Author: Mathew Ingram

Walking along the street, you decide to make a phone call with your cell. Pulling out your phone, it detects a wireless signal and logs on automatically, allowing you to make your call by Wi-Fi instead of using your expensive cellular service. Sounds great, doesn’t it? And hopefully, someday, that dream will come true and we’ll all be able to do just that. How close that vision might be is an open question, however.

A piece in the New York Times has gotten plenty of people excited about the prospect, given the interest expressed by companies like T-Mobile, Cisco and Earthlink. T-Mobile, for example, says it wants to let users switch seamlessly from its cell network to Wi-Fi hotspots it owns, which sounds great. But what if you want to use your phone in someone else’s hotspot — how easy will that be? Will you have to sign on and authenticate yourself every time, and/or pay your provider?

I’m as excited as the next guy about the idea of using Wi-Fi to make Skype calls instead of cellular calls — but I don’t think the carriers are going to make it as easy as I might like it to be, and I think we could wind up with a mish-mash of standards, charges and procedures. As usual, I think Om Malik has the right mixture of enthusiasm and skepticism on this one.

My thanks go out to Jason Kottke, whose remaindered links provide an almost endless source of great material for reading and thinking, for a recent link to an essay by Paul Graham, the programmer turned venture capitalist/incubator guy. Paul writes blog posts too, but he also writes thoughtful essays about all kinds of things — and the latest one stemmed from speeches he made at Usenix and another conferenceon Rails, about the benefits of being marginal when it comes to designing software or starting companies.

As Jason says, the essay is “filled with odd conclusions and unfair assumptions, but the general ideas are interesting to consider; lots of food for thought in this one for me.” Among the things that caught my eye as I read it were these great bon mots:

“I think that’s one reason big companies are so often blindsided by startups. People at big companies don’t realize the extent to which they live in an environment that is one large, ongoing test for the wrong qualities.”

“Outsiders have nothing to lose. They can do risky things, and if they fail, so what? Few will even notice. The eminent, on the other hand, are weighed down by their eminence. Eminence is like a suit: it impresses the wrong people, and it constrains the wearer.”

“The very skill of insiders can be a weakness. Once someone is good at something, they tend to spend all their time doing that. This kind of focus is very valuable… but focus has drawbacks: you don’t learn from other fields, and when a new approach arrives, you may be the last to notice.”

Great stuff. Thanks Jason — and thanks, Paul.

During all the discussion of the Long Tail that went on recently between Lee Gomes and Chris Anderson — with Nick Carr playing the part of the umpire — one of the things that got talked about was “hits” or “stars” and whether they can come from the tail or not. I was thinking of that when I read the recent Economist piece on a popular MySpace personality named Christine Dolce, who likes to go by the name ForBiddeN (if you have to ask why, then you are out of the loop and should go back to watching old Rockford Files episodes).

Ms. Dolce, who happens to be blonde and rather chesty, seems to like lots of mascara, Johnny Depp, people with piercings and a kind of S&M vibe with lots of denim and rippling muscles (not necessarily in that order), and she has created her own line of clothing called Destroyed Denim, as well as advertising a line of cologne — “the only cologne with REAL sex pheromones!” — and now she has a deal with Axe deodorant. Ms. Dolce apparently gets more than 800,000 hits a day and has been crowned the “Queen of MySpace.” Playboy pictorials are rumoured to be in the works, and she has been written about in Business 2.0 magazine and the Wall Street Journal.

Where did Ms. Dolce come from? Who knows. She’s a makeup artist who is busy creating her own brand, just like rock singer and MySpace hot property Tila Tequila, who reportedly has over a million MySpace “friends.” Are either of them any less real or any more fake than N-Sync or Dog the Bounty Hunter or anyone on just about any reality show or American Idol would-be star? Not really. But they are busy making themselves, rather than having others make them. How will MySpace handle this, Scott Karp wonders. Good question.

There’s an interesting interview on John Battelle’s blog with Bill Gross of Idealab, the guy who created (among many other things) a pay-per-click, search-based advertising company called GoTo, which became Overture, which was then bought by Yahoo. In fact, although John doesn’t mention this in the lead-up to the interview, without Bill Gross and GoTo there might never have been a Google — or at least not the $120-billion behemoth that controls over half the online advertising market.

According to someone who spoke to one of the VCs that invested in Google in the early days, the company had no clue what it was going to do to generate money, until it decided to “borrow” the pay-per-click search-related ad model from Overture. Fast forward a few years and presto: Larry and Sergey are billionaires, and Bill is… well, still working, and apparently not having the best time financially, according to rumours. Maybe Google could throw him a bone — or at least let him come by and help himself from the free candy room.

