AP Puts Up Ridiculous Blogger Toll Booth

Posted by Nick O'Neill on June 18th, 2008 8:00 AM

Yesterday the AP wrote about the new LinkedIn valuation:

It’s one of the richest appraisals for a Silicon Valley startup since Microsoft Corp. paid $240 million for 1.6 percent of Facebook Inc. late last year. That deal valued Palo Alto-based Facebook and its online hangout at $15 billion.

The Facebook financing in turn helped several other startups that promote online socializing to promote themselves.

Ning Inc. and Slide Inc. wrangled implied valuations ranging between $500 million and $560 million when investors poured more money into them earlier this year, while RockYou was valued between $200 million and $300 million in a deal completed last week.

That quote should have cost $25. Hope you enjoyed it! The new policy set forth by the Associated Press is that bloggers should pay to quote their articles. If I had a $15 for every time I was quoted I’d be doing pretty well. Unfortunately nobody would quote me at that point. That’s the same thing that will happen to the Associated Press who will be meeting with the head of the Media Bloggers Association on Thursday according to Tim Conneally of the BetaNews.

While policing for continuous misuse of content is a similar strategy used by leaders in the music industry, attacking individual bloggers one at a time will fail miserably. Then again, paraphrasing articles is just as easy and makes linking back to paraphrased articles unnecessary. Do you think the new strategy being used by the Associated press will work?

AP Toll Booth Screenshot
Screenshot of the AP Toll Both … Perhaps I should have paid for lifting a screenshot