In addition to some eye-popping figures for page views and unique visitors, the latest Huffington Post statistics show that if there’s one thing the site knows how to do, it’s how to get reader engagement that other news sites and publishers can only dream of.
There’s been a lot of journalistic finger-wagging over a student website that filed an erroneous report on the weekend saying Penn State coach Joe Paterno had died. But that student site behaved better than some other traditional news sources, both before and after the report.
The Associated Press and a consortium of major media owners such as the New York Times have launched a “news registry” called NewsRight. The entity says it is about tracking and licensing content, but where will it draw the line on “over-aggregation” and fair use principles?
There has been a remarkable flowering of companies over the past year or two, all riding a wave of developer and investor enthusiasm for the loosely defined concept of “big data.” But given that the big data startup market is probably overvalued and headed for a lot of consolidation, these new companies’ days might be numbered.
