Author: Mathew Ingram

I think I may have linked to Jeff de Boer’s incredible artistic creations before, way back when I had a blog called A Complete Waste of Time, but it’s definitely worth linking again — these tiny suits of armor for cats and mice are incredibly detailed works of art, made from steel and copper and silver. Awesome. And he’s from my former home town of Calgary, Alberta to boot.

Well, well, well. After six years — and the last couple of those facing mounting criticism of his efforts in the corner suite — Hollywood transplant Terry Semel is out as chief executive officer of Yahoo. To add insult to injury (although he remains non-executive chairman, which means he’s hardly hitting the bread lines) the share price of the Internet portal jumped by more than five per cent in after-hours trading after the company announced the news. Yahoo is going back to the future for a CEO: co-founder and Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang becomes the new chief executive. Yang has a blog post about it here. He says that Semel:

“Refocused the company on key strategic priorities, and in so doing, helped Yahoo! increase our revenues nearly nine-fold from $717 million in 2001 to $6.4 billion in 2006; boost our operating income from a loss in 2001 to nearly $1 billion last year; and create more than $30 billion in shareholder value during his tenure.

He helped grow our audience from 170 million to more than 500 million users globally, and he oversaw the expansion of our base of talented employees from 3,500 to nearly 12,000.”

This has to make Eric Jackson feel pretty good — he put together a Web-based protest group (mentioned by the Times UK and Wired, among other places) that got a significant amount of support from disgruntled shareholders, and took its criticisms to the Yahoo shareholders meeting. My friend Paul Kedrosky, who has been predicting this move would come, live-blogged the conference call.

I guess the pressure is on Jerry Yang now — although I’m sure his $2.2-billion net worth should be a comfort either way. Valleywag has a comprehensive “corporate obituary” on Semel and his reign here — and also points out that Jerry Yang is no Steve Jobs. Ouch. Painful but true, I suspect. Mike Arrington has a different take on the news at TechCrunch: why so sudden? Yahoo could have announced his retirement, etc. and taken its time. Instead, he is just gone and Yahoo turns to an old standby. That is a little odd.

“I come not to bury Facebook, but to praise it.” — loosely paraphrased from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

There’s no question that Facebook is the hottest thing going in social networking right now, and the launch of the Facebook F8 Platform has made it even more important as a model of what is possible for such a network. At the same time, however, I think that there’s also a troubling element to the site, which is that Facebook is to some extent a walled garden. Dave Winer writes about it here, Jon Udell hints at it here, and so does Dabble DB co-founder Avi Bryant here. Others have also written about the same kinds of issues here, here and here.

Obviously Facebook isn’t a walled garden in the same sense that America Online was way back when, or Prodigy or Compuserve or any of those other services. In fact, the F8 Platform launch ties Facebook into all sorts of Web services such as Flickr quickly and easily, which is a great feature and one I have written about before and likely will again. And yet, the reason Facebook did this is so you will spend more and more time on Facebook, and that is less and less time you spend on the regular Internet. Why can’t I have all the same features that I get with Facebook but without having to log in and click here or there everytime I do something?

In a way, we already have many of the attributes of Facebook: we can provide status updates through Twitter, we can chat through email or comments or GTalk or MSN Messenger or whatever — instead of Facebook’s irritating “wall-to-wall” feature, where you get an email telling you someone sent you a message, then you have to click and login, then leave a message, then they get an email, etc. Why can’t I just get the damn message?

In a sense, those kinds of irritations are a symptom of the larger issue, I think. We — and by “we” I mean bloggers, etc. — have all sorts of plugins and widgets that let us integrate Flickr and the MyBlogLog social network app and Last.fm song preferences and so on, and otherwise connect with people. Why do we need Facebook? Is it that we need the protection of the “limited profile” and the “click to add friend” process? I don’t know the answer. I’m just asking.

Update:

In light of all the coverage that I and others have been giving iLike for signing up more than 3 million users for their Facebook app, it’s worth noting Paul Kedrosky’s words of caution on that front.

I missed this the other day, but my friend Scott Karp had a great, in-depth look at the New York Times and its advertising revenue picture — trying to sift through the various financial tea leaves and figure out in dollar terms (as opposed to percentage terms) just how much the Grey Lady’s print revenue has been declining, and how much its online revenue has been increasing, and whether the latter is enough to offset the former.

