Month: September 2006

(Note: This is a piece I just posted at globeandmail.com, based on an interview with Weblo founder and CEO Rocky Mirza):

As the founder of a UK-based online-gaming property called IBetX.com and an Ottawa-based auction site called UniqueAuction.com, entrepreneur Rocky Mirza knows a little about what people like to do with their money online, and he is hoping that they will want to spend some of it buying and selling virtual properties as part of his newest venture, an online “virtual world” called Weblo.com. Mr. Mirza has managed to get some high-powered backing for this latest project (which launches on September 26): a major shareholder is none other than Richard Rosenblatt, whose most recent company — a little thing called MySpace.com — was bought by News Corp. last year.

Weblo has a long way to go before it is as massive as MySpace, of course, but Mr. Mirza says he believes it has the same kind of appeal as a social-networking site, with one added element: money. And not the kind of virtual money that players use in a virtual world such as Second Life or World of Warcraft, but real dollars. In a recent interview, Mr. Mirza said Weblo is a little like the game of Monopoly, but “without the board and with real money.” Players buy the right to “own” real-world properties such as the Taj Mahal, and then make money by either renting out space to other players, or from advertising that runs on their part of the site. They can also make money by selling their properties to others (Weblo takes a cut of each transaction).

Continue reading “Weblo wants to sell you the world”

Dear Larry and Sergey:

Dudes — long time no talk. Man, you guys must be busy as heck, what with all the billions piling up like that, and the new airplane and whatnot. You know, I kind of picture you guys as being like Scrooge McDuck, climbing around in a giant swimming pool full of coins and bills. Anyhoo, I just wanted to ask you whether you remember that big country just to the north of you — the one with the snow and the Mounties and the maple syrup. You know, Canada?

Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s pretty big. Okay, it doesn’t have a lot of people, but we’re right up there in the “best places to live” rankings and that kind of stuff. Part of NATO. The United Nations. You name it. So here’s what I’m wondering: How come Canadian companies can’t be ranked as “Qualified Companies” in the Google Advertising Professionals program? That’s what it says at Jennifer Slegg’s blog, and over at the Searchenginewatch forums.

According to Jennifer, your company can be a QC if you’re based in Somalia, Bosnia and Azerbaijan, but not if you’re based in good old Canada. So what do you guys have against the Great White North? We gave you Pamela Anderson and Mike Myers and Celine Dion for chrissake (okay, sorry about that last one). Even Paul Kedrosky, one of your finest venture capitalists, is secretly a Canadian. I will personally auotograph my copy of Bob and Doug Mackenzie’s 12 Days of Christmas in your honour if you do something about this situation immediately.

Your pal,

Mathew

Update 2:

Apparently Mike and TechCrush have come to an agreement — TechCrush has changed its logo and everyone is as friendly as could be. According to a post at TechCrush:

We had contact with Michael Arrington on a possible trademark infringement with Techcrunch, but we settled the matter quick and amicably. I got to know Michael as a decent and professional guy. Thanks Michael.

Mike has posted a chronology of events here. Still seems kind of pissed at Stowe Boyd.

Update:

Mike Arrington has responded in the comments section of this post, and says that he doesn’t want to go after TechCrush, but that his lawyer has suggested he might be in for trouble down the road if he doesn’t defend his trademark. As I mentioned in my response, trademark lawyers always say that kind of thing — it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to do it. I think maybe the disclaimer is the way to go. As for Dead 2.0, Mike says he loves it… he’s just not sure it’s the kind of thing an executive with a Web 2.0 startup should be doing. On that, he might just have a point. I still kind of hope it continues though.

Original post:

There’s a nasty mess brewing in the blogosphere, boys and girls — once again, the dark shadow of lawyers and trademark infringement is passing across our fair land (Ed: knock it off with the Lord of the Rings vibe already). It seems that TechCrush, a new site that promised to act as an antidote to some of the boosterism in the Web 2.0 sphere, has been smothered in its cradle by threats of legal action.

And who might those threats have come from? Well, the name of the site is a play on the name TechCrunch, which is the hub of Mike Arrington’s blog-publishing empire. Stowe Boyd apparently sparked the idea for the site when he said it would be nice if someone went back to take a look at some of the startups that Mike and his team write about so glowingly, to see if they made the grade or not. According to Stowe, Mike said that his lawyers were raising red flags about the trademark issue.

