Month: January 2008

I don’t know why I’m even bothering with a post that isn’t about Apple, when the entire globe — perhaps even the universe — is holding its breath waiting for news, but I have to say that the Facebook-buying-Plaxo rumour makes sense to me. I know that both Eric Eldon at VentureBeat and Mike Arrington at TechCrunch make a good case for why it might not happen, but I think it could.

Eric notes — as does Valleywag — that there is reportedly some bad blood between Facebook-backer Peter Thiel and Plaxo-backer Michael Moritz over some previous Silicon Valley deall, and Mike says that the numbers behind Plaxo aren’t that attractive for Facebook, especially at the $200-million valuation the site is looking for.

That may all be true, but I tend to agree with Henry Blodget on this one: adding the features of Plaxo, which allows users to import contact data from all kinds of different services, would make a lot of sense for Facebook, and even at $200-million it would be cheap given the (theoretical) $15-billion valuation Facebook has. Why not do it? I can’t see a tiff between Thiel and Moritz holding back an idea if it makes sense.

A couple of sites — including Pocket Lint and Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion — are running with the “news” that Steve Jobs’ keynote for Macworld has been leaked on Wikipedia. The only news is that anything with the word “Apple” in it becomes blog fodder leading up to the keynote, including old rumours.

The rumour about the Wikipedia leak is almost a week old now, having popped up on my friend Ian Betteridge’s blog Technovia on January 10 as well as a couple of other places. Same hauntingly plausible offerings — a 13-inch aluminum Macbook, YouTube for iTunes, etc. And the same widely-expected details such as an SDK for the iPhone.

Seriously, if someone was going to leak the keynote (assuming that would even happen), would they post it to a Wikipedia talk page? Why not send it to one of the many Apple sites? Some have argued that the ThinkSecret case made the regular rumour blogs too wary of printing Apple stuff, but I find that hard to believe. And one line in the keynote made my hoax antenna stand up: it says the DVD player on the Macbook “pops open when the eject button is pressed.” Don’t they all do that?

Not content to let sleeping blogs lie, Gizmodo editor Brian Lam has posted a response to the big CES brouhaha (it was definitely more than a kerfuffle), in which he argues that the gadget blog may have pissed some people off with its TV-B-Gone prank, but at least it isn’t in bed with the big tech companies like some blogs. Needless to say, the post already has dozens of comments — ranging from “You go, Gizmodo!” to those accusing Lam of changing the subject by making it about ethics.

If I were smart, I would probably stay away from this topic, given the response I got to my last entry, which drew shocked blog posts, emails and Twitter messages from people like Allen Stern at Centernetworks and Zoli Erdos. But I just can’t help myself. Lam has a point. Was the CES prank goofy and sophomoric? Sure it was — although all the hysteria about people losing business or losing their jobs was just ridiculous.

At the same time, however, more bloggers should think about what Lam is saying. If tech bloggers want to have influence, is the best way to do that by sucking up to technology companies? Frankly, even going to a trade show like CES makes me want to take a shower sometimes, let alone having to write about it. Maybe the prank was a dumb way to send that message — and maybe Lam’s argument is a post-hoc justification. But you know what? He’s still right.

Update:

I just posted a comment on Josh Catone’s post at Read/Write Web, and thought I would add it here as well. Part of what I’ve always enjoyed about blogs and other alternative media — and I’m thinking specifically of Suck.com here (now I’m dating myself) — is the irreverence and mischieviousness, the refreshing tell-it-like-it-is quality that blogs have, or used to have. There are plenty of blogs trying to play the old PC World-style, suck-up, toe the line, tech-journalism game. Why are we so quick to want Gizmodo to do the same?

Like my friend Paul Kedrosky, I think the reason for the jump in browser usage by those with iPhones should be fairly obvious: the iPhone browser is actually a pleasure to use, rather than a gigantic pain in the ass that renders pages badly and makes you want to stab yourself in the eyeballs or throw your phone off a bridge somewhere. Nevertheless, it’s still kind of amazing that the iPhone, with 2 per cent of the market, could overtake (even briefly) Symbian with 60 per cent of the market.

