Author: Mathew Ingram

There have been rumours about Google getting involved in the wireless wars in the U.S. for some time now, and the company itself has admitted many times that it is interested in expanding the number of people who use the mobile Web and in increasing the amount of competition there is in the mobile business. So it’s not hard to believe the report today in the Wall Street Journal that says the company is going to bid for wireless spectrum. But does it make any sense for Google to do that?

I’m not sure that it does — and not just because it will cost a boatload of cash to do so. Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget does the math at Silicon Alley Insider and comes up with a figure of $8-billion or so. Of course, that’s only a couple of years worth of cash flow, right? Google should be able to make that up in a few months of selling click-to-call ads on your mobile phone, or whatever the heck it is planning to do. But still — why does Google have to do this at all? Is the U.S. mobile market so broken that only Google can fix it? I hate to make reference to myself (okay, who’s kidding who — I love it) but I wrote a post recently in which I wondered whether people weren’t putting too much faith in Google’s ability to fix just about any company or industry with its magic Google dust. In that case, it was talk about Google buying Sprint that started me thinking.

So here’s a thought: what if Google is starting to believe its own publicity? What if it thinks it can fix anything too? As they say out West, you shouldn’t drink your own bathwater. The mobile business has humbled many companies before Google. Maybe they didn’t have PhDs in applied math coming out the wazoo, but still. I’m not sure Google really needs to wade into this one, or that it will gain much from doing so. Fortune thinks the bid may be a bluff.

More ammunition (for those who need more) for the dropping of the New York Times’ pay wall: according to Nielsen data for October, the paper’s readership — in terms of unique visitors — jumped to 17.5 million in October, up from 14.6 million the month before. A rise of almost 3 million uniques in a single month is pretty incredible. Maybe it was all that Britney Spears coverage. Hat tip for the link goes to Beet, which has posted a video interview with Vivian Schiller of the Times.

Maybe it’s the future of music and maybe it’s not, but I think U2’s experiment with Facebook and the iLike widget is a pretty interesting move. As CNET points out, Bono is involved with Elevation Partners, and one of the board members there is also on the board of iLike — and Valleywag’s Megan McCarthy notes that the connections are even more intertwined than just that if you look closer — but nevertheless, I think it’s a great idea.

The song is a preview of a tune called Waves of Sorrow, and it’s a nice long clip of Bono talking about the inspiration for the song and then kind of singing along and talking about it as he sings it. I admit that I’m a U2 fan (although the Bono “saviour of the world” act gets a little thin at times), but in any case I think it’s a pretty interesting use of Facebook.

http://s.ilike.com/swfs/rssPlayer.swf

After just three days of being up on Facebook’s iLike page and available to be added to users’ iLike widgets (and displayed in their feeds, of course) the song has more than 1.3 million fans, and there are over 9,000 wall posts. Will Bono be reading each one? Somehow I doubt it. In other iLike news, Billboard reports that the company has signed a deal for exclusive content with Keith Urban.

After I wrote a post yesterday about Google and Yahoo’s plans to turn email into a Facebook-style social hub, someone commented and included a link to a Slate piece about the “death of email.” As Zoli Erdos notes in his response, this kind of thing comes along pretty regularly — email is dead, the kids don’t use it any more, etc.

My point on the Yahoo/Google post was that younger people barely use email at all, and if those two giants want to jump on the social-networking bandwagon, maybe email isn’t the best approach. I’ve learned through hard experience that if I want to send a link or a quick question to either of my teenaged daughters, email barely works at all — they hardly ever check it, and so I’m reduced to saying “Did you get that link I sent you?” at which point they go and check it, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Obviously, my daughters won’t be teenagers forever. Eventually they will (I sincerely hope) get jobs and become productive members of society — at which point they will no doubt be forced to deal with the massive time-sucking drain on productivity that we call email. They too will get to enjoy the main feature of email: what some like to call an “audit trail” and others like to describe as “butt-covering.”

Let’s face it: by CC’ing everyone under the sun, sending long messages late on a Friday afternoon, including miscellaneous attachments for no reason and otherwise gumming things up, certain people achieve the appearance of work without actually having to do any — and then when someone calls them on it they can say “but didn’t you get my email?” If Google or someone else can fix that, then more power to them.

