Author: Mathew Ingram

If you read Jason Kottke’s blog at all, you might know that he spent a year trying to blog full time, financed by donations from both “micro-patrons” and regular joes (and janes), and brought that experiment to a close in February, with what he described at the time as mixed feelings. Now, Jason has joined an advertising group called The Deck, which was set up by online marketing whiz Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners as a kind of specialized, blog-based ad network — one which also includes 37signals.com, A List Apart, Waxy.org, Daring Fireball, The Morning News and (of course) Coudal Partners.

The Deck is an interesting effort. The network describes itself as “The premier advertising network for reaching web and design professionals [which] serves up millions of page views each month and is uniquely configured to connect the right marketers to a targeted, influential audience.” It also has some unusual rules, including that “We won’t take an ad unless we have paid for and/or used the product or service.” Deck ads are also the only ones that run on a site — no fighting with Google AdSense. And Coudal says the ads aren’t about cost per click or cost per thousand (which just to confuse everyone is referred to as CPM), but are about “cost-per-influence.”

I’m not sure what anyone else out in blog-land thinks, but I think Jim Coudal is pretty smart — and I don’t think that just because he’s coming to our little mesh conference in May (get your seats early, Jason Fried of 37signals is coming too). The Deck sounds like a great way to get a focused advertising buy, without splashing a whole pile of money out on text ads without any clue about who is really seeing them. Jeff Jarvis has written about how the blogosphere needs an open ad marketplace (although Chas Edwards isn’t so crazy about the idea), and one of the elements of that is ad buying that takes account of the audience it is reaching. The Deck seems like a great way of achieving that.

Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere, one of the first sites to try and organize a “citizen journalism” effort — or whatever you want to call it — has been absorbed by Backfence, another attempt at creating a regional user-generated media network. Dan’s effort, while well intentioned and flush with funding from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and former Lotus Notes inventor honcho Mitch Kapor, didn’t really work very well, and Dan effectively shut it down in January.

He later wrote an excellent overview of what he tried to do and why he thought it failed. Tim Porter also had an interesting analysis of why it failed, and included on his list of things to remember that “community can’t be forced.” In other words, you can’t just set up a nice site and wave a magic wand and create a network of passionate citizen journalists.

Now, Backfence has made Bayosphere one of its regional startup sites, and Dan is now working with the Center for Citizen Media, which he helped set up. But will Backfence have any better luck than Bayosphere did? That remains to be seen. Liz George of Baristanet took a look around in November and said it seemed a little like a ghost town. Backfence — which is also funded by Pierre Omidyar — says it plans to launch several new regional sites and has 100,000 unique visitors a month.

Update:

Christine Herron, who works with the Omidyar Network and also blogs at christine.net, has a pretty comprehensive list of some of the commentary in and around the blogosphere relating to the Backfence/Bayosphere deal.

Just posted something to my Globe and Mail blog about Google’s possible entry into the travel game, which stemmed from a recent post by Russell Shaw over at ZDNet. Seems he noticed an ad on mediabistro.com for “Google: Senior Account Executive, Travel Vertical.” Among other things, it said that the successful applicant would:

“Drive new business revenue growth with our Fortune 1000 advertisers in a specified vertical in one or more regions… work collaboratively with your team to grow revenue with new and existing vertical customers [and] utilize strong knowledge of vertical client base and agencies in your region(s) to develop high-level relationships.”

One former travel industry insider told me recently that he figured it was only a matter of time before Google got into the travel game, since it is a classic example of a business in which timely information is the key to getting a good deal — and one in which the travel agents and airlines used to control the information flow. Expedia.com and Travelocity.com helped “disintermediate” the industry, and in a sense the entry of Google would just extend that process even further.

“A lot of the value that a reseller adds is shopping around for the best deal, which is to a large extent search — and Google can search the pants off just about anybody,” said this former travel exec. For Google, being a search-engine company doesn’t just mean helping people find websites. It wants to help you find just about any kind of information, anywhere — including in books and real estate.

Against that kind of backdrop, searching for flights and hotels seems like a no-brainer, and Yahoo is already moving in that area with its FareChase service (which the NYT has an article about). Russell says that he thinks Google might strike up a partnership with Orbitz, since Travelocity is partners with Yahoo Travel and Expedia is owned by Barry Diller’s Interactive Corp., which also owns Ask.com.

