Author: Mathew Ingram

On Monday, shares of United Airlines lost more than 75 per cent of their value — erasing about $1.2-billion from the company’s market capitalization — after a story about the airline’s bankruptcy in 2002 somehow got pushed onto the website of a Florida newspaper, was picked up by Google’s news-aggregation service, then made its way onto the Bloomberg news wire and out to hundreds of thousands of stockbrokers and traders. But whose fault was it? By Tuesday morning, fingers were being pointed in multiple directions.

At first, it appeared that the Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper was responsible for the gaffe, but officials with the Chicago Tribune — which also publishes the Florida paper — said that no one in the organization had posted the old story, which came from the Tribune archives. Then, blame shifted to Bloomberg, which had picked up a headline from an investment news service called Income Securities Advisor.

Continue reading “United’s share slide: A comedy of errors”

Didn’t have time to blog this earlier today, for reasons that are too depressing to go into, but I still think Google’s announcement about an expanded newspaper archive search is one of the few things that have come out of TechCrunch50 and DEMO ’08 that I can genuinely get excited about. Most of the other news seems to involve companies whose vowel-deprived names (and in some cases business models) were either snatched out of the latest Web 2.0 hat — or in some cases copied directly from some other revenue-deprived startup.

Sure, Google’s archive search — which involves aggregating scans of old newspapers from around the country and the world (including a shout out to the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, the oldest newspaper in North America) — may be another revenue-free offering from the Web giant, as Silicon Alley Insider notes. But I guess I’m a sucker for Google’s motto about making all of the world’s information freely available. Or maybe I just have not-so-fond memories of scanning through reams of old microfiche slides from yellowing file folders in the newspaper library when I started in the news business. I would have given anything for a one-stop search that could find keywords in those files.

Continue reading “Google is the new microfiche archive”

Brad Stone over at The New York Times has a story about how Real Networks — which owns the Rhapsody music service, but is probably best known for distributing one of the most irritating media players ever — is launching DVD-copying software. It will allow users to make a copy of a movie, along with all of the features and artwork, but they will only be allowed to play the movie on the computer that runs the software. It also can’t be burned to a DVD and played in a DVD player, and in order to play it on another PC, users will have to pay $20 to buy another copy of the software for each device they want to play it on.

This is the kind of product announcement that makes you shake your head and wonder what the hell people at companies like Real are thinking. Not only is the product likely going to make Real a target for legal action by the movie industry, but as more than one commenter at Slashdot, Digg and other technology sites and forums have pointed out, copying DVDs isn’t exactly rocket surgery. There are dozens of easy-to-use programs such as DVD Decrypter, Handbrake (for Macs) and others that can accomplish the same thing, and also produce files that can be watched anywhere, burned, shared and so on.

Continue reading “Real launches DVD ripper — but why?”

Well, the day has finally come. A video on YouTube has finally topped 100 million views, and for better or worse it belongs to Canada’s pop princess, the pride of working-class Napanee, Ontario: Avril Lavigne. The video for her song “Girlfriend” is now at about 110 million views, well ahead of second-place holder Justin Laipply’s “Evolution of Dance.” The fans over at Avril’s BandAids forum are no doubt celebrating, since the record is the culmination of a viral marketing campaign cooked up by the site. First, BandAids came up with a YouTube “view-o-matic” page, which loaded the Avril video every 15 seconds. This cheat was picked up by dozens of media outlets — including yours truly, in a post at my Globe and Mail blog, which got linked to by Perez Hilton (watch those servers melt!).

Continue reading “Avril’s video tops 100 million views”

I’m not sure how many people noticed, but Clive Thompson — one of my favourite technology and science writers — returned to blogging this week. Clive writes regularly for the New York Times magazine, and his most recent piece was an excellent look at Twitter and the phenomenon of “ambient awareness” that such social-media tools allow, and why that’s a good thing. Clive’s blog Collision Detection used to be a treasure trove of those kinds of observations, drawn from scientific journals and various news articles, and after seven months of absence (which he says he will explain later), he is back to blogging.

