Author: Mathew Ingram

Well, it’s official. The “social graph” is the new metaphor for what the Web is becoming. Nick Carr points to a post by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (you might have heard of him, he kind of invented the Web) in which the godfather of hypertext lays out his thoughts about “Web 3.0,” or what has been called the “semantic Web.” And it is all about the connections between people, expressed through whatever sites or services they choose to allow to collect or transmit their social information.

As described by Sir Tim (who once told me in an interview that anyone uses the Sir in front of his name has to buy a round of drinks), the original Internet revolution was the ability to connect computers through various protocols — instead of having to worry about cables and specific kinds of equipment. The second revolution, which built on the first, was the ability to connect documents and files and databases, regardless of where those documents and data existed — i.e., the Web.

Now, he says, we are moving towards a social Web, which allows us to connect with other people in a variety of ways, and to do so (theoretically) regardless of where that person is and what software tools or service they are using. Sounds a lot like Google’s OpenSocial, doesn’t it? Although Sir Tim doesn’t mention that specifically, he is clearly talking about formats that allow the free movement of personal data from place to place.

One thing that I found particularly interesting was what the father of the Web said about how each advancement has required people to give up some level of control. He saysl:

“The less inviting side of sharing is losing some control. Indeed, at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits. People running Internet systems had to let their computer be used for forwarding other people’s packets, and connecting new applications they had no control over.”

And now, it is social information that is being transmitted — and there are tradeoffs that go along with that, as Facebook is forcing us to realize:

“Letting your data connect to other people’s data is a bit about letting go in that sense. It is still not about giving to people data which they don’t have a right to. It is about letting it be connected to data from peer sites. It is about letting it be joined to data from other applications. It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous.”

That Tim — he’s a pretty smart guy.

Predictably enough, Facebook’s new advertising initiative known as Beacon — the one that follows you around even when you’re outside Facebook and watches what you’re buying on partner websites — has sparked a small frenzy of consternation about privacy, with Charlene Li’s post about her suddenly public shopping spree at Overstock heading the pack. I’m going to side with Justin Smith of Inside Facebook on this one. I think this is pretty much a carbon copy of what happened with the news feed.

It was almost exactly a year ago that Facebook suddenly allowed everything you did on the site to be published to your news feed so that everyone could see it, and plenty of users went completely apeshit about it being a heinous invasion of privacy, etc. Facebook was excoriated for the way it handled the announcement, and for the fact that it forced people to opt out instead of allowing them to opt in and configure who saw what, and generally it was a tsunami of negative publicity.

And what is now one of the biggest draws about Facebook, one of the things that makes it so magnetic and social and addictive? The constantly updated info about who’s doing what, who has uploaded photos, who has joined a group, who has changed their relationship status to “it’s complicated.” In other words, the much-maligned news feed.

Obviously, the Beacon info is in a different category in a lot of ways. It involves things like shopping for coffee tables at Overstock, for example. So what? So Charlene didn’t notice the alert that asked he if she wanted that info to be broadcast or not. Maybe other people will not notice as well, or will get upset like Moveon.org has about how it’s opt out instead of opt in.

As Justin notes, 100 times as many people got upset about the news feed as joined the Moveon protest, and that one blew over eventually. Maybe Facebook will tweak things so it’s more obvious, or give you the blanket opt-out ability — or maybe not. I think it’s mountain and molehill territory myself. Will I have to ignore news feed items about people like Charlene buying coffee tables? Sure. Just the same way I ignore people telling me they just added the Zombie application. Big deal. (My friend Leigh Himel has a different view).

I didn’t get a chance to write about Marc Andreessen’s recent post related to the writers’ strike, in which he argued that Hollywood needs to become more like Silicon Valley — i.e., more entrepreneurial — but it certainly got me thinking. And now I get to write about it anyway, because an article in the Los Angeles Times effectively reproduces Marc’s argument, comparing the small, entrepreneur-driven approach of the Valley to the indie filmmaker or writer-director whose movie makes it big at the box office.

Patrick Goldstein of the Times makes a persuasive case for how some of the best movies come from independent filmmakers or writers, who are consumed by a dream and find any way they can to make it happen, and how some of those people go on to become Steven Spielberg or George Lucas. And then just when I was feeling all rosy about the whole thing, Steve Bryant of Reel Pop comes along and dashes some cold water on Goldstein’s argument, saying the odds of that happening to a struggling filmmaker or writer are astronomical.