I don’t want to spoil the ending, but according to Scott’s math — which looks fairly comprehensive to me (although I am an English major) — the answers are a) a lot, b) somewhat and c) not even close. Part of the problem with trying to do what Scott did is that the Times, much like other newspapers, doesn’t like to break out exact numbers for either its newspaper revenue declines or its online revenue increases, which may have something to do with the fact that “online is growing by 20 per cent” sounds a whole lot better than “grew by $3-million,” especially when your print revenue sank by almost ten times that amount and your top line is about $483-million. Steve Boriss at the Future of News has some thoughts on Scott’s detective work.

Note:

The title of this post, for anyone not familiar with Alice in Wonderland, refers to the chess game in that book, in which the Red Queen says “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

“Whether you’re a blogger or whether you’re The New York Times or CBS or The Wall Street Journal, if what you are doing is aimed at informing the public, then you’re a journalist, whether you get paid for it or not.”

Safire is quoted in this CNet story about a proposal in the U.S. to create a federal “journalist shield” law that would protect reporters — and possibly bloggers as well — from being forced to reveal their sources and/or testify in court. There are state laws that protect journalists, but not federal ones, which is why Josh Wolf wound up in court for refusing to testify and turn over his videotape of an anarchist demonstration.

Great piece in the New York Times magazine today, in which Julian Dibbel describes his tour of the “gold farms” in China, where young Chinese men toil over their keyboards for 12 hours a day collecting virtual money in games like World of Warcraft, sleeping in cramped dormitories and earning the equivalent of about 25 cents an hour. Stories about gold farming aren’t new, but this is the first time I have read a first-hand description of what they are like, and interviews with gold farmers. There’s also a video intro by Dibbel here (Update: Ed Felten of Freedom to Tinker has some thoughts here).

One of the things that interested me about the story was the fact that there is already a hierarchy in gold farming operations — the lowest level just pays young men to play games all day and collect gold, which is then sold to (primarily) Western players. But the companies that run games like World of Warcraft don’t like the gold farmers, so a second class of operation has developed that takes over the character of a player who wants more gold and plays the game while the owner goes about their real lives.

Is this any worse than a real sweatshop or gold mining operation? Hardly. In fact it’s arguably a lot better, since the only real health risk is either repetitive stress injury or some vitamin-related ailment from never seeing the sun. It’s also interesting that when these young men aren’t working, many of them play World of Warcraft in Internet cafes. It’s difficult to imagine anyone making shoes or t-shirts or mining gold for fun in their off-hours.

Bonus link:

There’s a great photo essay in the magazine as well, which is reproduced in an online slide show: it shows some game players and their avatars. Not surprisingly, there is a severely overweight young man whose avatar is a muscled superhero, and an Asian man whose avatar is a young schoolgirl. But there are also several young women, and one man who clearly has ALS or some other muscle-wasting disease, and is in a wheelchair wearing an oxygen mask — he plays Star Wars Galaxies about 80 hours a week.

It’s hard to believe that mesh 2007 was only a couple of weeks ago — in a way it seems like so long ago, and yet at the same time it seems like just yesterday. I have to say that those two days were a blast, thanks to all the tremendous speakers and panelists and moderators we had, not to mention all the smart people in the audience who asked a lot of excellent questions.

I used the FlickrSlidr app and some Flickr tags to put together a slideshow of some of my favourite shots — thanks to Rannie and Will and Pema and the guys at Canada NewsWire, and everyone else who took photos. There’s lots more at Flickr under the tags “mesh 2007” or “mesh07.”

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.

Since the Digg crew seem to have way too much time on their hands, it’s probably not surprising that they would come up with the idea of creating a real-life Digg button — one that sits in Digg’s lobby and displays the number of times someone has Dugg the Digg button on a page called (what else) diggthediggbutton.com. Of course, it seems as though they put one too few digits in the LED display, since by the time I looked at it last it had 11,458 Diggs and the display was only four digits long.

