Author: Mathew Ingram

If you’re one of those people who hates to have multiple logins for every site you come to (and I know I do), it’s great to see more big players like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo joining the OpenID project as board members. The more weight the idea gets behind it, the more likely that sites will use it, and Microsoft/Yahoo and Google pull a lot of weight.

As Mike Arrington at TechCrunch notes, however, this announcement only goes partway towards making it easy for you and I to employ one single sign-on for a multitude of sites. Why? Because all of the players involved are happy to join the team, but only Google has taken the extra step of becoming what’s called a “relying party” — meaning it accepts OpenID logins from other services and websites, which is kind of the whole point.

So yes, you can create an OpenID at MyOpenID or another trusted site (my OpenID page is here), but you won’t be able to use your Yahoo-generated or Microsoft-generated OpenID persona at one of the other big-name portals — at least not yet. So we’re falling well short of the interoperability thing. Hopefully some of those moves will start happening soon.

For lots of people I know (including me, I have to admit) Google News has effectively become their online newspaper. I don’t know where it stacks up in terms of news portals, and whether Yahoo News or MSN have bigger market share, but for many the day starts with a browse through Google’s version of the newspaper — and now that paper will include local news as well as world news. Can the 800-pound gorilla make local work? And does that help or hurt newspaper sites?

The first thing I wondered was whether Google was just looking at the placeline and/or the source for its stories, since the section in my version of the new Google News showed that the five stories were all from the Toronto Star. Was that paper being ranked higher just because it has the word Toronto in its name? Not according to the Google blog.

We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.

As always with Google, the algorithm is king. And the local section on my page did a pretty remarkable job of pulling together news from most of the local outlets, including radio-station websites such as 680News, as well as newspapers like the Star and the Globe — although it did pick up stories from as far away as Kingston and Montreal, so it’s not foolproof. But it’s still as good or better than many of the other news aggregators I’ve tried, including Yahoo (which used to be my start page).

Update: Topix founder Rich Skrenta has a response to Google’s launch that is worth reading, and there’s a post on the Topix blog that also looks at the impact of Google moving into the company’s local search space. The point of the post seems to be that “local news is not a search problem.”

I may be somewhat biased toward the “Web is friend, not foe” argument as far as newspapers are concerned, but I think this helps newspaper websites rather than hurts them. I know that there will be the inevitable arguments, like the ones the World Newspaper Association and others keep trotting out, that Google is “stealing” eyeballs and readers who just want a quick summary of the news, but I think that continues to miss the point.

In a nutshell, if a quick summary or the first paragraph of your story captures all that you have to offer, then you don’t deserve to have those readers in the first place. Write well, add value and readers will continue to come to you — and now even more may wind up coming, as a result of features like Google’s localized news. (Update: Greg Sterling has some market share numbers for Google News at Screenwerk).

I’ve been watching the “undersea cable-cut conspiracy” gathering steam over the past few days, and it’s almost comical to see some of the hoops people will jump through to suggest — with all kinds of provisos and assurances, of course — that there is something mysterious going on. So I’m glad to see that saner heads are prevailing in some posts, in particular one from O’Reilly that quotes a passage from Neal Stephenson’s piece in Wired magazine about undersea dangers.

It sometimes seems as though every force of nature, every flaw in the human character, and every biological organism on the planet is engaged in a competition to see which can sever the most cables.

The Museum of Submarine Telegraphy in Porthcurno, England, has a display of wrecked cables [and] each is labeled with its cause of failure, some of which sound dramatic, some cryptic, some both: trawler maul, spewed core, intermittent disconnection, strained core, teredo worms, crab’s nest, perished core, fish bite.

Robert Graham at a site called Errata Security is also pounding the “no conspiracy” drum, and points to security expert Bruce Schneier’s blog as one of those muttering darkly about how all of these cuts just have to be more than a coincidence. But as Robert notes, the reports of something dastardly at work mostly just highlight what he calls:

the human psychology of computer security: people are apt to see patterns where none exist. Outages in undersea cables are a common occurrence. They usually go unreported. However, once a major outage is reported, minor outages that would normally be ignored now become reported as well.

As it turns out, the reports that Iran was completely cut off were false. And at least one of the “cuts” (which makes it sound like Dr. Evil sent sharks with frickin’ lasers to destroy Iran’s Internet access) appears to not be a cut at all, but a previous repair that failed. As the O’Reilly piece points out, this may say something about how much of our access to broadband depends on a relatively small number of cables, but it doesn’t say much other than that, unless your tinfoil hat is on too tight.