Steve’s point is that marketing your great idea is the one thing that stands in the way of an entrepreneurial would-be filmmaker and glory, and that simply uploading a clip of your film to YouTube isn’t going to be enough to stand out from the mass of dreck that gets spewed out of Hollywood on the average day. And he is probably right.

I would still like to hope (and I think Steve would too) that sheer grit and determination can get you a long way — and there’s no question that the Web has lowered the barriers to being discovered or finding support. But it hasn’t removed them entirely. In other words, being lucky is probably still the best tool you can have in your arsenal.

One of the most popular video games this year is Guitar Hero, in which players flail away, Van-Halen-style, at a guitar-shaped controller and try to replicate the moves of the guitarist playing a popular song. Think of it as guitar karaoke. The original came out in 2005, and there is now a Guitar Hero II and a Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, as well as a Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s (a new game called Rock Band adds drums and a microphone to the mix).

Harmonix and RedOctane, the companies that developed and marketed the original Guitar Hero game for the Sony PlayStation2, reportedly had some difficulty getting the rights to certain songs that it wanted to use (most of which are performed by “soundalike” musicians). But they may not have as much trouble in the future.

According to a story at the tech blog Ars Technica, sales numbers from Soundscan — an industry tracking firm — show a fairly strong correlation between the music included in Guitar Hero III and sales of that same song through retailers and other outlets.

As an example, sales of the song “Reptilia” by The Strokes climbed by 127 per cent in the week the game was released, compared with the week before. A track by the band Slipknot saw a similar type of increase after being included in the game, with sales up more than 70 per cent in the first week after the game’s release, and up by triple digits the week after that.

The connection between Guitar Hero and higher sales is hardly black and white, of course. Some songs that were included didn’t see much of an increase. In some cases, the increase seen in album or CD sales could have been a result of conventional marketing campaigns or other influences that Soundscan and Ars Technica didn’t take into account. Nevertheless, there appears to be a fairly strong relationship between the game and sales.

At least one band seems to see the value of having their music included in Guitar Hero, to the point where they would like an increase in compensation for it: The Romantics, a 1980s band whose hits included “What I Like About You“, is suing Activision — which distributes the game — claiming that the soundalikes who recorded their song are too similar to the original band, and therefore they should get extra compensation.

Yet another in a long (and I mean long — we’re talking a decade or so) line of depressing declines in newspaper advertising levels, as detailed in a release by the Newspaper Association of America and in this Reuters story. And just to add insult to injury, Alan Mutter of Newsosaur notes both on his own blog and at Silicon Alley Insider that it’s even worse when you take inflation into account. I bet Alan is a lot of fun at parties.

As the Reuters story notes, there is some good news — while regular print advertising fell by 10 per cent in the third quarter, online ads rose by about 21 per cent. That’s good, right? Sure. Except for the fact that online advertising only amounted to about $770-million, and traditional newspaper ads accounted for more than 10 times that amount or about $10-billion. That’s a pretty dramatic gap, as Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has pointed out before — something he calls the “10-per-cent problem.”

BusinessWeek magazine has a piece about user-generated content and how it’s old and busted now — people really want professional content, apparently. As proof that “one after another,” video sites are turning their backs on UGC and going steady with the pros instead, BusinessWeek gives us one example: Mania.tv, which recently refocused and got rid of the user-generated part of its model, which apparently never really drew that many viewers.

Of course, it’s possible that Mania either didn’t approach that part of its business properly, or didn’t bother looking for the diamonds in the UGC rough — or maybe people were too busy uploading their stuff to YouTube and DailyMotion and Metacafe. It’s tough being third or fourth to the party, as a number of commenters have pointed out on Lost Remote.

The thing that really bugs me about the BusinessWeek article is that there’s this false dichotomy between high-quality professional content and low-quality UGC crap. It’s not that binary, I would argue. It’s more like a spectrum, with professional content on one end, and as you move down the scale you get lower quality, until there’s your brother-in-law singing karaoke.

Is there a lot of UGC crap that only someone’s mother would watch? Sure there is. But there’s a lot of garbage produced by “professionals” that gets foisted on people through traditional media too, whether they want it or not. I’d take some half-decent UGC over that any day.

