Okay, so maybe the Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates ads were designed to soften up the market by letting people get out all their pent-up anti-Microsoft emotions, so that the newer ads would seem better by comparison (sort of a scapegoat strategy). Or maybe they were just a total screwup and someone thought better of them. Whatever the case may be, the new one I just watched is light-years better (and I was one of the few who actually liked the Seinfeld ones, along with Mike Masnick at Techdirt). It’s understated, it’s human, it’s international in flavour and it has some touching moments as well. All in all, pretty well done, I think.
eBay selling Stumbleupon? Not surprised
According to TechCrunch, eBay is looking to unload Stumbleupon, the “crowd-sourcing” Web recommendation engine that the online retailer bought last year for $75-million. Mike Arrington says that reputable sources have told him the company is for sale. I can’t say I’m all that surprised. Not because Stumbleupon isn’t an attractive asset (although whether it was worth $75-million is a different question entirely) but because it never made any sense as part of eBay in the first place. When the rumours of an acquisition first surfaced in April of last year, I said that I didn’t really get it, and despite the attempts by many people to justify the deal since it happened, it has never made much sense to me, and still doesn’t. Combine that with talk of layoffs at eBay in the near future and a sale seems fairly plausible.
Zuckerberg worth $1.5-billion — or not
It’s bad enough that people pay any attention to Forbes magazine’s pathetic “my portfolio is bigger than your portfolio” list of rich people, but at least most of the people on the list have actual assets that can be measured in some objective fashion — i.e., by stock-market value. But young Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook, manages to get on the list at #321 with what Forbes calls a “net worth” of $1.5-billion, which is apparently based on little more than someone hitting a few numbers on a calculator. But hey, it makes for a great headline, right?
Is Facebook worth $15-billion? Not in any real sense of the word. Yes, it’s true that Microsoft paid $240-million for 1.6 per cent of the company, which theoretically values the entire company at $15-billion. But the key word there is “theoretically.” There’s about as much chance of someone buying Facebook for $15-billion as there is of me flying to the moon. In real terms, Mark Zuckerberg is worth something functionally equivalent to zero. I’d love to see him walk into a bank with a copy of the Forbes magazine list and try to get a loan for a couple of hundred million or so.
J-school student told not to blog about class
A few weeks ago, I came across a guest post at the MediaShift blog at PBS, in which Alana Taylor — a journalism student at New York University who also writes for the blog Mashable — talked about how disappointed she was with her classes at the university, and how “old thinking” permeated the school. Among other things, she mentioned that she was the only class member who had a blog, and that her teacher was encouraging students to think primarily about getting jobs at newspapers, and that the general sense at the school was that working online wasn’t a viable career choice.
It wasn’t a uniformly negative piece, nor was it solely about Taylor’s teacher — about whom she said some nice things as well, including the fact that she at least knew that blogging could be a paying job, and could lead to “real” journalism jobs. And it didn’t say much about the other students in the class, apart from some comments that a fellow classmate made after Alana asked her what she thought about the class during a break. That’s clearly not how her teacher saw it, however: according to an update by Mark Glaser at MediaShift, the NYU instructor called Taylor into her office and told her not to blog, Twitter or otherwise write about the class.
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Google: And then, we annex Sealand!
There was much chatter recently about a patent application that Google filed for a series of floating, offshore data centres, which would use wave energy to help defray some of the power costs required by the massive server clusters that Skynet, er… Google needs to function. Anchored seven miles or more offshore, the centres would also be outside territorial waters and therefore tax-free. My friend Om Malik says this idea isn’t unique to Google: a startup called International Data Security is working on a similar plan, although it proposes to use decommissioned ships docked in various harbours and served by fibre lines and high-speed microwave links.
Floating power centres would raise all kinds of issues, however, including — as one wag at Slashdot mentioned — the risk of Microsoft investing in a fleet of attack submarines, not to mention having to deal with the effect of salty sea water and humidity. More than anything, Google’s plan reminded me of Sealand, a former World War II sea fort anchored off the coast of England that was the subject of an ambitious (possibly even ridiculous) plan in the early 1990s to create an offshore data haven, with a server cluster suspended inside the legs of the structure.
Can you say The Streisand Effect?
I was flipping through my feed reader today, when I came across a post at BoingBoing about some funny doctored photos of kids at a science fair. You may have seen some of the same ones here and there around the Internet: there’s a girl holding a giant clip from a set of jumper cables in front of a cardboard setup that says “Electricity vs. Cat,” and another kid with a ’70s shirt and a bowl haircut in front of a board with a large hole and two nearby electrical wires that says “12-volt Sex Robot.” They are hilarious. Unless, of course, you are the kid in the ’70s shirt and the bowl haircut. Then, apparently, they are salt rubbed in a very raw wound that was created 30 years ago at the high-school science fair.
