Paul Graham brought up the issue of media companies censoring or not covering content that (positively) relate to each other.

Twice now, stories that
linked to reddit have gone out in Digg’s rss feed as frontpage stories,  only to disappear from the frontpage.
…
Digg’s whole point
is supposed to be that users decide what’s interesting.  Does that
merely mean, in  practice, that users get to vote among choices that
Digg approves?

We witnessed a similarly biased coverage in Turkey recently.  My friend Orhan Gorbon competed in the Vakko Cannes Istanbul off-shore sailing race, on a boat sponsored by Sabah, a leading Turkish newspaper.  I don’t read Sabah regularly, and the dailies I read, owned by the competitor Dogan Media Group, while covering the race (because one of their papers, Milliyet, also sponsored a boat), did not mention a word of Orhan’s boat.  Just like Digg, Milliyet was doing a disservice to its readers, who, arguably, are as interested in the Sabah boat as they are in the Milliyet boat.  By the way, Sabah did exactly the same.

I can accept this reporting bias in newspapers – after all, we choose our newspapers partly for their editorial biases.  However, I find it unacceptable in the case of Digg and reddit, since their whole point is a "Wisdom of Crowds-like" filtering of content.

NB. In the photo above, this blog proves its unbiased approach 🙂

Another fair warning is being yelled at the TV industry – I wonder if they are hearing it.  Om Malik reports again that the Skype founders are steadily moving on with their next venture aimed at disrupting traditional TV, much like they shattered some pretty solid walls in the voice world.

What Zennstrom and Friis are exactly up to is almost irrelevant.  They are so many different ways that TV can be attacked, if one is armed with the right arsenal.  TiVo proved that the audience is keen to adopt new technology.  MySpace and YouTube proved that the appetite for microchunked content is voracious.

The Skype team have the credentials and the cash to take it on seriously.  I look forward to the news coming from their direction.

TechCrunch (via Baris) has reported that MySpace has started banning widgets to link to external sites.  TechCrunch concludes:

That’s a major blow against the viral spread of services like YouTube,
RockYou and countless emerging others. I’ve been talking to a lot of
widget vendors lately, and “it works in MySpace” is a now a primary
selling point. Companies are investing large amounts of money in
widgetizing content from one site onto another and MySpace is huge.
This move, in the name of security, will likely do serious damage to
the cottage industry of flash widgets in MySpace. In as much as users
love their widgets, that means this will do serious damage to MySpace
as well.

I am not sure about the potential damage to MySpace.  Baris is right in that MySpace should not care about the widget companies. However, MySpace must care about the user experience.  To the extent that MySpace can allow its users to express themselves on its platform to a degree that satisfies them, there should be no problems, and MySpace should continue its growth.  However, it’s getting more and more obvious that open source development models are more productive than closed systems.

The question ends up being, "just how demanding are MySpace users?"  Now that MySpace is mainstream, I think the expectations of its user base is declining.  The mainstream has tolerated mediocrity in traditional media for a long time.

Even though I am a big fan of open systems, I think I am with Baris on this.

Here’s a thoughtful post about the future of entertainment, by Alemsah Ozturk and Ozgur Alaz, the team behind Marketallica.  I find the mindmap interesting.