From the August issue of Wired mag­a­zine: Ace a press interview.

Sally Stew­art, com­mu­ni­ca­tions con­sul­tant and author of Media Train­ing 101, offers some point­ers on how not to come off like an idiot when you’re talk­ing to a journalist.

1. Know what you’re talk­ing about and to whom you’re say­ing it. Jot down a few key points you want to make on note cards.

2. Give some thought to what you don’t want to men­tion, as well. Set bound­aries and watch out for topic drift.

3. Remem­ber, the per­son you’re talk­ing to is not your friend and will use any­thing you say — espe­cially the asides.

4. Pre­pare men­tally for the pres­sure, but don’t try to be per­fect. A lit­tle stut­ter­ing is OK. It shows you’re human.

5. Be suc­cinct. Limit your responses to three sen­tences or less for print media and a sin­gle sen­tence for television.

6. In a tele­vi­sion round­table, you might get to respond to one ques­tion dur­ing the entire show. Make it count.

7. Don’t talk over another guest. A lit­tle inter­play is good, but too much pegs you as a bully. No one can hear you anyway.

8. Avoid these terms: frankly, truth­fully, Web 2.0, proac­tive, impact­ful, par­a­digm, syn­ergy, no-brainer, empower, Web 3.0.

Reuters: Google to fea­ture news agen­cies’ articles.

Google is play­ing host to news arti­cles from four news agen­cies includ­ing The
Asso­ci­ated Press, the com­pany said today, set­ting the stage for it to
gen­er­ate adver­tis­ing rev­enue from Google News.

The part­ners — The A.P., Britain’s Press Asso­ci­a­tion, Cana­dian Press
and Agence France-Presse — now have their arti­cles fea­tured with the
orga­ni­za­tions’ own brands on Google News-hosted land­ing pages. The
com­pa­nies have agreed to license news feeds to Google.

Pre­vi­ously,
the five-year-old Google News ser­vice has crawled the Web to uncover
links to news arti­cles from thou­sands of sto­ries and clus­tered links on
sim­i­lar sub­jects together, with­out host­ing the arti­cles themselves. …

Looks like the rumors about the Red Her­ring mag­a­zine going out of busi­ness may be true. One tipoff: they promised to pay me $100 for use of a photo of RIAA pres­i­dent Cary Sher­man — but their check just bounced. And, to add insult to injury, I got dinged with a bad check return fee. Will revisit this if any offi­cial announce­ment comes along.

I own the fol­low­ing domain names that I’d like to sell for a mod­est price:

Podworld.org
2008electorate.com
Mypersonalp2p.com
Newmediabeat.com
Personalmedia101.com
Privacyp2p.com
Producermarketplace.com
Remixcentral.org
Sharingnetwork.org
Videoproducersexpo.com
Wecommerce.org
Wemarketplace.com
Wenetworks.com
Citizensmediasummit.com

If inter­ested, con­tact me at jdla­sica at gmail.com.

Busi­ness 2.0: The Face­book econ­omy. How third par­ties are mak­ing money off of Face­book. (Above, the part­ners of SocialMedia.com, no rela­tion to SocialMedia.biz.) Excerpt:

Zucker­berg has turned the MySpace busi­ness model upside down: Not only is he giv­ing devel­op­ers their own real estate within Face­book — both inside users’ pro­file pages and on pig­gy­backed appli­ca­tion pages — but he’s allow­ing them to make money from their apps any way they can, from ad sales to direct pur­chases of ser­vices and mer­chan­dise. For exam­ple, down­load iLike, an app that lets you sam­ple and pur­chase music, and the devel­oper gets a 5 per­cent kick­back if you end up buy­ing songs from iTunes or Amazon.

To incen­tivize devel­op­ers, Face­book is also break­ing ranks with rivals by shar­ing cru­cial data — such as a user’s age, inter­ests, and friends — that enables more sophis­ti­cated applications. …

Josh Kopel­man, a Philadelphia-based ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist and investor in such star­tups as LinkedIn and Yapta, sees more users com­ing Facebook’s way (Com­Score reports Face­book grew 270 per­cent last year, while MySpace grew 72 per­cent) — and even more devel­op­ers. “If you were a venture-backed Web startup,” Kopel­man says, “and had to decide whether to focus on a site that wel­comed you in and let you keep 100 per­cent of the rev­enue you gen­er­ate, vs. a site with a vague pol­icy that doesn’t let you gen­er­ate any rev­enue, it’s not even a deci­sion. It’s an IQ
test.” …

What apps work on Facebook?

