Month: April 2007

What MySpace has done with Photobucket — blocking users from posting video clips that are hosted at Photobucket — is totally understandable and hardly surprising, particularly given the company’s past behaviour, as Mike Arrington at TechCrunch points out. It’s in MySpace’s interests to constrain its users in that sense, and it no doubt seems like a great idea every time someone brings it up at one of the board meetings with News Corp. types (see update below).

Regardless of how obvious and unsurprising it might be, I think MySpace is making a mistake. The tendency to try and wall users in, or control what they are posting, or force them to use your tools, takes you down a road that inevitably leads to what I call AOHell. That’s what people used to call America Online, back in the good old days of the late 1990s — and not just because they kept bombarding you with sign-up disks and/or made it virtually impossible to cancel your account once you got trapped in their spider’s web. AOL was the quintessential walled garden of content, and it virtually killed the company, and TimeWarner along with it.

Yes, it’s good to be aware of what MySpace controls and doesn’t control if you are a user, and you may want to look at getting your own blog somewhere else, as the Scobleizer recommends. And it’s good for companies to be aware of how much their business depends on someone else, as Om points out. But that doesn’t make what MySpace is doing any less stupid.

As Steve O’Hear notes at ZDNet, part of what helped MySpace take over from Friendster as the king of the social-networking scene was that it was more open and allowed users to do more. Notice that I didn’t say “do more, but only with MySpace’s built-in tools.” Greg Sterling of Screenwerk found the quote I was trying to recall from News Corp.’s COO about people sponging off MySpace.

Update:

According to a statement from Fox Interactive Media that Om has posted, MySpace blocked Photobucket because the company was encouraging its users to post clips promoting an “ad-sponsored” video contest. My point remains the same. Should MySpace allow users to post things with ads that come from other companies? I know it’s counterintuitive, but I would argue that it should. Either you’re a social network or you’re not. Tony Hung has more.

Everyone seems pretty excited at news that Google has invested a whopping $1-million (say it with a Doctor Evil sneer — it’s more fun) in Maxthon, the browser that seems to have taken China by storm. Mike Arrington at TechCrunch says that it’s just part of a larger strategic arrangement between the two, and that set tongues wagging all over the blogosphere.

What does Google have in mind for Maxthon? What does this mean for Firefox? I don’t think it means much of anything, to tell you the truth. And it’s not just the fact that $1-million is about what Google spends on anchovies for the free gourmet pizza they serve in the Googleplex cafeteria every Wednesday afternoon. I also can’t see Google getting all worked up about a browser that is effectively an add-on for Internet Exploder Explorer.

And yes, I know you can change the rendering engine to Gecko (which powers the Firefox browser). It’s still an add-on, or a front end, or whatever you want to call it. And yes, it has lots of cool features, and I know it had tabs before IE. Whatever. I think the main interest for Google is the Chinese angle, and the fact that converting Maxthon’s built-in search to Google power would be a foot in the door where Baidu currently dominates.

Surfing through my feed reader this morning, I came across a post from Kareem Mayan about why he left a job at Fox Interactive Media (the News Corp. unit that controls MySpace). The bottom line — at least from my reading of his post — is that while he got to do some interesting things at the company, he just didn’t feel challenged or motivated.

Kareem, who I met at last year’s mesh conference and is originally from Toronto, is a smart young guy who I’m sure lots of companies would jump at hiring. But he left to run a small startup that is working on something in the field of education. Why? Here’s what he says:

“After too many days of being miserable, I realized it was because I wasn’t happy with my job. I was earning a lot of money, had just gotten a promotion, lived in a beautiful apartment near the beach with my rad girlfriend, but none of it was floating my boat.”

If you’re a big company like FIM or News Corp., you need people like Kareem — but you are destined to lose them because doing something challenging and meaningful means more than having a big job with a fancy title and a nice raise or a corner office.

Just one thing, Kareem: Can I have your beautiful apartment near the beach? 🙂

“When Anu the Sublime, King of the Anunaki, and Bel, the lord of Heaven and earth, who decreed the fate of the land, assigned to Marduk, the over-ruling son of Ea, God of righteousness, dominion over earthly man…” (the Code of Hammurabi)

I have a lot of respect for Tim O’Reilly. He seems like a standup guy, and I think he wants what’s best for everyone after the whole Kathy Sierra incident. But I’m going to have to agree with Mike Arrington, Dave Taylor, Tony Hung and others (including Jeff Jarvis, Marketing Pilgrim and Ryan Sholin) that Tim’s proposed “code of conduct” for the blogosphere — which comes complete with either a cheesy sheriff’s badge or a stick of dynamite icon for the sidebar of your blog — is a dumb idea. Well-meaning, but dumb.

