Month: November 2007

From Wired magazine’s Epicenter blog comes word that the prayers of hundreds of thousands — possibly millions — of Facebook users have finally been answered: the site will be dropping the much-despised “is” from its status updates. In other words, you will no longer have to contort your status in order to put it in the present tense (or put up with updates like “Susan is was having fun” from the grammatically challenged). You see? And you said that Facebook doesn’t listen.

That headline is meant as a joke, by the way. But like many jokes, it has some truth at the center of it. Do I like to see my posts linked to on Techmeme? Sure I do — and I get the sense that Fred Wilson does too, even though he’s a fantastically rich and well-respected venture capitalist who presumably has lots of other things that make him feel great about what he’s doing. And I think Dave Winer likes to see himself on there too, even though he has a kind of love/hate co-dependent relationship.

I think Fred makes a good point about the site drawing more from other places — places that aren’t really blogs in the strict sense, in that they aren’t written by a single individual. But is that a bad thing? I’m not sure it is. I suppose it would be if you were used to a Techmeme that consisted mostly of your friends, which I think Fred (and probably Dave) are suggesting it used to be. But isn’t that a little like the guy who has a great mountain view from his house, and then complains that all these new people are moving in and wrecking it? Why shouldn’t they get some of that view too?

Not a great analogy, maybe. But I think Fred is overstating the case a bit too. Jeff Jarvis is still on Techmeme regularly, and as a headline post plenty of the time. Rex Hammock is on there plenty too. Calacanis might not be, but only because all he seems to write about lately is Mahalo and (occasionally) fat-blogging. But maybe all those FOFs (friends of Fred) aren’t there as much — and I think that’s okay. We’re getting some new bloggers that are adding new points of view, like Ashkan at WatchMojo and Allen Stern at Centernetworks and ParisLemon and The Last Podcast.

Are we getting USA Today and places like that too? Sure we are — because blogs and media are blending. And that’s as it should be. Blogs aren’t just for the geeks and blognoscenti anymore. Is that going to boost the noise in the signal-to-noise ratio? Perhaps. But there’s more signal out there too. And yes, Techmeme is going to encourage people to “game” the system to try and push their posts up. So what? Don’t click on them. There’s still lots of great opinions and ideas out there — more than there ever were, in fact.

So Amazon has launched the Kindle, its e-book reader, with a press release and an event with CEO Jeff Bezos, which TechCrunch is live-blogging. Several sites have hands-on details, including Engadget (which I would be happy to pay for, Ryan, just not via a monthly fee).

If anything, my skepticism about the Kindle — some of which I allowed to escape in this post yesterday about the paying for blogs option — has increased. And not just because it looks (as someone said) like a giant version of a Handspring PDA from 1997, although I think that’s going to reduce the demand more than Amazon might like to think.

The thing that I’m really torn about is the wireless connectability. On the one hand, it’s great to have a device that can download books (although it reportedly takes a while), and it’s nice that Amazon has built that into the price. But then you have to pay to access the RSS feeds of blogs, which makes no sense — especially if, as Boing Boing notes, you can go to the blog directly with the built-in “experimental” browser. At this point, I feel compelled to use the phrase “WTF?” again.

The wireless also isn’t Wi-Fi, but a specially configured version of EVDO, so you can’t do all kinds of things with it. In other words, the wireless connection is sort of crippled, just as a whole series of other things about the device are crippled — and that would include the inability to put certain kinds of content on there because of the proprietary or restricted formats that Amazon is using.

I’m with Rex Hammock on this one: I would much rather have a larger version of the iPod Touch (assuming we could hack it, of course). Saul Hansell thinks we might get something like that in the future. Fred Wilson — who was approached about including his blog on the Kindle — says he thinks the whole idea of a dedicated e-book reader is ridiculous, and Kevin Kelly says he sees e-books as just one possible app on the Cloudbook of the future.

So lots of people probably know by now (at least if they read Techmeme) that Amazon is launching an electronic book-reading gizmo called the Kindle on Monday, and there’s a gigantic cover story about it in the latest issue of Newsweek magazine. Speaking of which, the Kindle will apparently be a magazine and newspaper reader too, letting you read publications that you’ve downloaded using its built-in wireless connection.

First things first — I think that Bezos is right to emphasize the wireless aspect, which is based on a cellular-style service that Amazon is calling Whispernet. Previous e-book readers had to be hooked up to the PC or a cradle of some kind in order to download new books via the phone line and so on, but being able to buy and download them almost instantaneously will add a whole other dimension (I realize that the iPod has managed to succeed without that ability, but then I think music is different from books in a whole bunch of ways).

The second thing that hit me was the part where Steven Levy says that users will be able to download books, newspapers and magazines, and will even be able to “subscribe to selected blogs, which cost either 99 cents or $1.99 a month per blog.” That one made me do a double-take. Pay a monthly subscription fee to read a blog? Either Levy and/or Bezos have been smoking something, or they have found some magical way to get people to pay for something that has historically been free.

