AOL’s difficult road

PaidContent.org has a piece analysing the detail of AOL’s move from subscriptions to advertising and setting out just how painful this move might be. It suggests, for example, that it should bring in $140m from advertising in the UK, but that this represents a third of UK subs revenues. The piece quotes Jonathan Milier, ceo,  saying: “One of the hardest things in business is to realize that your legacy business isn’t going to be a successful model going forward. … We were one of the first companies of the digital era to have to confront this.”

Google’s roll-your-own search

Google has launched its own version of customisable, vertical search, reports John Battelle. The service uses Google Co-op which the company admits has stalled a bit since launch, and differs from other offerings, like Rollyo, by allowing any number of domains to be searched, filtering for particular pages, and adjustment of the weighting of results.

Update: there is also a feature to allow “volunteers” to add sites to the vertical in question which could be great to getting a bunch of like-minded people to collaborate on building the ultimate vertical search for a sector.

Google Reader

I’ve been a long time fan of Newsgator – especially when used as a plug-in to Outlook, but I’ve been taking another look at Google Reader which relaunched recently. I’m impressed by a lot of the features, especially the way it is so easy to share blog posts on a public page – here’s mine. From now on I’m going to share more posts this way rather than blog about them.

Paid by the second

An assisted search start up ChaCha Search has come up with a novel way of paying it’s “guides”.

From Wired: “Workers at ChaCha are experts in specific topics, and they help users of the search tool find information that, presumably, only somebody in the know would be able to uncover. The ChaCha guides earn between $5 and $10 an hour as a starting wage, and any money they earn can be dumped instantly onto a debit card and spent right away. The guides keep track of their earnings on the ChaCha site and can get their earnings by clicking a “Pay Me Now” button on their personalized page.”

by Jim Muttram