Update:

My friend Stuart MacDonald, an ex-travel guy himself, has these thoughts.

Newsweek has announced a branded version of NewsGator’s RSS feed reader that is designed to make it easier for readers to sign up for and read RSS feeds — including, of course, those from Newsweek itself, which come pre-loaded in the reader. NewsGator is pushing this kind of thing as part of its “private label hosted solution,” a kind of micro-publishing system for “old” media like Newsweek and SFGate, the online arm of the San Francisco Chronicle. There are others out there too, like the downloadable reader application The Guardian has developed, called Newspoint.

While the NewsGator reader seems like a smart move for Newsweek, it’s not clear to me that a branded reader is the way for most people to go. For one thing, as Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 points out, the version being offered by Newsweek isn’t all that easy for “newbies” to wrap their heads around. Sure, you can read Newsweek feeds, but it doesn’t make it easy to find or add new ones (The Guardian’s app comes with a directory that includes a lot of popular newspaper and media feeds). I know Steve Rubel likes the idea of branded newreaders, but to me that makes it seem even more like a naked attempt by Newsweek to piggyback on the buzz around RSS and get people to read its feeds, without really helping them get any further ahead in terms of understanding how to get anything else.

That’s why — much as I hate to suggest it — Internet Exploder 7.0 might be one of the best ways for RSS newbies to get involved in it. It finds feeds and makes it easy to add them, and then you can see them in a sidebar and read them that way. Scott and some others said when IE7 first came out that the RSS implementation is lame because it isn’t that different from old-fashioned bookmarks, but in a way that’what part that makes it easier for people to get their arms around it, conceptually speaking. Before all you Firefox fans flame me, I know the Fox can do the same thing, but the reality is that most people still use IE and will for the foreseeable future.

Whatever people use, it’s important to find ways of making RSS easier for people other than geeks, or the real advantages of it as a micro-publishing format won’t be achieved. A friend of mine shared with me recently an email from a senior executive from a major retailer asking what RSS was, and why people were suggesting that his company should have some feeds — and even after my friend described what it was for, and how it could help his customers, he still didn’t get it.

In other words, there’s is still much work to be done. Cynthia Brumfield of IPDemocracy has some thoughts too.

Call it an occupational hazard: being a regulator, the CRTC (the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission”) tends to like to… well, regulate things. Satellite TV and satellite radio are good examples. Why do you have to buy a Canadian XM satellite radio box when the U.S. one receives all the U.S. and Canadian channels? Because of the CRTC. As the office in charge of making sure you listen to enough Bryan Adams and watch enough episodes of Corner Gas, that’s kind of its job.

With that in mind, it was refreshing to see the CRTC deciding not to regulate something, particularly something TV related like television on cellphones. Charles Dalfen, the chairman of the broadcast regulator, said in an interview that “It’s too early stage to want to clamp a regulatory regime on it.” He went on to suggest that since much of the content that Telus, Rogers and Bell Mobility are streaming to their phones is short clips, “At this stage, it’s not even clear what a mobile program is.”

Has someone been sneaking in to the CRTC offices and giving them reality lessons? First they decided not to try and regulate the Internet (another smart move) and now we can all watch clips of Paris Hilton’s new video or whatever on our phones, safe in the knowledge that we won’t have to watch a certain number of Avril Lavigne video clips at some point to compensate. Life is good.

As you may know if you’ve been reading my blog at all over the past little while, I find it fascinating to look at the various business models being pursued by Web 2.0 startups, and the debate over which route is better — such as the question of whether blog networks need VC money, which a recent post by Jeremy Wright raised, or whether startups should build themselves specifically to be bought by Yahoo or Google or Microsoft, and try to duplicate what del.icio.us did.