Email may not be dead, but it certainly isn’t looking too healthy, and hasn’t for years. As Zoli points out, the best approach is not to replace email with other things like IM or Facebook messages — which have their own flaws — but to make use of as many different methods as possible, depending on the situation. In some cases a wiki makes more sense, or a Google document, or a live chat, or (God forbid) even a phone call.

My friend Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 says that he thinks the whole “email is dead” meme is ridiculous.

I have to say I’m not a huge fan of Mahalo.com, the “people-powered” search engine from Jason Calacanis, but then I’m not really the target market (as Jason has pointed out in comments here before). And I can see how it might be useful to some people, if they’re looking for just one or two results. But as skeptical as I am, I look like Jason’s biggest supporter compared to Andrew Baron of Rocketboom, who wrote a recent post entitled “Why Mahalo is Fundamentally Flawed.”

I’m not sure what happened between Jason and Andrew, although I know that Jason offered Amanda Congdon a job after her acrimonious departure as the host of Rocketboom, and he also made some fun of Rockeboom (in what I thought was a kind-hearted way) in a recent Mahalo video. But still — Andrew doesn’t just criticize Mahalo for a few flaws in his post. He effectively accuses Jason of perpetrating a gigantic con, in which he pretends to set up a site to help people find search results, but in reality just wants to get them to click on his ads.

It’s interesting to read the comments on Andrew’s post as well: Jason shows up and gamely tries to respond to the criticisms, and also disproves Andrew’s claim that there are no positive reviews of Mahalo other than Jason’s (which Andrew wriggles out of by saying they aren’t credible). Then, after a comment from Duncan Riley of TechCrunch, the Rocketboom founder wonders whether Duncan’s comment came after a “nudge for a voucher,” whatever that means. It’s bizarre.

Just for the record, I have nothing against Andrew — he was a panelist at the original mesh conference last year, and we were happy to have him — and I think he was a pioneer with Rocketboom. But his vendetta against Jason seems more than a little over the top.

NewAssignment.net creator and journalism prof Jay Rosen’s latest venture just went live: Beatblogging is an attempt to improve the coverage of specific news areas or “beats” by using social-media such as blogs and wikis. In effect, Jay and his team — led by the indefatigable David “DigiDave” Cohn — want to help beat reporters use “crowdsourcing” methods (like Jay’s project with Huffington Post, the political-reporting effort OffTheBus.com) to draw knowledge from various sources.

The list of 13 participants is at Jay’s site, PressThink, and also at the MediaShift Idea Lab site that is part of PBS. It includes Wired digital-music writer Eliot Van Buskirk, a science reporter at the Houston Chronicle, a public-school reporter at the Dallas Morning News, a basketball writer at ESPN.com and a technology reporter at the Seattle Times. The San Jose Mercury News has some thoughts about why it’s taking part.

I think Jay’s idea is brilliant, and it will be fascinating to see how it develops. I wish there were some Canadian newspaper reporters taking part.

For anyone who’s interested, Michael Robertson — whose mp3tunes.com service is being sued by EMI for what the record label claims is copyright infringement — has posted a lengthy overview of the issues (as he sees them) on his website. There are links to the statement of claim from EMI as well as Robertson’s countersuit against the record company. I wrote about the latest battle (the founder of Linspire has been down this road many times before) a few days ago when the EMI suit was launched.

EMI’s suit is kind of ironic, given the comments that Edgar Bronfman of Warner Music just finished making about how the industry has wasted too much time suing people over the past few years. And if you’re nostalgic for those years, or just can’t get enough of the Metallica “sue them until they drop dead” approach, check out this comment from KISS front-man, reality-show star and all-around loudmouthed moron Gene Simmons in a recent Billboard interview:

“Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid’s face should have been sued off the face of the earth. They should have taken their houses and cars and nipped it right there in the beginning. Those kids are putting 100,000 to a million people out of work.”

 

From Nancy Baym’s always excellent Online Fandom blog comes news that a group of English football fans have effectively acquired a team. The group, which goes by the name MyFootballClub, consists of footie fans from more than 70 countries — and they are now the owners of Ebbsfleet United, a semi-pro club based in southern England.

The deal gives the group a vote on everything from the team lineup to who gets traded, according to an Associated Press article.

