Now MySiteApp, the Israeli company that previously put out the UppSite tool for converting websites into native apps, has brought out a new service called Brow.si for making mobile websites behave like apps. Brow.si is a multifunctional toolbar that can be easily inserted in a responsive website through the addition of some Javascript. It’s now in public beta, following a two-week closed beta period in which it was already used by a million people.

Pushing for the web

Much of this functionality is the sort of thing a publisher can put into a mobile website itself – content sharing through social networks, read-later options such as Pocket, font resizing and so on – but Brow.si aims to make its addition easier.

It also introduces something that’s previously only been available on apps: push notifications. Without the user having to install anything, they can subscribe to notifications from all the websites they visit that are using Brow.si, and consume that content through the platform’s own reader. Again, users don’t have to create an account for this – they just need to log into a social network (Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn) for sharing purposes, after which Brow.si will know which user is which.

What’s more, MySiteApp has become a WordPress VIP (see disclosure) feature partner, meaning sites using that publishing platform can easily install the Brow.si plugin. But again, that’s not all: as alluded to above, Brow.si is a platform in its own right, and it aims to help publishers monetize their content.

Cashing in

As MySiteApp CEO Gal Brill explained to me, publishers can add so-called “mini applications” that will only show up when the user activates the Brow.si toolbar. When the toolbar is swiped across the screen, it introduces new real estate below it, so the publisher could for example add a mini-app for the content recommendation engine Taboola, or they could even use this new space for traditional ads.

Mini-apps will be made available through Brow.si’s marketplace, and the company has an open API so third-party developers can help populate that marketplace with their own efforts.

It’s all very clever, and the simplicity of installation should give Brow.si a flying start. It remains to be seen, though, whether this sort of functionality will help publishers monetize their content on the mobile web. There are many variables at play here, from users’ desire for content-related push notifications (granularity seems to be lacking) to publishers’ desire for differentiated presentation.

That said, the addition of a new and relatively unobtrusive patch of mobile screen real estate for advertising purposes could turn out to be a welcome development.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

Not content with sticking two fingers up at the authorities with his Mega secure cloud storage service, larger-than-life entrepreneur Kim Dotcom is planning to release further privacy-centric services. And interestingly, in a Q&A session with the New Zealand Herald late last night, Dotcom said he intended the secure email and instant messaging services to be both military-grade and so easy to use that the user wouldn’t have to do anything to benefit from this security.

This is always the issue with security – if it requires much thought on the user’s part, it will generally fail. Dotcom, who also released a white paper on Tuesday to accuse the U.S. government of misleading New Zealand authorities while pursuing the German-born millionaire, said in the session that he wanted to “provide tools that give our users their privacy back”:

“We are working on encrypted email, IM, etc. The key to make encryption a global success is ease of use. So I am spending most of my time figuring out how I can give you encryption without you having to do anything and at the same time give you military grade privacy. You are all naked on the Internet. I like to help you put some pants on :-)”

It remains unclear what Mega is planning, technologically speaking, to achieve this kind of friction-free encryption. There are plenty of tools out there for sending encrypted emails and messages, but they tend to involve browser extensions or web forms, or paid subscriptions.

Mega’s cloud storage service has also come in for criticism by some security experts, who have pointed out that its use of so-called “convergent encryption” (in order to allow de-duplication) theoretically leaves a trace of who uploaded which file.

That extradition thing

Of course, Dotcom’s plans hinge somewhat on the ongoing extradition proceedings that he faces. The U.S. had Dotcom and some of his associates raided and arrested at the start of 2012 over allegations of copyright infringement, to do with their highly popular (and now deceased) Megaupload file-sharing service, and wants them sent over to face charges.

Since then, the case has occasionally veered into farce, with the New Zealand prime minister having to apologize for the country’s security services illegally spying on Dotcom, and a judge having to step down from the proceedings after describing the U.S. as “the enemy”.

All the while, Dotcom has maintained that Hollywood lobbyists were behind the raid and arrests. He reiterated and expanded upon these claims in the white paper released on Tuesday, verbosely entitled “Megaupload, the Copyright Lobby and the Future of Digital Rights: The United States vs You (and Kim Dotcom).”

The document highlights ties between U.S. vice president Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America (the MPAA, Dotcom’s bête noir), describing the whole affair as a “contract prosecution” linked to campaign contributions. It calls on the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the Office of Professional Responsibility of the U.S. Department of Justice to “conduct an investigation and hearings into the conduct of the Megaupload prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice.”

