Author: Mathew Ingram

Hi there. My name is Mathew Ingram, and until recently I was the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review in New York. I live in Canada. I post things I've written for work here, but also a daily newsletter called When The Going Gets Weird, which you can find here, and one about technology and culture called The Torment Nexus.
Posted on

Can you “crowdsource” a record album?

(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

The answer to that question appears to be “yes,” although there are a number of other questions raised in the process. A site called Sellaband.com, which has been up and running for almost a year, has now helped seven musicians raise enough money to make a professional-quality CD, by giving them the tools to set up a site where fans can donate money to the cause. It works like this: An artist uploads music to the site, and fans — known as “believers” — can effectively buy shares in the future CD for $10 each.

When the artist raises $50,000 (U.S.), Sellaband helps them find a producer, studio time and the other things they need to make a CD — and everyone who donated gets a free copy, as well as a share in the revenue from downloads of the music, and from sales of the CD. The site, which is based in Holland, was created by Johan Vosmeijer (a former Sony BMG executive), Pim Betist and Dagmar Heijmans.

After just six months, the site had more than 2,700 bands and musicians signed up, according to a post at TechCrunch, and now has about 4,000. The latest artist to hit the $50,000 mark is Australian singer Mandyleigh Storm (yes, she says that’s her real name), whose Sellaband page is here.

Jeff Howe, who wrote a piece for Wired magazine about the phenomenon of “crowdsourcing” (and is now working on a book about the same topic) wrote about Sellaband after they launched, and wondered whether the deal made sense for artists, since it appeared that the site owned the artist’s works and had control over who produced the album as well — but an update on his blog with comments from one of the Sellaband founders makes it clear that this is not the case. The money is held in escrow (although Sellaband earns interest on it), and the artist gets to choose who the producer is, and retains the performance and distribution rights. Sellaband takes 40 per cent of the publishing rights.

Eamonn Forde, writing for The Guardian’s music blog, says that he doesn’t see much merit in the Sellaband model, in part because the site is helping artists make CDs, and the industry is moving away from CDs to downloads — and even a $50,000 investment isn’t enough to get traction for a new CD without the backing of a major label. In a comment on his post, one of Sellaband’s founders disagrees, saying: “Once believers and artists have raised their budget, both parties are happy [even] with the worst-case scenario. Believers get their CD for 5 pounds and artists get to record it with professionals. On top of this both parties might be able to make some money.”

This Bloomberg story has some more details about Sellaband and its model and so does this story from The Guardian. A digital media site called Master New Media also has a good overview.

Posted on

Will Google index your voicemails?

snipshot_e4137ubjgjwt.jpgAs pretty well everyone probably knows by now, Google has in fact acquired GrandCentral, the mobile-telephony startup, for a rumoured $50-million. Most observers seem to see Google integrating the “one number” approach taken by GrandCentral — which Canadians and other non-Americans can’t make use of, unfortunately — with GMail and GTalk, and possibly with the entire Google Office suite. But others have darker visions: Venture capitalist Josh Kopelman says he is concerned about Google indexing your voice. Some (including those commenting on his post) see Josh’s criticisms as sour grapes from someone who has invested in competitor 1-800-Free411. Maybe Google should buy this thing as well.
Posted on

Playing Whack-A-Mole with Allofmp3

snipshot_e4kepbash8n.jpgSo the World Trade Organization seems to have finally convinced the Russian government to take action on one of its favourite bugaboos: the existence of “pirate” music site Allofmp3.com, which has been happily charging people pennies to download millions of mp3 files from popular artists from around the world for several years now. According to the Times Online, the site was quietly closed — about six months after Visa and MasterCard cut off service to the site — but as the same story points out, another site called Mp3Sparks.com popped up the same day, offering virtually the exact same service, and apparently run by the same outfit (the company says that it abides by Russian copyright law, which allows companies to collect royalties on behalf of copyright owners, without the copyright owners’ permission). As TorrentFreak suggests, downloading of digital music has effectively become a hydra. And apparently I’m not the only one that is fond of the Whack-A-Mole metaphor.

