Month: October 2006

Man, if I read one more analysis of the Google-YouTube deal — and that includes my own — my head is going to explode. My favourite take so far comes from Howard Lindzon, who starts out all sane and then starts to go off the rails in this post. Not only does he think Google should buy Zillow, but also Apple, Research In Motion, eBay, Amazon and Adobe. Then he completely loses it:

To ensure the deals go through – BUY TASER and arm the employees and LOCKHEED MARTIN to protect the Googleplex or Googleville. What the hell – after taking a few weeks off, BUY PHILLIP MORRIS and shut it the fuck down so that people live long enough to enjoy all the toys! BUT – make sure you push through legalized marijuana. Let’s face it. How much more fun would surfing the web and YouTube be. Shit, you may not even have to buy Akamai, because the web will seem fast enough. PS – I would than buy Chipotle’s because you need to feed everybody !

There’s more, and it’s just as good (Howard also gets the “most egregious use of capitals” award for this week). Are you listening, Larry and Sergey?

Note:

For even more analysis combined with laughter, check out the video discussion between Prince “Chartreuse” Campbell and video-blogger Loren Feldman of 1938 Media. Loren is also responsible for the hilarious Jason Calacanis takedown video rant posted here.

Here’s a piece I posted at globetechnology.com about YouTube in the wake of the Google deal:

What was just a wild rumour on Friday, poo-poohed by many observers — including dot-com billionaire Mark Cuban — became reality on Monday, with Google’s $1.6-billion (U.S.) purchase of YouTube, the video-sharing phenomenon best known for clips of a fat guy doing the Numa Numa dance in front of his bedroom webcam, late-night confessionals from an actress known as “lonelygirl15” (recently hired as a spokesperson by the United Nations) and a lesson in what happens when Mentos meet Diet Coke.

So what happens now? The most obvious thing is that YouTube goes from being an underfunded (arguably), money-losing (allegedly) but wildly popular website — with over 100 million videos streamed every day — to a ridiculously deep-pocketed company that is now attached at the hip to the world’s most powerful online advertising vehicle. Is this the beginning of the new Internet video revolution, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt said on the conference call following the announcement? Or is this an eBay-Skype sort of deal, with a lot more heat than light?

Mark Cuban — who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7-billion in 1999 and later bought the Dallas Mavericks basketball team — remains convinced that Google is going to be in for a heap of copyright trouble from content owners whose material keeps showing up on YouTube. Others feel likewise, and they note that the Fox Network could make things very difficult for the new YouTube if it decides to remove every clip from every Fox show that makes its way onto the video-sharing site. Why would Fox do that? Because it is owned by News Corp., which likely wants to leverage its MySpace social network and become a prominent player in the video-streaming world.

Continue reading “So what’s next for YouTube?”

Well, all those rumours about Google and YouTube turned out to have more than a little truth to them. And kudos to Mike Arrington of TechCrunch for getting out there first with the story. He had the Wall Street Journal and New York Times not just following him but giving him credit for breaking the news, and that is definitely a feather in his cap.

Meanwhile, whether out of plain old stubbornness or devotion to his argument, “Megaphone Mark” Cuban refuses to admit that maybe he was wrong to call anyone who bought YouTube a moron, and is still convinced that the Google gang are in for a world of copyright pain.

Could he be right? Maybe. Or maybe the deals that YouTube has signed with Warner and Universal and BMG are a sign that things are changing. In any case, as Rex Hammock points out, Mark Cuban is an expert on crazy, so there has to be a pretty big piece of him that is cheering on the guy with the surfer dude name — YouTube CEO Chad Hurley — and co-founder Steve Chen.

Om Malik admits he was wrong to side with the nay-sayers, but then throws in at the end that he thinks it might be an “HP-Compaq kind of deal.” That’s harsh, Om 🙂 And Eric Schmidt says on the conference call that this is the “next step in the evolution of the Internet.” I don’t know about that, but it sure is going to be fun to watch.

Well, last night the Google-YouTube matchup was just a rumour posted by Mike Arrington at TechCrunch, and plenty of people were poo-poohing it — if only because TechCrunch can occasionally be, er… somewhat promotional, if you know what I mean. But now the Wall Street Journal, a publication not known for rushing into print with unsubstantiated rumours, is reporting that the two companies are in talks about an acquisition that could be worth $1.6-billion (U.S.).

