Just as interesting are her efforts to make a living giving away her art for free. Ms. Paley, a cartoonist, has created a movie called “Sita Sings the Blues” that she is distributing under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license.

A self-described “information radical,” Ms. Paley argues that content should be free, while “containers” for content — such as DVDs — should be paid for. To bolster her argument, she disclosed how much she has made from her “free” film in a recent talk at Power to the Pixel’s Cross-Media Film Forum in October.

Here are the cold hard numbers:

• Total donations from people who appreciate her giving out free content: $23,000

• Profits from her online store which sells merchandise and DVDs: $19,000
• Theatrical distribution revenues: $3,000 (out of total box office tally of $22,350)
• Additional DVD distribution: $3,000
• Broadcast television distribution: $3,000
• Revenue from Central Cinema in Seattle which showed the film: $4,000
• Grand total: $55,000

She says she has not paid a penny for promotion or advertising, since the freely distributable film is its own form of promotion. All in all, she says, “It’s a sweet little living.”

Of course, this calculation doesn’t take into account how much it cost her to create the film. Even so, it’s an interesting glimpse at how an artist can try to use the free software model for their work.

Readers, what do you think? Is this a workable business model for artists?

The new logos include a goldfish, a green scribble and a monster with its tongue sticking out, each stamped with the word “Aol.” (The period is included. The “o” and the “l” are lowercase.)

The struggling Internet company is trying a new look for consumers and investors as it prepares to separate from parent Time Warner next month.

AOL has had a hard time in its transition from an Internet service provider to an advertising-based digital media company, and the company faces steep declines in revenue and traffic to its sites. It now is trying to remake itself into a top creator of entertainment, news, information and other content — and says that the new logo is shorthand for its strategy.

Last week, it announced plans to cut a third of its staff in its attempts to revive the company.

What do you think the new look says about AOL?

Videogames are serious business in China. The country’s online game market will reach 41 billion yuan ($6 billion) by 2010, accounting for half the global market, according to newly released data from Cnzz.com, a Beijing-based data analysis firm.

The Cnzz.com report says that almost two-thirds of China’s 338 million Web users are now online gamers. The online-game industry, which currently accounts for more than half of the total Internet economy, will see strong annual growth at a rate of 20% future years, the report says.

The mainstream remains the awkwardly named sector of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). In October, six out of the 10 most popular online games in China are MMORPG games, according to the report. World of Warcraft by Activision Blizzard still tops the list with the most registered players and peak simultaneous online users. But the current government regulatory fighting over its Chinese license, held by Netease, may yet have a negative impact on the game, according to the report.

Casual games — simple games such as card games — take second place with three ranked among the top 10 game list, while Web games such as Tencents’ QQ games are emerging as a new growth area. According to the report, by the end of Octover, there were 1.54 million users playing the top five Web games, with each user playing for an average of 30 minutes a day.

The Cnzz.com report also discusses the problem of the “free-to-play” business model that’s prevalent in China’s online-game sector. While many games companies in the U.S., for example, charge subscription fees, most Chinese games use the free-to-play (F2P) model, which allows players to try out a game without paying. The longer players stay in the game, the more likely they will be to pay for in-game items to move up into higher levels of play. But that also means that people who spend the most money are the best performers.

The report notes that China’s game developers have been considering subscription models since earlier this year. Among the top 10 game list, four are subscription-based titles and two were commercially launched this year, including Shanda’s major new title, AION. Cnzz.com says that a shift to the subscription model would be more likely to create a sense of equity and fairness in the games, because the top players would be those who spend the most time playing, instead of those who spend the most.

China’s online game revenue in 2008 was 20.8 billion yuan, accounting for about 27% global share, ahead of South Korea at 21% and slightly behind the U.S. at 29%, according to an earlier report by Shanghai-based market research firm iResearch. The firm also predicted that China is likely to surpass the U.S. to become the world’s largest by the end of 2009.

There’s plenty of debate about what’s causing the problem — and whether it is even a problem — spanning from academics to Wikipedia’s core participants themselves.

Some critics have been predicting the death of Wikipedia for years. In 2005, Professor Eric Goldman at the Santa Clara University School of Law declared that the site would fail within five years. With his own deadline nearing, he amended his stance to point out that Wikipedia has been slowly raising the drawbridge — making it harder for people to contribute — and will eventually face a labor squeeze as a result.

Researcher Ed Chi, along with his colleagues at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, makes a similar point: Wikipedia has become resistant to new content and new contributors. Chi has posted data to support that thesis on his blog.

Wikipedians themselves discussed this issue at the annual Wikimania conference in August, where Andrew Lih, author of “The Wikipedia Revolution,” led a panel discussion on Wikipedia’s demographic shifts.

The Wikimedia Foundation, meanwhile, has been taking steps to make the site more friendly to newcomers. Among the biggest is a redesign of the site’s main interface and editing features, which haven’t changed substantially in years. A beta version is already available on the site.
Take a look — would it make you more inclined to edit an article on your pet topic?

Its next challenge: Help fashion bible Vogue magazine cash in on its far-reaching influence at a time when advertising dollars are bleeding out of print.

