Month: October 2007

As expected, the New York Times appears to be seeing a substantial traffic jump now that its columnists and other opinion/editorial content are outside the newspaper’s “pay wall,” which was recently dismantled in favour of the Wild West known as the Interweb. According to traffic measurement firm Compete, the opinion section of the Times websites has seen traffic more than double since the move, and overall traffic to the newspaper’s site is up by 10 per cent.

As Valleywag notes, those extra pageviews are going to help the site’s bottom line, although they are likely still not enough to make up for the lost revenue from the death of TimesSelect. The important thing is that the newspaper’s columnists and other content are now part of the gigantic link-farm known as the Internet — and the growth in readership that they are likely to attract over time will almost certainly make up for the loss of the TimesSelect gravy train.

So Napster — the “new and improved” version — is going to try a Web-only strategy, after the (apparently) somewhat lacklustre response to its subscription-based downloadable software app and service. Smart move or desperate measure? Possibly a little bit of both. Let’s put it this way: it would have been a whole lot smarter, and a lot less desperate, if Napster had chosen to go the Web route a couple of years ago.

But then, what we’re calling Napster is really just a rebranded version of PressPlay, the lame record-company backed service, which was given the name that Roxio acquired out of bankruptcy — a bankruptcy that occurred after the RIAA sued Napster into oblivion and an acquisition by Bertelsmann AG was struck down by the courts. The real Napster died almost five years ago now, and the record companies spent the intervening years suing people and then getting taken to the cleaners by Steve Jobs and iTunes.

I have to say, whenever I see that logo with the cat (or whatever it is) wearing the headphones, I feel more than a twinge of nostalgia. For a brief period in the late 1990s, Napster was the best thing that had ever happened to the Internet as far as I was concerned. I know that it enabled rampant copyright infringement, etc., etc — but it was still a fantastically liberating piece of technology.

Napster says that it is preparing for the day when the major record labels (apart from EMI) finally see the light and start offering their music without DRM (digital-rights management) controls. Unfortunately, that day may never come — and even if it does, Napster is probably not the one that will benefit.

I’ve been meaning to get to this for days now, but I wanted to post about Jay Rosen’s lessons from Assignment Zero, the “crowdsourcing” journalism experiment he put together between his NewAssignment project and Wired magazine, with help from a team of people that included Dave “Digi-Dave” Cohn and Tish Grier. On a related note, Dave has also been working with Jeff Jarvis on the Networked Journalism mini-conference Jeff just finished putting together, and has a list of interviews with people who are involved in what might broadly be called social media in one way or another.

Among other things, Jeff admits that the trend story that Assignment Zero chose to focus its efforts on — the impact of crowdsourcing itself, and other “open source” approaches to media — was a little too “meta” and a little too big and subjective for the first project. And he quotes from Derek Powazek’s advice in his review of Assignment Zero lessons (which is here):

“Start with clear, simple tasks. This isn’t because the crowd can’t handle complicated ones – they can – it’s because they haven’t decided if it’s worth doing them for you yet.

People won’t do what you say because you just told them to. You have to inspire them to want to participate.”

Many of the issues that came up with Assignment Zero (and Wired writer Jeff Howe has his own take on the lessons here and here) didn’t have to do with the idea or even the execution so much as the co-ordination of volunteers and contributors. Finding out what people’s motivations are, how much they can do, what they want to do, and then dividing the work up amongst them is hard, Jay says.

“Dividing up the work into tasks people can and will do is among the trickiest decisions the project will have. Expectations have to be extremely clear or a crowd will generate a limitless number of honest misunderstandings.”

One of the potential solutions Jay talks about is having what the open-source movement calls “super-contributors,” whose job it is to help find and co-ordinate other contributors. While he says Assignment Zero did not “crack this case,” Jay told me that he thinks Off The Bus — the networked journalism project that NewAssignment is working on with The Huffington Post — is closer to a solution.

Assignment Zero and Off The Bus co-ordinator Amanda Michel writes a bit about participation levels here, and gives an example of the work Off The Bus is doing with “citizen journalists” here.