Tim’s post on the code is here, and there’s a New York Times story on it here, which notes that Tim and Jimmy Wales have been working together to put the code together (if I were being mean, I would suggest that what Jimmy really needs is a better code for dealing with Wikipedia frauds like Essjay). And it is worthwhile remembering that Tim’s code is a first draft. The code is to be developed through a wiki-style process.

My friend Rob Hyndman is right that the impulse for this code is a good one. We do need to take ownership of our communities, and how we behave in them, even if those communities are made up of a few blogs roped together by a common interest. And as Cynthia Brumfield notes at IPDemocracy, comparing a voluntary code of conduct with Iran — as the Scobleizer does — is really going over the top.

Tony says that all we need is a well-formed and clearly stated comment policy, and it’s interesting that even the head of Waggener Erdstrom (Microsoft’s PR agency) isn’t in favour of the code. (If you’re interested in a different badge than the ones Tim is offering, check out Accordion Guy’s version here).

I think part of what is appealing about the blogosphere (at least for me) is that it is still to some extent a Wild West-type frontier, — although the settlers and landowners are definitely moving in — and with that comes the risk of unpleasant behaviour. What happened to Kathy Sierra, and has happened to others, should not be tolerated. But I think codes of conduct should be a personal matter, rather than a quasi-legislated thing. Just my two cents.

P.S.

Wish I had thought to go with the “badges — we don’t need no stinking badges” thing instead of the Code of Hammurabi. Oh well. A bunch of people popped up with the line in the comments section of Tim’s blog, which incidentally has some comments that are well worth reading. For further reading, Shelley Powers cuts to the chase as usual, Tom Evslin has a typically thoughtful piece, and Tristan Louis takes a long look at the issues as well.

Joi Ito has a great post about how Twitter is a lot like SMS — something that most of the developed world (and even some of the less developed world) has been used to for some time now, but which still strikes most of us in North American as a novelty.

“Twitter was funny for me because it was like the whole “laptop crowd” getting the “aha” that Europe and Asia had with SMS awhile back…

…the idea that the Internet isn’t about “cyberspace” that turns on when you open your laptop, but that the Internet was something that you could carry around with you and that could ping you when it needed you.”

I wonder what non-North American readers think of all the hand-wringing about how Twitter and similar apps are going to destroy our lives.

Lots of chat going on about Paul Graham’s post on Microsoft and how it is dead. As my friend Tony Hung points out over at Deep Jive Interests, this is a wonderful piece of linkbait from the noted programmer and angel investor behind Y Combinator and Startup Camp. But I still think that Paul has put his finger on something important.

It’s obvious that even Paul Graham doesn’t believe that Mr. Softee is actually dead — and he admits near the end that the company is clearly still alive as a business entity, since it has tens of billions of dollars pouring in every month. What he seems to be arguing is that the software behemoth is no longer dangerous, no longer competitively interesting. In other words, it is boring — in the same way that IBM became boring in the 1980s, after Microsoft came along.

Tony is right that Microsoft is stll extremely powerful, and rich, and therefore has the luxury of time. And even for fans of Google and web-based apps like me, it’s obvious that MSFT will be a force for some time to come. But Paul is still making an important point, which is that Microsoft is no longer doing the things that appear to be the future — whether it’s the future of search, or mobile apps, or web apps. It is the IBM of the new century.

According to Talking Biz News, the writers-turned-bloggers at Business 2.0 magazine — who were directed to start blogs by editor Josh Quittner — have received their first paycheques based on their blogs. As part of the deal that saw everyone start blogging, Quittner said he would be paying his writers a bonus based on how much traffic their blogs got.

The Business 2.0 editor — who watched one of his writers, Om Malik, leave the magazine to start his blog empire last year — says the top blogs at the magazine, including Business 2.0 Beta, got cheques that were in the thousands of dollars. Others got cheques for hundreds of dollars, and some got less than $100. The lowest-earning, says Quittner, also got a little advice about maybe reconsidering the subject matter or approach of their blogs.

This is a fascinating experiment, as far as I’m concerned. Will the payments that the top bloggers are getting start to breed resentment within the Business 2.0 offices? Will some of the lowest-earning bloggers change their strategy to try and boost traffic? How soon until someone tries a few SEO black-hat techniques, like ghost linking to sites about mesothelioma?

Sam Zell — the so-called “vulture capital” investor whose nickname is “The Grave Dancer” — knows a lot about real estate, but does he know anything about newspapers and/or the Internet? Hard to say. But his first statement about the latter, in a story in the Washington Post, doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. In fact, I think it shows he has a lot left to learn.

