links for 2005-10-01

PaidContent: “American Public Media Group (APMG), parent company to Minnesota Public Radio, has invested almost $1 million in the for-profit, Boston-based Gather.com. The new venture is a social networking website devoted to creating an online community of public-radio listeners.”

TechCrunch reviews the latest version of Attensa, an RSS reader that integrates with Outlook, and notes that: Attensa is aggresively adding features to compete with other readers and has an excellent product suite. However, some (including Jeff Nolan) have stopped using Attensa’s Outlook product because of reported difficulties in making these third party applications work…

Google’s IM client (Google Talk) has gotten all the attention today, but it strikes me that the bigger announcement is the way they will start verifying Gmail accounts – through SMS messages to users’ cell phones.  The rationale is that you can fake other ways of verifying a real person is creating an account, but…

MediaPost Publications – New Search Engine Will Give Users Premium Content, For Free Congoo’s business model questioned (tags: PaidContent VerticalSearch Search)

Bottom line: things went as well as could be expected this week. Now bring on 2009!

Scoble: I was over at Alex Barnett’s blog this morning and saw he linked to a survey that said that 87% of influencers use RSS. This is PRECISELY why I’ve been telling everyone to get RSS feeds and why they should be full text. If no one else in society uses them, this is enough…