Month: May 2007

Some good points in David Pogue’s latest Circuits column in the New York Times, about how much there is left to do with what we call "Web 2.0." He writes about how there should be a social web that updates people about the latest flu virus or bug going around (although there’s kind of something like that already — too bad the domain name Sickr.com is taken by some German outfit), and about how there’s a British site that allows people to set up civic petitions of all kinds and vote on them. Some good business ideas in there.

(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t sound like a legend on the phone. He sounds like a friendly, slightly absent-minded scientist — which isn’t surprising, since that’s pretty much what he was before he invented the World Wide Web in 1990 while working at a particle-physics research lab in Switzerland, and along the way became a legend. He says he has a rule that anyone who calls him Sir (he received a knighthood from the Queen in 2004) “has to buy a round of drinks.”

In a phone call from Banff, where he was taking part in the 16th annual International World Wide Web Conference, Sir Tim talked about what he sees as the future of the “semantic Web” — in which not just websites will be connected together, but all kinds of data everywhere will be interconnected — and also some of the things he thinks could put the future of the Web at risk, such as the potential for large telecom companies to try and control the flow of data.

Globe: What sorts of things are you talking about at the conference?

TBL: “There are a number of trends happening on the Web. For example, there are pragmatic trends, such as the fact that we’re starting to see people using all kinds of small, portable devices to access the Web, as well as now huge screens. So the question is how do you make a web site that takes advantage of the big screen, when you’re planning a trip or whatever, but still works on a small screen when you’re checking your flights. The Web is also getting more into developing countries, so the number of people and the number of cultures on the Web is exploding… so that’s exciting. And then there’s the work we’re doing on the idea of the semantic Web.”

Globe: What do you mean when you use the term “semantic Web?”

TBL: “It’s a way of taking the data that is in lots and lots of different systems and connecting it together — for example, in a company or a database — and not just connecting it together, but realizing that it’s part of a community, that there are partners and suppliers and customers who all want to see and use this data in different ways. There’s a lot of excitement in the life sciences about doing this, where there are scientists looking for drugs and so on, and they have huge amounts of different sources of data. They’re looking for creative solutions to medical problems, but not everyone who is working on the problem has access to the right data.”

Continue reading “A chat with the Father of the Web”

I know, you’re probably kicking yourself for missing the latest mesh meetup — a social event aimed at poli-bloggers and various other hangers-on, fellow travelers, etc. that we had last night at the Charlotte Room. And so you should, because we had a great time without you 🙂

Liberal blogger Jason Cherniak showed up, as did Steve “Angry in the Great White North” Janke, and our good friend Andrew “call me Andrew” Coyne, who held court at the bar (as is his wont) until well into the evening.

We also had Mike “On the Attack” Brock– who has a new talk show called the Al and Mike Show — and many other luminaries, including Saleem and Kareem Khan, Leila Boujnane and her cohort from Idee, David “Troublemaker” Crow, Jevon MacDonald of Firestoker and a host of others (if you were there and I missed you, please let me know).

Obligatory mesh blurb:

mesh is only a few weeks away, and we have tons of great speakers and panels (see the full schedule here), and tickets are going quickly, so get your butt over to the site and grab a few, etc. etc.

It may not be a $1.6-billion takeover, but Joost seems to be doing pretty well nevertheless, attracting $45-million in funding from a group of backers — including CBS and Viacom, two of the TV networks it has signed content deals with. Obviously, they have decided that Joost is the horse they want to put their money on when it comes to Internet television. As Om notes, among the other investors are Sequoia Partners (also a backer of YouTube) and Index Ventures, whose partner Danny Rimer made a gazillion or so dollars by investing in Skype before it was bought by eBay. So I would imagine that he probably likes Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom just a little bit.

Nick O’Neill of Webpreneur says that Joost is about to pull off “one of the biggest fear-driven deals in history” by playing on the networks’ fear of the Internet, and Kara Swisher says on her Boom Town blog that the networks like it because “It looks and feels like a replication of the old television broadcast model,” which is a point I have also made in the past.