TechCrunch has a post up about Wikinvest, a kind of “crowdsourced” investment encyclopedia, and how it has added a pile of interesting data about certain sectors such as airlines and so on — including revenue per available seat mile and other fun stuff (and yes, if you invest in airlines, that stuff had better be interesting). Coincidentally enough, I was just looking at Wikinvest.com earlier today, because I spotted the name on the list of panelists at Paul Kedrosky’s Money:Tech conference.

The first commenter on the TechCrunch post brings up one of the first things that jumped into my mind as well, namely: If investing consists of finding little-known metrics or tools or insights that you can use to spot trends or problem areas, how does it help you to have — or contribute to — a kind of encyclopedia that keeps track of all that kind of info? In other words, wouldn’t it make more sense to keep that kind of thing to yourself, rather than sharing it? If so, then you have to wonder who is going to be doing all the work of submitting stuff to Wikinvest.

In some ways, what Wikinvest seems to be trying to do is a little different than what Coinvestor.com or Cake Financial are doing. Like Motley Fool’s CAPS — which is quite well done, as far as investing-related social networks go — these sites capture your trading activity, your portfolio performance, etc. and let you talk about what you think about stocks. But Wikinvest requires you to actually help other investors by providing data that may or may be one of your special tools for assessing the worth of a particular sector, which is a whole different ball game.

That said, I like Wikinvest — it’s well designed, and I think it is a valuable effort. I’m just not sure how much of the data that gets contributed is going to be worthwhile. It almost seems like the more worthwhile it is, the less likely that someone will contribute it. On a somewhat related note, Michael Robertson — of Linspire.com and mp3tunes.com and dozens of other ventures too numerous to name — just launched a kind of encyclopedia for the VC business called Dealipedia.com.

Recently installed Time-Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes is apparently kicking ass and taking names over at the struggling media and entertainment giant, talking about cutting costs by 15 per cent and restructuring the conglomerate’s cable division — but for some unfathomable reason, he still can’t bring himself to say that TW is planning to dump the declining AOL Internet access business. All he will say is that the company is splitting AOL into the access business and the content business, so as to “increase the strategic choices” available to the company.

Strategic choices? At this point, the only strategic choice for Time-Warner when it comes to AOL is the choice between whether to use a .45 pistol or a shotgun to administer the killing blow. I realize that when you’re a big-time CEO running a gigantic corporation with many moving parts, you can’t just come out and say “We are selling this dog,” but come on — everyone has to know that this is coming, right? AOL has been shedding subscribers by the millions every quarter for as long as I can remember. The access business is dying, and the body has already begun to smell bad.

If anything, the death of the access unit is the easy part. Sell it for parts to an income fund or someone who wants to play the declining margins game, and then move on. But the content business is a bit more problematic, as Cynthia Brumfield wisely points out at IPDemocracy. Although the shift from walled garden to free and advertising-supported content has been a relative success for the company — in the sense that advertising revenue has been growing — it still hasn’t come close to making up for the revenue that AOL gave up by making the shift.

I’m glad to hear that Facebook is looking at ways of fine-tuning its growing garden of apps and widgets (or perhaps jungle might be a better word). According to Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWrite Web, the social network is tweaking the way that apps and widgets can send updates or alerts in the site’s newsfeeds. In effect, Facebook will let apps that have a good success rate — that is, either new installs or clickthroughs on their existing events — send out more, and those that fail to pass those tests will be restricted in the number of alerts they can send out.

A post on the Facebook developer blog says that apps were previously restricted to an upper limit of 40 notifications per day. I think this move could have a couple of different outcomes: On the one hand, it should cut down on a lot of the noise that shows up in Facebook’s newsfeeds, about people becoming Zombies or rating different movies, or taking this or that quiz. But at the same time, it will increase the likelihood that a “good” app becomes even more successful, since it will get a correspondingly larger share of the newsfeed event market.

According to a story at CNET, things aren’t looking so hot at Revver, the video-sharing site that made its name by paying video creators based on the traffic their clips generated. More than half of the employees who worked there 18 months ago are now gone, CNET says, and the company has reportedly been shopping itself around for the past few months. Asking price: Less than half a million dollars (plus the assumption of debt). This for a company that raised almost $13-million in funding.

I was a fan of Revver’s model early on, because I thought it made sense to compensate video artists whose clips drove a lot of traffic to the site. Among the beneficiaries of this model were video artists such as the Eepybird team (the guys behind the Diet Coke and Mentos videos) and the Lonelygirl15 project, as well as a range of other artists, including the Ask A Ninja guys and the creators of the “Will It Blend” videos. Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee has more background on Revver.

One of the controversial aspects of a site such as YouTube is that it makes bundles of cash from the ads that top-rated videos bring, but until relatively recently the creators of those videos got nothing out of the deal. The company has since expanded its “partner” program to include top-rated video artists, which is a nice change. And maybe the fact that it has done so — and that YouTube is responsible for a vast proportion of the video traffic on the Web — was enough to make Revver irrelevant.

