On Tuesday, some of this behind-the-scenes drama broke out into the open, during a Twitter battle between Greenwald and Vanity Fair writer Kurt Eichenwald — a debate that throws into sharp relief some important differences between the Guardian writer and some of the others writing about the NSA story.

The argument started when Eichenwald, who has written a number of books about political and social issues, said the NSA program had been around for 10 years and asked when “the fearful” thought it had been used against them (these are excerpts from a Storify collection, which is here, but embedding the Storify widget here doesn’t seem to be working at the moment):

Eichenwald’s tweet got a response from Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute — who tweets under the handle @normative — and then Greenwald responded to them both (in a comment clearly aimed at Eichenwald), questioning the fact that some writers call themselves “journalists” and then demand secrecy:

The Vanity Fair writer responded with a series of tweets that mimicked the phrase Greenwald used in his comment — suggesting that the Guardian writer knows nothing about national security, that “having a single source constitutes having knowledge” and that government secrecy is necessary:

Greenwald then suggested that Eichenwald’s comments made it sound like “you work for the Pentagon,” and that this was clearly the point of the Vanity Fair writer’s approach to national security issues — and questioned his use of NSA officials as sources:

To this, Eichenwald suggested that just because someone has additional information on a story, it doesn’t mean that they have been “compromised,” and Greenwald accused the Vanity Fair writer of “parroting what gov’t officials tell you and calling it journalism.”

The Guardian writer said Eichenwald should “go be a spokesman for the Pentagon” and that this would be more honest than his current approach to the topic, and Eichenwald said that Greenwald didn’t understand the reasons for classification rules and that based on his personal attack, “the gloves are off.”

Greenwald responded that he knew plenty about the NSA, having written about it for seven years, and that he had also written a book about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

At this point, Eichenwald said the Guardian writer was “arrogant” for arguing that anyone who disagreed with him was beholden to the government, and Greenwald responded in kind:

While this might seem like just a lot of carping and bickering between two journalists, the issue at the core of this Twitter tiff is clearly Greenwald’s status as an outsider on national security issues — something that I (and others, including journalism professor Jay Rosen) have argued made it possible for him to move to the forefront of the reporting on the Edward Snowden leaks.

That outsider status has also made him a target for those within the traditional national-security establishment, however — a group that Eichenwald would likely fall into — because they perceive him as overstating the Snowden documents or not fully understanding them, and of attacking the government for a program that they believe has a valid purpose.

And perhaps they are also more than a little jealous that Greenwald is getting attention for a story they knew about but didn’t report much on, until the Snowden leaks threw the doors open and let all that sunlight in.

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Abysim

First up, Amazon announced it’s added “more than a thousand books, games, educational apps, movies and TV shows to Kindle FreeTime Unlimited,” its monthly subscription streaming offering for kids. Not surprisingly, Amazon didn’t provide subscriber numbers — though Kindle VP Peter Larsen said “the vast majority of our customers who take advantage of our one month free trial of FreeTime Unlimited choose to subscribe and enjoy our content library built just for kids.”

Of course, Amazon’s announcement refers to the Viacom shows that it grabbed exclusive rights to after Netflix lost them: “Among the content on FreeTime Unlimited are “exclusive Nick Jr. favorites from Viacom such as Dora The Explorer, Go, Diego, Go!, Blue’s Clues and The Backyardigans.”

Then Netflix announced that it’s launched a separate section of its site called Netflix Families, which “helps parents with the daunting task of entertaining kids this summer.” The site offers family recommendations in different categories (“family movie night,” etc.) as well as videos from parents about how they are “embracing the ease and flexibility of Netflix.” And Netflix notes that “Netflix works on almost any device with a broadband, WiFi or mobile data connection” — while Kindle FreeTime Unlimited is only available for the Kindle Fire.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / jwblinn

The main goal of BBC Labs is to find startups that the BBC can work with on commercial partnerships. The startups in the program don’t get funding, but over a six-month period get access to office space, and more importantly, get access to the BBC’s huge network and BBC execs working on its digital content.

Jenny Fielding, who heads up of digital ventures for BBC Worldwide (the company’s venture arm) and also leads BBC Labs, told me during the event that her metric of success for BBC Labs is whether a significant number of the startups that go through the program can seal a commercial deal with the BBC. She noted that “We’re about three out of six for the first class of startups.” Startups from the first class that were able to do deals with the BBC include video tagging company wireWAX, and mobile learning startup KO-SU.

For the startups, the key to the program is landing the BBC as an anchor customer. Howard Kingston, founder of Future Ad Labs, one of the companies in the second batch of BBC Labs, told me that a deal with the BBC could “make” a company at a very early stage in the company’s life.

All of the startups in the BBC Labs program come from London’s emerging tech scene, which is receiving growing attention from the major U.S. internet players, the U.K. government, new and seasoned entrepreneurs, and the world’s venture capitalists. There’s hundreds of web and mobile startups that have emerged from London in recent years, including some well-known firms like car service Hailo, and gaming company Mind Candy. In part because of this, we’ll be holding our second-annual Structure:Europe event in London in September (more info on that here and more info on the Structure:Europe Startup Zone here).