Let’s face it, the only reason I’m writing this post is so I can use a headline that features “LOLcatz“-speak, possibly my favourite Internet meme since the Star Wars Kid (although the “Dramatic Prairie Dog” is running a close third). Still, the news from VentureBeat that Google is working on a custom AdSense platform for Facebook strikes me as a great move by the Internet giant.

While everyone from Microsoft and Yahoo to Google itself is deep in talks with Mark Zuckerberg about doing deals for a stake in Facebook (which has three term sheets in hand with $10-billion valuations, according to Owen Thomas at Valleywag), Google is hard at work tunneling underneath the social-networking edifice and absorbing some of those clicks from within. Brilliant.

As Eric Eldon points out at VentureBeat, Google is effectively using the terms of Facebook’s widget platform — which allows developers to make money from their widgets — to do an end-run around Microsoft, which already has an advertising deal with Facebook that provides the bulk of the company’s $150-million or so in revenue.

(this is cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

When Radiohead’s “pay what you want” download experiment was first announced a couple of weeks ago, it seemed obvious that fans (particularly the poor ones) would like the idea. But would it actually work? And would the band make any money, or would most people download it for nothing?

Despite some early glitches caused by a rush of would-be downloaders, and some carping from fans about song quality, the early indications are that the experiment has been a raging success, and that a majority of people are willing to pay as much or more for such an album as they would if they bought it through iTunes or any other traditional method.

In fact, if some of the early reports about the project turn out to be true, the trickle of interest that some bands showed in the idea initially (including Oasis and Jamiroquai, as well as Nine Inch Nails) could soon become an avalanche: According to some estimates, Radiohead may have made over $10-million (U.S.) in a single day.

The day after In Rainbows went on sale on October 10th, music-industry blog Gigwise said it had learned from sources close to the band that Radiohead had already sold more than 1.2 million copies of the album. And while it’s impossible to know what everyone paid for those downloads, industry polls showed that a majority of people buying the album were paying between $1 and $20.

In other words, Radiohead could easily have made over $10-million in the first 24 hours, and likely made substantially more than that in the first two days of offering downloads. And those figures don’t include the number of fans who chose to pay $80 for the deluxe boxed-set CD of the album. Some fans actually paid the maximum amount the system was set up to process: 99 British pounds, or about $200.

Considering the group will keep the vast majority of that estimated $10-million-plus in revenue — in contrast with the small percentage most groups get with the traditional record-label process — more than one band has to be looking at Radiohead’s move as a model

Holden: “If the buzz is any indicator, that movie’s gonna make some huge bank.”
Jay: “What buzz?”
Holden: “The Internet buzz.”
Jay: “What the fuck is the Internet?”

— from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

Apparently, rock dinosaurs Led Zeppelin have decided that the Interweb might actually turn out to be worth something after all. The band — one of the biggest remaining holdouts when it comes to digital music delivery — has announced that its music will soon be available through iTunes and other online music stores. Said guitarist Jimmy Page in a statement released to the media:

“The addition of the digital option will better enable fans to obtain their music in whichever manner they prefer.”

Of course, fans have already been obtaining their music in the manner they prefer — ripping it from CDs or downloading it for nothing using Bit Torrent. Nice to see the boys have finally decided to join the 20th century, six years after it ended.

And while Radiohead is carving its own path with “pay what you want” downloads, and bands like Oasis and Nine Inch Nails are said to be considering a similar move, Led Zeppelin has decided to extend its relationship with Warner Music — in return for $60-million and a higher royalty rate. Royalty indeed.

The Wall Street Journal got the scoop on Discovery Communications latest move into new media (see, old media can still break stories): the TV network is buying HowStuffWorks for $250-million. According to the Journal story:

“We’re way behind in new media and digital,” says Chief Executive David Zaslav, who has shaken up Discovery since taking over in January. “I don’t think we win just by building vertically.”

Although it was a much smaller deal, Discovery acquired Treehugger — a popular environmental awareness site founded by a Canadian — in August for $10-million. As alarm:clock notes, Discovery was an early leader in using the Web, like a Wikipedia for basic-level science. Discovery is making a smart acquisition, I think.