Update:

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan of HipMojo has a great overview of the video scene.

I think Marc Andreessen — as usual — puts his finger on something important in his post on how the Microsoft-Yahoo merger (assuming it actually goes through) will affect the startup climate in Silicon Valley or elsewhere in the technosphere. Among other things, he points out that Microsoft, Yahoo and even Google don’t really account for a huge number of takeovers of Web startups anyway, once you get past del.icio.us and Flickr and a few others. But that’s not the big point.

I think the killer point is that while the elephants are mating (as I think my friend Paul Kedrosky described it), the field will be more or less completely open for Web companies to do whatever they can to develop a killer service or own a particular segment of the market, without having to worry about a gigantic beast lumbering into their business sector and squashing everything in sight. As Marc describes it:

In practice, that will be two years in which both Microsoft and Yahoo will most likely be considerably less aggressive on rolling out new products and new initiatives — because the key people at both companies will be consumed with the merger.

And, just think, if they are buying fewer companies as a consequence, that also means they’re less likely to buy one of your competitors and come after you while you are building your thing of value.

Marc has some other great points as well, including the fact that building a company just to get acquired is a dumb thing to do anyway, and rarely works out the way you want. In fact, building a company because you sense an opportunity or a need or a hole in the market — without focusing on getting acquired — is a far better way to actually ensure that you get acquired. Take your eye off the destination and focus on the journey, and pretty soon you will find that you’ve arrived.

Everyone has probably seen this video already, but for those who haven’t it’s a really nice introduction to a group I’ve been following for awhile called Improv Anywhere, which sets up elaborate events that fall somewhere between performance art, pranks and general public hilarity. In this one, over 200 completely normal-looking people walked into Grand Central Station and then froze in place at the same split second, and remained that way for five minutes — at which point they all continued on their way as though nothing had happened. It’s quite fun to watch. Some are in mid-step, one is tying his shoe and another has just dropped an armful of papers.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwMj3PJDxuo&rel=1&w=425&h=355]

There’s a somewhat similar group based in Toronto and New York called Newmindspace.com, which has occasional events including a pillow fight in Nathan Phillips Square, and a light-sabre battle. In their most recent, the group pulled together a group snowball fight in Trinity Bellwoods park, which Torontoist captured on film (or data card, or whatever).

There’s lots of chit-chat this morning about The Industry Standard — one of the leading lights of the tech publishing business during the first bubble — relaunching as a Web-only publication, something that was expected to happen in December, according to a report from the always reliable Rex Hammock, but didn’t wind up taking place until now. The site will be using outside contributors such as Matt Marshall of Venturebeat and Fred Wilson of A VC, and it also has an interesting “prediction market” feature that should be fun to watch as it develops.

The thing that really struck me about the new Industry Standard, however, is how much it is a metaphor for the evolution of the magazine industry itself. During the boom times, magazines like The Standard and Wired were the size of a phone book — despite the fact that most of the stuff they wrote about was on the Web. I remember bringing the magazines to my desk and painstakingly typing in Web addresses. Now, whatever I read about tech comes from Wired’s website, but also TechCrunch and Mashable and GigaOm (welcome back, Om) and Techmeme.

It may seem as though the new Industry Standard is deliberately setting their sights low, as Peter Kafka describes it at Silicon Alley Insider, with just one full-time employee and a lot of outside contributors. But in many ways, I think the new Standard (and Silicon Alley Insider itself, for that matter) is a lot closer to what “magazine” publishing should be like — and is like — now than the old one. I wish them luck.

Yahoo has been saying for some time that it was planning to euthanize its music subscription service, but it wasn’t clear what it would replace the service with. Now it has become clear: Yahoo has sold the operation to Real Networks and will be migrating users to the Rhapsody service — although they will apparently get a couple of months worth of the lower Yahoo price before they have to cough up the $12.99 a month for Rhapsody. I’m sure that will make them all feel much better. Ian Rogers of Yahoo Music has more on the move here.

Although Rhapsody has a free, ad-supported version of its subscription service, the main offering is a paid streaming model, and both the free and paid services are of course all wrapped up in some tasty DRM. But the biggest problem with Rhapsody — and with Yahoo Music — is simple: Most people don’t want to stream their music like a radio station. They want to download it and do whatever they want to with it. Period.

That’s why Yahoo is dumping its subscription service in the first place, because it wasn’t working (Yahoo is doing some other interesting things with music, which I wrote about here). And Rhapsody only has about 1.5 million users of its music service after four years of operation, which isn’t much to write home about. Of course, the Yahoo Music switcheroo is in question — along with virtually every other aspect of Yahoo’s business — because of that takeover offer from Microbeast.

