Month: September 2007

If there’s one thing that really drives me around the bend, it’s when people misinterpret academic or quasi-academic studies and draw all kinds of ludicrous and sweeping conclusions. It’s something the traditional media love to do with opinion surveys (most of which are completely unreliable), and the blogosphere has a tendency to do it as well. And we can see a prime example with a recent study by The Project for Excellence in Journalism.

I have no problem with the PEJ looking at the headlines on Digg.com and Reddit.com and del.icio.us and comparing those with the stories that appeared either on television or in mainstream media outlets. The project looked at stories over a period of seven days at the end of June. Not surprisingly — at least for anyone who has ever been to any of those sites — there was very little overlap with the stories that traditional media found important.

And what are we to gather from this research? Well, according to people like Nick Carr, it apparently shows that the “people formerly known as the audience” are thick-headed numbskulls and mouth-breathers who are only interested in a narrow slice of tech or other stories, and don’t care about the issues of state or the other topics that right-thinking people pay attention to. In classic Carr fashion, he concludes:

“When you replace professional editors with a crowd or a social network, you actually end up accelerating the dumbing-down of news. News becomes a stream of junk-food-like morsels.

The people formerly known as the audience may be more accurately termed the people formerly known as informed.”

The first problem with Nick’s approach is that it uses Digg and del.icio.us as representative of the entire phenomenon known as “social media” or “citizen journalism,” which is like watching two television shows and reporting that the entire landscape of TV as we know it is an insipid swamp (an argument that would actually be a lot easier to win — but I digress).

As James Robertson notes on his blog, one of the reasons why sites like Digg and Reddit aren’t filled with the top-most important and newsworthy stories on Iraq or the flooding of Texas is that every other news site was filled with those things. To me, one of the main things that makes Digg and Reddit valuable is that they allow people to promote stories and links that aren’t getting enough attention — not the ones that are.

Danny Sullivan notes that “to draw any definitive conclusions about the future of news would be premature and foolish given the limitations and short duration of the study.” But people like Nick are happy to do so anyway. Dan Gillmor has some brief thoughts on the topic here, and there’s a good look at the study at SFGate as well. My friend Scott Karp has his take at Publish2.0.

Although Google’s “Street View” visual search service isn’t in Canada yet, federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart already has her hackles up about the idea. Why? Because the service involves taking millions of photos of street-level scenery, and some of that scenery just might include people — and that, she says, might contravene the requirements of the federal privacy law, PIPEDA (if you really need to know what that stands for, you can look here).

As it happens, Google’s relatively new service has a strong Canadian connection already, since Calgary-based Immersive Media is the company that has been sending out squads of cars with 360-degree cameras mounted on them. In fact, Immersive already has a significant library of images from major Canadian centres such as Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa. You can see a full map of the routes and cities that the company has already scanned on its website. Ms. Stoddart says she has already written to both Google and Immersive Media, telling them that she is concerned the new service will breach the protections included in PIPEDA and asking them to respond.

Street View “does not appear to meet the basic requirements of knowledge, consent, and limited collection and use as set out in the legislation,” Ms. Stoddart said.

Update:

In a comment on my Globe blog, Colin McKay from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner says that the office is discussing with Immersive Media what steps they might be able to take “to render their images at a lower resolution to avoid the sort of concerns we have raised.”

This is an issue that the U.S. has already had to confront, since the service was rolled out earlier this year. After it was launched, users started posting snapshots of people — their faces fairly recognizable — being arrested, leaving adult video stores and urinating in the street. One woman posted a picture of her apartment, in which her cat was clearly visible in the window, and said she felt like she was under surveillance.

Google says it is more than happy to take down photos if someone complains, and has also pointed out that it contacted women’s support shelters and other institutions before launching the service and doesn’t include photos of those kinds of sites. The company also says that the pictures it is using are not an invasion of privacy, since what they show would be readily visible to anyone walking or driving down the street.

At the same time, however, it does seem as though there is something qualitatively different about what Google is doing. For one thing, the photos can be seen (theoretically) by millions of people, and they are also (theoretically) permanent. And yet, they are taken from a public street — something anyone with a cellphone could do if they wanted to. Does it matter that this is being done by a large, for-profit corporation? It seems to.

And still, the question remains: Where do we draw the line? Former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy famously said in 1999 that “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” Not everyone is willing to do so, however.

