Month: November 2007

From Nancy Baym’s always excellent Online Fandom blog comes news that a group of English football fans have effectively acquired a team. The group, which goes by the name MyFootballClub, consists of footie fans from more than 70 countries — and they are now the owners of Ebbsfleet United, a semi-pro club based in southern England.

The deal gives the group a vote on everything from the team lineup to who gets traded, according to an Associated Press article.

“This is a brand new concept, basically a massive trust,” said Roland Edwards, a director and club secretary of Ebbsfleet United in Kent, southern England.

Virtually every fan thinks that he or she can do a better job than the coach or the management of whatever sport they are watching. Now the fans of Ebbsfleet United get the chance to put their mouths where their money is. MyFootballClub sounds like an interesting story: according to the AP item, it charges its 20,000 or so members a $72 annual fee, and was founded earlier this year by former football writer Will Brooks.

According to a post at MacUser, the chairman and co-owner of Warner Music Group — Montreal’s own Edgar Bronfman Jr. — made some comments at a recent mobile conference about how music companies spent too long pretending that the industry’s business model wasn’t being threatened, and “went to war with consumers.” Here’s the money quote:

“We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong.

How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.”

A stirring and heartfelt sentiment indeed. And totally true, of course. Unfortunately for Edgar and the rest of the music industry, those five or six years spent dithering and suing music fans have left the major record labels in a hole so deep it might be impossible to get out. And Warner’s fight against non-DRM music hasn’t done much to help.

It’s nice to see someone admit their mistakes, even if it is years too late — but then I suppose Edgar Jr. is pretty used to admitting his mistakes by now, after having to take the rap for his disastrous investment in Vivendi, which obliterated a substantial chunk of his family’s fortune (acquired through the Seagram liquor business) back in the first bubble.

Update:

Mike Masnick of Techdirt fact-checks his distant cousin Edgar’s memory of how things happened.

There’s lots of chat this morning about Yahoo and Google’s plans to make email more social — whatever that means. Brad Garlinghouse of Yahoo was apparently talking to Saul Hansell of the New York Times, who wrote about it on his Bits blog (he’s the technology editor at the paper as well), and Brad wants to make email into a sort of social hub. In effect, it sounds like he wants to make Yahoo’s email into a Facebook-style platform.

This makes Mike Arrington sad, since it’s yet another sign that Yahoo can’t seem to get its you-know-what together and focus on a single thing at a time. Yahoo 360, Mash, etc. But wait — isn’t Brad the guy behind the infamous “peanut butter” manifesto, which was all about Yahoo spreading itself too thin? So maybe he actually has gotten the go-ahead from Jerry Yang and the rest of the Yahoo brain trust to try this email thing. My only problem with Brad’s idea is that for me, email is pretty close to broken. And it’s not just spam — although that’s a big part of it. It just doesn’t work properly somehow. It’s all out of sync, and it’s hard to keep things straight (although Gmail’s default “conversation” threading helps, I find) and it’s not integrated with enough other things. Is Yahoo going to fix all that, or is it just going to pop up profiles and miscellaneous crap whenever someone emails me?

If it’s the latter, then no thank you. If Yahoo or Google can find a way to make email relevant, to make it more efficient, more like RSS maybe, then I’ll think about it. My other concern is that for people below the age of 25 or so, email is a virtually non-existent form of communication. Making email a social platform might work for fogeys like me, but what about the next generation? Shouldn’t Yahoo and Google be thinking about that too?

Well, Rupert Murdoch has been dropping pretty big hints that the Wall Street Journal pay wall is a-comin’ down pretty soon — and it shouldn’t be too hard to make it crumble, since Digg just put a pretty big hole in it. As Kevin Rose describes in his rather economical post on the subject (I counted 38 words, not including his name), articles at the Journal will start carrying the Digg button, and any stories that get Dugg will be free for readers who come from the social-bookmarking site. Mike Arrington has a slightly longer post over at Techcrunch.

It seems like everyone is getting into the TV game, but not on the talking box (as Forrest Gump called it) — on the Web. And in some cases, TV networks are trying to take the Web and turn it into television. Good luck to them. Here’s a roundup of some of the news:

— News Corp. unit Twentieth TV is working with Yahoo on a “Web on TV” show, which will no doubt feature the latest hilarious clips of skateboarders hurting themselves or kittens on an icy pond.

— Lifetime Networks is launching a TV-style platform as part of its relaunched website, and will create new shows just for the Web as well as streaming Lifetime content.

— Newsweek says it is going to create a political talk show that will run weekly on its website, and the magazine has hired the former producer of Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC to put it together.

