Month: September 2006

Is it just me, or is Alex Albrecht — co-founder of Digg and the new video service Revision3 — just having waaaaay too much fun at the Revision3 launch party?

(photo uploaded by Thomas Hawk of Zooomr

As my friend Mark Evans points out, billionaire sports-team owner and media mogul Mark Cuban is often a refreshing blast of sanity amidst the hype and hoopla surrounding Web 2.0 and Internet business models in general, but his recent diatribe on YouTube and how only a moron would buy it is a little off the mark, I think (pardon the pun).

I wonder what someone like Mark might have said about a little Internet venture called Broadcast.com way back when the first Internet bubble was being inflated. Would they have said that only a moron would pay $5.7-billion for such a wild dream about the future of online video? I bet they would have. Luckily for Mark, Yahoo wasn’t listening and it coughed up enough cash to make him a billionaire, and now he can play with his sports team and tell everyone else how stupid they are. I think Don Dodge and I are on the same page.

As Umair points out at Bubblegeneration, YouTube is trying disrupt the entire video value chain, and has gotten a least a couple of rights-holders interested in pursuing that opportunity, and others such as NBC seem to be thinking along the same lines. That doesn’t mean YouTube will necessarily succeed, nor does it mean that someone should pay $2-billion for it. But there is value there.

Update:

Fred Wilson says we should stop the YouTube hating, and points to a great rant from music industry gadfly Bob Lefsetz, as well as a recent piece on YouTube with comments from Chad Hurley in the New York Times. And Jason Calacanis has some further thoughts on the issue, in which he says that YouTube’s genius has nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with distribution.

Herewith, a roundup of recent Second Life-related news events, as the virtual world continues to get more “real” (for better or worse):

• The Economist has a long piece on Second Life, including a fascinating tale of a psychology professor who set up a place in Second Life where his students could experience something akin to schizophrenia firsthand.
• Professor Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School recently held his first class in Second Life as part of an online-only course called “Law in the Court of Public Opinion.”
• IBM recently held an alumni meeting on the island it owns in Second Life.
• CNet has launched a presence in Second Life which consists of a virtual replica of the company’s offices in San Francisco, where the news agency says it plans to interview both real and virtual people.
• A Swedish online dating company has made the natural leap from dating site with photos to Second Life dating world with avatars.
• Scottish girl-rockers The Hedrons are the latest to put on a virtual gig inside Second Life.

It’s about time that Google gave its feedreader an update, and I think some of the features it has added are pretty good, although I’m not sure I would go so far as to call it “stunning”, as Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web does. It is pretty slick, though. It handled the importing of my OPML file just fine, and I like the fact that it marks items read as you scroll past them.

The sharing is not a bad idea either, and I like the way you can incorporate shared items into a blog widget, as Peter Upfold has done here. But maybe I’m just not cut out for the pure “river of news” approach, as Dave Winer calls it. I’ve tried just about every feed reader out there, including Bloglines and Newsgator and Rojo and Live Bookmarks, and I’m still kind of partial to Netvibes.com.

I like the way I can see about 20 different feeds in a single glance, with five or six headlines per feed, and can mark each individual one read with a single click (which reinforces the fact that I think headline writing has become even more important than it already was, but I digress). The new Google Reader is definitely an improvement, but I think I’ll stick with Netvibes for now, even if Paul says the new Reader rocks.

Didn’t we learn anything from Bubble 1.0? Apparently not — or at least some of us seem to be determined to jump right back into it with both feet, regardless of the consequences. Guys like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook could be forgiven, since they were probably playing on the swingset or learning long division when the first tech bubble came around. But how do you explain someone like RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan?

He apparently thinks that MySpace (which does not have 100 million users after all, as ForeverGeek tells us) could be worth $15-billion in a few years, or at least that’s what he told clients in something ironically called a “research note.”

As Pete Cashmore over at Mashable notes in a post, this estimate of MySpace’s theoretical value is predicated on a whole series of loony assumptions, including the alleged $1-billion value of Facebook and YouTube, multiplied by the market value of Google and the CPM (cost per thousand) ad rate that a premium show such as The Simpsons fetches.