As a Canadian — and therefore a hostage to some of the most uncompetitive mobile-phone service in the northern hemisphere — this happy result for iPhone makes me wonder what the future holds when (or if) we ever get these magical devices in the great white north. Since even the “unlimited” data plans that some carriers have aren’t truly unlimited, I can’t help but think that a better browser means more browsing, which means higher bills. Unless Uncle Steve puts some pressure on.

Update:

At least one analyst is expecting Apple to announce the Canadian iPhone (hat tip to Mark Evans for the link). And if you’re listening, Ted Rogers? Don’t do this.

Rafe Needleman at Webware has a post up on CoverItLive, which reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write about this live-blogging tool for awhile now (and no, I’m not going to “live-blog” this post — that would be too recursive for words). The company, which is based in Toronto, used to be called Altcaster, and president Keith McSpurren gave me a look at an early version of the beta last year. I thought an all-in-one app that offered support for video, photos and chat was a pretty good idea, but it looked more than a little rough around the edges.

Looking at the most recent version of the app, the team at what became CoverItLive has clearly been working on both the look and the functionality. As Rafe notes, the software makes it easy for someone covering a live event — such as CES or an election, for example — to host a live chat, poll the readers in almost real-time, embed video and so on. Once the event is over, the entire session is saved and can be replayed, as you can see with CrunchGear’s live-blog of Bill Gates.

If I were live-blogging something, I would certainly consider using CoverItLive. The last time I did it, for a panel during the Online News Association conference last fall, I used a BlackBerry — not something I would recommend 🙂

One of a number of cheap online storage services — a group that includes Carbonite, Mozy and JungleDisk (which uses Amazon’s S3 storage system) — Omnidrive.com appears to be having significant problems, and according to some reports may be heading for the deadpool. Some users are reporting that they haven’t been able to access the service, and both the website and the official support forum site produce a 404 error. So does the blog of founder and CEO Nik Cubrilovic.

Read/Write Web wrote about the speculation in mid-December (I somehow missed it), and Cubrilovic responded that everything was fine — and not just fine, but great. The company was not only profitable but had gotten more funding, he said, and was coming out with a new release soon. Then the former chief technology officer for OmniDrive responded to the Read/Write post, however — and said exactly the opposite.

Not only did the former CTO say that the company had gone dark — “There is no one working at Omnidrive today. No one is supporting the customers. No one is developing version 1.0. The Wollongong and Sydney offices have been vacated” — but he said he hadn’t been paid for the work he did between April and August, and that he believed the money the company claimed to have probably never existed.

On the surface, this sounds a lot like the story of Sam Sethi and Blognation. I’ve sent Nik an email to see if he can tell me what’s going on. If anyone else knows anything, let me know in the comments. Regardless of what’s going on with Omnidrive, it’s wise to think about the possible downside of storing data in “the cloud,” as Webware notes.

Update:

A reader named Charlie says in the comments that he was able to login to Omnidrive, so the service itself seems to be operating, even if the website and support forums aren’t. And Simon East notes in a later comment that the website and forums are now back up — with a note from Nik saying there was a server outage and it took some time to get the site back up, but the service itself was never offline. No response to my email yet though.

If you come to my blog much (as opposed to just reading the RSS feed), you’ve probably noticed that I’m using a comment-handling system called Disqus, which has been in beta for the past few months or so. Fred Wilson of A VC uses it too, and so does Andrew Baron of Rocketboom, and so does my pal Dave Winer. Founder and CEO Daniel Ha asked me to try it out and so I’ve been using it since about November.

As with some other comment-aggregation systems, such as CoComment.com (which I also used for awhile), Instense Debate and SezWho, Disqus gives you a central place where you can track all of your comments, and it also gives you a built-in, threaded commenting system for your blog — which if you use WordPress, as I do, comes in the form of a plugin. It’s easy to set up and easy to administer, and you can decide whether to let it handle all your comments or only the new one.

