Month: April 2008

I don’t use Plaxo’s Pulse — a kind of aggregator for social information about you and your friends — but I think it’s interesting that they have integrated any comments posted through Pulse with the Disqus comment system, which I have been using on my blog for some time now and am a big fan of. As Daniel Ha of Disqus mentions on the company blog, the various threads of disconnected conversation that are occurring in different corners of the blogosphere is something that is crying out for a solution, and Disqus could be the one to solve it.

One of the most recent flash points in that area occurred when Shyftr showed up on the scene, pulling full feeds from blogs such as mine and allowing people to share them and comment on them. Some people were upset about the fact that their RSS feed was being used as the foundation for someone else’s business, but others were also concerned that comments occurring on Shyftr weren’t connected to their blogs any more. The same type of issue has come up with other aggregation-style services such as FriendFeed (which allows you to post comments back to Twitter, etc. but not to blogs).

Congrats to Daniel Ha — who Mark Evans recently interviewed for his blog — on taking the first step in helping to tie those loose strands of conversation together. It almost makes up for the fact that Disqus still doesn’t support trackbacks 🙂

Update:

Founder Nick Halstead pointed out to me that Fav.or.it — a feed aggregator that also aggregates comments — allows comments that are posted inside the service to be integrated with blogs as well, although Fav.or.it has not gotten rave reviews from some.

Jimmy “I invented Wikipedia” Wales gave a demo of the latest version of Wikia Search tonight, at the Social Media Marketing conference in Long Beach, and there is a new alpha site that you can play around with — if you don’t mind a page that yells “Beware!” at you in red type, and throws Javascript errors every time you click a button or launch an Ajax script (I particularly like how the URL is re.search.wiki.com; nice touch there, Jimbo). It’s actually kind of impressive in a way, if only because everything on the page is editable by any user, without leaving the page.

When Wikia Search was first released, it was dismissed by Mike Arrington at TechCrunch as one of the most disappointing products he had ever reviewed — primarily because it just added social features such as user profiles on to a rather lame search tool (powered by the Nutch engine). I had to agree at the time. But this alpha allows a user, through the wonders of Ajax, to click and edit in place any one of the search results, including title and description, and even allows search results to be completely deleted. You can also add new URLS, and pull data from a preview, which also appears in place.

Obviously, this is wide open to abuse — in much the same way that Wikipedia is. In fact, it’s even easier because you don’t have to click to go to an incomprehensible “edit” page with weird wiki commands for links. You just click and edit. Whether Wikia Search can develop the same kind of community of editors and overlords that Wikipedia has, which prevent the entire effort from degenerating into outright anarchy, remains to be seen. But it’s an interesting experiment, I think.

Update:

A post at the newish Craigslist blog says that the company is:

“surprised and disappointed by Ebay’s unfounded allegations, which came to us out of the blue, without any attempt to engage in a dialogue with us.”

And the post goes on to say that eBay has no reason to feel threatened

“unless of course they’re contemplating a hostile takeover of craigslist, or the sale of Ebay’s stake in craigslist to an unfriendly party. (In which case, they’re out of luck!)”

So there you have it. Not much clearer than before, but it certainly lends some support to the “poison pill” idea. It’s possible that Craigslist implemented some kind of provision that would change the share structure in the event that eBay mounted some kind of hostile takeover attempt. Don’t you wish the court hadn’t sealed those documents? Maybe we can buy copies on Craigslist.

Original post:

It seems that now, along with other Craigslist mysteries — such as why the site sticks with that 1996 design, and why Jim and Craig don’t just sell out and buy a small Latin American country — we have the mystery of what the dynamic duo did to make eBay so mad. The auction site, which has about 300 employees and $2-billion dollars for every one that Craigslist has, is suing Craig and Jim for “unfairly diluting” eBay’s 25-per-cent stake in the classified service. As some readers may know, eBay wound up with a stake after an early employee sold his shares, something Valleywag has covered in great detail and was also confirmed by Craig in an interview with Sarah Lacey on TechTicker.