Posted on

Now that’s religious devotion — or something

snipshot_e45rdgkd7m5.jpgI just love Metafilter — I’m always coming across something I have never heard of before, which is one of my favourite things to do, and there are always lots of links to find out more about whatever it is. This time it was Sokushinbutsu, the mummified monks of Japan. Apparently hundreds of years ago, Buddhist monks would occasionally try to mummify themselves while they were still alive, by eating a special diet for several years and then drinking a special herbal tea that effectively embalmed them. Near the end, according to this article, the monk would be buried alive in a stone tomb with an air tube and a small bell, and when the bell stopped ringing they would be exhumed and then reburied for another few years before being put on display. Fascinating. More details here.

Posted on

Light posting alert

Since I am at the Ingram family homestead in the wilderness of northern Ontario, where cellular service is spotty and Internet access is of the dial-up variety, posting will likely be light — possibly even non-existent — for the next couple of days. If you look at the picture below and concentrate really hard, you can probably imagine me lying in a hammock somewhere.

221683564_1f9b02ce07.jpg

Posted on

Facebook appears to be down

I haven’t been able to log in to the site for the past few hours, and it seems as though some other people have had trouble too. Growing pains?

and… we’re back. Life can return to normal 🙂

Update:

Just got an email from Matt Hicks, who’s in communications with Facebook, and he said there was a power failure at one of their data centres this morning, but everything is back to normal now. That’s pretty fast — not the server repair, but the PR response. Impressive.

Posted on

Can MySpace change its spots?

In an interview with the Financial Times, one of the founders of MySpace — Chris DeWolfe, the one who isn’t everyone’s friend as soon as they sign up (that’s his partner Tom Anderson) — hinted that the social network might open itself up further to developers, in the same way that Facebook has with its F8 Platform initiative. Among other things, his comments have sparked a heated debate (some of which is visible at Mashable) over whether MySpace is copying or following Facebook, or vice versa.

snipshot_e41fxbgdht9o.jpgHere are the facts: MySpace came first, and is still substantially larger than Facebook in terms of unique visitors, users, page views (about 3 billion a day) and pretty much any other metric you want to use. MySpace has also had widgets that can be embedded in MySpace pages for some time — in fact, it was that ability that helped YouTube develop such a large following so quickly (maybe Chris and Tom should ask their pals Chad and Steve for a little of the excess cash from the Google transaction, instead of trying to squeeze $50-million or so out of Rupert Murdoch).

However, MySpace has not had an open API, nor has it allowed widget developers to build in ways of monetizing the traffic they get — in fact, when Photobucket tried that, MySpace gave it the smack-down and then after it was weakened, acquired the company. Facebook, by contrast, has said that developers are welcome to monetize their apps, and that the social network would be happy to help them do so.

Whoever is running MySpace would have to be a moron not to see how much traffic — and attention — Facebook has been getting since it opened up and became (or tried to become) a platform. But as Marc Andreessen has pointed out, what Facebook did was a lot more than just an open API. Can MySpace turn over a new leaf and stop acting like the network is a dictatorship? That remains to be seen. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that the company was making it sound like widget developers were the enemy.

Posted on

Murdoch shoots from the lip on WSJ

snipshot_e41fq5c7raj8.jpgTime magazine managed to land an exclusive interview with Rupert Murdoch (maybe it was by promising him the cover and a cover line like “The Last Tycoon”), and — as is typical for the blunt-spoken Australian — he holds nothing back. While some of the reporters for the illustrious Wall Street Journal took some unauthorized time off to protest Murdoch’s acquisition of the paper, the billionaire came out with jewels like this:

— “They’re taking five billion dollars out of me and want to keep control,” Rupert Murdoch was saying into the phone, “in an industry in crisis! They can’t sell their company and still control it — that’s not how it works. I’m sorry!”

— “The price of the Journal,” says Murdoch, “is $60 plus vitriol.”