The case followed complaints by Microsoft and others over Google’s treatment of rivals’ web services in its search results. These companies argue that Google favors its own services, which are not clearly marked as such, and also that it unfairly locks advertisers onto its platform and scrapes content from third-party search and comparison sites without consent.

A recent leak outlined the terms of the proposed settlement deal, but here’s the official version:

To address these concerns, Google offers for a period of 5 years to:

(i) – label promoted links to its own specialised search services so that users can distinguish them from natural web search results,
- clearly separate these promoted links from other web search results by clear graphical features (such as a frame), and
- display links to three rival specialised search services close to its own services, in a place that is clearly visible to users,

(ii) – offer all websites the option to opt-out from the use of all their content in Google’s specialised search services, while ensuring that any opt-out does not unduly affect the ranking of those web sites in Google’s general web search results,
- offer all specialised search web sites that focus on product search or local search the option to mark certain categories of information in such a way that such information is not indexed or used by Google,
- provide newspaper publishers with a mechanism allowing them to control on a web page per web page basis the display of their content in Google News,

(iii) no longer include in its agreements with publishers any written or unwritten obligations that would require them to source online search advertisements exclusively from Google, and

(iv) no longer impose obligations that would prevent advertisers from managing search advertising campaigns across competing advertising platforms.

Authorities in the U.S. more-or-less cleared Google over similar complaints, but it’s important to note that Google’s share of the search market there is around 67 percent, whereas in the E.U, it’s around 90 percent. This gives it stronger market power in Europe, and forces the regulators’ hand somewhat (as do local laws).

A Q&A document, which outlines the Commission’s concerns in detail, points out that “it does not seem likely that another web search service will replace [Google] as European users’ web search service of choice.”

“In this context, it is important for the Commission to intervene in order to ensure that Google’s prominent market position in web search does not affect the possibility for other competitors to innovate in neighbouring markets, including in the long-term,” the document states.

Flattr, co-founded by The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde, is quite a simple system. The user signs up to donate a certain amount — $5 for example — each month, and then “flattrs” people for their content, with the recipient getting an amount equal to the monthly pot divided by the number of flattrs the user has made. It was originally for tipping bloggers who had Flattr buttons on their sites, but last month the company expanded the functionality to allow the automatic tipping of people posting on Twitter, SoundCloud, Instagram and other sites.

However, Flattr has now removed the Twitter functionality after Twitter asked it to desist. As Flattr co-founder Linus Olsson explained in a blog post on Tuesday:

“Recently Twitter contacted us and told us that we are violating their API terms citing the second part of a clause (IV. Commercial Use, 2C. Advertising Around Twitter Content) saying ‘Your advertisements cannot resemble or reasonably be confused by users as a Tweet. For example, ads cannot have Tweet actions like follow, retweet, favorite, and reply. And you cannot sell or receive compensation for Tweet actions or the placement of Tweet actions on your Service.’

“This is a quite logical clause as it would stop companies to sell e.g. retweets and followers. It’s an understandable rule to keep the Twitter network clean but in this case the rule is strangely stomping out innovation on their platform.”

Now, Flattr is a for-profit firm that takes a 10 percent cut of payments carried out over its system. But even after Flattr offered to forego that cut in the case of flattred tweets, Twitter apparently said no. So, from today, favoriting tweets won’t result in the tweeter getting money — although those using the Flattr browser extension can still “flattr” tweeters through this alternative mechanism.

I’ve asked Twitter whether it sees another way in which Flattr can operate on its platform, but am yet to receive a response.

On the face of it, this action of Twitter’s seems to tally with its recent shutting-down of Ribbon’s service, which used Twitter’s Cards technology to allow full-on payments to take place within tweets themselves. However, Ribbon and Flattr appear to have broken two different rules — in Ribbon’s case, it looks like the company wasn’t making the right kind of Cards access request, and in Flattr’s it was the contravention of the tweet action regulation.

It’s probably too early to tell whether Twitter has an ulterior motive here, but Olsson suspects it does. As he told me:

“I would speculate that they want to control all the ways that money is changing hands on Twitter – if they control that, they can control the flow and in future get a cut of it. That would be a logical business model for Twitter – if you use Twitter to sell something you need to pay Twitter for it. I’m just speculating here, of course.”

Flattr will now put this theory to the test, Olsson added, by building a system “where you can send a flattr to someone on Twitter by tweeting them instead”. In the meantime, the service continues to expand its reach by adding YouTube to the roster of services through which flattrs can be made.

