“The news business is like the tobacco business: you want to reach new readers at as young and impressionable an age as possible,” Onion president Sean Mills said. “MySpace was, of course, a natural partner in that regard.” The truth hurts and causes lung cancer: MySpace and The Onion are now exclusive content partners. [Infectious Greed]

Source:Valleywag

Attention, blogtards: Michael Arrington has seceded from the blogosphere, a space in which his ego no longer apparently fits. In an otherwise tiresome review of yet another Web 2.0 product, Arrington made this fascinating observation:

The bloggers seem to like it, though… Ah, I love the blogosphere.

Apparently he’s no longer a blogger — just a distanced observer of you keyboard-chained louts. Take note of this the next time he tries to use his blogger cred to whine about the mainstream media.

Source:Valleywag

Who put the itching powder in media companies’ Web 2.0-buying jocks? Well, Rupert Murdoch, obviously. Ever since he slurped up MySpace for what now looks like a song, everyone else is trying to find a bargain. Condé Nast bought Wired.com and then Reddit, Forbes just picked up Clipmarks, and now it looks like the Hearst Corporation is adding social shopping network Kaboodle to its kit. Sure, Hearst might be trying to inject some social-networking mojo into its readership, but we suspect this deal is more about pulling the rug out from under Condé Nast’s competing portfolio of travel and fashion websites, which use Kaboodle’s technology. Such macho posturing over such girly pursuits. Well, whatever scratches your itch, guys.

Already this week, I’ve caught wind of at least 2 acquisitions of “Web 2.0″ services/websites by media companies. Media companies, not tech companies. I think this may be an interesting trend - and a very necessary one.

The two I refer to are Kaboodle (by Hearst Corporation) and Clipmarks‘ buy-out by Forbes, which is almost confirmed. I initially thought, in regards to Forbes, that they are picking up on their recent publicity (as if they need it), with Fake Steve Jobs. But on seconds thoughts, this may be slightly fantasy-land based thinking.

On the face of it, straight away, you can see both Kaboodle and Clipmarks are not media outlets. They are not press, or blogs, or magazines. Hearst, and Forbes, deal in these areas - and it seems very interesting to me that they would take an interest in something out of their usual line of business. Maybe they are worried that new media is going to trump them. Maybe.

If I may, I’d like to explain why I believe these types of deals and acquisitions are 100% necessary for the web to progress on its current path. In tech today, we only really have a handful of big tech companies that can instantly come to mind as targets to buy. These are namely Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, IBM (maybe).

The rate of release with new web services and products is larger than the group of tech organisations viable enough to go for a purchase, financially or otherwise. All these startups are looking for exits at one time or another, and acquisitions seem to take preference over IPOs. I almost wanted to add “this time around” to that sentence.

So we need companies with deep pockets from separate, but linked industries, to dive in and take some of the slack if a larger percentage of startups are to succeed with their exits. Simple point, jumbled post. Story of my life.

Matt Harwood is an Independent Online Media Consultant from Bedfordshire, UK. His background covers Interactive Marketing, and Design.

A handful of startups are groping around in the “social shopping” area, talking about making money from the 80% of online shopping time that is spent researching products rather than buying them.The king of this space is CNET reviews, which combines editor reviews with lots of pictures and structured data with direct user reviews as well. In May Yahoo launched Yahoo Tech, directly targeting CNET Reviews as well. When I research products, I usually don’t go much further than these two sites (although I spend a lot of time on the gadget blogs trying to find out exactly what new stuff I intend to research). Of course, CNET and Yahoo Tech focus solely on technology gadgets.

Other services have launched in this space as well, generally focusing on wish lists, recommendation lists or both, and often giving users tools to put widgets with recommended or desired products up on their blogs or websites. See our posts on Kaboodle, Stylehive, Yahoo Shoposphere and MyPickList. Wists is another site in this category, although we have not written about it yet. These sites expand well beyond technology in their product reviews.

These sites generate revenue from affiliate fees (via links to ecommerce sites) and/or via contextual advertising placed on the site, usually Google.

And now comes ThisNext, a Los Angeled based company with a NYT writeup as well as a thumbs up from Jason Calacanis (Jason used to work with the CEO, which may explain his mention of the product).

The site is the best I’ve seen so far, with clearly structured items and very easy ways for users to add their own opinion via comments, tagging, comment ratings and adding things to a wishlist. There are easy to find “buy” links if you want to purchase the item. Users can also create a website widget to show off the stuff they really like. Good stuff, well executed.

But I have never gotten that excited about sites like ThisNext and the others mentioned above. I don’t believe they will ever succeed in drawing customers away from big Internet brands like CNET and Yahoo, who are already doing a very good job of integrating user reviews with editorial reviews and content.

Neither the NYT or Jason mention that CNET is already out there and dominates this space for tech products. The NYT should have…writer Bob Tedeschi clearly intended to give ThisNext a positive review (complete with a picture of the CEO walking with a surfboard) but he never seems to be able to put his finger on why it’s so great.

Jason, however, nails it. He thinks ThisNext can be successful because it will show emerging trends in what consumers like.

It’s sort of like taking “The Tipping Point” concepts and making them into a product you can actually use. For example, as the community grows you’ll be able to see who recommended a product first. After some period of time you might be able to find the people who are good at finding–or creating–trends.

CNET doesn’t do this, they simply review products and put their reviews up on the site. They do not show how certain products become hot over time, and what people are good at picking winners.