The BoingBoing post doesn’t have any photos any more. At first, it had photos but the faces were blurred, and there was no link to the site they came from, because Mark Frauenfelder said that he was concerned that they were real photos of real kids. Then he got a comment — not from one of the kids, or one of the parents of one of the kids, but from the kid in the bowl haircut, or rather the adult who used to be the kid. He said:
So this one time, at Bandcamp…
Longtime readers of this site will know that I have a fascination with the way that the music industry is being transformed by the Web, much like other content-related industries (such as the one I work in), and how artists such as Trent Reznor and Girl Talk are dealing with that transformation. In addition to those experiments, we’ve seen a number of Web services and companies launch to try and help musicians evolve, from Topspin Media, which was founded by former Winamp and Yahoo Music exec Ian Rogers, to RCRD LBL, which was started by Engadget founder Peter Rojas.
Now, Andy “Waxy” Baio brings news of another startup aiming to fill that void and make it easier for artists to connect directly with (and sell directly to) their fans. It’s called Bandcamp (great name) and was co-founded by Ethan Diamond, one of the founders of Oddpost. For those who may not recall, Oddpost was one of the first Ajax-powered Web apps, and offered a desktop-style interface to Webmail long before Google’s Gmail came along, and was eventually bought by Yahoo. Andy has a great interview with Ethan about what he is trying to do with Bandcamp.
Should I get an iPhone or an Android?
So the Wall Street Journal says that the long-awaited, much-ballyhooed Google Phone is coming soon, and TechRadar says that Google execs demonstrated a working prototype at a developer event recently in London. Meanwhile, some of the bloom has come off the iPhone rose in the past little while (for some people at least), with much discussion of how Apple maintains an iron fist when it comes to which apps are allowed on the device. So if given the choice between the two — which I admit is pretty hypothetical at the moment — which one should I buy?
The iPhone is tres cool, no question about that. It looks great, it feels great, and (for the most part) it works great. The size of the screen and the auto-rotation feature, not to mention the multi-touch interface, makes Web browsing and photo viewing almost as appealing as on a desktop, and puts it miles ahead of any other mobile device so far. Apps like Shazam — which identifies the music you’re listening to on the radio or your stereo, or pretty much anywhere in the immediate vicinity of your phone — make the phone a pleasure to use. Unfortunately, Apple won’t let iPhone users install certain apps, even when they sound really useful.
Mark McKay wins C-61 video contest
Congrats to my pal Mark McKay, video-blogger extraordinaire, for being one of the three videos selected in Michael Geist’s recent contest to explain the dangers of the Conservative government’s proposed copyright legislation, Bill C-61, in 61 seconds (although it died when the Harper government called an election, depending on the outcome of that election the law could be revived). Mark — who bears a startling resemblance to Rick Moranis’s character from the movie Ghostbusters — has put together an introduction to the law with his usual skill, a talent he also employed for us at mesh 2008 in May, where he both shot and edited a lot of the video along with my friend Greg Philpott and his team at mDialog.com. The C-61 contest was judged by (among others) Stephen Page of the Barenaked Ladies.
IMDB finally gets with the program
Almost a decade after Amazon bought the darn thing, the Internet Movie Database or IMDB is finally getting the ability to stream movie trailers, TV shows and other content, so that when you go and check the site for reviews of a film or goofs (my favourite feature) or a plot synopsis, you can watch some of it right in the page. As Rafat Ali notes at PaidContent, this is so obvious an offering that it kind of makes you shake your head that it has taken so long — but that’s the movie industry for you. Apparently Amazon has signed deals with CBS and News Corp. (for content from Hulu) as well as Sony, and is hoping to get more. I wish them luck.
IMDB was probably one of the first websites I became addicted to — I loved going there before I picked a movie to watch to read reviews, and I loved going there after to read the goofs and other trivia — and it’s also one of the first that I can remember showing other people to try and get them to understand the power of the Web. Unfortunately for me, and anyone else who lives outside of the United States, most of the content that will be available through this new offering is restricted to U.S. residents, and so without some kind of anonymous proxy tool, you will get the dreaded “this video is not available in your country” warning.
Music: The Black Cab Sessions
I can’t remember if I’ve written about this before, since it’s not exactly new — I think it’s up to episode 58 or so now — but one of my favourite Web-based music experiences has to be the Black Cab Sessions. The format is dead simple: get a musician into the back seat of an old black British taxi-cab and have them play a song as the cab drives around London, while someone films it with a handheld video camera (must get kind of cramped). I’ve embedded a sample of the cab sessions: Badly Drawn Boy otherwise known as Damon Gough, playing Born in the UK.