I should probably add by way of disclosure that, since signing up for Flattr a month ago, I have received two flattrs for tweets of mine: one for €3 ($3.92 – I’m guessing the user didn’t favorite many tweets that month) and the other for €0.16. After Flattr took its cut, the remainder was €2.84, which is just less than the €3 that I have set as my monthly budget for flattring others.

So, now that the takeover has come to pass (the Financial Times reports the deal value as £45 million (USD $69 million), or around £20 per user), what fallout should we expect?

Cleaner data

According to Mendeley CEO Victor Henning, everything should be just fine. Mendeley will “stay an independent site” with plans to expand its 50-strong team to 80 within the next 18 months, he told me, adding that the deal would give both parties better data:

“All those resources will help us do two things. One is more integration — the biggest gap in our product offering is that it’s too difficult for users to get to full text content. When people found something on Mendeley it was usually just the metadata with a link to the publisher’s website. Elsevier publishes around 20pc of the world’s scientific output and has deals with other publishers for its Scopus database. We’ll be working to integrate Mendeley with Scopus and ScienceDirect to make it easier for our users to enrich and clean up the content we already have — our content is crowdsourced. Elsevier has a lot of clean structured data we can use to clean it up, and our data can enrich Elsevier’s because we have rich social information.

“We can now also take a more long-term perspective about monetization versus feature development and user growth. As an independent startup we were always trying to break even as soon as possible, and were under pressure to monetize new features. Now we can pick up certain things for the roadmap, for example hiring a fully-fledged mobile team. There will be a new iOS app soon, and we’re going to start building an Android app from scratch.”

Henning added that Elsevier’s existing 17 million author profiles would also have a positive effect. “Now, once we’re integrated, when you sign up to Mendeley we will immediately be able to present you with your profile to claim,” he said. “It will make it easier for users to get started.”

But what about all that criticism of Elsevier? There, Henning insisted there was little risk of users taking flight:

“People have criticized Elsevier for things they’ve done in the past but, particularly last year when they were subjected to criticism for their stance on open access publishing, they’ve taken that feedback to heart. They’ve doubled the number of open access journals that they publish. They do support open access publishing and they will expand on it in the future. Another move they made last year is, people were saying they’d like to text-mine content that you have, and they opened up to the community about that.”

Elsevier, meanwhile, also said in a blog post that Mendeley was “open, social and collaborative, and it is important to [Elsevier] that it retains all of those traits”.

“Elsevier has all the power”

However, not everyone is sounding so positive. One notable perspective is that of Jason Hoyt, Mendeley’s former R&D head and, since leaving the company, founder of open access publisher PeerJ.

Hoyt said in a post on Tuesday that Elsevier had previously hampered or outright stymied open access projects at Mendeley, including the service’s PDF preview functionality and a scheme to automatically put papers filed with Mendeley into the open access archive of the author’s institution:

“If one is honest, from a business perspective the Mendeley founders did the right thing to comply with Elsevier’s demands. My personal passions about Open Access hindered that, so no surprise it didn’t work out for more than a few years… I think that Mendeley as it stands today will continue to be useful even at Elsevier. That said, I think it will be challenging for Mendeley to become a truly transformative tool in science, which is what had originally convinced me to move from San Francisco to London four years ago.”

Meanwhile, open access blogger Mike Taylor noted that “Elsevier has all the power in the relationship” with Mendeley:

“So Mendeley say things like ‘very little will change for you as a Mendeley user’ and ‘we will continue to support standard and open data formats’, and I’m sure they believe them. But it’s dependent on the whim of Elsevier. The moment it becomes inconvenient or financially disadvantageous for them to do these things, they’ll stop.”

It will be worth keeping an eye on the user numbers of Mendeley and its main academic community rivals (such as ResearchGate) and reference management rivals (such as Zotero) to see which way the scholarly users themselves feel the wind is blowing.

Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of science publisher Elsevier, is an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the company that publishes GigaOM.

The idea, much as it was with printed content, is to archive the U.K.’s cultural and intellectual output. The libraries — including the British Library, the national libraries of Scotland and Wales, Trinity College Library Dublin, the Bodleian Libraries and Cambridge University Library — will be allowed to scrape and store everything on the .uk domain, and to demand copies of ebooks, e-journals and even CD-ROMs published in the U.K.