The newspaper said that the “discussions are still at a sensitive stage and could well break off,” which is newspaper lingo for “don’t hold it against us if this big scoop turns out not to be true.” And TechCrunch even gets props for breaking the news in the second paragraph of the WSJ story — I bet that page gets framed or laminated and is hanging on Mike’s wall within the hour.

Russell Shaw is saying he told us so, and even my friend Paul Kedrosky thinks the deal makes a lot of sense (although I don’t think GooTube is really a great name, marketing-wise). Jason Calacanis also has a breakdown of why such an acquisition would make “perfect sense.”

So here’s what I’d like to know: what does YouTube’s biggest fan, “Megaphone Mark” Cuban think about this potential deal? I assume it means that Larry Page and Sergey Brin are morons, since Mark seemed to think only an idiot would buy YouTube because of all the copyright liabilities involved.

It’s possible that the talks are not going to result in anything, or that the rumours are coming from YouTube and are an attempt to start a bidding war, as Cynthia Brumfield of IPDemocracy suspects, but if a deal is done I would be very interested to see what Mark’s take on it is after he dissed the company so badly.

Update:

Webomatica posted a link in my comments section to a post by Jeff Jarvis from the Online News Association conference (which I had hoped to go to), where Mark Cuban was the keynote speaker. He passed on the news of the WSJ story and the presenter asked Cuban about it, and his response was pretty much what you might expect: Google would be stupid to buy YouTube, and if they did they would wreck it because they would have to remove all the copyrighted stuff. Charlene Li at Forrester has some thoughts about the value of a merger too.

Update 2:

Mark Cuban has posted his thoughts about whether Google would be stupid to buy YouTube. No surprise — he thinks “moronic would be an understatement.” However, he does think it would make sense for Google to do some kind of ad deal with YouTube.

Hey, I love the Interweb as much as anyone, and how it makes it easy for people who feel they’ve been wronged to take their story to the people, etc. etc., but seriously — why would anyone in their right mind believe Brad Greenspan, who claims to be the rightful founder of MySpace, when he says that other executives conspired to defraud shareholders of $20-billion when they sold the company to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.?

Maybe if Brad had picked a slightly less ridiculous number, like say, $2-billion it would have been easier to buy into his story, which comes complete with detailed accusations against Richard Rosenblatt of Intermix Media — the company that bought another company that later morphed into MySpace, if you remember the tale that freelance writer Trent Lepinski told awhile back (the one that he said he was ready to publish until News Corp. allegedly put some heat on).

Brad’s story is that Rosenblatt and others conspired to keep the real information about MySpace’s phenomenal growth away from shareholders so that they would only think the company was worth half a billion dollars instead of $20-billion, which he keeps saying is the company’s real value, without really providing any coherent argument other than a phenomenal growth rate (and a reference to analysts like Jordan Rohan of RBC). Joe at Techdirt makes the same point.

Oh yes, and he has some totally incriminating emails from Rosenblatt, in which he says he thinks MySpace will be worth $20-billion some day. I guess that proves it then. If I email someone and tell them my house will be worth $8-million some day, can I then sue the guy who bought it because he only paid me $500,000? As my friend Rob likes to say, Brad should put down the bong. Here’s some more background on Brad and his various grievances, and details on why he was forced out of Intermix here.

An important update to my recent post about b5media, which is below. In addition to getting some financing, they are also getting the skills and abilities of my friend and former journalism colleague Mark Evans, who just quit his job at the National Post to join b5media as their vice-president of operations. His announcement is here. Congratulations, Mark — and to b5media. Rick Segal of J.L. Albright pays tribute to Mark here, and Om gives some props as well, while Kent Newsome has some thoughts about the challenges confronting a blog network.

Original post:

Congrats to Jeremy Wright and the rest of the gang over at the blog network b5media, including Duncan Riley and a host of others. Rick Segal broke the news earlier today that he and J.L. Albright co-led an investment in the company with Brightspark, which is Delrina co-founder Mark Skapinker’s shop. In response to some questions from interested onlookers, Rick — ever the iconoclast — even announced how much the two had invested: $2-million U.S. in total. As he put it:

Lots and lots of people are going to go, yeah right, bunch of VC lemmings chasing flavor of the month, pissing away gobs of cash on another me too blogger pile. In the words of Seth Godin, I can only respond; so?

