Jobneters launched its post-beta job referral site. On Jobneters the idea is to create a word of mouth referral system that highlights talented job seekers - the system works by paying referrers (the gossips) who contribute to a candidate's profile, if the candidate is hired. Won't that influence people to leave false praise? No, the recruitment business works through word of mouth anyway.
SmallTown has meanwhile launched its webcard business, allowing small businesses to fill in a simple "webcard" and get immediate web presence. They call it building the local web. CityVoter has a different tactic aimed at the same target.
Local television station websites in the USA will be hosting local “best of” contests developed by CityVoter, a company that enables local residents to nominate local businesses for prizes in up to 90 categories.
CityVoter is a strategy as well as a company. They use vote-for competitions to drive businesses to the web. The idea is to stage competitions that force/encourage a business to upload a few photographs to the local city voter media partner site and if not, to get local residents to put details up there anyway. It's an ultimate user-generated content play.
At the same time Microsoft is getting ready to launch a mobile ads service — presumably with a view long term to the local classifieds market.
It was also a week in which these issues came into the blogging community. Scott Karp argues that the next generation of media may simply not be as profitable as media industries traditionally have been. We're looking instead at an era where the gross cost of advertising to industry radically declines.
Why will it benefit most people? Because in the rush to reduce the cost of advertising it is the blogger, vidcaster, and podcaster with a small audience that can afford to downscale fastest and furthest. Even as news media scramble to pick up free material from bloggers and TV stations hook into user-generated content, they know that their ultimate liability is their overhead, their offices, hierarchies, bureaus, pensions, expenses, and an immovable sense of being entitled to their historic privileges.
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