Here’s an interesting snippet from the FAQs:

“Legal Deposit Libraries will copy U.K.-published material from the internet, including freely accessible material on the open web. They are also entitled to harvest copies of password-protected or paid-for material, but are putting alternative arrangements in place for any publisher who prefers to deliver such material to them instead.”

A British Library spokesman confirmed to me on Friday that this was a reference to paywalled content. However, given that people will only be able to access the archive by physically visiting the libraries in question, and that there will be a seven-day lag between publication and archiving, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem for the publishers.

The spokesman said social media output would also be included, “as long as it is U.K.-based and openly available on the web,” and confirmed that this includes identifiably U.K.-based individuals’ Twitter feeds, although “we’d need to select people because it’s a .com” — no Library of Congress-style catch-all approach, then.

“The main thing we’re trying to capture first time round is .uk domain websites,” the spokesman added, while also stressing that no non-public social media material would be scraped.

On the book publishing side, The Bookseller reported that priority will be given to ebook-only publishers. This is presumably because those who aren’t ebook only are already submitting their books under the previously existing legal deposit scheme.

So why is this all happening? As my colleague Mathew Ingram pointed out last year, digital content can often be ephemeral and easily lost. That sentiment was echoed on Friday by British Library chief executive Roly Keating:

“Ten years ago, there was a very real danger of a black hole opening up and swallowing our digital heritage, with millions of web pages, e-publications and other non-print items falling through the cracks of a system that was devised primarily to capture ink and paper.

The regulations now coming into force make digital legal deposit a reality, and ensure that the Legal Deposit Libraries themselves are able to evolve — collecting, preserving and providing long-term access to the profusion of cultural and intellectual content appearing online or in other digital formats.”

The U.K. is not the first country to update its legal deposit rules in this way – similar requirements are in place in Denmark, Finland, Sweden and New Zealand.

As I mentioned the last time I wrote about Bitcoin, I’m not an economist: I’m a technology journalist who is intrigued on a technical level by the theory and mechanics behind a distributed, algorithmically-generated “currency”, and that makes me want to track it and occasionally cover it when the tech angle is strong. Now, I don’t actually own any Bitcoins, but what if I did?

If I were to own stock in a tech company (I don’t, by the way) and I found myself writing about said company, I would at the very least be obliged to put a disclosure into the article — in fact, I would probably just avoid writing about the firm altogether. However, bloggers and journalists don’t follow that convention with currencies. Imagine an American journalist covering the fortunes of the dollar, and putting in a disclaimer to say that all her savings are held in USD – it would seem daft.

So I posed the question on Twitter earlier: “What are the ethics of writing about Bitcoin if you’ve bought some (I haven’t). Does it require stock-style disclosure?” Some quickly responded in the affirmative:

@superglaze I disclose my Bitcoin holdings when I write about them.

— Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) March 22, 2013

@kristajessica @superglaze Same principle applies to media owners owning property and their papers constantly talking up house prices

— Natasha (@riptari) March 22, 2013

Whereas others were more circumspect:

@andyvan @superglaze I haven’t thought about it in as much detail, but I don’t think it’s the same as having stock.

— Nate Lanxon (@NateLanxon) March 22, 2013

There’s some serious debate going on about whether or not Bitcoin actually is a currency, but I (like the U.S. Treasury Department, it seems) feel that it is, albeit an unique one. Its uniqueness stems not only from the way in which its creation is automated, but also from its current volatility and, crucially, the fact that people don’t generally understand it very well. We all know what nationally-issued currencies like dollars and yen are, and we don’t need the concept explained to us every time we read an article about them. The situation with Bitcoin is very different.

I strongly suspect Bitcoin’s meteoric rise in recent weeks is largely an echo chamber effect — coverage begets coverage — which puts those writing about it in an unusual position. We bloggers and journalists have an extraordinary amount of influence in people’s perceptions of Bitcoin and, as a result, the trajectory of its value. For that reason alone, I think any coverage from a writer who has bought into Bitcoin should come with a clear disclosure.

That said, my colleague Tom Krazit also brought up an interesting tangential point in discussion, suggesting that writers covering Bitcoin may actually have an obligation to buy into it on a low level, so they can conduct a few transactions and basically have a clearer idea of what they’re talking about in their coverage.

This is all clearly a new and unusual field to explore, so I’d be interested in hearing further thoughts on the subject.

The card in question, from a company called SmellYourMum (SYM), read, “You’re a c*nt. Sorry, I meant to say ‘Merry Christmas,’” although without the asterisk I inserted (this is a family website, after all). This was shown in an image, with the text alongside it including the aforementioned asterisk.