For the latest perspective on all this, we can look to Matt Mullenweg of Automattic.com, the creator of WordPress.com — the blog software this blog uses, and many others — as well as the blog-spam tool Akismet and lots of other cool stuff. On his blog, Matt writes about selling a minority stake in the company to what he describes as “to a few select partners who I think are going to bring a lot of value to the business far beyond mere dollars.” Matt, who is an extremely nice guy — even if he does look like he’s about 15 years old (he’s 22) — puts it this way:

“This isn’t going to change how the business is run, or the people involved with it, but it will allow us to take better advantage of the opportunities before us and also for us to keep our promise to every one of you to maintain a fast, stable, and innovative platform in the long term.”

Matt says the company “isn’t going to get fancy SoMA offices, throw huge parties at SxSW, or “get big fast.” Instead, it’s going to spend the money on sharing “everything we can back to the community, like all of the code behind WP.com in WordPress MU, the spellchecking feature we sponsored, free Akismet for 99.9% of users, and a few other goodies we still have up our sleeve.” A smart post and a smart move by a smart guy. Well done, Matt — and good luck.

Update:

VCMike, one of the guys at Polaris who acquired the stake in Matt’s company, has a description of why on his blog, and Automattic’s CEO talks about it here.

Note:

I don’t want it to seem like every post I write is somehow about our conference (www.meshconference.com) but it just so happens that Matt will be on a panel at mesh on May 16th. Mark Evans ran into him at iSummit and asked him if he would, and he very kindly said yes. Maybe we can talk a bit about his decision and how it came about.

Another quick post related to mesh, only because we’ve added something I think is cool to the lineup of speakers, panels and workshops — we’re calling it “15 minutes of fame,” and it’s a chance for anyone with a great Web 2.0 idea to get up on stage in front of all the mesh participants and talk for five minutes about their idea or their project, in front of all the VCs and marketers and journalists and other interested folks who are going to be at the conference.

There are going to be three of these spots during each day of the conference — hence the “15 minutes of fame” tag. And we (that is Mark Evans, Mike McDerment, Stuart MacDonald, Rob Hyndman and I) saw it as a chance for us to help shine a spotlight on some of the hard-working Web 2.0 startup types out there.

As Stuart describes on the mesh blog, we’re even going to spring for a full-day pass for anyone who gets selected to take part. And how do you get to be among the chosen? Just tell us in 250 words or so about you and your idea, and why you should get the chance to speak at mesh.

If you’re planning to come to mesh (May 15th and 16th in Toronto — more details at www.meshconference.com), have we got a deal for you: The Delta Chelsea has given us a deal on rooms, and the hotel is just a 10-15 minute walk from MaRS where the conference is being held. Not only that, but on Monday night we’re having an after-mesh party at The Drake, one of Toronto’s ultra-hip hotspots.

Thanks to Stuart MacDonald, who started Expedia.ca way back when, the travel company (which has grown just a little since Stuie whipped it up in his living room) has donated one of their bright yellow airport buses to take people from the conference to The Drake, and then shuttle back and forth from there to the hotel until 10:30. If the Delta just isn’t cool enough for you, The Drake has some rooms too — and if you’d rather stay somewhere a bit more upscale, the Sutton Place Hotel has a deal with MaRS that includes a limousine to take you to the venue.

Just a note for out-of-towners — tickets for mesh are going quickly, and so are rooms at the Delta, so head over to www.meshconference.com and get your reservations in before it’s too late.

Looks like our mesh conference in May might have stirred things up a little in the blog network marketplace, to judge by a recent post from Jeremy Wright. Jeremy is part of b5media, a multi-national blog network with principals in Australia and Canada (Jeremy lives in beautiful St. Stephen, New Brunswick), and in an earlier post about the schedule at mesh being finalized he mentioned that he was particularly interested in the keynote by Infectious Greed blogger and VC advisor Paul Kedrosky and a panel on whether Web 2.0 startups need VCs or not.

Jeremy said he was interested because “b5media is about to announce we’re going after funding.” This set off a small bombshell, it seems — and a cross-continent one at that. Paul Montgomery of Tinfinger wrote about it, and so did The Blog Herald and alarm:clock. John Evans, who runs a British-based blog network called Syntagma Media, also wrote a post about how b5media was going after VC money, and he gave the impression he didn’t think that was a good thing to do.

He wrote that:

“After a buccaneering but bootstrapping beginning, it seems b5media has decided to go down the venture capital route after all, with a round of VC funding. But you have to read between the lines of a Toronto conference agenda to find the reference.”