The alarm:clock blog says you will watch Joost, but Adario Strange at Wired’s Epicenter blog says it’s too buggy and too much trouble. And over at NewTeeVee, Om Malik makes some excellent points about the growth of Joost and the weaknesses of the peer-to-peer model for something like video. The bottom line: It may not be as easy to do as it was for voice with Skype. Meanwhile, Heather Green has some comments from investor Danny Rimer about what makes Joost so great.

They’re baaaack. The rumours about eBay buying StumbleUpon have resurfaced, but this time it’s the Wall Street Journal that is breathing new life into the story — a tale that was sparked first by TechCrunch back in April. At that point, the site — which was created by Garrett Camp and two university friends in Calgary — was rumoured to have talked with Google and Yahoo as well as eBay, and the price was said to be in the $45-million range. Now, according to the WSJ, it’s more like $75-million. Not bad for a site that has 2 million users.

Does it make sense for eBay? When the rumours first surfaced I wrote a post saying that I didn’t get it, and I still don’t. Muhammad Saleem at ProNet and Pete Cashmore at Mashable wrote about how they could see it working, but I still don’t buy it. Maybe eBay has some kind of grand vision that I’m not seeing — or maybe it’s just desperate for growth of any kind. Scot Wingo at eBay Strategies has some more thoughts on it, and Valleywag says the only explanation is that eBay just has way too much money on its hands from its online auction monopoly.

Update:

Michael Geist has a typically well-argued post on the latest Warner Brothers camcordering nonsense here.

Original post:

(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

When you go to see a movie, do you get irritated by the guys sitting in front of you with their video cameras pointed at the screen, illegally “camcordering” the film? I don’t, because I’ve never seen one, although I’ve been to my share of premieres, including (most recently) Spider-Man 3. And yet, Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century Fox and other Hollywood studios have been screaming and yelling for some time now about how Canada is a hotbed of piracy. In the latest move, Warner Bros. said on Tuesday that it will no longer hold preview screenings in Canada.

So that means no more previews of Warner Bros. movies before the main attraction at your local multiplex? Well, no. The studio said that it is cancelling all “promotional and word-of-mouth” screenings. Those are the special showings that occur just before a big movie hits the theatres, which are usually open only to contest winners, movie reviewers, people who see an ad, and so on — in other words, a pretty unlikely place for someone to bring in a camcorder under their shirt. So if Warner’s move strikes you as mostly a symbolic gesture, that’s because it probably is — a gesture aimed primarily at keeping the pressure on Parliament to bring in new anti-piracy legislation.

There have been other gestures as well. Studios and movie distributors have been lobbying to have Canada placed on a high-priority international piracy “watchlist” along with countries like China and Russia. And Twentieth Century Fox made some vague threats earlier this year to hold back some of its top movies from Canadian release, because the risk of piracy was reportedly so high. One Fox executive said in January that Canadian cam-corder copies were “like an out-of-control epidemic,” and that the country had become “a leading source of worldwide Internet film piracy.” He said Canada accounted for close to 50 per cent of illegal camcorder copies.

As Ottawa law professor Dr. Michael Geist and others have pointed out before, however, there are a number of flaws in the movie studios’ argument — including the fact that there is no tangible evidence for that 50 per cent figure. The International Intellectual Property Alliance, which includes the Motion Picture Association of America, has previously said that Canada is only responsible for about 20 per cent of camcorder copies. And even though that number still seems high, the MPAA has said only 179 of the 1,400 movies released between 2004 and 2006 were camcorded (Warner says 70 per cent of its movies were camcorded over the last 18 months).

Dr. Geist notes that one of the most recent studies of movie piracy found the majority of illegally copied movies – over 75 per cent — come from review copies or early releases that are sent to movie industry insiders, including reviewers at newspapers and magazines. Piracy experts say that camcorder copies are really only in demand for that brief window between when a movie is released for preview screenings and when the DVD is released. Canada obviously has DVD copiers too, but no one is saying we are an international leader (at least not yet).

Is camcordering a movie and selling millions of copies wrong? Of course it is — and we already have laws that make that a crime, although movie studios and distributors say they are too difficult to enforce. But it doesn’t help when the industry uses hyperbole and inflated numbers to try and make its case.

It’s only a few weeks until mesh 2007 — you can find more info at the site, including the full schedule of speakers and times, and there are still a few tickets left here, although they are going quickly — but there’s still time for one last mesh social event. So tomorrow night, we’re having a mesh meetup aimed at the political end of the Web 2.0 spectrum.