In analyzing and describing complicated things, Clive has a great way of humanizing things as well, often with just a simple turn of phrase. Take one of his more recent blog posts, about a study of how flies avoid the fly swatter when you’re trying to kill them. First, Clive describes how he returned home from vacation to find his house full of flies and how frustrating it was to repeatedly miss them, and then he describes what the study says about how to avoid this problem:

Continue reading “Clive Thompson returns to blogging”

Even if you don’t spend a lot of time on FriendFeed, it becomes apparent after not too long that Andrew Baron — the co-founder of Rocketboom, the pioneering video-blog starring Joanne Colan (and formerly starring Amanda Congdon) — has a real hate on for Jason Calacanis, the diminutive and self-aggrandizing founder of Mahalo and former founder of Weblogs Inc. The latest eruption was a post from Baron noting that Mahalo’s traffic seems to have flattened out, according to a graph that he included from Compete.

Continue reading “Andrew Baron vs. Jason Calacanis”

This video more or less speaks for itself. Base jumper Hans Lange jumped off a mountain in Norway in a specially-designed winged suit, but towards the end of the freefall his parachute failed to open and he plunged down the mountain towards the rocks and lake below, until a tree broke his fall. He recorded the entire thing on a helmet-mounted camera.

Google’s birthday is coming up — although it’s not clear exactly which one, or when it will actually occur, for a whole pile of reasons — and it occurred to me that the company must have done an awful lot of searches by now. After all, the most recent estimates I’ve seen are that Google processes more than 2 billion searches a day, although I have no way of knowing whether that’s true. So I started looking around for numbers and did some back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Here’s what I came up with (please keep in mind that I am an English major). If anyone can shed any further light on this — or fix the math — I’d appreciate it. Obviously, I had to make assumptions about what the average number of searches was during a year, based in some cases on nothing but a single number for that year, and I’m sure there are numerous other gaps of logic as well. Feel free to let fly with the suggestions, but try and remain civil.

Continue reading “How many searches has Google done?”

Marc Andreessen, the guy who designed the very first Web browser, co-founded Netscape and helped take it public and now runs Ning, showed up for an interview at the Churchill Club, where he talked to Kevin Maney from Portfolio magazine about a number of things, including Google’s new browser (which he thinks is great, and a step towards the browser as OS model that he has been in favour of since his Netscape days). But the part that really struck me came from the bottom of a Valleywag recap of the talk, in which he described what his Netscape co-founder and former CEO Jim Clark is up to:

Continue reading “Jim Clark: In a hot tub in Italy somewhere”

My friend Om Malik says that he has it on good authority that Joost — the much-hyped P2P online video startup run by the founders of Skype and Kazaa — is planning to kill its desktop client. This news was likely met in many quarters by a resounding cry of “What took so long?” Although the first few iterations of Joost’s client showed some promise, the app soon became (in my view at least) a bloated front-end to a lacklustre service. There were hints of some interesting features, such as the semi-transparent live chat window that you could bring up while watching a show, but too few of them were realized.

Continue reading “Joost to euthanize desktop client”

There’s a great series of guest posts over at Hypebot by my friend — and mesh 2008 keynote interview subject — Ethan Kaplan, the vice-president of technology at Warner Brothers Records, who provides a detailed breakdown of the online strategy behind the release of R.E.M.’s latest album, Accelerate. The band was apparently underwhelmed with the response to its previous albums, and decided that a gangbuster online push was one way to help reverse that tide, and Ethan was the natural architect for such a strategy, given his technology background — but also his intimate relationship with the band, which began over a decade ago when he created a fansite at the age of 16.

The strategy eventually included six different websites and sub-sites set up before and after the release of the album. And that’s in addition to the use of existing sites such as Murmur, the band’s community website and forum (which evolved out of Ethan’s original fan site), where bootleg audio of the songs started appearing months before the official release, taken from live rehearsals and promotional events. There was also REMDublin.com, which was set up as a central place for fans who attended the band’s Dublin 5-night series of shows to congregate and share their experiences. As Ethan notes: “Michael Stipe encouraged people to photograph and videotape the shows from the stage.”

