Author: Mathew Ingram

I think even infamous zombie-movie director George Romero would have felt outmatched by the ongoing Yahoo takeover saga, which has gone beyond drama into farce, then back into drama, then taken a right turn into the bizarre, and now threatens to become The Takeover/Merger That Wouldn’t Die. Microsoft wants to buy it, then it doesn’t, then Carl Icahn gets his fingers in the pie, then Microsoft wants to buy just the search operation, then it wants the whole company again, then it wants to team up with someone like News Corp. in order to dismantle the company — and meanwhile, Yahoo is talking with everyone but your Aunt Sally about a merger to thwart Microsoft.

The latest twist is that Microsoft and Carl are apparently still working on a takeover deal for the company. Icahn has sent a letter to Yahoo — and Microsoft has released its own similar statement — saying the two would be happy to discuss a takeover of some kind, but only if Yahoo’s current board gets the axe — the implication being that either the company gets rid of them, or Carl’s alternate slate is voted in at Yahoo’s annual meeting. In both statements, the potential for a full takeover is outlined. Microsoft’s release says that following a replacement of the board, it would

“be interested in discussing with a new board a major transaction with Yahoo!, such as either a transaction to purchase the ‘Search’ function with large financial guarantees or, in the alternative, purchasing the whole company.”

Continue reading “Yahoo: Night of the Living Dead”

If you’re any kind of online publisher — a traditional outlet looking to learn about online media, or a blog network looking to grow — you could do a lot worse than to follow the career of Nick Denton, a former traditional journalist (or at least the British version of same) who has become a new-media mogul thanks to the Gawker Media network of blogs. Nick has been conducting a kind of ongoing media workshop for the past couple of years, right out in the open (more or less). In the latest installment, the Dark Lord of the blogosphere has chopped the pay rate for bloggers at Gawker, for the second time in the last six months.

It’s not quite as bad as it sounds, however. Since the beginning of 2008, bloggers at the various Gawker properties — the flagship celebrity-obsessed blog, geek oracle Gizmodo, gossip rag Valleywag and so on — have been paid in part based on the traffic their posts attract. But that’s not their only pay; they still get a salary. The traffic-based payment is effectively a bonus — an incentive program (although whether it encourages bloggers to go for the cheap and titillating is the subject of debate). In other words, bloggers have to “earn back” their base salary first, and then whatever traffic they get after that is a bonus. And even with the cuts, Gawker bloggers still do pretty well.

Continue reading “Denton: Evil genius or just plain evil?”

It’s an old-media adage that if you can find three things that are similar, you have a trend on your hands, and can therefore write a big feature on the rise of the “hand-washing” trend or the “shoe-tying” trend. Well, after the Loren-Israel grudge match and the Jakob Lodwick flame war, we recently got the third in a spate of blogosphere bitchmemes: BoingBoing, the counter-cultural tour de force blog run by Cory Doctorow, Xeni Jardin and the rest of the Happy Mutant gang, came under fire recently for deleting any trace of the sex blogger Violet Blue.

Why did the Boingers do this? No one is saying. Violet doesn’t seem to have any clue, unless she’s being coy. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with something she wrote, or anything she can remember doing, although theories abound about personal relationships getting in the way of a continued relationship with BoingBoing. So what, you might ask? Well, one of the things that makes this spat a bit more interesting is the fact that Cory Doctorow is a prominent free-speech advocate and former Electronic Frontier Foundation staffer. And the site didn’t just remove some posts about or by Violet — it went back through the archives and deleted any reference to her whatsoever.

Continue reading “BoingBoing: It’s our blog, and our rules”

In the long-running Viacom vs. YouTube case — one that falls into the “desperately trying not to adapt” category — a judge has ruled that the Google-owned video site has to turn over a record of every user who has ever watched a YouTube video, either on the site or embedded in another site (a database that the judge’s ruling estimates would amount to 12 terabytes). Viacom is apparently trying to prove that copyright-infringing video clips from its shows are among the most popular content in the YouTube universe, and therefore YouTube should have to pay more in damages as a result of the infringement.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation makes a fairly persuasive argument that the judge’s order is a legal error, based on a U.S. law (the Videotape Privacy Protection Act, believe it or not) that prevents the publication of information about which videotapes a customer has rented. Unfortunately, Google’s own legal arguments appear to have worked against the company this time: its data-retention policies are based on the idea that IP addresses aren’t really personal data because they aren’t attached specifically to a single person, and in his decision the judge specifically quotes Google’s view that “in most cases, an IP address without additional information cannot [identify a user].”