So what did Craig and Jim do to get eBay’s knickers in a knot? Dilution implies that shares were issued that reduced the value of eBay’s stake in the company. But why would Craigslist do that? Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider says it’s likely because the classified site was raising money — although even he admits that doesn’t really make any sense. Why would a company with about $100-million in revenue and costs of about $30-million have to raise money? My friend Paul Kedrosky wonders whether Craig introduced some kind of poison pill that would reduce eBay’s stake if they pulled something the site didn’t like.

And what might that be? Well, what if eBay went into competition with Craigslist? That’s exactly what happened when eBay-owned classified site Kijiji announced last year that it was moving into the U.S., and it has quickly become a major competitor to Craigslist. The dilution eBay is complaining about took place in January — which is about the time that Kijiji was talking all kinds of smack about eating Craigslist’s lunch. Did Jim and Craig issue themselves some more stock around then? After all, they make up the entire board, and they own preferred voting shares while eBay owns common shares.

As Ashkan Karbasfrooshan at HipMojo says: “Put down the bong, the honeymoon is over.” And as my friend Rob Hyndman notes, this is an excellent lesson for all you startups out there — another example of why you need to maintain control over your stock.

After more than a year, an independent Web-based movie venture called Filmaka is finally out of “beta.” The project has a couple of high-profile backers: indie film producer Deepak Nayar (responsible for movies such as Bend It Like Beckham and Buena Vista Social Club) and former Fox TV network honcho Sandy Grushow, who gave the world shows such as The OC, 24, The X-Files and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Grushow was also one of the network executives behind American Idol, and says Filmaka is based on a similar premise.

The founders say they want to find young or up-and-coming TV producers and filmmakers and in some cases to help them get major studio or network deals. The site already has a stable of more than 40 Web-based shows that it plans to run on networks such as YouTube, and has been conducting a kind of Web-based talent search with a contest that ends on April 28 — the winner, who will be chosen by a jury including David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and Neil LaBute, will get as much as $3-million in financing to produce a movie for theatrical release.

That’s not the only contest Filmaka has been sponsoring either: the venture has also been running a sitcom competition with the cable channel FX, which will see the winner get $40,000 to shoot a 15 to 20-minute pilot for a potential FX television show, and the site has a documentary competition and a “branded entertainment” competition. Fox ran a similar kind of contest with MySpace, but didn’t turn either of the winners into a pilot. Jerry Zucker of NBC has spoken in the past about how expensive — and in many cases, ultimately futile — the current pilot-oriented TV production process can be.

More than 3,000 submissions have been received from aspiring filmmakers in more than 90 countries, and all of the submissions can be streamed from the Filmaka.com website. Visitors can choose to see entries by category (documentary, TV, feature etc.) or only the ones that have advanced to the jury level. Submissions include everything from animated shorts featuring “claymation”-style characters to sitcom-style comedies, and at least one Canadian filmmaker has several entries in different levels of the competition: Terry Miles has submitted a feature film called Lost and Found and also has an entry in the TV-pilot contest called The Secret Life of Amanda Jones, about a twentysomething college student who is also a vampire.

In an interview with Wired magazine, Grushow said that after 20 years in the network business, he wasn’t sure that any independent or unsigned filmmakers could produce content that he might be interested in, but he says his eyes were opened after Filmaka started the competition: “I was astonished at the quality level people were capable of creating … at such a low cost. To me, that represented a game-changer.” In Filmaka, he said, the partners hope create what amounts to “a studio with essentially no overhead.” And there’s already Canadian content.

If you’ve ever watched the Western classic High Noon and wondered what it would have been like if the bad guys were robots and the guns shot death rays, wonder no more. Not unlike a Star Trek episode, as it turns out. But a pretty cool one.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1m44VNw3O0&hl=en&w=425&h=355]

 

One quick reminder and one update on meshU:

The quick reminder is that we’re having a mesh meetup at the Irish Embassy tonight (April 21) starting at about 7:30, so swing on by if you’re in town and get some pre-mesh socializing in — the snacks are on us.

