test 1 9/25/06

My posting technique is unstopable.

I am now testing the notifier. Hurrah!

CitizenBay to pay local news contributers

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CitizenBay to pay local news contributers

CitizenBay is a city centered citizen journalism project that will pay users whose contributions are voted the ten best by readers each day in 60 cities around the US and France. Set to launch late this month, it’s a project of New York based Oleg Tscheltzoff. Tscheltzoff says his stock photo service Fotolia (which Mike Arrington has reviewed positively) proves this model can work.

Years after it’s grown passé to say the web makes the world smaller, there’s now a strong case to be made for the importance of local information on the web. CitizenBay is a well constructed site that looks like it could make a good run on the local social news milieu. That space could quickly become very crowded, though, and it’s hard to feel too confident in any new site of this type. CitizenBay is currently accepting emails for notification of launch in the coming weeks.

Contributers will be paid between $1 and $5 per original article voted by readers into the top ten each day for each city, users who submit articles they did not write will receive $1 each time a submission makes it into the daily top 10 for their city. It may not be professional journalism, but it could be a nice little chunk of change for top users. It beats some of the AdSense sharing schemes I’ve seen lately.

South Korea’s OhMyNews is probably the best example of a site that pays users to contribute news coverage, but it’s not an unusual approach. CitizenBay stands out for its integration of many media types into one site. The site has a partnership for example with one of France’s biggest YouTube clones, DailyMotion, to have video submissions automatically cross posted to the video sharing site with city names as tags.

CitizenBay combines user submitted text, photos, video and audio displayed in an ajax rich social network style with sections for news, classified ads and coupons and local events. There’s also a duplicate story filter. Tscheltzoff believes that localized ads will be able to command a higher than normal CPM and he’s got some cash left over from selling his French web hosting company to finance the compensation of users until the site takes off. The site will also charge for some classified ads if it picks up enough steam.

Users can easily subscribe to news channels by location, topic or author. All of this makes sense and the site is relatively pleasing to navigate and use - but I can’t help but think that it will need something else to succeed. The partnership with France’s DailyMotion could be a big help; perhaps if CitizenBay could find a similar partner in the US it’s chances of success would be increased.

CitizenBay

Tags: Techcrunch, Web2.0, news, citizenjournalism, UGC,

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News Feed Source
    Home Page: http://www.techcrunch.com
    Feed Title: TechCrunch
    Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch

Article
    Title: CitizenBay to pay local news contributers
    Link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/22643436/
    Author: ~Marshall Kirkpatrick
    Publication Date:

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Testing the notifier.

Six Apart Acquires Rojo

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Six Apart Acquires Rojo

Blogging platform company Six Apart will announce this morning that it has acquired Rojo, a feed reader and search engine that competes with Bloglines and other companies.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but our assumption was that this a less than $5 million deal. Six Apart is not planning on continuing to build out the core Rojo products. In the press release (sorry no link available yet), Six Apart says “Six Apart intends to sell a majority interest in Rojo’s newsreader services in the coming months,” meaning they will become a minority stockholder of the service. Rojo founder and CEO Chris Alden and CTO Aaron Emigh will joing Six Apart’s executive team.

This deal brings to a close the long saga of the Rojo story. The company was founded in June 2003, launched in October 2004 and had a stellar team of investors including TPG Ventures, BV Capital, Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway. Rojo consistently released excellent products and has a loyal core user base. Rojo had a promising start and its userbase continued to grow gradually. But the crowded and highly competitive feed reader space, dominated by Bloglines, Newsgator and others, was a tough playground to hang out in. My hope is that the Rojo product continues to iterate, it’s one of my favorite websites.

Our previous coverage of Six Apart is here, and Rojo is here. We also had a very lively discussion with executives from a number of feed readers, including Chris Alden from Rojo, in a TalkCrunch podcast a couple of months ago.

Rojo, SixApart

Tags: newsgator, bloglines, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0

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News Feed Source
    Home Page: http://www.techcrunch.com
    Feed Title: TechCrunch
    Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch

Article
    Title: Six Apart Acquires Rojo
    Link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/19849994/
    Author: ~Michael Arrington
    Publication Date:

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NeoFiles and RU Sirius Show this week

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NeoFiles and RU Sirius Show this week

David Pescovitz: RU Sirius says:

This week on NeoFiles, RU Sirius interviews Lee Lusted, one of the inventors of the bio-muse, a device that plays music by sending biological signals directly from the person to the computer. And on The RU Sirius Show, they kick back with the psychedelic rock band Turn Me On Dead Man.

Link

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News Feed Source
    Home Page: http://www.boingboing.net/
    Feed Title: Boing Boing
    Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/boingboing/iBag

Article
    Title: NeoFiles and RU Sirius Show this week
    Link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/19565321/neofiles_and_ru_siri.html
    Author: ~(David Pescovitz)
    Publication Date:

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