E-Media Tidbits

I can understand why Mark Cuban said newspapers should keep "blood-sucking vampires" like Google from indexing their content. But his argument falls short in a few key ways, I believe.

Cuban said newspapers have to understand that there is real value in what they do best, which is to "go out and find news and create good content." "Aggregators and search engines think there is no value to that," the Internet entrepreneur, HDNet co-founder and owner of the Dallas Maverick basketball team said at the OnMedia conference in New York last week. "They think there's an unending supply of necks."

If publications shut off their sites to the Google spiders, Cuban said, people who can't find that content via Google search or Google News might simply type "Forbes.com" or "NYTimes.com" in their Web browsers. He implied that if the great news brands refuse to be indexed without compensation, aggregators eventually would have to pay them to get their material.

One problem with Cuban's argument, though: There is a nearly unending supply of "necks," to use his analogy, for aggregators and search engines. Even if newspapers close off their sites to Google, their content will be found elsewhere, on other sites that pick it up under fair use...

In at least a short-term boon for HTML5 proponents, the consortium of groups that own the patents for the H.264 video-encoding codec announced Thursday that it will not seek royalties for another five years on videos that use the codec and are free to end users.

"Gack!" you say (justifiably). "Thank goodness I don't need to know about this H.264-HTML5-Ogg Theora mumbo-jumbo." Unfortunately, if you are in charge of encoding video for your Web site, if you design video players, or manage those who do, then you probably do need to pay attention.

Blame it on YouTube and Apple. Though they didn't start it, their recent moves have brought the debate about open-source video codecs from niche blogs to a wider audience.

First, the back story: H.264 is a very efficient video compression/decompression system...

One of the most important ways for blogs to get good traction in search used to come from links on other highly linked blogs and Web sites. The exchange of links from blog to blog created "link love," which then helped to increase a blog's Google PageRank. Along with keywords, PageRank could significantly boost a blog's position in search, sometimes putting that blog higher in results than a major news site. Even when bloggers linked to newspaper sites, news sites didn't always see those links as beneficial to them.

Now, a new kind of link love, associated with real-time search and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, might be the kind that news organizations seek to embrace.

In December, Google announced that that it would offer real-time search results that are seconds old, rather than the usual ones that are updated every 15 to 20 minutes. News headlines, blogs, tweets, and feeds from most popular social networking sites would now be part of a true, real-time search. ...