I am not a music fan. My iPod only has PodCasts on it. When in our second car (without the iPod adapter), I listen to talk radio. I quickly try to avoid all of Fred Wilson’s music posts. Therefore, I’m not the person to comment on the best experience between Last.fm, Pandora and the other music recommendation systems.

However, Last.fm has built an audience of 15 million people and today was rewarded with an $280 million acquisition from CBS.

The most interesting thing from the LA Times article (which I believe broke the story) was the way they positioned CBS’s strategy:

The purchase is emblematic of the sharp change in direction at CBS, which owns the oldest U.S. broadcast television network and one of the country’s largest radio networks.

Instead of focusing solely on creating programming, the long-staid company now sees its mission as reaching the broadest possible audience in any medium, including the Internet and cellphones.

I think it’s a great validation of the recommendation / personalization space that the one of the first acquisitions by CBS toward this new mission (after last week’s WallStrip) was in this space. Maybe Quincy Smith won’t let Google have all the fun!

One of the topics I wanted to cover in my series on online advertising was Online Ad Exchanges. Well, Robert Guth and Kevin Delaney at the Wall Street Journal have beaten me to it with a great article today. The article provides a great overview of how the exchanges work.

Also, I have to give myself a little credit … I predicted on April 4th a Google / Yahoo / Microsoft showdown on Read/WriteWeb. Currently, the first two parts have come true with Double Click’s planned exchange and Right Media’s exchange currently being housed at Google and Yahoo respectively. According to today’s Wall Street Journal, the third piece will emerge soon with Microsoft currently making a build versus buy decision.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has started developing a prototype of an exchange and has also considered buying one of the start-ups, say people familiar with the company. Microsoft General Manager Joe Doran declined to give details but said Microsoft has been studying the exchange model and “what it would take to build an exchange.” But, he said, “it’s still very early for the exchange concept to really catch on and drive to large scale.”

As I mentioned before leaving for the Internet Identity Workshop, the concept of Internet authentication while important is not that exciting to me. It is certainly a necessary piece of infrastructure, but has always fallen into the less is more category for me. (Obviously, this would be different if I was at a bank or other handling other sensitive information.)

What does interest me is applications being built on top of this basic infrastructure. I talked about one of these concepts in a recent Read/WriteWeb post on VRM and there certainly are many other concepts.

However, checking out TechMeme a few days ago, there were a number of links to a specific concept that I’m finding very interesting in the authentication space. Specifically, looking for ways to actually have the user authentication process result in value for the website. The concept they are talking about has been floated by a team at Carnegie Mellon University, to leverage the captcha concept of identifying a user as a human. However, instead of random strings it would use texts from books that are being digitized. They call the concept reCaptcha.

As another example, at IIW I met the team of Vidoop who has come up with an image based authorization technique. The idea is that user’s choose images instead of words for authentication. InfoWorld said:

It’s a lesson that’s apparent to anyone who has ever raised a child, and likely anyone who remembers what it was like to be one — pictures are easier to remember than words.

While a lot of Vidoop’s revenue comes from white label deals with enterprise clients (banks, etc…), they also have a consumer facing revenue. In this case, they actually pay web sites for using their. They justify this by getting advertisers to sponsor the images for their partner’s sites. In other words, a car image could be sponsored by BMW and that revenue would be shared with the site that showed the car image to a use Vidoop’s system to authenticate the user.

Obviously, in both these cases (Vidoop and reCaptcha), the key is to ensure that the process of authenticating doesn’t in any way hinder or slow the user’s experience more than other alternatives. If either of these services succeeds in doing this (and I think they might), it will be an intriguing source of value on the web in the next few years.

Alex Iskold, a co-author at Read/WriteWeb and wicked smart guy, released a new version of Blue Organizer this morning. I am really digging it!