In other words, Mr. Rohan’s argument (if I can even call it that) amounts to what philosopher Jeremy Bentham referred to as “nonsense on stilts.” Take some fictitious number that someone else has plucked out of the ether and multiply it by some other ridiculous number that can’t (or shouldn’t) be extrapolated — yup, that’s quite the “research” note, alright.

I know that getting attention is seen as a good thing in the brokerage business, as my friend Paul Kedrosky points out, but this is ridiculous. And former analyst Henry Blodget, who did his own bit to help inflate the first bubble, isn’t helping with a post that effectively says MySpace might be worth more than Yahoo, or not. Rob Hyndman is similarly unimpressed, as is Duncan Riley.

Lots of attention is being paid to a recent story by Bambi Francisco at Marketwatch (on a completely unrelated note, Bambi Francisco is one of my favourite names, as I may have mentioned before), in which Ms. Francisco reports that MySpace has eclipsed YouTube when it comes to numbers of video clips shared.

According to statistics from ComScore Media Metrix, 37.4 million individual users watched more than 1.4 billion video clips on MySpace in July, which put it ahead of YouTube, Yahoo and Google in terms of unique video streams (Yahoo was actually ahead in terms of actual users who watched video, with almost 38 million, but it only served up about 800 million clips during the month). ComScore says that July saw a mind-boggling 7.2 billion video streams viewed.

But wait. Blogger Greg Sterling notes that Hitwise has completely different numbers. In August, Hitwise says YouTube was by far the bigger draw, with more than 45 per cent of the traffic to Internet video sites. MySpace came in a distant second with 23 per cent, with Google Video at just a little over 10 per cent. VC Confidential has some thoughts about the difference in stats between Hitwise and ComScore, an issue that has come up more than once in the past.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has launched its own would-be YouTube killer known as Soapbox. In related news, Yahoo has bought an online video-editing startup called JumpCut.

I know the blogosphere has a short memory (except for Dave Winer, of course) but does anyone here remember Dead 2.0, that skeptical blog written by an anonymous guy who went by the name The Skeptic? He took potshots at various bubble companies and A-listers such as Mike Arrington at TechCrunch, and subjected new Web 2.0 services to the “Ask Skeptic’s Mom” test.

Then Nik Cubrilovic, who is the CEO at Omnidrive but also a friend of Mike’s, wrote a post in which he said that with only a few minutes worth of work he had identified The Skeptic as a senior executive at a technology company. The Skeptic posted a single post after that, as far as I can recall — in which he asked people whether they thought he should be “outed.”

When I checked it, the overwhelming majority said that they thought it didn’t matter who he was, a view I agreed with along with others, including my friend and fellow tech journalist Mark Evans. Well, for the past few days The Skeptic’s blog has returned a 509 error — bandwidth limit exceeded. Did Dead 2.0 just become too popular for The Skeptic’s limited hosting service, or did he decide to drop it? Or did his company make him stop?

The mystery continues.

For some reason, the photo below captivated me when I came across it at Flickr, after following a link from somewhere I can’t remember right now. It’s a snapshot from the space station in orbit, with “space tourist” Anousheh Ansari looking upwards at an apple floating in the air above her.

The look on her face is one of pure joy (the fact that she is attractive probably helps with the captivating part, I will admit). Is that look worth the $20-million or so she reportedly paid to get up there? Someone will have to ask her I suppose. The shot was posted to Ms. Ansari’s blog, where she also talks about the camaraderie among the astronauts on the space station.

I don’t write a lot about politics on this blog, for a bunch of reasons — including the fact that I don’t really know that much about politics, and the fact that I don’t really care that much about politics — but I feel compelled to mention the recent interview between former POTUS Bill Clinton and Chris “I’m wearing my dad’s hairpiece” Wallace on Fox. Wallace tried to pin Clinton with a question about why he didn’t do more to stop Bin Laden, but the wily Southern grappler turned the tables and got all medieval on Wallace’s ass, rhetorically speaking.