As Stowe notes, this has much the same flavour as the O’Reilly Web 2.0 trademark brouhaha, in which the publishing and conference firm sent a “cease and desist” letter to a conference that had the gall to use the term Web 2.0 in its name. In that case, however, O’Reilly was just concerned about brand confusion. What is Mike concerned about? A little criticism?

He certainly doesn’t seem too crazy about whoever is behind the blog known as Dead 2.0. Speaking of which, I think The Skeptic should remain anonymous — with or without Nik Cubrilovic’s help — if it allows him to keep taking shots at TechCrunch and other bubble-boosters. Food critics for newspapers get to remain anonymous so they don’t have to worry about the egos of restaurant owners while doing their reviews, so why not bloggers? My M-lister friend Kent Newsome has some thoughts here (and a great Neil Young reference in the title), and Shelley Powers has a good point too.

Clay “Power Law” Shirky, who I think is a pretty smart guy when it comes to the sociology of the Internet, has written a long post over at Corante about the idea of Citizendium — the “forked” version of Wikipedia that co-founder Larry Sanger has decided to create in order to try and fix what he sees as some of the problems inherent in the Wikipedia model.

One of the problems, as he sees it, is that experts are not given enough power in the current Wikipedia, and so Citizendium is designed to give them more. Experts — who will be defined by diplomas and other formal accreditation (although Sanger says there may be room to have non-accredited people elevated to expert status) — will be known as editors, and given more responsibility for topics they are expert on. In his post, Clay says that this is flawed because:

Experts are social facts — society typically recognizes experts through some process of credentialling, such as the granting of degrees, professional certifications, or institutional engagement. We have a sense of what it means that someone is a doctor, a judge, an architect, or a priest, but these facts are only facts because we agree they are.

Not surprisingly, such a statement — and the overall egalitarian tone of the rest of Shirky’s piece — draws the fire of Nick Carr, who says it is “fatuous stuff, which reveals, as if we needed to be reminded, that intellectuals make the very best anti-intellectuals.” Experts are experts because of their training, Nick says, whether they are architects or professors of romantic poetry. As Clay points out in the comments to his own post, however, he wasn’t so much talking about expertise as the perception of expertise, or authority in a particular field.

Clay has since posted Larry Sanger’s response to what he feels is a mis-characterization of what Citizendium is up to, or how editors will operate. But I think both men — and Nick Carr, for that matter — are avoiding what could be one of the biggest problems with the structure that Sanger is proposing, and that is experts arguing among themselves about who is the real expert. Anyone who has been around academics will know that they can be as venal and petty and childish as any Wikipedia troll, if not more so. Who’s going to referee that fight?

Just a quick administrative note to mention that I’ve been doing some housecleaning on the blog as far as widgets — and other plugins and add-ons, such as analytical tools — are concerned, because I’ve had a few comments from my faithful readership (thanks, Mom) about slow loading times, and the fact that occasionally the blog will just hang and not load at all.

I have a passion for widgets, and so I tend to load up on them whenever I come across one. If I’m reading a blog like Fred Wilson‘s or someone else who has a new widget or plugin — like Dead 2.0, which is where I came across the “democracy” poll plugin for WordPress — I have to download it and try it out. Unfortunately, though, some widgets are in beta or not hosted on robust servers, and so the blog will hang while it is waiting for a response.

I’ve removed the BlogMap widget and the Yahoo Finance widget for that reason, plus I got rid of the Swicki search I had because no one seemed to use it. I got rid of the GoodBlogs widget too, but then I put it back because I think it’s a worthwhile project so I’m going to cut them some slack when it comes to the response time from their servers.

I also axed the Google ads, in part because it was an experiment and in part because I only made about $2.50 in the past month or so (my friend Markus Frind of Plenty of Fish could probably tell me how to maximize that, but I’m really not that interested in the money at this point). I also trimmed the analytics that I had loading, like CrazyEgg — which is cool, but not really designed for a blog like mine — and Blogbeat, which was great but it has been bought by Feedburner and I’m waiting to see how that’s going to change the service. I still have Google Analytics and MyBlogLog and Statcounter.