I’m trying to think of a blog that I would pay money to read, and nothing is really coming to mind — not even Engadget or TechCrunch or Boing Boing. But that line of thinking raises the inevitable question: if a blog like Engadget is pretty much as good as a magazine (which I think it is), then why would people pay for one but not the other? That can lead you in one of two directions: charge for the blog, or don’t charge for anything. We know which one Jeff has chosen — but is it the right one?

Other questions include: Is it really as ugly as it looks in the photo? Steve Levy says no on his blog, but David Rothman of TeleRead says yes. And will it be open and support industry standards, or will it be full of awkward proprietary formats and DRM?

There were rumours even before the U.S. writers strike started that it might lead to one of the networks picking up Quarterlife, the new Web drama about twentysomethings created by Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, the team behind Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, and now it appears that those rumours have come true. NBC, which like other networks is looking down the barrel of an empty TV season, said that it has picked up the show and will run it starting in January.

The show becomes the first to move wholesale from Web to TV, but I predict (as others have) that if the strike continues, Quarterlife will not be the last to make that jump. The major networks have a voracious need for content, and when the chips are down they really couldn’t care less where that content comes from, so long as it fills the airwaves. During the last strike it was reality TV shows like Cops and America’s Most Wanted that filled the void for the networks — this time around it’s the Web.

As I noted in this post about the writers’ strike, it’s more than a little ironic that while the Web is the hot-button issue in the strike — in terms of the revenue share that writers want for online content — it’s also the place that writers are going to get their message out, and it has also now become the source of content that is replacing their traditional TV work. As my friend Tony Hung notes, these are interesting times.

(Note: This is cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

“Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel,” Mark Twain reportedly said, by which he presumably meant that one should think twice before making a writer or journalist mad. In Hollywood, the writers who create most of our TV shows and movies (and yes, I’m including Canada in that) are definitely mad, and they are showing it by doing what they do best: writing.

Some are writing opinion pieces for traditional media such as the New York Times and Newsweek, while others are taking their case online. Thanks to the Internet, writers can not only whip together and publish a blog for virtually nothing, but can also create and upload video to promote their case against the big studios and TV networks.

On the Web, in other words, ink doesn’t just come by the barrel; it’s virtually unlimited, and almost free. And it gives the writers a powerful platform to advance their case that they didn’t have during their last strike in 1989.

It’s more than a little ironic, in fact, that the very tools content owners are using to generate new revenue — which the writers say they are being denied a share of — are the same tools writers are using to get their message out. One of the central gathering points for strike information online is UnitedHollywood, a blog created by several union organizers with the Writers Guild, which keeps track of commentary both online and off about the strike, including videos and photo galleries.

The site features a video by the writers of The Daily Show, the popular satirical news show, in which the writers put on a version of the show from a desk set up in the middle of a picket line. Another video from the writers of The Colbert Report is a hilarious satire of a studio executive.

Continue reading “Striking writers use Web to fight back”

Ted Murphy of PayPerPost has a post up about what appears to be another Google PageRank restructuring, which Ted says is specifically directed at PayPerPost — and posts from Andy Beard at WebProNews and PPP-using sites like Big Foot Marketing and 5xmom.com (whose somewhat unsubtle real name is Make$ Money$) seem to confirm that PayPerPost users have seen their PageRank not just fall but drop to zero.

Is that fair? Ted and a small legion of PPP users clearly would argue that it isn’t. In fact, as TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley notes, Ted wants supporters to write to their Congressman to complain, and tries to make the case in his post that Google is just “defending their monopolistic stranglehold on search and online advertising,” and wants to put PayPerPost out of business because it’s an alternative to AdSense.

I wrote about this a little while ago, when Google used its PageRank hammer against a bunch of sites — including mine, which dropped a couple of ranks — for using paid links such as TextLinkAds. Some sites, such as the above-mentioned 5xmom.com, have decided to bend to Google’s will and get rid of their paid posts and links. Others, such as John Chow’s money-making site, have decided that it’s worth more to them to sell ads than it is to be in Google’s index, which is an interesting choice.

The question remains: is Google just trying to maintain the purity of the search experience, so that people don’t get misled by paid posts? If so, that’s a fairly noble goal (PPP’s disclosure policy requires bloggers to say somewhere on their site that they use PayPerPost, but not on the individual post). Or is the search giant just concerned with others selling paid links because that’s competition for AdSense? If so, that’s not such a noble goal. And how do we tell the difference?

Terry “PoMo” Heaton says that he has no problem with Google stamping out the “evil” that is PayPerPost, and that he would rather have Google policing such behaviour than any government. I’m not sure I would go that far. And Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests thinks that Google may actually be trying to send the webosphere a message that PageRank isn’t really that important.

