Charlene Li from Forrester posted an interesting argument today about the future of media arguing that:

Its funny to see some of the feature fighting tactics, so popular in the first portal cold war during the late nineties, coming back 2.0 style. Then, like now, portals continually played an escalation game over functions like chat, mail, and personalisation - mirroring each others' feature sets until a kind of lukewarm median had been established. This time, although the buzz is about social networking, video uploading and tagging - the logic is pretty much the same. New toys, same problems.

Contrary to cliché, its not hard putting a value on reputation. Accumulate enough bad reviews on eBay or have your business flamed by enough blog writers, and you can literally count the dollars disappearing from your bank balance. Transactional trust has until now been the main focus of online reputation management systems, but is it the only game in town?

Interesting piece on Techcrunch today about PhotoBucket - a hosting and publishing service for consumer videos and photos. The have just announced a $10.5 million Series B round with Trinity Ventures, largely on the strength of their 15 million members and their claim to drive drives 2% of total U.S. Internet traffic.

I love that old story about Rockefeller saving his fortune by pulling out of the share market when the shoe shine boy started giving him stock tips. To that end, there is a funny debate going on at the moment about 'second derivative companies'.