Here’s the six startups that the BBC Labs chose for its second summer accelerator program:

1). Future Ad Labs: The company has created a new kind of captcha that brands can use to create interactive games and content. The idea is that there are 300 million captchas completed every day, and that content is a valuable and under-utilized space for brands. The company’s “playcaptcha” is a captcha that guarantees user engagement, Kingston said in his short pitch to the audience.

2). The Backscratchers: The Backscratchers is a free-to-use freelancer community for the creative industry. Freelance photographers, writers, musicians and artists, and designers are hand-picked and filtered by the company, and the startup makes a cut off when a freelancer is hired by a creative agency.

3). Peekabu Studios: The startup develops software that enables any video camera to be able to recognize an object or an image. The company can use the image recognition software to create branded experiences. For example, a food network show could use a spatula (or some cooking item) as a image-recognition password to open up a branded game.

4). Animal Vegetable Mineral: The company creates content for the intersection of television and gaming. One brand they’re likely trying to emulate is Rovio’s Angry Birds, which broke out across TV and even film.

5). Social Spree: This startup is working on a service that tracks social media engagement across platforms and helps content providers manage and boost social media activity.

6). Oddizzi: Oddizzi is a content company that makes educational material for schools internationally. The characters Odd and Izzi teach children different lessons.

The lawsuit, filed in New York earlier this month, claims BuzzFeed owes more than $3.6 million in damages as a result of the soccer pic appearing on 64 sites around the web. According to Eiselein, who uploaded the original image to Flickr, BuzzFeed is liable for “contributory infringement” because the site’s viral news model encourages readers to share the content they find:

BuzzFeed Inc .. gathers items from around the internet, posts them on their website and encourages their visitors/readers to share them … BuzzFeed uses this fact to help convince potential advertisers to place ads on the Buzzfeed site in hope the ads will get a “viral lift” …

BuzzFeed, Inc actively encourages its users to share content, regardless of whether or not that content is owned by, or licensed to, Buzzfeed.

The complaint (embedded below) points to dozens of little known websites where the photo allegedly appears, in addition to the original BuzzFeed page which is still online but is now titled “The 29 Funniest Header Faces.”

The soccer suit is not BuzzFeed’s first brush with copyright law. In October, a paparazzi agency filed a lawsuit after a BuzzFeed staffer (the same one who made the soccer montage) posted copyrighted pictures of Katy Perry and a topless Kathy Griffin. BuzzFeed, which declined to comment, settled the case early this year.

The copyright issues poses a threat to BuzzFeed and similar websites, including Upworthy and For the Win, which have an editorial model based on finding content — especially images — that readers are likely to share on social media.

Last year, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti explained to the Atlantic that the site pays to license images from companies like Reuters and Getty, but that it also pulls from amateur sites like Tumblr and Flickr. In these cases, the provenance of the images can be unclear — in some cases, the photographer has made them available for public use while other times the author is simply unknown.

Peretti also claims that, in any event, BuzzFeed’s photo montages are fair use under copyright law because they are “transformative” (which is one factor in the first part of a complicated four-part fair use test).

In the soccer case, it’s unlikely that the self-represented photographer “contributory infringement” theory will succeed on a legal basis — if he does, the case would throw a large chill over the sharing culture that has become a fixture of the social web. More likely, the case will just show once again how traditional copyright law — and its frequently abused enforcement tools — is ill-fitted for the digital age.

You can decide for yourself if the original soccer image is worth $3.6 million by looking at it here.

Eiselein v BuzzFeed

What’s Trending wants to use the new cash infusion to scale its production and invest in ad sales and multi-platform distribution. The funding comes as a kind of validation that What’s Trending’s YouTube strategy is working. What’s Trending originally launched in 2011 as a web format for CBS, but severed ties with the network soon after and briefly tried its luck as a weekly pop culture show online, only to turn into a daily YouTube format a year ago.

The funding announcement comes just a day after news broke that Fullscreen Networks has raised an undisclosed amount from the Chernin Group, Comcast Ventures and WPP, and adds to a number of funding announcements for YouTube-based businesses in recent months. Which goes to show that — despite all the recent talk to the contrary — at least investors still think there’s money in producing content for YouTube.

Speaking of which: Bedrocket’s Lerer came to our recent paidContent Live conference to share his thoughts about investing in digital media. Check out the video below:

• Fortune lists Apple’s witnesses for this week, with a reminder that all of their testimony has to be wrapped up by Wednesday because summations take place on Thursday and there’s no court on Friday. “Then Judge Cote will have to write her decision. The best estimate I’ve heard for how long she’ll need is three weeks, give or take a week.”
• Apple SVP Eddy Cue took the stand for most of the day Monday and was questioned by both DOJ and Apple attorneys. Publishers Marketplace reports, “Cue, as he did on Thursday, did not offer much in the way of relevant information that would affect the price-fixing case on either side. Instead his testimony provided lots of Steve Jobs nostalgia, with additional tidbits on the late Apple chief’s active involvement in the creation of the iBookstore and the agency model.”
• A lot of the questioning has centered around emails that Jobs wrote at the time of the launch of the iBookstore. In one, Jobs wrote “Wow, we have really lit the fuse on a powder keg.” The New York Times reports, “Mr. Cue said Mr. Jobs was remarking on the company’s ability to ’cause ripples’ in the e-book industry, which was then largely dominated by Amazon.”
• Jobs had the idea for virtual page curls in iBooks and chose Winnie the Pooh as the free book that came with every iBooks app. (AllThingsD)
• After Apple VP Keith Moerer said last week that Apple has 20 percent of the U.S. ebook market, Cue said it has “grown 25 percent” from what he claimed was a 20 percent market share in 2010, i.e. that it is now at 25 percent, Publishers Marketplace reports. (It seems implausible that Apple had 20 percent of the ebook market in 2010.) Also, “Apple is apparently neck-and-neck with Barnes & Noble for the number-two spot after Amazon: ‘I believe it’s close. I’ve heard at different times we go back and forth,’ said Cue.”
• Mac vs. Windows! “Both parties showed their evidence on a projector screen. Apple’s legal team used a MacBook to shuffle between evidence documents, stacking them side by side in split screens and zooming in on specific paragraphs. In contrast, the Justice Department’s lawyers could show only one piece of evidence at a time. One video that [DOJ attorney] Mr. Buterman played as evidence failed to produce the audio commentary needed to make his point.” (NYT) Apple Insider notes that the DOJ was using HP computers.