He goes on to say that he’s not in favour of this approach because:

“The sheer effort involved in raising money… and the complexity of contractual arrangements, deplete your time and energy which should be concentrated on selling value to customers.”

In Jeremy’s post in response (he also responds to John Evans in the comments on Syntagma’s blog) he says that b5media.com is looking at a couple of offers, but he doesn’t want to get into it in public.

“Yes, in the last few weeks 2 key opportunities have come our way. Opportunities that we’ve decided to open the door to, to see what’ll happen. We’re not going to put the business on hold. We are not going to chat the way we do business day to day. Yes, we’re looking at the funding options available to us (including early stage, obviously) in order to see what makes sense for our bloggers, readers, partners and the future of the industry.”

Sounds like plenty of fodder for some interesting discussions at mesh — and just to add one final plug, tickets are going quickly so get in there and get one. Or two. Or 12.

Here’s another selection of things I’ve come across but haven’t had time to write full posts about (but might if time allows):

• There are plenty of video-sharing sites out there, and more every day given the success of YouTube.com, but Revver is different according to Rafat over at PaidContent: It inserts ads into the stream and shares revenue with the creator — and it just got $8.7-million in second-round financing. Interesting idea. Sidenote: one of the co-founders is Ian Clarke, founder of the Freenet Project.
• Do you love Apple and everything it stands for? Then you might want to read a bit more about Jason O’Grady, the guy behind PowerPage and Apple Insider — Apple rumour sites that are being sued by the computer company for divulging “trade secrets,” otherwise known as rumours about future products. Jason has written a piece at ZDNet, and some of the responses in the comments are worth reading.
• Benjamin Cohen is a former teenage dot-com millionaire (former teenager, I assume, not former millionaire) who has had his account with Google’s AdSense repeatedly cancelled for click fraud, but the search company refuses to say how it determined he was “guilty” or what the evidence consists of, citing “proprietary algorithms” and rules against disclosure.
• David Kirkpatrick, an editor at Fortune magazine, has some thoughts about “old” media’s self-flagellation over its own failings and the superiority of “new” media. His point is that content wins, regardless of where it appears, and old media has as good a chance as new media, if it smartens up.
• Samuel Freedman is a journalism professor at Columbia who writes on the CBS blog Public Eye that the whole concept of “citizen journalism” devalues professional journalism and that it ignores the skills and attributes that make professional journalists worth having. My friend Stowe Boyd disagrees rather strongly and I can see his point.

If online delivery of video – including streaming and downloadable TV content – is the current version of the great Internet gold rush, then Disney/ABC has just jumped into the lead by staking a major claim. The news about its free, ad-supported streaming TV show plans, which was broken by the Wall Street Journal on its website, is a substantial move forward from a major network – exploding the TV, Jeff Jarvis calls it – and has instantly become the standard by which all the other networks will be measured. As the story describes it:

“On April 30, ABC will unveil a revamped Web site that will include a “theater” where people with broadband connections can watch free episodes of “Desperate Housewives,” “Lost” and other hit shows… Episodes will be available the morning after they air and will be archived so people can eventually view a whole season. A Disney Channel version with five shows will start in June, and an ABC Family version is also planned. Disney’s Soapnet cable channel will start offering programs free on its Web site on April 17.”

Notice that it’s not downloadable episodes, but streaming content that you have to watch in the online “theatre” on Disney/ABC’s website (later in the article, someone from the network says that they are contemplating offering downloads at some point, for $1.99 without ads, or 99 cents with ads). Still, VC Fred “Microchunk your media” Wilson says it is “big, big, big.” It’s interesting to see, however, that Umair “Edge Strategies” Haque at Bubblegeneration disagrees, and thinks that Disney/ABC has done it exactly wrong.

The main reason ABC wants to keep you on the website is because the TV episodes have been specially formatted with three minute-long ads each, all from a single advertiser such as Ford or Proctor and Gamble. And while you can fast-forward the content, you can’t fast-forward through the ads. The story says:

“The ads won’t look like typical TV commercials. For starters, instead of five commercial breaks during an hourlong episode, there will be three breaks lasting a minimum of one minute each — all of them from the same advertiser…. viewers will have a choice of what type of ad to watch — for instance, a traditional video commercial or an interactive “game” commercial.”

