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 Woodlands, Texas based startup Insightory is setting its goals high, with the aim to do for management knowledge what Wikipedia has done for general knowledge.
The service itself joins a growing list of document uploading sites that include Scribd and Docstoc, although the company claims that unlike these services Insightory is more targeted and heavily moderated. The content is aimed at management professionals, professors and graduate students and comes from a variety of sources including users from within the United States and elsewhere.
Insightory believes that companies need a constant supply of management knowledge and that their service can provide this; certainly it does help to get other opinions when in management so the service may find a willing audience.
The service is currently in alpha with a beta version to be launched this month and collaboration and networking tools coming in the first half of 2008. Insightory is holding a Contest for the best management-related documents uploaded to the site with prizes ranging from $100 to $3000, more details here.
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 The strike by the Writers Guild of America continues to drag on, with the writers this week rejecting a new proposal from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that offered $130m in additional compensation to writers.
The sticking point continues to be compensation for online sales and revenue, with the Writers Guild claiming that the new offer of $250 for a year’s reuse of an hour long program streamed on the Web was not enough when compared to the normal $20,000 payment made per year for re-runs of a program.
Further talks between both parties are set to resume this week, but unless one party backs down from its current position the strike will go on over Christmas and into the new year.
The immediate effect of the strike saw a number of topical daily talk shows go off air, including NBC’s Tonight Show and Late Night, CBS’ Late Show and Late, Late Show and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The networks had stockpiled scripted drama and comedy shows prior to the strike, but as the strike drags on these stocks are running out. Viewers in the United States won’t be presented with static, but they will soon be presented with reruns and cheap to produce reality TV shows and gameshows as the networks scramble to fill the gaps.
Younger audiences are already switching off TV, with various surveys indicating that a growing number of viewers prefer the internet over television. Consider that during the last Writers Strike in 1988 television lost roughly 10% of its audience after the strike, and at a time where there was fewer alternatives for entertainment. Today a viewing audience presented with reruns and reality TV has alternatives, and the internet will be the number one alternative; a switch away from TV today could be as big or even bigger than it was in 1988 and would benefit nearly every part of the long tail of online content providers.
Here’s a quick list of TV shows that will go off air in the coming months. Even if the Writers go back to work tomorrow the networks have already started firing staff so it will take time now to re-hire staff resulting in a delay in restarting production.
House (FOX): three episodes left scheduled for January
Samantha Who? (ABC): six episodes left
Family Guy (FOX): mix of new episodes and repeats through January
CSI x 3, NCIS, Criminal Minds, Without a Trace and Cold Case (CBS): four or less episodes each
Ugly Betty, Pushing Daisies and Grey’s Anatomy (ABC): two episodes left
Desperate Housewives (ABC): last episode to be shown Sunday
The Office (NBC): 0
Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, Two And a Half Men, Rules of Engagement: 0
24 (FOX): postponed indefinitely
See our previous coverage here, here and here.
(image CC via myyearofnewthings on Flickr, list data via AP)
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 An interesting article over at the NY Times details the failure of Coca-Cola to follow through on its initial commitment as a Facebook partner in Beacon. Coke had been named as a “Landmark Partner” in Beacon along with Verizon and Blockbuster when Facebook announced Beacon November 6.
Notably Coca-Cola didn’t realize that Beacon wouldn’t be opt-in, and this was key in their withdrawal of support, and continued absence from the program:
“We have adopted a bit of a ‘wait and see’ as far as what we are going to do with Beacon because we are not sure how consumers are going to respond,” said Carol Kruse, Coke’s vice president of global interactive marketing, this morning..“I, like you, certainly understood that it would be opt-in. That’s what I heard before as well as what I heard on the 6th.”
As we know Facebook has now flipped on Beacon, switching to an opt-in model after widespread criticism from users and groups including Moveon.org. The evolving story though is how Facebook got to this point, particularly given key partners were led to believe that the program was opt-in, suggesting that someone, or something caused Facebook to switch to an opt-out model at the 11th hour.
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 Microsoft has acquired Seattle based social networking site WebFives.