As expected with how connected Alex is, there has been great coverage in the blogosphere. However, the best quote is probably from Richard on R/WW:

All up, BlueOrganizer is an excellent practical example of how semantic web technologies are creeping into Web 2.0. We forecast this in our 2007 predictions post at the end of 2006, which Alex contributed to. Interesting though that the ‘official’ semantic web efforts, led of course by Sir Tim Berners Lee, still aren’t making much headway on the Web. But when you mix in user-generated content, APIs, “parsers, web services and analysis algorithms” and the rest of the techniques that AdaptiveBlue is using, well just maybe Sir Tim will get his Semantic Web after all…. just not perhaps as he envisaged it.

Well done guys and best of luck moving forward!

Answer: They both are flip flopping

That is right, Ziff Davis UK has received an official statement from Microsoft that it will not litigate. The story on ZD includes a quote:

“If we wanted to go down that road we could have done that three years ago,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. “Rather than litigate, Microsoft has spent the last three years building an intellectual property bridge that works for all parties–including open source–and the customer response has been tremendously positive. Our focus is on continuing to build bridges.”

This completely contradicts a Fortune story ran on May 14th (8 days ago) that claimed open source free software violated 235 of Microsoft’s patents and litigation would be following. This created quite an amazing level of tension in the community and resulted in numerous follow up stories like the one featured on the cover of Information Week.

Leaders have come out strongly against litigation since the article. (Even a friendly competitor’s CEO weighted in.) Therefore, it would be easy to assume that Microsoft has simply changed it position. However, I think a more likely scenario is that Microsoft is just flip flopping to create additional uncertainty. This is a HUGE mistake for Microsoft! People remember who is threatening to sue them and it doesn’t create good will in the marketplace. They need to compete in the marketplace not courts.

PS - If you don’t get the political reference, here is a link. And no I’m not trying to make a political statement, just pointing out the problem with Microsoft’s position via a little humor.

Last week on Jaffe Juice, there was a hilarious video called “The Break Up” It is a funny take on a consumer breaking up with an advertiser. The video was actually put out by Microsoft’s Digital Advertising Solutions Group.

The video demonstrates, in a sarcastic way, Microsoft begining to engage with innovators and early adopters regarding online advertising.

Of course, the space is very competitive and I’ve already said what I think would be innovative. (No, it wasn’t an acquisition of aQuantive.)

I picked up a copy of Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code after reading a review on Feld Thoughts . I finally got around to reading it over the last few weeks and have really enjoyed the story. While ultimately there certainly have been significantly more succesful open source projects than Chandler, it is a very interesting ethnographic study on the life of a large and ambitous software project.

The book can be summed up by a ‘law’ introduced by the author two-thirds of the way through: Rosenberg’s Law

Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. And then, of course, there is a corollary: The only software that’s worth making is software that does something new.

This certainly has been the experience I’ve had over my entire career working on software projects. However, I would suggest there should be one more component to the ‘law’ … when you do something new, there is no better feeling of accomplishment

Anyway, I would definitely encourage anyone working in the software industry to pick up a copy.

I am just getting back from a trip to San Francsico today. I ended up spending most of my time at the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, but went into San Francisco for an afternoon and evening of meetings. On the flight back, I was reflecting on the differences between Silicon Valley and San Fran and saw this great video by ValleyWag.

Absolutely, hillarious! However, I had to wonder what the Pittsburgh character would look like? Maybe an someone Amish?

Found Via: Feld Thoughts

I’ve been trying to keep this blog pretty focused on topics around online advertising, technology and business models. However, I’m not sure that is the best approach - especially now that I’m blogging regularly at Read/WriteWeb.

No matter what, I couldn’t help but point to this exciting news in the Washigton Times.

Hat Tip: Charlie

A few days ago, I wrote a post that has been floating around in my head over the last few months. While I’ve been trying to avoid making Profitable Signals just a link blog to my R/WW posts, I believe this is significant enough to point you to it.

The post is titled Google’s Potential Vulnerability - An Open Ad Network. Please go check it out and let me know what you think!

Update: Please Digg R/WW Story