Flickr and Picnick: Two great tastes…

Another great idea from Flickr, which just recently announced that it would be adding geotagging and other features: the integration of photo-editing tools, in this case from Web-based editing service Picnik. Mike Arrington says he prefers Fotoflexer, which I’ve never tried, but regardless I think Picnik is a great addition.

I’ve often wanted to trim or crop or otherwise modify a photo of mine while I’m browsing them, but can’t be bothered to download it and then open it with Photoshop, etc. I’ve tried some online tools that allow you to import photos from Flickr into their service — which they can do once you grant them access to your account — but it’s still not as intuitive as using those tools right on the site.

I wonder how the Flickr announcement will affect some of those other services such as Flauntr.com and Preloadr.com.

At last, a Facebook app that’s useful

Google announced something kind of cool: a Facebook app for Google News, which allows you to choose categories or feeds based on your own keywords, and then share those stories with others and see what stories your friends have shared. Okay, it’s not a cure for cancer, but I think it’s a pretty useful app as far as Facebook apps are concerned — although that’s not exactly a high bar to clear.

I share stories I come across through either a del.icio.us feed (which is on my blog in the sidebar) and/or my Google Reader shared items (which are also in the sidebar), but lots of people don’t use those things, and may never use them. Google’s Facebook app gives them another way to see what stories their friends think are interesting, and to share their own picks from the headlines.

It will be interesting to see whether Google — which is about as data-obsessed as its possible for a company to be — will come up with any cool numbers based on what people have shared.

It’s called throttling, and everyone does it

There seems to be quite the fuss today over Comcast’s “network management” approach to BitTorrent traffic, which according to an Associated Press story consists of intercepting packets and disrupting the connection between a downloader and the tracker (a nice touch to download the Bible in order to illustrate what Comcast is doing — I wish I’d thought of that). I’m not quite sure why everyone seems so surprised that this is happening though. Cable companies and telcos have been doing this for some time.

102_ozzie_choke_bdd.jpgSome call it network management, some call it bandwidth or traffic “shaping” and others call it “throttling” (which conjures up a nice mental image of what carriers are doing to their customers). As Michael Geist has pointed out before, Rogers Communications — the largest cable company in Canada — has been doing this for the past couple of years at least. As Michael notes in his post, this behaviour seems particularly egregious considering that the downloading of music is currently permitted (or at least not explicitly banned) under Canadian copyright law, thanks to the Public Copying levy that gets applied to blank CDs and other media.

Rogers admitted to throttling BitTorrent almost two years ago, and argues — as most carriers do — that such services soak up bandwidth and cause their network to run too slowly for other customers (something I have yet to see conclusively demonstrated). But it’s not just Rogers: there’s a list of ISPs that do this kind of thing at AzureusWiki, where you can also find tips on how to turn on encryption to disguise the traffic.

Unfortunately, even if you encrypt the packets, some ISPs will respond by throttling anything encrypted on the assumption that it is probably BitTorrent or other software. As Michael points out in his post, this has caused some university researchers a headache because then their encrypted email slows down as it gets caught in the “bandwidth management” process.

Like those “unlimited” cellphone data plans that turn out not to be unlimited at all, this kind of thing is another example of how the cable companies and telcos try to suck and blow at the same time: they sell you their unlimited or high-speed plans, bragging about all the things you can do with them, and then charge or block you as soon as you try and do any of those things.

Dave Winer: Something nice this time

As anyone who has read this blog for awhile probably knows, I have been hard on Dave Winer occasionally (and I think with good reason, but I don’t want to get into that right now).

The fact remains, however, that Dave is a pretty smart guy when it comes to things like RSS — let’s not get into whether he “invented” it or not — and he also thinks outside the box when it comes to things like how newspapers and other media present their content, and that is something I’m interested in as well. So I think it’s only fair that I point out when I think he’s doing something interesting.

The thing in this case is his New York Times keyword index. It’s a simple thing, in a lot of ways, since it just scans the newspaper’s index and comes up with the number of times a certain word is used, then ranks them from top to bottom — but it also has a couple of additional features, including the fact that it displays the headline of a story when you hover over the number.

That’s a nice touch. And it’s an interesting companion to Dave’s “river of news” NYT feed (something I tried to recreate with my Twitter feed of Globe and Mail headlines).

I don’t understand why the Times — or other newspapers, for that matter — don’t provide that kind of alternative search or browsing tool themselves. It’s not rocket science (no offence, Dave) and it might even attract users who don’t want to use the linear approach that most papers default to. Why not have a keyword tag cloud too? The Washington Post had a demo of such a feature awhile back as part of its Post Remix lab project, but it never became part of the actual site, which I think is a shame.