“This is a brand new concept, basically a massive trust,” said Roland Edwards, a director and club secretary of Ebbsfleet United in Kent, southern England.

Virtually every fan thinks that he or she can do a better job than the coach or the management of whatever sport they are watching. Now the fans of Ebbsfleet United get the chance to put their mouths where their money is. MyFootballClub sounds like an interesting story: according to the AP item, it charges its 20,000 or so members a $72 annual fee, and was founded earlier this year by former football writer Will Brooks.

According to a post at MacUser, the chairman and co-owner of Warner Music Group — Montreal’s own Edgar Bronfman Jr. — made some comments at a recent mobile conference about how music companies spent too long pretending that the industry’s business model wasn’t being threatened, and “went to war with consumers.” Here’s the money quote:

“We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong.

How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.”

A stirring and heartfelt sentiment indeed. And totally true, of course. Unfortunately for Edgar and the rest of the music industry, those five or six years spent dithering and suing music fans have left the major record labels in a hole so deep it might be impossible to get out. And Warner’s fight against non-DRM music hasn’t done much to help.

It’s nice to see someone admit their mistakes, even if it is years too late — but then I suppose Edgar Jr. is pretty used to admitting his mistakes by now, after having to take the rap for his disastrous investment in Vivendi, which obliterated a substantial chunk of his family’s fortune (acquired through the Seagram liquor business) back in the first bubble.

Update:

Mike Masnick of Techdirt fact-checks his distant cousin Edgar’s memory of how things happened.

There’s lots of chat this morning about Yahoo and Google’s plans to make email more social — whatever that means. Brad Garlinghouse of Yahoo was apparently talking to Saul Hansell of the New York Times, who wrote about it on his Bits blog (he’s the technology editor at the paper as well), and Brad wants to make email into a sort of social hub. In effect, it sounds like he wants to make Yahoo’s email into a Facebook-style platform.

This makes Mike Arrington sad, since it’s yet another sign that Yahoo can’t seem to get its you-know-what together and focus on a single thing at a time. Yahoo 360, Mash, etc. But wait — isn’t Brad the guy behind the infamous “peanut butter” manifesto, which was all about Yahoo spreading itself too thin? So maybe he actually has gotten the go-ahead from Jerry Yang and the rest of the Yahoo brain trust to try this email thing. My only problem with Brad’s idea is that for me, email is pretty close to broken. And it’s not just spam — although that’s a big part of it. It just doesn’t work properly somehow. It’s all out of sync, and it’s hard to keep things straight (although Gmail’s default “conversation” threading helps, I find) and it’s not integrated with enough other things. Is Yahoo going to fix all that, or is it just going to pop up profiles and miscellaneous crap whenever someone emails me?

If it’s the latter, then no thank you. If Yahoo or Google can find a way to make email relevant, to make it more efficient, more like RSS maybe, then I’ll think about it. My other concern is that for people below the age of 25 or so, email is a virtually non-existent form of communication. Making email a social platform might work for fogeys like me, but what about the next generation? Shouldn’t Yahoo and Google be thinking about that too?

Well, Rupert Murdoch has been dropping pretty big hints that the Wall Street Journal pay wall is a-comin’ down pretty soon — and it shouldn’t be too hard to make it crumble, since Digg just put a pretty big hole in it. As Kevin Rose describes in his rather economical post on the subject (I counted 38 words, not including his name), articles at the Journal will start carrying the Digg button, and any stories that get Dugg will be free for readers who come from the social-bookmarking site. Mike Arrington has a slightly longer post over at Techcrunch.

It seems like everyone is getting into the TV game, but not on the talking box (as Forrest Gump called it) — on the Web. And in some cases, TV networks are trying to take the Web and turn it into television. Good luck to them. Here’s a roundup of some of the news:

— News Corp. unit Twentieth TV is working with Yahoo on a “Web on TV” show, which will no doubt feature the latest hilarious clips of skateboarders hurting themselves or kittens on an icy pond.

— Lifetime Networks is launching a TV-style platform as part of its relaunched website, and will create new shows just for the Web as well as streaming Lifetime content.

— Newsweek says it is going to create a political talk show that will run weekly on its website, and the magazine has hired the former producer of Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC to put it together.

