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One problem is that many Internet users eschew the idea of these ads, saying they commercialize authentic dialogue and undermine people’s credibility. “It interferes with your relationship with your friends and your audience,” said Robert Scoble, a technology blogger with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter, who says he “unfollows” people on Twitter who send him ads. Facebook does not allow members to insert paid ads into status updates or profiles. “For us, it goes against the authenticity of the page,” said Brandon McCormick, a Facebook spokesman. Peer2 gets around the ban by offering users points instead of dollars; points are redeemable for Amazon products. - mediaeater

The biggest movies are still backed by megawatt ad buys. On the other hand, Paramount Pictures did not buy a single billboard to promote “Paranormal Activity,” its recent horror film. The studio also saved tens of millions of dollars by forgoing a national television campaign. Instead, Paramount depended on its publicity arm to fan interest on blogs and in traditional media. The flack attack worked: the film, made for just $10,000, has sold $104 million in tickets. - mediaeater

The map itself is to no longer be static; mapping is not either. The need is for a greater range and hybridity of mapping and user options in augmenting or examining the many layers of information in any place. The map is to longer be static, nor in the tense negatively charged stasis of the traditional maps of old. Geo-spatial integration of community , information, narrative,time , history and augmentation may be what becomes web 3.0, but it certainly is to be a key hybrid space and space of measure and discussion. - mediaeater

A demo of our FactFinder API performing real-time fact extraction of two API’s: Yahoo Boss and Twitter. - mediaeater

recently closed a deal for a new CBS drama, “NCIS: Los Angeles,” to sell its repeats for the impressive price of $2.35 million an episode. The buyer? USA network, which happens to be owned by NBC. The original “NCIS” is the most successful program on USA — in repeat episodes. Mr. Moonves noted that the two NCIS editions taken together “are a billion-dollar property.” No show created on any cable network has been able to approach that level of revenue. “My model isn’t broken,” he said. - mediaeater

Arcade Fire > Funeral (180-gram vinyl reissue) - mediaeater

To help address this challenge, we've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they're off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time. - mediaeater

Geotagging your tweets will allow you to: * Tweet about places and add context to your tweets. * Connect with other users at a local level. * Join the local conversation. Things you should consider: * Geotagging uses your exact location. * Anyone can see it: even if you delete it, we cannot guarantee it will be removed from every partner. * Turning it off does not remove historical data. You can, however, remove all of your prior data. - mediaeater

However, sources in three of the four largest music companies told the Financial Times that record labels' financial concerns were the greater hurdle. "We think Spotify is a great service but they're going to have to convince us they can convert enough people from free to paid subscriptions to make it worth our while," one label said. "As an ad-supported service the economics don't work at all." - mediaeater

BREAKING NEWS: Chairman Rockefeller Releases New Investigative Report on Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and Their Impact on American Consumers - mediaeater

Among regular Internet users in the United States, 48 percent said in the survey, conducted in October, that they would pay to read news online, including on mobile devices. That result tied with Britain for the lowest figure among nine countries where Boston Consulting commissioned surveys. In several Western European countries, more than 60 percent said they would pay. When asked how much they would pay, Americans averaged just $3 a month, tied with Australia for the lowest figure — and less than half the $7 average for Italians. The other countries included in the study were Germany, France, Spain, Norway and Finland - mediaeater

But even if the freemium model does work for music — and I’m far from convinced that it does — MySpace is so far behind in terms of user interface and experience that it’s hard to imagine the company launching a compelling paid product. (dead on re WTF are these people talking about freemium music model has anyone been paying attention to the last decade... Giga is right about being skeptical and unconvinced) - mediaeater

However, without a feedback loop consumers may never fully appreciate what can be gleaned from their space-time-travel trail. Therefore, one way to enlighten the consumer would involve holders of space-time-travel data to permit an owner of a mobile device the ability to also see what they can see: (a) The top 10 places you spend the most time (e.g., 1. a home address, 2. a work address, 3. a secondary work facility address, 4. your kids school address, 5. your gym address, and so on); (b) The top three most predictable places you will be at a specific time when on the move (e.g., Vegas on the 215 freeway passing the Rainbow exit on Thursdays 6:07 - 6:21pm -- 57% of the time); (c) The first name and first letter of the last name of the top 20 people that you regularly meet-up with (turns out to be wife, kids, best friends, and co-workers – and hopefully in that order!) (d) The best three predictions of where you will be for more than one hour (in one place) - mediaeater

Under the new settlement, works will only be included in the ambitious digital project if they have been registered in the US, or come from the UK, Australia and Canada – countries which have “contributed the largest number of English-language works to American libraries,” according to the parties to the settlement. The similarities in their legal systems and the structure of their publishing industries made it appropriate for these countries to be included, according to the backers of the settlement. The changes will mean that 95 per cent of all foreign works will no longer be included in Google’s digital book archive, said Richard Sarnoff, chairman of the Association of American Publishers. - mediaeater

The answer has importance far beyond the book-scanning project—it involves the very legality of how search engines operate on the Internet. If search engines cannot make full copies of books and Web sites without permission from copyright holders, their own business model would be jeopardized. When leading publishers and authors sued Google for violations of copyright, it appeared that the first serious test case was at hand. - mediaeater

CEO Lesson Two: Get your company through media meltdown as fast as possible. Rupert Murdoch is clearly not there yet — he spent the week threatening to sue the BBC and Google for “…stealing content.” You might be able to replicate your old model for a time, but, as the Forrester reports states, “…you do so under a sun that is gradually sinking on the horizon.” The more time you spend in the meltdown stage, the fewer resources you’ll have to work with during your recovery — cf. Gourmet. CEO Lesson Three: Use your leadership to prod, push, cajole your company into Stage Three. No, it won’t be easy and you could very well lose your job in the process — note that Reed Elsevier’s Ian Smith left the company this week after spending nine months on the job. Your executives may only know the old way. Your board may only know the old way. You see lower operating margins ahead. You don’t have a clear pricing model. - mediaeater

Search Cheat Sheet This is a quick guide to the operators and restricts supported by wave search. - mediaeater

With Google's Social Search experiment, Bing's integration with Twitter and Yahoo!'s partnership with One Riot, social search clearly has both potential and momentum. But what will social search look like, and will it help us search better? And if it will, how? I've written previously about how social search won't replace traditional search, how social relevancy rank can be used to deliver good results, and why the concept of social search is a return to a familiar state rather than something to fear. Today, I'll get more specific about the three flavors of social search that will improve user search experiences. - mediaeater

an extension to the Atom feed format to express what people are doing around web Join the mailing list. Contribute to the wiki. The Activity Streams format has already been adopted by Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live, and Opera. First draft specs: Activities in Atom; Activity Schema; Atom Media. An initiative from the Diso Project. Background. - mediaeater