So Jimmy Wales — founder of Wikipedia and the for-profit spinoff Wikia — has shown some screenshots of what his “social search” site might look like, which come to us courtesy of Matthew Buckland’s blog in South Africa (always happy to welcome another Matthew to the blogosphere). And guess what? They look an awful lot like Facebook. There’s a photo and a “status” section, and a link to photo galleries, plus some miscellaneous tabs and something that looks a little like the Facebook “wall.”

The idea behind Wikia seems to be similar to the idea behind Jason Calacani’s “social search” directory Mahalo.com — the idea being that raw algorithm-powered search isn’t enough any more, because it’s all filled with spam and black-hat SEO tricks (which is true, of course), and therefore we need to inject some human beings in there. In Jimmy’s view, Google also needs some competition and isn’t really getting much except from other gigantic Internet companies (Wired has a mini-Q&A with Jimmy on the search project here).

As Mike Arrington notes, we will see whether social search actually does do a better job than regular search. But the interesting thing to me about the Wikia Search is that it is so clearly modelled after Facebook. Is that now the de facto model for a social networking site? Not that there’s anything wrong with Facebook (other than the whole walled garden thing).

It just seems like everyone wants to be Facebook now. Google and Yahoo want to make their email clients into Facebook, LinkedIn wants to be Facebook — I guess that’s not surprising when the site just pulled in $240-million for less than 2 per cent of the company. It seems that being Facebook is a pretty good thing to be right now.

There have been rumours about Google getting involved in the wireless wars in the U.S. for some time now, and the company itself has admitted many times that it is interested in expanding the number of people who use the mobile Web and in increasing the amount of competition there is in the mobile business. So it’s not hard to believe the report today in the Wall Street Journal that says the company is going to bid for wireless spectrum. But does it make any sense for Google to do that?

I’m not sure that it does — and not just because it will cost a boatload of cash to do so. Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget does the math at Silicon Alley Insider and comes up with a figure of $8-billion or so. Of course, that’s only a couple of years worth of cash flow, right? Google should be able to make that up in a few months of selling click-to-call ads on your mobile phone, or whatever the heck it is planning to do. But still — why does Google have to do this at all? Is the U.S. mobile market so broken that only Google can fix it? I hate to make reference to myself (okay, who’s kidding who — I love it) but I wrote a post recently in which I wondered whether people weren’t putting too much faith in Google’s ability to fix just about any company or industry with its magic Google dust. In that case, it was talk about Google buying Sprint that started me thinking.

So here’s a thought: what if Google is starting to believe its own publicity? What if it thinks it can fix anything too? As they say out West, you shouldn’t drink your own bathwater. The mobile business has humbled many companies before Google. Maybe they didn’t have PhDs in applied math coming out the wazoo, but still. I’m not sure Google really needs to wade into this one, or that it will gain much from doing so. Fortune thinks the bid may be a bluff.

More ammunition (for those who need more) for the dropping of the New York Times’ pay wall: according to Nielsen data for October, the paper’s readership — in terms of unique visitors — jumped to 17.5 million in October, up from 14.6 million the month before. A rise of almost 3 million uniques in a single month is pretty incredible. Maybe it was all that Britney Spears coverage. Hat tip for the link goes to Beet, which has posted a video interview with Vivian Schiller of the Times.

Maybe it’s the future of music and maybe it’s not, but I think U2’s experiment with Facebook and the iLike widget is a pretty interesting move. As CNET points out, Bono is involved with Elevation Partners, and one of the board members there is also on the board of iLike — and Valleywag’s Megan McCarthy notes that the connections are even more intertwined than just that if you look closer — but nevertheless, I think it’s a great idea.

The song is a preview of a tune called Waves of Sorrow, and it’s a nice long clip of Bono talking about the inspiration for the song and then kind of singing along and talking about it as he sings it. I admit that I’m a U2 fan (although the Bono “saviour of the world” act gets a little thin at times), but in any case I think it’s a pretty interesting use of Facebook.

http://s.ilike.com/swfs/rssPlayer.swf

After just three days of being up on Facebook’s iLike page and available to be added to users’ iLike widgets (and displayed in their feeds, of course) the song has more than 1.3 million fans, and there are over 9,000 wall posts. Will Bono be reading each one? Somehow I doubt it. In other iLike news, Billboard reports that the company has signed a deal for exclusive content with Keith Urban.

After I wrote a post yesterday about Google and Yahoo’s plans to turn email into a Facebook-style social hub, someone commented and included a link to a Slate piece about the “death of email.” As Zoli Erdos notes in his response, this kind of thing comes along pretty regularly — email is dead, the kids don’t use it any more, etc.