Vogue has hired Blue State Digital to help analyze the Conde Nast publication’s audience as part of a broader, revenue-generating push that ultimately will involve implementing paid subscriptions on Vogue.com, said Tom Florio, publishing director for Vogue and several other Conde Nast magazines.

The collaboration between magazine publisher and Web strategist began several months ago when Diego Scotti, Vogue’s executive director of marketing, emailed Blue State Digital co-founder Joe Rospars. Vogue executives, keenly aware that the monthly magazine is just one of many ways people connect with the publication, had been looking for ways to capitalize on its influence.

The question, Mr. Florio said, was “Can we take a strategy to build a political candidate and apply it to a magazine like Vogue?”

Since the presidential campaign, Blue State Digital has accelerated its push beyond the political realm into nonprofits, organized labor and commercial ventures, among other sectors.

Over the course of several meetings, Mr. Rospars and his colleagues took Vogue executives through presentations on how the firm cultivated and organized prospective Obama supporters.

Blue State Digital used what it calls a “relationship ladder,” which broke down voters into increasingly targeted groups based on the depth of their involvement, from the 13 million people on the campaign’s email list up to the 200,000 people who hosted events.

Vogue’s relationship ladder begins with what it calls its “distributed audience,” which includes anyone who interacts with Vogue at any level, from reading an article about the magazine to buying a dress that appeared in it. Beyond them, Vogue hopes to identify people who pass along information about the brand and, ultimately, people willing to pay for access to certain material on Vogue.com.

Vogue’s approach, like Blue State Digital’s, is a departure from the standard practice of identifying an audience and promptly asking for money. For the campaign, Blue State Digital operated on the premise that there are many types of transactions between a campaign and voters, and that to maximize transactions it had to start by drilling deeper into the lives of potential supporters.

“It’s a decidedly different approach,” Mr. Florio said. “The more we understand the interaction with the brand, the more we’ll be able to cultivate the relationship with them relating to their needs, which ultimately leads to monetizing the relationship” through channels like e-commerce and subscriptions.

The music game, in which people tap on colored balls in time to music when it reaches the line at the bottom of the screen, is a popular app among buyers on Apple’s iPhone App Store. Various iterations of Tap Tap Revenge have been downloaded 18 million times since the game was first released in July 2008.

With those past games, Tapulous said it released a different version whenever it had significant new content that it wanted to charge for — and it had to persuade existing users to download the new games. But with Tap Tap Revenge 3, Tapulous is allowing people for the first time to buy additional music for the game inside the app so they can increase their selection of songs. Tapulous is selling two songs for $1 and sometimes six for $3. The company has also built virtual premium game rooms, where only those who have purchased the song can enter and find others to play with.

“We have the beginnings of a social gaming ecosystem,” says Tapulous founder Bart Decrem, adding that people also have the option of being notified by a text message when someone challenges them to a game.

Decrem says Tap Tap Revenge 3, which was released in October, was No. 1 in Apple’s top paid rankings for the first three weeks and added that it has already sold half a million tracks of music. Tapulous also earns a fee whenever people go directly from the game to buy the iTunes version of a song for their music library.

Though in-app purchasing is currently only available on its 99-cent app, Tapulous is working on incorporating the feature into a free version. Apple had allowed the new feature initially only for paid apps, but lifted that restriction in mid-October.

Tapulous says it also plans to sell virtual items that will let people dress up their avatars, as well as bombs and shields that will help players in the game. It is also working on a way to let users buy music and items within the app as gifts for other players.

Next year, Decrem expects the already-profitable company to get half its revenues from advertising and the other half from in-app commerce.

Previously on App Watch

Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages: Wikipedia.org is losing unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police the world’s fifth-most-popular Web site.

Microsoft, News Corp. Discuss Web Pact: Microsoft and News Corp. have held discussions about a partnership that could result in News Corp. removing its newspaper content from Google’s search engine while continuing to feature it on Microsoft’s online properties.

Sifting Web Chat for Inspiration: IBM and a handful of other major marketers are experimenting with a new process of developing ad campaigns based in part on what consumers are chatting about on the Web.

In Rural India, Entertainment Comes Via Cellphone: In the farthest reaches of India’s rural heartland, the cellphone is bringing something that television, radio and even newspapers couldn’t deliver: Instant access to music, information, entertainment, news and even worship.

EBay Search Glitch Damps Sales: An eBay search glitch over the weekend damped sales in the run-up to the crucial holiday shopping season.

Starting Friday, Twitter users began to post updates about service outages. Alex Mendez tweeted “33:40 minutes on the cellphone dealing with TW / earthlink. UGH,” and Diane Fischler wrote, “Not getting email messages again. Woke up to about 60 left over from yesterday’s Earthlink outage, now seems to be down again. Who else?”

On Saturday and Sunday, EarthLink users continued to complain about their lack of service. Jim Rattray wrote: “#Earthlink email has been down for 24+ hours. ‘We’re aware and working on it.’ Not good enough,” while romeneskoblogs said, “I haven’t received Earthlink email since Friday night. Customer service rep (in India) said could be 72 hours b4 restored.”

