Author: Mathew Ingram

Just came across something interesting from a few days ago that I somehow missed, but which could have serious implications for newspapers and their evolving relationship with Google: Search Engine Journal notes that Google News is tinkering with its algorithm and the way it ranks news stories. It wants to do a number of things, but one of the main ones is to promote the publication that first breaks a news story, rather than one of the follow-up pieces from newswires or larger papers.

That’s good for smaller local papers, since they will get more exposure and hence more traffic. It doesn’t say so in the Google News blog post, but I have to wonder if this is related to some of the criticism that Google got after they did the deal with Associated Press to host AP stories on Google servers and some people complained that local publications weren’t getting credit from Google News for the stories they were breaking.

Let me just say I’m glad to see Yahoo moving into the Web 2.0 social-media area, integrating its services with blogs through the Yahoo Shortcuts service/widget for WordPress — and I’m a huge fan of Alex King, the WordPress plugin genius who designed the feature (and also did the wonderful Share This plugin) — but this new Yahoo offering makes me very nervous. Why? Because of the potential for an outbreak of one of my least favourite features: pop-up links.

I don’t just find pop-up links irritating — I absolutely loathe and detest them (I’m not the only one). In fact, I will go out of my way to avoid websites that use them. And I don’t particularly care whether they are informative or advertising-based. I don’t like Snap’s pop-up windows, even though the link is placed beside the text, because it is automatically triggered when your mouse moves over it.

I don’t really like Adaptive Blue’s links either, but at least they aren’t triggered automatically. And don’t even get me started on those text-link ads that pretend to be hyperlinks (except they have two underlines instead of one) and trigger a gigantic popup with a Microsoft search or an advertising link in it. As soon as I see those links on a site, I am gone.

To be fair, Yahoo’s widget just gives you the stuff — the stock chart, or the Yahoo search results, or the Flickr photos (which I must admit is kind of cool) — and you can then decide to include them right in the body of your post or attach them as text link pop-ups. For the love of all that is good and holy, please don’t do the latter. I’m begging you.

According to from Michael Geist — who Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing loves to call “the copyfightin’ prof” — a proposed update to Canada’s copyright law that he and many others fear could be a carbon copy of the DMCA won’t be introduced until next year. In another post, Michael notes that the Facebook group he set up that is dedicated to voicing concerns about the copyright bill has now passed 20,000 members.

Below, I’ve posted a piece I wrote for the Globe that was published in the paper on Thursday, about the role that Facebook and blogs have played in the opposition to the proposed bill (which may have convinced the government to delay passage of the legislation). I also wrote a blog post recently on the same topic at my Globe blog.

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The federal government doesn’t seem to have too much time for what some call — Facebook, MySpace, blogs and so on. Access to many such sites is restricted in many government offices, presumably because they are seen as time-wasting devices for the office slacker. Will Ottawa’s view of such tools change now that they appear to have helped derail the proposed revisions to Canada’s copyright laws? It might, although it’s difficult to say how. The feds may begin to see these sites as deserving closer attention, or they may just dislike them even more now.

Although the government isn’t saying why the proposed copyright legislation didn’t show up for a vote in the House this week — as it was widely expected to — it seems more than a little coincidental that a storm of negative publicity reached its peak just before Industry Minister Jim Prentice pulled the bill. That storm came from many different areas, but all of them were powered to some extent by “social media.”

University of Ottawa law professor and copyright expert Michael Geist got the ball rolling with a number of blog posts on the topic, as well as a video that he uploaded to YouTube that described how people could voice their opposition to the bill. That in turn led to the formation of a Facebook group.

Many of those opposed to the legislation, including Prof. Geist and Canadian copyright lawyer Howard Knopf, believe the amendments would have turned the Canadian Copyright Act into a virtual copy of the U.S. law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (PDF). Although the DMCA has been hailed by content providers as a valuable tool for preventing piracy, critics argue it has also been used to dismantle much of what consumers have come to see as “fair use,” a principle that is enshrined in the common law of many countries, including Canada, and allows copyright infringement to occur for artistic or creative purposes.