Disqus.com has avatars for those who register, and it also gives users the ability to rate a comment. The registering part has irritated more than one reader, but I figure it’s a small price to pay for a lack of spam. In the few months I’ve been using it, I’ve had two pieces of comment spam make it into my email inbox — everything else has been handled by Disqus. One of the best parts of the system is that when you get an email notifying you there’s a comment, you can simply reply to the email and it gets posted as a comment in reply, which is a huge time-saver.

There are a couple of things that I don’t like about Disqus. For one thing, it doesn’t support trackbacks — although Daniel said they were working on something that would take the place of trackbacks. Another thing is that if you create a draft post in WordPress, it can be revealed on your Disqus comment page even if it hasn’t been published; Daniel said this was a flaw and they were planning to fix it.

The other little thing is that it took me awhile to figure out how to delete a comment (you have to click on the person’s avatar to get a menu). Other than those quibbles, I think Disqus is an excellent system and I intend to continue using it. The best part is that I find myself commenting more, and that is (I think) a good thing. If you have any thoughts about it, please let me know — in the comments 🙂

According to a piece at Wired, now that digital-rights management seems to be going the way of the dodo, some labels are thinking about watermarking as a replacement. The piece contains this not-totally-comforting comment about the current watermarking process:

“At its most precise, a watermark could encode a unique serial number that a music company could match to the original purchaser. So far, though, labels say they won’t do that… Sony’s and Universal’s DRM-free lineups contain ‘anonymous’ watermarks that won’t trace to an individual.”

So, there you have it. The industry could trace specific tracks to you, but they promise they won’t do that. Reassuring, isn’t it? I’m sure at one point Sony would have promised that it would never install a Trojan virus or back-door rootkit on your computer when you bought one of the company’s CDs too, and we know how that turned out.

I’m trying to imagine a world in which every piece of content was watermarked in some way. What would happen to mashups? How would it affect the principle of fair use? Would Internet service providers start to block specific activity on the Web based on whether a watermark was detected? And would the DMCA-driven “take it down first and ask questions later” policy extend to virtually every kind of content?

Just this afternoon I was listening to The Ongoing History of New Music on 102.1, and host Alan Cross was talking about the “Amen break” — a legendary drum riff that appeared in a song by The Winstons in 1969 and then started showing up in rap and hip-hop samples in the 1980s, and has since appeared in dozens of popular hits.

What would have happened if GC Coleman (the drummer) or Richard Spencer — the composer who holds the rights to the song, and is now a high-school social studies teacher — had a watermark on that sample? Would they have become rich, or would hip-hop have come up with a different sound? Would all the bands that used part of the track have been sued? Would anyone care? I wonder.

Nice to see someone (other than me) paying some attention to Markus Frind and what he has been able to accomplish with his dating site, Plenty of Fish. The New York Times has a story about him — which I found via a Twitter post from my friend Mark Evans — and it highlights the main things you need to know about Markus and Plenty of Fish:

1. The site looks like crap, and Markus doesn’t care (and neither do users).

2. Markus works 10 hours a week and makes $10-million a year.

3. Plenty of Fish gets about 1.2 billion pageviews a month.

The Times’ story mentions Craigslist, and I think the comparison is apt: like Craig, Markus has also focused on keeping the site free and on only doing those things that users want, not what others think he should do. And true to the old rule of thumb that Canada is one-tenth the size of the U.S., Craigslist has 25 people and has 12 billion pageviews a month, and Plenty of Fish has two people and does 1.2 billion.

A couple of little-known facts that aren’t in the Times’ story: Markus once helped to nab a suspected killer for the U.S. Marshal, and his research in mathematics was cited in a paper that won the Fields Medal, the math equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Markus also says there are some major announcements coming about Plenty of Fish.

Update:

Kevin Burton of Tailrank isn’t buying it. If Markus is so successful, he says, why doesn’t he just shut up and run the site and pocket those $10-million instead of bragging about it? Burton says Frind is either a liar or a fool. Any comment on that, Markus?

Yes, it’s another meme — and this one seems to be an enhanced (or even more annoying) version of the “five things” meme that was going around about a year ago, when Vanessa tagged me and I wrote this post. Why it’s eight things now instead of just five I have no idea — inflation? Anyway, Leigh and Keith have both tagged me, so here goes:

1. My middle name is Duff. It was supposed to be Doyle, but my grandmother (a scholarly sort) liked the name Duff because I was premature, and therefore I was “from my mother’s womb untimely ripp’d,” as Shakespeare said of MacDuff in Macbeth. I was called Duff or Duffy until I was about 15 and made people stop.

