Month: March 2007

Rumours of trouble at the San Francisco Chronicle (which came from Tim O’Reilly originally) have sparked much commentary, some of it insightful — and here I have to mention Dave Winer, whom I have had differences with in the past but who makes some worthwhile points about what papers need to do — and some of it, well, not so much. Like my friend Mark Evans, who has a long post here, I think Robert Scoble falls into the not-so-much category with his post about how newspapers are dead.

Are newspapers in trouble? Sure they are. And I would definitely agree that there hasn’t been enough thinking about (or investment in) the future from many newspapers, although I would argue that the Globe and Mail has been doing more than some of its competitors. But I don’t think it advances the debate any to throw around apocalyptic pronouncements — and I say that knowing full well that many people will discount what I’m saying because I work for a provider of dead-tree media.

Obviously, more people like Robert Scoble are getting their news from the Web — as am I, and other geek types. As Mark points out, however, plenty of people are also getting their news from free papers, which have been growing at an incredible rate. That definitely means trouble for the newspaper industry’s current business models, but not necessarily for print itself. But there are still hundreds of millions of people subscribing to newspapers, and likely will be for decades, even if that number decreases.

To me, part of the problem is that everyone focuses on the “paper” part of the word “newspaper,” which to me is the least important part of the term. There’s no question that the paper part of the business is decreasing in importance, and news may no longer be primarily distributed on smashed-up trees. Does that change the nature of the business? Definitely.

But it doesn’t mean newspaper companies have to die — it just means they need to evolve.

Further reading:

Doc Searls has some ideas about how to do that. Mike Arrington has some thoughts about journalism at CrunchNotes. Karoli at Odd Time Signatures has a few thoughts about the evolution as well (love the new blog design, Karoli). My friend Scott Karp has a long and typically insightful look at the paper business here. And Steven Hodson at Winextra notes that the equation is a little different for small-town or local papers, which I think is an important point.

After much rumour and innuendo, as well as some sabre-rattling in the direction of Google and YouTube — or at least Comedy Central-rattling — News Corp. and NBC have announced a joint venture to provide network television, movies and other content online. The hype-infested press release is here, and all of the Techmeme discussion is here. But the big question is: Will this be (as Google has reportedly dubbed it) Clown Co., or is it a YouTube-killer?

The press release makes it sound like the Second Coming: Full-length TV shows, video clips that you can “mashup” or whatever it is you kids call it on the Intarweb — and all free for the taking.

“Full episodes and clips from current hit shows, including Heroes, 24, House, My Name Is Earl, Saturday Night Live, Friday Night Lights, The Riches, 30 Rock, The Simpsons, The Tonight Show, Prison Break, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader and Top Chef….

… will be available free, on an ad-supported basis, within a rich consumer experience featuring personalized video playlists, mashups, online communities and video search.”

Sounds great, don’t it? Of course, as Mark Cuban notes here, the gap between press release promises and reality can be vast. How much of this content will be free versus pay — and how much will the fees be for the latter? What kind of DRM will be used? Will we be able to fast-forward, rewind, pause, etc.? Will only a few token clips (of the networks’ choosing) be provided for embedding or mashing? Mike Arrington has notes from the conference call, but many questions remain unanswered.

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 says the news is an admission that the content-creation business is dying, and he could be right. To me, the tone of the press release suggests that this particular Holy Grail is primarily an advertising venture — and that’s generally not a good sign. Like Valleywag, the first thing this reminded me of was MusicNet, the record companies’ much-hyped response to Napster, which crashed and burned shortly after leaving the runway.

Of course, the networks could provide all kinds of DRM-free content, free for the asking, embeddable anywhere, full-length, etc. Or not. My friend Paul Kedrosky thinks that NewTube could be successful enough that it and YouTube could co-exist for some time (although he is skeptical of NewTube’s ability to pick hits). Like Stan Schroeder at Frantic Industries, I’m willing to bet that NBC and News Corp. will find some way — or, more likely, dozens of ways — to screw this up royally.

Peter Rip, the venture capitalist and blogger whose point of view carries a fair bit of weight (at least with me), has a post that is getting a fair bit of commentary going on Techmeme, which he says that Web 2.0 is over, done (and possibly overdone as well), has jumped the shark, is finished, kaput, history, etc.

I would definitely agree that the buzzword Web 2.0 is getting long in the tooth, and he makes it clear it’s the buzzword he thinks has outlived its usefulness, not the concept of interactivity, or agile Web-based services. I’m not sure the Alexa charts he uses — which show a decline in traffic to TechCrunch, Gigaom and Technorati — are that persuasive, mostly because I think Alexa is fatally flawed, but the point is still well taken.

