Month: October 2008

There was quite the hullabaloo in the blogosphere and Twitter-verse over the weekend about pop princess Britney Spears launching a new blog-style website and setting up a Twitter account. Will Brit actually be posting messages to fans on Twitter? Unlikely, I would think — although not impossible, I suppose. Dave Matthews does it (at least from what I can tell this is the real Dave), and even shares his thoughts about personal matters such as… well, go read it for yourself. Other artists do it too, including Ben Kweller and David Usher (who has adopted social media with a real passion, and was our guest on a panel at mesh 2008 in May). And others too.

That said, however — and no offence intended to Dave or David or Ben — there are few stars of Britney’s caliber out there blogging and Twittering. And no, I don’t think Courtney Love counts, although some of her MySpace posts are a lot of fun, if a rambling stream of consciousness (or unconsciousness) is what you’re after. Among other things, it’s fascinating that Britney’s Twitter handle is @therealbritney, something I suppose is inevitable in a world of Fake Steve Jobs and characters from TV shows like Mad Men setting up Twitter accounts. Do people care whether it’s the real Britney? And how would they know, assuming they care?

Continue reading “Does Britney really want to get social?”

I don’t know why I like this video so much, but I just had to post it. It’s a short clip featuring music from a artist known as RJD2 (who also appears in the video — he’s the man with the beard at the beginning who tries to help the man on crutches), and it features a man with a specially modified set of crutches who does a kind of acrobatic street dance down the sidewalk. Watching some of the looks he gets from passers-by is part of the fun. The video was filmed by Ghost Robot director Joey Garfield, and there’s also an alternate version, which you can watch side-by-side with the original. For some reason this reminded me of another of my favourite videos: Christopher Walken doing a dance he choreographed himself in the video for Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice. (link via Neatorama).

It’s been a Twitterific kind of week, in a lot of ways. Not just because Ev Williams seized the reins of power (such as they are) at the startup — which led to lots of theorizing about why Jack Dorsey, who originally came up with the idea for Twitter, was so suddenly sidelined — but because Twitter is probably the classic example right now of a Web 2.0-type service that has plenty of users, but still no actual business model. With the U.S. and even the global economy in a state of upheaval and layoffs sweeping through Silicon Valley, what happens to such a company?

Twitter investor Fred Wilson seems to be getting more and more exasperated with the question about the company’s business model, but as my friend Mark Evans notes, it’s a question that has become a lot more pertinent than it was even a few months ago. Another investor, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, says Twitter will introduce a business model of some kind next year, and Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider believes that the company could eventually be worth $1-billion once it figures out how to translate a devoted user base into actually dollars and cents.

Continue reading “Twitter: The hunt for a business model”

Maybe everyone knows by now, but a piece in Women’s Wear Daily (I know, I know — but they have good New York media coverage) was the first mention I had come across about Adam Chodikoff, the 37-year-old researcher who provides most of the facts that underpin John Stewart’s barbed witticisms about the news on The Daily Show, and who helps come up with those video clips that refute what guests in the hot seat are saying. What’s particularly interesting is that Chodikoff has little or no interest in Google searches, Wikipedia entries, blog posts or anything like that.

Continue reading “The brains behind The Daily Show”

You little whippersnappers are probably too young to remember a great website known as Suck.com, which was a killer blog long before the word “blog” had even entered the popular vocabulary. Back when Wired magazine was fresh and new, and people still struggled with this strange animal called HTML, Suck was a beacon of satiric wit that punctured the egos of Web 1.0 millionaires, poseurs and startup emperors alike. Unfortunately, it expired in 2001 along with so much else, and nothing has come along that compares (although The Onion comes pretty close).

That said, there was one voice that almost captured the middle-finger style irreverence and sarcastic hilarity that was Suck: a site called Uncov.com, written by Ted Dziuba, who happens to also be a startup entrepreneur. Just as it was becoming a must-read source of ego-popping rhetoric and wit, Uncov shut down so that Ted could focus on his startup (which, not surprisingly, has been greeted with more than a few Bronx cheers) but it has returned, better than ever, with bon mots like this:

Continue reading “Ted Dziuba, Uncov and the return of Suck”

This may seem like an odd time to be launching something related to stock-trading, but when you think about it, the kind of turmoil we’ve seen lately — with indexes plummeting by thousands of points, only to rebound again the next day — is the perfect environment for some traders. All you have to do, of course, is pick the right spot to get in and out. Will the newly launched StockTwits.com help you do that? I honestly have no idea. But it couldn’t be any worse than listening to some of the “professional” investors and money managers who got us into this mess.

StockTwits comes from the occasionally fevered brain of my friend Howard Lindzon, a Toronto and Arizona-based venture capitalist who was also instrumental in creating the stock video show Wallstrip. While many people continue to be puzzled by the purpose of Twitter, a small but growing group of traders and analysts like Howard and his partner Soren Macbeth have turned it into a kind of instant-messaging version of the banter that goes on between traders: stock symbols, news tips, rumour and innuendo — all laced with a hefty helping of profanities and off-colour jokes.