My point on the Yahoo/Google post was that younger people barely use email at all, and if those two giants want to jump on the social-networking bandwagon, maybe email isn’t the best approach. I’ve learned through hard experience that if I want to send a link or a quick question to either of my teenaged daughters, email barely works at all — they hardly ever check it, and so I’m reduced to saying “Did you get that link I sent you?” at which point they go and check it, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Obviously, my daughters won’t be teenagers forever. Eventually they will (I sincerely hope) get jobs and become productive members of society — at which point they will no doubt be forced to deal with the massive time-sucking drain on productivity that we call email. They too will get to enjoy the main feature of email: what some like to call an “audit trail” and others like to describe as “butt-covering.”

Let’s face it: by CC’ing everyone under the sun, sending long messages late on a Friday afternoon, including miscellaneous attachments for no reason and otherwise gumming things up, certain people achieve the appearance of work without actually having to do any — and then when someone calls them on it they can say “but didn’t you get my email?” If Google or someone else can fix that, then more power to them.

Email may not be dead, but it certainly isn’t looking too healthy, and hasn’t for years. As Zoli points out, the best approach is not to replace email with other things like IM or Facebook messages — which have their own flaws — but to make use of as many different methods as possible, depending on the situation. In some cases a wiki makes more sense, or a Google document, or a live chat, or (God forbid) even a phone call.

My friend Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 says that he thinks the whole “email is dead” meme is ridiculous.

I have to say I’m not a huge fan of Mahalo.com, the “people-powered” search engine from Jason Calacanis, but then I’m not really the target market (as Jason has pointed out in comments here before). And I can see how it might be useful to some people, if they’re looking for just one or two results. But as skeptical as I am, I look like Jason’s biggest supporter compared to Andrew Baron of Rocketboom, who wrote a recent post entitled “Why Mahalo is Fundamentally Flawed.”

I’m not sure what happened between Jason and Andrew, although I know that Jason offered Amanda Congdon a job after her acrimonious departure as the host of Rocketboom, and he also made some fun of Rockeboom (in what I thought was a kind-hearted way) in a recent Mahalo video. But still — Andrew doesn’t just criticize Mahalo for a few flaws in his post. He effectively accuses Jason of perpetrating a gigantic con, in which he pretends to set up a site to help people find search results, but in reality just wants to get them to click on his ads.

It’s interesting to read the comments on Andrew’s post as well: Jason shows up and gamely tries to respond to the criticisms, and also disproves Andrew’s claim that there are no positive reviews of Mahalo other than Jason’s (which Andrew wriggles out of by saying they aren’t credible). Then, after a comment from Duncan Riley of TechCrunch, the Rocketboom founder wonders whether Duncan’s comment came after a “nudge for a voucher,” whatever that means. It’s bizarre.

Just for the record, I have nothing against Andrew — he was a panelist at the original mesh conference last year, and we were happy to have him — and I think he was a pioneer with Rocketboom. But his vendetta against Jason seems more than a little over the top.

NewAssignment.net creator and journalism prof Jay Rosen’s latest venture just went live: Beatblogging is an attempt to improve the coverage of specific news areas or “beats” by using social-media such as blogs and wikis. In effect, Jay and his team — led by the indefatigable David “DigiDave” Cohn — want to help beat reporters use “crowdsourcing” methods (like Jay’s project with Huffington Post, the political-reporting effort OffTheBus.com) to draw knowledge from various sources.

The list of 13 participants is at Jay’s site, PressThink, and also at the MediaShift Idea Lab site that is part of PBS. It includes Wired digital-music writer Eliot Van Buskirk, a science reporter at the Houston Chronicle, a public-school reporter at the Dallas Morning News, a basketball writer at ESPN.com and a technology reporter at the Seattle Times. The San Jose Mercury News has some thoughts about why it’s taking part.

I think Jay’s idea is brilliant, and it will be fascinating to see how it develops. I wish there were some Canadian newspaper reporters taking part.

For anyone who’s interested, Michael Robertson — whose mp3tunes.com service is being sued by EMI for what the record label claims is copyright infringement — has posted a lengthy overview of the issues (as he sees them) on his website. There are links to the statement of claim from EMI as well as Robertson’s countersuit against the record company. I wrote about the latest battle (the founder of Linspire has been down this road many times before) a few days ago when the EMI suit was launched.

EMI’s suit is kind of ironic, given the comments that Edgar Bronfman of Warner Music just finished making about how the industry has wasted too much time suing people over the past few years. And if you’re nostalgic for those years, or just can’t get enough of the Metallica “sue them until they drop dead” approach, check out this comment from KISS front-man, reality-show star and all-around loudmouthed moron Gene Simmons in a recent Billboard interview:

“Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid’s face should have been sued off the face of the earth. They should have taken their houses and cars and nipped it right there in the beginning. Those kids are putting 100,000 to a million people out of work.”