Author: Mathew Ingram

Does the “social radio” market — which features well-established players like Pandora and Last.fm — need another entrant? The gang behind Jango seem to think so. The site, which has been in beta for the past few months, opened up for full access Monday, and says it has 70,000 users already. Co-founder and CEO Dan Kaufman is the former CEO of Dash, a mobile-shopping startup that flamed out in 2001 (not that we should hold that against him, of course).

I have to say one thing about Jango.com: it’s pretty simple to use. When you hit the site you get a search box and a list of “stations.” You can choose a station, which is a pre-mixed selection of artists, or you can type in an artist’s name — at which point you are taken to a user page, without even having to sign up (you can create an account from the user page by just typing in your email and a password). My page is here. By choosing an artist’s name you effectively create a “station” based around them, which can made up solely of that artist, or artists that are similar. Jango suggests musicians and bands that it thinks you might like based on your choice, and then you get to choose from Jango’s list and add that artist to your station — or you can type in your own choice and add that. And that’s about it. You can click to buy a track through Amazon, and you can see who else is listening to a particular artist or station.

The site doesn’t have some things that Last.fm and Pandora do. It doesn’t have a widget, for example (like the one I have in my sidebar), although the company said that’s coming. But it is far easier to figure out and use than Last.fm, I think, which I find confusing and non-intuitive. And when it gets right down to it, one of the keys to such a site is the music recommendation part: in other words, how does it do in terms of suggesting related songs or artists you might want to listen to?

Like others, I’ve found Last.fm and Pandora to be sketchy on that front, particularly with some artists. Jango did not too badly with the few I gave it, although it remains to be seen how it performs over the long term. And when it comes to competing with Pandora at least, Jango has one killer feature: it’s available to Canadians, whereas Pandora is not — it cut off access to Canuck users earlier this year because it hadn’t acquired the appropriate licenses.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt definitely has a point: mp3.com and Linspire (formerly Lindows) founder Michael Robertson does seem to have a way of getting sued. I’m not convinced that it’s a deliberate strategy on Robertson’s part, as the Techdirt post suggests, but it certainly seems to happen with alarming regularity. I guess that’s what happens when you spend most of your time trying to drag the record companies kicking and screaming into a new business model. The latest suit is from EMI, which has a long and tangled history with the entrepreneur.

The first go-round came with mp3.com — and in particular a service called MyMp3, which allowed you to upload your music to the company’s servers and stream it from anywhere. Even though the service checked to see whether you had the right to the CDs you were uploading, the record companies saw it as unauthorized copying and therefore copyright infringement and sued. Universal later acquired the assets of the company (CNET bought the domain name). After launching a Linux-based competitor to Windows (and being sued by Microsoft), Michael Robertson launched another online music venture called mp3tunes.com, with a number of features. In addition to the ability to store music online and stream it to anywhere, the site allows users to “sideload” songs from other websites, in effect, transferring them to an online locker run by mp3tunes. This works for songs acquired legally, but also apparently for songs acquired illegally.

And so, another lawsuit: EMI says that Robertson is effectively trying to do much the same thing he did before. And that’s not all the lawsuits, either. In addition to mp3tunes, the entrepreneur started another service called AnywhereCD.com earlier this year, which allowed users to buy CDs and have them shipped — but also allowed them to download mp3 versions of the songs right away, in DRM-free format.

One of the service’s original partners was Warner Music, but that deal fell through within days of the launch (as I wrote here) because WMG didn’t like the DRM-free download option. There were suits and countersuits, and while the two sides eventually settled, the venture wound up going under. One thing is for sure: music fans may be getting screwed in various ways, but the lawyers are making out like bandits.

There’s a story in the Guardian today that says Google is working with American Idol creator and producer Simon Fuller — who also gave the world the Spice Girls — on some sort of top-secret TV project that will apparently revolutionize the medium as we know it. Is Google going to get into the creation of content?