Having just watched New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning defy the overwhelming odds against him and evade a quarterback sack to make a 32-year pass that helped swing the tide of the game in his favour, I can’t help but think that Yahoo is looking for exactly the same kind of Hail Mary pass to get out of the embrace of Microsoft. In this scenario, Steve Ballmer is the gigantic defensive lineman who is bearing down on Yahoo like a freight train with legs, and he already has a grip on Yahoo’s jersey.

But does it make any sense for Yahoo to cut some kind of search-related deal with Google, or use Google to help finance a News Corp.-led deal to try and foil Microsoft’s dastardly plan? I’m not sure it does. Being absorbed by the Borg may not be the kind of thing anyone wants, but management by a private equity fund is no picnic either, and contracting its search division out to Google isn’t going to solve anything. Yahoo is still going to be stuck with a pile of lame assets and no strategy.

Meanwhile, Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget over at Silicon Alley Insider says that he thinks Yahoo should avoid a takeover by Microsoft, and instead convince Ballmer to cut a deal in which they combine their Internet assets and Microsoft takes 51 per cent of the combined company. There are only two things wrong with that idea: 1) It’s dumb, since it would mean that Yahoo would be controlled by Microsoft anyway, and 2) Ballmer would never agree to it.

Former Wired editor Kevin Kelly has a very perceptive essay up that is apparently part of a book he’s working on called Technium, and in it he describes the Internet as a giant copying machine — a network that distributes information far and wide, and in the process of doing so copies it over and over, creating an almost endless supply of identical copies, all of which effectively cost nothing to produce.

Our digital communication network has been engineered so that copies flow with as little friction as possible. Indeed, copies flow so freely we could think of the internet as a super-distribution system, where once a copy is introduced it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire.

The problem, of course, is that giant industries — music, movies, media and entertainment in general — have been created based on the idea that copies are scarce, and that control over the methods of distribution of those copies is the key to wealth. What happens to those models when copies are readily available and free? This is something Mike Masnick at Techdirt has also written about — the economics of abundance. How does that work?

Kelly argues that when copies are free, you have to focus on what can’t be copied. Trust, for example, which has to be earned over time. He has a list of eight qualities, or elements of intangible value that he calls “generatives” — things that have to grow over time and can’t be copied, and therefore should (theoretically) be worth something. They are:

— Immediacy
— Personalization
— Interpretation
— Authenticity
— Accessibility
— Embodiment
— Patronage
— Findability

I think Kelly has put his finger on something important. Each of these qualities is going to be worth different amounts to different people at different times, depending on their needs, or wants, or moods. It makes things somewhat more complicated than just charging people when they go through the turnstile at the movie theatre, or when they buy a physical product, but in the long run I think they could actually create more value. It’s worth reading the whole essay.

Alexander Rose at The Long Now blog has a post about how the foundation has determined a winner in the 2002 wager between Dave “I invented blogs” Winer and Martin Niezenholtz of the New York Times. The bet was whether a search of the top news stories from 2007 would produce more results from blogs or more from The New York Times. According to Rose, blogs won — although he also notes that the bet was poorly worded, and therefore ambiguous in many ways.

I think the bet was more than just poorly worded, however. The whole idea behind was flawed to begin with, and is even more flawed now. The wager pits blogs against the New York Times as though one is somehow a replacement for the other. That may have made some sense in 2002 but makes very little sense now — especially since the NYT and plenty of other mainstream media have blogs of their own.

Let’s recap: Blogs and media are not opposing forces. Blogs aren’t replacing “mainstream media,” they’re enhancing it and expanding it — connecting it to the conversations that are going on around it and through it and with it. Blogs take stories and commentary from the traditional media and extend them out into the world. Arguing that blogs will replace the traditional media is like saying forks are going to replace spoons.

Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider says that he has heard rumours of at least one and possibly two other bidders who had offers all ready to go for Yahoo before Microsoft jumped in and spoiled the party, and Paul Kedrosky says he has also heard such talk — supposedly private equity groups, likely out of New York, looking to take advantage of Yahoo’s depressed stock price to launch a takeover and then pay for it by selling off bits and pieces.

Update: News Corp. may also be considering a bid of some kind, Mike Arrington reports.

Regardless of whether there are other bidders or not, I don’t see how they can afford to top Microsoft’s offer. Sure, they could probably raise the money to boost their bid, but would it be worth it? The fact is that Yahoo is worth more to Microsoft than it is to anyone else — Microsoft can justify paying a much higher price because it will (theoretically at least) get enough in the way of synergies out of the deal to make it worthwhile.

How is a private equity bidder going to justify a 62-per-cent premium? There just isn’t that much value in Yahoo for anyone else, IMHO.