In other media-related announcements, MSNBC’s redesign is live (just in time for Rex “Fimoculous” Sorgatz to leave and an old friend of mine to arrive) and it has a very cool Ajax-y feature that lets you move chunks of the page up or down depending on your interests.

And in the old-time newspaper world, a number of chains have done a deal with real-estate site Zillow to put their ads on the Zillow site and use Zillow features on their newspaper websites. For more, see this piece of commentary on CNET about newspapers and the classified conundrum, and see Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing for a post on the Zillow deal.

Ethan Kaplan of blackrimglasses, the Warner Music Group technology shaman and all-around smart guy, has a great post up about the pile-on effect that we all see from time to time on Techmeme, as well as a related problem: the incessant desire for “scoops” and “exclusives” that companies use to play blogs off against each other — using embargos and other cheap parlour tricks to get blogs to parrot whatever marketing slogan happens to come down the pike.

I know that Mike Arrington at TechCrunch and Pete Cashmore at Mashable try hard not to get sucked into that vortex, and I’m sure that Richard MacManus and the gang at Read/Write Web do too, but it’s hard when everyone wants to be first. As Mike said at our mesh conference in May, being first is easier — if you’re not first, then you have to try harder to add value somehow. If you’re first, well… you’re first.

The problem, as Ethan describes in his own inimitable fashion, is that being first hardly matters any more. It’s not like anyone is going to be first for more than a second or two, and then the great tsunami of coverage will descend on the subject until it is obliterated beneath a pile of Techmeme.com posts. As Ethan says:

“It’s like is holding back an immense amount of water pressure then releasing it. In the end, can you tell who the first drop to hit you was? No. You only know that you are wet and uncomfortable.”

Well said. It’s unlikely we will ever get rid of the desire to be first — I think it’s one of the most primal desires of the journalist (and in using that term I include bloggers) — but I hope that more and more people will choose to focus on the issues that need to be talked about, instead of just the latest release of a Facebook/Google/MySpace widget that aggregates Web 2.0 social bookmarking spreadsheets or whatever.

Today’s cautionary tale about using Facebook comes from one Kevin Colvin, who appears to be a bank intern at the American division of Anglo Irish Bank — or at least that’s the story Valleywag has up, along with a charming photo of Mr. Colvin in a Halloween costume, which I have reproduced here for your enjoyment. I believe he’s some kind of elf or fairy of some sort — Tinkerbell perhaps.

In any case, it seems that Mr. Colvin booked off sick in an email to his boss, who sent a message back with an understanding comment about personal obligations — and included a compliment on Kevin’s wand, along with a copy of the photo that he had posted to his Facebook after a Halloween party. Not only that, but he apparently forwarded a copy of the email to a number of co-workers, which is how it wound up at Valleywag.

This isn’t the first time that someone’s personal behaviour has gotten them in trouble at work, and it’s unlikely to be the last. We can argue about whether it was right for Kevin’s boss to lift the photo and then publicly humiliate him in front of his coworkers by forwarding the email, but perhaps he wanted to send some kind of message to the rest of the staff. It may not be right, but it happens. Facebookers beware.

As several sites are reporting — including PaidContent’s UK division and Mashable — Bebo has launched a social-media platform with a pile of traditional TV and media partners including the BBC. Bebo often gets forgotten when people are writing about social networking, because the majority of coverage focuses on Facebook and MySpace.

But while Bebo was created in the U.S., it has developed a large European user base and has about 40 million users or so, which puts it not that far behind Facebook. And the partners it has lined up for its social-media launch include some major names — such as CBS, BSkyB, Channel 4, ESPN and MTV, as well as some smaller players. According to the press release, the Open Media launch will allow Bebo users to:

“store and curate within their personal profiles their favorite music and video content, and virally distribute that content throughout their ‘friends network’ and the wider Bebo community.”

On a related note, the word “curate” has become increasingly popular as a way of describing what users are doing when they pick clips they like and post them somewhere, or send them to friends — makes it sound all Latin and important, doesn’t it? A lot better than saying something like “I was goofing off and watching kittens on YouTube.”

Further reading:

— CNET’s Caroline McCarthy has some details
— info on ad revenue splits over at Contentinople
— the Telegraph has a take, along with some really craptacular ads
— Silicon Alley Insider calls Bebo’s offering the “anti-Hulu”
— PaidContent has a video interview with a Bebo exec

Does the “social radio” market — which features well-established players like Pandora and Last.fm — need another entrant? The gang behind Jango seem to think so. The site, which has been in beta for the past few months, opened up for full access Monday, and says it has 70,000 users already. Co-founder and CEO Dan Kaufman is the former CEO of Dash, a mobile-shopping startup that flamed out in 2001 (not that we should hold that against him, of course).