Continue reading “Inside R.E.M.’s Web strategy”

Shane Richmond at the Telegraph has news of an interesting ruling from a British High Court judge, in a case that involved allegedly defamatory comments posted to an online discussion group about investing. In his decision, Mr. Justice Eady said that even though some of the comments on the investment forum amounted to “vulgar abuse,” they were much more like slander — in other words, much more like nasty remarks that are made to someone in person — than they were like libel (which usually involves writing or publication). As he put it:

“[Such comments] are rather like contributions to a casual conversation (the analogy sometimes being drawn with people chatting in a bar) which people simply note before moving on; they are often uninhibited, casual and ill thought out. Those who participate know this and expect a certain amount of repartee or ‘give and take’.”

Continue reading “Comments more like slander than libel”

If you’re looking for more than the typical “Chrome is great” response to Google’s new browser, here are some of the ones I’ve come across that I think make good points and/or go into some depth. For whatever it’s worth, I think it’s pretty good — and it seems pretty damn fast as well. Will I make it my default? Not just yet.

— Walt Mossberg has a review of Chrome up at All Things D and seems to like it, but isn’t blown away (his speed tests don’t jibe with mine though, and CNET says Chrome beats every other browser).

— SEO 2.0 thinks that a Google browser could actually be a bad thing, for a number of reasons (some of them good).

— Jack Schofield at The Guardian notes that almost all of Chrome’s features (and even its name) are already available in other browsers, and in some cases have been for years.

— Matt Cutts, the Google blogger, has an excellent post up in which he responds to some of the criticisms (Google’s going to track me! Google’s going to know everything!) and questions about Chrome.

— Eric at Internet Duct Tape says he likes Chrome a lot, and it really is fast, but it’s missing some crucial things (ad blocker, etc.).

— Wired has a great in-depth look at the Chrome project.

From the Los Angeles Times (via a post at Wired) comes the news that a little-known “newspaper” called the Club Penguin Times apparently has almost 7 million subscribers, many of whom read the paper at least once a week. And where is this newspaper published? Inside Club Penguin, the virtual world for kids that was developed by a trio of parents from the tiny town of Kelowna, B.C. and bought by Disney last year in a deal worth as much as $750-million. As the L.A. Times notes, that readership makes the Club Penguin paper bigger than either the New York Daily News or the Chicago Tribune, among others.

Obviously, there are differences between an online journal published for kids between 6 and 14 and traditional newspapers in the real world, but that’s still a huge number. The Club Penguin “paper” gets about 30,000 submissions a day from readers for its poetry contests, its “Aunt Arctic” advice column and other features (much of the content in the newspaper is created by users). And best of all, the Penguin Times doesn’t have to worry about advertising — it doesn’t carry any.

Lane Merrifield, the CEO of Club Penguin and an extremely nice guy, was one of our keynote speakers at mesh 2008 last May. There’s some video of his talk with Stuart MacDonald at mDialog.

As I said in my post yesterday about Google’s new Chrome browser (and as a number of others have also noted, including Kara Swisher and Mike Arrington) Google’s real target isn’t Microsoft’s Internet Exploder, or even Mozilla’s Firefox, but the desktop operating system market. As Fred Wilson points out in his blog post on the topic, Google’s focus is the “cloud” — i.e., Web-based applications such as GMail and Google Docs and so on — and for an increasing number of people (including me), the browser is just a window through which they can use a variety of Web-based services.

So the point of Chrome is to turn the browser into a better interface for those Web services and apps, by using a faster, custom-made version of Javascript, by isolating each site in its own tab so that it can’t crash the whole browser, and so on. Although some of these features appear in IE 8 as well (including the separate sandbox-for-apps approach) Nick Carr is right when he says that Google is the only company for whom the cloud is a priority, and the only one with the resources to totally remake the browser into a Web operating system — continuing a trend that Netscape started back in the first bubble.

Continue reading “Chrome may be great, but will it matter?”