I think plenty of readers would be interested in alternative ways of finding stories, just as they now use features such as the “most read” and “most emailed” lists the Times and other papers have. Why not add even more ways of slicing and dicing the news?

Will Twine be my new backup brain?

From the descriptions that I’ve read at TechCrunch, Read/Write Web and at Danny Ayers’s Raw blog, the new social-aggregation app from Radar Networks called Twine sounds like something that I (and I assume others as well) have been waiting for for some time now — a truly smart social bookmarking (or “knowledge management”) app. Whether it can really deliver, of course, remains to be seen, since Twine is in beta, and no one has really had a chance to use it.

ball_of_twine.jpgI’m pretty much addicted to del.icio.us at this point, after having used everything from Furl to Clipmarks as a kind of “backup brain” or digital notebook (and yes, I’ve used Google’s Notebook). And yet, for all its usefulness, delicious still lacks a lot of things, and one of them is smart tagging. If you go to my delicious account — you can see that I’ve got about 7,400 items tagged at this point, and there are so many tags that they’ve basically become unusable as a navigation tool.

Every now and then I feel guilty about how cluttered and disorganized my tags are, but I just can’t be bothered to do the grunt work of organizing them into clusters or whatever del.icio.us calls them. The point at which my ears — or eyes — really perked up as I was reading the descriptions of Twine was when they mentioned that it has a smart (or semantic) tagging system that will tag things automagically, and then find relationships between tags as well.

It seems like a simple thing, and yet it could be so powerful — and so useful. If you think about how you use normal objects in your life, or how you interact with people, relationships form naturally over time to the point where things and people are connected without much conscious effort.

I would love to have that kind of intuitive behaviour appear in my backup brain as well as my real brain. My friend Paul Kedrosky seems skeptical about Twine’s ability to become that kind of tool, but I hope he is wrong.

Further reading:

 

Google = lean, mean, cash machine

Even when you’re expecting a pretty amazing financial performance — as just about everyone (including me) was from Google’s latest quarter — it’s still something to see a company that is firing on pretty well all cylinders and has a commanding share of the market it operates in. I expect that watching Microsoft in its early years was very similar, as it came to dominate the desktop operating-system business and turned into a gigantic cash-manufacturing machine.

I know that there are many things that could happen to derail the Google train: online advertising could go soft, click fraud could become a bigger issue, etc., etc. It’s not as though bigger companies haven’t suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of a curve before. It could happen to Google.

At the moment, however, the company is at the top of its game — it’s in a dominant position in a rapidly-growing market, and despite having $15-billion or so in revenue, it is still growing at double-digit rates every quarter. That means it could very soon be a $30-billion company, and then people who thought $500 a share was too expensive are probably going to feel very foolish.

Viacom: Stupid like a fox?

I have to be honest: I’m not sure whether Viacom’s new plan for The Daily Show is a great idea or a really dumb idea (I’m also leaving open the possibility that it’s somewhere in between those two). The network — which has been feuding with YouTube for almost a year now over various clips of John Stewart that keep popping up on the site — is launching a site dedicated to the show, which will offer more than 13,000 clips dating back to the very beginning.

According to this story in the LA Times, Viacom has spent a lot of time tagging and identifying clips so that they can be searched and aggregated by topic, guests, etc. –and even plans to allow users to take part in the cataloguing to some extent, Wikipedia-style. In the piece, the head of digital media at Comedy Central thanks YouTube for jolting Viacom executives into awareness:

“Without YouTube, he said, Viacom might not have recognized the true value of the archives and dragged its feet in digitally archiving and tagging” the clips.”

Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget thinks Viacom’s move is dumb. He thinks the network should quit suing YouTube (which it says it is still going ahead with) and upload all of its clips to the site. Part of me thinks that he’s right — why not make use of the service that everyone already associates with The Daily Show anyway? Plus it comes with built-in Flash encoding, easy embedding, commenting tools, etc.

At the same time, however, YouTube has constraints. Clips tend to be short and poor quality, for example — and to a large extent that’s what users have come to expect. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to do the kind of tagging and other things that Viacom is talking about, and even if they could be done they might be wasted on an audience that just wants to watch a funny clip.

I think (as my friend Steve Bryant at the Hollywood Reporter does) that in an ideal world Viacom would do both: upload short clips to YouTube and let people embed them wherever they want, and then have a much larger storehouse of longer clips and entire shows — all tagged and catalogued, with added features and possibly even HD content — at its own site.

Zuckerberg: We don’t focus on revenue

I know everyone is obsessed with when Mark Zuckerberg is going to announce the winner of the “Dance with Facebook for $10-billion” contest, but I found something he said during his interview with John Battelle interesting. He said:

“We don’t focus on optimizing the revenue we have today. It has always been our philosophy to run the company at around break even as we grow.”