But that’s not really the interesting part, I don’t think (although I have to say Clinton showed a lot more fire than I had associated with the man previously). I think it’s fascinating how in the not-too-distant past, we would have been forced to either take Fox’s word for how the interview went — using their carefully selected clips — or take the word of Clinton fans with their clips. Instead, if we want to, we can simply watch the entire interview on YouTube (or Google, since YouTube got the old “notice and takedown” message from Fox) and decide for ourselves.

I think we’ve all gotten kind of used to that idea, but I would still argue that it’s a very powerful thing. More here.

Garth: “Did you ever find Bugs Bunny attractive when he put on a dress and played girl bunny?”

Wayne: “(cracks up laughing) No!”

Garth: “Neither did I… I was just asking.”

I realize I’m not the only one who has made the connection between Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht of Digg and Wayne and Garth from Wayne’s World, but I figure I have just as much right to use that analogy as anyone, since Mike Myers and I are both Canucks and I live about six blocks from the high-school he went to in Toronto. So there. Party on.

Plus, the picture in the New York Times piece on how the Digg boys are branching out into video pretty much cries out for a Wayne’s World reference. Two shaggy-haired twenty-somethings sitting there with bottles of beer, laughing their heads off at something — the only jarring difference is they have laptops on their laps instead of a cheap electric guitar, and their jeans don’t have obvious holes in them (oh yes, and no baseball caps).

Is it a business? Sure sounds like one to me, with $100,000 in revenue per month right out of the gate. In fact, it might actually be a better business than Digg, ironically. Of course, if it doesn’t work out they can always blame on those darn meddlesome kids (otherwise known as the Scooby Doo ending).

Gabe Rivera over at Techmeme has introduced advertising on his blogosphere buzz-tracker/feed-aggregator, and it consists of posts from bloggers that are featured in a right-hand column, a privilege for which they pay several thousands of dollars per month. I think this is potentially a great idea — and much better than just running Google’s AdSense or those annoying pseudo-hyperlinks that some bloggers like.

The ads integrate well with Techmeme’s overall feel, and they are a great way of appealing to blog-centric companies, although my friend Mark Evans wonders just how many of those there might be for such a program. Jeff Jarvis likes it too — and he’s a hard man to please. Cynthia Brumfield at IPDemocracy is a fan as well, and points out that this type of ad has the potential for a lot more engagement with readers than traditional ads (Squash likes it too).

I think Dwight Silverman makes a good point on his Houston Chronicle blog, however, which is that this type of advertising isn’t for everyone or every company, and will only succeed to the extent that those who get involved in the program actually try to become part of the conversation. If those sponsored posts are just lame PR releases disguised as blogs, they will quite quickly fade into the background.

Update:

John Tokash raises an interesting point, in that he wonders how much the featured posts — which are effectively advertising — will wind up “polluting” the overall techmeme aggregation function (admittedly, “polluting” is kind of a loaded word). Just before I came across his post, in fact, I noticed that on my Netvibes feed-reading page, one of the featured posts was listed as the latest addition to Techmeme. Should they not be flagged somehow as sponsored, or advertising? Just wondering.

Dave Winer seems to be suggesting that Gabe should auction off those spaces instead of setting a price for a month, which is probably not a bad idea (makes it hard to forecast revenue though). And Erick Schonfeld wonders if featured posts might actually get less attention than if they just appeared on techmeme normally.

Gabe Rivera has a response to some of Tom Foremski’s quibbles with the model here.

The picture of Google that emerges from a recent Fortune magazine article depends a lot on your point of view. Some will focus on the fact that the Googleplex is all free cafeterias and young people whizzing around on scooters. Others will focus on how the gigantic cash-spewing machine that fuels the company gives its managers unprecedented freedom to think in different ways — to try and fail, and in some cases not even to worry about making money at all.

Is that a good thing? It might be. On the other hand, Google might be fiddling while Rome burns. It’s interesting to contrast Google with Microsoft. Even when the software giant was young, the entire company was focused on extending the dominance of Windows and Office. Do you think Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer gave employees 20 per cent of their time to work on new things? Dream on. Even with the internal think-tank work that Microsoft has done, it has still wound up getting side-swiped by the Internet, the iPod and plenty of other things.

