Is it that big a deal that Netflix offered a million-dollar bounty for anyone who improves its movie recommendation engine by 10%? Wait, how do you even measure the accuracy of movie recommendations? Who cares, the media's eating it up as if they get a finder's fee. (If you win this contest after reading it on Valleywag, you do owe us a finder's fee: a lifetime subscription to "Netflix: Porn Edition." [NY Times]
Rocketboom video blog founder Andrew Baron (pictured) sells another week of ads for $80,000, says he sells $4,000 a month in t-shirts alone, then does some classic "If only we got a fraction..." math to justify a possible subscription model. A fine business model, but didn't Drew spend the last year decrying "Old Media?" Ads and pay-per-view are as old as Cable TV. [MarketWatch]
Aw, nobody likes PayPerPost, a service so mercenary that even blog network exec Jason Calacanis called it "stupid and evil." BusinessWeek calls the company "unrepentant" when it announces that the company (which pays bloggers to write about products and services) just took a $3 million venture capital investment. The bright side: There's no way this company will earn enough to satisfy its investors, so at least it'll get as screwed as the bloggers whose reputations it ruins. [BusinessWeek]
