Month: February 2008

Earlier this week, comScore released a report looking at Google’s click-through rates for January, which showed a precipitous decline — and that in turn caused a similar precipitous decline in the company’s share price, slicing about $15-billion or so worth of market value from the stock in a single day’s worth of trading. Now, the traffic-measuring company says that it has looked more closely at the report and come to the conclusion that the decline was the result of Google’s attempts to improve the quality of the ads that are generated when people do a search.

The slide in Google’s shares wasn’t all comScore’s fault, of course. In some ways, it was like the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Investors have spent the past few months getting progressively more and more concerned about the U.S. economy and the effects of a recession on online advertising — and Google is the poster child for online advertising, since that makes up about 90 per cent of its revenues, and therefore justifies about 90 per cent of its multibillion-dollar valuation. All those fears were crystallized with the comScore report.

Still, it seems more than a little disingenuous for the company to be coming out with a fuller investigation of the click-traffic results after the horse has already stampeded from the barn, in a sense. Couldn’t comScore have seen this one coming? Given the nervousness around online ads, the news that click-through rates had fallen by 7 per cent in a single month was almost sure to set off a firestorm. It might have been nice to throw a few of those caveats in there at the time. Oh well — a billion here, a billion there. C’est la vie. I’m sure Google will get over it.

As some of you may know, Mike McDerment — CEO of FreshBooks.com, the excellent online invoicing company based in Toronto — is a personal friend, and a fellow organizer of the mesh conference (about which more details should soon be forthcoming; cross your fingers). For some insane reason, he and a couple of the FB team decided to fly to Miami and rent an RV so they could do a road trip to Future of Web Apps and SXSW. And they created a blog for the express purpose of tracking their journey.

I’m not quite sure how to describe this venture, except that it seems a little like what might happen if you crossed Easy Rider and Hunter S. Thompson’s Where The Buffalo Roam with National Lampoon’s Vacation. Anyway, be sure to check out their adventures, and the videos they will be posting with various software superstars along the way. And to put you in the mood, I’m posting a video clip that they led off with — the incomparable work of Jack Rebney, who is also known as the World’s Angriest RV Salesman (Warning: turn down the sound if the kids are around).

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ds7OfXXi-c&rel=1&border=0&w=425&h=355]

Never having been to San Francisco, I don’t know what the calibre of the city’s homeless population is like vis a vis the Toronto homeless. It’s possible that many of the San Francisco down-and-out are merely in between public relations jobs, or are biding their time waiting for another senior VP spot to open up at a dot-com — the kind of thing you might need, say, a free voicemail account for. Google says it is providing all of the homeless with their own lifetime voice number via GrandCentral, the Web telecom venture it acquired last year.

I guess homeless people in San Francisco don’t need blankets the way homeless people in Toronto do, and they probably don’t need food either. Presumably there’s lots of second-hand golf pants and mesh shirts and whatnot lying around for them to wear as well, so they’ve got that covered. What they really need is voicemail. And maybe an assistant to answer the voicemail, but I can tell that Google is starting small. Maybe they’ll build up to the assistant thing. And maybe the next move will be free paper-shredding for those important documents.

I just know that someone is going to tell me that voicemail will help homeless people get social assistance, and maybe get an apartment or at least a room, and that lots of government departments require you to have a phone number, etc. etc. And maybe all of that is true. But social agencies have been handling that for years. Will free voicemail help? Maybe, maybe not. It sure helps Google look good — and yet, it seems almost absurd on the face of it. Why not just invite them to the Googleplex for a day of free gourmet lunches and foosball games in the cafeteria?

Paul Miller has a new column at ZDNet that’s all about the Semantic Web — or Web3.0, as some like to call it — and he’s got a post up about an interview he did with the Father of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in which Sir Tim says that all of the various building blocks required for the Semantic Web to start functioning are there, and all that’s needed is for some people to start putting those blocks together. There’s no question that Sir Tim is right, from a technical point of view. But what’s really missing is magic — something that is going to pull people into it.

