Month: October 2006

Paul Hemp emailed me recently to let me know about a piece he wrote for the Harvard Business Review, entitled “Are You Ready for E-tailing 2.0?” In it, he talks about the moves by retailers such as American Apparel to set up virtual storefronts in the game Second Life, and how this could lead to an increasing amount of shopping taking place online, with friends meeting virtually to window-shop in virtual stores.

According to the piece, Raz Schionning, who oversees Web marketing for American Apparel, says that

Visitors to the Second Life store often arrive in groups and seem to know one another. They typically talk about the clothes on display. They might buy something or watch the in-store videos. But they often end up chatting about unrelated topics, even as they continue to linger in the store—mirroring the activity at popular virtual clothing stores in Second Life, such as Preen and Dazzle Haute Couture.

I’ve written before — both on this blog and in a recent Globe and Mail column — about this idea, and how smart retailers and marketers like American Apparel and Adidas (and even Telus, one of Canada’s telecom companies) are making inroads into Second Life and using these virtual worlds for word-of-mouth marketing.

One of the things that got me to write about this phenomenon, in fact, was an earlier piece that Paul did for HBR, which was accompanied by a virtual conference in Second Life about marketing to avatars. I think Paul is definitely on to something.

Note:

In other Second Life news, Reuters is opening a virtual news bureau in the game, staffed by reporter Adam Pasick — who will appear as avatar Adam Reuters. His first piece was an interview with the head of in-world bank Ginko, and he said he plans to cover it just like any other developing economy or society. The bureau is here.

If I were an advisor to a startup, or a venture capitalist like Paul Kedrosky or Rick Segal or Fred Wilson, I would clip and laminate the story from today’s New York Times about the decline and fall of Friendster, or blow it up and make a wall-hanging for the boardroom, or force every employee to memorize it, or something equally dramatic. As a VC in the story says, Friendster is an “iconic case of failure,” an epic tale of missed opportunity and failed potential, like a Greek tragedy with Silicon Valley engineers and VCs instead of Oediupus and his mom.

In 2003, Friendster was a social-networking star, and growing quickly. Kleiner Perkins and a host of other top VCs were all over it like white on rice. The company turned down a $30-million buyout offer from Google. Why not? It was going to be huge. Then came the stability and performance issues as it grew — ignored, of course. Then the “help” from miscellaneous CEOs, board members and others, most of which focused on competing with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. And a long, spiralling trip from superstardom to the bottom of the barrel, as MySpace became everything Friendster could have been.

So who’s to blame? The founder suggests (through a friend) that the VCs screwed everything up. Some of the VCs even appear to agree. The legendary John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins says “We completely failed to execute… everything boiled down to our inability to improve performance.” While the executive team was planning to expand and offer all kinds of new features, the site was so slow as to be almost unuseable, and it continued to pursue a kind of gated-community approach even as MySpace opened itself up to anyone.

This story should be required reading in the Valley, especially now during what may or may not be Bubble 2.0.

Tony Hung, who blogs at Deep Jive Interests, pointed something out to me via email — and if he hadn’t, I probably never would have heard about it. There has been plenty of news and discussion about it, but none of it has shown up on Techmeme.com or any of the other feed aggregators and meme-trackers I follow. Why? Because no “A-listers” have written about it (as Gabe Rivera of Techmeme points out in my comments, it’s there now).

It’s an issue that strikes right at the heart of the debate the blogosphere has been having lately about PayPerPost and blog “payola,” and whether bloggers should disclose their conflicts of interest.

The issue has to do with Edelman, the PR firm that Steve Rubel works for, and Wal-Mart. Tony’s post lays out it pretty well, as far as I can tell — as well as a story in Business Week, and posts from Shel Holtz and Biz Hack. In a nutshell it has to do with Wal-Mart paying for a couple of bloggers to drive their RV across America and write about how great Wal-Mart is.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. More power to them. Except that the connection to Wal-Mart, and the extensive financial backing the company has provided, is never mentioned anywhere on the blog. In light of comments made by Richard Edelman the last time the whole Wal-Mart/blogger thing blew up, where he said bloggers should “disclose receipt of product samples, membership on advisory boards or any other financial consideration that might affect their impartiality,” you would think Edelman would have made sure to do so in this case.