This reminded me of what Jim Buckmaster and Craig Newmark have always said about craigslist.org, which is that they basically spend zero time thinking about how to “monetize” all the eyeballs and pageviews they get (about eight billion a month or so) and spend close to 100 per cent of their time thinking about their users and what they want and need.

That drives Wall Street types and venture capitalists crazy, and people like to use those quotes to make a point about how unrealistic Web 2.0 businesses are, etc. etc. — but from a certain standpoint it makes perfect sense.

Not that you shouldn’t be thinking about a business model, obviously. But that can’t be your number one concern. If it is, you will almost certainly produce a crappy service that eventually fails, because no one goes there.

Content will find the most efficient route

A piece in Forbes notes that more than 500,000 people in the space of a couple of days decided to download the new Radiohead album via BitTorrent, even though they could have downloaded it from Radiohead and paid the same amount, i.e. nothing. Although Eric Garland of Big Champagne — the download-tracking service that provided the numbers for the story — seems surprised that they would do this, but I don’t find it that surprising at all (neither does Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch).

Not only are people used to BitTorrent, it’s a lot faster and easier than downloading it from Radiohead’s site was, according to many of the people who tried to do so. If you’re not going to pay for it anyway, why not use the most efficient method? In fact, Radiohead should have used BitTorrent to power their downloads in the first place, the same way that Linux distros like Linspire and Ubuntu do.

Live-blogging Future of News panel

(This is my attempt at live-blogging the ONA panel on the future of news at the CBC in Toronto with Leonard Brody of NowPublic, Rahaf Harfoush — who did research for Don Tapscott’s book Wikinomics — and Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur. Note: I did this on a BlackBerry, so please excuse the typos)

Keen says citizen journalism sounds Orwellian, like a guy in a beret creeping around feeling very virtuous; doesn’t think journalists should necessarily be good citizens;

Brody says it’s a dumb term, like citizen dentist; says it is “the people’s view”; brand promiscuity; most younger readers don’t read just one thing, they search and read an average of 16 links on a story;

Rahaf (who is in her 20s) says she bought a newspaper a week ago — for her dad.

Keen says citizen journalism is part of a fetishization of the authentic, focus on the personal; cultural changes, has very little to do with media; take out your frustrations on something else — doctors or restaurants, don’t ruin media; big media has as much responsibility as anyone else; bowing to reality television and cult of celebrity;

Keen says big media should be less humble, more arrogant, more authoritative; saying we understand, you need a voice is … Recipe for disaster;

If you take that view, Brody says, you will be speaking to an empty room. It’s not good or bad, it just is.

Rahaf says having an arrogant journalist tell me what’s important, not interested in that; interested in a dialogue, and in individual voices.

Public view, human perspective and don’t trust single view — want to triangulate truth on my own Brody says; he says the vast majority of people don’t want to be paid; if they did it would be easier — love and ego are much harder to control;

Keen says when we generate something of value most of us want to be paid; not going to give away my labour for nothing; youtube model or wikipedia model, vessel they put their information into, bad in every way; one of the things that keep journalists honest is that they’re paid

Rahaf says that blogs have to develop a reputation, build up trust over time, effectively self-regulating; social contract

Brody says they want to be arbiters of their own truth;

Continue reading “Live-blogging Future of News panel”

Another piece of the Google social net

It’s not a huge deal, really — as Greg Sterling notes over at Screenwerk — but the news that Google has added social features to Google Maps is just another piece of the puzzle that is (or at least could be) the Web company’s emerging social net. The features aren’t rocket science, of course: user profiles that link to maps a person has created, reviews they’ve written of local businesses, etc. But it ties some things together in ways they weren’t before.

As many people have noted — including me in this post — Google has been working on what appears to be a unified social-networking approach that would bring together many of its existing services such as GTalk, Orkut, Maps, Picasa, etc. and let people create what amount to “activity streams” that others could subscribe to, hints of which first appeared in a post at Google Blogoscoped.

Amazon patent foiled by lone gunman

A heart-warming story — at least for those who have long thought that Amazon’s patent on the “one-click” buying system it uses on its website was stupid and should be struck down: the guy who has almost single-handedly been fighting to have the Amazon patent reviewed by the USPTO won his review, and many of the broad claims in the patent have been invalidated.

You can find out more on his blog, which is called IGDMLGD (for reasons that I haven’t been able to determine). As it turns out, the blogger is a chap named Peter Calveley, a New Zealander who has a science degree and a commerce degree and studied to become a patent attorney, although he has never practiced. His interest in the Amazon patent was apparently fueled by an unsatisfactory experience buying something on the website.