There’s a sci­ence to achiev­ing per­fect viral alchemy, and it’s get­ting more sophis­ti­cated by the day. One place every Face­book devel­oper fre­quents is Appaholic.com. Cre­ated by San Francisco-based pro­gram­mer Jesse Farmer, Appa­holic breaks down Face­book appli­ca­tions by pop­u­lar­ity, growth rate, and even “viral­ity,” as mea­sured by growth in a sin­gle day. On a recent day, Farmer ticked off the lead­ing app in each cat­e­gory: Top Friends, a Slide appli­ca­tion that lets you rank your friends; Grid­dle, a word game; and What’s My Chi­nese Name? …

Farmer has already spot­ted a few tell­tale pat­terns. One attribute that’s death to an app, he says, is com­plex­ity. Face­book and all its home­grown appli­ca­tions are rel­a­tively sim­ple; those who cre­ate some­thing that requires too much thought or expla­na­tion quickly run into trouble. …

Four ways to make money

1: Sell ads

The play

Just about any Face­book app can get into the ad game, but only those with the biggest audi­ences will earn seri­ous money. Sev­eral easy-to-use ad net­works are already deliv­er­ing the ads for a cut of over­all sales.

The front-runners

Graf­fiti (5.9 mil­lion users). This highly viral draw­ing tool spread quickly because of its sim­plic­ity and originality.

iLike (5.4 mil­lion users). Users can set up their music and video libraries in mere minutes.

2: Attract sponsors

The play

Adver­tis­ers are already spon­sor­ing apps. Besides being widely used, your appli­ca­tion needs to offer com­pa­nies a nat­ural way to inter­act with their customers.

The front-runners

Like­ness (2.9 mil­lion users). Offers quizzes that gen­er­ate top-10 lists — an ideal
brand­ing vehi­cle — and matches them with those of friends with sim­i­lar preferences.

Food­Fight (2 mil­lion users). Vir­tual lunch money buys you food to throw at friends. Next up on its menu: chicken wings from a major food chain.

3: Sell services

The play

As apps become more about util­ity and less about fun, oppor­tu­ni­ties will arise to sell dig­i­tal ser­vices of last­ing value to users. Even­tu­ally, they’ll make pur­chases with­out leav­ing their profiles.

The front-runners

Files
(43,000 users). Offered by Box.net, this online file-storage ser­vice turns a Face­book pro­file into a repos­i­tory for mem­bers’ dig­i­tal media.

Pic­nik
(206,000 users). A Face­book ver­sion of Photoshop.(Hello, Adobe?) Basic tools are free; advanced fea­tures are offered for an addi­tional fee.

4: Sell products

The play

As Face­book increas­ingly becomes the cen­ter of people’s dig­i­tal lives, it’s also becom­ing a venue for sell­ing things — dig­i­tal and oth­er­wise — to its fast-growing audience.

The front-runners

Amaz­ing Gift­box (127,000 users). Sends vir­tual Ama­zon merchandise.

Band Tracker (29,000 users). Searches upcom­ing con­certs and links to ticket vendors.

Visual CD Rack (20,000 users). Lets users browse and buy music from a vir­tual CD rack.

The pay­off

Most devel­op­ers are going the affil­i­ate route, offer­ing prod­uct wish lists and then send­ing users to sites like Amazon.com or iTunes. Oth­ers, how­ever, are directly sell­ing such items as ring­tones and T-shirts.

Tricks of the trade

1. Be a mid­dle­man. iLike makes its music-sampling apps sim­ple and hands off sales to iTunes or Ama­zon via affil­i­ate part­ner­ships. Those directly sell­ing hard goods need to pre­pare for the com­plex­ity of pay­ment and delivery.

2. Keep it sim­ple. Face­book has not yet become a place where peo­ple are likely to buy, say, a dig­i­tal cam­era. But users are start­ing to pur­chase items that don’t break the bank and extend Facebook’s util­ity. XLR8 Mobile, for instance, is look­ing to sell ring­tones and wall­pa­per on Face­book via cus­tom store­front wid­gets. “We don’t want to bring peo­ple to the store,” says XLR8 Mobile CEO Perry Tell. “We pre­fer to bring the store to the people.”

3. Give it away. Going viral is always the goal. One great way to get there is by offer­ing free sam­ples. Whether it’s a dig­i­tal down­load of a song or the image of an item, give your cus­tomers a taste of what they’ll get before ask­ing them to commit.

4. Don’t rule out the odd. “Some­times wacky, unusual, off-the-beaten-path stuff sells huge,” Tell says. “Every­one is look­ing for the next Crazy Frog, so you must be will­ing to try lots of things.”