Tony Ruscoe, a programmer who became famous (in the blogosphere at least) for discovering the Google Base domain before the search company launched it, was poking around in Google’s attic again and found some new potential services that Google seems to have waiting in the wings, including Google Real Estate, Google Guess, Google Events and Google Weaver. Here are some other services that Google, the company with attention deficit disorder (or is that “diversify at all costs” disorder?) is reportedly working on:

• Google Laundry (email a request, clothes are shipped FedEx)
• Google Shoe-Size Estimator (still in beta)
• Google Change (send in your coins and get Google Checkout credits)
• Google Calculator (with sine and cosine functions, naturally)
• Google Lawn-Care (only available in San Francisco)
• Google Timekeeper (a virtual desktop clock)
• Google Therapy (a version of Alice the chat-bot)

Isn’t the Googleverse a wonderful place to live? On an unrelated note, how many kids with ADD does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Answer: Hey, let’s go ride bikes!

So the Rolling Stones — arguably the world’s oldest rock band — are the latest lure to get eager music fans listening to a concert via their cellphone (other such concerts have featured lesser lights such as Daddy Yankee and Rihanna). As Carlo at MobHappy and others note, you get just 7 minutes for your $1.99, and you can only listen for 14 minutes in total no matter how much you want to pay. Why? Because of fears of bootlegging, believe it or not — like someone is going to rip the entire concert from their cellphone.

Even without that kind of asinine restriction, the Listen Live Now service leaves me cold. Yes, I would love to hear the Stones live without having to fly to Paris and pay $350 or whatever their tickets cost now. And yes, I know that the sound doesn’t come from some drunken groupie holding their phone up in the air but straight from the Stones’ soundboard, as BusinessWeek breathlessly informs us. But it’s still $2 for 7 freaking minutes — and it could easily be the 7 minutes when Keef forgets where he put his guitar, or when Charlie has to be taken backstage to refill his oxygen tanks.

I’m with Ethan Kaplan, director of technology for Warner Brothers, who wonders on his blog Blackrimglasses: “When will (most) bands realize that bootleg recordings of shows are the best inner and post record cycle marketing tools they have?” Of course, the Stones need marketing like I need another hole in the head, but Ethan’s point is a good one. More bands should do what Pearl Jam does, and sell their own “bootlegs” of every concert directly to their fans.

But then they wouldn’t be able to get $2 for 7 minutes, nor would they be able to help the evil phone companies find new ways of extorting money from their hapless users. And thanks to commenter Peebs for this link.

Robert “I used to work for Microsoft but now I work for this little podcasting startup” Scoble, aka The Scobleizer (who apparently got his name at a previous job because he liked to install all kinds of beta software on people’s machines — which then became known as “Scobleizing” them) hates the Internet.

Chad Hurley, the guy with the surfer-dude name and the hottest Internet-media property going — namely YouTube, home of classics such as the Diet Coke and Mentos video — seems to be reading from the standard Web 2.0 (or Bubble 2.0) playbook in his recent media appearances, including his It Girl role at Allen & Co.’s media confab earlier this month and a recent interview with Internet columnist Bambi Francisco of Marketwatch (Chad Hurley, Bambi Francisco — you can’t make this kind of stuff up).

Are you going to sell, Chad? No way — we want to remain independent, we’re trying to build value, long-term vision, etc. etc. (see previous playbook entries under Facebook and Skype); Your company’s value has soared to $1-billion or so, hasn’t it Chad? I don’t really know — we’re focused on long-term value, we don’t think about that kind of thing, etc. etc. But then Chad slipped a little and said he might consider an IPO, and you could almost hear the sharks swarming for the chum in the water, some of them looking to cut Mr. YouTube down to size and some eager to help him fleece, er… assist the investing public. Would it fly? Some IPOs haven’t done so well (hat tip to Paul Kedrosky for the link)

Meanwhile, competitor Revver — which has a similar setup but takes the additional step of sharing revenue with those who upload videos (which is why the Diet Coke and Mentos boys asked people to upload their clip to Revver rather than YouTube) — has gotten additional financing from the funding arms of cable giant Comcast and Ted Turner’s new-media outfit. Draper Fisher Jurvetson is also a backer of Revver, as is William Randolph Hearst III (who spent some of the family dough during Bubble 1.0 too, by investing in cable-Internet flameout @Home).

Is Chad’s potential IPO a sign of Bubble 2.0? The inimitable Ze Frank has some thoughts.

Okay, maybe fortune is a little strong, and she arguably had more fame before — but, well, you know what I mean. Ana Marie Cox, formerly of Wonkette (and even more formerly of that late, lamented bastion of Bubble 1.0 satire known as Suck), has been named the new Washington editor for Time’s online unit, according to Jim Romenesko. Back when Nick Denton’s Gawker media empire was just a dream, Wonkette was one of the blogs that got even non-Internet types talking, perhaps in part because of Ana Marie Cox’s salty language. She retired and wrote a book (which hasn’t done that well, according to a snarky comment on Wikipedia, despite an advance of $250,000) and now seems to have gotten a foot in the door of “old” media — or at least the new version of old media.

