New web app is like Pandora for your tastebuds
I interviewed these guys recently—really interesting web app that’s sure to be a hit with bloggers and foodies alike.
Journalists the world over are struggling to cope with a social and mobile tsunami of ‘user generated content’, to use an increasingly inadequate phrase. Twitter and YouTube will overwhelm news organisations who can’t master their potential.
A common mistake for those seeking to cope with this profound disruption is to confuse technology with innovation. Algorithms, apps and search tools help make data useful but they can’t replace the value judgements at the core of journalism.
Genuine innovation requires a fundamental shift in how journalists think about their role in a changed world. To begin with, they need to get used to being ‘curators’; sorting news from the noise on the social web using smart new tools and good old fashioned reporting skills.
Source: soupsoup
Net Neutrality and Access to Content
The media industry is whining and pissing off all the Googleheads. Apparently, several networks are blocking access to their content when it’s being connected to via GoogleTV. Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures in NYC wrote about this twice over the last week and stirred up some opinions with his viewpoint on net neutrality. Let me preface this with saying that I am not a traditional tech person and my understanding of net neutrality is from a different school of thought than most of the individuals in the tech and online world.
Here is what I comprehend: net neutrality and its proponents advocate that the government and ISPs should remain unprejudiced when it comes to online content -meaning that the government and ISPs can’t interfere with content simply because they don’t like it. For a more lengthy explanation, anyone can head over to Wikipedia and search for net neutrality.
There’s no word from the networks -such as CBS, ABC, and Hulu- as to why there’s the block. There’s also not too much specifically coming from Google camp -yet… but I don’t think this necessarily has to do with net neutrality.
A network blocking access to it’s content when accessed via X-platform has less to do with net neutrality and more to do with web syndication. Syndication has been around for decades in the entertainment world -from radio syndication during the early 20th century to television and film syndication over the last thirty or forty years- and it’s big business. Between selling the rights for a certain show to air in syndication to format sales (e.g. Britain’s Popstars show and American Idol = result of format sale), people make lots of money. Some shows and films even earn more money in syndication than they did during the original airing, such as the original Baywatch. Because of the financial aspects involved, of course networks are going to get fussy about which platforms have access to their content -they want to make sure they get paid!
I don’t suspect that the block for GoogleTV will be a permanent thing, however. Hulu and Netflix have continually grown their inventories, so it’ll only be a matter of time before Google has access, too -it’s only getting so much fuss because it concerns GOOGLE.