Continue reading “Canadian DMCA delayed, for now”

(This is a piece I wrote for the Globe that was published Wednesday. I’m posting it here for anyone who might have missed it.)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave Canadians an early Christmas present on Wednesday: the ability to download TV shows from the Canadian version of iTunes, the company’s popular online media store. This particular present comes with a catch, though. Let’s put it this way: you’re only going to like this new feature if your TV-watching diet consists exclusively of Canadian TV shows and hockey games, because that’s pretty much all that Apple has on its virtual shelves right now.

There are a couple of treats for younger viewers thrown in there, mind you: there’s the popular teen drama The Hills, for example, as well as episodes of South Park. And for the younger kids, there’s an animated TV show called Avatar: The Last Airbender. And if you like Degrassi: The Next Generation, you’re going to love the new iTunes store.

If you were hoping to watch the latest episode of Heroes on your iPod while you’re on the train or stuck in traffic, however, you are out of luck. The same goes for episodes of other top shows such as Lost, Battlestar Galactica and The Office. They remain stuck in your television.

Is this because Apple thinks that Canadians only want to watch episodes of Corner Gas, Little Mosque on the Prairie and old NHL hockey games? Not really. Although Apple isn’t saying, it’s obvious that the company just hasn’t been able to strike the kind of content-licensing deals that would allow any other shows to be part of iTunes.

Continue reading “iTunes Canada TV blockade ends, sort of”

In an Associated Press piece about Jeff Tweedy, the lead singer of Wilco and a well-known former drug addict, there’s a hilarious anecdote about how his 11-year-old son learned of his past drug use:

“Well, you know Spencer is 11, and awhile back, he said ‘I just read on Wikipedia that you started smoking pot when you quit drinking in nineteen-whatever. That makes me so mad. Wikipedia is always so wrong. It’s just like, so stupid.’

And I had to take him aside and say ‘Spencer, I didn’t think I was going to have to have this discussion with you at this age, because it is not something that has really entered your world, but I don’t want to lie to you.

That Wikipedia thing, there are probably a lot of wrong things on there, but that is not one of them. That happened.’”

I think that anecdote says a lot about Wikipedia and the nature of modern fame, and also about the difficulties of parenting in a social-media world — plus it’s hilarious to boot. And the rest of the interview is well worth a read too, if you like Wilco at all (which I do).

(via The Listenerd)

Great quote from Jack Warner, founder of Warner Brothers, which I found on Marc Andreessen’s excellent blog (a blog I wish he had more time for). Warner was talking about movies, but I think — and I assume Marc agrees — that it applies to all kinds of things:

“Every worthwhile contribution to the advancement of motion pictures has been made over a howl of protest from the standpatters, whose favorite refrain has been, ‘You can’t do that.’ And when we hear that chorus now, we know we must be on the right track.”

The quote comes from Neal Gabler’s book An Empire of Their Own, about the rise of the Hollywood studios.

Facebook appears to be trying to gain some ground against Google’s as-yet-unreleased OpenSocial effort by opening up its developer platform for other sites to use. The F8 platform started as a set of APIs that other sites could use to create widgets — of which there are now about a million (two or three of which are actually useful) — but the social network announced today that other sites can now license and use the Facebook platform, something Bebo appears to be doing already.

Where does this put Facebook as far as OpenSocial goes? On the other side of the fence, it seems to me. Facebook is talking about getting platforms or networks such as Bebo to adopt the Facebook platform markup language and other aspects of how it works, so that then applications designed for one network can be used elsewhere — but presumably only if that other network or platform also supports Facebook’s language and standards (this reminds me of Microsoft’s attempts over the years to convince developers to use its various flavours of HTML and other languages).

In any case, this is pretty much exactly what Google seems to have in mind with OpenSocial: a single set of standards that application developers can use so that widgets or apps run on different networks and data can flow from one to the other and back again (Chris Messina is coming at the same idea from a different perspective). Of course, there is a possibility that Facebook and Google could work together, but I wouldn’t bet the house on it. (ParisLemon says this is just a proxy for the war between Google and Microsoft).

Nick O’Neill of All Facebook asks in his post who the competition will decide to side with — Google or Facebook. To me, there’s no contest. Yes, Facebook is popular and has lots of cool features. But whose application or development format would I want to support? I’d go with Google every time. In any case, as Dave “Mc500 Hats” McClure puts it, the social-platform wars are on. And hey, don’t forget about Friendster either — they have a platform too.