In this video case study, Pearson gives an example of a student struggling with the quadratic equation. Through the use of intelligent APIs, the digital textbook automatically senses that the student is struggling and quickly provides a solution by offering supplemental learning material that can then be monetized without leaving the textbook application.

Innovation like this often requires IT departments and business users to put competing priorities aside and collaborate. For many large organizations, this can be a challenge. But a company-wide API strategy allowed Pearson to identify similarities within these business groups, allowing for less marginal work and more opportunity to create new digital experiences to monetize content.

Watch the full paidContent Live panel discussion to learn more about how API strategies can help transform your business.

But even more than that, Foust — who writes about counter-terrorism and used to work for the American Security Project — argues that these errors mean the Guardian (please see disclosure below) and Post stories were rushed into print with little or no regard for the facts, and suggests this is part of a regrettable trend towards breaking news without spending enough time to verify what is being reported. But is that really fair?

Both sides have their version of events

In fact, much of the evidence Foust provides to counter the Guardian seems to be based on a foundation just as shaky as anything the newspaper reported. There may be some well-founded doubts about former CIA staffer Edward Snowden’s credibility on some aspects of the PRISM program, but Foust seems to take as gospel public statements from NSA officials and others in the Obama administration, as well as anonymous sources who are quoted by other outlets — and ignores evidence that contradicts his own conclusions.

Ryan Singel, a former Wired editor who now runs a startup called Contextly, notes a few of these cases in comments posted on Foust’s piece, which appeared on Medium (where comments appear alongside the sentences to which they refer). For example, Foust says the Guardian incorrectly stated that other phone companies have also had their data collected by the NSA, not just Verizon — a claim he scoffs at. But as Singel notes, there are reliable reports that other companies have been part of the same program.

Foust also questions the Guardian‘s statement that this type of data collection wasn’t envisioned by the Patriot Act, and therefore came as a surprise to many, but as Singel points out in a comment, even one of the authors of the Patriot Act says the law was never intended to permit that kind of mass surveillance. And while Foust says the collection described is arguably legal, Singel makes the case that it could well not be, based on a recent decision from the Supreme Court.

The idea that the NSA program gave the spy agency “direct access” to the servers of companies like Google and Facebook is another Foust target: he points out that subsequent reporting showed the PRISM system may well be just a way of automating the production of data under FISA court orders, rather than providing indiscriminate access to tech company servers. But he ignores the fact that the kind of lock-box system the New York Times and others described could easily fall within the term “direct access.”

It’s not a single story but a process

The point is that the stories the Guardian and Post reported were just the beginning of an evolving story about a top-secret program — one whose details are sketchy at best, and one whose very existence was likely to be denied by not only the NSA but plenty of other sources who were happy to answer phone calls from journalists with their own spin on events.

The reality is that some or all of the stories we’ve seen about PRISM and the NSA would likely never have seen the light of day if it wasn’t for the Guardian and Post reports. Does this qualify as “journalistic malfeasance?” Hardly. In some ways, it’s a perfect example of the idea of news as a process rather than a finished product — reports about a secret document trigger a host of other reports, and eventually more of the truth emerges.

Is it messy? No questions. Have there been mistakes? Yes (and it’s true that some of those probably haven’t been identified as transparently as they should have been). But it’s hardly malfeasance.

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / wellphoto

DreamWorks has deep experience with kid-focused content. It has already launched multiple successful television offshoots of blockbuster children’s movies. The first, Penguins of Madagascar, launched in 2009 after the success of the company’s Madagascar movie franchise, and will launch a new season this summer on Nickelodeon. In fact, every single one of the company’s four animated television series for both Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network has been renewed and continues to draw views from pint-sized fans who can’t get enough of their favorite characters.

Even better for Netflix, its first series under the deal with Dreamworks, Turbo: F.A.S.T., piggybacks on the soon-to-be-released Turbo — giving the streaming service plenty of room to develop the show around a fresh audience and a new character. That could lay the foundation to move other successful DreamWorks’ properties to Netflix, beyond the 300 hours of original programming included in this deal.

The deal  – which also helps fill a void Netflix created when its partnership with Viacom fizzled out – stands to round out its successful programming for adult viewers, namely House of Cards and the revival of Arrested Development. By banking on already-known characters like Shrek and Po, Netflix creates more likelihood that moms and dads will make the subscription service a fixture in households. And that could help establish the company full time in the kids programming arena, where it’s tried to gain a foothold over the last few years.