If you notice the blog still loading slowly, please let me know — and if you come across any cool widgets, let me know about that too 🙂

Matt Marshall over at VentureBeat (formerly Silicon Beat) is taking some lumps for a recent guest-blog post that was extremely critical of the online part-planning site Evite, because the author, Auren Hoffman, is an investor in a competing site known as Socializr — a fact that isn’t disclosed until almost the end of the piece, in a kind of offhand way. My friend Paul Kedrosky has taken a shot at Matt, as have others.

As Paul notes, this is a risk that someone like Matt takes by letting others write pieces on a site like VentureBeat. Is Evite a glacially-slow site that could use a good update? Sure. But that’s not the point. The fact that Auren’s criticisms are all totally valid becomes irrelevant as soon as we discover that he is both an investor in a competitor and a friend of the founder.

Should Matt have run the piece from Auren at all? Plenty of commenters on his site seem to believe he shouldn’t have, although Matt says he believed it was a worthwhile commentary, and one he agrees with. I think it’s questionable, but if he is going to run that kind of thing I would recommend a disclaimer at the top, so that readers go into it knowing what they are getting. Andrew Fife has some thoughts here.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle recently (a kerfuffle is a little smaller than a brouhaha) over whether v-logging or video blogging is worth it or not. I wrote about it here after Alec Saunders brought it up, and everyone from Jeff Pulver to Robert Scoble has weighed in on it over the past week or so. Lots of discussion about whether video is the right way to get certain things across, is it too much bother, etc.

Now we have noted VC blogger Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures announcing that he has given up podcasting. Why? Fred says that basically it was too much trouble to put together a show, with all the equipment and getting guests and editing it down, and so on. He also says something similar to what I think Alec and I and others were saying about vlogs, which is that a big audio file is not necessarily the best way to get information across. My friend Stowe Boyd concurs.

That’s not to say it isn’t worth doing for other reasons — a podcast like This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte is fun to listen to for the entertainment value, especially when someone completely deranged like John C. Dvorak is on. But to me it’s more like a talk show than something you do because it has a huge amount of value to it. So it’s fun to listen to on the train or while you’re running, but it’s not something I would consider a must have.

I know my friend Mark Evans has been doing a podcast with his former colleague from the National Post, Kevin Restivo, and I know that podcasting consultant Leesa Barnes is probably going to call me crazy, but most of the time I just don’t see the point of some of the podcasts that are out there. Of course, I should probably add that I don’t see the point of many of the blogs that are out there either 🙂

The folks at Disney seem to be jumping all over the digital media bandwagon lately, what with the deal to sell movies through Apple’s new movie-download service (the only studio to sign up with Apple so far), and now a deal with Yahoo to sell an entire album from a Disney artist — Jesse McCartney — in pure, unrestricted, uncrapped-up with DRM format. Maybe somebody slipped something into their coffee over there at The House That Mickey Built.

I’m sure Steve Jobs, who just joined Disney’s board after they acquired Pixar, would rather they stuck with iTunes and only iTunes, but it’s nice to see record companies trying something different. A representative from Disney-owned Hollywood Records told Variety magazine:

We’re trying to be realistic. Jesse’s single is already online and we haven’t put it out. Piracy happens regardless of what we do. So we’re going to see how Jesse’s album goes (as an MP3) and then decide on others going forward.

It will be interesting to see how sales of the album do, both of Yahoo’s DRM-free version and the DRM-rich iTunes version — not to mention the old-fashioned shiny metal disc version. A few years ago, the band Wilco streamed its entire Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album for free on its Web site, and wound up having a best-selling album on their hands.

On his recent radio show, former money manager and current investment pit-bull and part-time sideshow freak (and friend of Paul Kedrosky’s) Jim Cramer said that old media companies will never be as successful as new ones because they keep getting dragged down by the losses of their legacy assets like newspapers, and that on the open market, something like MySpace would be worth more than the New York Times. Discuss.

Let me just say from the outset that I hate Paris Hilton and everything she stands for. I don’t just hate the fact that she’s shallow and has no good reason for being famous (apart from being from a well-known family, who aren’t nearly as rich as everyone thinks they are). And not just because of that stupid TV show either. I hate lots of other things, including her weird nose and that face she makes with her eyelids half shut that makes her look like someone with brain damage.