Go read the arti­cle (or bet­ter yet, sub­scribe, like I do) for the com­plete run­down. Face­book is emerg­ing as the new dig­i­tal marketplace.

Time mag­a­zine: Why Face­book is the future. Excerpt:

Face­book’s appeal is both obvi­ous and rather sub­tle. It’s a web­site,
but in a sense, it’s another ver­sion of the Inter­net itself: a Net
within the Net, one that’s every­thing the larger Net is not. Face­book
is cleanly designed and has a classy, upmar­ket feel to it–a whiff of
the Ivy League still clings. Peo­ple tend to use their real names on
Face­book. They also declare their sex, age, where­abouts, roman­tic
sta­tus and insti­tu­tional affil­i­a­tions. Iden­tity is not a per­for­mance or
a toy on Face­book; it is a fixed and orderly fact. Nobody does any­thing
secretly: a news feed con­stantly updates your friends on your
activ­i­ties. On Face­book, every­body knows you’re a dog.

Maybe
that’s why Facebook’s fastest-growing demo­graphic con­sists of peo­ple 35
or older: they’re refugees from the uncouth wider Web. Every com­mu­nity
must nego­ti­ate the imper­a­tives of indi­vid­ual free­dom and col­lec­tive
social order, and Face­book con­sti­tutes a crit­i­cal rebal­anc­ing of the
Internet’s found­ing vision of unfet­tered elec­tronic lib­erty. Of course,
it is pos­si­ble to mis­be­have on Facebook–it’s just self-defeating.
Unlike the Inter­net, Face­book is struc­tured around an opt-in
phi­los­o­phy; peo­ple have to con­sent to have con­tact with or even see
oth­ers on the network.

There are some great Char­lie Rose inter­views on CharlieRose.com. Here are two recent inter­views with tech heavyweights:

• Esther Dyson (talk­ing about mak­ing her genome pub­lic, Google, YouTube and more)
• Craig New­mark

The San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle on 10– and 11-year-old dig­i­tal sto­ry­tellers. Excerpt:

A sam­pling of the results were pro­jected on a screen Sat­ur­day and are avail­able for view­ing at MoAD’s [Museum of the African Dias­pora] Web site. Each stu­dent was recorded telling a story about a fam­ily mem­ber, which plays over a photo of that fam­ily mem­ber. Their voices some­times stum­ble, but the mate­r­ial is funny and touch­ing, and the details often sur­prise. Delilah Sagote, 10, talks about her Samoan grand­mother grow­ing up play­ing bas­ket­ball and going to church with her broth­ers and sis­ters. Isa­iah Tenes, 10, dis­cusses his great-grandmother’s strug­gles as a young per­son, say­ing, “Her mom was born in Europe dur­ing the war. She had three other sis­ters. She said: ‘They would be lucky if they made it to school.’ There were bombs falling and gun­fire all the time. They would have to hide in bomb shel­ters. It was under­ground and very scary.“

The stu­dents learned how to com­pose pic­tures. Tenes’ mother is posed in a chair hold­ing a photo of her mother in much the same out­fit and posi­tion. The angle of the pic­ture of Sagote’s beam­ing grand­mother is from below, under­scor­ing the point that these kids man­aged to cap­ture the world as they saw it.

Each stu­dent took more than 300 pho­tos, so the hand­ful dis­played on the Web site are the result of a lot of edit­ing. Com­mon themes seem to be cars and friends, although the stu­dents were also taught to look for inter­est­ing lines and forms — which makes for intrigu­ing visions of the urban landscape. …

You can see some of the dig­i­tal sto­ries here.

A few days after I wrote about the Spock peo­ple search engine comes this story in the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle: People-search engines try to be more spe­cific than Google.

Locate a long-lost friend or old class­mate. Get dirt on a poten­tial hire.

These are just a cou­ple of the uses of an emerg­ing group of search engines that find infor­ma­tion about people

Peo­ple search engines include:

Wink, in Los Altos, Calif.

Spock, the Red­wood City, Calif., which went pub­lic this month.

Zoom­Info, a people-search engine focused on the busi­ness world, is a
rel­a­tive indus­try vet­eran, founded in 2001.

Pipl, PeekYou and WikiYou are also in the people-search mix, though
they fea­ture far smaller indexes and spot­tier results.

The Hay­den­films 3.0 Online Film Fes­ti­val launches. Four films will be show­cased at the Direc­tors Guild of Amer­ica in NYC in Jan­u­ary and the top win­ner receives $10,000.