Let’s face it — the biggest problem with the Semantic Web is that it’s as boring as dry toast. It’s all about plumbing and widgets and data standards, all of which have names like FOAF and TOTP and SIOC and whatnot. It’s right off the dork-o-meter. The Lone Gunmen from The X-Files would have a hard time getting interested in this stuff, let alone anyone who isn’t married to their slide rule or their pocket protector. The things that the Semantic Web would make possible are fascinating and in some cases very appealing — it’s just getting there that’s the hard part.

A related problem, I would argue, is that not enough people even know what the word “semantic” means. I’m sure lots of people hear the term and either have to go look it up, or are left wondering what the hell people are talking about. And even when you know that the word refers to meaning as represented in language, or knowledge as represented in data, you’re still not much further ahead — it’s meta-data, or meta-knowledge. Not exactly warm and fuzzy, or easy to explain over a beer (or ten).

HTML and Web protocols are pretty boring too, but eventually they were able to do something that made people sit up and notice. What are those things going to be for the Semantic Web? I haven’t got a clue, but I’m glad Sir Tim and others are hard at work on it. For what it’s worth, I had a nice chat last year with the Father of the Web (who told me if someone other than the Queen refers to him as Sir, they have to buy a round of drinks), and we talked about the Semantic Web too.

Cory Doctorow, the Canadian author and former Electronic Frontier Foundation staffer, has written a piece for The Guardian that essentially mirrors my own thoughts on the term “intellectual property” — in effect, that it is a dangerously loaded phrase. There’s no question that it sounds really great, and has the added appeal of encapsulating a whole bunch of different principles in a two-word phrase. At the same time, however, it encourages (perhaps even forces) people to think about creative content in a distorted and fundamentally wrong-headed fashion.

Why? Because there’s no such thing as intellectual property in the same sense as we think about physical property. You can steal my car, or my wallet, and that deprives me of those things in a very real way, which is why doing so is a crime. But you can’t steal my idea any more than you can steal my thoughts. And in some cases, taking my idea and adding to it will actually make it better, which is why we have principles like “fair use” and “fair dealing.” There’s no such concept as “fair driving,” where you get equal access to my car (believe me, you wouldn’t want it).

“If we’re going to achieve a lasting peace in the knowledge wars, it’s time to set property aside, time to start recognising that knowledge – valuable, precious, expensive knowledge – isn’t owned. Can’t be owned. The state should regulate our relative interests in the ephemeral realm of thought, but that regulation must be about knowledge, not a clumsy remake of the property system.”

As Cory notes, this doesn’t mean that creators don’t have an interest in the uses that get made of their content. They clearly do, and rightly so. But as I tried to argue during the whole Lane Hartwell debacle, that interest doesn’t exclude all other interests, including the interests of society as a whole in encouraging creativity and freedom of speech. What we really need to find is a better way of balancing those things.

Not my mother, of course — a freelance writer who was approached about a writing job at the flagship blog in Nick Denton’s sarcastic and bitchy media empire. He mentioned it to his mother, who summed up the site far better than I’ve seen anyone else do, despite plenty of effort:

“Well, I had more time to investigate this [name redacted].com. It seems to be a melange of stupid news that no sane person would peruse. Having said that, I can see it may be popular. Most of the comments I read were by people thinking they are too smart by half. So I presume their audience is 19-29 persons who think highly of themselves. You are probably perfect to write for this crowd.”

Brilliant. You gotta love that last line too 🙂 Found (where else) at Gawker, where it was posted by none other than the Dark Lord himself.

I may not be the best one to follow in this regard, since I have a fondness for widgets and plugins (yes, Brent, I know my page is really loading slowly), but I think the Google chatback applet is a great idea. Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch seems less than impressed, and wonders why anyone would want random people visiting their blog to send instant messages through Google Talk. I see it as just another way for people to ping me about something — even if it’s just to see if I’m around, or to ask a quick question. I’ve already used it several times, and it’s only been a day or so.