— “When the Journal gets its Page 3 girls,” he jokes late one night, “we’ll make sure they have M.B.A.s.”

and finally:

— “What if, at the Journal, we spent $100 million a year hiring all the best business journalists in the world? Say 200 of them. And spent some money on establishing the brand but went global — a great, great newspaper with big, iconic names, outstanding writers, reporters, experts.

And then you make it free, online only. No printing plants, no paper, no trucks. How long would it take for the advertising to come? It would be successful, it would work and you’d make … a little bit of money. Then again, the Journal and the Times make very little money now.”

Classic Murdoch. Kevin Maney says in Portfolio magazine that he hopes Murdoch starts a bidding war for journalists.

Posted on

Is Facebook really “the new AOL”?

Update:

Jason Kottke has expanded on his one-liner (referred to below) and agrees with Scott Heiferman’s comparison to AOL’s “rainman” platform from days gone by. Steve Rubel has also written a post about the same topic that is well worth reading. And Jeff Jarvis disagrees that Facebook is the new AOL.

Original post:

It’s probably inevitable, given how quickly Facebook has been growing and infiltrating people’s lives, that it would start to get criticized for all sorts of things. But one of the criticisms that strikes a real chord — at least with me — is the notion that Facebook might be “the new AOL.” The latest mention of this meme came in a squib at Jason Kottke’s blog, but there have been other mentions of the idea in various different places recently (including the comments on a post at Brad Feld’s blog).

snipshot_e41cbcmv3pdv.jpgWhat does that phrase “the new AOL” mean? Maybe for some people it means that Facebook is going to eventually merge with Time Warner, thus destroying about $50-billion in market value, but for most it means that Facebook is in some sense a “walled garden.” In other words, it has some nice content and features, but it tries to maintain those in some sort of segregated way, in a location that is part of the Internet but at the same time not part of the Internet. I wrote about this particular issue as it pertains to Facebook in this recent post but it’s still on my mind. In the comments on that post, Nav and Joe Thornley make the point that Facebook simplifies things that people could otherwise do on the regular Internet with blogs and Twitter and Flickr and so on, but don’t have the time or the inclination.

Scott Heiferman, co-founder of Meetup and Fotolog, says in his post on the subject that Facebook’s Platform project reminds him of AOL’s “rainman” platform — a set of API-like tools people could use to build the Web 1.0 version of widgets. Marc Andreessen says Facebook platform is smart because in any fight between a platform and an application, the platform wins. But what happens if there’s a fight between a platform and the Internet?

Obviously, you don’t have to dial up to a special phone number to use Facebook, or install special software, or pay a monthly fee. And you can pull in content from elsewhere (Flickr photos, etc.) using the API and various widgets. But you still have to do things like click on an email to go to a page where you log in (every time), and then click somewhere else to read a simple message, which I have to say is a gigantic pain in the ass.

Is Facebook just a stage in the evolution of the Internet, the way that AOL was — a kind of democratizing force or “Internet kindergarten” of sorts, that will eventually give way to a truly open platform? Don’t get me wrong, I like Facebook a lot, and I totally see the value of the news feed and the photo-sharing and so on, and I think the F8 platform is a brilliant strategy. I’m a big Facebook fan. But I really like the Internet too 🙂

Posted on

CBC’s Wish List: experiment or disaster?

There’s a story on the Globe and Mail site about the CBC’s Great Canadian Wish List project, in which the broadcaster set up a Facebook group and asked Canadians to vote on what they wanted for the country, with the winner to be announced this weekend in honour of Canada Day (if you have a Facebook account — and who doesn’t by now — the group can be found here).

The story notes that the project is seen by some as having been hijacked by conservative religious groups and turned into a debate on issues like abortion and gay marriage. But is that really the case? And even if it is, does that mean the experiment was a failure?

snipshot_e4h1tgvfn5p.jpgThe top three wishes as of Thursday were: 1) to ban abortion; 2) that Canada remain pro-choice and 3) for a spiritual revival in our nation (below that were wishes including “restore the traditional definition of marriage,” as well as “I wish tuition fees would be either lowered or eliminated,” and “it’s time for drastic measures to save our environment.”) The group had 18,572 members and 546 discussion topics, with more than 5,360 comments posted on the group’s “wall.” The top three wish groups have from 4,000 to 8,000 members. The story also mentions a piece of commentary by Elaine Corden on The Tyee, a B.C.-based website, in which the author criticizes the CBC for launching the contest, and says it is “laughable at best, contemptible at worst.”