This doesn’t just cause confusion by blurring the lines between blogging and payola, or blog-vertising, but it arguably does Edelman harm too — and that would be a shame, since they are the PR firm that probably walks the walk the most when it comes to blogging and the conversation (the Wal-Marting Across America blog has a post that puts all the blame on Wal-Mart haters). I’m hoping Richard Edelman responds to this one in some way soon. As Tony points out in an update, the PR blogosphere is unanimously critical of Edelman on this one.

Update:

Scoble has weighed in, as have several others, including John Dowdell, who says that he isn’t sure the story is as cut and dried as it has been described. He argues that the relationship with Wal-Mart was disclosed (although I think Tony and I would argue not well enough) and that it’s not clear Edelman orchestrated the whole thing. All fair points, which it would help to hear from someone at Edelma. If I have rushed to judgment, I will be happy to apologize.

I never thought it would come to this, but I have to say I think Dave Winer and Nick Carr are both right. Dave, riffing off a post by Jeff Jarvis on where journalism is headed, said that he sees the future of media as like cooking dinner rather than like a symphony, since “readers are becoming writers.”

A nice way of putting it, that last bit. Nick, meanwhile — in a somewhat restrained post, at least for Nick — juxtaposes Dave’s musings with several reports about journalists being killed, including Anna Politkovskaya in Russia and two German reporters in Afghanistan. The message being (I assume) that real journalists get killed and bloggers sit around in their pyjamas.

A fair point (one also made in the LA Times recently). And yet, I think back to the blogger known as Salam Pax during the invasion of Iraq and some of the things he wrote, and wonder whether that wasn’t equivalent to war reporting in many ways. Maybe not battlefield reporting, but he could easily have been targeted by his government for what he was writing. And there are plenty of “traditional” journalists who make the average blogger look like a reporting dynamo.

Are bloggers going to replace all kinds of reporting? Hardly. Or at least, not until we have bloggers in war zones, as Dave suggests in a follow-up post. But no one said this was an either-or question, or at least it shouldn’t be. There will always be a need for strong reporting, from all kinds of places — I think we are just broadening the scope of who gets to do it, and that’s a good thing.

Update:

Haydn Shaughnessy has some worthwhile thoughts on the topic of readers vs. writers (and the need for editors).

New York’s Museum of Modern art obviously likes to live up to its name, and what could be more modern than YouTube? According to a piece in the Wall Street Journal (reg. required) this weekend, the museum is using YouTube visitors to help curate an upcoming video collection. According to the story:

MoMA solicited videos to be included in a retrospective of the Residents, an avant-garde multimedia group, that will open next week. The museum has posted the clips of 11 finalists on YouTube and invited the public to weigh in. The votes and comments those works receive on the site will help determine which are screened at the museum.

And MoMA isn’t the only one doing this kind of thing, apparently. The article says that London’s Saatchi Gallery is sponsoring what it calls “the first reader-curated contemporary art show” later this month, in which online voters picked the participants, and the Pace/MacGill Gallery in NYC put on a summer show called “Self-Portraitr,” that included nearly 130,000 photos submitted by Flickr users.

I tuned into Rocketboom’s video-cast on Friday because they did a segment on the New York City Live Window event — in which Versu Richelieu (otherwise known as Kess Quinn) is sitting in a store window for 72 hours, building an exact replica of her surroundings in Second Life — and it struck me that this looks very much like the future of advertising (or at least a possible future).

Intel sponsored Versu to sit in the window and also paid however many Linden dollars it cost for her to build what she’s been building, so they get all kinds of publicity out of it, and Linden Labs gets lots of publicity for Second Life too (although they had to take the world down during the event to block an “exploit” of some kind). Even Versu gets some publicity for her SL building skills, and so does virtual PR firm and event host Millions of Us.

Then when I watched the Rocketboom episode, I saw a different kind of ad — host Joanne Colan, who started the segment interviewing Versu as an avatar in the game Second Life, shows up dressed in a Borg costume from Star Trek and does an ad for a battery recycling company. Is this the future for video-cast advertising? It just might be.

It was kind of cheesy, and I don’t know whether it crosses some boundaries to have the host doing ads in the middle of the show, but then we’re not talking about Ted Koppel either, let’s face it — and shows like Texaco Star Theater with Milton Berle in the early days of television weren’t all that different, really. Also interesting: Andrew Baron of Rocketboom, Joanne and the advertiser all show up in the comments on the episode.

Back when PayPerPost first came along, it got a huge amount of negative publicity from the blogosphere, with some bloggers calling the company outright evil for paying people to write about corporate clients (and not requiring them to disclose that fact on their blogs). At the time, I wondered whether there was any such thing as bad publicity, and whether PayPerPost would suffer for the avalanche of criticism.