Obviously, if people ping me through the widget and I’m busy, then I just won’t answer. But if it’s someone asking a quick question, or telling me something interesting, then I’m happy to hear from them. Some people like to leave comments, some people are happier with an IM message. And I like the idea that my blog becomes the central point of contact for people who may not be able to remember my email, or don’t know whether I’m using GTalk or Skype or MSN. Rafe Needleman doesn’t think much of the widget, but I think he’s being a little harsh.

Rafe mentions Meebo as a better option, and I tried it — in fact, I used it a lot before I found a way around the firewall at work. And I tried the Meebo Me blog widget for awhile too. But you have to keep Meebo open in a browser tab all the time, and it’s hard to know when there’s a new message. I like GTalk because it’s integrated into my Gmail, which is always open. I used Plugoo for awhile because it integrated with GTalk and it worked great, but now that there’s a Google widget I don’t need it.

I’ve been dying to use that headline for days, ever since I saw someone use it in a comment on a Read/Write Web post about Google Docs, and if even half of what Mike Arrington says about the closure of Stage6 is true, then Divx deserves the “epic fail” tag for sure. After writing about business for almost 20 years, I’ve heard a lot of dumb stories about boardroom sideshows, corporate intrigue and personal vendettas and this one appears to rank right up there with the worst.

Stage6 was a popular and widely-respected video hosting site, one of the first to offer full, high-definition video. Launched as a showcase for the Divx compression standard, it wasn’t designed to be a money-maker, but after it got a lot of attention the company apparently decided to spin it off, and Divx co-founder Jordan Greenhall took it over with some staff from the company and prepared to launch with financing from VCs and other investors. And then the train seemed to leave the tracks.

Despite the fact that the spinoff would bring in revenue for the company, and get the cost of streaming all that HD off its books, Divx apparently decided at some point to cancel the deal and keep Stage6 in-house. Now, even more inexplicably, they are shutting it down — presumably because it was costing too much money to run. What a waste. It’s possible that Stage6 might never have actually made it as a business, but to yank people (and investors) around like that is a pretty childish way to run a company. Whoever is responsible should be ashamed.

I hate to pick on someone — unless they deserve it, of course — but I’m willing to make an exception in Lance Ulanoff’s case. He’s the PCMag editor whose piece on Facebook got picked up by Fox News, primarily (I’m assuming) because of the headline, which says “Facebook’s death spiral has begun.” The actual column is a sort of drive-by critique of the social network, in which Ulanoff cobbles together reports about how it used to be hard to quit Facebook, and about how it had some problems with the news feed back in 2006, and about how it reminds him of America Online back in the day. Sounds like a death spiral, doesn’t it?

When I finished reading the piece, I checked the byline to see who wrote it, and the name Ulanoff rang a bell. Then I remembered: Lance is the same guy who wrote a piece about digital-rights management and music not that long ago, which I also wrote a post about and called “staggeringly dense.” A commenter took me to task for that — and other things — but I’m going to stick by it. For a blogger, both of these pieces would be forgiveable; for a guy whose bio says he is the editor-in-chief of the PCMag Network and has 20 years of journalism experience, it’s pretty sad. Who said bloggers were the only ones to deliberately stir up controversy just to get readers?

I don’t know whether Yahoo’s new Buzz feature will actually get any traction, or whether it will be lost in the sea of other Yahoo stuff, or whether it will be orphaned or otherwise screwed up in some way (in the past, any of those options would be a safe bet), but at least the company seems to be trying to do something interesting, which is worth a round of applause all by itself. I think the Digg gang can probably sleep safe at night for a little while, but Yahoo could turn out to be a strong competitor (Stan Schroeder doesn’t think so).

To me, there are two interesting aspects of the service: One is that most-Buzzed-about items will feed into Yahoo’s main news page, and the second is that search results will help determine what moves up the Buzz rankings. Those are two things that Digg can’t really offer — unless it does some partnership deals with Google, of course, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility. It’s true that Digg recently signed a deal with the Wall Street Journal, but I don’t think that’s going to do much to affect the placement of news stories over at WSJ.com anytime soon.

