Federated Media, by its own account, “support[s] independent website authors and audiences, by connecting them to marketers.” Loosely translated, this means the only asset they have is their relationship between external publishers and marketers. No content. No product. And No loyalty (as far as I can tell, FM’s big publishers do not have to sign exclusive or non-compete deals). Sure, FM has some impressive blogs, powered by the flagship BoingBoing (nice to have friends with really big websites), but the right marketer (or better yet, salesperson) could come along with a more attractive offer and Digg, TechCrunch and the rest would move on without a moments notice.

The company employs over 50 people, so they’re doing something right, but networks are ripe for pilfering. Someone can always come along with a shinier offer and higher CPM and you can quickly lose inventory.

I don’t know John personally, but our lives have crossed indirectly at IDG and with our interest in ad networks, but I would strongly urge him to cash out.

Since Google and media buyers don’t care where the page view originates, tens of thousands of page view farming sites have cropped up. From the blatant parked domain and plagiarized “blog” to the “link blog” and “copy blog” (featuring a quick comment on whatever is hot online today), these sites are easy to create and even easier to profit from (if you throw up enough of them). But I don’t care how good Google’s algorithms are, a click from a visitor to the parked domain, “cellphones.com” is not valuable to anyone other than the guy that owns the domain.

Even legitimate sites and blogs are guilty of occasional page view farming. Top 10 lists of irrelevant content, hot gadget reviews even though 10,000 other sites posted a similar review and gossip/celebrity slander drive massive amounts of page views. Eventually, advertisers (I know they’re typically way behind the curve, but the Internet has ways of educating even the oldest dinosaurs) will catch on.

Steve Rubel recently commented on this trend coining it “The Lazysphere and the Decline of Deep Blogging” calling for a return of less-frequent, unique reporting. What Rubel seemed to miss was the motivating factor in the “Lazysphere”—easy money.

Uncov, a wonderful anti-web2.0 blog helps make my point:

“Robert Scoble loses his Facebook account… [and] Google Blog Search has 7,156 results for “scoble facebook”. Evidently, this was (and still is) the talk of the web. I have news for you, though. In the rest of the world, it was business as usual… I didn’t see it in newsstands at the airport. So, look out your office window, take a deep breath, and realize that nobody cares but you.”

Why in the world would over 7,100 people comment on Robert Scoble’s boot from Facebook? Because it drives easy page views. As long as people’s wasted time can be easily monetized, this problem will persist. Whether it’s typing at home, virtual gold farming or adding to the noise of CES coverage, people will always try to make a quick buck. Unfortunately, page view farming is diluting the value of quality, original content (and may even be putting it out of business) and could become the basis of an internet advertising recession if marketers don’t start changing their ways.

There’s a lot more to be said here, but my profit per word is dwindling. Stay tuned for my next post, “Robert Scoble at CES Reviews the Ice-Pooping Robot”.

So what will I be doing? Lots of things (as always). My responsibilities include “evaluating potential products and enhancements through market research, business analysis and ROI modeling, building business plans and performing market analysis to justify resources for product development and ‘own’ the product and serve as its expert and evangelist across multiple relationships” among other things.

Basically, I will be driving product development through research, ROI projections and detailed requirements gathering. I’m still transitioning out of my old role, but will keep this site updated on my progress.

Take Gizmodo and Engadget’s coverage of the September 5th Apple Event. They both blogged the even as it happened. Engadget’s entry simply went down the page chronologically forcing a reader to refresh and scroll to the bottom of the post every few seconds to see an update. Gizmodo’s coverage wasn’t much better, but at least posted in reverse-chron.

Here are a couple suggestions, some easy, others not so, that would greatly enhance the Live Blogging experience for any event.

• First, to Engadget, put a “Jump to recent” anchor link to the end of the post for pete’s sake! I know anchor tags aren’t as flashy as Ajax or, um, Flash, but it would greatly improve your functionality.
• Now to single out Gizmodo, having multiple bloggers in one blog post is confusing. Separate them visually or go without. One person can handle a Steve Jobs announcement.
• Why not take advantage of Web2.0 technologies and display these threads in one place like a slide show or IM conversation? How great would it be, instead of having to refresh hundreds of times, you could see when the blogger was typing, just like AOL IM and Google Talk?
• Why doesn’t Apple let people video tape the damn thing? With the amount of live video blogging going on around us, how difficult would it be to encourage video blogging of live events?

Maybe none of these techniques would work well, but I want the importance of thinking outside the box when it comes to live blogging events… I wasn’t at the Apple event today and the jumbled and poor-execution of the live bloggers didn’t make me feel like I was either. Make the event online nearly as compelling as the live one and you’ve got something.

Google justified the move by claiming that its a step towards reducing duplicate content stating, “Instead of 20 ‘different’ articles (which actually used the exact same content), we’ll show the definitive original copy and give credit to the original journalist.” Also, according to PaidContent, Google does not have any current plans to advertise on the AP stories appearing on Google News, “but company officials aren’t ruling out the possibility in the future.”

So what does this mean for news publishers?

1. Wire services are dead. Unless you have a very large base of loyal customers reading your syndicated articles, feel free to reinvest the $3000-$5000/month you spend on the AP or Reuters on original content for your site, because no one will be coming from Google for it.
2. Original content is still king. YouTube aside, until Google actually invests in content creation (or a tool that enables citizen journalism), content publishers should focus on creating original, thought-provoking content. Yes you can still cover the news, but cover it from the angle important to your audience.
3. Don’t kid yourself, Google sees the value in original content. Again, ignoring YouTube, a large percentage of Google’s revenue is given away to publishing partners. You can’t tell me that there aren’t people at Google eying the benefits of hosting original content and keeping more of that revenue for themselves.

As a person responsible for the traffic of a large IT News organization, this move does trouble me. But it also has some advantages. The duplicate content corrections Google is promising should have immediate impact on sites that already publish original news analysis and we should be able to move valuable content dollars away from syndicated news (that wasn’t driving that much traffic anyway) and into more profitable original reporting. Whatever happens, I’ll be keeping a very close eye on traffic from Google News and other content deals the “Search” company makes in the future.

My favorite feature by far is the ability to share items from the dozens of feeds I read. Currently, when you “share” items in Google Reader, the tool automatically creates a web page (and RSS feed) of all your shared items. In theory, this would allow you to post the best of the best of the feeds you read for either later reference or your lazy friends. You can see an example over at LiveManly.com under “Random Good Stuff”.

This got me to thinking. If Google (or someone else) were to harness the power of social networking/bookmarking with this tool and, for example, allow users to add their shared feeds to a central database/aggregation tool, wouldn’t this be a very valuable news aggregation tool?

I haven’t completely hashed out this concept, but think about this: if instead of having to go to a site like Digg or Delicious to save/share your bookmarks (items you probably found through RSS anyway), you could simply upload your shared (best of) feed to a tool and it would group similar posts and tags.

And wouldn’t the end result–a common mind-share of the best of the web–be extremely valuable to other readers? Especially if feed contributors could be segmented into groups (i.e. gamers, executives, foodies, etc).

The only downfall with this is if a company other than Google were to do this they would need to rely on users using Google Reader (and Google continuing the service) as no other feed aggregation tool (that I know of) has this feature.

Anyone heard of anything like this?