As is often the case, all that the criticism did was help get the company’s name in front of a bunch of prospective clients, and attract bloggers who didn’t really care about the disclosure/payola issue. In no time, PayPerPost had raised $3-million, and now there are at least two other competitors looking to do the same thing, including ReviewMe.com and Creamaid.com (a pretty weird name for a Web 2.0 company, although I’m sure it has something to do with cream rising to the top, etc.).

As an aside, it’s interesting to see the flashes of arrogance that Mike Arrington displays in writing about these two newcomers, one of which comes from an advertiser on TechCrunch called Text Link Ads. In addition to calling blog payola a “virus,” Mike says:

Frankly, we’re not happy that one of our sponsors has launched this type of service, and we’ve notified them that we will not allow promotion of ReviewMe through TechCrunch.

That made me shake my head a little. “Will not allow” promotion of the company through TechCrunch? That’s a bit rich, especially when the parent company’s product — Text Link Ads — is just as much of a cancer on the web as PayPerPost is, albeit a more obvious one. And then Mike says this:

It’s clear that simply stating we don’t like these services isn’t going to make them go away.

I’m hoping this was a joke. How could they not close up shop after Mike and the rest of the A-list told them to stop what they were doing? The nerve of some people. Let’s face it — PayPerPost is not going away, and even if it and ReviewMe and Creamaid all go away, others will take their place. From my point of view, at least ReviewMe forces the people it hires to disclose that they are being compensated, which puts it one step closer to advertising and one step away from editorial.

There are all kinds of similar boundaries that get crossed in “traditional” journalism, from the travel section to the various “special” advertorial supplements that newspapers run, and eventually smart readers figure out whom they can trust and whom they can’t. And that’s about all we can hope for.

Is anyone really surprised that Dick “No, we are not a sinking ship” Parsons at Time Warner is rattling the old copyright sabre at Google and YouTube? Much like Universal when it started muttering about YouTube stealing its content not too long ago — even as it was talking to the site about a deal on licensing — the media conglomerate seems to mostly be searching for negotiating leverage, as Mike Masnick at Techdirt points out, and Greg Sterling notes as well.

Notice that Parsons has not said he will sue, only that he is pursuing the copyright issue (or whatever weasely phrase he used). Universal didn’t say it would sue either — it just tried to come across as pissed off, as though it was thumbing through the Yellow Pages looking for a good copyright lawyer.

Before I get flamed by “copyright law is sacrosanct” types, I’m not saying Time Warner and Universal don’t have a point when it comes to the blatant posting of TV clips and videos. But I think their posturing says more about how they feel they need to deal with Google than about their real concerns over copyright. And just for the record, this does not make Mark Cuban right.

Note: I’ve started doing weekly reviews of Web 2.0 tools and services for globetechnology.com — last week I wrote about Writely — and this week I wrote about Sharpcast, an online photo-sharing service that offers automatic synchronization with your home PC.

If there’s one thing the Web has plenty of, it’s photo-sharing sites. There’s Flickr.com, of course, which was started by a couple of Canadians and then eventually bought by Yahoo, but also Webshots.com, SmugMug.com, Photobucket.com, Snapfish.com and many others (interestingly enough, although Flickr gets most of the publicity, Photobucket is actually number one in terms of images and users, thanks in large part to the fact that millions of users of MySpace.com rely on Photobucket to host the images for their blogs).

So why would anyone want to hear about another photo-sharing site? Because a service called Sharpcast.com offers something a little different from the others, and that is automatic image synchronization between your computer and Sharpcast’s servers. In other words, it backs up whatever images you choose, and keeps the photos constantly backed up whenever something changes. You can also use the service as a standard image-sharing site for family and friends, but the synchronization part is the big differentiator between Sharpcast and your average run-of-the-mill photo site.

Continue reading “A look at Sharpcast’s photo software”

Just got an email from Michael Tippett, one of the founders of NowPublic, the social-media site based in British Columbia. Michael was kind enough to come and be on a panel at the last mesh conference we had in Toronto in May, and had some interesting things to say about “citizen journalism” or open-source reporting or whatever we’re calling it today. NowPublic, which encourages people to upload news reports, photos and video of news events, now has 30,000 contributors in over 130 countries, which is pretty impressive.

