But joking aside, what it is, is really human negotiation, between the buyer and seller. I asked Brian Kupetz, Director of Development for the La Canada, CA based company Zigabid to tell me a little about what makes Zigabid so unique:

Zigabid allows buyers and sellers to sell entertainment tickets without a fixed price. It’s is the first company to offer a dynamic pricing model for tickets, with many competitors introducing similar features in 2009. The concept is rather simple: tickets are a commodity and should not sell at a fixed price, they should sell like any other commodity in which pricing is market-driven.

The initial feature set we have introduced is a negotiation system which provides buyers and sellers the means to determine a mutually agreeable sale price. The ticket market space is extremely crowded and Zigabid not only differentiates itself from Ticketmaster, Live Nation, Stubhub and Tickets Now by its stock market style functionality, but it is also very transparent about its service fees.

Zigabid is restricted to the US so far, so I haven’t had the pleasure of actually using their services myself, but since I was part of the development, I know that it’s real simple to use. I asked Brian how many tickets their system is currently holding, and he said that they have an estimate of 200′000 seats listed, mostly sports and concert tickets.

A rather bleak home page greets me when I go to www.mtvmusic.com to watch the miracle that is the MTV Music website, where we now can watch music videos, all for free, right there in the web browser. The home page has a rather pretty lead image, well, a number of images in fact, but below that, there’s just an unbalanced column of video thumbnails with the title “Vintage Videos”. But who cares?! I want my Run DMC!

You can even embed the videos! A very nice initiative by MTV Netwworks. But the website doesn’t seem all that… developed. Well, it is “Beta”. The FAQ page says “Coming soon… ” with the page title “Copyright”, and as you can see in the column to the left, the information about the video, comments and rating is rather confusing. There’s no call to action below the Rate This Video title for one. And the comment for this video is inaccessible. If you look under MTV Music API, there’s a note stating “For now, registration is only required for commenting in our forums.“, but that’s the forums. I figured maybe you have to be logged in to view the comment, but there’s no way to register! Nor to sign in!

I’m not all that impressed by the quality of the videos, but I’m not the one to complain. The audio sounds pretty good, I guess that’s more important. Maybe the video quality will improve in time like when YouTube rolled out “High Quality” videos, but I wouldn’t count on that being any time soon.

So after a few minutes of digging around, watching some dandy videos, I thought “What about censorship?”. So I tried searching for the word “F*ck” (spelled out properly of course, don’t ask me why this particular search term, I just wanted to search for something dirty), and I got this semi censored result:

Pretty funny ey? I also watched the notorious video “Lapdance” by N.E.R.D. and it was the clean version. This doesn’t necessarily mean they censor videos though. I can’t think of a song that includes a dirty word that might tell me if they do censor videos at the moment, but I’m sure you can find one if you start digging through the archives.

Yo, VIP! Let’s kick it! Alright, Stop!

Word to ya mother