DigitalMediaTrends.com

Yahoo opens APIs

Yahoo is taking a cue from Facebook's playbook, encouraging outside developers to create new software programs that would make Yahoo's pages "stickier." The company has already released the source code for Yahoo Mail and aims let users embed non-Yahoo products and services into their My Yahoo homepages. The company hopes that developers' programs, also called widgets, will entice users to hang around Yahoo's pages longer. Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo senior vice president of communications, communities and Front Doors, is the man who sternly identified those problems. Yahoo's disparate businesses were spread thin -- like peanut butter over toast. Garlinghouse, who sounds pleased with the new course of action, sees a future in which companies like Evite (owned by Barry Diller's IAC/InterActive Corp.) The New York Times and News Corp.'s MySpace create widgets for My Yahoo, using their contact lists to display upcoming events, share articles or view updates to friends' profile pages. The report says Yahoo's decision is about embracing consumers' desire to create or customize content, but it's also about defense: Yahoo has to innovate to keep up with MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, with which it just struck a smart ad serving partnership. Could this be a giant step forward for the Web giant? More ...

YouTube Used For Real Estate Ads

Could YouTube overtake Craigslist as the undisputed classifieds king? After all, video is a far more helpful resource for a prospective buyer than a photo--especially when it comes to apartment hunting. Brokers and landlords are using the video-sharing site as an opportunity to give walking tours of their properties. After a few clumsy first attempts with his MiniDV player, broker Andre Kendall bought a Treo and started making movies with his mobile phone. "I got so many comments from people saying they hadn't seen anyone use YouTube for an apartment," he says, and it was a definite success. Another broker turned video walk-throughs into a business. Called reelProperties, his company now produces walk-throughs for Prudential Douglas Elliman at $150 a pop. His walk-throughs include trappings provided by programs like Final Cut and Avid, which allow his employees to input music and captions about the apartment into the videos. It's a new way to make money on YouTube. More ...

PayPerPost's New Payday

The bete noire of the blogosphere, PayPerPost, isn't going away anytime soon. The Orlando company, which pays bloggers to write about products and services, closed a $7 million round of funding, reports Forbes.com. The second funding round, led by well-known Valley VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, brings the company's total backing to $10 million. In a year, PayPerPost has signed up 27,000 bloggers to write reviews in the year since it launched, along the way drawing the ire of well-known bloggers like Jeff Jarvis and Michael Arrington for allegedly corrupting citizen media. More ...

Television 2.0: Content Convergence

It's been a looming change for so long that it seems TV's complete digital transformation can't come quickly enough. But even before TV's Next Big Thing (is it Joost? Is it Brightcove? Is it Apple TV?) fully establishes itself, media futurists are looking towards Television (Content) 2.0. By that time, TV will already be a fully interactive, on-demand, personalized experience, and the TV spot will either disappear completely or be scaled back to 15-seconds. The migration of TV content to the Web and Web-based devices is one thing, but imagine the resulting transformation of content. Consumers will one day watch news broadcasts by choosing relevant categories; similarly, demographic information will be key as content makers create programs for specific audiences.

Audiences will also become more involved, interacting with and adding to professionally picked, high-quality user-generated content. Advertising will no doubt become acutely targeted, but it will also have to become more flexible: short pre, mid, and post-rolls will remain, but the prolonged commercial break will not, meaning more product placements and product segments, and branded banner ads. More ...

Google’s goal: to organise your daily life

Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off. More ...

Facebook Moving to An Open Platform Strategy

Facebook will announce a new strategy to let other companies provide their services on special pages within its site, moving beyond its basic social networking service. These companies will be able to link into Facebook users’ networks of online friends...an example it cites is where a media company could let groups of users share news articles with each other on a page inside Facebook. More ...

Blog.de Sells 30 Percent Stake To Burda; German Digital Acquisitions

Mokono, a German-based blog space provider that also operates localized versions around Europe, has sold a 30 percent stake in its platform to magazine publisher Burda. Founder Vasco Sommer-Nunes refused to disclose the amount, which he said would be used to grow the technical infrastructure and staff of the operation. More ...

Web 2.0 in Germany: Copy/Paste Innovation or more?

While English certainly isn’t foreign to Germans, it has still slowed their adoption – and network effects, which have been a driving force, are often tied to language and reach as well. What’s been the consequence in Deutschland? A mushrooming of German copycats that have localized and copied their US role models, sometimes down to the last pixel. More ...