Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
iReport's tagline "Unedited. Unfiltered. News." is a clear - though not unqualified - claim that what's being presented is news. And the frequent appearance of the CNN logo is presumably used to imply credibility.
Even when they try to quarantine user-generated content into a separate site or sub-site, established media organisations inherently lend their reputations to those reports.
So why don't they moderate posts? My guess is that it would cost too much. The whole idea of user-generated content is to bring in eyeballs that will (hopefully) click through to the main site, or to yield advertising revenue that doesn't have to be shared with the content creators. Outrageous content attracts attention, and attention translates to dollars.
And one school of thought says that if you do moderate, you're increasing rather than reducing your potential liability. The reasoning is that if you don't moderate you can leave responsibility with the poster, but as soon as you start moderating, you implicitly accept some responsibility for whatever gets through the process.
Anyway, all this makes me glad I don't think I'm smart enough to be a share trader. Mind you, if you were quick enough to apply the old adage of "buy on rumour, sell on fact" Friday would have been a nice payday.
The rumour emerges, and Apple shares fall to $US95.41. You pick some up, then unload them three hours later at ten bucks profit. Multiply that by a few thousand shares and you've made as much in a morning as most people do in a year.
But what's the other old adage? Hindsight has 20/20 vision.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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