Time Warner Cable felt compelled to publish the post after a number of customers had mused in recent months that the ISP was behind the sub-par performance of their YouTube videos. The supposedly damning evidence? Users had discovered that blocking a few IP numbers vastly improved their experience.

Time Warner Cable’s blog post doesn’t go into the IP number blocking, but explains the core of the problem this way:

“The internet is not as simple as one wire connecting a website’s servers to a customer’s home. Traffic originates in countless places, heading toward billions of end-user destinations. Each network that carries web traffic is itself a collection of a number of complicated technological and business relationships. As traffic flows from one area of the internet to another, it passes through this network of technologies, agreements and protocols and culminates in each particular user experience.”

In other words: It’s all about peering, and where in the network content is cached — which, as Time Warner Cable suggests, is as much about business as it is about technology. Case in point: Netflix has been trying to get ISPs to join its own Open Connect content delivery network and install its OpenConnect caching servers on ISPs’ networks.

The video service is arguing that this would greatly improve customers’ streaming experience while keeping down costs for ISPs, and Netflix is even willing to install and maintain these machines for free. However, getting U.S. ISPs to join has proven difficult. Not only are companies like Time Warner Cable and Comcast operating their own TV services, which makes them Netflix competitors, but they also want Netflix, Google and others to pay for distributing so much traffic on their networks.

Netflix has started to take this peering fight to the court of public opinion. The company is publishing a monthly ISP speed index, and launched a new Super HD video quality level that is only available to customers of ISPs that have joined Open Connect. Time Warner Cable has responded to this by alleging that Netflix is discriminating against its customers – a charge that Netflix unsurprisingly denies.

Google has thus far kept quiet in this peering fight. But the fact that its users resort to blocking IP numbers to get better quality levels on certain ISPs, as well as Time Warner Cable’s new denial, makes it clear that even for YouTube users, the peering wars are far from over.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Swetlana Wall

We’ve written extensively about why Digg is launching an RSS reader and how the company’s knowledge about news junkies and early tech adopters will help inform its approach. Betaworks, the NYC-based incubator and investor, purchased Digg last summer and has been working on revamping it since then to be the ultimate social news source.

The RSS reader will launch in beta next week on both desktop and mobile, and the team at Digg said they would be working on adding an Android app and integration with other news reader services very soon.

Here’s how the company described it in the blog post Monday:

“And so next week we will begin rolling out Digg Reader, version 1. We’re doing the launch in phases because, as you might have guessed, RSS aggregation is a hard thing to do at scale, and we want to make sure the experience is as fast and reliable as possible. Everyone will have access by June 26th. With all this in mind, we thought now would be a good moment to come up for air and share a little bit about the product you’ll see next week, and what else we’ll be adding over the next few months.

Given the compressed time frame for this sprint, we decided early on that we needed to focus on one type of user. We asked ourselves who had most to lose from the shutdown of Google Reader, and the answer was fairly obvious: the power user, the people who depend on the availability, stability, and speed of Reader every day. The good news is that these users are also the most eager to contribute to the development process. (Over 18,000 people signed up to provide feedback on the product.)”

The first piece was a column by NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan on the weekend, about the recent explosive NSA revelations, which were reported primarily by the Guardian — a relative newcomer to the U.S. news scene. Sullivan was responding to a number of reader comments asking why the Times had missed this particular bombshell, and wondering whether the newspaper had been approached but had chosen not to publish the story.

News will find its own outlet

As Sullivan explains in her piece, the NYT apparently wasn’t contacted by Snowden. But it’s understandable that some readers would wonder whether the paper had decided not to go with the story, since something similar happened in 2005 with another story about government surveillance: at the urging of the Bush administration, the Times sat on the story for more than a year — something Edward Snowden said influenced his desire not to go to the newspaper with his NSA leak. As Sullivan notes:

“The delay hasn’t been forgotten. The video journalist Laura Poitras, who worked on the N.S.A. stories in both The Post and The Guardian, said the earlier delay by The Times influenced Mr. Snowden’s decision on where to take his information. What’s more, when a video or article released anywhere can go viral in minutes, the outlet is less important.”

Meanwhile, in a separate piece published Sunday, NYT media writer David Carr talks about another story that got away: in this case, the story about Toronto mayor Rob Ford and his alleged crack-smoking behavior, which appeared first on Gawker — and then subsequently in some of Toronto’s major newspapers, which had apparently been working on the story for some time.

Like Sullivan, Carr notes that certain news stories don’t wait for traditional journalistic organizations to get around to reporting them — that “big news forges its own path,” as he puts it. And he also notes that this is just a more recent version of something that has been occurring for some time:

“Traditional news organizations used to be free to break news — or not — in their backyard and on their chosen beats. Now they have to be looking over their shoulder — at everyone. And in virtually every aspect of culture, from business to technology to fashion, the big guys now compete with a range of Web sites that break their share of news through obsessiveness and hyperfocus.”

The path of least resistance

The “hyperfocus” that Carr mentions is an important point. As I argued in a recent post, the Guardian likely got the Snowden leaks in part because of the obsessiveness and focus of Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer-turned-blogger who has devoted much of his writing to cataloguing the government’s malfeasance related to WikiLeaks and whistle-blower Bradley Manning — a point that journalism professor Jay Rosen made in a recent post as well.

