Entries Tagged 'Business' ↓

is that the New York Times will stop charging for TimesSelect, offering the whole paper free online. They say the subscription program was a success, but that they noticed the potential of advertising growth to be greater than subscription growth (which is what most said two years ago, but whatever - better late than never). The key to this, of course, is that the Times still does reporting, unlike most regional or city newspapers that have largely abdicated this function to the wire services.

something quite unique happened. Evan Williams (CEO of Obvious, co-creator of Blogger) put Odeo up for sale: Obviously: Looking for Odeo’s new home. He followed up with an interesting piece on his weblog about the lack of a marketplace for websites. It’s a very interesting development - Odeo isn’t a runaway success, but it’s not a failure either. It’s a marginally successful site that could, in the right hands, become a very good if not great site.

The traditional approach to unloading a property like that is to hype it beyond recognition until some big company can be goaded into buying it. But that wouldn’t serve Odeo well at all, and so Williams is charting an alternative path. As Anil Dash implies, that Williams has “Thank you” money is both refreshing to see and, ultimately, good for the web and the future of the industry.

Six Apart is pumping up its Blogging Solutions for Business. For some time now large-scale integration issues have been handled (and it seems pretty well) by a growing and capable group of consultants and developers. While it’s certainly great news that Six Apart is adding features that will make integration in corporate environments easier, I hope they don’t cut the developers’ grass in the process. I highly doubt they would do that - after some missteps early on, Six Apart seems pretty good about both improving their service while also energizing and nurturing the developer community.

that VeriSign has purchased weblogs.com. And now that it’s not just rumour anymore, it’s appropriate to comment.

What a bloody nightmare. VeriSign haven’t met a service they couldn’t screw up, a trust they couldn’t break, a marginally ethical lock-in they didn’t do everything in their power to try to gain over their own customers. I can’t imagine a worse option. Hope Dave’s happy with his money though - whatever your opinion of the guy, he has provided a fantastic service that was absolutely critical to the development of the world of blogs.

Update: Paidcontent.org has the details. There’s more all over the web. People seem a great deal more optimistic about VeriSign than I am - I guess that many lucky people have avoided being VeriSign customers.

Adobe to Buy Macromedia in $3.4B Deal.

the guy behind del.icio.us, has taken some funding and is going to work on it full time.