Time Inc. has selected Quigo to provide an Adwords-like platform for bidding on pay-per-click text ads across all Time Inc. sites. Quigo will replace Google AdSense network and Yahoo Publisher Network, which currently serve pay-per-click ads from advertisers that buy ads in Google’s and Yahoo’s centralized search advertising marketplace.
What distinguishes the Quigo platform is [...]

USA Today announced a partnership with 4INFO, a text message information service, to provide targeted ads via text messages that USA Today readers can request on their cell phones for updated information on sports, stocks, weather and other such data. USA Today concedes that their average 44 year old user isn’t currently a big user [...]

Never underestimate Steve Jobs. After all of the hand-wringing over Apple’s iPhone being a closed platform, today Apple announced that the iPhone will indeed be open to third-party applications — ingeniously, through integration with Apple’s Safari web browser, which has just been released for Windows (which itself is a huge smack against Microsoft, which has [...]

Movable Type has just released version 4.0 and reversed a decision that nearly killed MT 3.0 and led to the rise of WordPress — MT 4.0, currently in beta, will be released in open source later this year. (See Read/WriteWeb coverage.) The interesting question is how the market will respond to an open source battle [...]

Facebook Platform, which allows companies to build applications — and entire ad or fee-driven businesses — inside Facebook is a brilliant move, which could given Facebook the opportunity to become the next Google. The secret to Google’s success with AdSense was sharing revenue with publishers and letting them figure out how to optimize the revenue. [...]

Let’s play connect the dots with a number of recent announcements that together reveal the real battleground for the future of media:

Doubleclick announces that it is setting up a “a Nasdaq-like exchange for the buying and selling of digital advertisements”

Google announces that it is extending its AdWords marketplace to TV
AOL announces that Advertising.com will provide [...]

Is it possible that the future of the content business is worse than being less profitable and worse even than not scaling anymore — is it possible that content creation will cease to be a business?
I was struck by this quote from a music business manager in the WSJ article about the complete collapse of [...]

The once monolithic media industry is undergoing a radical schism, dividing itself into content creation, on the one hand, and content aggregation and distribution on the other.
The nature of this transformation suddenly crystallized for me when I read Tom Foremski’s piece on the new West Coast/East Coast media industry divide. Tom seems to be focused [...]

Dave Winer and many others don’t like that Apple’s iPhone is a closed device, which doesn’t allow you to change the software or use other software. While I can appreciate how frustrating it must be for people like Dave with the skill and desire to customize their tech products to better suit their needs, they [...]

We’ve all become so enamored with the increasingly distributed nature of the web — or the de-portalization as Keith Teare of Edgeio puts it — and the success of user-centric platforms like YouTube and MySpace. But we seem to be forgetting that the most successful platforms are acting just like portals — the “one stop [...]