If that’s your cup of tea, then I encourage you to sign up with StockTwits.com and start following — and even debating with — Howard, Soren and some other smart people like @wood83, @infoarbitrage, @gregormacdonald and @pkedrosky.

There are lots of reviews of the Google phone from HTC and T-Mobile flying around, including one from Walt Mossberg of the Journal that calls the G1 a “worthy competitor” for Apple’s iPhone, and one from David Pogue at the New York Times, who correctly points out that it isn’t really *the* Google phone. It’s just one of what will presumably be many Google phones, with different features, from different manufacturers. Don’t like the side-flipping keyboard or the fact that the tilt sensor doesn’t auto-rotate the display? Maybe the next Google phone will be more to your liking.

This is already a significantly different approach to the one Apple has taken, and in many ways the blogosphere’s typical (and natural) focus on the specifics of the actual G1 device itself tends to obscure the larger picture of what Google is doing. In almost every way, the Google phone approach is open, while the Apple approach is the same as it has always been: either completely closed or very strictly controlled. That kind of focus, of course, arguably makes Apple products more appealing because the hardware, software and services are tightly integrated.

Continue reading “Google phone: Will open win over closed?”

Just in time for the U.S. election, FriendFeed — the “life-streaming” aggregator run by former Google engineers Paul “Gmail” Buchheit and Bret Taylor — has launched a real-time view that looks more than a little bit like Twitter, or like Twitter would if it had an auto-update feature (which it used to at one point, MG Siegler at VentureBeat points out, until the strain on its servers made it turn the feature off). Like some others, I confess I find it a tad vertigo-inducing, like watching the landscape rush past you on a train and trying to focus on individual objects. But for a small room with relatively few participants, I could see it being quite useful. More useful than Twitter? (assuming “useful” is a word you’re prepared to think of in association with Twitter) That’s hard to say. I’ve embedded the presidential debate room below so you can get a taste of what it looks like.

Continue reading “FriendFeed real-time: It’s Twitter-tastic”

Filmmaker Brett Gaylor has created what he calls an “open-source documentary” called RIP: A Remix Manifesto. It’s about the importance of mashups and the remix culture, and includes interviews with and footage of mashup DJ Gregg “Girl Talk” Gillis (and his parents, as far as I can tell from the clip), as well as Cory Doctorow, copyright expert Lawrence Lessig and Jammie Thomas, the mother who became a kind of sacrificial lamb in the record industry’s war on peer-to-peer downloading. In the spirit of the movie’s subject, the filmmaker has made some of his footage available for others to remix as they wish. The film premieres in Montreal this week. Hat tip to the CBC’s Jesse Brown for the link.

It’s almost too good (or bad) to be believed: John McCain, the U.S. presidential candidate who as a senator supported the draconian rules included in Digital Millennium Copyright Act, now finds himself begging YouTube to stop removing his campaign’s video clips. YouTube has been taking them down because they contain excerpts from news broadcasts, and broadcasters are claiming that is copyright infringement. The McCain campaign is put in the uncomfortable position of arguing that those excerpts are “fair use,” and that YouTube should knock it off.

YouTube has responded to the McCain campaign (while stifling a chuckle, perhaps?) that it can’t play favourites just because the senator is in the midst of an election campaign, and that while Mr. McCain no doubt thinks his clips are of extra importance, “there is a lot of other content on our global site that our users around the world find to be equally important.” Then comes the real zinger: YouTube’s general counsel Zahavah Levine says that: “We hope that as a content uploader, you have gained a sense of some of the challenges we face everyday in operating YouTube.” Bam.

Eric Schmidt and other Google executives keep saying (usually in speeches to content-creation or distribution companies) that the company has no interest in getting into the content business, but the Web giant continues to do exactly that. Seth McFarlane’s new comedy venture is one example, and The Hollywood Reporter has come up with another: a YouTube show called Poptub, which appears to be a kind of Entertainment Tonight for the Web. As pointed out by NewTeeVee (which has apparently been trying to nail down Google’s involvement for some time), the show is in many ways just a reincarnation of an earlier experiment by Yahoo called The 9.

Poptub features the same host, the often overly enthusiastic and perky Maria Sansone, and a similar format in which YouTube clips are highlighted and Web celebrities are interviewed. The show also covers the typical entertainment fare, including awards shows and other red-carpet outings. Much like McFarlane’s project, Poptub is being distributed through the Google Content Network, which allows publishers to embed episodes of the show (or highlights) in their pages via Google ad widgets. The launch of Poptub, which apparently occurred last month, was reportedly kept under wraps so that the channel could build some buzz.

