virtualeconomics

News Corp (finally!) taps the newsgathering potential of MySpace

If you were a news company and you bought one of the biggest social networks in the world, you'd probably start thinking about synergies between news and social networking and exploring ways of tying them together. Oddly, though, News Corp's first attempt to combine MySpace with news was just a news aggregator, launched a couple of years ago and then (as far as I know) never mentioned again. In fact, it's taken them a staggeringly long time to realise that tens of millions of people talking every day about the things they've seen might just produce the odd bit of news themselves - but they finally got there, adding uReport to the network so that users can submit photo and video to Fox News. 

The show must go on (and on, and on)

Ricky Gervais today became the latest in a long line of performers to rail in fury against the elementary workings of supply and demand. From his blog:

"Tickets for my Edinburgh show are changing hands for £200. Please don't buy them. The people selling them are scum...I have tried to stop this happening but I can’t. I’ve tried holding tickets back for sale on the night. I've tried putting gigs on sale at the last minute so people don't have time to put them on eBay, but nothing works."

And, indeed, nothing will, short of playing more nights so that the supply of performances matches the demand for them at whatever price Ricky imagines fair. Want the after-sale ticket price to fall below £200? Put on more shows. You'll know you're doing enough shows when the price on eBay falls to the face value.

At the intersection of Twitter and print journalism

There's something slightly unsettling about watching Ben Goldacre decide what topic to cover in his next Bad Science column for the Guardian newspaper by asking people who happen to follow him on Twitter what he should write about. But I can't quite put my finger on why it seems odd that the contents of a future newspaper article should get decided this way. 

"We, errr, bought things pretty much at random. Now we need to sell them"

First eBay, now Yahoo - it seems two of the biggest online businesses in the world are finally rationalising their portfolios by, well, flogging off all the random things they bought over the past ten years and never really found any use for. eBay has already given StumbleUpon back to its founders and proposed an IPO for Skype; now Yahoo is apparently looking to offload Hotjobs and will put other divisions up for sale when it reports later today. Not long ago ITV announced it would try to sell Friendsreunited. My guess for the next few sales of social media toys acquired at random by big companies who thought they needed something that sounded a bit web2.0-ey? More Yahoo bolt-ons, especially Delicious; AOL's Bebo, which it has never been able to do much with (except watch Facebook eat their lunch); and maybe it's even time for Google to admit that

(a) it doesn't really have a commercial plan for YouTube and

(b) one isn't going to drop out of the sky like it did for search. 

Amazon and Phorm

Q1: is Amazon going to let Phorm farm its pages for valuable user-behaviour data without paying anything for it?
A: of course not!
Q2: is Amazon going to pretend this is a privacy issue rather than the opening move in a negotiation to secure the appropriate valuation from Phorm for that data?
A: remains to be seen. They're not spooning up the free publicity they could get by claiming that's the issue yet, though.

Censoring facts

Apparently Courage cannot advertise that drinking beer increases confidence. Indeed, no alcohol manufacturer can advertise that alcohol affects a drinker's mood. Even though it's a basic chemical fact that alcohol, a depressant, affects a drinker's mood. I'm with the ever-excellent Daily Mash on this one: "the ASA said the advert for Courage beer was unacceptable because it implied that drinking alcohol could enhance self-confidence in a way that anyone who has ever drunk alcohol is completely aware of". Requiring advertisers to lie is not a positive development for the ASA's work.  

Breaking news - ASOS community launches

My (very pretty) friend Ilana Fox just Twittered the beta launch of a new ASOS community. ASOS is the leading light in revolutionising online fashion retail so it's always interesting to see what they're up to. In this case it's a nice, clean, mostly black social networking interface that - mere moments into what is basically a semi-private launch - seems to be generating plenty of good participation. Obviously a site like this lives or dies on the scale and quality of the network effect it can generate so it's pretty impressive that this early on it's got people signing up and talking. 

Andrew Lloyd Webber is right about Internet piracy

Via Techdirt; Andrew Lloyd Webber has apparently condemned the Internet (yup, the whole thing) as "the Somalia of unregulated theft and piracy".

It's a fascinating claim, and over at Techdirt Mike has already demolished the wilder misconceptions about the Internet and music business models that it implies.

But the claim also belies a curiously one-sided and ultimately misleading view of Somalian piracy. There is, of course, a simplified view of the Somalian naval situation in which evil pirates seize peaceful international shipping and hold it to ransom. So far, so obviously over-simplified as to offer no insights at all. A rather more nuanced view of at least some of Somalia's "pirates" - see eg here in the Independent - points out that much of their activity concentrates on protecting Somalian waters and interests from foreign companies dumping nuclear waste and stealing much-needed seafood off the Somalian coast. Others have pointed out that the so-called pirates have taken on the role of coast-guards (an official function not carried out by the state in decades) in order to prevent arms smuggling. Sure, some of them are just bandits. It is equally clear that many are not, and are ordinary people who have taken up arms to defend Somalia in absence of any sort of formal naval protection.

Begin to sound at all familiar? Sure, there are people who just download music off the Internet because it's free and they don't want to have to pay for it. But the situation, like the situation off the Somalian coast, is vastly more complicated and richer than that single view, and many of those branded "pirates" are actually trying to carry out a valuable public services. In fact, Andrew Lloyd Webber may have had a point.

If only he knew.

New CEO

Hopefully a sign of exciting times ahead that news of our (AND, my employer's) new CEO was broken on his personal blog an hour before it was even picked up via the usual leak to Media Guardian...

Firefox3 vs IE7

Amusing myself this morning by imagining the conversations going on at Microsoft now Mozilla's Firefox 3 browser has overtaken IE7 as the most popular in Europe.

"Why do people still bother switching to Firefox now we've copied the entire damned interface?"
"Because we're evil and they're not. Given the option, people don't seem to like evil."
"Crap. What can we do about that?"
"Be less evil?"
Laughs all round.
"But seriously, what can we really do?"