So if you want to hang with some other poli-bloggers and get revved up about the mesh panel with Andrew Coyne, Garth Turner, Phil de Vellis and Scott Feschuk — which will be looking at how the Web is changing politics — this is your chance. It starts at about 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Charlotte Room, which is near the intersection of King West and Spadina in Toronto. There’s more details and you can sign up at the Upcoming page.

Aaron Swartz is a pretty smart guy — after all, he co-authored the RSS 1.0 standard for feeds when he was just 14 years old, and while still in his teens was working with Lawrence Lessig on some of the plumbing behind the Creative Commons initiative. He has also edited thousands of Wikipedia articles, and was a co-founder of Reddit, the Digg-style social news engine that was recently bought by Conde Nast.

Phil Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped has posted a lengthy interview he did with Aaron via instant messaging, in which the 21-year-old talks about working at Conde Nast (he says he was asked to leave — and has made it clear he didn’t like working there, in blog posts such as the one I wrote about here), as well as his reaction to job offers from Google, his thoughts about Wikipedia and his views on sexism in the tech community. An interesting read. Aaron isn’t too clear about what he’s doing now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was something pretty interesting.

Update:

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch says he has been able to confirm the deal with some “senior people” (the Valleywag rumour was apparently the work of an “overzealous employee,” according to Mike — a little professional jealousy?), and the price is $250-million. Not bad for something that had revenue of about $6-million last year. Pete Cashmore at Mashable says that he has also confirmed the deal is happening. Mike runs the numbers on the deal in an update.

Original post:

Given the source, we should probably take this with a rather large container of salt, but Valleywag says that Photobucket is about to be acquired by MySpace. Rumour or not, this makes a lot of sense to me — a whole lot more sense than Microsoft and Yahoo, last week’s favourite rumour. Yes, the two have been feuding rather publicly, but that’s because their services are so intertwined with each other. Photobucket accounts for more than 70 per cent of MySpace’s photo traffic, according to Hitwise. In other words, it has pretty much the same relationship to MySpace as PayPal had to eBay way back when.

It made sense for eBay to bring PayPal in house, and I think it would make a lot of sense for MySpace to do the same. And Photobucket has reportedly been on the auction block — the only issue now is whether MySpace will pay what the company’s backers are looking for. I would say this one has an 80-per-cent chance of actually happening.

I have a lot of (okay, some) respect for Warren Kinsella, the political advisor/blogger/aging punk rocker who writes an op-ed column for the National Post. He speaks his mind, and sticks to his principles, and I admire the fact that his band is called Shit From Hell. But I have to say that his latest op-ed piece — about the rise of blogs versus Old Media — is kind of lame.

In his piece, Warren argues that the bid by Thomson for Reuters (along with Rupert Murdoch’s takeover offer for Dow Jones) discredits one of the latest theories about the media — namely, the theory that “the much-trumpeted New Media (to wit, the Internet and its bastard children, such as Web logs and the banned-at-Queen’s-Park Facebook) are about to supplant the Old Media.” Gather round, kids — this is what we call a “Straw Man” argument, in which a columnist creates a facile position (allegedly held by his opponents), which he then proceeds to dismantle with the greatest of ease.

Warren goes on to say that “the buzz about the New Media juggernaut has been, perhaps, a tad overdone,” and that “rumours of the traditional, mainstream media’s demise are somewhat exaggerated.” He also says that “most of the commentary that takes place online depends entirely upon the efforts of Old Media” (a phenomenon I am no doubt contributing to with this post).

We’ve heard this particular song before — bloggers just parrot or comment on what appears in the press, therefore they are parasites, etc. As Nick Carr has noted, however, not all parasites are bad. In any case, the part that bugged me about Warren’s piece was that no one I can think of (no one with a lick of sense, at any rate) has ever argued that blogs and Internet media will *replace* everything we associate with Old Media.

Enhance and extend, yes. Comment on, critique, yes (something columnists do as well, I might add). Expand, add to, help to illuminate, in some cases fact-check, certainly. But replace? Hardly. In other words, it’s easy to dismantle that particular argument, because it’s absurd.