The update about meshU is that we’re releasing a batch of 25 discount-priced ($30) student tickets for the day-long workshop event (more info at the meshU site), so if you’re studying Web design or development or programming or anything along those lines — or know someone who is — be sure to book a ticket soon, because they will probably go quickly.

To be honest, offering student tickets was something we meant to do from the beginning, but it kind of slipped through the cracks during all the planning of mesh and meshU — thanks to a number of our friends and fans for calling us on it. We think it’s a great way of giving back to the community, and helping the young Web developers and designers of tomorrow. mesh on!

Update 2:

Via a Twitter post from Engtech (which I found on FriendFeed), I came across a suggestion from this guy about how to re-enable your Twitter cache. I tried it and it seems to have worked. And now — finally — there is a Twitter blog post about the difficulties (hat tip to Frederic from The Last Podcast).

Update:

There’s a yellow box at the top of the home page for Twitter users that says:

“Due to some cache changes we made Friday, you may not be seeing all updates in your timeline (don’t worry, they’re still there!). Thank you for your patience while we fix this issue.”

As Nav notes, this is the equivalent of flowers after a fight. I think we could use a bit more than that.

Original post:

MG Siegler of ParisLemon and VentureBeat (and my rival for number nine slot on the Techmeme 100) is keeping the pressure on Twitter about the system’s recent problems — intermittent dropping of people’s messages, etc. — and so he should. For a service that is supposed to be all about real-time communication, the Twitter gang have been doing very little of that about their own issues. People continue to complain on the Twitter customer-response forum, and have gotten little response.

Continue reading “Twitter failure: Call the irony squad”

As we all know, the number one rule of the blogosphere is that you must write about the blogosphere (it’s like the opposite of the Fight Club), and in the absence of a “bitchmeme” for this weekend — although Twitter’s intermittent issues come close — we have some link-trolling extraordinaire from Henry over at Techcrunch, who has parsed Techmeme’s links for the past four months or so and come up with a list of the top tech bloggers (according to Techmeme, that is).

I was pretty chuffed to find my name in the number 9 slot, up there in the top 10 with stalwarts such as Larry Dignan, and of course Mike Arrington and Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch. Although it seems that my place at number 8 could be in jeopardy — that relentless new guy, ParisLemon (aka MG Siegler), is apparently going to get moved into my position once Henry combines MG’s posts at ParisLemon with his posts at VentureBeat. (Update: Henry says he’s not combining multiple authors, so I am safe in the top 10 apparently). As they say at the Oscars, it’s an honour just to be nominated along with such talented, etc.

One of the amazing things about this list (apart from my presence on it, of course) is the size of the disparity between Mike Arrington and the rest of the list. In less than four months, he has written 207 Techmeme-headline blog posts (that presumably doesn’t count his posts over at Crunchnotes). That’s an average of almost two posts every single day. I’ve averaged a measly one post every two days — and if I could have cranked out one more I would have beaten that bugger Thomas Ricker at Engadget. Is that why I’m writing this? Of course not. Just saying 🙂

Ze Frank, the creator of the legendary Web-video feature known simply as “the show,” has a new project I just found out about called “Young Me, Now Me” — the idea being that you take a photo of yourself in the same pose as a picture of yourself from when you were young, and submit it to Ze. Some of the shots are pretty funny. As with many of Ze’s projects, including the recent Twitter “color wars,” there’s no obvious goal for the contest, which ends today. Will people get to vote on the best? It’s not clear. That’s half of the fun of Ze’s ideas — the fact that there’s no obvious purpose other than to do something interesting. The photos remind me of this video by Vimeo founder and former CEO Jakob Lodwick.

I was thinking about Twitter and the periodic outages of the past day or so, and came across MG Siegler’s post at ParisLemon (on FriendFeed, not Twitter) and started nodding my head as I was reading it. I couldn’t figure out yesterday whether Twitter was broken, or whether people were just not Twittering as much. I was at a baseball game at the Skydome in Toronto, so I wasn’t checking or posting a lot — and as MG notes, the weather was pretty nice in a lot of places (including Toronto) and it was a weekend, so I thought maybe other people had better things to do as well.

