CBSSports.com announced its fantasy sports service is opening its doors to third party developers and companies to create apps for its products and services. CBSSports.com's innovative open Fantasy Platform will represent the first of its kind in the fantasy sports industry.

Skyword, a content farm, secured $6 million in funding from Cox Media Group, Inc., a broadcasting, publishing, direct marketing, and digital media company. Cox is the sole investor in the company, and a Cox representative, not yet publicly named, will join Skyword's board of directors.

CBS Local Digital Media announced a partnership with Examiner.com that will result in the delivery of original lifestyle content to local audiences. The collaborative editorial pieces, which will focus on "Best Of" guides and "Top Spots" lists, will be written by local writers and published on CBS's locally targeted properties.

According to the Wordpress.com blog, the popular blogging and website building tool is partnering with Federated Media to offer the opportunity to advertise to its bloggers. According to the post: "We've resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn't terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google's AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense."

Appcelerator, Inc. -- a platform to create apps for mobile devices, tablets, and desktops -- garnered a $15 million endowment in a third round of funding. This latest deal gives the company a total $31.5 million investment. The round was led by Mayfield Fund, Red Hat, and Translink Capital.

Money is the root of all evil. It is also the foundation upon which economies are built. Certainly, it's high on the list of objectives for most organizations. Hey, even not-for-profits have to cover costs. So how do we reconcile this yearning for earning with such laudable corporate mottos as "do no evil"? Companies with good reputations generally earn them by delivering genuine value to customers. These, and others, often offset craven capitalistic endeavors by doing good works. Value and giving back are certainly admirable tactics, and I would not discourage any company from following this righteous path.

Who is the mobile magazine reader? Texterity -- a Southborough, MA-based company that provides digital and mobile publishing solutions -- sought to answer that question in its annual readership survey. The 2011 Mobile App Readership Survey (with results certified by BPA Worldwide) was designed to specifically study magazine app users while on their mobile devices.

Much like the average American family farm, it seems like content farms may be struggling -- if this week's news about Demand Media is any indicator. One of the biggest and most well-known mass producers of content on the web is cutting back the number of articles it produces, and enraged its freelancers in the process.

If any company could propel an ebook-first publishing model, it is probably Amazon. With the popularity of the Kindle and the extensive information the company holds on its clients, Amazon is better positioned than most to push targeted ebooks to customers. The company even released a statement earlier this year showing that ebooks are outselling print books on Amazon.com. Despite this, Amazon is foraying further into the print publishing world.

The steady increase in ebook sales over the last few years has had a significant impact on the book industry, as publishers have had to rethink long-standing business models. The rise in ebooks' popularity has opened new doors for authors, especially undiscovered authors, who can now turn their manuscripts into ebooks and sell them on ecommerce sites such as Amazon with just a few clicks of the mouse. While much attention has been paid to the changing roles of publishers and authors, little has been said about the roles of literary agents as they also attempt to navigate this evolving landscape.

From an outsider's perspective, being a professional freelance writer may seem like the dream job. After all, you can make your own hours, work from the comfort of home (or from your local Starbucks), and handpick which projects you want to pursue based on your level of expertise or interest. Those who are active in the field know this is far from true. For many freelancers, finding a job that appropriately compensates their level of skill, and relaying that job into a steady gig takes patience, perseverance, and a whole lot of practice writing query letters. But there's good news for freelancers. The market is changing.

Somewhere between unknown, independent bloggers and traditional publishers with well-respected reputations are the sites known as content farms--websites that generate a large quantity of content specifically designed to rank high in search engine results. They range from local, content-driven sites such as AOL's Patch and Examiner.com to how-to sites such as Howcast and Demand Media's eHow.com to topic-focused sites such as Suite101 and Associated Content.

I first met Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and organizer of Content Marketing World, at the Niche Magazine Conference in February 2011. He was a featured speaker at the event, and he spoke on a number of topics, mainly social media and content marketing. I enjoyed every session I attended, but his keynote on content marketing was what stuck with me. As the founder of the Content Marketing Institute, you'd expect him to be passionate about content marketing. It was more than that, though. Pulizzi, who's been around the publishing business for a long time, talked about content marketing in a way that "just made sense" for both marketers and publishers.

When considering the future of web content management (WCM), it is perhaps helpful to remember that the technology is designed to systemize and automate that which has long been practiced by retailers and expected by consumers in the real world. Just as a shopper who enters a sporting goods store and asks for help finding a fishing rod might beat a hasty retreat if the clerk brings back a soccer ball, visitors to websites expect to be listened to and to receive personalized service. When you figure that an online shopper is not a car drive away from another store but rather just a few quick keyboard strokes away from another website, the pressure to get WCM right mounts exponentially.

This past April, 1 month after her highly publicized resignation as CEO of NPR (National Public Radio), Vivian Schiller delivered a warning to her former public radio colleagues, saying, "There is massive change on the horizon." She cautioned that "if you don't aggressively reach out to new audiences on new platforms, someone else will," and she urged public radio to embrace technology by letting go "of the nostalgia for how that content is delivered and how that community is forged. Give the audience what they need and how they need it, and you will be fine." Whether there's any truth behind Schiller's prediction that "new digital-only startups will enter the marketplace in audio" and public radio will find itself "longing for the days when the competition was the radio station that overlapped on your broadcast signal" remains to be seen, but as audiences find new digitally friendly ways to consume content across all public media sectors, her prophecy may soon become reality.

As someone who favors open standards and open source, I think HTML5 may become an attractive alternative to Flash. After all, the World Wide Web is built on open standards. What really caught my eye though was an Adobe press release issued on Aug. 1: Adobe announced an "Early Preview of New HTML5 Web Motion and Interaction Design Tool" called Adobe Edge. Adobe Edge is a new motion and interaction design tool that lets creative pros build animated web content using web standards such as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

I've got a challenge for you. Take a look at the way you create, manage and deliver content. No, really. Take a close look. Conduct a systematic, fair, scientific survey of your content production lifecycle. Get professional help if you need to. Look at each and every step in your process and ask yourself, "Is this the best we can do, or is it just the way we've been doing it for so long that we believe it is the correct -- and only -- way to work?"

According to Pew Research Center, "50% of adult cell phone owners have apps on their phone." In other words, we have gone app crazy! What was once reserved for the early adopters, gaming companies, or social networks has now become the must-have tool for any business. You have a website, Facebook page, Foursquare deal, and now the time has come to decide... app or no app? In this episode of Content Throwdown! we will explore the pros and cons of building an app. So grab your marketing plan, put on your wrestling gear, and let's hit the mat!

Whether you are an experienced digital publishing machine or a novice brand looking for the benefits of content marketing, you most likely need the help of freelance writers to help tell your story. You may find that you need help developing ongoing content - or that you need additional content producers to keep up with the velocity.

I assessed two competing digital paper products in the early '90s: Adobe Carousel (later renamed Acrobat) and Envoy. I settled on Acrobat, based on Adobe's deep expertise in print via PostScript. The idea of a timeless, reliable digital file format remains appealing today, especially when that format is ubiquitous, easy to create, search, and use (not to mention an ISO standard). Creating a PDF file from a properly styled word processing document, such as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, or WordPerfect, gives you both print fidelity and automatic hyperlinking. You can be sure of a rendition faithful to the print version. Moreover, users on Windows, Mac, and UNIX platforms will see and use it the same way.