Nick Carr points to a piece by Jaron Lanier in the New York Times, wherein the virtual-reality guru with the wacky dreads talks about how he has changed his mind about the whole “information wants to be free” thing and would just really like to get paid, thank you very much. Maybe the virtual-reality guru and experimental musician/filmmaker business isn’t paying off any more and Jaron needs the rent money.

In any case, (as Nick himself points out), what Jaron suggests is virtually impossible. In fact, his rant might as well be entitled “I Want To Put the Genie Back in the Bottle Please.” Information of all kinds has breached the wall and is hurtling in all directions, unable to be contained — or not for long anyway — or metered or subjected to a toll approach. That’s a fact. One hopes that Jaron hasn’t been advising the music industry (and he clearly hasn’t been talking with Rupert Murdoch).

On a related note, author Harlan Ellison has a similar rant about getting paid, which you can watch on YouTube. It seems that Warner Brothers wanted him to contribute to some kind of DVD — for nothing! Can you imagine the gall?

I think Harlan Ellison has written some amazing science fiction, and I am a huge fan, but after listening to his rant on YouTube, I get the impression that if he were a musician, he would charge you for singing Happy Birthday at your kid’s party. In fact, if you happened to pass by his apartment on your way somewhere and heard him singing in the shower, he would probably want to charge you for that too.

It’s ironic that Ellison’s rant is on YouTube, where it is free — and where I saw it and got at least a little value out of it. If it had been on a DVD somewhere, I would never have seen it. Does Harlan get any value from me seeing it on YouTube? He might someday, theoretically. But Harlan wants cash in his pockets right now. He doesn’t want to build a relationship with me as a reader, or any of that New Age crapola.

Tell you what, Harlan. I’ll keep my money to myself, and you keep your rants to yourself. And that goes for you too, Jaron.

From Wired magazine’s Epicenter blog comes word that the prayers of hundreds of thousands — possibly millions — of Facebook users have finally been answered: the site will be dropping the much-despised “is” from its status updates. In other words, you will no longer have to contort your status in order to put it in the present tense (or put up with updates like “Susan is was having fun” from the grammatically challenged). You see? And you said that Facebook doesn’t listen.

That headline is meant as a joke, by the way. But like many jokes, it has some truth at the center of it. Do I like to see my posts linked to on Techmeme? Sure I do — and I get the sense that Fred Wilson does too, even though he’s a fantastically rich and well-respected venture capitalist who presumably has lots of other things that make him feel great about what he’s doing. And I think Dave Winer likes to see himself on there too, even though he has a kind of love/hate co-dependent relationship.

I think Fred makes a good point about the site drawing more from other places — places that aren’t really blogs in the strict sense, in that they aren’t written by a single individual. But is that a bad thing? I’m not sure it is. I suppose it would be if you were used to a Techmeme that consisted mostly of your friends, which I think Fred (and probably Dave) are suggesting it used to be. But isn’t that a little like the guy who has a great mountain view from his house, and then complains that all these new people are moving in and wrecking it? Why shouldn’t they get some of that view too?

Not a great analogy, maybe. But I think Fred is overstating the case a bit too. Jeff Jarvis is still on Techmeme regularly, and as a headline post plenty of the time. Rex Hammock is on there plenty too. Calacanis might not be, but only because all he seems to write about lately is Mahalo and (occasionally) fat-blogging. But maybe all those FOFs (friends of Fred) aren’t there as much — and I think that’s okay. We’re getting some new bloggers that are adding new points of view, like Ashkan at WatchMojo and Allen Stern at Centernetworks and ParisLemon and The Last Podcast.

Are we getting USA Today and places like that too? Sure we are — because blogs and media are blending. And that’s as it should be. Blogs aren’t just for the geeks and blognoscenti anymore. Is that going to boost the noise in the signal-to-noise ratio? Perhaps. But there’s more signal out there too. And yes, Techmeme is going to encourage people to “game” the system to try and push their posts up. So what? Don’t click on them. There’s still lots of great opinions and ideas out there — more than there ever were, in fact.

So Amazon has launched the Kindle, its e-book reader, with a press release and an event with CEO Jeff Bezos, which TechCrunch is live-blogging. Several sites have hands-on details, including Engadget (which I would be happy to pay for, Ryan, just not via a monthly fee).

