I am in Heathrow on my way to Cape Town for the World Cup. Sitting in the lounge I was watching Japan v Cameroon on the TV and, as the game was boring, began to read the Independent newspaper.

Then this graphic caught my attention.

Robert Scoble cornered Ron Conway in the hallway at the Chirp conference yesterday and in the aftermath of Twitter acquiring Tweetie, and announcing their own URL shortening service, asked the big question. Is it still sensible to invest in companies seeking to expand or enhance the use of Twitter in some way?

Ron is unequivocal in his answer.

For what it’s worth I think Ron is right…. as usual

TechMeme Link here

Mag+ live with Popular Science+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

No comment really.

I do think video and audio are missing from this vision, but it is a great first step.

Many of you will be familiar with the project I have been incubating over the past 18 months or so. s.erious.ly. It is predicated on two ideas. One is the trend (now almost complete) of the deportalization of internet content. The second is the success of companies like Glam Media and Sugar Publishing is proving the value of passion based content networks. Today, the 4th site in the group was launched – seriouslyipad. It is aggregating – in real time – all articles from a selection of highly rated sites about the iPad.

Feel free to subscribe, comment, or hang out…..

Walt Mossberg today reviewed a couple of new technologies that allow you to beam video from a PC to a TV wirelessly. Pretty cool, but IMHO there is not a big demand for this.

More interesting is the discussion about whether we are at the tipping point between TV and the internet, where more and more people will get their video from the Internet.

In the video below Walt is a sceptic, but his colleague makes the point that the big TV companies have much to lose if we are close to that point, namely subscriber fees from Cable and Satellite.

Worth Viewing

A nice vision of the near future from BERG. It is focused on Magazines but makes me think about web content more. What is the role of a web site, a web page, a post and a tweet in this world?

The UI concepts are nice, but functionally limited. And the discovery of content doesn’t seem to exist, it assumes subscriptions to publications – which I’m sure will only be part of the story, and a small part at that.

Take a look yourself:

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Hat Tip to CrunchGear

Discussion at TechMeme

Huffington and Mathias Döpfner (CEO of German media empire Axel Springer) discuss the future of news. The moderator is Christine Ockrent, CEO of France 24, a TV broadcasting company.

In the context of Rupert Murdoch declaring his intent to take his content out of Google this is a timely exchange.

Clearly there are many sides to this issue, but – bottom line – the cost base of old media is not sustainable, and the news gathering possibilities of the distributed masses together with curation and aggregation present a powerful alternative.

I recommend anybody interested in the future of news and aggregation spend the 50 minutes watching this.

Glam hired a new guy today. Techcrunch, VentureBeat and PaidContent all posted about it.

All of the reporting on this hire focus on Glam’s coup in getting their man, and on their profitability heading into Q4. There is little in the way of analysis, which is probably quite reasonable on a news-filled Monday morning here on the West Coast..

As TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid reports:

Glam Media has scored a major senior hire, landing Josh Jacobs, Yahoo’s Vice President & GM Advertising Technology Platforms who currently runs Yahoo’s entire display ad platform and previously ran the portal’s publisher network. Jacobs will be joining Glam as Senior Vice President of Brand Advertising Products & Marketing, where he’ll run all of Glam’s brand advertising products, as well as marketing and communications. This is a major win for Glam, which has shown strong growth through the economic downturn as it eats away marketshare from the likes of Yahoo, MSN, and AOL.

However, there is a more strategic conclusion to draw from Glam’s recent trajectory and from this hire in particular. Glam is unique in having successfully built a new model that is far more focused on the evolving landscape of publishing and reading habits than any of its competitors. Samir Arora – Glam’s CEO – grasped very early that the growth in the number of publishers on the Internet would lead to a changing landscape for advertisers. By grasping the trend early he has succeeded in building a most impressive business. A woman’s content site, with virtually no original content, where the majority of the traffic is not on glam.com, but is on the several hundred publisher sites that make up the Glam network. By realizing that the audience is already there, and that the business is to take advertising to it, rather than to seek to capture it for a destination portal, Arora has figured out how to grow a large business, even in hard times.

I wrote about deportalization quite some time ago, and spelled out its implications. As we move from the era of deportalization into the new era characterized by the real time stream, Glam are positioned to continue to grow. Display advertising is a major element in Glam’s strategy and rightly so. High value audiences are found clustered around all major topics. Ad networks typically fail to realize the value of those audiences, or adequately facilitate a brand from engaging with them. Glam is simply a small indication of the potential for passion-focused distributed advertising.

Here is a book I wrote in 1988 for Penguin. It is available free on Google books. And as of today I can embed it in a web page.

With the recent rise to prominence in the UK of the BNP, it may be an interesting read again. At the time I used a non-de-plume (Keith Tompson) because it was actually dangerous to be an open and active anti-racist.

It also has some relevance to the internet debate about race hatred.

Jean-Marie Hullot and Gilles Samoun have – today – launched fotopedia.com. It is the culmination of the work done by the fotonauts team over the past 2 years.

fotopedia is both a web site and an optional downloadable client. At launch the web site brings together awesome images covering more than 4500 subjects. It allows those who download the client to create encyclopedia pages for subjects of their choice, or to add images to the already existing encyclopedia pages. Users vote for their favorite images (either on the web site or in the client). Each subject is produced dynamically from the votes of the contributors and the users and will likely change over time.

The subject pages bind to Wikipedia content for the same subject.

Here is one I did earlier, for Manchester United. I am using the embeddable widget feature to put it here on my blog.

fotopedia brings to the Internet the photographic equivalent of what Wikipedia did for text. It is inclusive and community driven. And above all else it is beautiful.

Disclosure: I am a shareholder in fotopedia…and I am very biased. But it truly is wonderful.