As the EFF notes in its discussion of the issue, the AOL privacy breach of a couple of years ago is ample evidence that an IP address and some other user information can be used to quite easily track down individual users. Is that what Viacom has in mind — and if so, are individual lawsuits a la the RIAA the next thing on the agenda? If so, then the judge’s decision effectively emasculates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is supposed to protect hosting companies if they abide by takedown requests. Mike Arrington says the judge is “a moron.”

I know it’s been a couple of days since this was announced, which in blogosphere terms is a lifetime ago, but something about the announcement of a deal between Google and “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane continues to puzzle me. Actually, a bunch of things about it puzzle me — and not just the fact that (as Valleywag points out) this deal was originally talked about almost a year ago. I guess I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the idea.

Just to recap, the cartoonist and the search engine have teamed up to offer, well… I don’t know what to call them except maybe cartoon “webisodes” — a series of 50 two-minute clips that will be distributed through Google’s AdSense program and will be collectively known as Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy. As described (both of the times it has been announced), the clips will be animated and will carry advertising in some form, whether banner or pre-roll/post-roll. MacFarlane has called them “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in the New Yorker, only edgier” (notice he didn’t say funnier).

I guess my problem — if I have one — is that this deal seems to be neither fish nor fowl. It’s not so much that it blurs the line between TV and animation and the Web, because I’m all in favour of that kind of line-blurring in digital media. It’s more that Google and its advertising program seem like an odd fit with an artist like MacFarlane; even just writing a sentence like “the deal between the search engine and the cartoonist” reminds me of that old saying about the fish and the bicycle. What are these two things doing together?

Are the clips that Seth creates content or advertising? They will be distributed through AdSense, and carry ads, but they aren’t technically advertising (to blur matters even further, Seth will create special versions of the clips for advertisers). In many ways, this is the kind of thing that Yahoo might do, and in fact has done, in the past — creating content or contracting with someone to create content, although without the advertising piece. Does that mean Google is becoming a content company, and if so, is that necessarily a good thing?

According to the Wall Street Journal, the seemingly interminable Microsoft-Yahoo dance has taken a new twist: Microsoft has apparently approached large media entities — including Time-Warner and News Corp. — about joining up for a run at Yahoo, with the ultimate intent of breaking the company into its component parts. I have to say that this makes total sense to me, and in fact, I would argue that such a deal makes even more sense than either a Microsoft takeover of the entire company or a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo’s search operations.

If Yahoo were a patient at a hospital, the physician in charge might already have scrawled “GFP” on its chart, which to other doctors and nurses is a sign that things are not going well and the patient is “good for parts” — meaning organ donation, etc. (and yes, doctors really do that kind of thing). If nothing else, the past couple of years have shown that while Yahoo has many good assets, the company as a whole is not working. It is trying to do too many things at once, some of its strategies conflict with each other, and there’s an overall lack not just of visionary leadership but (I would argue) of basic functional decision-making ability. In other words, a prime candidate for organ donation.

If such a deal actually came to pass, Microsoft could acquire the search technology and assets that it needs to get out of its distant third-place position in search and search-related advertising, and a media partner could acquire some of Yahoo’s media-related assets — Yahoo Music, the video-related operations, Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance and so on — and other parts of the company could be auctioned off or just shut down. When a company struggles for as long as Yahoo has, it is often (but not always) a sign that it has simply outlived its usefulness, and needs to be either fundamentally restructured, sold or broken apart. I think Yahoo’s time has come. And even Fred Wilson seems to think so.

I don’t want to get all patriotic on you or anything, but I came across a couple of tributes to our home and native land (okay — my home and native land anyway) and they were sufficiently funny and yet true at the same time that I couldn’t help but take note of them. One was a guest post on the Queen of Spain’s blog by Meg Fowler, and while it’s entitled “Ten Things That Are Better About Canada,” it isn’t really about why we’re better than the U.S. or anywhere else, I don’t think — just why things are pretty darn good. My favourites include:

— Our national bird is tastier than yours.

— We know the secret to feeling rich — turn all your currency into gold-coloured coins!

— Our national flag is a leaf and two bars — something you can find in any town we have, too.

— We have more trees than we have McDonalds. And more hockey rinks than Wal-Marts. And more donuts than cops.