SYM claimed the ad wasn’t offensive because of “the specific context of it appearing on a humorous card intended for close friends or family.” Amazon chimed in saying the card was “meant as a bit of light-hearted, irreverent fun,” but also went a step further, arguing that the ad in question wasn’t an ad at all, but a product listing.

Nonetheless, the ASA said it qualified as an ad and therefore fell under its remit. It said the use of the c-word was “so likely to offend that it should not be used at all in marketing communications even when it was relevant to the name of the product.”

Interestingly, part of the problem here is that Amazon doesn’t have an adults-only category for products carried on its site. SYM also noted that Amazon didn’t provide a way for it to censor the image, which showed the asterisk-free version of the card’s message (that said, the ASA said even the asterisked version was too offensive).

There are many products in Amazon’s UK store that would probably fall foul of the precedent here. So the question is, is this just excessive censorship, or does the regulator have a point here?

If a physical shop carried a poster for such a card in its window, there is little doubt that people would complain. And although the ASA said the offensive word should not even be used in marketing communications, I suspect that the card’s listing in a printed catalog would not have elicited such a complaint to the advertising regulator in the first place.

The ruling leaves Amazon in a difficult position, due to the breadth of third-party products carried in its store. It doesn’t help that the ruling also comes in the same month in which Amazon U.S. was found to be advertising algorithmically-generated but nonetheless appalling “Keep calm and rape a lot” T-shirts. If there’s much more of this kind of pressure, Amazon may have to be a bit more proactive about screening the products it carries, or at least adjust the way in which it advertises them.

However, “flattring” someone has until now remained a slightly clunky business, with the content platform needing to carry a Flattr button and with the user having to remember to click it in order to reward the creator. No longer – changes revealed on Monday make it possible to flattr someone simply by clicking the “like” or “favorite” button that’s already next to their content. At launch, 8 services are supported: Twitter, Instagram, SoundCloud, Github, Flickr, Vimeo, 500px and App.net.

That’s right: this makes it possible for you to earn money just by being an awesome tweeter.

Cashing in

Let’s remind ourselves of how Flattr works: users budget a certain amount of money that they want to donate or pay each month. Let’s say User X wants to spend $10 a month. Each time User X flattrs someone, that flattr gets added to a tally, and at the end of the month the money gets divided by that number. Flattr itself takes a 10 percent cut, so, if User X flattrs people 100 times in the month, each recipient then gets 9c.

According to Flattr co-founder Linus Olsson, there have been around 1.5 million flattrs performed since the service launched three years ago. Ignoring the fact that some pay a lot and others very little, the average monthly spend per user is around €4.50 ($5.80) and the average flattr is around €0.50. From this, we can deduce that, on average, users flattr around 9 times each month – this is really not much, and it highlights the need for Flattr to make the changes it announced today.

As Olsson explained to me, it was one thing to have a button that blog proprietors could integrate into their own self-hosted site, but it’s quite another thing to handle the content spewed out on platforms such as Twitter:

“The main way of flattring before has been the button, but the problem with the button is with most content sites today it’s impossible to integrate the button. So we have been thinking how to make it simpler to flattr and possible to flattr in places where the button cannot be added.

“The logical way was to use existing like and favorite buttons, which one can argue are empty right now. Now you can make those functions worth something. We see it as giving them the value they should have.”

This integration has not involved partnering up with Twitter and the others; instead, Flattr is simply using their APIs. “That’s one reason we didn’t do this when we started three years ago — it wasn’t possible,” Olsson pointed out.

More widespread, but more subtle

The use of APIs comes with several benefits for Flattr. For a start, it gets the startup around the problem presented to it by Apple last year. Apple rejected a podcasting app called Instacast on the basis that it included Flattr payment functionality – this apparently broke the App Store T&Cs, because it didn’t give Apple a way to claim its 30 percent cut of all in-app payments.

Now, because Flattr’s method of tapping into the core service’s APIs obviates the need for a telltale Flattr button, Apple would have no way of knowing whether the use of an app that’s plugged into Instagram or Twitter, for example, might result in someone making money without Cupertino taking a slice.

The other problem partially solved by the API approach is that of unclaimed flattrs. A Twitter user, for instance, doesn’t have to sign up to Flattr in order to have people flattr their tweets – they do, however, have to create a Flattr account in order to get the cash. So, when they create that Flattr account, authorizing Flattr on their Twitter account will tell the system that, yes, they are the person whom User X meant to credit.

