Wired News writes:

According to internal documents provided to Wired News and interviews with key executives, Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other American daily newspapers, will begin crowdsourcing many of its newsgathering functions. Starting Friday, Gannett newsrooms were rechristened "information centers," and instead of being organized into separate metro, state or sports departments, staff will now work within one of seven desks with names like "data," "digital" and "community conversation."

The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.

Doc Searls writes:

# Ideas aren't physical. Regardless of the legalities, treating ideas as possessions insults their vast combustive power. Jefferson put it best: "The moment [an idea] is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
# Ideas aren't worth jack unless other people can put them to use.
# Ideas won't change the world unless others can improve on them.
# Ideas grow by participation, not isolation.
# Ideas change as they grow. Their core remains the same, but their scope enlarges with successful use.
# Ideas have unexpected results. No one person can begin to imagine all the results of a good idea. That's another reason to welcome participation.

BlogHerald writes:

It appears that Digg has changed their stance towards their ‘economy’.

The Digg economy is the reward system for the users who contribute to the website by submitting content. This ultimate reward is the glory by way of user rankings, calculated as a function of total stories submitted by a user that made it to the front-page.

Keeping this economy in mind, you could say that the recent algorithm ‘upgrade’ at Digg is actually a shift from a capitalist free market state, to a socialist state of equality.

Prior to this change, the Digg economy was a capitalistic one. One that emphasized fairness and allowed each individual user to create his own fate. Under this system, each user was rewarded appropriately, based on their level of contribution to the system. This economy has now become a socialistic one (not to be confused with communistic economies), which emphasizes equality over fairness.

Mashable! writes: "Everyone has been surprised with YouTube’s near-exponential growth since its launch in February 2005. Now Time Magazine is recognizing that success, naming YouTube their “Invention of the Year”. The phenomenon that gave birth to lonelygirl15 and the Diet Coke and Mentos craze beat a nanofabric umbrella, a car that can travel 3,145 miles on a gallon of gas, and a robot that can ride a bike...The question is: which startup is destined to be the next YouTube? Digg, Facebook, Bebo, Piczo, Metacafe and a few others are probably ripe for acquisition, but it’s hard to imagine any of those redefining an entire market in the same way as YouTube."

Dave Sifry of Technorati provides key figures:
- 57 million blogs
- 100K being created daily
- 55% active (updated once in past 3 months)
- 1.3 million new postings daily

Wikipedia provides this definition:

Two-sided markets, also called two-sided networks, are economic networks having two distinct user groups that provide each other with network benefits. Example markets include credit cards, comprised of cardholders and merchants; HMOs (patients and doctors); operating systems (end-users and developers), travel reservation services (travelers and airlines); and video games (gamers and game developers). Benefits to each group exhibit demand economies of scale. Consumers, for example, prefer credit cards honored by more merchants, while merchants prefer cards carried by more consumers.

In some networks, users are homogenous, that is, they all perform similar functions. For example, although participants in a telephone network originate and receive calls, these roles are transient. Almost all phone users play both roles at different times. Likewise, almost all instant messaging, FAX, and email users both. Networks with homogenous users are called one-sided to distinguish them from two-sided networks, which have two distinct user groups whose respective members consistently play the same role in transactions.

In a two-sided network, members of each group exhibit a preference regarding the number of users in the other group; these are called cross-side network effects. Each group’s members may also have preferences regarding the number of users in their own group; these are called same-side network effects. Cross-side network effects are usually positive, but can be negative (as with consumer reactions to advertising). Same-side network effects may be either positive (e.g., the benefit from swapping video games with more peers) or negative (e.g., the desire to exclude direct rivals from an online business-to-business marketplace).

Two-sided (or more generally multi-sided) markets are roughly defined as markets in which one or several platforms enable interactions between end-users, and try to get the two (or multiple) sides “on board” by appropriately charging each side. That is, platforms court each side while attempting to make, or at least not lose, money overall.

Examples of two-sided markets readily come to mind. Videogame platforms, such as Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Sony Play Station, and Microsoft X-Box, need to attract gamers in order to convince game developers to design or port games to their platform, and need games in order to induce gamers to buy and use their videogame console. Software producers court both users and application developers, client and server sides, or readers and writers. Portals, TV networks and newspapers compete for advertisers as well as “eyeballs”. And payment card systems need to attract both merchants and cardholders.

But what is a two-sided market and why does two-sidedness matter? On the former question, the recent literature has been mostly industry specific and has had much of a “You know a two-sided market when you see it” flavor. “Getting the two sides on board” is a useful characterization, but it is not restrictive enough. Indeed, if the analysis just stopped there, pretty much any market would be two-sided, since buyers and sellers need to be brought together for markets to exist and gains from trade to be realized. We define a two-sided market as one in which the volume of transactions between end-users depends on the structure and not only on the overall level of the fees charged by the platform. A platform’s usage or variable charges impact the two sides’ willingness to trade once on the platform, and thereby their net surpluses from potential interactions; the platforms’ membership or fixed charges in turn condition the end-users’ presence on the platform. The platforms’ fine design of the structure of variable and fixed charges is relevant only if the two sides do not negotiate away the corresponding usage and membership externalities.