In other media-related announcements, MSNBC’s redesign is live (just in time for Rex “Fimoculous” Sorgatz to leave and an old friend of mine to arrive) and it has a very cool Ajax-y feature that lets you move chunks of the page up or down depending on your interests.

And in the old-time newspaper world, a number of chains have done a deal with real-estate site Zillow to put their ads on the Zillow site and use Zillow features on their newspaper websites. For more, see this piece of commentary on CNET about newspapers and the classified conundrum, and see Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing for a post on the Zillow deal.

Ethan Kaplan of blackrimglasses, the Warner Music Group technology shaman and all-around smart guy, has a great post up about the pile-on effect that we all see from time to time on Techmeme, as well as a related problem: the incessant desire for “scoops” and “exclusives” that companies use to play blogs off against each other — using embargos and other cheap parlour tricks to get blogs to parrot whatever marketing slogan happens to come down the pike.

I know that Mike Arrington at TechCrunch and Pete Cashmore at Mashable try hard not to get sucked into that vortex, and I’m sure that Richard MacManus and the gang at Read/Write Web do too, but it’s hard when everyone wants to be first. As Mike said at our mesh conference in May, being first is easier — if you’re not first, then you have to try harder to add value somehow. If you’re first, well… you’re first.

The problem, as Ethan describes in his own inimitable fashion, is that being first hardly matters any more. It’s not like anyone is going to be first for more than a second or two, and then the great tsunami of coverage will descend on the subject until it is obliterated beneath a pile of Techmeme.com posts. As Ethan says:

“It’s like is holding back an immense amount of water pressure then releasing it. In the end, can you tell who the first drop to hit you was? No. You only know that you are wet and uncomfortable.”

Well said. It’s unlikely we will ever get rid of the desire to be first — I think it’s one of the most primal desires of the journalist (and in using that term I include bloggers) — but I hope that more and more people will choose to focus on the issues that need to be talked about, instead of just the latest release of a Facebook/Google/MySpace widget that aggregates Web 2.0 social bookmarking spreadsheets or whatever.

Today’s cautionary tale about using Facebook comes from one Kevin Colvin, who appears to be a bank intern at the American division of Anglo Irish Bank — or at least that’s the story Valleywag has up, along with a charming photo of Mr. Colvin in a Halloween costume, which I have reproduced here for your enjoyment. I believe he’s some kind of elf or fairy of some sort — Tinkerbell perhaps.

In any case, it seems that Mr. Colvin booked off sick in an email to his boss, who sent a message back with an understanding comment about personal obligations — and included a compliment on Kevin’s wand, along with a copy of the photo that he had posted to his Facebook after a Halloween party. Not only that, but he apparently forwarded a copy of the email to a number of co-workers, which is how it wound up at Valleywag.

This isn’t the first time that someone’s personal behaviour has gotten them in trouble at work, and it’s unlikely to be the last. We can argue about whether it was right for Kevin’s boss to lift the photo and then publicly humiliate him in front of his coworkers by forwarding the email, but perhaps he wanted to send some kind of message to the rest of the staff. It may not be right, but it happens. Facebookers beware.

As several sites are reporting — including PaidContent’s UK division and Mashable — Bebo has launched a social-media platform with a pile of traditional TV and media partners including the BBC. Bebo often gets forgotten when people are writing about social networking, because the majority of coverage focuses on Facebook and MySpace.

But while Bebo was created in the U.S., it has developed a large European user base and has about 40 million users or so, which puts it not that far behind Facebook. And the partners it has lined up for its social-media launch include some major names — such as CBS, BSkyB, Channel 4, ESPN and MTV, as well as some smaller players. According to the press release, the Open Media launch will allow Bebo users to:

“store and curate within their personal profiles their favorite music and video content, and virally distribute that content throughout their ‘friends network’ and the wider Bebo community.”

On a related note, the word “curate” has become increasingly popular as a way of describing what users are doing when they pick clips they like and post them somewhere, or send them to friends — makes it sound all Latin and important, doesn’t it? A lot better than saying something like “I was goofing off and watching kittens on YouTube.”

Further reading:

— CNET’s Caroline McCarthy has some details
— info on ad revenue splits over at Contentinople
— the Telegraph has a take, along with some really craptacular ads
— Silicon Alley Insider calls Bebo’s offering the “anti-Hulu”
— PaidContent has a video interview with a Bebo exec