Michael wrote to tell me about a new feature they’ve added, called Highlight. In effect, it’s a blog-posting tool very much like the Performancing plugin for Firefox, which brings up a small window at the bottom of your browser when you click on the yellow highlight icon with the letters NP inside it. All the pieces of a blog-publishing tool are there, including a headline field and an edit window and tags, which the Highlighter fills in automatically for you (although you can easily change them).

After you configure your blog — which worked flawlessly with both of my WordPress blogs — you can publish a post to your blog with a single click, and if you want to you can add a NowPublic.com link at the bottom (you don’t have to). The tool also publishes the post automatically to NowPublic, and then gives you a link in the edit window of your browser so that you can find photos and video from NowPublic to add to your post. The site had a wide selection of photos from the recent plane crash in New York, for example — a sample is below.

http://media.nowpublic.com/js/71b1da54d9a849b51fd128312a59b89f.js

One of the interesting things about NowPublic that doesn’t get mentioned a lot is the photo-sharing features that are built in. When you click on a photo, you get a larger version, and when you hover over the photo you get a menu with “ThumbPrint” sharing options (you should be able to see the same menu on the photo above). You can get a high-resolution version if the photographer allows it, and you can also get code to embed the photo in your blog. Very cool.

I think the Highlighter tool is also a great idea — it makes it easy to post things to both your blog and NowPublic at the same time, and to add photos and video. Kudos to Michael and the team.

I expect that a post like this is exactly what author, entrpreneur and “cultural critic” Andrew Keen is after, since he entitled his post on the Google-YouTube acquisition “Thieves unite in $1.6-billion deal.” But I felt compelled to write something anyway, if only because he clearly isn’t the only one who believes in what he calls the “essentially fraudulent nature of Google’s business model.”

Keen links admiringly to a piece in the Independent online by Jeremy Warner, who says that Google and YouTube are similar in that “neither seems to care a fig about the law of copyright.” For his part, Keen says the two are “tied together by their use of free content to establish value for their businesses and to drive revenue,” and mentions “their blatant disregard for intellectual property law.”

Warner doesn’t get too specific about whether he’s talking about Google Video or the Google book-scanning project, but Keen specifically mentions the claims from publishers that Google News is an infringement of copyright, describing his interview with Richard Landry, executive director of the Independent Press Association, who argues that the Google business model is

a form of theft. The search engine steals content from traditional content producers and then makes money by selling advertising off the back of the snippets of information that it displays on its website.

Could this get any stupider? It’s hard to imagine how. The Press Association and the World Association of Newspapers have both tried this argument, and just come out looking like morons, as does the entire country of Belgium for its recent decision to block Google News from displaying content from Belgian newspapers.

Let’s review: Google News posts snippets of text, which is permitted by fair use principles — just as it does for the Google Print project — and doesn’t display advertising on its pages. How is that “a form of theft” or “blatant disregard” for intellectual property? I would be tempted to describe Keen’s post as a troll, but unfortunately I think he actually believes what he wrote.

Bonus link:

For more unintentional hilarity, be sure to check out Keen’s magnum opus on how Web 2.0 is the new Communism.

I followed the recent dustup over some comments Mike Arrington of TechCrunch made at the recent Online News Association conference in Washington, but didn’t get a chance to write about them, in part because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say exactly. Mike made some inflammatory comments about traditional media, including the New York Times, and said that blogs were better, which raised some hackles and even drew some a critical response from Jeff Jarvis — no great friend of traditional media — and Staci from PaidContent.

Then I read something that Nick “The Prophet of Doom” Carr wrote about the event, and it got me thinking — and then I read a recent post from Huffington Post’s Eat The Press, and it got me thinking even more. I won’t recap all of Nick’s rather long-winded post (is he getting paid by the word?), but suffice it to say that he doesn’t think Mike should be throwing rocks because he didn’t disclose some conflicts involving his blog and the startup he’s involved in, called Edgeio. Then Nick says this:

Traditional journalism has its weaknesses, as any journalist will tell you, but it has many strengths as well, strengths that are hard-earned and worthy of respect. Many bloggers assume that blogging represents a step forward when, in important ways, it actually represents a step backward.

When it comes to conflicts of interest, or other questions of journalistic ethics, the proper attitude that we bloggers should take toward our counterparts in the traditional press is not arrogance but humility. In this area, as in others, blogs have far more to learn from newspapers than newspapers have to learn from blogs.

