Big brands turn to small blog houses for big results

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I keep thinking about TeuxDeux - the simplicity of it all and how they managed to sign up 10,000 users within the first 24 hours of their launch and along comes Robert Scoble's post which brings closure to my pondering. If you can make your offering simple and easy to understand, even entertaining in the introduction of it (watch the TeuxDeux video) and if you have followers who in turn have followers, and so on, voila - 10,000 users in 24 hours. No massive sales force, advertising campaign, PR, marketing, or whatever. Big brands turn to small blog houses for big results.

Buying content versus controlling the market

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Interesting headline:

Microsoft may pay News Corp. to delist from Google | Search - InfoWorld.

Which could have been written:

Microsoft may buy news from News Corp

One implies control of the market and the other implies valuing and purchasing the product that is for sale.

I'm all for paying for content. Content producers, artists and others need to be supported for all of us to benefit from their work. If they can't support themselves, they can't produce the content we all want to see.

However, the sale of content should not create a monopoly for the sole purpose of manipulating the market. If content is to be sold, it should be sold freely with no preferential treatment given to one vendor over another.

In this age of transparency trying to control a content source versus providing a better product or service to get access to, or to support content, is never going to work. Let's hope the headline should have read:

Microsoft may buy news from News Corp