WebFives was initially founded in 2004 by former Microsoft engineer Mike Toutonghi as Vizrea and offers social networking with a focus of mobile media, including video, music and photos. Users are provided with standard social networking profile pages complete with blogging, and have the option of accessing their sites via computer or via a WAP specific page.
According to The Seattle Times, Toutonghi told WebFives users that the service will stop at the end of the year because of the Microsoft acquisition, making the acquisition a technology buy as opposed to a community buy. Toutonghi went on to encourage users to sign up to MSN Spaces and/or Windows Live for their social networking experience.
Price of the acquisition was not disclosed.
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 New figures released by comScore show that YouTube remains the outright leader in online video.
Based on videos viewed, Google owned sites (YouTube + Google Video, but mostly YouTube) commanded a 28.3% market share in the United States in September with Fox Interactive Media (FIM) sites (MySpace and others) on 4.2%. The figures (see chart) demonstrate that YouTube doesn’t dominate video viewing as much as would be expected, suggesting that the long tail is alive and well in the sector given the top ten video sites only hold 45.2% of all videos viewed online.
The unique viewer numbers for video destinations also show Google leading, but by a smaller margin of 39.4% vs 22.6% for FIM sites. These figures are for people visiting the actual video sites themselves suggesting that much of YouTube’s dominance comes not from YouTube.com itself, but from people embedding YouTube videos (28.3% of all videos viewed vs 4.2% for FIM).
Notable in its absence from both top ten charts is the IAC owned Vimeo, who according to this post fired founder Jakob Lodwick today. Clearly Vimeo isn’t performing although it has positioned itself well with support for HD video. IAC usually takes long term positions in companies it owns (Ask.com for example) so it’s not on Deadpool watch yet but you’d expect IAC will be looking at ways of improving its performance going forward.
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 Google’s “Blogger in Draft” program that tests functionality for Google’s popular Blogger blogging platform has rolled out OpenID support for comments.
The new service will allow anyone with an OpenID account, including LiveJournal and TypeKey services to log in and validate a comment on blogs running under the Blogger in Draft service. Google notes that the feature is a test and that they will seek user feedback, but all things being equal this will end up being provided on Blogger itself.
The bigger news, particularly for rabid OpenID advocates is a suggestion from Google that they are “working on functionality to let Blogger’s URLs (both Blog*Spot and custom domains) be used for commenting elsewhere on the web,” which sounds a lot like code for Google is looking at turning Blogger logins into OpenID log ins in a similar way that AOL did with its user base.
It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to know who is driving this, and Google even drops a hint in the example link: “http://brad.livejournal.com/”; LiveJournal founder and former SixApart employee Brad Fitzpatrick joined Google in August and is credited as the founder of OpenID.
OpenID advocates are passionate about the potential of the idea, but despite the noise and companies such as Digg, Yahoo and even to some extent Microsoft adopting OpenID it has failed to capture the broader public’s imagination. If the 1000 pound Gorilla in the room decides to adopt OpenID across its range of products, presumably with Blogger being only the first step of a broader rollout, OpenID may finally take off outside of the first adopter and tech communities.
Thanks to David for the tip
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 The Wall Street Journal is quoting “people familiar with the matter” saying that Google will announce a bid for the 700 MHz wireless spectrum Friday.
Google first expressed interesting in bidding in July, when it sent a letter to the FCC demanding that the new bandwidth have four requirements: open applications, open devices, open services and open networks. The FCC only adopted two of Google’s recommendations when it released the terms for the auction July 31, with support for open applications and open devices, but with no requirement for open services or open networks.
With the auction due in January and bidders having to declare their intentions to bid by December 3, there has been no shortage of speculation as to whether Google would or wouldn’t participate.
The ongoing mystery is exactly what Google plans to do with the spectrum. Since we last wrote about the auction Google has announced the Open Handset Alliance (Android) which includes T-Mobile and Sprint Nextel; in effect Google has an existing partnership with two of the four major existing mobile players in the United States. If Google is seeking to become a cellphone operator in its own right, this wouldn’t be well received by T-Mobile or Sprint Nextel; unless of course Google is already talking about partnerships where by one (or both) of their partners provides the towers and service provision whilst Google maintains spectrum ownership, whilst presumably dictating access terms that would favor open access and/ or Android itself.