I have to say one thing about Jango.com: it’s pretty simple to use. When you hit the site you get a search box and a list of “stations.” You can choose a station, which is a pre-mixed selection of artists, or you can type in an artist’s name — at which point you are taken to a user page, without even having to sign up (you can create an account from the user page by just typing in your email and a password). My page is here. By choosing an artist’s name you effectively create a “station” based around them, which can made up solely of that artist, or artists that are similar. Jango suggests musicians and bands that it thinks you might like based on your choice, and then you get to choose from Jango’s list and add that artist to your station — or you can type in your own choice and add that. And that’s about it. You can click to buy a track through Amazon, and you can see who else is listening to a particular artist or station.

The site doesn’t have some things that Last.fm and Pandora do. It doesn’t have a widget, for example (like the one I have in my sidebar), although the company said that’s coming. But it is far easier to figure out and use than Last.fm, I think, which I find confusing and non-intuitive. And when it gets right down to it, one of the keys to such a site is the music recommendation part: in other words, how does it do in terms of suggesting related songs or artists you might want to listen to?

Like others, I’ve found Last.fm and Pandora to be sketchy on that front, particularly with some artists. Jango did not too badly with the few I gave it, although it remains to be seen how it performs over the long term. And when it comes to competing with Pandora at least, Jango has one killer feature: it’s available to Canadians, whereas Pandora is not — it cut off access to Canuck users earlier this year because it hadn’t acquired the appropriate licenses.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt definitely has a point: mp3.com and Linspire (formerly Lindows) founder Michael Robertson does seem to have a way of getting sued. I’m not convinced that it’s a deliberate strategy on Robertson’s part, as the Techdirt post suggests, but it certainly seems to happen with alarming regularity. I guess that’s what happens when you spend most of your time trying to drag the record companies kicking and screaming into a new business model. The latest suit is from EMI, which has a long and tangled history with the entrepreneur.

The first go-round came with mp3.com — and in particular a service called MyMp3, which allowed you to upload your music to the company’s servers and stream it from anywhere. Even though the service checked to see whether you had the right to the CDs you were uploading, the record companies saw it as unauthorized copying and therefore copyright infringement and sued. Universal later acquired the assets of the company (CNET bought the domain name). After launching a Linux-based competitor to Windows (and being sued by Microsoft), Michael Robertson launched another online music venture called mp3tunes.com, with a number of features. In addition to the ability to store music online and stream it to anywhere, the site allows users to “sideload” songs from other websites, in effect, transferring them to an online locker run by mp3tunes. This works for songs acquired legally, but also apparently for songs acquired illegally.

And so, another lawsuit: EMI says that Robertson is effectively trying to do much the same thing he did before. And that’s not all the lawsuits, either. In addition to mp3tunes, the entrepreneur started another service called AnywhereCD.com earlier this year, which allowed users to buy CDs and have them shipped — but also allowed them to download mp3 versions of the songs right away, in DRM-free format.

One of the service’s original partners was Warner Music, but that deal fell through within days of the launch (as I wrote here) because WMG didn’t like the DRM-free download option. There were suits and countersuits, and while the two sides eventually settled, the venture wound up going under. One thing is for sure: music fans may be getting screwed in various ways, but the lawyers are making out like bandits.

There’s a story in the Guardian today that says Google is working with American Idol creator and producer Simon Fuller — who also gave the world the Spice Girls — on some sort of top-secret TV project that will apparently revolutionize the medium as we know it. Is Google going to get into the creation of content?

Colour me skeptical. For one thing, Google doesn’t know anything about content — nor does it want to know anything, as far as I can tell from what Eric and the boys (Larry and Sergey) say about what they see as Google’s business. Finding content, yes; indexing content, obviously; maybe even aggregating content in some smart way. But creating it? I don’t think so. I could see Google doing a deal with Fuller to distribute content through a YouTube channel, for example, or some other kind of arrangement. But I don’t see the company getting any further involved in content production than that — unless Larry or Sergey want to wangle a walk-on role in Heroes, which I’m sure they could probably swing without too much trouble.

Maybe in part this is another example of what I wrote about yesterday — that Google is seen as the company that can save just about anything, and that rumours like this one boil down to the fact that people think TV sucks, and they wish Google would fix it somehow.

So TMCNet blogger Rich Tehrani says he has heard rumours that Google is going to acquire Sprint. This is a subject that others have raised as well, most often in connection with the much-hyped “Google phone” — which we now know isn’t a phone at all but an open platform. In other words, it’s even less likely that Google would buy Sprint than it was before.