Hate or not, however — and it’s possible that many people love to hate her, just as they love to hate Jessica Simpson and lots of other airhead “celebrities” — the blogger known as Chartreuse hits the nail on the head with his latest post about why Paris Hilton is famous, and what marketers can learn from her, a post entitled “Why Paris Hilton Is Famous (or Understanding Value In A Post-Madonna World).” As Chartreuse puts it, Madonna was marketing 1.0 and Paris is marketing 2.0.

What’s his point? That Paris, having gotten attention with her ridiculous sex video — which was about as erotic as watching paint dry — used that attention to surreptitiously market anyone and anything that she was associated with or might want to be associated with, from fashion designers to dog food companies. Even in her comments about being arrested for DUI, she mentioned that she wanted to stop for an In-n-Out burger.

As Chartreuse notes, attention is the currency of Web 2.0, and Paris has gained more by deflecting it at the same time as she attracts it. In effect, he says, she is not a product but a *platform.* That, as one commenter says, is f***ing brilliant (check out the comment from Satan too). Chartreuse, I think it’s time to come out of beta.

My tech-writing colleague from the National Post, Mark Evans, has an interesting Q&A on his Canadian Web 2.0 site Maple Leaf 2.0 with Mike Pegg — the guy behind a blog called Google Maps Mania. Mike says he started the blog because he has always loved maps, and so when Google Maps came along he wanted to find out everything there was to know about it and all the various mashups people were doing (like my favourite — beerhunter.ca).

From there, he started getting invited to speak at conferences, and met some of the Google Maps team, and then wound up being invited to have lunch with Google CEO Eric Schmidt — who gave him a few tips on how to make the blog better. From blogging to lunch with the chief executive officer of one of the world’s largest technology companies. That’s quite a ride.

Just when I thought the whole “Google News is stealing our content” furore had finally gone away, here comes Belgium. Having fought tooth and nail to not have their material indexed or displayed by Google’s news aggregator, the tiny country — whose major contribution to global culture appears to be Belgian waffles — has finally been successful in its efforts, and will no longer be forced to have Google redirecting traffic to its news sites for free. Another victory for idiocy.

“We are asking for Google to pay and seek our authorisation to use our content … Google sells advertising and makes money on our content,” said Copiepress president Margaret Boribon, conspicuously ignoring the fact that Google doesn’t sells advertising on the Google News site, and only uses snippets of articles as allowed under most “fair use” provisions of copyright law.

Well done, Belgium. Now you can join that small group of morons currently dominated by Agence France-Presse, which successfully had itself (and all of its member papers) removed from one of the world’s most popular news search engines.

Update:

Google appears to have taken the judge’s order literally, and removed Belgian newspapers not just from the Google News index, but from the entire Google index period. That’ll show ’em.

Update:

Mark Cuban says that the Warner deal proves nothing, since we don’t know any of the details, and that it reminds him of when Bertelsmann AG did a deal with Napster not long before the company had to close its doors and file for bankruptcy. You gotta give Mark credit — he sticks to his guns 🙂

Original post

In case you needed any further confirmation that the state of online media is in turmoil, there’s a great example today with the news that Warner Music is working with YouTube to license its music to the massively popular video-sharing site. That’s one end of the spectrum of reaction to what’s happening with media. Then there was Universal Music rattling the sabres at a recent conference, and saying that YouTube was stealing from the label and owed them millions of dollars. That’s the other end of the spectrum.

It’s ironic (or at least a funny coincidence) that just as the Warner deal emerges, former online-media mogul and billionaire sports-team owner Mark Cuban writes a blog post about the decline of YouTube, and how the site is doomed because — among other things — it uses a lot of bandwidth and relies on copyrighted material for a lot of its traffic. As far as Mark is concerned, YouTube is just like Napster and will be hit with the same lawsuits, and likely be found guilty of inciting people to breach copyright, just like Grokster and Kazaa were.

I happen to think that the principle of “fair use” still covers things like using a Talking Heads song as the soundtrack for your kid’s bar mitzvah or whatever, but IANAL (that’s geek shorthand for “I am not a lawyer”). However, Mark also argues that there’s no need for YouTube because the major labels — and by extension the TV networks — can do their own deals and bypass YouTube, and that’s where I think he is most wrong. Sure they could, and they likely will. But why not use the massive traffic and name recognition that YouTube has going for it?