Update:

Associated Press spokesman Paul Colford emailed me about this post, and said that “only a tiny fraction” of the content that the newswire shares with aggregators such as Google and Yahoo comes from its member papers. Here is his comment in full:

“AP’s state wires, which include member content, are not licensed to Google and other online aggregators.

As a result, only a tiny fraction of the national and international stories sold by AP to aggregators originated with members of the cooperative – typically scoops credited to the members.

Except for this tiny fraction, the stories sold to Google and others are original AP reports by agency staffers.”

Colford also said that the Nashua Telegraph yearbook story described in the post below moved on the AP wire with a tagline that gave credit to the newspaper (although I didn’t see any such credit on the Google News version).

Original post:

I got a comment on one of my posts today from Damon Kiesow, the managing editor of the Nashua Telegraph, and I thought it was worth highlighting here because he talks about a real-world example of what the new Google “hosted news” deal with Associated Press is like for newspapers such as his.

According to Damon, his paper wrote an offbeat story about a girl and her problems getting a picture into her high-school yearbook, and Associated Press picked it up — and now is ranked as the top source. Here’s his comment:

Our first experience with the new AP/Google partnership:

The yearbook story was an offbeat piece that was picked up by the national wire. So, instead of Google giving our version (NashuaTelegraph.com) top prominence – the AP/Google page gets the traffic.

As Damon points out, even the other newspapers that picked up the wire story — such as Boston.com — are given preferential treatment in Google News, and the original Nashua Telegraph story comes up at the bottom of the search results. But there’s a silver lining, says Damon:

“Despite our angst at this, we have the last laugh as Fark.com ended up pointing at our version, driving 40 – 50k pageviews to that one story this morning.”

Welcome to the ever-changing world of Google-driven news. Steve Yelvington has some worthwhile perspective on the Google AP deal here.

My friend Muhammad Saleem — a top Netscape submitter — just dropped me a note to say that the former Digg-style Netscape social-news site will be reborn at some future date at a site called Propeller.com. Tom Drapeau has a somewhat lacklustre post on the move over at the Netscape blog (at least Jason Calacanis knew how to market something with a little energy).

Muhammad — who was more than a little ticked at Mike Arrington and others for what he saw as an overreaction to the news that Netscape was changing — says he likes the branding. I’m okay with it, for what it’s worth, but I’m not clear on what Propeller is supposed to convey really. There’s also no timeline on when the site will go live, which kind of makes me wonder why they bothered. Why not wait until it’s ready to go?

I know Muhammad thinks people rang the death knell for Netscape too early, but I still wonder how many people are going to switch over to the new site. For whatever reason, I think the name Netscape had a certain drawing power, and it got lots of traffic in part because it used to be a portal. To start over with a new site and name is going to be an uphill climb, I think.

Egon: “There’s something very important I forgot to tell you.”

Egon: “It would be bad.”

According to a leaked video from an internal Google briefing — first reported by a commenter called “fanboy” at Google Blogoscoped and expanded on by Ionut Alex. Chitu at Google Operating System — the company plans to tie together some of the strands of social information it has through Google Reader and other services into what it apparently refers to as “activity streams.”

The idea seems to be that your RSS feeds and your Calendar events and GTalk updates and your blog postings could all be turned into a single stream of information, which others could subscribe to. As more than one person has mentioned, this sounds very much like a Facebook feed, which contains everything from status updates to photos that have been posted.

There aren’t a whole lot of details on these new plans — which go by the code name Maka or Mocha or possibly Makamaka, depending on who you believe — but I think such a feature is a smart move for Google to make.

It’s ironic that Facebook’s unified feed, which caused so much consternation when it was first released, is a huge part of what makes the site so sticky — being able to see what all of your contacts are up to in a single glance is very addictive. Google has a bunch of useful apps like Gmail and Reader and so on, but they aren’t tied together very well. Mocha could change that.

Note: There are also some pretty amazing stats about Google Reader in the video briefing, including the fact that the back-end for the Reader (which apparently serves as the back-end for other Google apps that involve feeds) has 10 terabytes of data and 8 million feeds, and that Google plans to add feed recommendations and other social features soon.

