How Publishers Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Zite's Aggregator 22
waderoush writes "In March 2011, personalized-magazine startup Zite got a cease-and-desist letter from a group of 11 media giants outraged by the way Zite's popular iPad app 'misappropriated' their news articles. By August 2011, Zite had become part of CNN, which is owned by Time Warner, one of the organizations behind the C&D letter. Zite's brief clash with the media establishment, followed by its swift assimilation into the same establishment, is emblematic of a larger story unfolding in the media business: the grudging acknowledgement by publishers that readers want to access their content in new ways. In this article Zite CEO Mark Johnson explains how the startup mollified publishers (by presenting articles in 'Web view' mode rather than a stripped-down 'reader mode'), why CNN bought the company, and how it strives to make reading more enjoyable while still respecting publishers' business models."
About the Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Just to be clear: what this means is that the news agencies' Advertisements were displayed, instead of stripping the information down to the article (without ads). The News agencies were right to send C&D letters to Zite, but with the new system, the news agencies had a chance to make revenue off of their own content.
The answer to the question "How did publishers learn to stop worrying and love zites aggregator?" is "Zite changed their system to be respectful towards the content producers and their need to make money from content they produced". (I just want to head off any comments by who want to jump on the narrative that publishers need to just need to look at things differently regarding, say, piracy.)
Zite is AWESOME for programmers (Score:4, Informative)
I've been using Zite for a while now (which I started using on an iPad), the thing I really love about it is that it does the best job of anything I've seen at finding stuff from websites out of the mainstream.
Unlike Flipboard where you might be looking at a lineup of TechCrunch or Engadget articles, Zite has found of ton of great articles on obscure blogs all over the place.
This goes for general programming things, to process of development, to specific languages and technologies.
It even has an endearing quirk if you follow the topic "Cocoa" - I entered that referring to the Apple development framework, but mixed in with the development articles are articles about the cocoa industry and recipes for hot chocolate...
I really recommend it as great resource to plum for deep interest in pretty much any subject (though as I said I use it mostly for programming).