2. I come from a long line of pilots. My dad was a fighter pilot in the Canadian Air Force (there’s a page about him here) and his father was also a pilot and helped to start the flying club in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, where they trained pilots during the Second World War. I don’t know how to fly, but another guy named Mathew Ingram does.

3. I was born in the same town as CBC hockey commentator Ron Mclean: Zweibrucken, Germany. Both of our fathers were stationed there with 3 Wing, a small NATO fighter base. Another guy who lived there the same time as me: Rob Hyndman, my mesh-organizing pal.

4. I helped break the story about Royal Bank of Canada taking over Richardson Greenshields in 1996, one of the biggest takeovers in the financial sector at the time. I was sitting behind a guy on the VIA train to Kingston and being a nosy sort I was reading over his shoulder and he had a file with all the details of the deal.

5. I worked at Alberta Report magazine in the late 1980s, when Ken Whyte was in the midst of his transition from small-town sports reporter to big-time Toronto journalist. Also at Alberta Report then: my friend Mark Stevenson, who joined Ken at Saturday Night magazine and then the National Post and is now at Macleans.

6. Like Leigh, I am a huge Star Trek geek and have seen every episode of the original probably hundreds of times, and can recite much of the dialogue verbatim, whether you want me to or not. I can also do this for the movies Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Plains, Trains and Automobiles, as well as most of Blade Runner.

7. I interviewed David Walsh of Bre-X not long before he died of a heart attack, leaving the world in doubt about whether he deliberately planned the world’s largest gold-mining scandal or whether he was a naive patsy.

8. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week — and when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation, I once successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me. I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. **

** I just threw that one in to see if anyone would make it to the end. It’s a quote from a famous essay

The New York Times has a piece in Sunday on Gawker, and how it may have “jumped the snark.” It’s a look at some of the turmoil that the site has seen in recent weeks — including the departure of writer Richard Morgan after just one day, and the sudden resignations by former editor Choire Sicha and writer Emily Gould not that long ago.

Of Morgan, Nick Denton has said he “didn’t so much quit as splutter out. We did manage to get two publishable posts out of him before that happened. I wish him luck at a more leisurely institution” (for bonus points, you can read a transcript of an instant messaging conversation that Morgan and Denton had before he started.

In any case, the Times notes how recent stories in New York magazine and n+1 were rather unflattering, and talks about how the quality of the writing at Gawker has declined (according to some). The story also throws in some numbers about the traffic the site is getting now compared to the “glory days,” and just to pour salt in the wounds the writer calls up Tina Brown and Kurt Andersen and both say they no longer read it. Oh, snap.

For his part, Denton has a post in which he notes that Gawker has reportedly jumped the shark at least twice before — once in 2004 and once in 2005. Meanwhile, the site’s pageviews have continued to climb, according to a chart included in the post. Gawker’s views are now double what they were when the last shark-jumping comment was made.

It’s romantic in a way, the image of “citizen journalists” with their trusty cellphones, capturing news events around the world and allowing everyone to see instant photos or videos. But it can also be very dangerous, as a story out of China shows. As reported by CNN and at TechCrunch, a man who took pictures of a confrontation between townspeople and a company dumping waste was beaten to death by private security guards.

Although many stories describe Wei Wenhua, 41, as “a blogger,” he appears to have been a construction company official who merely started to record the fracas on his cellphone. A group of more than 15 “chengguan,” or private security contractors — sometimes referred to as “city inspectors” — reportedly attacked him and he was dead before he reached the hospital. In a press release, Reporters Without Borders calls Wei the first citizen journalist to die in China.

There’s a nice overview of the music industry’s dilemma in the current issue of The Economist. Nothing that surprising, but some worthwhile points — including a telling anecdote to start the piece, in which one of the major record labels has an epiphany about where the CD business is going:

“At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.”