Sam has apparently decided to parrot the line taken by a Belgian copyright agency and by the World Newspaper Association, among others, who argue that Google News is “stealing” content from newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune (which Zell just acquired), and needs to be stopped. This simply isn’t true, as I have argued before, including here and here. On the contrary, newspapers get a tremendous benefit from being indexed by Google News, just as websites get a tremendous benefit from being indexed by Google’s search.

In the Q&A session after a speech, Zell drops this incredible bomb:

“If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?” Zell said during the question period after his speech. “Not very.”

Either Zell is trying to be deliberately provocative, or he’s a complete ignoramus. Number one, Google makes virtually nothing from Google News — since the search engine doesn’t sell advertising on any of its news content pages — and number two, even if all the newspaper content from all the major newspapers were removed from the search engine, Google would no doubt still be happily making billions of dollars.

Nice to see that Jason Calacanis agrees with me. He has a rant about Zell here.

Note:

In other Google News-related news, Agence-France Press has signed a deal with Google, after suing the search engine for using its content — a deal that sounds very similar to the one Associated Press signed after launching a similar suit.

No doubt newspapers are hoping for a similar type of outcome, in which Google (presumably) pays them for their content. But Danny Sullivan makes an interesting point about the AP and AFP settlements: much of the traffic that newspapers are geting now will likely dry up, since any hits that used to go to wire stories from AP and AFP will now go to the original posted at Google News, rather than the copies at any AP or AFP member newspapers.

Given the amount of wire copy that most newspapers rely on to fill their website and print editions, that could become a serious Achilles heel.

Update:

Lucas Grindley has posted a comment on my media blog with a link to his blog, where he argues that Mr. Zell might be right, and that newspapers should a) resign from AP if it doesn’t stop providing their content to Google, and b) charge a fee to Google for indexing stories, and force the search engine to provide only headlines instead of the whole first paragraph.

With all due respect to Lucas, his theory about Google News being some Machiavellian effort to increase remnant inventory on newspaper websites so they are forced to use AdSense is ridiculous. Google indexes newspapers and sends readers to their sites — monetizing that traffic is up to them. If they fail, that is hardly Google’s fault.

And holding back news, or charging fees to Google to index newspaper headlines, is equally ridiculous. Does Sam Zell charge the real estate section of the newspaper to list his properties? No, he pays them. Same principle.

Further reading:

More on Zell’s comments from Rex Hammock, Frank Gruber at Somewhat Frank and Doc Searls, and there’s also an excellent and insightful post (as always) from my friend Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests. Ad Age magazine also has a good look at the issue here, and makes the point that newspapers aren’t like real estate (although they might once have been). And David Olive has a nice opinion piece at the Toronto Star as well — thanks to Tony for pointing that one out to me.

From Marshall Kirkpatrick at Splashcast comes word of an interesting development at YouTube: the launch of a dedicated politics “channel,” hosted (if that’s the right word) by news and politics editor Steve Grove, which aims to aggregate all the political video clips that get uploaded to the Tube (so far there are only 10, and the channel has about 500 subscribers).

But I would expect this channel is going to involve more than just aggregating — or at least I hope so. I (and plenty of other people) have already seen Steve Grove interview Phil De Vellis, aka ParkRidge47, about why he created the Hillary Clinton Vote Different/1984 video, and if the new YouTube “editor” does more of that kind of interviewing things could get very interesting indeed (Phil De Vellis, incidentally, is going to be a panelist at the upcoming mesh conference in Toronto, which I am helping to organize).

With YouTube hosting a politics channel, and Huffington Post working with NewAssignment.net to field a bunch of citizen journalists, the upcoming U.S. election campaign could be very interesting indeed. If YouTube were still a small startup, this might be seen as a “power to the people” kind of move, but now that the video site is part of the Googleplex, there are already some — like Republican media strategist David All — who are concerned about the amount of power and influence Google has.

Wired magazine has been adding blogs over the past little while, and one of the new ones that I haven’t checked out until recently is GeekDad. Last night I took a look at it (after someone in the TorCamp “chat swarm” on Skype mentioned it), and it’s a pretty good read — and very eclectic. So I scanned the list of authors, and noticed some familiar names, including:

• Chris Anderson, Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief
• Steve Jurvetson, founding partner of Draper Fisher Jurvetson
• Kevin Kelly, editor at large for Wired magazine
• Warren Packard, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson
• Thomas Hawk, CEO of Zooomr
• Adam Grosser of Foundation Capital
• Andrew Anker, general manager of Six Apart
• Todd Lappin, inventor of the Telstar Logistics parking scam

All in all, quite a high-powered list of geek dads. I will definitely be keeping an eye on what they post, even if all my youngest daughter cares about right now is Webkinz — which the Globe had a story about today.

