DISQUS

Layers on top of someone elses' content. Another way to make money off the work of others. Why don't companies like RocketOn create something original instead of trying to "layer on" the work of others? I guess it's easier this way...

Wow! Thank you for taking the time, and ten times my original piece in length to prove me wrong and failing so spectacularly. I guess Mashable doesn't care about the quality of its content.

-I quoted Valleywag because that's where I saw it first, nothing wrong with that.

-People still think of GOOG as a technology company, just because you found a reference to someone talking about blogger means nothing. Google continues to be thought of as a tech company by most people.And it thinks of itself as a tech company.

- Google profits from Google news by sending traffic to sites that use AdSense.

-Not profiting from a service doesn't mean they don't hurt the profits of other companies. It''s like saying Craigslist only makes money from job ads and therefore has no effect on the classified advertising business of newspapers.

- Yes, "heritage" media has a lot to blame for missing the boat in many ways but even if it hadn't missed the boat, even if it had been blogging etc,years before, it wouldn't help. That's because the online business model is much poorer than the "heritage" business model. "They can't get there from here" is the way I like to explain it because online advertising and other online revenue opportunities can't support the "heritage" costs of media. Google and others have helped to create very low cost online advertising and thus set the price of advertising online. Google and its ilk doesn't want editors or journalists it uses software and servers. "Heritage" media can't compete against that model.

- Yes, millions of bloggers, a veritable citizen journalist army will replace the old media! Wow, you really believe all this "emerging" media stuff don't you! Good luck.

I've got an iPhone and I like it. Yet I get so many people coming up to me telling me why they won't get one, why their phone is better, why they are waiting for their contract to run out before getting one, what is wrong with the iPhone. Non-iPhone users are totally hung up about the iPhone, which is strange. I really don't care about their reasons for not having an iPhone. And I say that not in anyway believing I own a superior technology product (in which the phone part sucks). Why do others care so much about their cell phones? My guess is that these are the new PCs, Personal Cellphones, and they are a statement of a specific kind, about the owner, which is why there is so much emotional involvement (not on my part of course.)

The interesting thing about my post about funding Web 2.0 companies is that we don't have a definition of the term Web 2.0. Which doesn't really matter, because we are now in a 2.5ish transition to something new... Come to our 2.5 Web conference in SF in December :-)

Techmeme was acquired by GOOG secretly in January. Gabe had to cover his Las Vegas CES "expenses."

$1 per user seems like a lot, especially since most of the applications are fun, such as the zombie one, and the cocktails, etc. I'm not sure how well those types of apps can be monetized, or their longevity. But there will certainly be some new business opportunities from Facebook apps and the sooner you can get into this the easier it will be to rise up above the white noise of thousands of other developers jumping in.

I totally agree. It seems somehow backward to give away breaking news but charge for old news(!) I think both should be given away...
As you say, newspapers have tons of material in archives and the search engines will serve it up for ever and ever. It's a shame not to let the search engines establish your brand wherever, and all over the internet.
Soon, many of these things will seem obvious, but for now, they are counter intuitive to many of the media establishment. But that is changing.

Nice summary of the evening. An interesting point is about the value creation. These media sites don't make a heck of a lot of money, so how can newspapers and magazine make money with the current online business models? Newspaper web sites are growing in readership but that increase cannot support their costs of doing business. So how will we pay for professional journalism...?

Well, I've drained several savings accounts and am working my way through emptying my pension plan because I can't stop doing what I'm doing and I don't want to take a day-job like 99.999999 per cent of the Blogosphere.

We will have a professional media that can pay for itself because otherwise everything becomes partisan and skewed. Also, the blogosphere doesn't have to get up every day and do this. Journalists do it every day.

Everybody can be their own courtroom lawyer, but we know what the punchline to that one is. Similaraly, a society that relies on bloggers for its media and decimates its media professionals is foolish. Democracy relies on the quality of its media. Society uses media to think through big problems and we have some massive ones to deal with.