That said, there is an outstanding problem: right now Flattr has no way of automatically informing people that someone out there is trying to give them money; it’s up to the user to tell their intended recipient to sign up and claim their payment (the payment only leaves the user’s account once it is claimed).

Will it work?

As I stated above, there is a lot of goodwill behind the micropayments concept, but also a number of failed attempts to make the concept work in reality.

If you view this as a chicken-and-egg dilemma, then Flattr is very much doing the right thing. After all, you’re less likely to get into being a Flattr user if the person you want to give money to hasn’t made it super-easy to take Flattr payments. Conversely, if there aren’t scores of people using the service, there is little impetus for content platforms to incorporate the Flattr button.

In theory, quietly plugging into platforms such as Twitter and Instagram makes it a heck of a lot easier for the service to gain scale. However, it raises another issue: visibility. If there’s no Flattr button, how is the company going to educate users about the scheme? How will they know that this system is in place, allowing them to reward their favorite content producers?

Olsson reckons the imminent introduction of automated notifications for content creators will help the service spread: “First people get unclaimed flattrs, get a message about them, collect them [then] flattr others.” I’m not so sure. It’s true that the services we’re talking about didn’t sport Flattr buttons in the first place, but I can’t help but feel that some extra marketing element would be needed in order to really educate potential users about the service.

A couple of moves revealed at SXSW on Monday may change that. The first is a drastic simplification and improvement of SoundCloud’s paid-for premium tiers -– the company’s primary source of income – while the second is the introduction of a so-called Pro Partners tier for brands. The Pro Partners tier is not only a serious potential revenue source, but it also introduces a visual element to the site that is likely to trickle down to ordinary consumer accounts in time.

Freemium boost

Let’s look at the simplified freemium model first (bearing in mind that free membership allows two hours of uploaded audio). Previously, SoundCloud had four paid tiers, starting on the Lite package, which offered four hours of audio for €29 ($38) a year, and grading up to a Pro Plus package that included unlimited audio and various analytics for €500 a year.

There are now just two paid tiers for the average user: a Pro package that is priced the same as the old Lite (€29 annually or €3 a month) and offers the same amount of audio storage, but with added analytics and controls; and a Pro Unlimited tier that adds unlimited storage at €9 a month or €99 a year.

In short, becoming a very heavy SoundCloud user just got significantly cheaper and more attractive.

Paving the way for ads?

The Pro Partner program is in beta for now, with early users including Snoop Lion, Red Bull, The Guardian, Kevin Smith’s SModcast and even the Grammys (for the CenterStage talent contest). These brands and musicians are able to promote their profiles in the “Who To Follow” section, and they can also create what SoundCloud calls “moving sounds” — essentially, image slideshows that run behind the service’s trademark soundwave representations. Moving sounds can be reposted just like any normal audio stream, although they don’t work in embedded streams yet.

As SoundCloud co-founder and CTO Eric Wahlforss pointed out to me, the company has been working with artists and major labels for a while now, but this move opens up new possibilities:

“We’re changing the canvas so it becomes more visual. It’s cleaner and simpler. As an audio partner or a brand you get that canvas to express your identity on. It works for brands who are creators of audio content as well –- we’re only bringing on brands that are creators as well right now.

“Some features — or all even, we hope –- will eventually trickle down to all of the tiers.”

For artists, I can certainly see the introduction of “moving sounds” providing an opportunity for simple, stylish visual expression. The images will need to fit into the bar format used for all SoundCloud sounds, which differentiates the potential results from, say, those slideshows people create when wrangling an audio track into a terrible makeshift YouTube video.

But the real opportunity here will be for advertisers. It is now much easier to imagine a scenario where brief ads are inserted into streaming playlists, in between tracks, with both audio and moving graphics being part of the deal. And, asked whether this is the direction in which SoundCloud is heading, Wahlforss certainly didn’t deny the possibility:

“In general, there is a whole movement of native advertising. We’ve seen success with YouTube with promoted content, so we feel there isn’t anything happening in audio on the native advertising side. We think we’re the best positioned of any service out there to do that and to really work with creators.

“[However] we’re in the early stages right now; it’s in the experimental phase. Right now these pieces of content won’t appear unless a friend of yours reposts the content.”

Wahlforss’s caution is well-advised: SoundCloud may be the de facto user-generated audio platform on the web now -– an expensive game to be playing -– but it is not invincible. People are willing to tolerate ads to some degree, but not if they are too intrusive. Monetizing this platform will mean walking a delicate line.