The double entendres pretty much throw themselves at you when you come across news like this: that the media group behind Penthouse is buying the company that runs the Adult Friendfinder service (among other things) for half a billion dollars. Various Inc., which runs a wide variety of other websites — including BigChurch.com and GuanXi.com — has reportedly been shopping itself around for some time, but investors tend to shy away from the adult-entertainment market.

The company isn’t getting much of a premium for the deal either, since it has annual revenues of about $200-million, or about 5 times what Facebook had last year. There was a fascinating profile of the founder of Various, a guy named Andrew Conru, in Business 2.0 magazine earlier this year, which described the nondescript industrial mall the company operates out of and Conru’s unremarkable background.

Penthouse also has an interesting history — a Porn 1.0 company founded by legendary party animal Bob Guccione as a more crude competitor to Playboy, it became a media and entertainment giant. Like many of its non-porn counterparts in media, however, the company failed to adapt to the digital age and eventually filed for bankruptcy (there were apparently some other backroom shenanigans as well).

With the Adult Friendfinder purchase, new owner Mark Bell — a Florida real estate developer and former owner of an Internet hosting company — is obviously trying to create a Porn 2.0 empire in its place.

It’s interesting to see some of the reactions to Scott Karp’s post on Twitter and why he stopped using it at Publishing 2.0, a post which has now topped the cluster of Techmeme discussion about Twitter). Anne Zelenka, who writes for Web Worker Daily — part of Om Malik’s GigaOmniMedia — has a fairly visceral response, which is to call Scott’s post insulting.

The clear implication, she says, is that Scott finds talking to people like her a massive waste of time. In the classic sense, of course, it is a waste of time. As Scott quite rightly points out, the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter is quite low in many cases — there’s a lot of banter and chat and extraneous information of various kinds, and that can make it difficult to get some good, solid work done. It’s like having the TV on too loud, or people chatting behind you when you’re trying to do something.

I think what Anne’s driving at, though, is that some of this social interaction, some of this “ambient intimacy,” is good for us — even if it does get in the way of our actual work. I would compare it to working at home versus working at my office: at home, I can actually get a lot more accomplished, but I miss the social interaction, the miscellaneous chatting and random conversations with co-workers. Some of it is just socializing, but some of it has value — although it may not be immediately obvious.

Anne Zelenka has an interesting post up at GigaOm about the latest venture from Chris Messina, also known as Factory Joe or Mr. Tara Hunt. It’s an attempt to roll a kind of social-networking architecture into WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platforms around and the one I usually recommend to friends who want to start blogging (and the platform I use for this blog and others). Chris has a post about what he calls “the inside-out social network” here.

I’m going to read some more about it, since it seems to have something to do with OpenID and some other stuff as well — and Chris says that it will start with WordPress but should be able to work with all sorts of platforms — but I like the idea. Anne’s post has a great quote from copyblogger Brian Clark, who says that creating content through a social-networking application like Facebook is “like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.” That’s a good way of putting it.

I’ve been noticing the same thing that Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang is writing about, namely, that Twitter usage seems to be increasing, and that it is also driving more activity elsewhere, including to my blog — in part, I think, because I automatically post new entries to my Twitter feed (which is here, in case anyone is interested).

More people seem to be following me, with new ones being added almost every day. I’ve also noticed more Twitter results showing up in Google News searches, although apparently this has been happening for some time now. Not only that, but when I scroll through the status updates from my Facebook friends, a surprising number of them say that so-and-so “is twittering…” and then what their message is.

This fits with my theory that Twitter is really just the Facebook status update separated from the site and living on its own. It seems that more and more people like that functionality — or maybe it’s just the geeks. David Armano of Critical Mass says it’s because Twitter is a “conversation ecosystem,” which is an interesting idea.

Paul Bradshaw has some lessons on how to use Twitter as a “micro-blog,” and my friend Paul Kedrosky — ever the iconoclast — says that it’s neither IM nor email nor Facebook status; it’s all those things and less. Scott Karp, meanwhile, explains why he has given it up.