In the not-so-distant past, the New York Times was one of the main platforms for breaking this kind of news, and perhaps even the main platform. But given its behavior in cases like the pre-Iraq war reporting of Judith Miller and in the case of the 2005 surveillance story, it’s not surprising that leakers like Snowden might decide to take their story elsewhere — and there are plenty of other outlets for that information, including places like WikiLeaks.

Carr is right that “big news forges its own path.” In a sense, it is like water, which takes the path of least resistance. The New York Times and other outlets used to be the water company, but they are no longer the only outlet — and if they provide too much resistance, the news will flow elsewhere. Whether that is ultimately good or bad for journalism remains to be seen, but it is a fact.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / SoulAD and Flickr user Jan-Arief Purwanto

Against this backdrop, it’s worth noting an annual report, conducted by Kantar Sports Media and Sporting News Media, that shows a rise in mobile consumption and other trends in sports media. Here are some highlights:

• Thirty-five percent of America’s 170 million fans are using mobile devices to follow sports, which is up from 21 percent in 2011 and reflects overall web trends; 23 percent of these are using mobile to watch video

• Fifteen percent of people who watched live games online admitted to using ”unofficial” (read: pirated) streaming sites

• Only seven percent of fans are watching through connected TVs, including gaming consoles, but this number consists heavily (47 percent) of fans between 18 and 24

• Twenty-five percent of fans follow sports on a social media platform, with Facebook being the most popular

• Overall, men follow sports more than women but females make up 51 percent of sports fans on social media

My quick takeaway is that the mobile and social media numbers seem low, but I’m probably underestimating the overall proportion of older Americans who prefer to watch sports on TV without fiddling without their phone at the same time. It may also reflect the leagues’ ongoing reluctance to make games available online.

The report was put out by an industry group and was compiled through online surveys (so take it with a grain of salt); you can find more here.

B&N reduced prices fairly drastically for Father’s Day, discounting its Nook tablets between $70 and $129. That was a big drop for a week-long promotion. But B&N said Monday that the slashed prices are sticking around for … well, at least for awhile, with no end date given, though it’s apparently still “limited-time pricing.”

So the 7-inch Nook HD tablet now starts at $129, down from $199, and the 9-inch Nook HD+ tablet now starts at $149, down from $269. The devices were both launched less than a year ago.

Nook Media President Jamie Iannone said this is to “help our customers gear up for a great summer reading season … We’re thrilled to keep in place our best prices ever and deliver great value to make reading more affordable.” But it’s not a great sign for the health of the Nook tablet business: If customers were snapping up these tablets, B&N wouldn’t have to slash their prices. To be sure, the 7-inch tablet market is crowded, but Amazon’s most basic 7-inch Kindle Fire is still $159 with ads and $174 without, while Google’s Nexus 7 starts at $199 (for 16 GB; the Kindle Fire and Nook HD start at 8 GB). The iPad Mini, meanwhile, starts at $329.

Plus, combine the price cuts with the multiple rumors that Barnes & Noble plans to phase out the Nook tablet line by the end of fiscal year 2014 (which would be a year from now) and it starts to look as if B&N is trying to clear out stock. (The company has already phased out the lower-end Nook Tablet and Nook Color.) We may get more answers from the company’s next earnings report, which comes out June 25.

The shows will begin running in 2014, and though Netflix didn’t release more specifics on content, it seems clear that most of them will be aimed at kids. That means the DreamWorks deal could help replace the Viacom shows like Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob SquarePants that Netflix recently gave up (and Amazon then grabbed).

This isn’t the first deal that Netflix and DreamWorks have made: The two first signed a deal in 2011 and then, this past February, announced an original kids’ show that will air in December.

Those alternate revenue streams take on many forms: Live shows, direct sponsorship deals with brands, even t-shirts. New on the scene is Subblime, which bills itself as “a community where you can connect with people that inspire you and discover the things they’re crazy about.”

Recently launched, the site currently hosts pages for fewer than 20 creators, who share everything from their favorite skirts to crossfit essentials to camera equipment and electronics.

Subblime owes a clear source of inspiration to Pinterest: Not just because of its clean, image-driven layout, with a heavy emphasis on links to external products, but because of the baker’s dozen or so creators featured on Subblime, all but two are female — matching with Pinterest’s equally lady-friendly approach.

However, it’s impossible not to see the potential for other creators, gender or personal brand aside — the value of a service like this for anyone from Wil Wheaton to Epic Meal Time is quite clear — especially if they’re drawing revenue from these affiliate links.

The rise of companies like Subblime makes one look back at other strategies that have been deployed to profit off online video beyond the basic ad-supported models. As Calacanis memorably stated:

Every time you invest $1 in YouTube, you’re building their power base and leverage over you. How can you invest that $0.66 of that dollar in an asset you control? At least then you might have a fighting chance over Goliath.

So what are these alternate assets that might be controlled? This is thinking about the problem from the opposite direction, but Kickstarter, Indiegogo and other crowdfunding solutions remain a prominent part of the ecosystem. A sustainable part of the ecosystem? That remains to be seen.

