Ebay is going to be getting a new blog named Ebay Ink. Fortune reports in an article and interview that eBay has hired Richard Brewer-Hay to be the blogger of Ebay Ink. Brewer-Hay was previously with PodShow. Unlike eBay’s existing blogs and forums, which focus on more traditional (and sanitized) corporate communications, eBay Ink aims to give readers a peek inside eBay’s internal operations. Brewer-Hay has pledged to write unbiased entries about what he observes as an all-access employee of the $7.7 billion dollar company. Though eBay Ink is not a direct response to the recent seller boycott and frustration over ongoing changes, eBay’s communications team says that a forum for frank discussions is long overdue. “There hasn’t been one place where investors, industry analysts, employees, [eBay] buyers and sellers, and PayPal and Skype users can talk to someone from the company, or listen to someone from the company discuss what changes mean from a high level,” said company spokesman Jose Mallabo. Brewer-Hay was hired in January and has spent the past two months learning the ins-and-outs of the corporation. Fortune Small Business got first crack at him; below are edited excepts of our conversation about his ambitious mission and why he believes eBay Ink, launching in April, will change the dynamic between eBay’s top executives and its user community. Ina Steiner at AuctionBytes writes that the new blogger has never sold anything on eBay. He also has yet to reach out to auction bloggers. eBay will launch a new blog in April that it told Fortune Small Business would be an unfiltered link between users and the company. Two things just jump out at me. First, the newly hired blogger has never sold anything on eBay. And secondly, while he says the first thing he did when he got to eBay was to meet with industry bloggers to find out “how we can work together,” he has never reached out to AuctionBytes. Other industry bloggers who linked to the FSB article do not mention having heard from him either: Randy Smythe, PowerSellers Unite and Tamebay, for example. Richard Brewer-Hay does admit in the Fortune interview that has never sold anything on eBay but his wife has bought and sold a number of items. Brewer-Hay also said in the interview that his blog posts will not be edited by eBay corporate. FSB: Your blog will be linked from eBay’s PR webpage. How much influence will eBay have on what you write? RBH: My words go straight up onto the blog, unedited. It’s got to be transparent. There’s got to be an authenticity to it, an honesty to it, otherwise there’s no point in doing it in the first place. I’m going to open up my e-mail to questions from folks. People can comment, too, and comments are going to be open. You’re going to get the good, the bad, and the ugly. It kind of goes back to what I was saying at the beginning. They hired from outside the organization. I have no prior agenda with any of the execs or people in the company. I’m still in the process of getting to know them. I haven’t met a lot of them yet. That’s a big, important thing. The other thing is, this is my job. There are no other jobs that I’m doing. Some corporate blogs are just side gigs for existing employees, but I’m doing this 100%, day-to-day. The blog will launch in April. They appear to be in desperate need of a blogger. The official eBay blog does not appear to have been updated since October, 2007. Ebay is also facing a growing problem with disgruntled sellers. Sellers starting striking when eBay raised listing fees. Sellers are planning another boycott on May 1st. This is probably an issue that Ebay Ink will need to address when it debuts in April. Marketing Vox also has an entry about eBay’s new blog. Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

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FriendFeed Now Sends Replies Back to Twitter
FriendFeed is an aggregator of personal social media feeds. You can broadcast all your personal feeds on FriendFiend like this and include your blog feed, Twitter feed, Delicious feed, Amazon wishlist, Flickr feed, and so on. FriendFeed has been letting its users reply to items posted on FriendFeed including tweets. This was creating a problem because people would reply to a tweet on FriendFeed but there would be no echo of this tweet on Twitter. To solve this problem FriendFeed has added a feature that will send an @reply back to Twitter. There is now a checkbox that lets you also send the comment as an @reply on Twitter. You will have to provide your password to have the tweet sent as an @reply from your account. FriendFeed’s tweak helps solve a discussion fragmentation problem that Mashable says has been discussed a lot lately. There has been a lot of conversation in the circle of folks that dips into my FriendFeed stream regularly on the topic of comment and discussion fragmentation, which essentially means the problem of posting things on your blog, them ending up in your lifestream at Twitter and FriendFeed, and the ensuing conversation never making it back to the original posting place. This little bit of functionality actually re-unites a bit of the conversation from the FriendFeed fragment (shard?). I wonder if this means that they’ll be working on further comment fragmentation formulae? We’ll be interested to see how this develops. Expect more services that attempt to interact with Twitter in a similar manner. Twitter has been growing faster than ever lately. There are 948,895 twitter accounts according to Twitdir.com. A lot of web companies are going to find the idea of adding services that interact with that large userbase very appealing. Posted in Twitter Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

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New York Post’s Richard Johnson: Blogs are Parasites
I Want Media has posted this brief one question interview with Richard Johnson, the editor of New York Post’s popular gossip column called Page Six. In the one question interview Richard Johnson says blogs are like parasites. Richard Johnson, editor of New York Post’s Page Six column: “I think they’re more like parasites. A lot of them don’t generate their own news stories. Some of them have been sued for publishing things they don’t have the rights to publish. Mostly, they’re just parasites.” … But, while interest in celebrities is increasing, PageSix.com was folded recently because “we were about two years too late” on the Internet. A lot of celebrity “news” is generated by the celebrity publicists so it is wrong to suggest that blogs are constantly sucking celebrity gossip material away from the magazines and newspapers. Johnson could just be bitter because the PageSix.com project failed – although it might have done much better if the website had been given a little more time. Filed in Blog Pessimism. Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

