, gets new partners

VentureBeat reports that blog ad network Federated Media is launching a new web analytics platform that will permit marketers to track ad performance and reader engagement across social media sites. The platform will be extensible via an API.

Content Owners Make a Hash of Online Distribution

With digital rights management and other attempts to curtail content sharing having proven a bust, commercial content publishers have yet to come to grips with the new realities of the open media marketplace, says Internet Evolution blogger Jon Emmons.

Disney.com to Launch Family-Oriented Platform

Mediaweek reports that Disney is planning to launch a family-friendly social network this summer that allows parents to create profiles for the entire family and meet other families in similar life circumstances.

Brit Media Mammoths Mull Merger

WARC reports that United Business Media and Informa--two of Britain's largest business media companies--are in merger talks. The combined company would be worth close to $6 billion, making it one of the largest business information providers worldwide.