Crowdfunding has clear benefits for creators — direct engagement with fans, and more importantly direct engagement with the money of fans. But enough stories are emerging about reward fulfillment issues to keep creators wary about treating these services like magic ATMs.

In addition, direct sponsorships — whether integrated into the content or the soap opera-esque “presented by…” approach — remain in play. In fact, according to Leap Year producer Wilson Cleveland via email, “Leap Year contributed to driving 35 percent of Hiscox’s total Q3’12 sales… I’d seen brands like Denny’s call out stats on ‘improved reputation’ but never bottom line stuff. Reason being, branded content is still very much under the ad agency domain…and ad agencies rarely if ever, chest-thump about the effect their expensive campaigns have on sales particularly when it comes to branded digital content.”

These other means for revenue remain nebulous enough that really, one of the most reliable means seems to be one of the very oldest: T-shirts and merchandise sales. (Just read this post by Vlogbrother John Green to see how highly the Nerdfighter empire values the diversity of its revenue streams, including the ability to sell products directly to its audience.)

Which honestly might be a sign that Subblime is on the right track — by creating a curation system for online shopping, the site allows creators the ability to get a cut of recommended products with relatively minimal effort. And the “minimal effort” angle might be key to that: YouTubers are awfully busy folk.

Image courtesy of Flickr user laurenindvik.

But one replacement product that I wouldn’t use? An RSS news reader from Facebook.

In one sense, it wouldn’t be surprising for Facebook to launch an RSS reader at its press event next Thursday in Menlo Park, as some people have speculated. Anyone using Google Reader has to find a replacement by July 1, and it’s still a pretty wide-open market. Products like Feedly seem to have a head start, but there’s still time for someone to roll out a new product and win over users.

We’ve seen that Facebook has no problem quickly launching products to try to disrupt a growing market, even if it’s not a sure thing they’ll succeed. (Just look at Poke, the company’s challenge to Snapchat.) And between the company’s launch of hashtags last week to improve the real-time nature of the news feed (even if I think hashtags are better saved for ironic conversation), and the addition of new tabs for following people on the new News Feed, Facebook clearly has ambitions to be more of a resource for news. (After all, brands and advertisers love the real-time nature of constantly updated live events and news.)

But as a hardcore Google Reader user, I have no interest in using an RSS reader replacement from Facebook, and there are several reasons why it seems like an ill-suited product for the social platform.

The appeal of Google Reader was that it was a reliable tool for importing and consuming news — one that wasn’t influenced by trends. When I subscribe to a feed, I want to read everything in that feed. With Twitter and Facebook at my disposal, I don’t need another site to see articles that my friends are sharing. I rely on my RSS feeds for work to catch every item of technology news flowing across the internet every day — I need to see everything, not just what’s popular, to do my job. And I follow probably 20-30 blogs about topics like fashion or cooking, where the writers post infrequently but where want to read every one of their posts.

So why wouldn’t I look to Facebook to re-create this experience? Probably because I don’t want my RSS reader to be social — I have Twitter and the existing Facebook for social news. I don’t want all my friends to know that I read fashion blogs on a daily basis. I don’t want the news I read to influence the ads I see on Facebook, or the stories that show up in my news feed. As the Washington Post’s auto-sharing from its social reader experiment showed, people don’t want everyone to know what they’re reading.

Of course, we don’t know if Facebook is launching an RSS reader at all, let alone what it would look like. The company did not have any comment on the matter when we asked. But social sharing is embedded in Facebook’s DNA, so it’s a reasonable assumption that any RSS reader put out by Facebook would have serious social attributes, with a heavy emphasis on sharing.

Sure, there’s room for social news on Facebook. On my account, I “like” a lot of news outlets, as well as journalists and celebrities and business figures. In fact, a quick glance at my news feed would show mostly news stories, and very few posts from my friends. It’s a great way to see what’s popular right now in the news, or to catch an older story I might have missed on Twitter. But social news is a distinctly different experience from what people knew and loved about Google Reader — and that’s a distinction that a company like Digg seems to understand.

As I wrote previously, Digg’s new RSS news reader will likely incorporate some social features but will also serve as a separate product from the popular stories posted on Digg.com. And while Google Reader used to have much-beloved social features, these were complements, not a replacement, for the feeds themselves.

Would it make perfect sense for Facebook to create a dedicated spot on its site for news? Sure. But that likely wouldn’t keep me from searching for my next RSS relationship.

A Fraunhofer infographic showing how SiDiM would turn one book into individual copies.

Reports about the work first popped up on German blogs this week, with one blogger revealing examples that include changing wordings like “invisible” to “not visible” and “unhealthy” to “not healthy.” Other examples included sentences in which the order of words was changed, or in which hyphens were added to words.

The idea behind SiDiM is similar to the way rights holders have been trying to protect music and video for some time. Instead of trying to lock down copies through technical measures that prevent copying, so-called fingerprinting measures simply add markers to a work that make it possible to identify the original purchaser. In theory, this prevents people from sharing their works for the fear of being caught.

However, in music files, these types of changes are a lot less notable than a machine rewriting a book, which is why it’s unlikely that authors and literature friends would embrace SiDiM. The system is currently in testing, and Fraunhofer secured some state funding to run these tests and even got a subsidiary of the German book publisher’s association to join.

But here’s the twist: German blog Lesen.net pointed out that the book publishers actually joined because they’re interested in finding alternatives to the traditional lock-down approach of DRM, simply because they’ve learned in the past that even the strongest lock can be broken.