Further reading:

MG Siegler at ParisLemon says Google appears to be moving in the direction he has been hoping it would for some time now, and Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has some thoughts on the various features Google seems to be looking at — including possibly allowing comments on Google Reader shared items, which is a bit of a sticky subject as this TechCrunch post outlines.

Update:

Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped says in a comment here that he has reason to believe the proper name for Google Reader’s new project is “Maka-Maka.” Not sure what the name is supposed to mean — all I could find out from a Google search was that Maka-Maka is the name of a popular “manga” (or adult) comic involving two female friends who become lovers, and that the word “maka” in Hawaiian means “eye.”

The BBC has a story about a survey that says businesses are losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day because employees are wasting time on Facebook and other social networking sites. According to this consulting firm, 233 million hours worth of work time is lost every day — and the firm recommends that more businesses ban or block Facebook, as both the Ontario government and Toronto City Hall have done recently.

I’m sure managers at all sorts of companies are nodding their heads at this kind of report. Those damn lazy workers — clicking around on Facebook wasting time when they could be working! There must be a way to stop them. As Stowe Boyd notes, it wasn’t that long ago that other technologies were the culprit. I can remember (yes, I’m extremely old) the same kind of attitude when PCs and Internet access started to become commonplace in offices. Give someone a PC, let alone Internet access? God forbid — then they’ll just piss the day away playing Minesweeper or Solitaire, or checking their email every ten minutes.

The reality is that employees who don’t like their jobs or aren’t properly motivated will always find ways of avoiding work. If you remove Facebook, or the Internet, or Solitaire, or even their PC they will waste time and avoid work by smoking, or taking long bathroom breaks, or doing a crossword puzzle from the newspaper, or staring out the window for hours at a time.

When it gets right down to it, Facebook is not the problem — Facebook is a symptom. And as Ethan Kaplan points out, if you are in any kind of businesses that deals with the general public and you can’t find a way to leverage those social networks, then you are doing something wrong.

From the European Union — not exactly a bastion of sound decision-making on a whole range of issues — comes the novel idea of banning or blocking searches for dangerous words such as “bomb.” EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini says that he intends to explore with the private sector how to “prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism.”

I think this is a brilliant idea. Why didn’t anyone think of it before? It’s so simple. But I don’t think it goes far enough. Why not ban the actual words themselves instead? That would be much more effective. Then people not only couldn’t search for things like bombs or killing, they wouldn’t be able to write about them either — and eventually, they wouldn’t even be able to think about them, because the concepts themselves wouldn’t exist!

Double-plus good, don’t you think?

Not that long ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt would routinely deny that the company had any intention of using its Gmail, Google Docs and other services to compete directly with Microsoft’s Office suite. “We’re just playing around with some Web stuff,” he seemed to be saying. “Nothing important to see over here.”

We all knew differently, of course, and now we have even further evidence that Google is intent on moving into the corporate space, with the news that it has signed a deal with CapGemini to push Google Docs and other apps at small and medium-sized businessses.

Until now, Microsoft has remained relatively mum about Google, but apparently this latest move was a little too much for the software behemoth to take. As ZDNet reports, the company issued a somewhat defensive-sounding statement about its Office software dominating the market, etc. etc. — and then followed up with some helpful questions for journalists to ask Google, such as:

1. Google touts having enterprise level customers but how many “USERS” of their applications truly exist within the enterprise?

and

2. Google has a history of releasing incomplete products, calling them beta software, and issuing updates on a “known only to Google” schedule – this flies in the face of what enterprises want and need in their technology partners.

Microsoft goes on to take thinly-veiled and not-so-thinly veiled shots at the fact that Google apps depend on Internet access, that they don’t let you create headers and footers, and other earth-shattering revelations (the company’s statement also flicks at the issue of corporate security, which others have mentioned as well).

Of course, the overwhelming impression created by the note is that Google is starting to get under the software titan’s skin. Larry and Sergey are probably chuckling to themselves even now.

(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

Given the success that some YouTube “stars” have had — with Dutch singer Esmee Denters signed to a boutique label run by Justin Timberlake, and Ysabella Brave also signed to a recording contract — it’s not surprising that some record labels would try to do an end-run around the process and create a YouTube “sensation” out of whole cloth.

That appears to be what happened with Marie Digby, a young singer who was recently signed to a recording contract with Disney’s Hollywood Records. According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, the 24-year-old singer was already working with the record company before posting any of her cover versions of popular songs to the video-sharing site.