In an interview with the Blogging Times, Duncan discussed what the team plan to use the money for, which appears to include a salary for Mr. Riley, among other things (b5 also plans to spend some of the money compensating its bloggers). More on the deal from Problogger and b5media partner Darren Rowse.

Update:

Phil Sim of Squash isn’t convinced that blog networks really make sense as a business, or as an investment. And Nick Douglas at Valleywag heads straight for the jugular, as usual, although coming from someone at another blog network he might be protesting just a wee bit too much, methinks. Plus the capitalization thing is totally offside 🙂 Shel Israel has some thoughts here, and Syntagma (a competitor) has some more critical thoughts.

It’s interesting to see the spectrum of opinion on Powerset, the search startup that just raised a bunch of cash from some high-profile Silicon Valley types including Peter “PayPal” Thiel and Esther “Release 1.0” Dyson (daughter of legendary astrophysicist Freeman Dyson).

Some critics, including Danny Sullivan of Searchenginewatch — who posted a comment on Matt Marshall’s piece at VentureBeat and has more thoughts here — seem to feel that Powerset is doomed, because so many other companies (including Ask) have tried to unseat Google by offering “natural language” search. Others have a “search is broken, so best of luck” attitude, and to his credit Barney Pell of Powerset links to representatives of both camps from his blog.

It’s obvious that in addition to getting some heavy hitters interested in his company, Mr. Pell is a pretty smart guy. He studied symbolic systems at Stanford and then got his PhD in computer science from Cambridge University, and wound up working on AI control systems for NASA’s Ames Research Center, according to this old bio page from there. Matt has some more history in his Venture Beat piece, but it’s clear Barney knows a thing or two.

In other words, he must know that plenty of people have tried the natural-language search model before, and yet he obviously feels that there is still something worth doing there, as he describes on his blog. And who wouldn’t agree that search is somewhat broken? Nine times out of ten, the first page of results from the average Google search is garbage.

If natural language search can help with that, I’m all for it. Of course, one of Mr. Pell’s critics, Steve Bryant, says having a good search engine isn’t enough to compete with Google.

Congrats to Jeremy Wright and the rest of the gang over at the blog network b5media, including Duncan Riley and a host of others. Rick Segal broke the news earlier today that he and J.L. Albright co-led an investment in the company with Brightspark, which is Delrina co-founder Mark Skapinker’s shop. In response to some questions from interested onlookers, Rick — ever the iconoclast — even announced how much the two had invested: $2-million U.S. in total. As he put it:

Lots and lots of people are going to go, yeah right, bunch of VC lemmings chasing flavor of the month, pissing away gobs of cash on another me too blogger pile. In the words of Seth Godin, I can only respond; so?

In an interview with the Blogging Times, Duncan discussed what the team plan to use the money for, which appears to include a salary for Mr. Riley, among other things (b5 also plans to spend some of the money compensating its bloggers). More on the deal from Problogger and b5media partner Darren Rowse.

Update:

Phil Sim of Squash isn’t convinced that blog networks really make sense as a business, or as an investment. And Nick Douglas at Valleywag heads straight for the jugular, as usual, although coming from someone at another blog network he might be protesting just a wee bit too much, methinks. Plus the capitalization thing is totally offside 🙂 Shel Israel has some thoughts here.

My friend and fellow mesh organizer Mike McDerment has been on a real roll lately with FreshBooks, the online invoicing and time-tracking software company that he and his team of Web 2.0 wizards run out of a secret location known only as “The Meadows” (actually, Toronto).

The latest addition is a social aspect that plenty of small businesses and freelancers would likely be very interested in: the ability to aggregate and track not just your own data — that is, how often and how quickly you get paid, etc. — but data supplied by others as well, to see how you compare to the rest of the industry. As Mike explains in his post, all of this information would be voluntary, and would remain anonymous.

Not only that, but Mike says FreshBooks will be looking at the aggregated data to find the best performers and interviewing them for the benefit of the whole community. All in all, some pretty cool features, I think. Nice job, guys (and girls). Stowe Boyd (an advisor to and investor in the company) has more here.