Others taunted the subscribers. “If someone told me they had an Earthlink email account, I think I’d guffaw loudly,” Mike Benjamin wrote, while Charles Parker said, “Earthlink is STILL having email problems? I dumped them 10 years ago because…they were having email problems!”

EarthLink did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the email service outages. But this isn’t the first time its customers have had to deal with spotty email access — they also experienced an outage during April, on Earth Day, when a power outage in Pasadena, Calif., knocked out service for a few hours.

If you’re an EarthLink subscriber, how has your service been this weekend?

Analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein this week highlighted what they characterize as a kind of licensing loophole affecting the hit iPhone, which they say puts a limit on the amount of money that flows into Qualcomm’s bank account. They estimate the savings provides a lift to Apple’s operating profit that should top $280 million for fiscal 2009 and $400 million for fiscal 2010.

Conversely, if Qualcomm could somehow manage to change the situation, the additional money that could flow to the chip maker would be “a stunning 9% boost” to estimates for Qualcomm’s 2010 operating profits, say analysts Toni Sacconaghi and Stacy Rasgon, authors of the Bernstein report.

Neither Qualcomm nor Apple will comment on their thesis. Explaining how the analysts arrived at it requires a short dive into Qualcomm’s business model.

The San Diego company helped develop one of two major technologies for digital cellular networks. Though a minority of the market initially, Qualcomm’s patents cover key aspects of newer third-generation networks. So companies delivering 3G products pay patent royalties to the company, which are widely believed to average a little less than 5% of the wholesale price of a cellphone. (Precise terms are negotiated confidentially, and can reflect factors such as patents that Qualcomm might want to license from the handset maker.)

Qualcomm’s Web site lists more than 145 licensees, including all major makers of 3G handsets. The one glaring omission is Apple, whose iPhone uses 3G networks and is the biggest name in smartphones. One name that is listed is Foxconn, the Taiwan-based company that manufactures iPhones for Apple.

Sacconaghi and Rasgon say the royalties paid to Qualcomm are based on the price Apple pays Foxconn for each iPhone–about $244, they estimate–not the wholesale price that Apple charges carriers like AT&T for iPhones, which they say averages about $590. Assuming those prices and a 4% royalty rate, they estimate that Foxconn pays Qualcomm about $9.70 per iPhone–compared to $23.60 per phone that Apple might pay directly, based on the higher wholesale price.

Why couldn’t other handset makers get the same deal? Most others build some of their own cellphones internally, or for some other reason have signed a licensing deal with Qualcomm, Rasgon says. (Once they are licensees, the licensing fee they negotiate holds for all the handsets they sell–wherever they are made, he adds).

Apple, by contrast, was a new entrant to the market with the iPhone and relies completely on an external manufacturer–and does not have a licensing relationship with Qualcomm. “Apple among handset vendors is in a unique position,” Rasgon says.

As to whether Qualcomm might try to press Apple for more royalties–or have any legal basis for trying to do so–is unclear, Rasgon and Sacconaghi say. One factor that could weigh into Qualcomm’s thinking is that Apple is a potential user of Qualcomm chips, and a supplier seldom likes to irk a customer. On the other hand, Apple has been building up its own internal chip design capability as a result of its 2008 purchase of a startup called P.A. Semi.

So no change in the two companies’ relationship seems imminent. But it’s worth paying attention, because the dollars that fly around can get pretty large. Samsung, for instance, just agreed to pay Qualcomm $1.3 billion in advance plus future royalties in an extension of the two companies’ licensing agreement.

Over the past 20 years, 3-D-capable devices like set-top boxes as well as 3-D programming have become available at home. A lack of standard broadcasting formats, relatively little content and the need for 3-D glasses, however, have kept it from a broad audience.

Tech companies are betting that will all change, and when it does, you’ll be able to lose the glasses.

According to new data from Thomson Reuters, 3-D-related patents have risen sharply in recent years, led by companies such as Samsung, Panasonic and Toshiba. “It will only be a matter of time before 3-D televisions start showing up in the home,” the report says.

Patent activity in the 3-D television space grew 69% over a five-year period, with more than 1,000 unique invention patents filed last year alone. This year is on par, with 486 filed in the first half of 2009.

Cinema-related 3-D patents rose 45% in the last five years, with 149 filed in 2008 and 61 in the first half of this year. Those patents are more likely to be for accessories, such as glasses and projection systems, than advances in movie production.

The report notes a particular area of innovation: lenticular lenses. Thirty patents filed in 2008 related to the technology, which facilitates 3-D viewing without 3-D glasses. “This would be a key development helping to bring 3-D television to the mainstream television consumer market,” it says.

Another area of patent growth is in 3-D photography, something the industry is seeking as demand for digital cameras slows. Still-photography-related 3-D patents rose 57% from 2003 to 2008, led by Fujifilm, Sony and Samsung. In the first half of this year, 368 have been filed. “It appears that we may soon be watching 3-D commercials on our flat-screen televisions and paging through the 3-D memories of our children’s photo albums,” the report says.