Her appearances on TV shows and radio shows, for example — which apparently occurred after they saw her YouTube videos — were booked through a record company executive, and the story says that the record label was also involved in choosing the songs she posted to YouTube.

Crass? Yes. Surprising? Hardly. As Wall Street Journal blogger Kara Swisher put it: “Hollywood lies again; also just in — birds fly, fish swim.”

For many YouTube watchers a big part of the appeal of finding someone like Ms. Digby is that they are outside the traditional star-making machinery, and are therefore more authentic and natural. To find out that this isn’t the case often ruins the magic (although Lonelygirl15 continued to be popular once it was revealed to be fake).

Ms. Digby isn’t even the first to be involved in such a scheme: last year, a Scottish singer named Sandi Thom appeared on the scene, playing songs with her band from her apartment and streaming them over the Internet, and after attracting as many as 100,000 viewers (allegedly) she was signed to a recording contract — except, of course, that she had already been signed to a contract before the performances began.

In a post on her MySpace blog, Ms. Digby maintains that the Wall Street Journal story was blown out of proportion (although she doesn’t deny that she was working with a record company before posting her material to YouTube). She says:

“Here’s Lesson 1 for me in Media – The writer will use whatever quote he wants of yours to make it fit his ‘angle’. This loser was desperate for a good story… he knew what he wanted to write before he ever even talked to me.

The guy’s angle is this : that I am a complete phony and fake and a pawn of my record label in some brilliant marketing scheme. IS this guy completely insane. You think it’s that easy? That you get signed and suddenly everything’s taken care of for you!!!??”

Ms. Digby goes on to say that:

“What hurts the most is that this loser took every genuine thing i said and made it sound like I am acting, that this whole thing is scripted. The dude is desperate to be onto the next ‘ lonely girl’ or whatever.. i’ve actually never seeen that but its obvious that’s what he wanted me to be.”

Although some commenters on MySpace and YouTube have denounced her as a fraud, a number of fans have posted comments of support.

Is Ms. Digby a fake? That’s difficult to say. Her version of events seems to be that she developed the YouTube campaign in an attempt to keep the record company’s interest, while the WSJ tries to make the case that the whole thing was orchestrated by the label. The bottom line is that we may never know the “real” story, now that YouTube has become a subsidiary of the Hollywood department of smoke and mirrors.

Jonathan Coulton — who refers to himself as an “authentic Internet superstar” — has some perspective on Ms. Digby on his blog, in which he describes her as being “clotheslined by the thin line between grassroots and astroturf.” Nice line.

Although we had some advance warning that this might be happening — courtesy of a post from Mike Arrington at TechCrunch that was denied by Netscape at the time — it’s still kind of sad that AOL is pulling the plug on its social-news experiment at Netscape.com.

The note at the Netscape site says that the Digg-style interface is merely moving to another location (Mike said he heard reports that it would be wow.com, another AOL-owned site). But it seems obvious that interest in the idea is waning, and the focus has shifted back to making Netscape into the news portal it used to be, primarily for the ad dollars. According to the site:

“We received some feedback that people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled. In fact, we specifically heard that our users do have a desire for a social news experience, but simply didn’t expect to find it on Netscape.com.”

I know there will be a lot of gloating over this move — particularly from those who don’t like Jason Calacanis — but I think it’s unfortunate. Even if it was in essence a “Digg-clone,” I still think (as I have said from the beginning) that Netscape introduced some useful features to the social media model, including the use of editors to promote and add to stories, and the somewhat controversial decision to pay top submitters.

For whatever reason, Netscape just never seemed to be able to get much traction, so we will never know if any of those features makes sense for a social news site — and that’s a shame.

Update:

Muhammad Saleem, a Netscape “scout,” says in his post on the announcement that he’s shocked at how some blogs have mis-reported the news as the closure of Netscape — and he has a point. But I think even if the site remains at a different location, it seems obvious that its star has dimmed somewhat in the AOL universe, as HMTKSteve notes in his comment at Muhammad’s blog.

This doesn’t have anything to do with the Web, really — or with Cadbury chocolate, which is the product that is allegedly being advertised — but it still made me laugh for some reason. The original version is here.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbLr2NEV_7o&w=425&h=350]