Glam is both a direct publisher of content and an advertising network. A big part of their business model is float management - making sure that they collect money before the pay it out to partners. If they pay too soon, they could get hit with bad debt when advertisers don’t pay. Pay later, and they keep the interest they earn on partner money.

That’s why they’re extending the payment period to already beleaguered publishing partners. In a notice today, Glam blames the economy and extends payment terms from 60 or 90 to 120 days:

Screen shots of Brash are below. More than 25 content sites have joined the Brash.com Network at launch, including: ArtistDirect; DigitalTrends.com; eCoustics.com; InGameNowSeriousWheels.com; Squidoo and MonstersandCritics.com. Content will also be syndicated from Time.com for national news; Rolling Stone for music news and updates; TheCarConnection.com for car reviews and news, SB Nation for sports coverage and CNET for technology information. Launch advertisers like Unilever’s Axe brand deodorant, H&M and HP. Glam says that the aggregated Comscore user numbers from the original content partners is over 10 million/month.

Google has just launched a new homepage for its blog search that bears a strong resemblance to Techmeme, Memeorandum and their “memetracker” counterparts. The site displays a listing of the top stories from across a variety of topics including business, politics, technology, and entertainment.

Memetrackers identify emerging trends on the web, especially across blogs. They are often the best way to learn about breaking news stories, as they can automatically monitor hundreds (or more) news sources at once. Major news outlets and user-submitted content sites like Digg often trail memetrackers by days.

Google may well be able to leverage some of the technology it has developed for Google News, which identifies emerging news stories across thousands of sites run by newspapers, television stations, and other media sites. But at this point it’s too early to tell if Google Blogsearch will be more useful than any of the other memetrackers (or if its even in the same league). Much of its utility will lie in how often the listings are updated, how many sources it pays attention to, and how it assesses a blog’s credibility - a memetracker is only as good as the stories it presents.

Google may be able to create a useful tool, but that may not be enough to overcome the established leaders in this space. In 2007 the New York Times launched its own TechMeme killer, which has largely been ignored. There’s something about TechMeme which keeps bringing people back to it.Source:TechCrunch

Image licensing platform GumGum has scored a deal to serve free legal images across Glam Media’s publishing network. Glam publishers will have access to photos from Splash News’ catalog of celebrity images, many of which run from $75-500 apiece under standard licensing deals. In lieu of these fees, GumGum will allow publishers to display their images with ad overlays free of charge (publishers will receive around 20% of the revenue from these ads - the rest will go to GumGum, Glam, and Splash).

The deal comes two months after GumGum annouced a major shift in the technology used to power its platform. In the past, the site would issue photographs as Flash objects, which made them easy to track and monetize with ads. But Flash-based images are slow and clunky compared to a normal image file, which made the system unappealing to publishers.

Just as online sites have grown increasingly niche as interest groups continue to find each other and flourish within environments filled with like-minded users, Glam Media’s advertising empire has been launching multiple niche channels in order to better target ads within its quickly growing network. Having rolled out verticals for topics like Entertainment, Living and Family, the latest new channel in the Glam Media network is Glam Wellness, which encompasses mind-body-spirit, empowerment, and a healthy planet.

Those brands related to this particular category, including Glam Wellness launch sponsor SOYJOY, can take advantage of Glam’s network in order to better target interested consumers. Glam wouldn’t be able to offer such targeting without the enormous reach it has, spanning a very wide array of female-oriented sites that participate within Glam Media’s network. Having recently raised more than $80 million, Glam is continuing to push out more verticals, further branching out its advertising network and potentially providing more quality targeting capabilities to participating brands.

Aside from display ads and other basic advertising methods, Glam has recently introduced its Glam Applications Platform. We’ve also seen other branding pushes come through Glam with a more recent partnership with Flock, which features direct delivery of Glam network content to users that utilize the fashion- and entertainment-centric Flock web browser. Such partnerships allow Glam to explore various forms of unique advertising opportunities as well.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Glam Launches Distributed Media PlatformGlam Reigns over iVillage as the No. 1 Network for WomenGlam Signs Google for Ad Brokerage and SearchGlam Media’s Acquisition of StyleMob RevealedGlam Media Steals Executive Talent from MySpaceGlam’s New Ad Exchange Connects Marketers, Publishers, & Ad NetworksLifetime to Use Glam’s Managed Vertical Network

Women’s vertical network Glam Media is announcing the launch of a new channel in the network, Glam Wellness. The initial launch partners include: BeThree.com, Conscious Living TV, EcoFabulous, EatingWell, Lifescript, Low Impact Living and Spaparazzi.

Glam claims this new wellness channel will launch with 3 million monthly uniques and the total Glam network has over 640 content publishers and comScore reports 77 million global monthly uniques.

While this might not sound like big news, when you combine it with the launch last week of Glam’s developer platform Atako, the more blogs and content sites in the Glam network, the more distribution the developers will have access to. It will be interesting to see if Glam can "woo" developers to move off the sexy iPhone platform development and on theirs. The truth is that there could be nice returns building on the Glam network.