Update:

Dave Pogue at the New York Times has a nice Q&A with Ms. Wonkette, in which he asks her about how she got her start, what she thinks of blogs vs. old media and so on, in which she says this (among other things):

AMC: You know, I suspect that The New York Times will never cease to exist. That dinosaur can’t be killed. That really would take a meteor, and I don’t think blogs are a meteor. They’re kind of like a tiny asteroid shower. But The New York Times is going to have to change. I mean, all major media outlets are going to have to change to meet the demands of people who might, you know, have grown used to some of the things they get from blogs.

And Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting has some tongue-in-cheek thoughts.

Damn, I hate it when Cynthia Brumfield of IPDemocracy writes the post that I was planning to write — and I hate it even more when Nick “the Prophet of Doom” Carr starts taking his medication again and actually says something reasonable and balanced. Both of those things happened today, when they commented on the “Long Tail” brouhaha started by Lee Gomes at the Wall Street Journal.

Lee, a columnist I have taken issue with before, questioned whether the Long Tail phenomenon described by Wired editor Chris Anderson in his book of the same name was as far-reaching or as significant as the author claimed. He even did what might be called reporting on the issue. Anderson responds with a refreshingly even-handed response, and points out a few places where Lee avoided inconvenient info in making his criticisms (bad columnist! bad!).

As much as I hate to admit it, I kind of agree with Nick, who says that both men are likely right. Is there a Long Tail? It seems obvious that there is, even just anecdotally, in the sense that the Internet makes it easier for people to find those old songs or old books or old pron or whatever. Perhaps Chris — like many authors who immerse themselves in a subject for so long — wound up seeing it wherever he looked, and has overstated its importance a tad.

In the end, quibbling over the size of the tail seems to miss the point to me. By sheer coincidence, I came across a recent Slate magazine piece today that looked at the Long Tail and applied it to Slate stories from the archive, with somewhat mixed results. But it did point out that every old story clicked on by someone is a story that has already paid its way — any clicks, in other words, are therefore gravy. How much gravy remains to be seen.

Update:

The suddenly reasonable Nick Carr has posted a lengthy email he got from Lee Gomes in which the WSJ columnist responds to some of the criticisms made by Mr. Anderson. The plot thickens.

• The Motion Picture Association may have picked on the wrong guy when they sent a letter asking software developer Shawn Hogan to pay up for downloading movies. He happens to be a multi-millionaire, and plans to take the MPAA to court.
• Eric Rice of Hipcast makes the point that podcasts and other audio and video content are not two-way — in other words, not conversations but monologues in a sense (although they can contain conversations). This may seem obvious, but I think it bears remembering.
• Once again, a couple of members of the “old” media show that they don’t know how to take a joke: Ken Jennings, the guy who won all that money on Jeopardy, wrote a satirical post on his blog about the show in which he called Alex Trebek a cyborg (among other things), and the New York Post reamed him out for it, as did the Associated Press. That’s just sad.
• New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell returns to the scene of the crime and responds to criticism of the comments he made awhile back (eons in blogosphere terms) about how blogs are derivative. He qualifies his comments a bit, but sticks to his central point, and says that being derivative isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I don’t know about you, but I’m loving the geek smackdown going on between Kevin Rose of Digg — and assorted Diggers — and Jason Calacanis of the new and improved Digg-style Netscape (let’s just call it an homage, shall we?). Jason tossed a hand grenade into the social media-social bookmarking space when he offered to pay the top submitters on Digg and Reddit and Newsvine to come over and do their stuff at Netscape. Some (okay, it was Mike Arrington at TechCrunch) have called it desperation, while some have applauded Jason’s cojones.

Then Digg founder Kevin Rose made some comments about Jason’s offer (and his lack of imagination, etc.) on Diggnation, the Digg weekly podcast. Cue the outraged post from Mr. Calacanis, in which he says Kevin has “cracked,” and that this proves he has won the debate. Kevin responds with a post saying Jason’s move is a “PR stunt” and that he should “Think of what your loyal Netscape users must think – you’re essentially telling them that they aren’t good enough and that you have pay better users.”

To his credit, Mark Glaser of PBS’s MediaShift does a nice job of summing up some of the back-and-forth on this whole issue, and also does some enterprise reporting of his own — he gets in touch with a top Digg poster by the name of BloodJunkie (Derek van Vliet, who happens to be from Toronto, and has submitted a whopping 13,152 stories to Digg), who says that he is considering taking Mr. Calacanis up on his kind offer (another Digger has the opposite view here). In an email to Mark, he says he is “at the point where I am considering pursuing the offer. I really appreciate that someone is recognizing the value we Diggers, Flickrers and Redditers add to the online world.”