In a recent post — entitled “Why Facebook sucks” — Dave Winer slams the social network for being too closed, and for “getting in between me and my address book,” as he puts it. Not surprisingly, this has sparked a series of posts, including one from Randy Holloway entitled (you had to know this was coming) “Why Dave Winer sucks.” Stowe Boyd took issue with Dave’s comments — in what I thought was a fairly reasonable manner — only to have Dave post via twitter (I refuse to say he “tweeted” or whatever I’m supposed to say) that Stowe was “a creep” and “an idiot.”

As usual, Dave has managed to turn something that could have been a worthwhile discussion about concepts and ideas into something personal. Why? Who knows. It’s just something he does. Not that long ago, he did it with Jason Calacanis, and he has done it with numerous others. It reminds me of the old story about the scorpion convincing the frog to carry him across the pond, and then stinging him at the last minute, causing them both to drown. And when the frog asks why, the scorpion says: “I couldn’t help it — it’s my nature.”

Steve is right to use a pic of kids playing in a sandbox to illustrate his post about the whole affair. As for Dave’s complaints, it’s all well and good to talk about Facebook as a roach motel or a closed system or the new AOL or whatever (something I’ve expressed doubts about in the past), but as Brandon and Stowe himself have pointed out, address book data isn’t trapped as Dave makes it out to be, thanks to Facebook’s API. Nice try, Dave.

Along with several other bloggers, I saw a post at Silicon Alley Insider the other day about the New York Times highlighting reader comments on its front page — in this case, underneath a photo of Al Gore after he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Henry Blodget says the Times should be congratulated for this experiment in social media, while David Spector says that it’s a terrible idea and that the newspaper is “devaluing” itself by doing so.

I thought at first that Henry might have stumbled across either an experiment that went live by mistake, or a glitch in the Times’ comment-posting process, but in a comment on the Silicon Alley post, Heather Green from BusinessWeek says that she noticed the Times featured reader comments on the front page back in August as well, when the bridge collapsed in Minnesota.

What’s interesting to me is how opinion is divided on whether this is a good idea or not. David Spector and some of the commenters on his post and others argue that comments belong on story pages but not on the front page, and that the New York Times should just be providing the facts. Others seem to think the facts are probably well known by the time the NYT gets to a story, and so reader comments are a valid part of the news.

I’m inclined to go with that latter view. If it’s a big story that has already been reported, like Al Gore or the bridge collapse, I think a few carefully selected reader comments would be a useful addition to the story. Why else do reporters interview people for their thoughts and then quote them in news stories? Comments are just a way of letting people who don’t happen to get interviewed have their say.

It’s hard to know where to start with Universal’s rumoured TotalMusic plan, which Business Week has just written about (although as Techdirt points out, Digital Music News first had the story weeks ago). Apparently the idea is to get all the record labels together, and then somehow convince Internet service providers and cellular companies to offer streaming music to their users — either for free, by eating the cost themselves, or by adding an additional fee onto every Internet user’s account.

Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider seems to think that this idea might actually work, but that it’s too late in the game for such an idea. I think it’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Where do these music executives come from — Mars? Mike Masnick says that it’s like an updated version of PressPlay and MusicNow, the last pathetic attempt by the industry to come up with a solution to rampant downloading, but I think that he’s being too kind. It’s way dumber than those services were.

Let’s forget for a moment that Universal, Sony BMG and the other major labels would never be able to agree on the details of any such plan, and that such a plan would never even make it through the impenetrable minefield of artists’ rights, publishers’ rights, performance rights and so on. And let’s forget that any such service would inevitably be all crapped up with DRM controls to the point where it would barely function at all.

Even if there was any evidence that people were willing to take streaming music instead of downloads (which there isn’t), how could Universal think that ISPs and cellular carriers would somehow be willing to carry the freight for this deal? Or shovel the costs onto their already aggravated users? It boggles the mind.

As widely reported by just about everyone, Google has increased the amount of storage you get with Gmail — or rather, it has increased the rate at which the amount of storage is increasing. The amount of storage you can buy if you want to upgrade has also increased. Although he hasn’t posted on it yet (shame on you, Paul) I expect my friend Paul Kedrosky will be celebrating the news, seeing as how he has been asking for this for some time now.