David Ulevitch and the team behind OpenDNS have launched a cool new social networking-type service to combat “phishing” — those fake emails from eBay and PayPal that try to get you to type in your account details so they can boost them and go on a spending spree. It’s called the PhishTank, and it’s designed to be a central repository for phishing emails that anyone can contribute to. Users can also help to verify phish attacks, which in turn should help services such as OpenDNS block them before they hit your mailbox.

There are a couple of interesting things about PhishTank, including the fact that it has an open API (application programming interface), as Paul Stamatiou notes, which means that anyone can design an application that makes use of the data in PhishTank in different ways. The service is also working on toolbar buttons for Thunderbird and Outlook that will allow users to send a suspected phish to the tank with a single click. There’s also a bit of community built in, with pages that rank the top submitters and verifiers.

In an interview with David last week, I asked why anyone would want to devote their time to verifying or submitting phishing attempts. It’s easy to see why someone would be attracted to uploading and sharing photos at Flickr or videos at YouTube, but phishing attacks? His response was that hundreds of people were already doing that even before there was a community — by sending emails to OpenDNS. In fact, he said that the PhishTank was in part a way of dealing with the volume of such submissions, by effectively outsourcing part of the job of verifying them.

That’s a smart use of Web 2.0, it seems to me, and could potentially kill two birds with one stone. Whether it actually becomes a community or not is almost irrelevant, since it has already taken a load off OpenDNS in a sense. And David definitely has some experience with a bottoms-up startup — his first venture, EveryDNS, was started “in college as a kind of beer fund, then it gradually became a college fund, and now it is much more.”

It may have a small set of about 100,000 users, he says, but “they are some of the very top geeks” including senior scientists at Microsoft and Sun. David himself is such an uber-geek that he is user number 18 on Slashdot, the venerable geek forum.

Well, Om managed to keep turning 40 to himself for a little while — apart from an offhand reference here — but you can’t keep secrets for long in Web 2.0 world, especially when you have a big party with all the beautiful people (Mike “TechCrunch” Arrington, Nick “Valleywag” Douglas and others) at Pier 38 in San Francisco. And especially when someone like Thomas Hawk of Zooomr posts a bunch of party snapshots, including one entitled “GigaStud.” Happy 40th Om. And Valleywag’s Nick Douglas has a great job — he not only gets to go to parties, he gets to crack wise about all the people there.

I’ve kind of been following the brouhaha over Tribe.net founder Mark Pincus and what he wrote about an old classmate, Murry Gunty, and how a 15-year-old decision by the latter seems to have turned into an exercise in old vs. new media. After much back and forth, it turned into an article in the Washington Post, followed by a heartfelt post from Mr. Pincus alleging that the article was unfair to him.

What’s interesting to me is not what Mr. Pincus said about Mr. Gunty, or whether — as Jason Calacanis says — taking shots at old classmates is what blogs are for, etc. I find it interesting that some of the commenters on the Pincus post take him to task for what he did because they think it was wrong to use his real name, since it unnecessarily exposed him to ridicule. Interestingly enough, one of those commenters is Mike Arrington of TechCrunch.com and another is blogger Don Park.

Some people seem to feel that using his name was just “reporting” and is therefore permissible, and that he should be exposed because he’s a cheater (or whatever). I would have to agree with Mike and Don and others though — I don’t think Mark’s point was advanced at all by using a real person’s name, and if anything it detracted from his argument and diverted the conversation away from his main point.

That’s not good journalism, nor is it good blogging. It’s what we in the old media refer to as a “drive-by.”

Not only is PayPerPost — the company that pays bloggers to write about advertisers — still around, but now it has raised a pile of money to boot, from some gullible VCs. Apparently the founders have decided to ignore all the free advice they got last time around about how they should probably require bloggers to disclose their conflict of interest, but then that probably isn’t surprising given what the founders said back when the subject came up.

In what was a strangely convoluted argument that kind of made my head hurt, the PayPerPost blog argued that forcing people to disclose actually made their posts worse because:

they use disclosure as an excuse to create less compelling content. These are people who just think of the service as “payola” and don’t put much effort into their posts. They will meet the minimum requirements but aren’t necessarily interested in the topic they are writing about.