There are also some numbers, of the kind that should make many a label stop and think, if they aren’t already:

“The volume of physical albums sold dropped by 19% in 2007 from the year before… For the first half of 2007, sales of music on CD and other physical formats fell by 6% in Britain, by 9% in Japan, France and Spain, by 12% in Italy, 14% in Australia and 21% in Canada.”

And some perceptive points about the slippery slope that the major labels find themselves on at the moment:

1. “Because sales of CDs are tumbling, big retailers such as Wal-Mart are cutting the amount of shelf-space they give to music, which in turn accelerates the decline.”

2. “Artists are receiving far less marketing and promotional support than before, which could prompt them to seek alternatives.”

3. “Record companies face such hostile conditions that their backers, whether private equity or corporations, are loth to spend the sums required to move into the bits of the music industry that are thriving, such as touring and merchandising.”

But perhaps the best point in the piece is the observation that the industry could have saved itself a lot of the pain it has seen over the past several years, and likely become stronger to boot, if it had shown more flexibility when digital music first became a reality, instead of deciding to sue everything that moved and call that a strategy. Now, they could be too far down the slippery slope to irrelevance to recover.

Some more details from Liz Gannes over at NewTeeVee about the efforts of movie writer Aaron Mendelsohn and some fellow striking writers to put together a mini-studio to produce Web content. They’re looking for VCs to put up $30-million or so to launch their studio, Virtual Artists — a name that appears to be a reference to United Artists, the seminal 1920s studio founded by Charlie Chaplin and others.

Incidentally, it’s worth remembering, as Paul Kafka points out at Silicon Alley Insider, that United Artists didn’t work out so well, in part because movies became longer and more expensive to produce. Most of those who formed the studio were also well-known actors — in other words, the “talent,” and not just a bunch of writers whom most of Hollywood (rightly or wrongly) assumes are a dime a dozen.

So will Mendelsohn and his gang be able to follow through on what Marc Andreessen recently described as the remaking of Hollywood in Silicon Valley’s image? That remains to be seen. Kafka worries that the economics of Web video are uncertain at best and there is certainly some evidence that that is true. But why does it always have to be a black and white question of Web vs. traditional TV and movies?

With Quarterlife, Marshall Hersovitz and Ed Zwick have shown that there can be a lot of overlap between TV and Web video, in both directions. Meanwhile, some comedians, actors and directors who started with short video clips — Andy Samberg and the Lonely Island crew come to mind — have managed to extend that into more traditional (and presumably lucrative) spheres. To me it seems a lot more like a continuum than a black and white separation of worlds.

Allen Stern of Centernetworks has a post up about how to get rich — theoretically at least — by coming up with a popular Facebook app. The numbers he has are from Adonomics (formerly Appaholic), an advertising analytics service aimed at Facebook developers, which is owned by a venture fund called Altura (“the first only-Facebook VC”). Adonomics will also guarantee a certain number of installs of your app for a fee.

According to Adonomics, the top Facebook app is FunWall, with 22 million installs and 3.6 million active users — or 16 per cent of the total. It’s not clear how the service defines active users. This app, according to Adonomics, is worth almost $30-million. If you do the math, that works out to about $8 per active user. Where does Adonomics come up with this figure? That’s also not clear. Apponomics is more than a little coy about the methodology behind its calculations.

I’m betting the numbers come from a place in Silicon Valley known as “Thin Air.” Is a Facebook app worth something? Sure it is. But is FunWall in any real sense “worth” $30-million? Maybe in some alternate universe. As an example of how Adonomics does math, the site says that Facebook has 60 million active users and a valuation of $18 billion, which “translates to $300 per active user.” Except that valuation for Facebook is hypothetical, and as a result virtually meaningless. (The script the company uses also likely violates Facebook’s terms of use).

Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Partners says there are a number of factors that determine what a Facebook user is worth. Greg Thomson of Toronto has developed a number of apps — including My Aquarium — and says he now has more than 8 million installs. In this video from FacebookCamp, he says an active user is worth about $3 per year. Favourite Peeps was worth 4.5 cents per user, while RockYou says it thinks the average app user could be worth between 30 cents and a dollar.