That’s not likely to stifle the rumour mill, however. Why? I think it’s because Google has effectively become the saviour of everything. What was once a tiny company with a simple service that everyone used and/or liked has become a globe-spanning colossus with a market value bigger than the gross domestic product of a medium-sized country — and so the implication is that Google can do anything.

What people mean when they say Google should buy Sprint is “Sprint sucks.” When they say Google should come out with a phone, they mean “the cellular phone industry sucks.” Similarly, when they say Google should buy Yahoo, or Microsoft, or China, or whatever, that’s shorthand for “those things suck. Google would fix them.”

Would Google buying Sprint make any sense? Not really. Despite the attempt to compare it to Google buying YouTube or Google buying Keyhole (which became Google Earth), it would not be anything like either of those deals. Sprint Nextel is a gigantic conglomeration of telephone poles and legacy PBXes and customer-service desks and trucks and cable. Google needs that like a hole in the head.

A site called Real Fresh TV, which appears to be a European social media consultantcy, has an interesting proposition for Facebook that it has laid out in the form of an open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg: allow people to pay a monthly fee and thereby not see any of the “social ads” that Facebook is planning to insert into news feeds and so on. The only wrinkle I can see is that it might be difficult to accomplish (or Facebook might not want to do it) since the whole point of having social ads is to take advantage of the networks that people have with their friends, and if you cut off those messages than that reduces the value. Still, not a bad idea, really — Facebook still gets revenue, and users get the choice of whether to see them or not. What do you say, Mark?

I guess it wouldn’t be a weekend in the blogosphere without a little drama of some kind, and this weekend it was Mike Arrington’s no-show at BlogWorld Expo. The soap opera apparently began with a comment from Leo “TWiT” Laporte at the conference about how Mike didn’t come because he “forgot” (something I can only assume was Leo’s idea of a joke).

It quickly escalated into a full-on Arrington hate-a-thon, in which people used Mike’s absence from the conference as a jumping-off point for all kinds of ad hominem attacks (like the ones in Tony’s comment section at Deep Jive Interests) and conspiracy theories about link-bait. In the end, conference organizer Rick Calvert set the story straight by explaining how confusion over dates and a lack of communication helped lead to Mike not being there, and I think a lot of people who piled on the Mike-bashing bandwagon might be feeling a little sheepish now.

I have some personal experience with Mike and conferences, since he keynoted at the last mesh conference I helped organize in Toronto in May, and I can say that while he was occasionally difficult to reach via email (not surprising, really, with the volume of email he probably gets), he went out of his way to stay in touch, showed up on time and took part in all of the events without a word of complaint despite being severely jet-lagged. He even stayed longer than he had originally planned.

If there’s one thing that events like this weekend’s hate-a-thon reinforce, it’s that rushing to judgment in a blog post (or a comment on a post) without having all the facts is rarely — if ever — a smart thing to do. More often than not it’s better to wait.

Before I get started, let me just confess that I am not a programmer. I’ve tinkered with some HTML and even some CSS, but other than that I’m pretty much illiterate (a fact that my brother, who is a real programmer, would no doubt be happy to confirm). I’m an English major, after all. And yet, I have read a fair bit about the trend towards what some are calling “agile” software design, and it struck me that there are similarities between software programming and the traditional media.

A lot of traditional programming — the kind that produces software with billions of lines of code in it — involves dozens or even hundreds of people all toiling away for weeks, months or even years to produce a piece of software. It’s like a military campaign, in which the grunts do the low-level work, then it gets tested, then eventually it goes “gold” and is shipped. Then everyone buckles down for the next revision or upgrade.

As I understand it, an “agile” approach takes a much more evolutionary approach, in which the software gets put together in small chunks and then tested, then tinkered with, then tested, then improved, and so on. In that sense, the end product evolves over time, based on the feedback from users and from watching it get stress-tested in the real world. I could have this all wrong, but that’s my perception of it.

Now let’s look at the way a traditional medium such as the newspaper operates. It may not be months or years (although magazines are close to that kind of time-frame) but you still have a gigantic machine with many small cogs, devoted to producing something that is frozen in time — a lot like the software that goes gold and is shipped. Then everyone gets ready to do the revisions or the upgrade of the news the next day.

The Web, however, is not like that — or shouldn’t be. With a Web operation, news gets out quickly but in smaller chunks, and then it is tested against the facts (and the responses of those involved, or with knowledge of the events) and revised, and it evolves over time. It is never really finished. Instead of a mammoth project aimed at a single product, it is a series of small steps that eventually take you somewhere.

Just a thought.