Pardon me while I laugh my ass off at Rick Feldman, CEO of the National Association of Television Program Executives. The guy says all free content is doomed. More →

Amazon just bought Zappos, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos decided to get all vlogger-ghetto in his YouTube message to the Zappos people. I’m not complaining, though — if the CEO of a major corporation wants to get down-to-earth and relatable, this is a good way to do it.

In the video, Bezos shares what he claims is everything he knows: More →

Well isn’t Vodafone the friendly mobile phone operator at the moment? Not content with slashing mobile roaming rates (forget the fact that they’re unfair and should never have been so exorbitantly high in the first place) and offering up Twitter love to its customers, it’s now announced a week of free Facebook access for its users.

Yes, from Friday 24th July, for one week only, those with funky cell phones capable of viewing the web (the Nokia N97 for example) will be able to surf the social network for nothing.

Presumably, the hope is that you get so hooked that, when it stops being free, you’ll carry on and pay Voda’s data rates for the privilege. More →

Social networks are hot. People like to connect, and marketers could potentially make a killing with access to your social graph. Facebook alone is currently valued at $6.5 billion. Even Google’s getting in on the action through Google Friend Connect.

Imagine, then, the value of a service to create your own social networks. Ning, the hosted social network solution from browser inventor Marc Andreessen, just raised $15 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners. This latest investment round values the startup at — get this — $750 million. That’s pretty good for a freemium service without its own advertising platform, especially since only three percent of its network creators actually pay for ad-free service.

Free self-hosted social networking scripts abound on the Internet, but the average community leader has neither the time nor the patience to install and maintain such scripts. Ning could do for social networks what Blogger once did for blogs — idiotproof them for the masses.

As technology changes media, media starts looking like technology. Silicon Valley has always been fueled by venture capital; now Motown can court investors instead of labels. The New York Times has a great piece today about Polyphonic, a venture capital firm for independent musicians. Their portfolio includes the Toronto alternative band Metric, which has actually rejected multiple offers from big record companies. More →

The portal strategy is a relic of the late nineties, a leftover from newspapers blending content for mass audiences. Companies who continued to pursue that strategy, most notably Yahoo and AOL, have rightfully been labelled relics as well.

That’s why I’m happy to hear that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, who jumped to the troubled tech titan from Google just over a hundred days ago, sees the folly of the portal strategy. Acknowledging the fragmentation of media, the very phenomenon that makes Google search so valuable, Armstrong is pushing two very modern ideas within the company: niche content and superdistribution. He properly positions the former to provide depth, and the latter to provide speed.

If that strategy sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the strategy of a good blog network. AOL is about to spin off from Time Warner through an IPO; the company needs a conrete direction and a fresh perspective to attract investors and survive the spinoff. You know the portal strategy is dead when your grandmother’s dialup ISP abandons it.

(Photo via John Batelle.)

UK mobile operator Vodafone has set up a new web site designed to chart where Brits are going on holiday, via the Twitter hashtag #ukhols.

In the last month or so UKHolsMap.com has been active, the top recorded destinations have been New York, Vancouver, Paris, London, St Ives, Barcelona, Seoul, Cyprus, Crete and Istanbul. More →

If the Bing parody ad was a blow to the Bing team’s self-esteem, wait ’til they hear about this: Microsoft is about to buy Yahoo’s search advertising business for several billion dollars, plus guaranteed revenue. More →

Only in the deranged mind of a mainstream media stooge would a site called The Pirate Bay actually charge for service. That’s exactly what Wayne Rosso, former CEO of failed P2P service Grokster, now proposes as the new CEO of The Pirate Bay. Rosso was installed by Global Gaming Factory, new owners of the legally beleaguered torrent tracker. The money from monthly service fees will be used to pay off copyright trolls. More →

Imagine for a moment that someone burgles your house, steals some electronic equipment, and then phones you a couple of weeks later to ask if you’ve got the manuals for it. (actually, fans of British sitcoms may well recognise this from a “One Foot in the Grave” episode).

That’s what TechCrunch’s statement that they’ve “spent much of the last 36 hours talking directly to Twitter about the right way to go about [posting the stolen documents]” feels like.

Now we know that TechCrunch didn’t steal them, and that the person who did decided to pop the docs in a virtual scatter gun, and that TC has milked and got a lot of mileage out of what are essentially fairly boring internal memos, but it once again raises an interesting question on what’s fair game to publish. More →