Corden says the fact that the wish list was hijacked shows that the broadcaster’s attempts at populism are inherently flawed. “It’s like when Sanjaya fans perverted the American Idol vote,” she says, except that “instead of watching talented singers being kicked off a crappy reality show, I’m watching state-sanctioned homophobia.”

Describing the CBC’s Wish List as state-sanctioned homophobia is a little over the top in my view — especially since the second wish is that Canada remain pro-choice. There is less than a 10-per-cent difference between the two.

Still, there’s no question that the CBC project became a magnet for a variety of interest groups, and it’s not the first online survey to do that. Several commenters on the Globe story note other contests that have been hijacked, including Time magazine’s poll on “Person of the Millennium” and a poll in Hungary that was ultimately hijacked by comedian Stephen Colbert. One commenter even mentions the Globe’s own polls on various topics, which occasionally are influenced by political parties and interest groups.

But does that make what the CBC did worthless or unwise? No. An interesting experiment? Yes.

If you look at the wishes in the list, once you get past the top three there are plenty of other wishes that got large numbers of votes, including wishes that have to do with the environment, getting Canada to help with aid to Darfur, pulling troops out of Afghanistan, and recycling Tim Horton’s cups. Thousands of Canadians got to make suggestions and vote for the issues they care about.

To me, focusing on the top two or three misses the larger point. Yes, religious groups clearly feel strongly about the abortion issue, and they obviously tried to get their supporters to join and vote — but the second wish more than balances that. Why is that not a valuable contribution to the debate? The whole point of “social” media is to let anyone who wants to say something have an opportunity to do so, including people with unpleasant views, or those whose opinions we disagree with.

Posted on

Google funding widget incubator

Google appears to be setting up a kind of widget incubator program — like a Y Combinator/Startup Camp for widgets — according to a post over at Read/WriteWeb tonight. Marissa Mayer apparently announced the windfall… er, program at the Searchonomics Conference in Santa Clara. There’s a brief description of it here, and a FAQ here.

snipshot_e4iie0mvp6j.jpgThe program (Danny Sullivan has a good overview) is aimed at “bootstrapping an economic ecosystem around gadgets,” and involves two kinds of monetary offers to developers: the first gives Google Gadget developers a chance at a grant of $5,000 to develop their gadgets further (those with gadgets that have at least 250,000 page views a week are eligible), and the second is a “seed investment” of $100,000 to developers who want to build a business based on the Google platform. This second stage — which sounds a little like an angel round — is open only to those who have already had a grant.

The upshot? As Richard puts it: “It’s Christmas for third-party developers.” I would expect to see companies like Slide.com, the Max Levchin-owned developer that has several popular Facebook widgets and has been buying others, jump on board this gravy train. It will be interesting to see whether Google Gadgets spread farther than just the Google ig page. There’s a post about it on the Google blog, and one at the Google code blog.

Posted on

Studio to YouTube: Yippee ki-yay, motherf…

I have to confess that I was somewhat skeptical — okay, really skeptical — when I read in the New York Times about a deal between 20th Century Fox and a group of guys who had put together an “homage” video about the Die Hard movies. As the story describes, the original video was a compilation of action sequences from the three movies, with a rock-style song as a voiceover, including the immortal words “Yippee-ki-yay, motherf***er” as the chorus.

die-hard.jpgThe movie studio forced YouTube to take the video down, since it uses a whole pile of clips from the copyrighted movies, etc. etc. Standard bone-headed movie industry activity, in other words. But at some point, a light bulb clearly went on over someone’s head (either that or a studio executive under 30 attended a meeting) and Fox approached the group and offered to not only let them post the video again, but offered to pay them as long as they included some clips from the upcoming movie (which is in theatres now). In other words, turn an homage into a preview.