In an odd twist, Calveley has also worked as a motion-capture actor, wearing a capture suit in order to help create CGI battle scenes in movies such as Lord of the Rings. After realizing that none of the motion-capture actors were mentioned in the credits of the movie, Calveley protested this oversight and launched a campaign to have their contributions recognized.

In the case of the patent battle, Calveley managed to single-handedly do what Tim O’Reilly and others failed to do with their BountyQuest effort, which was designed to encourage people to search for and submit “prior art” that could invalidate patents such as Amazon’s, which O’Reilly has been criticizing for years.

Zonbu network PC “bait-and-switch”

I really wanted to like the Zonbu, a small, Mac Mini-style network PC that runs a modified version of Gentoo Linux and uses Amazon’s S3 (and a small built-in Flash drive) for storage — and best of all, costs just $99. It seemed like such a great idea, as Nick Carr describes here and Daniel “Fake Steve Jobs” Lyons gushes here. Okay, it has a really stupid name, but then who doesn’t in these Web 2.0 times.

zonbu.jpgIn fact, the Zonbu might even be a great idea — except for the fact that it doesn’t cost anywhere close to $99. Or rather, it costs $99 in the same sense that a computer from Bill’s PC Warehouse costs $200 because it doesn’t include a monitor, keyboard, mouse or any software (which I’ve always thought was a little like taking the wheels and the engine out of a car and then advertising it for sale at $50). As Zoli Erdos points out in his post on Zonbu, the box actually costs about $250 when you go to buy one. In order to get the $99 deal, you have to sign up for two years worth of online data storage, which brings your total cost to about $400.

Okay, $400 isn’t a bad price for a networked PC with automated backup and a small form factor — except that you still need a monitor and a keyboard and mouse. I can buy a fully-configured Acer or HP desktop with all kinds of bells and whistles for $400. It might not fit under the counter or look good tucked onto a bookshelf, but it comes with a 160-gig hard drive, and I don’t have to call it a stupid name.

Quit reviewing us online, café says

Greg Sterling at Screenwerk has an interesting post about a local café in his home town of Oakland called Rooz, which has posted signs saying “No Yelpers” — in other words, no customers who plan to bitch about the service or the food on the Yelp.com customer review site. Greg asked about the sign and got this response:

“What I was told, in a nutshell, is that the café staff has encountered a stream of would-be critics “with attitude,” predisposed to take issue with or be critical of the business.”

Greg says the staff argued that some customers were being deliberately snotty in their reviews “for entertainment reasons or to impress the Yelp community,” and weren’t being respectful of the impact their reviews might have on a small business like the café. The response from some of the Yelpers in question (not surprisingly) has been unapologetic:

“How DARE you ban my opinion?? And for this, I shall not return. EVER. Not the best business plan in the world buddy.”

As Greg notes, it seems a bit odd to pick a fight with your customers, even the snotty ones who give your place lacklustre reviews on a site such as Yelp. Maybe this café owner has enough customers, and doesn’t need to attract any more.

Google scared of Facebook? Puh-leeze

I have to say that until now I thought Josh Quittner was a pretty smart guy. He was at Business 2.0 magazine for quite awhile, and was editor when the whole shebang went down in flames not too long ago, and was an early convert to the blogs-as-media idea after Om Malik left. But the piece he just wrote for Fortune about how Facebook “has Google running scared” is pathetic.

I’m not saying that to be mean — but I hope the editors at Fortune (assuming there are any) really torqued his piece, because it’s just sad. It’s not just the odd part here or there either; it’s the whole thesis. Why is Google running scared of Facebook? Well, let’s see — it’s got lots of users, and it’s growing really fast, and several people have left Google and gone to work for Facebook.

I guess Larry and Sergey might as well close up shop and sell those planes then. Oooh, and one of the people who left was an engineer. They’re really hard to come by in Silicon Valley — and Google only has, well… about 3,000 more left.

But the biggest threat Quittner mentions (apart from the fact that Facebook “isn’t for sale,” which doesn’t seem like anything to be scared of really) is that Facebook is the leader in what Josh calls “the Innernet” — where people control who gets to see what information, and where the site protects you from all the bad stuff and bad people out in the Wild West of the Internet.

I remember another place that did pretty much the same thing, and it too seemed really big at the time: it was called America Online. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal any more.

Then Quittner says that Facebook is also a threat because of its widget platform, and that apps like Super Wall — which was created in a single weekend — have developed a “user base” of 10 million in no time at all. As he puts it:

“That’s a real economy (or could be, if someone figured out how to make money from it).”

Oh yeah — it’s a real economy. Except for the fact that, well, no one has figured out how to make money from it. Of course, making money is kind of central to most economies, but you know — whatever. Man, Google must really be quaking in their boots! They’d better buy Facebook for $10-billion or so right now.