Colour me skeptical. For one thing, Google doesn’t know anything about content — nor does it want to know anything, as far as I can tell from what Eric and the boys (Larry and Sergey) say about what they see as Google’s business. Finding content, yes; indexing content, obviously; maybe even aggregating content in some smart way. But creating it? I don’t think so. I could see Google doing a deal with Fuller to distribute content through a YouTube channel, for example, or some other kind of arrangement. But I don’t see the company getting any further involved in content production than that — unless Larry or Sergey want to wangle a walk-on role in Heroes, which I’m sure they could probably swing without too much trouble.

Maybe in part this is another example of what I wrote about yesterday — that Google is seen as the company that can save just about anything, and that rumours like this one boil down to the fact that people think TV sucks, and they wish Google would fix it somehow.

So TMCNet blogger Rich Tehrani says he has heard rumours that Google is going to acquire Sprint. This is a subject that others have raised as well, most often in connection with the much-hyped “Google phone” — which we now know isn’t a phone at all but an open platform. In other words, it’s even less likely that Google would buy Sprint than it was before.

That’s not likely to stifle the rumour mill, however. Why? I think it’s because Google has effectively become the saviour of everything. What was once a tiny company with a simple service that everyone used and/or liked has become a globe-spanning colossus with a market value bigger than the gross domestic product of a medium-sized country — and so the implication is that Google can do anything.

What people mean when they say Google should buy Sprint is “Sprint sucks.” When they say Google should come out with a phone, they mean “the cellular phone industry sucks.” Similarly, when they say Google should buy Yahoo, or Microsoft, or China, or whatever, that’s shorthand for “those things suck. Google would fix them.”

Would Google buying Sprint make any sense? Not really. Despite the attempt to compare it to Google buying YouTube or Google buying Keyhole (which became Google Earth), it would not be anything like either of those deals. Sprint Nextel is a gigantic conglomeration of telephone poles and legacy PBXes and customer-service desks and trucks and cable. Google needs that like a hole in the head.

A site called Real Fresh TV, which appears to be a European social media consultantcy, has an interesting proposition for Facebook that it has laid out in the form of an open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg: allow people to pay a monthly fee and thereby not see any of the “social ads” that Facebook is planning to insert into news feeds and so on. The only wrinkle I can see is that it might be difficult to accomplish (or Facebook might not want to do it) since the whole point of having social ads is to take advantage of the networks that people have with their friends, and if you cut off those messages than that reduces the value. Still, not a bad idea, really — Facebook still gets revenue, and users get the choice of whether to see them or not. What do you say, Mark?

I guess it wouldn’t be a weekend in the blogosphere without a little drama of some kind, and this weekend it was Mike Arrington’s no-show at BlogWorld Expo. The soap opera apparently began with a comment from Leo “TWiT” Laporte at the conference about how Mike didn’t come because he “forgot” (something I can only assume was Leo’s idea of a joke).

It quickly escalated into a full-on Arrington hate-a-thon, in which people used Mike’s absence from the conference as a jumping-off point for all kinds of ad hominem attacks (like the ones in Tony’s comment section at Deep Jive Interests) and conspiracy theories about link-bait. In the end, conference organizer Rick Calvert set the story straight by explaining how confusion over dates and a lack of communication helped lead to Mike not being there, and I think a lot of people who piled on the Mike-bashing bandwagon might be feeling a little sheepish now.

I have some personal experience with Mike and conferences, since he keynoted at the last mesh conference I helped organize in Toronto in May, and I can say that while he was occasionally difficult to reach via email (not surprising, really, with the volume of email he probably gets), he went out of his way to stay in touch, showed up on time and took part in all of the events without a word of complaint despite being severely jet-lagged. He even stayed longer than he had originally planned.

If there’s one thing that events like this weekend’s hate-a-thon reinforce, it’s that rushing to judgment in a blog post (or a comment on a post) without having all the facts is rarely — if ever — a smart thing to do. More often than not it’s better to wait.