Plenty of people, including Wired’s Threat Level blog and my friend Leigh, are up in arms about the fact that Rogers (a major Internet service provider, for you non-Canadians) is inserting messages to its customers on top of web pages such as the Google home page. Wired brings up the spectre of net neutrality, and other sites are also scandalized by the practice.

Mike Masnick of Techdirt is right when he says that Rogers’ behaviour betrays a kind of arrogance — a “we own the pipes, so we’ll do what we damn well please” attitude — but I fail to see how this has anything to do with net neutrality. Contrary to what Kristen Nicole at Mashable and others are saying, Rogers is not “overwriting” Web content, it’s merely pushing the page down and inserting a message at the top. Cynthia Brumfield has an example of something Verizon does that she thinks is worse.

Lots of sites do the same thing with frames and so on. Is it ugly? Sure. But apart from that, I don’t see what everyone is getting excited about. In fact, while I’m not sure I want to make a habit of this sort of thing, I’m going to side with Seth “Bah Humbug” Finkelstein on this one. As he notes in his post, this just isn’t that big a deal. Let’s save all of the net neutrality hyperventilating for something a bit more serious, shall we?

YouTube is reaching out to all the Tay Zondays and Marina “HotForWords” video artists out there, inviting them to apply to become “partners” in the video-sharing site’s network. Until recently, only corporate content suppliers could be partners — meaning they shared in the video revenue the site brought in from ads and so on. In May, however, YouTube made some of its most-popular content providers partners, including HappySlip (whose videos I highly recommend), Smosh and others.

Now the site says that it is opening up the partner program to anyone — in Canada or the United States — who thinks their content is good enough to become a partner, and YouTube has turned Tay Zonday and HotForWords into partners, along with acts such as Pete and Brian. The latter only have about 7,500 subscribers and 185,000 channel views (compared with Tay, who has about 21,000 subscribers and over 1.7 million channel views). You can do better than that, can’t you?

For your entertainment, I’ve embedded one of the latest videos from HappySlip below. Click here if you’re reading this via RSS.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek8iWRA6jzA&rel=1&w=425&h=355]

Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize winner for literature, is the latest to mount her rhetorical horse and try to skewer the blogosphere — and the Internets in general — as being bad for our Culture, bad for Knowledge, and generally just not as good as Books and That Sort of Thing. Duncan Riley is right to call this approach Keensian (as in Andrew Keen, who I just finished writing about) because the same impulse drives both of them: the impulse to see ideas and knowledge as valuable only if they appear in books.

This is more an example of intellectual fetishism than anything else, I suspect. Nick Carr is clearly in this camp as well, although it’s not evident so much in his actual post on Lessing’s speech as it is in the comments, when he responds with umbrage to one of his readers by saying that:

“fucking around with ‘text’ all day has absolutely nothing to do with reading serious, challenging books… she’s talking about the desire to read good books as a manifestation of the desire to expand one’s knowledge and understanding of one’s world.”

As a commenter quickly notes, however, a desire to expand one’s knowledge and understanding of the world is not synonymous with books, no matter how much Doris and Nick wishes that it were. It used to be, yes — and for the kinds of places that Ms. Lessing talks about in her speech, it still is. But it’s quite a leap to say that blogs and the Internet in general are just a waste of time compared with anything book-related. I would have expected a bit more insight from Ms. Lessing.

As Shelley points out at Burningbird, wasting time and mindless entertainment in general have a long and storied history that stretches back through the entirety of human history — it is no more a product of the Internet than it was a product of radio, or the “talkies,” or cave paintings and getting drunk on fermented wheat were thousands of years ago.

The data points continue to pile up in favour of the decision by the New York Times to drop its subscription service: according to a post over at TechCrunch, traffic to the NYT website has climbed by more than 60 per cent since the wall was removed at the beginning of September. ComScore’s latest survey apparently shows that the Times got 19.4 million visitors in October, compared with about 12 million in August — for an increase of 7.5 million or 64 per cent. There are issues with comScore, as there are with most of the major measurement firms, but when combined with the New York Times traffic numbers that I recently mentioned from Nielsen, it’s obvious where the overall trend is going.