Poptub was created by Embassy Row, the production company run by reality TV guru Michael Davies, the guy behind Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and other shows, and is sponsored by Pepsi. Whether the idea of a YouTube clip show is going to fly or not remains to be seen, however. After the cancellation of The 9, Yahoo’s head of programming told NewTeeVee that he didn’t think video-clip shows really worked that well (“It’s a lot easier just to email somebody a link to a given video”), and as Liz Gannes at NTV has pointed out, there’s plenty of evidence to make that case.

Music Ally has news of some numbers relating to Radiohead’s pioneering “pay whatever you want” experiment with their album In Rainbows. The stats come from a speech given by Jane Dyball, head of business affairs for the band’s music publisher, Warner Chappell, which as Music Ally notes took a substantial risk by allowing the group to offer downloads on that basis. The unfortunate part about her comments, however — which were made in honour of the one-year anniversary of the album’s release — is that they don’t really tell us a heck of a lot that we didn’t already know.

One of the first things Dyball says, according to Music Ally, is that the digital publishing income from In Rainbows “dwarfed all the band’s previous digital publishing income and made a ‘material difference’ to Warner Chappell UK’s digital income.” That’s not saying much, unfortunately. Before the downloadable album idea came along, Radiohead wasn’t on iTunes and hadn’t done anything much in the way of other digital sales either, so just about anything would have dwarfed all its previous digital publishing income. Making a “material difference” to Warner UK’s digital income means that it was pretty good, but again it doesn’t really tell us much.

Continue reading “Radiohead: Some numbers on In Rainbows”

Just for the record, John Gruber of Daring Fireball seems like a smart guy, and he certainly knows a lot about Apple. How he knows so much isn’t clear, but he appears to be pretty well connected. Everything he said in advance of the Apple event yesterday (as far as I can tell) turned out to be true. But is that enough for John? No. Just to rub it in, he takes some time in a post today to call out those who were wrong, including a long section about Duncan Riley at The Inquisitr, who started the rumors about Apple launching an $800 laptop, which of course turned out not to be true.

I’ve had issues with Duncan in the past, but this seems more than a little mean-spirited. Was the report from his reliable source wrong? Sure it was. And as Gruber points out, today’s post on The Inquisitr does more or less try to weasel out of that by claiming that the $899 monitor effectively fulfilled most of the rumor. I think Duncan should have come out and said his source was wrong and then moved on. But that’s just me. Still, was it really necessary to do an all-out takedown of Duncan’s blog post, as though such things never happen on the Web? I mean, come on.

As Peter Kafka notes at Silicon Alley Insider, the combination of Apple’s secrecy and the huge interest in new products is a recipe for a rumor-fest (something Apple seems to have become resigned to). There are dozens of sites that exist solely to propagate rumors about what Apple is up to, and 90 per cent of those turn out to be wrong. Even Engadget and Gizmodo have been wrong in the past. For all I know, Gruber himself may have actually been wrong about something once or twice. Has that somehow become a blogosphere crime now?

If Duncan had no source whatsoever, and simply made up the $800 rumor out of thin air, then I think he would deserve that kind of criticism. But he says he had a reliable source, and I have no reason to think otherwise (of course, they aren’t all that reliable any more). The other sites that come under fire from Gruber seem even more petty: so 9to5 Mac was wrong about the plastic shell. Is that the end of the world? Hardly. And then he slams Mac Soda for having the apostrophes facing the wrong way in ’08 and ’09. Come on, John — time for a few deep breaths. Back away from the keyboard slowly. What the heck, maybe even go outside for awhile.

Just a quick post to say congratulations to my friend and fellow mesh conference organizer Mike McDerment, the CEO of online-invoicing service FreshBooks. The company just launched a quarterly industry-benchmarking feature, which involves releasing aggregated data from the various industries that use its invoicing services, so that other companies in those industries can compare their vital statistics — how long it takes to get invoices paid, what proportion of revenue is recurring versus new, etc. As Mike explains in the video I’ve included with this post, this kind of info can be a very powerful tool for companies to use, particularly small and medium-sized businesses that are trying to gauge how they compare to their peers in the industry. Congrats to Mike and the rest of the team.

According to a report at Broadcasting & Cable, the tall foreheads at Saturday Night Live — including Canadian-born creator Lorne “Dr. Evil” Michaels — are in talks with NBC about setting up a standalone site for the show, one that would feature clips as well as out-takes, video of rehearsals and so on. This seems like such a no-brainer that it’s hard to understand why it hasn’t happened already. There are clips on Hulu (which I would embed here, if it weren’t for the fact that they aren’t available outside of the U.S.), but the show could be doing so much more with its content.

Apparently the audience that Tina Fey’s impersonation of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been drawing has caused more than a few jaws to drop at NBC. According to MediaPost, clips of Fey doing her thing have pulled in twice as many viewers as watched the originals on NBC, which according to a comment from TVbythenumbers at Silicon Alley Insider is almost unheard of. Obviously, those numbers are getting a boost from the election and the heightened awareness of the topic, but there’s also a feedback loop effect that SNL is benefiting from.

Continue reading “SNL to get website — what took so long?”