Before I get started, let me just confess that I am not a programmer. I’ve tinkered with some HTML and even some CSS, but other than that I’m pretty much illiterate (a fact that my brother, who is a real programmer, would no doubt be happy to confirm). I’m an English major, after all. And yet, I have read a fair bit about the trend towards what some are calling “agile” software design, and it struck me that there are similarities between software programming and the traditional media.

A lot of traditional programming — the kind that produces software with billions of lines of code in it — involves dozens or even hundreds of people all toiling away for weeks, months or even years to produce a piece of software. It’s like a military campaign, in which the grunts do the low-level work, then it gets tested, then eventually it goes “gold” and is shipped. Then everyone buckles down for the next revision or upgrade.

As I understand it, an “agile” approach takes a much more evolutionary approach, in which the software gets put together in small chunks and then tested, then tinkered with, then tested, then improved, and so on. In that sense, the end product evolves over time, based on the feedback from users and from watching it get stress-tested in the real world. I could have this all wrong, but that’s my perception of it.

Now let’s look at the way a traditional medium such as the newspaper operates. It may not be months or years (although magazines are close to that kind of time-frame) but you still have a gigantic machine with many small cogs, devoted to producing something that is frozen in time — a lot like the software that goes gold and is shipped. Then everyone gets ready to do the revisions or the upgrade of the news the next day.

The Web, however, is not like that — or shouldn’t be. With a Web operation, news gets out quickly but in smaller chunks, and then it is tested against the facts (and the responses of those involved, or with knowledge of the events) and revised, and it evolves over time. It is never really finished. Instead of a mammoth project aimed at a single product, it is a series of small steps that eventually take you somewhere.

Just a thought.

Ego alert: I was on The Agenda with Steve Paikin — a current affairs show on TV Ontario — on Wednesday night, along with my friends Mark Evans and Om Malik, as well as Jesse Hirsh, a CBC commentator on media and technology, and Nancy Baym, a University of Kansas professor who writes the always excellent Online Fandom blog.

We were talking about Facebook (of course) and the Microsoft deal, but also about privacy and “social advertising,” and whether online social networking is a replacement for real face-to-face networking — stay tuned until the end to see Nancy lay into Om on that one 🙂 The video clip is here, or you can click on the image of yours truly below.

Virtually everyone thinks they’re funny — and the ones who think they’re the funniest are the ones who aren’t funny at all. Into that latter category, I would have to put the new “media satire” site 23/6 (which is apparently a play on the term 24/7 — but like the site itself, the name isn’t funny either). As Chris Albrecht points out at NewTeeVee, the unfunnyness of the site is more than a little sad, considering that News Corp. and HuffingtonPost have apparently been working on this thing for more than a year now.

For some reason, everyone thinks that satire — particularly political or news-driven satire — is really easy to do. After all, that guy Jon Stewart just sits there and reads the headlines and makes faces, and people think it’s hilarious, right? And The Onion gets away with murder too, just by writing takeoffs of popular news stories. How hard could that be?

Well, guess what. It’s really hard. It’s not that hard to do — it’s just really hard to do it well. After all, even The Onion misses from time to time. Maybe 23/6 can get into the swing eventually, but you have to wonder why they even bothered. It’s not like the political or news-driven satire game doesn’t already have a bunch of players. Portfolio’s media blogger doesn’t think much of it either.

One benefit of being owned by Google has to be the mind-boggling amounts of server space they have available, with something like 45 or 50 massive data centres located around the world and an estimated 500,000 servers or so in total (you can find them quite easily — look for the football-field sized building with no windows and a four-storey air-conditioning system attached, right next door to a big dam).

YouTube is rolling out some of the benefits of that arrangement: it just announced that uploaders can now use a multi-file upload tool, and the maximum file size has been boosted by a factor of ten to 1 gigabyte from 100 megabytes (although they still can’t be any longer than 10 minutes). Just think — that means high-definition versions of Soulja Boy’s new dance and the latest LOLcatz video are coming your way.