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Social browser Flock has announced the launch of a new, customized version of their browser today. The new version is named Gloss and brings together Flock’s browser technology with fashion and entertainment content from over 35 sources. Glam Media, who yesterday announced the launch of their platform, is one of the launch partners. Other content providers include: Glamour, The Budget Fashionista, TMZ, Cosmo, DesignerApparel, PopSugar and others.

Within the Flock Gloss browser, there are news feeds and pre-set favorites along with a pink design (see below). My guess is that we will see a variety of these customized versions from Flock this year as they try to gain market share in the browser market.

Check out all of our Flock coverage including the launch of their Eco-Green and German versions.

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The so-called social Web just became legitimately open, as MySpace has launched the two first implementations of its Data Availability initiative on Flixster and Eventful. Simultaneously, the company is announcing that it will support OpenID, allowing its users to sign into any OpenID-enabled website using their MySpace credentials. The move comes one day before Facebook’s developer conference kicks off, where the rival social network is widely expected to announce the first implementations of its own data portability initiative: Facebook Connect.

The implementations of Data Availability on Flixster and Eventful work much as you might expect. On Flixster, users can register using their MySpace credentials, at which point they can import their profile data and connect with any of their friends who already have accounts on Flixster. On Eventful, users can not only import their profile data, but also receive alerts for events coming to their area, based on the artists that the user has friended on MySpace. Hence, if you’re friends with Augustana on MySpace and they are having a concert in your town, you’ll automatically be alerted to it.

All of this information is synced across the Data Availability supporting sites and MySpace. So, if you update your profile, edit your biography, or remove an artist from your friend’s list on MySpace, this will immediately be reflected on Flixster and Eventful. Certain more sensitive data like religion, sexual orientation, and ethnicity are only cahceable for 24 hours by Data Availability partners, while core profile data like age, location, and profile photo can be stored on the third-party site, though still synced with MySpace.

Asked about the distinction between data that is cached and that which is stored, Jim Benedetto, SVP of Technology at MySpace told me: “It’s very technically challenging to rely on MySpace’s server [for accessing all of the data]. [As a user] if I don’t want all information to be available to Flixster, I can revoke access and cut it off. But a core piece of information such as my age, email, first and last name that is key to the initial registration, Flixster can maintain control over so people can continue to login to Flixster with it.”

As for the OpenID initiative, much like other Web giants including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo that have announced support for the movement, MySpace is only acting as an identity provider, meaning that while you can use your MySpace credentials to sign into other Web sites, you cannot yet use your credentials from another OpenID provider to sign into MySpace. Nonetheless, announcing support for OpenID is another small victory for MySpace over Facebook, and keeps the pressure on the latter to legitimately open up.

MySpace first announced Data Availability in May, with launch partners Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, and Photobucket. Asked about the status of these higher profile rollouts, Benedetto told me that “All of them are currently working on their implementations. Flixster and Eventful are just smaller companies that were able to move very quickly using our APIs to get them live.”

As for Facebook, they announced Connect with Digg signed on to support the initiative one day after MySpace kicked off Data Availability back in May. Google also has its own hat in the ring in the battle to become your universal profile with its Google Friend Connect offering.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:MySpace Data Availability Goes LiveEventful MySpace App: Tell Your Aritsts Where You Want Them to GoFlixster Calls Down $5M of its Series BEventful Launches Facebook App for Bringing Artists to Your CityTwitter Interface for Eventful: Fact of Fool?Eventful Working with Presidential Campaigns in Grassroot EffortsEventful Demands $7.5 Million - and Gets It

Source:Mashable!

Glam Media, the self-described distributed media network that sits atop the women-centric market of the Web, with either a whole or partial role in over 600 websites and blogs, is expanding its sights yet again this year, just weeks after it introduced a new advertisement marketplace called GlamX Ad Exchange. Today the company unveiled its very own application platform. It is dubbed, simply enough, Glam Application Platform.

Glam is inviting publishers, developers, and advertisers alike to exercise the platform, which it has code-named “Atako” and currently has positioned as a private beta. The company believes the strength of the release resides at its core, where an open-source design has been implemented. (Said to be based on the Google Gadget spec, the platform may also take advantage of OpenSocial and OpenID.)

The Glam Application Platform also arrives with levers to monetize developments easily, with or without advertisements. If application creators wish to go without marketing, developments may be distributed freely, as they would ordinarily, or through direct payments. Any applications borne of the Glam Application Platform will be delivered through a system called the Glam Apps Store.

Whether or not Glam has taken cue from Apple’s own App Store initiative, whose design was first publicly introduced earlier this year, Glam is no doubt employing the concept to further its mission to tap its increasingly valuable content network as broadly and deeply as possible. Since the point at which Glam surpassed iVillage last year as the dominant force in online media space specific to the female demographic, the flash terms “vertical” and “network” have in kind been touted ever more strongly by the company. With the Glam Application Platform there’s no doubt that the company sees its global audience of roughly 77 million monthly users as carrying considerably more value than has so far been realized.

The initial establishment of the Glam App Platform, because it is private beta, may have a limited impact at first, but it likely won’t be long before it d