When I read the NYT story, I thought “Well, that’s going to wreck it — it will no longer be a tribute, but just a paid ad for the movie.” And when I read a quote from a Fox executive saying “Why should something that people enjoy be any less ‘cool’ because it is supported by a film studio?” I thought to myself that he must be a moron. Obviously, having the studio involved would ruin the whole “user-generated” nature of the thing.

But I think I might have been wrong. Not only has the new clip been viewed more times than the original, lots of commenters on YouTube like it better — and you know what? It’s actually pretty good. The studio left the creators alone, and obviously didn’t even mind the “motherf***er” chorus, which is a crucial part of the both the movie and the tribute video. The whole thing kind of works. (the clip is not for childish ears, obviously).

Posted on

A new Web icon: Islamic Rage Boy

If you’ve been reading news about India or Pakistan, or the Middle East, Salman Rushdie being knighted by the Queen, you may have seen photos featuring a young Islamic man who has come to be known (at least in some circles) as “Islamic Rage Boy.” In almost every photo, this bearded man is clearly agitated, yelling into the camera, waving his fist in the air, etc. And it’s not until you look at a site like SnappedShot that you realize he shows up in picture after picture, about different events, always with the same expression.

snipshot_e4bukwgiqif.jpgPhoto-journalists like nothing better than to have a photo of riots or protests, and whatever group Rage Boy belongs to seems happy to oblige. There’s a recent photo of him in a group of Islamic protesters during the recent worldwide “Day of Rage” against Salman Rushdie being honoured (since the author is still the subject of an Islamic fatwa, or death sentence, as a result of insults to the Prophet Mohammed contained in his book The Satanic Verses). Last fall, he was striking almost the exact same pose during protests over comments that Pope Benedict XVI made about the Prophet during a speech. There are also wire photos of what appears to be the same man protesting the publication of anti-Muslim cartoons in a Danish newspaper, and the use of the Prophet’s face on a playing card, and a visit by President Bush.

Rage Boy has become such a popular icon of Islamic fundamentalism that author Christopher Hitchens uses him as a metaphor in his latest column at Slate.com. In true Web icon style, he even has his own T-shirt. And blogger Mike Elgan of The Raw Feed compares Rage Boy to Everywhere Girl, a young woman named Jennifer Chandra, whose stock photo has become ubiquitous in online advertising, as chronicled by The Inquirer in Britain and several other outlets. Her blog is here.

(Note: Just so we’re clear, this is not meant as a judgment of any kind — positive or negative — about the validity or sincerity of any specific Islamic or Muslim protest, cause, or viewpoint. I just thought it was interesting. If anything, it’s a comment on the laziness of wire-service photographers and/or editors)

Update:

Mike at The Raw Feed notes that Islamic Rage Boy has now been unmasked as Shakeel Bhat, a 31-year-old former armed militant.

Posted on

A market develops in Facebook apps

It’s interesting to see that a market for Facebook applications — or widgets — is developing, although the prices are still small. In one of the latest transactions, Inside Facebook notes that Slide.com (run by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin) has bought the app Favorite Peeps for a reported $60,000. Another site, FaceWatch, has also written about the purchase — and Josh Catone has a look at the phenomenon at Read/WriteWeb. Update: Fred Wilson has a good post up about it as well.

snipshot_e41cliqw0fja.jpgFavorite Peeps apparently has over one million users and was developed by Dennis Rakhamimov, a software engineer at a company funded by Peter Thiel — another PayPal co-founder, who is also an investor in Facebook. Inside Facebook notes that the deal values each user at less than five cents, compared with the $25 per user paid by Viacom for the Xfire gaming site and the $36 per user paid by News Corp. for MySpace. Another Facebook app, Extended Info, was recently bought by a travel company called SideStep — although no purchase price was disclosed. The creator of the app, Trey Philips, just finished his third year of university and said he put the widget together in a few hours at the Facebook F8 hackathon. Within days it had 60,000 users. VentureBeat has also noted the rise of the Facebook app-buying market.