PR stunt? Maybe. But Jason’s relentless focus on paying the “talent” — a topic he also held forth on during the Amanda Congdon-Rocketboom soap opera — seems to have exposed some of the cracks in the “user-generated content” model. It will be interesting to see how (or if) those cracks widen, and where they lead.

Rafat makes a good point at PaidContent, and Leo “TWiT” Laporte has one as well — which is that the top 10 posters don’t really make or break a site like Digg. I also think that Steve Rubel is right when he says that Netscape needs to find its own niche, and let its own community grow rather than trying to buy someone else’s. Meanwhile, Kevin “Tailrank” Burton calls on Jason and Kevin to publish an open API — and Jason responds in the comments.

Just so we’re clear: I really like Jay Rosen’s idea for a new kind of “open source” or “networked” journalism, as Jeff Jarvis likes to call it (hey, don’t knock it — it’s a lot better than “user-generated content”). Or maybe I should say that I really want to like it. As an old-media hack who thinks there is a whole lot that could be improved about the way that journalism works — including opening it up to just about any blogger or vlogger who feels like taking a crack at it — Jay’s idea has everything going for it. Except that I’m not sure it’s going to work. Other than that it’s a great idea.

Here’s how Jay — who is a smart guy, and a veteran journalist — describes it:

“Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn’t, couldn’t or didn’t. They raise the money too.”

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Craig Newmark, of the ridiculously successful craigslist, thinks it’s such a good idea he has put up some money to help it get started. The geniuses behind the McArthur fellowship program gave Jay some money too, and even Jeff Jarvis has been helping out, and sees it fitting in with the hush-hush Daylife project he hasn’t really said much about. Jay mentions the terrific donation-funded reporting by Chris Allbritton as an example of what he’s after.

Not surprisingly, Dan Gillmor — who started a citizen journalism venture called Bayosphere awhile back, and now helps run the Center for Citizen Media — also thinks it’s a great idea. But will it work? Dan’s own effort failed to attract any support from the blogosphere, or from interested citizen journalists in the Bay area, for a variety of reasons that Dan himself laid out after it folded. What makes Jay think NewAssignment will get any more traction?

To be fair to Jay, he points out that this is still just an idea, and that it will take time to work out how ideas for stories come up, how the “reporters” who cover them are chosen, how their material is handled and/or edited (or not) and where and how it eventually gets distributed. I really want to like this idea — I’m just not sure it’s going to work. Among others commenting on the subject, my pal Scott Karp notes quite rightly that true journalism has always been a not-for-profit venture.

Update:

Jay Rosen has part two of a Q&A with himself about the idea here, and Mark Glaser of MediaShift does some musing about it as well (he’s been asked to help out by Jay apparently). And U.S. News and World Report has a story about it.

I don’t usually do this sort of thing, and Elliot Noss of Tucows assures me that he doesn’t either, but the Toronto-based domain registrar supremo sent me a link to an eBay auction that some readers — particularly fans of the Guess Who — might be interested in. The item up for bids consists of two tickets to Bridle Bash II, a pool party being held at a private residence in Toronto’s swanky Bridle Path neighbourhood, which features an up-close-and-personal performance by legendary Guess Who frontman Burton Cummings. The party is a benefit concert for Camp Oochigeas, a summer camp devoted to kids with cancer, and there’s more information at the blog run by Joey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla, a Tucows staffer and blogosphere stalwart.

There’s a downside to having the centre of the technology world in a place like Silicon Valley, and that is the need for vast quantities of air-conditioning (not just for the computers, but for the people too). The culprit behind the latest MySpace-crippling power outage in California isn’t clear yet, but power consumption of all kinds is an issue for the entire technology industry, and particularly for data-intensive companies such as Google, which is building giant new server farms on the shores of the Columbia River in Oregon to try and cope with the demands it faces.

According to FON founder Martin Varsavsky, Google co-founder Larry Page said that one of the major hurdles the company faced in its future growth plans was the need for electricity. In a piece I wrote for the Globe and Mail after the Google server story came out, I noted that rising power demands are in many ways the Achilles heel of Web 2.0 — a point that has also made by many others, including Sun CEO and blogger Jonathan Schwartz, who wrote about the pressures that power requirements are placing on businesses.

It’s a problem that is likely to continue, and one that is affecting other business centres too. My solution? Hook all those servers at Google up to stationary bikes at the Googleplex in Mountain View, and have programmers ride them while they’re working. Not only would it produce power, but it would help reduce the expanding waistlines caused by Google’s free-candy policy. For more thoughts, see Rob Hyndman and Mark Evans.