Month: August 2007

I guess it wouldn’t be a weekend without some kind of pissing match or emotional upheaval in the schoolyard blogosphere, and the current candidate is a high-profile sparring exercise involving Jason “Mahalo” Calacanis and Dave “I invented RSS” Winer.

In a nutshell, Jason got up at Chris Pirillo’s Gnomedex conference and talked a lot about Mahalo.com, his “people-powered search” startup. No surprise there — Jason is a promoter’s promoter.But some people took offence at the promotional flavour of his remarks, including Dave (although Dave has pointed out that he wasn’t the only one, and Wired notes that Chris Pirillo himself made similar comments on Twitter).

If you want to catch up, there’s Jason’s response to Dave on his blog and Dave’s initial response and follow-up. Stowe Boyd has some thoughts about how Dave tends to be a loose cannon at conferences, as Blake Ross (ex of Firefox) and others can probably attest.

As I know from personal experience, Dave is notoriously thin-skinned — kind of surprising for a guy who has been blogging since most of us were in kindergarten, but still a fact. He even takes Steve Hodson to task at Winextra for describing his remarks at Gnomedex as being “pissy.” Robert Seidman, meanwhile, goes with the term “chucklehead.”

Dave maintains that his comments were all about how Mahalo isn’t a platform that developers can work with, and seems upset that everyone focuses on the tone of his remarks instead of the substance. But there’s an easy solution to that: don’t be so pissy about it in the first place.

Update:

As always, my mesh friend Loren Feldman at 1938media has a way of putting everything into perspective with his Gnomedex Thoughts video (thanks to Allen of Centernetworks for the link). And it seems that Jason and Dave have made up, according to a Twitter post — I refuse to call them “tweets” — from Jason, in which he said: “Accepted Dave… and as always I respect your ideas greatly and am always open to hearing how you think any product can be better. “

Dave has apologized (at least sort of) here, but in true Wineresque fashion, he apparently couldn’t let things rest and so has posted a number of suggestions for Jason on how he could apologize as well. Classic. Still can’t get enough of this topic? There’s more at Wired’s Epicenter blog.

I’m a huge fan of the Freakonomics guys, and a subscriber to their RSS feed, but I didn’t realize until I saw a MediaPost item on Techmeme that they had been “acquired” by the New York Times. I also didn’t realize until I read through the item that they have switched to partial RSS feeds, which I absolutely loathe.

That loathing appears to be shared by dozens of commenters and formerly faithful readers who left their thoughts on Stephen Dubner’s post about the move to the Times. Many have said they will be unsubscribing from the blog, which will hopefully make the NYT smarten up.

I realize that — as Tish Grier points out on the MediaPost item — the Times is looking to make their content pay, especially if they decide to lose the Times Select pay wall (as has been rumoured), and getting readers to click through to the website is probably one way of doing that. But I still think it sucks.

Some of the reasons are enumerated in this comment on the Freakonomics post. The bottom line is this: if I wanted to click through to the website, then I would just go to the damn website in the first place. Partial feeds defeat almost the entire purpose of reading RSS feeds in the first place. Bad idea, guys.

Update:

Mike Masnick at Techdirt has a post on the topic, in which he describes how full-text feeds can actually lead to more page views. And the Freakonomics guys have posted an update on the RSS issue that is somewhat less than reassuring.

Storage news from both Google and Microsoft today: The former is giving you the ability to upgrade your combined Gmail and Picasa Web Album storage, in what could be a precursor to a full-fledged Gdrive storage offering, and the latter has launched its news Windows Live Skydrive.

Both are defective, in my opinion. I realize that these are just betas, but Google is way off base with 6 gigabytes of combined Gmail and Picasa storage for $20 a year. The early-bird (or more likely mistaken) price of $1 made a lot more sense to me. Storage is virtually free, and Google knows it — and as more than one person has pointed out already, Yahoo Mail is unlimited, and Flickr.com has unlimited storage for $20.

Windows Live Skydrive, meanwhile, starts with the clunky Windows Folders interface and design and 500 megabytes of storage. What the heck is that all about? I have photos that are 500 megabytes in size (okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not much). Mike Arrington of TechCrunch is similarly unimpressed.