There’s no question that a story on the Yahoo News page can push a gigantic amount of traffic because of Yahoo’s size. It’s still one of the top three news pages on the Web, after all. And it’s possible that having Buzz-worthy stories on there will prove to be a big boost for some blogs and other sites — although Yahoo is starting with a fairly small group of 100 sources. As with Digg, of course, there’s also the risk that Buzz could be gamed. But it’s an interesting experiment nonetheless.

What if you took the Facebook news feed and removed it from Facebook? That’s kind of what FriendFeed is like. I’ve been using it for awhile now, courtesy of my blog friend Louis Gray, and I have to say it’s become quite addictive. As Eric Eldon notes at VentureBeat, the site — which just launched publicly — is so simple and easy to use that it’s hard to resist. It pulls whatever your friends are doing from dozens of sites such as Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader and others.

But it does a lot more than that as well. You can comment on the items that your friends have posted, you can watch video clips they’ve posted to YouTube right in the feed, you can click “Like” and give an item the thumbs up, and the site continues to add new features almost every day. For example, I just discovered today that you can even create what FriendFeed calls an “imaginary friend” — someone who doesn’t use FriendFeed, but whose activity you want to track (my feed is here).

The ease of use and the relentless addition of new features isn’t surprising when you find out that Paul Buchheit and a team of former Googlers are behind FriendFeed. Paul launched and developed Gmail, among other things (and is also apparently responsible for coming up with Google’s “don’t be evil” slogan). As TechCrunch points out, Paul and co-founder Sanjeev Singh also participated in the funding round, which raised a total of $5-million and includes Benchmark Capital.

As Jason at Webomatica notes, one big competitive threat on the horizon is Facebook itself, which recently announced that users can import items from outside services into their news feed. Given Facebook’s massive size relative to FriendFeed, this is obviously an issue for the service, but comparing the two also makes it obvious how much more seamless and easy to use the feed at FriendFeed is. But will that be enough?

Well, the very first Digg Town Hall is over, and I think I can safely say that it isn’t likely to change anyone’s mind about the site one iota. If you’re a fan, and you think Kevin (Rose) and Jay (Adelson) are a couple of great guys with the site’s best interests at heart, then you will likely continue to believe that after the show. They do seem like nice guys with good intentions. If, on the other hand, you believe that they are out of their depth running the site, aren’t transparent enough about how they run it, or are too busy navel-gazing, then you’ll probably still think that after the show.

There were only 20 questions submitted — not much of a town, really — but some took up the bulk of the show and others were dismissed relatively quickly. One of the first things out of the gate (after some audio issues) was a statement from Jay that the site does not have anything like a group of “secret moderators” or editors who bury things or block people. All there is, he says, is a site admin whose job it is to remove porn links and other things that breach the terms of service (Kevin says he did that job for the first six months or so that the site was live and then they hired someone). And there are no “bury bots” or a “bury brigade.”

All there is, according to Jay and Kevin — but mostly Jay — is an algorithm or series of algorithms that are designed to maintain “diversity” on the site. In other words, designed to keep posts and links and comments and Diggs coming from as wide and diverse a group as possible. That’s why some links get more Diggs but still don’t get “promoted” to the front page, they explained — because too small a group of similar people are Digging it. It’s the same with burying, Jay notes: too many similar people burying something wouldn’t work either.

Among other things, the two said that they are working on the new comment system (expected by April, maybe), and are working on fixing the search and duplicate-finding functions, which they freely admitted were broken. And they are going to introduce support and other forums to respond directly to users. They also said they want to be more transparent — but then a few minutes later said they didn’t necessarily want to show who was burying things, and also said they couldn’t talk about what criteria they look at to determine “diversity” of Diggs or links, except to say that they look at “a lot of stuff.”

Note:

Tony Hung has some thoughts at Deep Jive Interests, and there’s an overview of the town hall here as well. Best line in the Mashable live-blogging chat (which they did with Keith McSpurren’s excellent CoverItLive) was an Oasis reference: “Is that Liam on the left, or Noel?” My friend MG Siegler of ParisLemon also has a good writeup at VentureBeat.