Does Google’s flexibility mean it is any less likely to get a nasty surprise? That’s hard to say. For my part, all the stuff about “engineering chaos” and giving employees the right to fail and so on is great — and don’t get me wrong, it is definitely great, and I think more companies (including mine) should encourage it — but the piece of the puzzle that rang the truest for me, as it obviously did for Richard at Read/Write Web, came at the end, when Eric Schmidt was drawing on the whiteboard talking about the Internet:

The gist of the illustration is that there’s practically no money left to be made in computers, not in hardware or software. The money, instead, is all in Web applications, a trend Schmidt had been predicting since his days as chief technology officer at Sun a decade ago. Users won’t always be traveling to the Web on the PC.

Can Google manage to take a commanding presence in that future world? Google Calendar and Google Spreadsheets and Google Notebook are interesting, but as far as I’m concerned they are baby steps along that road. Maybe a little less chaos and a little more focus wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

An idle thought for a Sunday afternoon: virtual worlds such as Second Life, The Sims Online and World of Warcraft are hugely popular online games, in part because they manage to combine elements of the real world with fantasy and the unreal, and also because they allow for all kinds of behaviour (good, bad and in between) to find a harmless outlet. Such behaviour includes malicious acts known as “griefing” in Second Life, adults pretending to be children for sexual purposes, and even the rise of what amounts to a virtual Mafia in The Sims.

The game Grand Theft Auto has also become hugely popular by allowing game players to engage in all kinds of nefarious behaviour, including theft, murder, assault and battery, prostitution, drug-dealing, and so on. So why isn’t there an online version of Grand Theft Auto, where people can form gangs and beat other players up, steal their virtual money, blackmail or extort other players, set up prostitution rings and so on? It seems like it would be a slam-dunk.

Obviously, there would be a risk of real-world violence being blamed on Grand Theft Auto, but that already happens. I’m only half-joking here. I think watching people’s behaviour inside such a game would be like an incredible real-world psychology laboratory in action.

Rex Sorgatz of Fimoculous.com may just be right — this clip on YouTube may be the funniest NBC promo ever.

Social networking and social media — sites such as MySpace.com and YouTube.com — are often written about as though they are universally a good thing. And there’s no question that it’s great to have places where kids can socialize online, so to speak, and share blog posts and photos and music, or where they can go and watch video clips of people trying stupid bicycle tricks or kittens trying to get out of Kleenex boxes or whatever. But as my friend Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 is fond of pointing out, there is a dark side to these kinds of networks.

A couple of stories I came across recently reminded me of that. One was actually fairly comical: a university student posted a picture of a teacher’s dog on MySpace, along with a note saying that he planned to kill the dog — which got animal rights activists and others all in a lather. However, it turned out to be part of a media assignment in which students were asked to do whatever they could to make the teacher’s dog famous (I would have said the student should have won hands down, but threatening the dog was not allowed).

Another story involving students and teachers saw some high-school students set up a MySpace page that they pretended had been set up by their teacher, confessing that she was a lesbian, etc. She is suing two students for defamation and libel, and one of the students is facing criminal charges. And another story that just recently broke in Toronto involves high-school kids videotaping each other having fist-fights and then uploading them to YouTube.

Obviously, these kinds of stories are just the tip of the iceberg. Others have written about adults trolling for sex with children on MySpace, and the social-networking site has been sued by the family of a 14-year-old girl who says she was sexually assaulted by a man she met through MySpace. And some critics of YouTube have argued that having a forum to upload video of people fighting or engaging in other questionable behaviour can encourage that kind of behaviour.

True? Who knows. It’s possible that YouTube and MySpace and VampireFreaks.com (the social-networking site for goths and emos that was associated with the recent shooting in Montreal) are just making it easier to discover things that have always existed, but were harder to come across before the Internet. In any case, I expect we’ll be seeing more of these types of stories — but the potential liability of MySpace or YouTube in such events remains a big question mark. And if you’re a parent, think about what the parents of Amanda Wenk went through — a high-school senior, she uploaded racy photos of herself and her friends and they spread around the Internet like wildfire, until she had become a quasi-celebrity.

Update:

Pete Cashmore at Mashable says Bebo — which is even more popular than MySpace in Europe — is cracking down on bullying and other behaviour.