If anything, my skepticism about the Kindle — some of which I allowed to escape in this post yesterday about the paying for blogs option — has increased. And not just because it looks (as someone said) like a giant version of a Handspring PDA from 1997, although I think that’s going to reduce the demand more than Amazon might like to think.

The thing that I’m really torn about is the wireless connectability. On the one hand, it’s great to have a device that can download books (although it reportedly takes a while), and it’s nice that Amazon has built that into the price. But then you have to pay to access the RSS feeds of blogs, which makes no sense — especially if, as Boing Boing notes, you can go to the blog directly with the built-in “experimental” browser. At this point, I feel compelled to use the phrase “WTF?” again.

The wireless also isn’t Wi-Fi, but a specially configured version of EVDO, so you can’t do all kinds of things with it. In other words, the wireless connection is sort of crippled, just as a whole series of other things about the device are crippled — and that would include the inability to put certain kinds of content on there because of the proprietary or restricted formats that Amazon is using.

I’m with Rex Hammock on this one: I would much rather have a larger version of the iPod Touch (assuming we could hack it, of course). Saul Hansell thinks we might get something like that in the future. Fred Wilson — who was approached about including his blog on the Kindle — says he thinks the whole idea of a dedicated e-book reader is ridiculous, and Kevin Kelly says he sees e-books as just one possible app on the Cloudbook of the future.

So lots of people probably know by now (at least if they read Techmeme) that Amazon is launching an electronic book-reading gizmo called the Kindle on Monday, and there’s a gigantic cover story about it in the latest issue of Newsweek magazine. Speaking of which, the Kindle will apparently be a magazine and newspaper reader too, letting you read publications that you’ve downloaded using its built-in wireless connection.

First things first — I think that Bezos is right to emphasize the wireless aspect, which is based on a cellular-style service that Amazon is calling Whispernet. Previous e-book readers had to be hooked up to the PC or a cradle of some kind in order to download new books via the phone line and so on, but being able to buy and download them almost instantaneously will add a whole other dimension (I realize that the iPod has managed to succeed without that ability, but then I think music is different from books in a whole bunch of ways).

The second thing that hit me was the part where Steven Levy says that users will be able to download books, newspapers and magazines, and will even be able to “subscribe to selected blogs, which cost either 99 cents or $1.99 a month per blog.” That one made me do a double-take. Pay a monthly subscription fee to read a blog? Either Levy and/or Bezos have been smoking something, or they have found some magical way to get people to pay for something that has historically been free.

I’m trying to think of a blog that I would pay money to read, and nothing is really coming to mind — not even Engadget or TechCrunch or Boing Boing. But that line of thinking raises the inevitable question: if a blog like Engadget is pretty much as good as a magazine (which I think it is), then why would people pay for one but not the other? That can lead you in one of two directions: charge for the blog, or don’t charge for anything. We know which one Jeff has chosen — but is it the right one?

Other questions include: Is it really as ugly as it looks in the photo? Steve Levy says no on his blog, but David Rothman of TeleRead says yes. And will it be open and support industry standards, or will it be full of awkward proprietary formats and DRM?

There were rumours even before the U.S. writers strike started that it might lead to one of the networks picking up Quarterlife, the new Web drama about twentysomethings created by Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, the team behind Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, and now it appears that those rumours have come true. NBC, which like other networks is looking down the barrel of an empty TV season, said that it has picked up the show and will run it starting in January.

The show becomes the first to move wholesale from Web to TV, but I predict (as others have) that if the strike continues, Quarterlife will not be the last to make that jump. The major networks have a voracious need for content, and when the chips are down they really couldn’t care less where that content comes from, so long as it fills the airwaves. During the last strike it was reality TV shows like Cops and America’s Most Wanted that filled the void for the networks — this time around it’s the Web.

As I noted in this post about the writers’ strike, it’s more than a little ironic that while the Web is the hot-button issue in the strike — in terms of the revenue share that writers want for online content — it’s also the place that writers are going to get their message out, and it has also now become the source of content that is replacing their traditional TV work. As my friend Tony Hung notes, these are interesting times.

(Note: This is cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

“Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel,” Mark Twain reportedly said, by which he presumably meant that one should think twice before making a writer or journalist mad. In Hollywood, the writers who create most of our TV shows and movies (and yes, I’m including Canada in that) are definitely mad, and they are showing it by doing what they do best: writing.