Nice job, Meg. And the other piece was a guest column in the National Post by a U.S. executive named Dave Burwick, who is leaving his tour of duty in Canada to head back to the U.S. and came up with his own list of things he loves about this country, including some thoughts about how hockey is a metaphor for our culture (and no, it doesn’t have anything to do with Don Cherry, thank God). Some selections:

— Hockey Night in Canada: One of the last communal TV events left anywhere.

— Eating a peameal sandwich every Saturday at 7 a. m. during my son’s hockey practice.

— Raising a family right in the middle of the city, and knowing they’re safe.

— Surviving a minus-30-degree day in downtown Winnipeg, and how it made me feel more alive.

I took a bike ride this afternoon through the Rouge River valley and into Pickering, out to Frenchman’s Bay — where some people were sunbathing, some were kite-surfing in the shadow of the giant Pickering nuclear plant, and some were sailing or kayaking — and along the way I saw hundreds of people walking, biking, picnicking, playing football, throwing a Frisbee, and just generally having a great time on a beautiful day. They were many different shades, from pale white to off-white to various shades of brown and black; some were wearing shorts, some dresses, some salwar kameez and some the hijab and chador and even burqa. And they were all Canadian. Happy Canada Day.

Update:

The much-rumoured Microsoft acquisition of “natural-language search” startup Powerset is now official, with a statement from MSFT and one from Powerset. Mike Arrington says that sources close to the deal tell him the rumoured $100-million asking price is in the ball park. Not bad for a company that has virtually no actual operating business.

Original post:

Matt Marshall over at VentureBeat says he has it on good authority that Microsoft is planning to make an offer for Powerset, the “semantic search” startup that has been in stealth mode for quite awhile now, popping up only long enough for a party or two, and recently poked its head out with a small-scale demo of its technology as a Wikipedia search engine. The rumoured dollar value for this deal? $100-million. If true, that would be a hell of a payday for something that hasn’t really shown much in the way of spectacular results so far, and is based at least in part on 30-year-old technology that the company licensed from Xerox’s PARC labs. TechCrunch says the deal could still be derailed by the Microsoft-Yahoo mess.

Of course, for a company like Microsoft, $100-million is chicken feed — Bill and Steve find that kind of money stuffed under the couch cushions when they vaccuum the Microsoft HQ. And the idea of an acquisition has been around before, with rumours floating here and there. It’s a painfully well-known fact that Microsoft’s search is a distant third place to Google and Yahoo, which is one of the main reasons the software behemoth continues its on-again, off-again (currently on-again) pursuit of Yahoo’s search business. If it could use Powerset to add natural-language search tools to its arsenal, that might help to close the gap with Google — although as Danny Sullivan has noted many times, we’ve been around this particular racetrack many times before.

It’s been a veritable geek flash-mob — in more ways than one — since Google announced that it will now be able to search and index Flash files on the Web, thanks to a special player that Adobe has created for it and Yahoo to use. The player effectively acts like a regular user, clicking on the various buttons or dragging sliders or whatever, in order to reveal all of the content trapped within the Flash widget or page. As far as I can tell, the only thing the Adobe player won’t be able to simulate is a pissed-off user clicking away from the page altogether, because the Flash widget or movie is so annoying and/or completely useless.

I’m no SEO magician, but I also have to wonder (as Erick Schonfeld does) whether the ability to search through Flash files is going to be that great for websites, since the main thing that gets you higher in Google search results is the number (and quality) of links that you have to your content. Are people all of a sudden going to start linking to the content inside a Flash widget, or boosting their links to a page because it has searchable Flash now? I don’t think so, although I could be wrong.

But the biggest fly in the ointment for me is the simple fact that most Flash websites are — not to put too fine a point on it — crap. The technology is occasionally used to good purpose, but more often than not is a cheap and cheerful way to make a site look interactive and fun, while simultaneously robbing it of any usefulness and overdosing on eye candy. Disagree? Feel free to tell me so in the comments.

Nokia now has three of the Big Four labels signed on for its upcoming “Comes With Music” service, which is expected to launch later this year. EMI hasn’t signed up yet, but apparently it is planning to. Although the terms of the deals are unknown, Nokia has reportedly paid the record companies millions of dollars for the right to offer some of their songs for download, and will build some of that cost into the price of Nokia handsets. Not surprisingly, Warner boss Edgar Bronfman Jr. is full of visionary enthusiasm for the project:

“Nokia’s Comes With Music service will be a significant step forward in the evolution of digital music. It’s the first global initiative to fundamentally align the interests of music companies with telecommunications companies.”