Best Buy and Napster: Dumb 2.0
So Best Buy is acquiring Napster, the struggling music subscription service, for $121-million. That’s a nice premium for Napster’s shareholders — about 85 per cent over what the shares were trading for before the offer — but they are likely to be the only ones celebrating this deal, I predict (and even so, the stock has tumbled by more than 60 per cent in the past year). The acquisition is obviously an attempt by Best Buy to branch out from the slow-growth electronics business, and there’s nothing wrong with that impulse. But buying Napster is a dumb way to go about it, in my view.
No doubt Best Buy believes that it can somehow magically fix what is wrong with Napster, by combining the service with its deep pockets and existing technology retail business. Adam Ostrow at Mashable says he sees the deal as making sense, and I would argue that he is right — to a point. Best Buy clearly sees Napster as a relatively cheap add-on, considering the company’s stock was barely trading on par with the amount of cash it had on hand ($67-million). But unless Best Buy has supernatural abilities (and the company’s track record in music doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence on that front), I think this combination is doomed.
Why? Because Napster’s problem isn’t a lack of money, it’s a lack of a successful business model. Despite the protestations of those who enjoy streaming music services, including Union Square Ventures partner and noted music fan Fred Wilson, the fact remains that most people don’t want streaming or “subscription” music — that is, music they can’t keep forever. If they did, then Yahoo Music wouldn’t have been such a dismal failure, Virgin Music wouldn’t have shut down, AOL Music wouldn’t have had to be acquired (by who? Oh yes — Napster) and satellite radio companies Sirius and XM likely wouldn’t have had to merge. For whatever reason, people like to own music.
A new theme: Defending my Thesis
Maybe it’s the reverse of spring cleaning, but I’ve been feeling a yen for a new blog theme, and I finally took the plunge. I looked around at a bunch of different WordPress designs, and saw many that I liked, but in the end I went with the excellent Thesis theme from Chris Pearson. I was a big fan of his Cutline theme, and used that for some time before moving to my most recent theme — The Morning After. I tinkered with it and customized it quite a bit, and learned a lot about CSS along the way, but in the end I wasn’t really happy with it, and Thesis fit my needs perfectly. Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments, and if you’re reading this through your RSS reader then, well… never mind 🙂
David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008
This doesn’t really have much to do with the Web or new media or anything like that, but I feel compelled to take some notice of the fact that David Foster Wallace is dead. His wife apparently came home Friday night to find that the author had hung himself in their home in Claremont, California. He was 46. It’s not clear whether Wallace was depressed or dealing with any other issues before his death, but suicide and various forms of mental illness, including depression, were a recurring theme throughout much of his work (after his first novel got critical acclaim in the late 1980s, he checked into a hospital and asked to be put on suicide watch, and suicide also appears in a commencement speech that he gave at Kenyon University in 2005).
In one short story he wrote, called Good Old Neon, the narrator — a well-liked, high-school sports star turned advertising executive — recalls feeling like a fraud all of his life and eventually kills himself (you can read some of it through Google Books). Wallace described the story as his attempt to understand a high-school classmate of his, a well-liked sports hero who later committed suicide. Wallace himself was a sports star of sorts in high school, a competitive junior tennis player. Tennis forms one of the backdrops for Infinite Jest, probably his best-known work, a sprawling 1,000-page novel about (among many other things) the life of a young man living at an exclusive tennis training academy.
Waxy digs into Girl Talk data
If you are the kind of data geek who loves to just accumulate numbers about things and then slice and dice them to see what appears, then Andy “Waxy” Baio is your kind of guy. An independent journalist and programmer whose blog at Waxy.org is a treasure trove of such things, Andy spent some time recently and analyzed the recent album from DJ mashup artist Girl Talk (which I wrote about here). Using data from Wikipedia — as well as some he got by using Amazon’s “crowd-sourcing” engine, Mechanical Turk — he came up with a spreadsheet listing all the samples that Gregg “Girl Talk” Gillis used on the album (264 in all) and how many samples each song contained.
Then he created a visual timeline of where the samples appear in each song, and a bar graph that shows the age of each song used as a sample (median age: 13 years old), as well as the same data laid out in a different way, to show that Gillis uses a lot of recent hits, and also a lot of 80s tunes, but not that many in between. What does any of this mean? Who knows. But it’s a tour de force of data porn. As always, Waxy gives a full breakdown of his methodology, and all the data can be download as a CSV file if you want to run your own analysis.