Some are writing opinion pieces for traditional media such as the New York Times and Newsweek, while others are taking their case online. Thanks to the Internet, writers can not only whip together and publish a blog for virtually nothing, but can also create and upload video to promote their case against the big studios and TV networks.

On the Web, in other words, ink doesn’t just come by the barrel; it’s virtually unlimited, and almost free. And it gives the writers a powerful platform to advance their case that they didn’t have during their last strike in 1989.

It’s more than a little ironic, in fact, that the very tools content owners are using to generate new revenue — which the writers say they are being denied a share of — are the same tools writers are using to get their message out. One of the central gathering points for strike information online is UnitedHollywood, a blog created by several union organizers with the Writers Guild, which keeps track of commentary both online and off about the strike, including videos and photo galleries.

The site features a video by the writers of The Daily Show, the popular satirical news show, in which the writers put on a version of the show from a desk set up in the middle of a picket line. Another video from the writers of The Colbert Report is a hilarious satire of a studio executive.

Continue reading “Striking writers use Web to fight back”

Ted Murphy of PayPerPost has a post up about what appears to be another Google PageRank restructuring, which Ted says is specifically directed at PayPerPost — and posts from Andy Beard at WebProNews and PPP-using sites like Big Foot Marketing and 5xmom.com (whose somewhat unsubtle real name is Make$ Money$) seem to confirm that PayPerPost users have seen their PageRank not just fall but drop to zero.

Is that fair? Ted and a small legion of PPP users clearly would argue that it isn’t. In fact, as TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley notes, Ted wants supporters to write to their Congressman to complain, and tries to make the case in his post that Google is just “defending their monopolistic stranglehold on search and online advertising,” and wants to put PayPerPost out of business because it’s an alternative to AdSense.

I wrote about this a little while ago, when Google used its PageRank hammer against a bunch of sites — including mine, which dropped a couple of ranks — for using paid links such as TextLinkAds. Some sites, such as the above-mentioned 5xmom.com, have decided to bend to Google’s will and get rid of their paid posts and links. Others, such as John Chow’s money-making site, have decided that it’s worth more to them to sell ads than it is to be in Google’s index, which is an interesting choice.

The question remains: is Google just trying to maintain the purity of the search experience, so that people don’t get misled by paid posts? If so, that’s a fairly noble goal (PPP’s disclosure policy requires bloggers to say somewhere on their site that they use PayPerPost, but not on the individual post). Or is the search giant just concerned with others selling paid links because that’s competition for AdSense? If so, that’s not such a noble goal. And how do we tell the difference?

Terry “PoMo” Heaton says that he has no problem with Google stamping out the “evil” that is PayPerPost, and that he would rather have Google policing such behaviour than any government. I’m not sure I would go that far. And Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests thinks that Google may actually be trying to send the webosphere a message that PageRank isn’t really that important.

So Jimmy Wales — founder of Wikipedia and the for-profit spinoff Wikia — has shown some screenshots of what his “social search” site might look like, which come to us courtesy of Matthew Buckland’s blog in South Africa (always happy to welcome another Matthew to the blogosphere). And guess what? They look an awful lot like Facebook. There’s a photo and a “status” section, and a link to photo galleries, plus some miscellaneous tabs and something that looks a little like the Facebook “wall.”

The idea behind Wikia seems to be similar to the idea behind Jason Calacani’s “social search” directory Mahalo.com — the idea being that raw algorithm-powered search isn’t enough any more, because it’s all filled with spam and black-hat SEO tricks (which is true, of course), and therefore we need to inject some human beings in there. In Jimmy’s view, Google also needs some competition and isn’t really getting much except from other gigantic Internet companies (Wired has a mini-Q&A with Jimmy on the search project here).

As Mike Arrington notes, we will see whether social search actually does do a better job than regular search. But the interesting thing to me about the Wikia Search is that it is so clearly modelled after Facebook. Is that now the de facto model for a social networking site? Not that there’s anything wrong with Facebook (other than the whole walled garden thing).

It just seems like everyone wants to be Facebook now. Google and Yahoo want to make their email clients into Facebook, LinkedIn wants to be Facebook — I guess that’s not surprising when the site just pulled in $240-million for less than 2 per cent of the company. It seems that being Facebook is a pretty good thing to be right now.