The Wall Street Journal has launched a Facebook application today which allows people to read content from The Wall Street Journal exclusively from within the social network. The content is ad-supported. The application is called WSJ Social and it filters through content from the publication through Facebook’s social graph to provide a tailored experience for different users.
Yesterday I wrote about a new website called SafeHouse. SafeHouse is The Wall Street Journal’s WikiLeaks competitor. The Wall Street Journal said that those who submit whistle-blower documents to SafeHouse will be guaranteed anonymity through encryption. Jacob Appelbaum, a former WikiLeaks volunteer, and a developer of the Tor anonymity network, immediately noticed flaws with SafeHouse.
WikiLeaks is best known for containing whistle-blower documents that are confidential in nature. WikiLeaks provided anonymity to those who submitted the documents. WikiLeaks grew in popularity and journalists started
thinking to themselves why they didn’t come up with the idea. Most publications ask for tips from readers without guaranteeing anonymity. The Wall Street Journal is launching a new portal that has a similar concept.
The Wall Street Journal is going to start selling single digital issues of their newspaper on the iPad for $1.99. You can buy the single issues through the free iPad application. Dow Jones head of digital content Alisa Bowen said that these changes have nothing to do with the pay wall by The New York Times.
News Corporation is highly interested in building a LinkedIn competitor. That specific task has been delegated to The Wall Street Journal and The Wall Street Journal is now requesting the services of Slingshot Labs. Slingshot Labs is another News Corporation subsidiary. Slingshot is part of News Corp’s web research and development arm. The about page of Slingshot’s website says “Our mission at Slingshot Labs is to be a fast-mover in the quickly evolving Web2.0 landscape.”
In 2008, The Wall Street Journal launched a professional social network called the WSJ Community. But that social network was hardly noticed so now its back to the drawing board.
Slingshot built a service for News Corporation called the Daily Fill and also launched MySpace events for the large social network. There are about 40-50 people on the Slingshot staff and the subsidiary has their own funding and operations. WSJ Connect seems to be still in the planning stages but there is a “strong interest” in moving the project ahead.
After the recent Wall Street meltdown, you would figure that less people would be interested in financial jobs but now the economy is recovering. The Wall Street Journal plans to capitalize on the economic recovery by launching a financial career website called Fins.com.
Dow Jones Ventures General Manager and former Chief Revenue Officer of Jobster Kevin Hatfield is the General Manager of Fins. Fins is the first launch to come out of Dow Jones Ventures. Ann Sarnoff is leading the project. Before Fins, Dow Jones Ventures and IAC partnered on a website called FiLife which has not gained much success.
One of the biggest problems with Fins right off the bad is that there are too many job seeking website alternatives out there as of right now. If I were looking for a finance job, I’d first check TheLadders, Monster, and CareerBuilder.
Two years ago The Richter Scales made a parody song of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire and called it Here Comes Another Bubble. Part of the song lyrics include, “Blog, blog, blog it all! Blog it if its big or small. Blog at the cineplex, etc.” That is exactly what people all over the world is doing and many are making a living out of it, including myself. Through Pulse2.com I am able to afford a salary that is comparable to what corporations were paying me in the past and it is able to pay for an office in a commercial area of Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’m not the only one that is able to pull this off.
The Wall Street Journal reports that there are as many people making a living as bloggers as there are lawyers in the country. There is about 20 million bloggers in the nation of which 1.7 million are profiting from the Internet trend. About 452,000 people in America are using blogging as their primary source of income.
Three out of every four bloggers are college educated and most of them are white males that report above average income levels. Bloggers who are able to do it for a living successfully are about 2% of bloggers overall. Blogs that are able to receive 100,000 unique visitors per month have a high chance of hitting $75,000 in monthly income through advertisements and paid blog posts.
Even though bloggers work very long hours and are constantly finding ways to distinguish themselves from the rest of the herd, most of them report that they are overwhelmingly happy.
What makes blogging such an attraction is the low cost to entry and no barriers to entry. To a certain extend, writing your opinion about anything you want is backed by the First Amendment’s freedom of speech and freedom of the press. So far blogs have been doing okay in surviving the recession, but it is rather ambiguous what will happen when professional bloggers lose work. Will they be covered by unemployment and whether they are covered as journalists under shield laws?
Regardless the numbers are extremely staggering. The kind of money that can be made by just typing words on a computer and publishing it on an independent website is staggering. It will be amazing to see where blogging technology takes us from here.
The Wall Street Journal has jumped on the iPhone bandwagon. Interestingly, the iPhone application is free despite the fact that they charge for their publication on the web and on the Kindle. Last year The Wall Street Journal created a free BlackBerry application so it was expected that they made one for the iPhone too. Even though the application is free, users will be glaring at massive advertisements at the bottom of the screen. Notice the Oracle logo that is prominently placed at the bottom of the screen?
Other major publications that have built an application for the mobile device includes Bloomberg, CNN, and The New York Times. None of these charge to use the application so The Wall Street Journal had to remain competitive too.
The videos and streaming radio that is available through The Wall Street Journal application connects to the built-in YouTube application on the iPhone.
Popular