In other words, it made them worse from a marketing point of view. But the hard part for me is that the posts we’re talking about are payola — although the PayPerPost people would obviously like you to think that all those bloggers chose to receive money for things that they were already going to blog about positively anyway because they just love those products so much, gosh darn it.

Yeah right. And obviously, disclosing that you’re getting paid for something will make it seem less authentic, which will make it resonate less with readers (although it might still give them some Google juice, as Scoble points out). That’s why they don’t want to do it. When it gets right down to it, PayPerPost and its advertisers are counting on their ability to pull one over on blog readers, because that’s the only way their idea has even a chance of actually accomplishing anything.

And it does no good to argue, as Dave Winer does, that lots of so-called “journalism” is full of that kind of payola — including tech reviews, sports reporting and travel writing, to name just a few. That doesn’t make it right.

If there’s one thing that unites bloggers, it’s the compulsion to post things at any hour of the day and in virtually any location, whether it’s photos of the smelly guy across the aisle on the subway or a car accident or whatever. And that means blogging from a mobile device of some kind, be it a BlackBerry or a Windows PDA or a Treo or just a regular old Nokia candy bar. But anyone who has tried to do that knows that it is far from easy, even with a well-established site like Textamerica.com.

That’s why Ambient Vector, a Toronto startup run by Sutha Kamal and a bunch of other smart guys, has launched Nakama — a mobile photoblogging service that is a whole lot easier to use than most of the others I’ve come across, although it still has some glitches here and there. There’s lots more info at MobileCrunch.

I should note that I am friends with Sutha and his partner-in-crime David Crow, whom I have gotten to know through Toronto’s blogger and DemoCamp community, and I have even enjoyed nachos and salsa in their spartan little office with the server sitting on the floor in the hallway. And Sutha writes a blog about some of the things his company has been going through for the Globe and Mail’s small business website. So make of all that what you will.

There are other mobile blogging and photo-blogging solutions out there, including one called Mobispine.com and one called Splashblog.com (neither of which I have used), and you can also post photos from a mobile device with Blogger and the mobile version of Typepad that Six Apart launched with Nokia awhile back. There’s also another Toronto startup called Filemobile.com that has a photo component to it, although it also has a lot of other features. But most of the solutions that are out there require you to download and install software.

Nakama (which means “close friend” or “ally” in Japanese) doesn’t require any downloads, and Sutha says it will work on just about any phone or mobile device out there. You can post the photos by sending an SMS message and the software will even call you back to let you record an audio tag, which is attached to the photo. You can quickly and easily see the photos and video clips that your friends have uploaded and leave comments on them, and they can easily see and leave comments on yours.

All in all, it’s a pretty neat service. Two thumbs up to Sutha and the rest of the team.

Maybe it’s just been a slow period for “real” news from the blogosphere over the past few days, or maybe Mark Cuban’s comments about YouTube have stirred up some conflicting views about Web 2.0 and the New Bubble and that sort of thing, but there has certainly been a lot of back and forth about the issue since Megaphone Mark made his “moron” statement.

Fred Wilson of Union Square said he thinks YouTube is one of the best things to happen on the Internet over the past several years, which got a couple of people going — including my friend Rob Hyndman, who took issue with this statement, and got a response from Fred in his comments. Rob also got kind of riled up by Bob Lefsetz’s rant against Cuban, which had that kind of breathless, drunk-guy-with-a-sticky-caps-lock thing to it that Bob does so well, and so Rob helpfully advised him to “put down the bong.”

Unfortunately, there seem to be a whole bunch of tangential — and in many cases ad hominem — arguments getting in the way of this debate. Is Mark Cuban jealous because he wishes he had come up with YouTube? Is Fred Wilson just trying to hype something Web-related because he has a vested interest in another bubble, as Rob suggests in a comment on Fred’s most recent post? Has Bob Lefsetz been spending too much time with his hash-pipe recently? And so on.

To me, there’s a litle bit too much talk about how much YouTube will (or might) be worthl. I couldn’t care less. As was the case with Napster, I’d rather focus on how YouTube is changing (or could change) the old media model, just as Slingbox and other technologies are. And one of the ways it has done so has nothing to do with technology, as Jason Calacanis points out — and has everything to do with distribution. That’s where the real value lies.