This type of thing might find a niche - it won’t displace blogs that are dedicated to talking about the newest and greatest products in a given space, and they won’t displace the big review sites like CNET for people who want to find reviews on a product they already know about. But perhaps they can serve people who want to be a part of a community that decides what products are hot and which are not.

Am I excited? No. But I’m intruiged enough to write about this at 3:30 in the morning. Or maybe I’m not excited because it’s 3:30 in the morning. I don’t know. We’ll see what happens.

TechAddress’ Coverage found here.

FOR most small businesses, competing on the Web is hardly easier than competing offline, where gigantic retailers with huge marketing budgets dominate. But for Amenity Home, a start-up in Los Angeles with three products, four employees and no marketing budget, getting noticed was a simple matter of word-of-mouth advertising, albeit in an unusual way.

Late last month, an online shopper posted a photo of one of Amenity Home’s $400 duvet covers on ThisNext.com, one of a new breed of Web sites that promises to connect independent-minded shoppers with hard-to-find products. Other shoppers copied the photo to their own blog pages, bringing the company some much-welcome attention, said Kristina de Corpo, an Amenity Home founder.

“We’re a young business furiously trying to keep our heads above water, so this is really exciting,” she said. “We’ve gotten tons of hits from it.”

Sites like ThisNext and a handful of services like Kaboodle.com, Wists.com and StyleHive.com are spearheading a new category of e-commerce called “social shopping,” that tries to combine two favorite online activities: shopping and social networking. These sites are hoping to ride the MySpace wave by gathering people in one place to swap shopping ideas. And like MySpace, the sites are designed for both browsing and blogging, with some shopping-related technology twists included.

Social shopping is just the latest solution to a chronic problem for online retailers and shoppers: many shoppers aren’t sure what to buy, but they know they won’t find it on the sites of mainstream retailers like Macy’s, Amazon or Wal-Mart.

Online retailers often refer to this as the “product discovery” problem, but it might better be referred to as online retailing’s Teflon piñata, so many times have entrepreneurs tried to crack it.

“Online shopping is more accurately described as purchasing, because it’s so directed and goal-specific,” said Gordon Gould, ThisNext’s chief executive. “You might be looking for a plasma screen TV, but there’s not a lot of lateral thinking about what else you might be interested in. We want to show people other products that wouldn’t make sense for an e-tailer to batch together.”

•Users who register with social shopping services typically create their own pages to collect information on items they find. But instead of simply describing what they have found on other sites and posting a Web address, they can download a piece of software that allows them to grab images of those products to post on their own shopping lists.

The social shopping services can then post pictures of items that have been viewed or circulated widely among visitors who have searched the site for, say, home furnishing ideas.

The social shopping sites hope to parlay that enthusiasm into advertising revenue, once they attract enough visitors to go back to merchants with a better sales pitch. Some sites, like ThisNext, also plan to form so-called affiliate relationships with merchants, who often pay percent commissions on sales that come as a result of their products being featured on other sites.

ThisNext also gives users the ability to transfer pictures or videos of their favorite products from the site to their personal blog pages. Mr. Gould said the site could also eventually make money by helping companies find influential customers that they might involve in early-stage marketing plans or product testing, among other things.

“If you’re the go-to guy for buying Kona coffee, I want to find you, not a generalist,” he said.

Kaboodle, meanwhile, has created another revenue source by striking a deal late last month with eBay’s comparison shopping service, Shopping.com. Under that agreement, whenever a Kaboodle user features a product that also appears on the Shopping.com database, Kaboodle will post the prices at which the product is sold online at various merchants. Should a reader click through to the merchant’s site, Kaboodle will earn a share of the fee the merchant pays Shopping.com for that click.

Kaboodle has also worked with eBay to create pages for collectors of certain items on Kaboodle, wherein they can receive feeds of eBay auctions that are relevant to their collections.

The site, which has about 50,000 registered users, has so far raised $3.55 million from well-known Silicon Valley investors, like Guy Kawasaki and Shea Ventures, according to Manish Chandra, Kaboodle’s chief executive.

Last week Kaboodle introduced a set of new features, including one that allows users to run a slideshow of the products on their list, and then transport that slideshow to their own blog pages. (That could account for the late-summer popularity of a collection of string bikinis featured on Kaboodle’s home page last week.)

According to Rob Goldman, who leads the American division of Shopping.com, Kaboodle and its cohort have potential.

“Who knows? This may be the only way you shop for clothes in the future, by seeing what your friends and other people are wearing,” he said. “But in the scheme of the way commerce is conducted online right now, I’d see these more as venture investments, and less as line extensions.”

Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst with Jupiter Research, an online consultant, agreed. The increasing popularity of customer reviews on retailer sites and elsewhere, she said, “will help get customers a little more engaged, and thinking about recommendations from other people, which is what ThisNext and these other sites are based on.”

One hurdle, Ms. Evans said, is getting users to go through the trouble of downloading software so they can grab images of products they like, assuming they are motivated enough to post favorite products to begin with.

Ms. Evans said that social shopping sites would also have to be vigilant against featuring stale products — a particularly vexing issue for fashion merchandise — because retailers typically carry such products for about 12 weeks.

But instant popularity for such sites is not assured. “I think this will have a nice developing trajectory, rather than something that’ll explode tomorrow,” Ms. Evans said. “Customers are so used to going to the store to discover new products that it’ll take a long time to get them out of that.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company