AOL Buys Bebo for $850 Million
AOL has purchased the Bebo social network for $850 million. They made the announcement today in a press release. They claim Bebo has 40 million members worldwide. With a total membership of more than 40 million worldwide, Bebo is a global social media network which combines community, self-expression and entertainment to enable its users to consume, create, discover and share content. Bebo is one of the leading social networks in the UK, and is ranked number one in Ireland and New Zealand, and number three in the U.S. Its users are heavily engaged and view an average of 78 pages per usage day. Bebo has approximately 100 employees operating in offices in the UK, San Francisco and Austin, TX. The deal comes just one week after AOL’s launch of Open AIM 2.0, an initiative that allows the developer community greater freedom to access the AIM network and integrate AIM into its sites and applications, and the announcement by Apple of a downloadable AIM application for the iPhone. Under the terms of the agreement, AOL will acquire Bebo for $850 million in cash. “Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media,” said Randy Falco, Chairman and CEO, AOL. “What drew us to Bebo was its substantial and fast-growing worldwide user-base, its vision of a truly social web, and the monetization opportunities that leverage Platform-A across our combined global audience. This positions us to offer advertisers even greater reach and marketers significant insights into the desires and needs of consumers.” “AOL understands the shifting dynamics of the Web and has clearly demonstrated its commitment to leveraging the ever-increasing power of social networks,” said Bebo President, Joanna Shields. “With one and the same vision in this area, it was a natural progression for Bebo to join AOL, and we look forward to working together to continue to expand the online social experience globally.” Like other social networks Bebo offers a combination of profiles and photo and video sharing. They also have thousands of applications. Past rumors have valuated Bebo at around $1 billion to $1.5 billion. They came pretty close to that with this $850 million sale. Larry Dignan at Between the Lines sees this as the start of a social networking consolidation round. As for the rest of the field, AOL’s purchase of Bebo is likely to set off a round of consolidation among smaller players that would be fine tuck-in deals in a larger setting. With Bebo off the table sites like Ning and LinkedIn have just become more valuable-especially to a company like Yahoo, which appears to be left out of the social networking party. There are others still out there that the big Internet players could snag like Friendster.com, hi5 and myyearbook.com. MyYearBook.com recently claimed to be the fourth largest U.S. social network – ahead of Bebo. Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

CBS Launches Local Ad Network
Caroline McCarthy at News.com’s The Social blog reports that the CBS Television Network is launching a program that will have local bloggers installing CBS News widgets in exchange for revenues. The CBS Local Ad Network is being managed by a company called Syndigo. One blog already approved for the CBS widget advertising plan is SFBayStyle – you can see the widget on the right side of the blog. On Monday, the program was launched in a selection of the TV network’s regional markets: Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Francisco, Denver, and Chicago. Within the next few weeks, CBS has said, the CBS Local Ad Network will come to New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Miami, Sacramento, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. Some of the blogs currently participating in the new program are San Francisco’s SFBayStyle and Boston’s Red Sox Nation. Approved sites will be able to choose the content of the CBS headlines displayed (breaking news, sports, politics), as well as select from a number of options to determine, for example, whether they want video content in the widget. Bloggers can’t just embed a widget and hope for profits, CBS Television Stations Digital Media Group president Jonathan Leess told CNET News.com. “There’s a screening process, obviously,” he said. “We have to figure out or get some visibility into what the content is on that site, and then we screen, but we have a third party (Syndigo Networks) that administers all this for us.” CBS declined to share exact breakdowns of the revenue-distribution process. “All of it’s based on certain traffic estimates from each of the sites, and (ad) placement,” Leess said. Paid Content says no payments will be made until over $50 are earned by the partner. Payment is 45 days after the calendar month; payments that don’t exceed $50 will roll over until they do. The contract runs one year. As far as I can tell-and I may be missing something in the fine print-members have to sign up before they are told the rev share amount. Turning local bloggers into affiliates is a smart move. This is the kind of idea that could also motivate others to launch local blogs and generate a local blog boom. It may not necessarily be this exact program from CBS that ignites a local blog boom but the news networks do have some potential here to use blogs to spread their brand. The program that succeeds will be the one that bloggers can build a business around. Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

Spitzer’s Call Girl Had a Blog
By now everyone has heard that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was caught in a prostitution sting. The New York Times reports that the prostitute Spitzer was having the secret rendezvous with is 22-year-old Ashley Alexandra Dupre. In addition to being a hooker, Ashley is also a wannabee singer and as nearly all 20-somethings do these days she has a MySpace page. The MySpace page includes a single from one of her songs called “What We Want.” There is also a blog on her MySpace page. She has not been a very dedicated blogger. Her blog contains just one entry over a priod of several months. Ironically she offers some relationship advice in her only post. If you are in a relationship, and it is “doing absolutly nothing” for you, makes you feel bad about yourself or situations, just causing unessesary drama, and ruining things that you may actually care about…why would you want that in your life?? you need to surround yourself with the people that make you feel good, and that will help you get to that next step in your life. that is what a relationship is all about…growing and moving forward. Surround yourself around people that are making moves, and doing what “they want and love” with their lives, positive energy…thats what life is all about…living. Because if you dont, misery loves company, they will only try to bring you down with them…but the question is, are you strong enough, to not let that happen? Its hard to see if you let it get to that point… …and then from all those answers you have to decide if that person is worthy of being a part of “your” life….because it is your life, your show…you decide who you want the characters to be…not the other way around. Every person is different, every person has their voice…can you recognize your voice, listen to it, and stick up for it?? Now that she has been identified and she has a blog is she going to blog anymore? There is some curiousity about who clients #1 through #8 are. Some of the blogs and sites discussing Ashley Alexandra Dupre’s MySpace pages include Wonkette, The Blotter, Americablog, JammieWearingFool, Gothamist, Politico, Village Voice, Power Line, PoliBlog, A Blog For All, Radar, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed and Memeorandum. Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 9:06 am and is filed under Celebrity Information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.