It’s great that by January or so, we can expect to have 6 gigabytes of storage, according to some predictions. But still — and I don’t mean to sound ungrateful — why so little? After all, Microsoft’s new Windows Live Mail gives you 10 gigabytes, apparently, as more than one irritated Microsoft defender noted after Mashable and TechCrunch (which gave me a 500 internal server error earlier this morning) compared Gmail to Windows Live SkyDrive, which I’ll admit is kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison.

But seriously, where is the Gdrive we’ve heard so much about? As Nick Carr notes in this post, storage using services like Amazon’s S3 has effectively become too cheap to meter. Does that mean Amazon is better than you are, Google? Well does it?

One of the themes of Web 2.0 (if there is such a thing) is that all of the data that gets aggregated by Web applications and social networks can be a very powerful thing, and can in some cases justify giving services away for free — provided people who use those services agree to let their data be sliced and diced and parsed in various ways, whether to generate ads or whatever.

In this way, data becomes “the new Intel inside,” as Tim O’Reilly has said (and Paul Kedrosky has echoed in a number of posts).

With that in mind, I thought it was interesting to read Jim Buckmaster’s response to a question along those lines that was submitted to the Freakonomics guys as part of their recent Q&A with the reluctant businessmen who run Craigslist. I found it admirable in a way that when they were asked what they planned to do with all that data from billions of online listings, Jim said:

“It sounds old-fashioned, but we generally don’t view information submitted by our users as data to be used for other purposes.”

About as old-fashioned as saying you don’t really want to monetize those eight billion pageviews you get every month, I suppose. You have to hand it to Jim and Craig — they may be passing up billions of dollars in IPO money or acquisition leverager, but they stick to their principles. My friend Leigh has some thoughts about the whole “I own your data” approach to Web services too.

After some criticism of my current blog theme — which is called Lorem Ipsum and is from the talented folks at Let’s Mint — I did a quick poll (which you can see in this post) to see what people thought of the design. About 60 per cent of those who answered said they preferred the previous theme, which is called Cutline and is from Chris Pearson, and most of the rest said they either liked this one or didn’t care one way or the other.

In fact, I had a substantial number of people tell me either in the comments or by e-mail that they never see the design anyway, because they read the blog via RSS (I would likely say the same of other people’s blogs, which I only go to when I want to save a particular post via del.icio.us).

In any case, I was somewhat torn. I really like this design, which I think is kind of newspapery looking, but a sizable majority of voters didn’t like it. So I decided to have my cake and eat it too — I put a WordPress plugin called “Theme Switcher” in the sidebar, with this theme, the Cutline theme I used to use, the Rin Tin Tin theme I used before that, plus a few others thrown in there just for fun.

Now everyone can use the theme they like. Once you choose a theme it sets a cookie, so that’s the design you will see whenever you come back to visit. Assuming you ever do that 🙂

Pardon the interruption for an ego-related post: I taped a segment for the CBC morning radio show The Current today, which should be airing tomorrow morning (that is, Friday the 12th of October). For anyone who wants to check it out, the show starts at at 8:30. There’s more information about the show here, and a tool for finding out what frequency CBC Radio One is on in your region here.

The guest host for the show was K-OS, the rap and hip-hop artist otherwise known as Kevin (or Kheaven) Brereton. The multiple award-winning writer/singer/producer of songs such as Crabbuckit and Sunday Morning, K-OS was born in Toronto and raised in Trinidad and Whitby. Having never met him before, I didn’t know what to expect, but he was a down-to-earth guy and a generous host.

We talked about the future of the music industry in light of Radiohead’s recent “pay what you want” album news, and subsequent reports that other prominent artists such as Oasis, Trent Reznor and Jamiroquai may consider doing something similar.

The central question for the segment was whether the record industry was a group of dinosaurs, with the Radiohead news as the asteroid that would eventually make them extinct. I agreed that many of them were dinosaurs, but said Radiohead and others were more like evolution at work — like those fish with the stubby little feet who first walked on land. What they will evolve into remains to be seen.

Anyway, it was a really enjoyable interview. K-OS asked some great questions, and also threw in some of his own thoughts about the issue from his point of view as an artist. Definitely worth a listen.