Update:

Bambi Francisco has decided to leave her job at Marketwatch and run Vator.tv full-time, which I think is the right move to make, and I wish her well. And Pete Cashmore notes that the whole conflict of interest brouhaha (or is it more of a kerfuffle?) has actually been pretty good marketing for Vator.

Original post:

When is a conflict of interest not a conflict of interest? When it involves a Web startup, apparently. Both the Wall Street Journal and ZDNet have written about Vator.tv, and how one of the key players behind the company — which does interviews with CEOs of various startups — is Bambi Francisco, the wonderfully-named tech writer for Marketwatch.com.

There are a couple of obvious problem with this, one of the first being that interviewing CEOs of startups is Bambi’s actual job, and now she is starting a company to do that separate from Marketwatch. But it gets worse: according to both the WSJ and ZDNet, Ms. Francisco owns a stake in Vator.tv, and her main partner and financial backer in the venture is none other than Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal and now a venture capitalist. Bambi’s coverage at Marketwatch has also mentioned both Mr. Thiel and some of the various technology companies that he has invested in or advises.

Could this be any more clear-cut an example of conflict? I don’t see how. And yet, Marketwatch editor David Callaway tells ZDNet that:

“the rigid rules of the past may not always apply to new media. Is there a potential for a conflict in Bambi’s case? Yes. Do I think we can avoid it? Yes.”

Matt Marshall of VentureBeat seems to feel that Ms. Francisco has been wronged in some way by the coverage of this story, and that it is “a non-scandal,” and many may agree with him. I am not one of them. However, he also comes to what I think is the correct conclusion: Bambi has to leave Marketwatch (to avoid what he calls “complications,” and what I would call conflicts). Either that or she has to sever her financial relationship with Vator, or make Marketwatch a partner in the venture.

An internal memo from David Callaway to Marketwatch staff is here, but it doesn’t do much to clarify the situation (at least not to me). Let’s review one thing that Mr. Callaway seems to have missed: A conflict of interest doesn’t exist or not exist because *you* say it does — it’s something that your readers or viewers get to decide on. And in many cases, the appearance of a conflict is just as bad as having an actual conflict. Staci Kramer at PaidContent is right — making this about old vs. new media is a copout.

Meant to blog this earlier when I came across it, but a guy named Matt — a student at Stanford studying design and business — wrote a post the other day about a couple of special visitors who came to his class: Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the co-founders of YouTube. Matt says that he had the good fortune to go out to lunch with the two new multimillionaires, and asked them what the keys to the company’s success were.

The answer is fairly succinct, and not exactly a secret either, but still worth repeating: the first key to success was the ability to embed video, and the second was an infrastructure that allowed the site to scale quickly and easily. Sounds simple, but the first was unique when YouTube offered it — and I would argue it was also by far the most important of the two factors — and the second is a lot harder than it sounds.

Liz Gannes has a great post over at Om Malik’s NewTeeVee site that looks at Vimeo, a video-sharing site that I must admit I had kind of overlooked in the frenzy of interest over YouTube and Revver and so on. She describes how the site got started as a personal project launched by Jakob Lodwick and Zach Klein, the twenty-something founders of CollegeHumor.com, which was bought by media mogul Barry Diller’s Interactive Corp last August (Jakob and Zach also co-founded BustedTees.com).

According to Liz, Vimeo has shied away from the upload-anything, celebrity-focused, copyright-infringing YouTube approach and tried to focus on the home-movie crowd. The founders say they are trying to reinvent home movies for the Internet age, not reinventing television — an approach I think is in some ways much more appealing — and the site doesn’t even list the most-viewed videos, the way most such sites do.

But one of the most fascinating things about the NewTeeVee post for me was the video clip that Liz embedded from founder Jakob Lodwick, which I have embedded here. I highly recommend it.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/155054 w=400&h=300]

If you’re in Toronto and you’re interested in the future of journalism, and how it’s being affected by blogs and other forms of “social media” or “crowdsourcing” or “citizen journalism” — or whatever we’re calling it now — feel free to brave the sudden return of winter and come on by the University of Toronto tonight for what I hope will be a lively and informative discussion.

Yours truly is on a panel with my friend and former National Post journalist Mark Evans and advertising buyer Hugh Dow, on a panel moderated by the lovely and talented Amber MacArthur, the new media specialist for CityNews. It’s at the Robert Gill Theatre at 241 College Street and attendance is free, but seating is limited. You can register here.