Quick roundup

Things that I've seen over the weekend of note:

MatchMine is the best new idea I've seen this year. It's not new to recommend media content to people on the basis of their individual preferences (that's what Google News tries to do for news, what Last.fm and Pandora do very effectively for music, what TIOTI wants to do for TV, what Amazon does adequately, if sometimes randomly, with books) but trying to generalise it across multiple media from a single location is new. The question then becomes whether it's better to try and do this by building one central recommendation engine - MatchMine - for all types of media or just pull together the very good, existing ones in one place (HT: Mashable).

A new McKinsey report says, rather alarmingly (if not very surprisingly), that "a vast majority of people base their choice of news sources not on quality but on convenience, comprehensiveness or timeliness" (HT: LunchoverIP).

McClatchy reported last week (Paidcontent) the first fall I recall ever seeing for a newspaper company's year-on-year online ad revenues.

Australian politicians are considering granting their federal police wide-ranging powers to censor the Internet. This is a move which has been tried elsewhere, of course, notably in repressive dictatorships such as Iran and China, and has been met with effective resistance from interested sections of the online populations of those countries.  The practical effect would presumably be to criminalise anyone with a passing knowledge of how to work around the censorship controls. I'm not convinced it's a smart move on the part of Australia to criminalise their most technically proficient citizens.

And the FT argues that a softening economy will actually boost the performance of the online ad market - the argument being that in times of economic downturn, advertisers will have to abandon their less effective buying habits (and let's be clear that a lot of this activity is little more than habit) and actually start to think seriously about where their most effective ROI is. Which of course generally means online.

Comments

[MikeTrap]

Thank you, Seamus. To be clear, we're not trying to replace the silo'd solutions, just enhance them with a media type-, application-, and device agnostic complement.

We're live now, please have a look and let us know what you think.

Cheers -

Mike Troiano
CEO
matchmine