Microsoft is going to have to work a little harder than that, and so is Google. Storage options like JungleDrive that are built using Amazon’s ultra-cheap S3 storage service — and others like the ones described at Read/Write Web — look pretty good compared to either one at the moment.

Although Mike Arrington seems less than impressed with it, I think Google’s plan to allow comments on Google News stories — but only from people involved in a news event — is actually a pretty interesting idea. There’s no question that it’s going to be a lot of effort, and that it may in fact fail as a result, but I think the impulse behind it (as described on the Google blog) is a valuable one.

In effect, this is a step towards “crowdsourcing” of the news, but in a very focused way. Instead of allowing anyone to comment on a news event or story, Google’s plan is to only allow comments from those who are a part of the story (although how the company plans to verify that remains to be seen). I think — as Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests does — that this has the potential to expand the journalistic process.

For many newspapers and other news organizations, a story has a limited lifespan, unless it is one of a small number of big headliners that get followed up day after day, or month after month. Whoever responds in time to get their comments included in the story makes it into print, and those that don’t are rarely heard from.

I found it interesting that in the Wall Street Journal story on the new feature, a professor of pediatrics who was asked by Google to comment on a story in which he was quoted said this:

“I’ll do a 15- to 20-minute interview, and two sentences will appear about what I’ve said… So the Google feature is really a chance to flesh out those two sentences and to include some more of what I ordinarily talk about in a 15- to 20-minute interview.”

Google’s proposal has the potential to allow unheard-from participants to make themselves heard, and thus make news stories more complete — as pointed out at Poynter Online and by my mesh friend Mike Masnick at Techdirt — and I think that would be a great idea, at least in principle. In any case, it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Update:

As Mike notes at TechCrunch (courtesy of Gabe “Techmeme” Rivera), the terms of service at Google News prevent anyone from crawling the site and aggregating any of its content — but this doesn’t seem very kosher if Google is now effectively creating (or expanding on) the news. And Danny Sullivan has some responses from Google to questions about the new feature.

It may sound like a new way to torment your friends using Facebook, but a widget that Vancouver-based DabbleDB just launched also strikes me as an interesting way of managing different tasks or parts of a project among a group of Facebook users. Not only can you create tasks and to-do lists for yourself, but you can create them for others as well — and then bug them until they’ve finished them. Here’s a link to the widget, and my friend Paul Kedrosky (whose venture firm has an investment in Dabble) has more here.

By now, anyone who isn’t living in a cave probably knows that the blogger behind Fake Steve Jobs has been exposed as Forbes writer Daniel Lyons. If you need to find out more, you can read one of the eight thousand posts about it on Techmeme. I’m not all that interested in finding out FSJ’s secret identity — in fact, I was kind of hoping he wouldn’t be found out.

What I find really fascinating, like Anil Dash of SixApart and my friend Joey deVilla from Global Nerdy, is that Daniel Lyons is also the guy who wrote the Forbes magazine screed about blogs not so long ago. Does that make him a hypocrite? Perhaps — although I would argue that, like many magazine writers (or newspaper writers for that matter) Lyons likely took a stance for the article that he knew would be controversial, as a rhetorical device, and may or may not have actually felt that way personally.

In any case, that clearly didn’t stop him from seeing the power of having a blog. As Anil puts it: “The benefits of blogging for one’s career or business are so profound that they were even able to persuade a dedicated detractor.” And Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 notes that Lyons clearly felt compelled to do something more creative than Forbes allowed him to do, and as a result he is likely to benefit from it — at Forbes’ expense.

When I read the New York Times piece about the poor multi-millionaires lamenting their poverty — while living in million-dollar homes and making hundreds of times more than the average person — I had many of the same thoughts as my friends Mark Evans, Jason at Webomatica and Jeremy Toeman at Live Digitally. In other words, a combination of disbelief, irritation and more than a whiff of outright disgust.

At the same time though, one of the things that the piece brought home to me was that beyond a certain point — in most cases, once people get past having to work to literally put food on the table or a roof over their family’s heads — money doesn’t really matter in the same sense any more.

I’ve seen it happen to stockbrokers and bond traders and men who have made millions in the oil patch: many of them would continue to work just as hard if they were being paid in poker chips or jelly beans, provided everyone else in their social circle was also being paid in poker chips or jelly beans.

