Content Matters

..or so says Rafat, reporting from the Web 2.0 conference.  He reports that CNET will be selling the influential Esther Dyson e-newsletter, Release 1.0, to O'Reilly Media.  According to Rafat, Esther and partner Daphne Kis will not be making the move to O'Reilly with their title.  While Release 1.0 may not have the clout that it had during the heady dot-com days, it's still got a strong brand and should do well within O'Reilly.
It also makes you wonder where CNET is headed.  Both Fred Wilson and Jason Calacanis recently penned posts about how Michael Arrington's TechCrunch is poised to surpass CNET (with Jason, in fact, suggesting that Mike should be brought in to run the plummeting CNET).

AOL announced yesterday that it had acquired Relegence Corporation, a news and information aggregation company.

Relegence is one of a number of Israeli-American companies leveraging linguistic and algorithmic technology for search, classification and text mining.  While Israel continues to be a strong leader in developing these technologies, the companies  (ClearForest, Trendum, Lingomotors and others) have had modest success in translating those technologies to solving real-world problems and in establishing themselves as viable businesses.

Steve Fadem and the Relegence team seem to have broken through in the financial markets, leveraging their technology to aggregate news, feeds, websites and other sources of content.  However, it would seem that AOL wants them for the underlying technology, not their institutional Wall Street business.

According to Israeli business newspaper the Globes, the deal was priced between $55-65M, while Ha'aretz put the deal at $50-100M.

It will be interesting to see how AOL integrates the Relegence capabilities into their consumer offerings.  Perhaps this may also signify the beginning of mainstream adoption of text mining applications.

For more on the Relegence acquisition, see posts from CNET, BloggingStocks and Staci at PaidContent.

For me, Election Day brings memories of late nights watching Peter Jennings, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw provide news and analysis.  Of course, Peter is gone, while Dan and Tom have retired.  But even if they were all still here, I doubt that I'd be turning to them tonight for coverage.

To see how influential the blogosphere has begun, all you have to do is take a look at how the major media outlets are covering tonight's election results.  Time/CNN will host about 20 bloggers, from DailyKOS to RedState (left to right) in their "Internet Lounge", while MSNBC will include a number of bloggers in its coverage.

Looking at the chart to the right, you can see how sites like DailyKOS, Little Green Footballs and the Huffington Post have attracted hundreds of thousands of users.

The mainstream media still provides a level of quality (and fact-checking) that you can't get from the blogs.  But many of us are turning to the web and to less formal channels for our political information.  According to ABC News, 43% of likely voters use the Internet for updates on political information.  That's why sites like MSNBC's First Read and ABC's Political Punch are seeing their usage grow.

So, where will I turn for results tonight?  I'll probably watch the MSNBC coverage, but I'll also use CNN's website to compare race-by-race results to NPR's Election 2006 breakdown of key House races and Votemaster's Senate Race poll.  And, of course, at 11pm EST I'll tune in for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (and guest Dan Rather) for their priceless insights on Indecision 2006.

In the meantime, in the immortal words of Dan Quayle (via Kenneth Cole) "Don't Forget to Vot".

Today's New York Times describes how Google has begun testing a marketplace to sell print ads for newspapers.  Under this program, newspapers will make available extra inventory, which advertisers may bid on via Google's platform.  It's not an actual auction, in that the newspapers don't commit to running the ads.  Basically, advertisers may bid on various positions, then if the newspapers have the space, they can accept those ads.  On the surface, this program makes sense.  It extends the newspapers' ad sales teams to a national or global base of advertisers; like an airline selling empty seats at a discount, newspapers hope to convert available inventory to cash from advertisers whom they don't already reach.

However, this isn't Google's first foray into the sale of print advertising.  Business Week ran an article in March, describing  Google's unsuccessful experiment in buying and reselling (via auction) print space in various magazines. 

The Google initiative opens up print advertising to many companies who otherwise might not try it.  That's both a strength and a weakness.  Online advertisers, accustomed to PPC or pay-per-action models, have different goals and metrics than print advertisers.  Print advertising is often to gain awareness, not to trigger a direct response.  It will be interesting to see whether Google can make this test a success.  There's a market for local advertising, and it's possible that Google can combine this with local search to help a distinct group of advertisers reach their targets.  The challenge will come in targeting this offering to the right kind of advertisers, as the typical PPC Adwords buyer may not be a fit.

Institutional Shareholder Services ("ISS"), the leading provider of Corporate Governance information, was acquired yesterday by RiskMetrics Group.

ISS is best known for its Corporate Governance Quotient reports, which rate more than 7,500 public companies for their board structure, audit issues, executive compensation, insider ownership and other criteria that measure governance.

RiskMetrics, spun out of JP Morgan, provides analytical tools to help financial institutions assess their market and credit risk.  The combined Company will have 900 employees and estimated revenues of $200 million. 

A copy of the press release can be found here.