From a consumer viewpoint Google entering the auction process is a positive step forward, even if we don’t know Google’s intentions yet. Competition is always good, and Google owned spectrum would provide downward pressure on cell phone rates that will benefit users on all networks, not just those using a Google owned service.
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 Google has released two new features for its RSS reading product, Recommendations and Drag-and-Drop.
The Discovery recommendation feature suggests new sites a user may wish to read based on current subscriptions and (interestingly) browsing history. Google has previously offered feed bundles based on subjects, but this is the first time it has offered customized recommendations in this way.
The drag-and-drop functionality allows users to re-order or move subscribed feeds within a folder or to another folder. This style of functionality isn’t unique, and as Google itself points out, RSS readers such as Bloglines and NewsGator already provide drag-and-drop functionality.
Google thanks a number of interns and ex-interns for the new features, a nice thing to do.
As a Google Reader user I know I’m certainly going to use the drag-and-drop functionality, and I’m even looking at some of the suggested feeds as well, but I’ve got to ask: how is it that we can get drag-and-drop in Reader and not Gmail? Surely Gmail could do with this functionality. Maybe the Gmail team needs some interns as well 
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With Facebook making changes to its Beacon program, users will see a new set of options every time they interact with a “Beacon Affiliate”. This is what you’ll see:
 Notification
Facebook users will see a notification in the lower right corner of the screen after transacting with a Beacon Affiliate. Options include “No Thanks” that will immediately stop the transaction from being published. Alternatively closing or ignoring the warning won’t immediately publish the story, but it will be put in a queue
 Second Warning
Presuming you’ve ignored or closed the first notification, Facebook warns users again the next time they visit their home page. A new box reminds you that an activity has been sent to Facebook. Like the first notification you can choose to not publish the activity by hitting remove, or you can choose to publish it by hitting ok.
Per the original statement from Facebook at this stage, presuming you’ve ignored the warnings and not selected to publish the activity or told Facebook no, it won’t be published. Here’s the kicker though: they’ll keep annoying you until you finally make a decision:
If a user does nothing with the initial notification on Facebook, it will hide after some duration without a story being published. When a user takes a future action on a Beacon site, it will reappear and display all the potential stories along with the opportunity to click “OK” to publish or click “remove” to not publish.
But there is hope should you not wish to have your Facebook experience consumed by messages asking you to publish or not publish an activity, you can opt out permanently
 Opt Out
Found via the “External Websites” section of the Facebook Privacy page, this allows users to permanently opt in or out of Beacon notifications, or if you’re not sure be notified. The downside is that there is no global option to opt out of every Beacon affiliated program; it has to be set per program. Better this than nothing I suppose.
Update: second screen shot is updated. Thanks to Facebook for the more up to date shot.
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Reports surfaced yesterday, and now we have the official word from Facebook. Users will now have to opt-in to share purchases via Beacon:
Stories about actions users take on external websites will continue to be presented to users at the top of their News Feed the next time they return to Facebook. These stories will now always be expanded on their home page so they can see and read them clearly.
Users must click on “OK” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice.
If a user does nothing with the initial notification on Facebook, it will hide after some duration without a story being published. When a user takes a future action on a Beacon site, it will reappear and display all the potential stories along with the opportunity to click “OK” to publish or click “remove” to not publish.
Users will have clear options in ongoing notifications to either delete or publish. No stories will be published if users navigate away from their home page. If they delay in making this decision, the notification will hide and they can make a decision at a later time.
Clicking the “Help” link next to the story will take users to a full tutorial that explains exactly how Beacon works, with screenshots showing each step in the process.
It seems like a win for users, although I’m sure the ramifications of this announcement will be dissected and considered in the hours and days to come. First impressions though: the immediate defaulting to privacy is sure to appease many critics, but the details may still raise some concerns, for example Facebook is still capturing this data, the only difference now is that it wont automatically share it. Will this be enough? advertisers will still be able to tap into Beacon for purchasing preferences and other details based on activity on Facebook so the privacy option is really only skin deep.
(via AllFacebook)
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