Who knows, maybe this time all of Edgar Jr.’s pronouncements about a revolutionary step in digital media will actually come true — unlike, say, his similar pronouncements about the benefits of a merger between Seagram and French media conglomerate Vivendi, a deal that would eventually vaporize billions of dollars in shareholder value, along with a substantial chunk of his Montreal-based family fortune. But let’s not dwell on that. And I’m also not going to mention how Edgar has repeatedly pledged that he has “gotten religion” about the need for progress in the music industry, only to repeatedly demonstrate the exact opposite whenever it comes time to actually do something.

Continue reading “Warner joins Nokia’s “Comes with DRM””

My choice for this weekend’s Big Think post stems from a recent Wired article by Chris “The Long Tail” Anderson, in which he attempts to argue that the ability to sort through gigantic databases of information — something he associates with Google — will mean “the end of the scientific method.” As I understand it, his argument is that since we have so much data, we can just use algorithms to find correlations in the data, and that will produce as much insight as years of traditional scientific research. The piece is entitled “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” and there’s a somewhat related post from Kevin Kelly (another Wired alumnus) on his blog Technium that he has entitled “The Google Way of Science.”

I think Anderson’s piece is an interesting thought experiment, and it forces us to think about how the sheer quantity of data we have available to us changes how we do things. However, like many others who have responded to his article (check the comments on the article for more), I think it has a number of serious flaws — and they are all summed up in the title, which implies that having a lot of data and some smart algorithms to sift through it means “the end of the scientific method.” That’s just ridiculous. It reminds me of philosopher Francis Fukuyama writing a book in the early 1990s about “the end of history,” in which he argued that the clash of political ideologies was more or less over, and that liberal democracy had effectively won. As we’ve seen since then, this was more or less complete rubbish.

Anderson argues that “The Petabyte Age is different because more is different.” There’s no reason for believing that this is true, however. Expanding the amount of data — even exponentially — doesn’t change the fundamental way that the scientific method functions, it just makes it a lot easier to test a hypothesis. That’s definitely a good thing, and I’m sure that scientists are happy to have huge databases and data-mining software and all those other good things; but that doesn’t change what they do, it simply changes how they do it. With all due credit to Craig Ventner of the Human Genome Project, sifting through reams of data about genetic pairs and sequencing them can help tell us where to look, but not what to look for, or what it means.

Continue reading “Google and the end of everything”

Whoever leaked the supposed memo with Rogers’ pricing for the Canadian iPhone played a cruel joke on their fellow Canucks: instead of the much-hoped-for $30 unlimited data plan — like AT&T users in the U.S. have — we get a series of plans that start at twice that amount, and the cheapest plan comes with a pathetic 400 megabytes of data and a paltry 75 text messages. If you want 200 text messages (which many U.S. plans come with) and a gigabyte of data per month, you have to spend a whopping $100 — oh yeah, and that’s without the ridiculous “system access fee” that gets tacked on, and call display is extra too.

The most common response to the plans so far, at least to judge by a Twitter search and a blog search, is virtually unprintable — as was the original domain name of this website, which is collecting names on a petition to send to the Competition Bureau (as of Sunday morning, the site had accumulated more than 10,000 names). There are some detailed responses here, and also here, and serial tech entrepreneur Albert Lai has a response to the plans here. Former Tory candidate Stephen Taylor calls it “a rip-off.”

As my friend Mark Evans notes on his blog, Rogers is clearly going for the cash grab here. I wish I could say that I was surprised, but this is pretty much what I was expecting. I think Rogers knows that Apple devotion and early-adopter syndrome will drive plenty of people to buy an iPhone regardless of the plans, and they will make boatloads of money on them, and everyone else can get stuffed. It’s a shame that Canada’s cellphone market is such fertile ground for plundering.

Update:

A Rogers account representative emailed me some additional info (which she also sent to Tris Hussey of Maple Leaf 2.0). In a nutshell, she says that you can choose one of the new data plans and add a voice plan, or you can add a data plan to your existing voice plan (but not one of the iPhone bundles). Upgrading to the iPhone from your existing phone and plan starts at $199.