There’s nothing wrong with that, obviously. Getting away — or “off the grid,” as my hyper-connected friends like to say — is a good thing. And spending time outside with friends and family is also good. But I still felt a strange kind of disconnected feeling yesterday, when I checked Twitter and didn’t see anything but the occasional message. Where was everyone? What were they doing? I don’t want anyone to think I have a Twitter addiction — I was perfectly fine with it. But it still felt, well… weird.

I guess that’s the thing with social apps like Twitter. They connect you to a large group of people, and allow you to stay in touch with them in some minimal way (ironically, I had a long conversation with someone yesterday about the benefits of these kinds of “weak ties”). But when it isn’t working properly, you feel — out of touch. And in this case, it wasn’t by choice but a result of some external event. As ParisLemon notes, it was also hard to tell whether it was Twitter’s fault, because intermittent messages were coming through. Damn you, Twitter. More info here.

It’s hard to imagine an example that sums up the conflicting ambitions and tensions within the TV business better than the latest announcement about Gossip Girl, the show that appears on the CW network (co-owned by CBS and Warner Brothers). The news from the network is that fans will no longer be able to watch episodes online, as they have been since it started airing last fall. Instead, CW would like viewers of the show — which is all about a girl and her blog, and was effectively created in part to piggyback on the online habits of its target audience — to watch it only on television.

That’s ironic enough, of course — a show that’s all about how young people are turning to the Web and social media, but you can’t watch it online. The reasoning behind the decision is even more illuminating, however: in effect, the network is saying that the show has become too popular with fans online, and they would like to shift some of those eyeballs to the tube instead. Why? Because that’s where the advertisers are. Advertising on TV still brings in far more revenue per viewer than online, and CW needs to build up the former at the expense of the latter.

In reality, of course, the network may end up irritating the core group of viewers — many of whom enjoy the freedom of watching a stream online whenever they want — and the show could go down the drain regardless.

Louis Gray — the social media blogger who seems to be everywhere lately — has gotten the weekend blogosphere “bitchmeme” started early, it seems, with his post on how the majority of bloggers “don’t deserve any ad revenue.” According to Louis, most bloggers simply echo the posts that appear on TechCrunch and Mashable and other top tech blogs, and therefore they aren’t really adding any value, and as a result they don’t really deserve to have any advertising. He also says:

“Urged on by the success of mega blog networks like TechCrunch and spurred forward by stories from ProBlogger, or corner cases like Dooce.com, Daily Kos and others, an inordinate amount of people are hoisting ads on their blogs… in the hope of turning their daily rantings into big dollars that could possibly change their life.”

It seems to me that Louis is saying several different things here. On the one hand, he is saying that most blogs don’t get enough traffic to justify any substantial amount of advertising, and therefore they are never going to get rich, or make enough money to “change their life.” That seems fairly obvious. And while it’s probably worthwhile to let people know that the “get rich by blogging!” pitch is false, most of the people who think that will soon be in Vegas or signed up for some multi-level marketing scheme anyway, so the problem is somewhat self-regulating.

Louis also seems to be saying that for a blogger who wants to make money, copying the same content that dozens of blogs have isn’t really adding much value, unless you have an incredibly devoted and unique following. This is also wise advice (although arguably also fairly obvious). But does it follow that most bloggers “don’t deserve any ad revenue?” I don’t think so. There are lots of bloggers out there with original voices, who appeal to specific markets, and I think they deserve all the ads they can get.

Why shouldn’t they be able to defray the costs of their hosting, or their bandwidth, or their computers? That’s what micro-publishing is for. Louis says that “some bloggers act as if it’s their God-given right to write, post a few ads and start raking in cash.” I haven’t come across any of those, but he is quite right that they are mistaken. I just don’t think they’re as common as he thinks they are. And if the others can make a few dollars and advertisers are willing, then who are we to say they shouldn’t?