That’s a smart move, and obviously crucial to the success of this effort – which at the moment is a two-month trial – with advertisers. But lots of questions remain, not the least of which is how many people will watch these streaming shows, as Jeff Pulver notes. And how will ABC’s local affiliates react? They make a lot of money by being the exclusive providers of those hit shows in their regional markets. The WSJ story also mentions that retailers such as Wal-Mart make a fair bit of coin selling DVD versions of those episodes – how are they going to react? Those with TiVos and PVRs will also likely be unimpressed, says Dwight Silverman.

Fun times in the TV business. And all part of the upheaval that we’re planning to take a look at as part of the “Future of broadcasting” stream in our mesh conference in Toronto May 15th and 16th – tell all your friends 🙂

Update:

Staci at PaidContent grabbed a few minutes to chat with Anne Sweeney of Disney/ABC about the deal.

Paul Kedrosky has posted an item about an article on Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in Bloomberg Markets, a magazine published by the financial data company, and as usual Paul has pulled out one of the most jaw-dropping facts from the multi-page article – and no, it’s not the part about Paul Allen’s 413-foot boat with the two helipads. It’s the part about how much the billionaire’s net worth has declined since he pulled away from Microsoft in 2000 and started diversifying his investments.

According to the Bloomberg piece (pdf link), Allen’s investment portfolio – the bulk of which was made up of shares in Microsoft – was worth $30-billion when he started selling his stake in the software giant and buying cable companies and sports teams and other investments. In 2003, his net worth had dropped below $13-billion. And if he had simply hung onto his stock in Microsoft and not sold? It would be worth about $78-billion, by Bloomberg’s estimates. I’ll wait while you pick your jaw up.

Obviously, $15-billion or whatever Paul Allen has now is more than enough to keep one man happy, not to mention enough to afford a sprawling “compound” near Bill’s that is worth about $130-million and a boat that cost about $200-million. Does he sit around and rue the fact that he could be worth $78-billion? That’s a question I don’t feel qualified – let alone able – to answer. But the Bloomberg article does talk about how he (along with his sister, who helps manage his investments) has started trying to prune some of his bad bets and make some more boring, financially-successful bets instead, on things like pipelines.

And why did he decide to sell off more than half his stake in Microsoft? Did he just want to diversify, or was there more to it than that? For what it’s worth, longtime PBS tech columnist Robert X. Cringely (real name: Mark Stephens) said recently that he heard from highly-placed sources that Allen started pulling away from the software company he co-founded not long after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma – and hearing Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer talking about how to get his shares back if he were to die. True? Who knows. But Allen has paid the price for that decision (along with some bad investment choices) even if he still has billions of dollars left.

It occurred to me as I read all the other reactions – pro and con – to Apple’s Boot Camp announcement that I hadn’t written here about my reaction to it (assuming anyone really cares), which is a little odd considering that the desire to boot both Apple’s OS X and Windows is something I’ve blogged about before. I guess I was so busy writing about the news for the Globe and Mail’s dead-tree edition (the story is here) that I never got around to blogging it.

The bottom line is that I think Boot Camp is a good thing, and an interesting step for Apple to take, but it’s mostly interesting for what it implies about the future rather than what it means right now. In many ways, it’s a natural extension of the move to Intel chips, which coincidentally was also one of those things many people (including me) said was probably just a wild rumour and would never happen. When it comes to booting Windows on Intel Macs, right up until the announcement of Boot Camp most people seemed to think that doing so would be something only determined hackers would be able to achieve. Now anyone can do it, as Paul Thurrott and others including Walt Mossberg have described.

Will people want to do it? Sure they will. I might even give it a shot just to see how it works (Alec says he might too). But let’s face it – rebooting all the time is a major pain in the ass. I do it from time to time to switch from Windows to Linux, but it still bugs me because you have to shut everything down and you can’t move or copy things from one session to another. Like many people, I think the dual-boot option is just a step on the road to true “virtualization,” which will use better software tools and new processors to allow operating system to run side by side seamlessly – at the moment, running things like VMWare and VirtualPC gives you a kind of slowed-down version of the OS you can only use for non-processor intensive applications (in other words, no games).

