"AOL is repositioning itself as a news and information company," Seed programming director Saul Hansell said Tuesday as he demonstrated the website at the annual South By South West (SXSW) gathering of technophiles here.
"This is really just taking the freelance writing model that has existed forever and using the Internet to make it vastly more efficient," Hansell
TechCrunch reports:
"Owl is less like Wikipedia than it is like Helium, which also pays for expert articles and has been around for more than three-years. Right now, Owl is rather spare. Most of the articles still seem to be written by Owl/Aol staff instead of contributors. That should change once more people find out about it."
That is, for what it’s worth, not the distinction Google News is making: The “(blog)” label is supposed to be attached to any news published with blogging software. At the time, I thought Google might be throwing a bone to newspaper companies that don’t like being lumped with amateur news sources. And while I’m sure the new label was not important enough to reach Schmidt’s desk, his framing of that distinction — “the infrastructure around the writer” — is an interesting one.
Nails it:
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"It seems like this is a case where a few bad eggs are spoiling the omelet, or however that old saying goes. The problem isn't PR, but bloggers who are working with it in a less-than-sincere way.
Founder @ Dearing Group LLC.
George can be reached via email at george@dearinggroup.com or on Twitter, and Facebook Subscribe to this site via RSS here.