Typical Nick, right? Then I read this post from Eat The Press, which made a point of noting how many outlets — including the Washington Post — had ample evidence that Republican Congressman Mark Foley was sending inappropriate emails to young pages at the House of Representatives, but did nothing. A blogger published the emails, and then ABCnews.com did the story. And that’s not the only case of traditional media either canning or distorting a story, of course. The New York Times has several in its closet, including the Judith Miller affair.

So yes, bloggers have some things to learn from traditional media when it comes to disclosing conflicts. But traditional media darn well has plenty to learn from bloggers as well — and I for one am glad we have both.

I’ve never met Mark Cuban, but I like him a lot. I love his courtside ranting and raving, I like the whole billionaire in a T-shirt thing, and I really like the fact that he lets things pretty much just hang out on his blog and says what he feels — how many billionaires or CEOs do that? And I even like his blog when I think he’s wrong, like I did with the whole “only a moron would buy YouTube” thing. But sometimes I think maybe he could use an editor — or at least a friend.

In his latest post, Mark takes another stab at the whole Google-YouTube-DRM thing, but this time he does it in a kind of stream of consciousness format that makes me wonder whether he isn’t spending some of those billions on British Columbia’s leading export. He talks about looking for music and videos, and how YouTube’s new quicklist makes it easy to find things, and programs like Total Video Converter let him convert movies so he can watch them on his iPod. And then he loses it — here’s a sample:

Wait a minute, who is the little guy hovering in front of me ? Dang, it looks like a Google lawyer ! Is he using a juet propulsion pack to fly ? No, its a floating Segway. Wow ! He is saying “No problem mark. You didnt crack any DRM, we dont use any !. You just downloaded a file from one of the most popular sites in the world and converted it to a format that works for your Ipod. We put it up there for you to take, so take it !

If copyright owners didnt want it there, they would have sent us a Take Down Notice !. I must be right because millions of people do it every day ! You wonder how I can fly with this Segway ? Its the DMCA Safe Harbor laws keeping me safe and floating. Take all the music, movies and videos you want, our users will upload more ! Enjoy , enjoy, enjoy !

Mark, buddy — time to step outside and maybe get some fresh air, dude. Or at least put down the bong for awhile. In other Cuban-related news, Deep Jive Interests has coined a new buzzword: To “Cuban.”

A little while ago, I got an email inviting me to go to a secret URL and try out an unreleased Web service, one that tries to apply Digg-style voting to search results. The site has now gone live, so I’m free to write about it, and I have to say it’s an interesting idea, but not one that I’m convinced will work — or at least not the way the company behind it, called Coolchaser Corp., intends it to work (Note: the site was down the last time I checked, due to what appear to be server problems).

The service from url.com (which I think is kind of a dumb name) takes the search results from Google, MSN and Yahoo and aggregates them and then displays them on a page. When you follow one of the links, you get a small toolbar at the bottom of the window with two buttons — one with a thumbs-up icon for “good result” and one with a thumbs-down icon for “not so good” — and you get a small text box in which you can enter a comment.

The idea is that as people rate search results, those with more votes flow to the top of the aggregated page of links, and users can see how many people thought a particular page was a good result, and any comments they may have made. It’s an appealing idea, and it’s obvious from the url blog that the founders believe people are naturally good and that they want to help. But do enough of them fit that description to make the service worthwhile? I’m not sure.

Even if there aren’t enough people who want to vote, however, url.com still makes a pretty good multi-engine search — and if it adds further value, then so much the better. One of the only downsides is that some websites run frame-blockers that remove the toolbar, and so you can’t vote on them. Coolchaser also runs a service called ClipClip.com, which is sort of like Clipmarks and other products that let you clip, store and share data as you surf the Web.

Anyone who has seen Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in action — either in person or in one of the hilarious video clips of his Monkey Boy motivational-speaker routine — knows that it isn’t easy for him to play the underdog role. His thing is more of the “barking mad pit-bull” kind of role. But in a recent Business Week interview, he does his best to paint a scary picture of a world where Google is a media giant with no competition:

The truth is what Google is doing now is transferring the wealth out of the hands of rights holders into Google. So media companies around the world are all threatened by Google. Why? Because basically Google is telling you how much of your ad revenue you get to keep.They better get some competition. Us. Yahoo. Somebody better break through or you can short all media stocks right now.

Boy, I’m getting all choked up, Uncle Steve. Good thing we have Microsoft out there trying to help us poor folk. Feel free to tack a little more onto the purchase price of Vista and put it towards the “Microsoft Media” competition fund.