Spreadthunderbird is Go

One of the reasons that Firefox has been successful is the extraordinary way that users have been mobilised as part of a vast, global marketing group without precedent. Tens of thousands – perhaps even hundreds of thousands – of people have added their pebble to the cairn of promotion to produce the market shares we see today for Firefox (particularly in Europe)....

On Open Enterprise blog.

A Taste(Book) of the Future of Publishing

Publishers continue to fret over their precious texts appearing online, worrying that there's no business model for them if the content is already "out there". Well, take a look at this for an alternative vision of publishing in the future:

TasteBook is a service that lets users take their favorite recipes from partner sites (starting with Epicurious) and create printed cookbooks that are delivered to them and/or friends. Users can add their own recipes as well, and customize the book with their name and other information. Blurb, which was recently in the news, is somewhat similar but does not focus on recipes.

I predict this will happen more and more, and publishers realise their job is about, well, publishing - producing objects with words in them. In other words, the money is in the analogue stuff - the digital you give away as promotion.

BBC Gets Some Things - Like YouTube

Elsewhere, I've criticised the BBC for its all-too eager embrace of Windows DRM. But in some respects, some of its top people understand the new dynamics:

The BBC has struck a content deal with YouTube, the web's most popular video sharing website, owned by Google.

...

Mr Highfield said the BBC would not be hunting down all BBC-copyrighted clips already uploaded by YouTube members - although it would reserve the right to swap poor quality clips with the real thing, or to have content removed that infringed other people's copyright, like sport, or that had been edited or altered in a way that would damage the BBC's brand.

"We don't want to be overzealous, a lot of the material on YouTube is good promotional content for us," he said.