At that point, what matters is who you see as your peers, why you are doing what you’re doing, and what you see as important in life. And in many cases, the drive that makes people work so hard can’t just be turned off with the flick of a switch once they make a certain amount of money. In many ways, the money is irrelevant. I wish I knew what that felt like 🙂

I know there’s been a lot of Canadian flag-waving around here, what with my recent posts on Treehugger, Club Penguin and Webkinz, but heck, if I don’t wave it, then who will? In any case, there’s some news today about another Canadian Web 2.0 success story, namely Freshbooks — which (full disclosure) is run by my friend and fellow mesh organizer Michael McDerment.

As discussed in a post over at the Amazon Web Services blog, Freshbooks is one of a handful of partners that has been testing a new service called Amazon Flexible Payment Service. Mike’s partner Sunir explains more about the details of the testing they’ve been doing in a post at the Freshbooks blog, and Amazon has more details on FPS here, and Phil Burns says he is already working on integrating it with Facebook.

Amazon’s payment service (which Mike Arrington broke the news of here) looks to me like something that has the potential to become a real competitor to PayPal, a service that has many great features but has also irritated many users by being, well… inflexible. And at least at first glance, the pricing for FPS looks fairly competitive with PayPal and Google Checkout. Even Uncov seems to like it 🙂 FPS joins a stable of impressive services Amazon has launched over the past year or so, including its S3 storage business and the EC2 or “elastic computing in the cloud” business — which companies can effectively use as a virtual server farm.

As the AWS blog describes it:

In much the same way that S3 and EC2 allow developers to forget about leasing space in data centers, buying servers and negotiating for bandwidth, FPS shields developers from many of the messy and complex issues which arise when dealing with money.

There are no minimum fees and no startup charges, and any transaction fees are obvious and transparent to the user, Amazon says. As James Robertson notes on his blog, Google gets a lot of attention, but Amazon continues to roll out services that are inexpensive, useful and potentially even revolutionary with very little fanfare. Congrats to Mike and his team for getting in on the ground floor of what could be another winner.

According to a recent speech by Google Earth’s chief technology officer Michael Jones — which Brady Forrest describes at the O’Reilly blog — the site is using “crowdsourcing” techniques to generate detailed maps of India — using a package that the company has put together with a GPS transmitter and some software that it hasn’t publicly released yet. There’s a transcription of the talk and some more details at Dan Karran’s blog, and the Google Earth blog notes that this approach is very similar to the Open Street Map project — except of course that OSM is, well… open. More thoughts at FortiusOne. We all work for Google in one way or another, don’t we? Whether we know it or not 🙂

Came across a great story at CNET, in a post that SEO (search engine optimization) blogger Stephen Spencer wrote about his 16-year-old daughter Chloe and her website. As she told a recent conference, Chloe loved Neopets so much that she wanted to set up a website about them, so with her dad’s help she looked up some popular keywords and built a blog on WordPress. He says she is now making close to $1,000 a month.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djjl_4jeznw&w=425&h=350]

I just love this story: an article on multiple sclerosis at Xinhua, the Chinese news site, used a “file photo” of an X-ray that happens to be a still image from The Simpson’s — namely, an X-ray of Homer’s brain. An editorial comment about MS patients? Unlikely. Tony Hung wonders whether it’s a cultural thing, and Joey deVilla at Global Nerdy thinks it might have something to do with the kind of animation used in Asian instruction manuals. I think the explanation is pretty simple: the image is number three when you do a Google image search for the term “X-ray.”

Three hard-working, family-oriented guys from the picturesque mountain town of Kelowna, B.C. A website that is filled with nothing but wholesome, kid-friendly entertainment featuring that most kid-friendly of animals, the penguin — and not a single advertisement, pop-up window or spyware-installing toolbar. The only way the Club Penguin story could be any more Canadian is if the site featured Mounties in it. The company even donates 10 per cent of its profits to charities involving underprivileged youth. If Mother Theresa had kids, this is the website they would play on. The site is so clean it almost squeaks. Congratulations to the Club Penguin team — nice guys (and Canadians) do finish first sometimes.