Update:

Valleywag has more on the Alexa issue here, and Mike Arrington points out that his traffic has just kept going up, which kind of undermines Peter’s thesis somewhat.

Peter also notes (as does Mark Evans here) that what we need now is more innovation when it comes to helping all the sites and services we have work better together, so that each one is no longer an island. The easy work has been done — the Ajaxification of everything, the rounded corners and pastel colours, the logo with the missing vowels, not to mention the cheap storage and server space provided by Amazon’s s3 and ec2.

Paul Kedrosky rightly says that we need to focus on what is changing and what it means, not on marketing mumbo-jumbo. And whenever I hear the term Web 2.0 now, I think of Tim Berners-Lee’s response last year, in which he argued that the kinds of interactivity most people mean when they use the phrase are just the Web, period — not one-point-this or two-point-that.

A piece from the New York Times has reignited the debate over online advertising and the monetization of the “long tail” of the Web, one that got a boost recently with a post from Jeremy Liew, a venture capitalist at Lightspeed Venture Partners, who noted that in order to build a business with $50-million in revenue — pretty small beer in most circles — a site would have to have about gazillion page views a month (I’m rounding up).

As the ever-insightful Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 writes, this rather depressing arithmetic exposes a fundamental problem with online advertising: namely, that the pricing is all out of whack when compared with regular print media, or pretty much any other “real world” media for that matter.

In a nutshell, most advertisers and ad agencies still see online advertising as something akin to direct mail, or junk mail, as most people refer to it. In other words, you send out billions of impressions a day and hope that some moron decides to send in that coupon, or sign up for your special travel deals, or order your Cialis knockoffs, or whatever. And my friend Rob Hyndman suggests that they might be right to see it that way.

As Scott and others have pointed out, however, this perception also has a lot to do with the fact that advertisers are still focused solely on the page view, and in part the Web industry is itself to blame for that, since page views are still one of the primary yardsticks by which sites measure themselves and others. Until we come up with something better — some measure of engagement, broadly defined — online advertising is going to languish.

My oldest daughter Caitlin has been applying to universities (yes, that means I’m old — please don’t remind me) and most of them ask for some kind of personal statement about your abilities, etc. And I was really, really tempted to submit this, which was written by this guy:

“I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.

I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I’m bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding.”

Continue reading “I have been caller number nine…”

Is all the fuss about Twitter much ado about nothing, as Shakespeare put it? Is Twitter the crack of the Internet, as my friend Mark puts it? Is it a useful way of staying connected to friends, and keeping track of your thoughts — as Tara “Miss Rogue” Hunt has said? Or is it a waste of time designed for the self-obsessed and those with short attention spans or attention-deficit disorders? Is it all Robert Scoble’s fault?

The answer to all of those questions, of course, is yes. Except for the Scoble one; I don’t really have an opinion on that, although I will point out that the Third Law of the Blogosphere reads: “When in doubt, blame Robert Scoble.” I wrote a bit about the Twitter phenomenon a few days ago, in this post, and described it as “noise, but also signal,” and I’m sticking with that.

Twitter.com may seem like a throwaway fad — the Hula Hoop or Pet Rock of Web 2.0 — and perhaps it is. But I also think it is another piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding how we relate to each other in an online world, and how those relationship mechanisms are changing. Instant messaging and Second Life and blogs and Digg and Facebook are all pieces of that puzzle too.

Can Twitter be irritating? Of course it can. So can email, and so can the telephone or a conversation in a bar. But we still use or engage in those things. It’s worthwhile remembering that even Alexander Graham Bell never expected the phone to be used for business — he saw it as an entertainment device. I wonder what he would have thought of Twitter.

Further reading:

The always insightful Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users has a great post looking at the benefits but also the downside of a “continuous partial attention” app such as Twitter and its potential effect on our lives.

Coming so soon after the company bought a social networking platform (Tribe.net), Cisco’s $3.2-billion acquisition of WebEx makes it clear that the network equipment company’s interest in matters of the Web is more than just a passing fancy (although I suppose that it’s possible deals of that size qualify as a fancy at a giant like Cisco, which has a market cap of about $155-billion).

In any case, WebEx is an interesting purchase to make. I think Om is right that the service makes a natural pawn (or maybe a rook) in the chess game with Microsoft for supremacy in the in-between world of Web and desktop for corporate users. And from that point of view the deal makes a certain amount of sense as a positioning effort.