The real question, of course, is what the long-term strategic implications of the move are. Is Apple planning – as people like Robert X. Cringely argue – to allow anyone to run Mac OS on any old PC eventually? This debate seems to have degenerated into a question of whether Cringley (whose real name is Mark Stephens) is an idiot or not, but for me the issue is what Apple sees as its core business. Is selling the OS its core business, or is the OS just a tool for winning converts to Apple hardware?

For what it’s worth, I think that Apple makes a lot more money from hardware than software, and would be happy to trade smaller sales (or less growth) in the Mac OS for a larger proportion of PC hardware sales – and a better chance of pushing its hardware sales into the living room and home-theatre direction. Kind of like Sony used to be, I guess, except better.

You might think that this post isn’t really work-related, since it involves pictures of my recent vacation in Florida, and therefore it shouldn’t appear on a blog whose name includes the word “work” – but you would be wrong. Here’s my excuse: I’ve played around a bit with Albert Lai’s cool photo-sharing service Bubbleshare.com, but never integrated a gallery into my blog, and this seemed like a great opportunity (incidentally, Albert will be appearing on a panel at the conference Mark Evans, Stuart MacDonald, Rob Hyndman and Mike McDerment and I are organizing in May).

As Mike Arrington of TechCrunch and others have pointed out, there has been a proliferation of photo-sharing sites over the past year or so (including Smugmug.com, whose “lightbox” effect is quite cool), but one of the things that makes Bubbleshare a little different from Flickr – which I also use and love, and have integrated into my other blog at photos.mathewingram.com – is that it makes it dead simple to create and share albums. It also has some cool Ajaxy interface stuff, including the Mac-like ability to resize photo thumbnails on the fly using a slider.

Anyway, enough work talk. Here are the photos – all of which were taken on a beautiful white-sand beach on Siesta Key, near Sarasota, with an HP Photosmart H817 5 megapixel (and no, this blog isn’t going to turn into a daily dose of imagery, which in any case I highly recommend if you enjoy good photography).

I posted a short link the other day – one of my “items that might grow up into blog posts” – about a Scottish singer named Sandi Thom, who decided to just play in her apartment and stream it over the Web instead of touring in an old broken-down van, and how she got 100,000 viewers and was then signed to a multimillion-dollar contract with RCA. Now it turns out that that great story reported by CNN and others may not be quite as clear-cut as it seemed at first.

The first inkling that this might not be quite so incredible a tale came when an old contact from years ago sent an email about it. Adrian du Plessis was a sort of freelance securities investigator when I dealt with him back in the late 1990s, when I was writing about the stock market for the Globe and Mail – he helped dig up some of the more salacious stock scams involving the then-Vancouver Stock Exchange, which was notorious for mining and penny-stock frauds. Anyway, somehow over the intervening years he had gotten into the music business, and he said there was more to the Sandi Thom story. As he put it:

“Contrary to the PR spin, Sandi Thom is an example of old-school PR/marketing dressed up as a viral campaign. Thom is at the centre of a well-conceived and realized marketing campaign, which has used traditional news media (newspapers, radio, tv) to create interest online. And, it’s been spun as happening the other way around. It’s a fascinating study, and, very much like a stock promotion!”

So I looked around on the Web a bit, and came across a post on the music blog Chartreuse, which gave a little more detail (which also apparently came from Adrian). Apparently, Sandi Thom signed a contract with a music publisher last year — a company called Windswept/Pacific Music, which has contracts with artists such as Beyonce Knowles and The Who. And traffic stats from Alexa seem to show that Sandi’s site started to get more traffic around the time press releases and news articles appeared about her playing in her apartment, not before. No signs of her getting 100,000 viewers, in other words.

There are also comments on Chartreuse from the publishing company that indicate Sandi Thom had already been approached by a record label after singing at a regular gig, and that she had already recorded a solo album, as well as being offered the chance to record with other prominent artists – before she started the “playing in my apartment” thing.

Is that fraud? Hardly. Good marketing? Maybe – but still kind of depressing, in a way. There’s more on Adrian’s new blog.