EBay buys Skype
In a deal that has a lot of folks scratching the heads, EBay buys Skype for $2.6 billion in cash. That’s a lot of money, but I’m not so sure this is a bad idea. It gets EBay and PayPal on folks desktops and gives buyers and sellers a direct way to communicate. Check out the investor PowerPoint pitch. Privacy definately is a concern, but at this point, Google knows more about me than my mother.
Inequality and Blogging
Shelley Powers, by critiquing a guest list, hosts a great discussion about the hype machine says our technology solves problems of inequality, while the reality is quite different.
Memorandum revving up
Tech Memorandum and Political Memorandum resemble a Google News for blog driven content. Very impressive. Robert Scoble gave them a heaping of hype and visibility yesterday. There are a number of services that have already been working this space from different angles, three of which are daily visits of mine that I would like to mention: Findory, BlogRunner, and Digg. They try and bring the web’s conversation to you in different ways.
It should be interesting to see how Memorandum vs. Findory vs. BlogRunner vs Digg plays out. Aggregation that recognizes the web as the editor, as Gabe Rivera Memeorandum developer says, is very powerful, as Google News demonstrates.
Update: Memorandum updates real, real, real fast. It even caught my small non-influential post. I’m very curious about how it works.
Interview: Hilary Schneider, Senior Vice President of Knight Ridder
PaidContent: Media Executive Interview Series: Hilary Schneider, Knight Ridder:
Q: How do you view the citizen journalism movement, and where does that fit within your company?
A: We are very intrigued with consumer generated content, and we are actively experimenting with it. At this time, we have in excess of 55 blogs, and we are adding approximately 10 per week. I think that consumer generated media, especially blogs, will be part of the core capability that consumers will come to expect from content providers.
Given this expectation, it will be imperative that we label and brand content that is sourced and edited by KR, so that it is very clear to our readers that we are providing the content, after putting it through KR’s editorial process, especially to protect “truth in advertising.”
It is highly interesting that consumer generated content changes the provision of news from a monologue to much more of a dialogue, in which the consumer has an ability to advance any discussion.