However, I also think Rafe Needleman makes an excellent point in his post at Webware, which has the wonderful title: “Cisco buys WebEx for the land — the product is a teardown.” Having used the service more than once, I can attest to the fact that in most cases it is difficult to configure and a pain in the ass to use, in contrast to more flexible (and cheaper) Web services such as Vyew.com and Adobe’s Connect.

In that sense, the deal doesn’t look quite so great — and the valuation looks rich at best. Paul Kedrosky asks whether Cisco even knows what it wants to be when it grows up.

There’s no question that online video has become a phenomenon over the past year or so, whether it’s the rise of YouTube and “user generated” stars like Lonelygirl15 or IsabellaBrave or the increasing use of video blogs by politicians such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And the $1-billion Viacom suit against YouTube only reinforces the power struggles that are taking place in this new universe.

Online video and the revolution it is helping to power is a big part of what we’re going to be discussing at the mesh conference in Toronto on May 30 and 31, and so we wanted to reach out to the community and hopefully find our own version of that fantastic “The machine is us/ing us” video that has been making the rounds of late.

My fellow mesh organizer Rob Hyndman has written a great post on the mesh blog with more details about the contest we’ve set up. Check it out and then get out that video camera!

So Viacom has slapped Google (or YouTube) with a $1-billion lawsuit for blatant copyright infringement on a massive scale, according to the entertainment conglomerate’s claim. On a side note, have you ever noticed how people invariably get slapped with lawsuits? Not just hit — slapped. And a big thick lawsuit would hurt, I bet. Especially legal paper.

But seriously, is anyone surprised by this? I’m willing to admit that Viacom might have a point about a few things, such as the copies of copyrighted material that pop up right after a clip is taken down, or the inability to search for more than 1,000 clips, etc. But those are really technicalities and Viacom knows it. It doesn’t even seem to be trying to make a real case under the DMCA.

I still think that the lawsuit — which Cynthia Brumfield at IPDemocracy correctly describes as “puffy and fluffy” — is really just another case of negotiation by other means, just like the notice and takedown letter about the 100,000 clips. I would also agree with Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget that it is unlikely to be successful.

I also think that, regardless of the merits of the case (which are not nearly as strong as Viacom’s blustering press release implies) my friend Paul Kedrosky is right, and this lawsuit is fundamentally just dumb. Not necessarily wrong in a legal sense — but still dumb.

If you can’t wait until the mesh conference (May 30 and 31 in Toronto) to talk about all the interesting things that are happening on the Web and how they are changing media, marketing, business and society, then come on out to the next mesh social event. The first one at the Irish Embassy was so much fun that we decided to have another one.

It’s taking place on March 28 at the Charlotte Room, which is just east of King and Spadina in Toronto, and we’ve got most of the bar booked — and all of the pool tables (check the Upcoming page here for more details or to see who else is coming). Come on down to have a few drinks and connect, share and inspire.

Let’s mesh!

Just a quick administrative note to all of my devoted readers (hi Mom) that I am on vacation for the next week or so, and so blogging is likely to be erratic at best. In the meantime, please enjoy some photos I took last year when I was doing pretty much the same thing I am doing now.

It seems as though everyone has an opinion on Twitter, the instant-messaging style app that Blogger founder Ev Williams shut down Odeo to focus on (wise decision, that). Pete Cashmore says that it’s another way to blog about your cat, while Karoli at Drumsnwhistles just doesn’t see the point — and in the comments on her blog, Robert Scoble says Twitter hate is “the new black.”

It’s an interesting idea, Twitter — and in many ways a natural evolution of (or accessory to) Evan’s original creation, Blogger. And the name is perfect, since it conveys precisely the kind of instantaneous, frivolous, and maybe even scatter-brained nature of the app itself, like a bird twittering. Not singing, but twittering.

I blame Austin Hill of Billions with Zero Knowledge for getting me on to Twitter, even though he has never mentioned it to me. I signed up because a couple of friends had mentioned it, and then I started seeing Austin’s updates from the TED conference pop up regularly in my Google Talk window as feeds from his Twitter — and on his blog in a little Twitter widget. I thought it was a pretty cool way of sending out short thoughts.

In fact, it reminds me a lot of what my 17-year-old daughter and her friends do with their instant messaging accounts, where they change their login names every hour or two to let everyone know how they’re feeling — complete with many emoticons and other strange characters — or include some lyrics from a favourite song, etc. And they do the same with their Facebook profiles, where they post updates every hour or so.

Is this obsessive behaviour in some sense? Possibly. And I can see the point made by many, that these kinds of continuous interruptions don’t really add anything important. And yet, I still find it interesting. We want to be connected, I think, and anything that helps us do that is useful in some way — even if it results in noise that we have to tune out sometimes.