I did a panel at Podcamp Toronto on Sunday with my friend and former Globe and Mail colleague Keith McArthur, in which we talked about new media and ethics, and I wanted to download some of what happened there for anyone who couldn’t make it (from what I understand, there should be archived video of the session soon at the Podcamp wiki). I think it’s an interesting discussion, and we only touched the surface of many of the issues in the hour or so we were talking about it (Michelle Sullivan has a pretty good overview as well).

Keith started with a few examples of ethical lapses on several different sides of the equation. One was by the Globe: an April Fool’s joke involving a CBC radio report about Jimmy Carter, which was reported as though it was fact in the Globe. A second was by the blogosphere: a story that Ford had stopped Mustang owners from publishing a calendar with shots of their classic cars in it (more on that here). And the third was from corporate America: In responding to a blog, Target said that it only handled such requests from “legitimate” media outlets.

One of the main things that struck me about those three examples is the difference in responses between traditional media and “new” media, in part because of their structure (one in print and the other online and easily changeable) and likely in part for cultural reasons. The Globe, for example, apologized for the story and ran a lengthy response from the writer involved (although it felt somewhat insincere). But that was days later. In any case, there the matter ended.

Continue reading “Thoughts on new media and ethics”

I have to say, I think it is very cool that a couple of Web developers who work for the New York Times came up with Shifd, a mobile app that lets you store links, notes and maps that are accessible from your regular browser or from a mobile device. That said, however, I still don’t see why I would use it (although to be fair, I’ve only played around with it a bit). To me, it looks like a solution in search of a problem.

The idea behind Shifd.com is that you sign up for the app, which uses Adobe’s AIR platform, and then you can store links to sites or news stories you want to visit or read later, and you can store notes, and you can send yourself maps or location-type information. Like Erick Schonfeld, I’m wondering why I wouldn’t just do those things either inside a mobile browser — using a bookmarking service such as del.icio.us, for example — or through a mobile app like Google Maps.

The other alternative, of course, as mentioned by a number of commenters at TechCrunch and elsewhere, is to just email yourself the link or the note. I regularly send myself emails that have certain keywords in them, knowing that I can search through Gmail quickly and find them. All I really need is a way to aggregate those easily based on keyword and feed them into something like Remember The Milk. And this looks like a cool example of what can be done with tags and del.icio.us.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Wagstaff of Loose Wire has some thoughts about how something like Shifd could be used by newspapers and others as an information delivery and/or storage mechanism. Maybe it does have its uses after all. It wouldn’t be the first app that was designed for one thing and wound up being used for something else.

Twitter seems to be one of those things that people write about almost as much as they actually use (which isn’t hard, considering the average Twitter post is less than 140 characters). I’ve written my share of blog posts about Twitter, including here and here, and now we have a longish post from Howard “Smart Mobs” Rheingold about why he has started using the app, along with some follow-ups from my friend Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests and from Nick Bradbury of FeedDemon.

Howard puts his finger on some important things about Twitter that he says makes it interesting as an example of a “smart mob,” including:

• Openness
• Immediacy
• Variety
• Asymmetry

And I would agree with all of those. But one of the most important factors, I think — and the one from which many of the others flow — is the first one: openness. If I send an @ message to just about anyone (unless they have blocked me), I know that they will likely see my post. I can’t think of any other app that allows that, except perhaps the ability to comment on someone’s blog. In some cases, I direct message people (d username) on Twitter because I can’t remember their email address, or don’t know which one of the many they have I should be using.

Facebook allows this kind of thing too, but to a much more limited extent. And messaging people through Facebook — which is another way a lot of people reach me — is much less immediate, since you have to click the link in the email to go to the Facebook message page, and whoever gets your response has to jump through the same kind of hoops. Twitter is always on, and is much faster, provided the person you need to reach is paying attention (my Twitter info is in the right-hand sidebar).

I think Tony puts it well when he says that Twitter is like a big group chat with a wide and varied group of people. I would definitely agree. And like many groups events — parties, etc. — not everyone is listening to everyone else, and there are side conversations going on that you may only hear one side of. But if you want to approach someone, they are as close as an @ message. And sometimes it’s just fun to listen in.

Update:

Jeff Jarvis has a column up at the Guardian about Twitter.