Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• The Case for Freeing the WSJ Online

  An interesting article in Business Week about opening up the Wall Street Journal Online in the wake of the sale to Murdoch. For The Wall Street Journal Online, going free will come at a high cost. The daily financial newspaper is one of the few major publications to successfully charge for access to most of its online content, earning roughly $79 a year from each of its nearly 1 million Web subscribers. Once incentives and other free offers are taken into account, some analysts estimate that the paper will bring in more than $65 million this year from WSJ Online subscriptions alone. But soon-to-be owner Rupert Murdoch seems willing to sacrifice that revenue in return for the possibility of earning many millions more from online advertising. In an Aug. 8 earnings call for News Corp. ( NWS ), which plans to acquire Journal publisher Dow Jones ( DJ ) for $5.6 billion, Murdoch said both companies are debating making WSJ.com free, though there are no concrete plans yet. "I think it would... Posted Aug 25 2007, 06:44 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Rants, Web 2.0, Blogging

• Twitter is, or will be, a Messaging Platform

  Charlie discusses the future of Twitter and touches on what I think are two key points: corporate twitter and content subscription. The key as Charlie discusses is the opt-in and one-way nature of Twitter. That is, I only get updates from someone if I explicitly choose to receive them, and the party I subscribe to doesn't necessarily need to listen to me. That sure sounds a lot like an RSS aggregator, doesn't it? To me, Twitter is exactly that: a messaging aggregator. The future of Twitter is a messaging platform . Twitter has a number of ways to deliver updates - you can get them on your phone (via SMS), from IM, or on the web. And of course, you can get them as RSS and bring them anywhere you want. You can also send the updates from any of those mediums. Ever better, Twitter has an API for putting data in and getting messages out, which means I can update Twitter and have this "status update" sent out to Facebook , my blog , and so on. Delivery based on context and priority The key feature... Posted Jun 18 2007, 03:05 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Web 2.0, Innovation, Business, Blogging

• On Syndication ... and why formats don't matter

  One of my big pet peeves with syndication is when platforms publish multiple formats. Or, more precisely, when the user is presented with 5 similar-looking icons with all of those options. Why make the user think ? The user wants your content, but you've put an additional barrier in that ultimately has little or no effect on their consumption. Many argue that ATOM is a superior format, and from a technical perspective that is probably the case. I just can't bring myself to care all that much. ATOM makes certain things easier (or even possible) for the developer. If I were developing a publishing platform or an aggregator, I might feel more strongly about it. But as a publisher and consumer of content, I don't care how syndication happens. I don't care if you're sending me RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0, ATOM 0.3, or ATOM 1.0. I don't care how you encode and escape and cache the content. Those are technical details unimportant to the consumption and creation of the content. Much of the appeal and success... Posted Feb 12 2007, 10:40 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Web 2.0, Blogging

• An Anthropologist's Take on Web 2.0

  The Machine is us. ( Link to the video ) Posted Feb 09 2007, 02:35 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Web 2.0, Innovation, YouTube, Video, Blogging, Entrepreneurship

• PodShow gets funding... but forgets to renew DNS?

  Maybe that really was the last Gillmor Gang . My downloads of the latest show kept failing, and now I know why - PodShow.com expired on Oct 4th and is now parked. Ooops! I don't know what's more ironic - their domain expires and they forget to renew just after they get funding, or that GoDaddy sponsors the Gillmor Gang. Posted Oct 09 2006, 06:18 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Rants, Things that amuse me, Web 2.0, Blogging