There have been a number of threads floating around the blogosphere recently that have to do with traditional media vs. “new media,” and the differences between the two — something that this article in the New York Observer got me thinking about again. There was the TechCrunch post about ads in Twitter, which was somewhat lacking in facts; there was the idea that journalism online has become much more of a process or continuum rather than an end in itself; and then there was the whole concept of “if the news is that important, it will find me,” which I wrote about.

I wanted to try and pull a few of those together because, well… that’s how I roll. Plus, it’s something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit, and writing about it helps me think. So bear with me (or not). If you look at some of the comments on my post about the Twitter ads story, as well as on other posts about it, you can see people talking about how it “wasn’t a story,” and suggesting — as Nate Westheimer did — that traditional media, with editors and so on, would never run something like that. I’d like Nate to read the New York Observer piece and see if he still feels the same way.

Would a newspaper or TV station or magazine have run with a Twitter story like TechCrunch did? Maybe not. But the fact is that plenty of poorly-sourced or single-sourced or anonymous-sourced stories show up in newspapers all the time — and not just the Enquirer or People magazine, but in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. And it’s not only stories about nuclear weapons in Iraq either — it’s stories that are about celebrities, or wealthy Wall Street types, or politicians. Sometimes, a story is just too good to pass up, even if it’s shaky.

That’s why it’s actually a good thing that news is becoming more of a process (which it always has been). Instead of trying to pump rumours and innuendo into full-fledged stories that deserve a premier spot in the paper, journalists can toss things into the ether when they think there is more to a story, and then update the story as it develops, something Mike Arrington said at mesh 2007 that he sometimes does. This is frequently messy, which is why I like to adapt the old saying about “if you love the law or sausages, don’t watch either one being made” to apply to the media. It’s not pretty, but it is occasionally true.

And that brings me back to the idea of “news.” What do we mean when we use that word, or when we say something like “if the news is that important, it will find me?” Some people responded to my post on that concept by saying they weren’t confident that “real” news would find them, by which I think they meant news of the U.S. election, or war in Sudan. But that’s only one small part of the definition of “news” — something that every person is probably going to define differently, and may even define differently depending on what day it is.

Is the Web to blame for creating “news” out of nowhere, as the New York Observer article suggests? I don’t think so. Newspapers have been doing that for about a hundred years. The Web is probably accelerating and amplifying that phenomenon — but at the same time, a proliferation of sources is also helping to nip such stories in the bud a lot sooner.

Update:

According to Microsoft, the first video is an inside joke — poking fun at such cringe-worthy corporate videos. Suuuuuuure it is. Whatever makes you guys feel better. I suppose all of these incredible lame videos were in jokes too, right?

Original post:

The following video will likely make you cringe, even if you aren’t a Springsteen fan — and even if you aren’t a Windows fan (thanks to David Crow and MG Siegler for this one):

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPv8PPl7ANU&hl=en&w=425&h=355]

But is it as bad as the following one, or better? At least this guy can sing:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmIObmv2t6M&hl=en&w=425&h=355]

It’s probably frowned on in certain quarters to support an outfit like The Pirate Bay, the law-flouting group of Swedish hackers that has become one of the world’s leading sources of links BitTorrent files. But I can’t help but admire their willingness to thumb their noses at the forces of authority — especially their latest move, which is to provide a kind of WordPress blog-hosting service for people who want to say whatever they wish, without fear of legal reprisals or takedown notices.

In addition to providing a Torrent tracker that links to terabytes worth of copyright-infringing material — something for which they are currently fighting a legal battle with the record industry and the movie industry — The Pirate Bay is now offering an image-hosting service with virtually no restrictions, the new blog-hosting service, and is also reportedly working on a video-hosting service as well, according to TorrentFreak. On top of that, Pirate Bay ringleader BrokeP is also working on a music-sharing service that will allow fans to compensate artists directly.

In other words, The Pirate Bay seems to be turning into a one-stop shopping centre for either piracy and lawlessness or freedom of speech and the distribution of content, depending on how you look at it. But I still wish that the pirates would go ahead and buy Sealand — I’d love to have some Pirate Bay currency or a Pirate Bay passport.