They would be stupid not to, just as the record labels were stupid not to find some way of working with Napster instead of beating it into the ground with lawsuits. Warner Music’s deal may have a lot of question marks still, but it is taking the path of least resistance, while Universal is stuck in the dark ages. Mark Evans has some thoughts too. Oh yes, and Jason Calacanis agrees with Mark Cuban, but he is also wrong. Rafat at PaidContent says that the labels may take a stake in YouTube, and ArsTechnica says that Warner has had a conversion on the road to Damascus, just like Paul.

Update:

Mark Cuban says that the Warner deal proves nothing, since we don’t know any of the details, and that it reminds him of when Bertelsmann AG did a deal with Napster not long before the company had to close its doors and file for bankruptcy. You gotta give Mark credit — he sticks to his guns 🙂

Everybody loves to look at the search terms that people type into Google and other search engines. I’m convinced that’s half the reason people wanted to write about the debacle that erupted when America Online released all those search histories, and it’s why people like to look at Google Trends and Technorati’s Buzz and all those other trackers (if only we could get a look at that giant screen in the Googleplex that scrolls real-time search requests all day long).

Markus Frind, the founder and sole proprietor of the massively successful online dating site Plenty of Fish, has an interesting theory in one of his recent posts. The post is mostly about how Markus’s site ranks compared to other international dating sites (answer: number three), but the interesting part for me was right at the end, where Markus says that searches for info on new homes correlates extremely well with real economic data such as housing starts. His theory:

There will come a time when traders, banks etc pay more attention to keyword search data then government housing stats and other economic reports that are months out of date. I predict in the next 5 years search data such as trends in search terms like “buy new home” will have major impact and move markets and reports on housing starts will do nothing.

Is Markus out to lunch? I’m not so sure. He might be overstating the case, but I think he is on the right track, and that search data will become (is becoming) an ever more important indicator of consumer behaviour, or potential behaviour. In an interesting coincidence, my friend Paul Kedrosky posted something recently on what Google searches — categorized by region — might indicate about housing bubbles (or fears of same) in the offing.

Getting too deeply into the personalities behind the formation of Wikipedia.org is not wise — much like delving into the history behind the development of RSS or podcasting (see Wikipedia entries on either for more detail, and if you’re a real glutton for punishment try reading the changelogs) — but suffice it to say that Larry Sanger played a key role in the development of the “open source” encyclopedia, along with the much more famous Jimmy Wales.

In any case, Mr. Sanger announced recently that he has decided to create his own version of Wikipedia, which he calls Citizendium. In open-source software terms, this is known as a “fork,” which is what happens when one group working on a project decides they can’t work with another group. According to Mr. Sanger, the Citizendium will begin with the complete text of what is already in Wikipedia, and then build on it.

The explicit use of experts as “editors” (non-experts are to be known as “authors”) is one of the key differences between Citizendium and Wikipedia, although how someone qualifies as an expert is not clear (that’s a problem with Jason’s idea too). Is a degree in that subject enough, or does it have to be a certain type of degree from a certain calibre of institution? Another key difference is that Citizendium will require the use of real names and email addresses, and there will be enforcers known as “constables” who can remove articles or suspend accounts.

Is any of this going to work, and if so will it make what results better or more reliable than Wikipedia? That remains to be seen. While Mr. Sanger’s proposal sounds interesting, I wonder when I read sentences like this one: “In time, an effective and fair “legal” system will be established.” How would the United States would have turned out if the Constitution had contained nothing but that single sentence under the discussion of the new republic’s legal system? Marshall Kirkpatrick has a fairly skeptical take on the new venture at TechCrunch.

I have to say I’m a little surprised that Nick “Wikipedia is dead” Carr hasn’t devoted more space to this new development. While he has posted about it, there is remarkably little about how this proves Wikipedia is flawed or that the entire community-driven knowledge model is a load of bollocks etc., etc. There’s some discussion at Slashdot (with Sanger taking part) and Nick has helpfully linked to the original email thread in which Sanger proposed turning what was then called Nupedia into a wiki back in 2001.