Image courtesy of (CC-BY-SA) Flickr user gazzaPax.

The Bookseller also reported on a few other Pottermore initiatives and updates:

• The site, which has attracted 45 million unique visitors since launching in April 2012, is launching apps later this year and will also release another PlayStation game. The previous Harry Potter PlayStation game, “The Book of Spells,” sold over a million copies last holiday season.
• The interactive Harry Potter experience on Pottermore.com is getting a redesign. CEO Charlie Redmayne said, “As it stands, if you don’t know the books you won’t get much out of it. What we want to do is open it out for those people who haven’t read the books, or who haven’t seen the films, but perhaps come to it via the Lego, or the Harry Potter computer games.”
• Redmayne didn’t break out Harry Potter ebook sales (the only figure the company has released is that it sold nearly $5 million worth in its first month) but said sales are “still a very significant figure each month.”

The magazine is called Atlantic Weekly and features a “best of” collection of curated content from the Atlantic.com and sister brands Cities and AtlanticWire. It will be priced at $2.99 a month, $19.99 a year or $1.99 for a one-off purchase.

A new issue will arrive every Friday afternoon. The idea, according to Smith, is for readers to have a collection of content, including photos and features, at the ready to enjoy over the weekend.

The format for the Atlantic Weekly follows the “subcompact publishing” trend introduced by innovators like Marco Arment and 29th Street Publishing‘s David Jacobs. The idea is to create relatively lightweight apps that deliver readers a mailbox of content once a week or so — while giving the publisher a new stream of recurring revenue at a low production cost. One good example is The Awl’s Weekend Companion.

As my colleague Mathew Ingram has noted, one big drawback to the app publishing model is that readers can’t share content the way they do on the web — meaning it’s harder for stories to go viral. But this wil be less of an issue with the Atlantic Weekly since the magazine features only curated content available elsewhere.

There’s no word yet when an Android version will arrive. Here’s a video of the panel on paywalls where Justin Smith first teased the paid product:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on paidContent .

As creativeLIVE’s user base grows, it needs additional capacity to film more courses, said CEO Mika Salmi. Since its launch in April 2010, the company said its students have surpassed a total of 12.5 million learning hours and top one million learning hours per month.

Despite growing competition in online education — from veteran companies like lynda.com to newer entrants like Udemy — Salmi said it’s increasingly attracting students with its high production quality and live online broadcasts.

“It’s not just about telling you what to do, it’s about people in the classroom attempting to do what the teacher is doing,” he said. “It’s a real-time event.”

Unlike other companies targeting lifelong learners, creativeLIVE doesn’t just offer pre-taped video courses. Users can purchase recorded courses but watch frequent live broadcasts of classes on everything from software development to filmmaking for free. Salmi said that the average live class receives 30,000 unique viewers and while he declined to share how popular the paid courses are, he said that the company has paid out a total of $3.5 million to the more than 100 instructors who teach 250 different courses on the site.

The company was launched in 2010 by photographer Chase Jarvis and entrepreneur Craig Swanson but mostly operated under the radar until last year, when it announced a $7.5 million round of financing from Greylock and others and added Salmi, formerly the president of Viacom Digital, as CEO. (It later raised a smaller amount from Hollywood talent giants Creative Artists Agency and William Morris Endeavor, as well as Google Ventures and Crunchfund.) Now that it’s making a bigger push in a crowded field of online education, it makes sense that the company wants to maintain a bigger presence in Silicon Valley, where it can be closer to potential teachers for its classes and talent to help the startup grow.

For now, the company’s audience is mostly U.S.-based, although Salmi said that its most successful broadcasts get viewers from around the world. But it has aspirations for cultivating an even more global audience. Given its focus on live broadcasts, it would make sense for the company to open up studios in different time zones. But Salmi declined to comment on future plans regarding new studios, saying only that viewers tune in at all different times of the day and night to watch its broadcasts and that it’s exploring different products that would enable the company to reach a global market on a real-time basis.

In a nutshell, the product allows advertisers to target their ads to specific pieces of commentary that appear on the Post‘s opinion pages (what newspapers used to refer to in the old print days as the “op-ed” page, because it was opposite the newspaper’s editorial page). So brands or commercial entities sign up for an account, and then have the ability to post up to 600 words of commentary that appear just below the official Post opinion piece, right before the comments.

One of the issues that gets brought up about sponsored content is the confusion that it allegedly produces in readers when they can’t determine what is advertising and what isn’t — but as Peter Kafka points out at All Things Digital, no one with anything close to 20-20 vision is going to be fooled by the Post‘s “sponsored views.” They appear in a box, which has a different-colored background, and there’s an (admittedly rather small) identifier that says “sponsored views.” It’s pretty obvious that they are something separate.

A worthwhile experiment

Kafka is sceptical about whether these ads will be effective or not — since they are so clearly advertising and not content — but what I think is smart about the idea is that it gives advertisers one of the things they want so badly from content (and get so infrequently from newspapers), and that is targeting. In some ways, it’s a little like what the New York Times started to do by offering ads on stories that are trending on social networks, but even better because it is targeted by topic.