“Rogers customers … can select from the new data pricing (ranging from $30 for 300MB to $100 for 6GB or $50 Flex Rate plan) and add a voice plan, or they can choose a combined voice and data plan to best suit their individual needs. Customers are not required to take the value packs, and can order most other features a la carte, such as $7 for Caller ID.

Existing customers can keep their existing voice service plan and pick a separate data plan (not in the iPhone 3G bundle) to meet their needs. They will need to check their upgrade eligibility, but any customer with a monthly service fee that is over $30 can upgrade to an iPhone 3G at $199 (for the 8GB model).”

Update 2:

Jevon at Wirelessnorth.ca points out some fine print in the Rogers contract that could jack up your costs for the iPhone even further — to the tune of $1,100 or more, thanks to a mammoth “break fee” that you will be charged if you try to escape from your three-year contract early.

At the risk of writing about two “High School 2.0” blogosphere situations in one week (the first one being the Loren Feldman and Shel Israel brouhaha), I couldn’t help but notice that Jakob Lodwick — the brash young millionaire co-founder of Vimeo and CollegeHumour.com, and one-time blogging boyfriend of party girl-blogger Julia Allison — has decided to quit the Internet. Well, maybe not the Internet per se, but the “social Web,” meaning he has closed his blog and his Tumblelog (he’s financially involved with Tumblr as well). Why? Because he just can’t take the abuse any more, he says. It’s just too much.

Apparently, some people have been saying mean things about Jakob — about how he’s arrogant, and insufferable in a way that only a millionaire geek can be, that he dresses funny, and so on. It’s gotten to the point where even his Mom can’t take it any more, and has had to shut down her own Tumblr blog. The humanity! At some point, reading through Jakob’s last post to the blogosphere at large, and then through his farewell letter, I started to think that maybe it was just a big prank — maybe Jakob is secretly laughing at us. I mean, could he really have written a line like “I may be a millionaire, but this sort of thing still hurts” and not felt just a little ridiculous? Then he says:

“I am walking away from what might be called The Social Web. This comprises any site where ‘anyone can sign up’ and electronically socialize with one another. The story is the same with most of these sites: a few settlers discover and make themselves at home, enjoying the solitude.

Increasingly, less-adventurous people find their way to the site. The population begins to snowball. A vocal minority of thoughtless jerks begin to speak up, driving away the settlers. In the worst case, the result is something like MySpace.”

Continue reading “Memo to Jakob Lodwick: Grow up”

My friend Steve O’Hear from Last100 has the news that Google has launched its own media-streaming software, called Google Media Server. According to the description at the Inside Google Desktop blog, it’s pretty simple: if you have a networked device that can connect to your TV, then you can watch YouTube videos, look at photos and listen to music (although it’s for Windows only at this point). It’s not surprising that Google would get into this niche — if anything, I find it kind of surprising that they haven’t done it before now.

Getting content from a computer to your TV hasn’t been easy until relatively recently. If you were into Linux you could play around with something like the open-source MythTV.org software, and many people I know — geeks, naturally — modified their Xboxes to act as streaming media servers, while some built their own standalone media boxes. Now most game consoles will serve that function, and there’s the Apple TV and Mac Mini as well, which do the job quite well. And, of course, if you’re really desperate you can always use Windows Media Center 🙂

It will be interesting to see how much traction Google gets with its offering — and as Steve points out in his post, this is clearly just a small part of the Web company’s push into the living room.

Like my friend Mike Masnick at Techdirt, I came across a long guest post not long ago at William Patry’s blog (Patry is legal counsel for Google and an expert in copyright law) about the need for something approaching a “compulsory license” to solve the problems of rampant digital copyright infringement. A good example of a compulsory license is the legal mechanism by which Internet radio broadcasters are allowed to play music and pay a set rate to artists. A similar process (although it is not compulsory) compensates publishers and songwriters when music is played on the radio — something the music industry was not in favour of when it was first instituted in the 1930s and ’40s, but quickly grew to like and rely on. The record industry is now trying hard to extend that kind of payment to artists as well, something I wrote about recently.

As Mike notes in his post on the topic, lawyer Joshua Wattles spends the better part of his guest post at Patry’s blog describing how terrible most compulsory-licensing approaches are:

“Most, however, have nothing to do with lofty aspirations of balance or with enabling an otherwise impossible market or even with a measured response to benefit a clamoring public. Instead, they have everything to do with power players reaching for commercial advantages within a niche market.”

Continue reading “The big problem is the word “compulsory””