I remember awhile back coming across a post that Nick Carr did about someone who was using Amazon’s S3 remote storage service to do backups, and wound up getting a bill for a month’s worth of charges for hosting his data — and it was a single cent (the original post by Dave Gurnell is here, and Nick’s post is here). I thought at the time that it was pretty impressive, so I created an Amazon Web Services account.

I downloaded JungleDisk, a backup/storage app that acts as a front-end to S3. Then I uploaded a whole pile of photos as a test, which worked flawlessly, with my JungleDisk files and folders showing up as a network drive in Windows and a WebDav remote share in Linux and the usual drag-and-drop to add or move files and so on. A little while ago I got my first monthly bill from Amazon: 75 cents. Not bad.

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a post up at Read/Write Web about a relatively new blog-tracking and aggregation/filter site called Blogcosm, in which the creator of the service, a veteran geek named Scott Lawton — who claims to have been around even before Dave Winer invented blogging (which is just crazy talk) — talks about how he’s gunning for Gabe Rivera’s Techmeme.

I’m going to give Mr. Lawton the benefit of the doubt, because I’m a nice guy, but I have to say that his site competing with Techmeme.com is like me competing in a bike race with Lance Armstrong. At the moment, Blogcosm is a haphazard collection of blog info and rankings taking from other sites such as Technorati (which it might be able to compete with, given how far Technorati has fallen in the past year or so).

As for the design of Blogcosm.com — well, let’s just say that Techmeme may not be anything much to look at, but next to Blogcosm it looks like something that came out of Apple’s design lab. I mean, damn. I’ve seen sites that were designed using Microsoft’s PageMaker from 1998 that looked better. I agree that design isn’t everything (what we might call the craigslist philosophy), but still. It made my eyes hurt.

I think Techmeme is safe for awhile.

Update:

Please see my exchange with Scott in the comments below.

A New Music Express piece on Radiohead brings with it a rather large knee to the goolies for comScore, which came out with some numbers on downloads of the band’s “pay what you want” album In Rainbows (I wrote about comScore’s results here). ComScore said that its survey showed less than 40 per cent paid for the album, and most paid less than $4. There was quite a bit of skepticism about the results, however, since — as Ethan Kaplan of blackrimglasses.com pointed out — it was based on just a few hundred people. Well, here’s what the band said in a statement:

“In response to purely speculative figures announced in the press regarding the number of downloads and the price paid for the album, the group’s representatives would like to remind people that… it is impossible for outside organisations to have accurate figures on sales.

However, they can confirm that the figures quoted by the company comScore Inc are wholly inaccurate and in no way reflect definitive market intelligence or, indeed, the true success of the project.”

comScore has since defended its analysis, according to this MTV story, and there is a statement on comScore’s blog with more detail about the company’s methodology. For anyone who is interested, Canadian musician Jane Siberry has been allowing fans to pay whatever they want for her music for several years now, and keeps a running tally of how many paid and the average price in the sidebar of her online store. More than 90 per cent pay the “recommended” price or higher, and the average price is well above what a song sells for on iTunes.

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land (who claims to be on vacation) makes an interesting point about Facebook, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s claims that the company isn’t planning to do an IPO any time soon. He may not want to issue shares and file a prospectus, Danny says, but the social-networking site will likely have to start filing financial documents with the SEC soon — at which point it might as well go all the way and get a stock-exchange listing.

As Danny notes, U.S. securities rules require a company to file financial reports with the SEC if it has more than $10-million in assets (gee, does Facebook have that much do you think?) and more than 500 employees who hold stock options. At the moment, Facebook has about 300 employees, most of whom likely have options, and it is growing quickly. This SEC rule also snared Google, which confided in its prospectus that the clause accelerated its IPO offering.

Hilarious — and so true. (via the always excellent Fimoculous)

http://www.collegehumor.com/moogaloop/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1787501&fullscreen=1