One of the trends we talk about a lot at paidContent is the idea that advertisers have effectively become their own media companies, with the ability to publish their own content and reach their own audiences. In order to appeal to advertisers, publishers like the Post have to try harder — and one way to do that is to offer them the ability to reach readers about a topic that they have some kind of agenda on (the Post also offers something called BrandConnect).

As for how much the Post might make from this kind of venture, that’s unclear. The pricing depends on “timing and other factors” — which is also smart, since it allows the newspaper to theoretically charge more for issues that have blown up in a viral way, or charge more for the ability to target something within minutes of it being posted. None of that is going to change the newspaper’s overall financial picture much, but it’s not stupid.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Getty / Chris Jackson

Bloomberg reported Wednesday that Time Warner Cable has been using its negotiating muscles to keep TV networks from licensing content to Apple and others. An industry insider who declined to be named confirmed this account in a conversation with GigaOM, saying that the company has been aggressively pushing for these kinds of clauses in its recent contract negotiations.

At the center of the dispute are so-called virtual cable operators — companies that operate pay TV services without having any physical infrastructure of their own. Instead of using their own satellites, cables or phone networks to get TV signals to the consumers, virtual operators would simply stream their programming over the internet.

There have been reports that Apple was considering a plan to launch such a virtual operator in the past, and other companies have looked into launching these kinds of businesses as well. One of the more notable efforts is Intel’s forthcoming TV service, which the company wants to launch before the end of the year.

To compete with traditional cable, these operators would have to be able to offer much of the same programming. And that’s something that cable companies apparently want to prevent. Richard Greenfield of BTIG Research first reported Tuesday that at least one or more of the existing operators had added clauses to their contacts with TV networks that would prevent the networks from licensing their content to companies who don’t control their own infrastructure.

Bloomberg was able to get Times Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt on the record about contracts featuring these provisions:

“We may well have ones that have that prohibition.”

It’s worth pointing out that cable companies wouldn’t be able to keep all kinds of programming inaccessible with these kinds of provisions. NBC and Comcast are specifically barred from these tactics as part of their merger conditions, as Greenwald points out. However, other TV networks don’t have these kinds of restrictions, and some may be inclined to follow the demands of cable companies in order to protect their growing retransmission fee revenue stream.

In the past two years, we have seen a number of disputes arise between networks and operators about the amount of money operators have to pay to carry certain channels. In the end, most of these disputes ended with networks having the upper hand because operators simply couldn’t afford to lose key programming. But it’s possible that barring competitors like Apple and Intel from access to the same content is one of the benefits that networks now have to throw in to sweeten those deals.

From Apple’s iAd website:

With iAd Workbench you can target who you want, when you want, manually, automatically or both. Assign specific targeting criteria (such as device, gender, age, location and preferences) to your campaign, or have iAd find the right audience for you.

iAd Workbench

The idea is that brands can better target ads for their apps — and drive users to download them — based on the type of app and user. Workbench will also estimate each campaign’s reach, and let developers adjust how much they’re spending (either on a cost-per-click or cost-per-acquisition basis) based on the response the ads are getting.

The ads in question are banner ads that appear within iOS apps. The minimum purchase amount to participate in an ad campaign in Workbench is $50. That price is drastically lower than the required buy-in when the iAd program first debuted in 2010. At that time it was  aimed at recruiting large global brands with huge ad budgets; it was reported that Apple was charging a $1 million minimum to brands that wanted to show interactive ads to Apple’s iOS app users. Those brands included Disney, Nissan, AT&T, General Electric and more.

iAd has not worked out the way Apple had initially planned: at the end of 2012, after more than two years in business, iAd had just a  2.9 percent share of the U.S. mobile ad market. Apple’s developers are making money from their apps — Tim Cook said Monday they’ve paid developers $10 billion since 2008 and $5 billion in just the last year.

With the lower prices, smaller developers with very limited budgets will have a better chance to participate and advertise. In another nod to development outfits with fewer resources, Apple also included a new iAd Producer option, allowing quicker and easier crafting of banner ads. The original iAd concept required the creation of complex interactive ads. The new Producer offers five pre-made banners for iPhone/iPod touch and iPad that developers can quickly customize.

The Oriella Digital Journalism Study asked 553 journalists in 15 countries about their outlook and their publications, and reflects some interesting geographic differences. Here are some highlights:

• 59 percent of journalists are tweeting in 2013, versus 47 percent in 2012.
  

• Twitter use is highest in English-speaking countries, while barely a third of German journalists have a Twitter account.

Here’s a graph that shows the relative popularity of digital and social media tools:

And here is how social media use varies across countries. Note the difference between France and Germany, which is surprising given the reactionary attitudes towards digital journalism often found among news organizations in both countries.

Here are a few other interesting nuggets:

• Citizen journalism is making inroads: A fifth of those surveyed said it carries as much credibility in their organization as mainstream reporting.

• Thirty-nine percent of journalists regards themselves as “digital first” (perhaps the flip side is more striking — 61 percent still regard themselves as print journalists).

In a related release, Robin Grainger, Director of the Oriella PR Network, said the findings suggest that “‘Shorter but quicker’ journalism may afford media brands greater prominence – and consequently greater traffic — in search rankings, news readers and social news aggregator apps such as Flipboard and Pulse News.”

The countries surveyed were Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S.. On average, 37 journalists were surveyed in each country. You can find the report and more here.

(Image by Aaron Amat via Shutterstock)