Apparently, the idea was sparked Kevin Rose of Digg got together with girl geek Ladyada of Adafruit and Phil Torrone of Makezine, and they decided it would be fun to give proto-hackers something hands on to build, and decided on a real-world Digg button with a small chip and LED display. So then the Revision3 gang decided to build their own larger version and put it in the Digg headquarters, hooked up to an Ethernet connection, so that anyone who Dugg the idea of the button could watch their Digg reflected in real time. And then it occurred to me — why don’t we put a bunch of these real-world Digg buttons on actual objects?

We could put them on the local Starbucks outlet, a local panhandler, the corner newstand, etc. Then people could press a button and vote for their favourite places. This guy tried to do something similar, but it involves a whole lot of Post-It Note pads and markers, and seems to be a whole lot of work.

This is a story I wrote on bloggers and libel that appears in Saturday’s Globe and Mail. The newspaper version is here. Thanks to Chris “Zeke” Hand of Zeke’s Gallery and to Michael Geist for their help with the story.

Many bloggers dream of getting mainstream recognition for their work, but unfortunately for some, the attention they’re getting comes in the form of a lawsuit instead of media-star status. Earlier this week, Steelback Brewery president Frank D’Angelo filed a $2-million libel suit against Ottawa-based blogger Neate Sager for making what he says are disparaging comments about him.

In another recent case, Montreal art-gallery owner Chris (Zeke) Hand has found himself on the receiving end of a lawsuit as a result of something he wrote on the blog he maintains for Zeke’s Gallery. Warren Kinsella, a prominent blogger and newspaper columnist, sued another blogger for libel last year, but settled the case after the blogger apologized for his remarks and paid Kinsella’s legal costs.

And p2pnet, a British Columbia-based news site that writes about file-sharing, is still fighting a libel lawsuit launched by Kazaa tycoon Nikki Hemming based on comments that were posted on an article about the company.Hand’s ordeal started last November, when he posted an item on the Zeke’s Gallery blog about a competing gallery owner who sold fake paintings to Loto-Québec (something that was also mentioned in several media stories at the time).

Continue reading “Bloggers becoming a magnet for lawsuits”

Another developing theme this evening: the supremely awesome density of the record industry. After a record industry executive threatens a university professor for linking to a critical blog post (see my post below), we now have the spectre of a recording industry representative — Jay Rosenthal, who runs SoundExchange, the entity that collects royalties for digital performances of music, such as Internet radio — saying, and I quote:

“I sincerely am starting to hate the Internet. I know you see the Internet as some incredible invention that has opened the door to unlimited distribution of music—and your lofty goal is to bring music to as many as possible. But all I see is a tidal wave of artist abuse.”

Rosenthal goes on to say that the Internet “is not becoming a beacon of light, but a cesspool of darkness.” Wow. That’s quite the well-reasoned argument there, Jay. Nice work. The comments come during a debate with publisher Kurt Hanson of the L.A. Times. In his thoughtful response, Hanson notes that:

“Your industry’s “success” here brings to mind what would have happened if the film industry had succeeded in its efforts to block the development of the home video industry. Had those lawyers succeeded, they would have deprived their companies of a future revenue stream (VHS and DVD sales) that’s now worth billions of dollars a year.

Your lawyers did succeed in shutting down the centralized service, so by forcing P2P file sharing into an uncontrollable environment, they deprived your companies of what could have eventually become a multi-billion-dollar revenue stream of monetized file sharing.”

Again, some nice work there. And when in doubt, blame the Internet.

Not to get on a rant against lawyers or anything (see previous post about Avvo being sued), but I couldn’t help mentioning the little brouhaha Dell got into recently with the Consumerist blog, after a lawyer for the company company wrote the website an email asking them to take down one of their posts — specifically, this post, which contained 22 suggestions from a former Dell employee about how to get good deals and/or good service. I encourage you to read the whole thing and email it to your friends.

In the letter, which is quoted verbatim on Consumerist, Tracy Holland of Dell says that the spot in question “contains information that is confidential and proprietary to Dell,” and that this is “in violation of his or her employment agreement and confidentiality obligations.” As I was reading, I imagined the editor of Consumerist reading the letter and wondering “and all this relates to me how exactly?” Which is pretty much what the lawyer for the blog said in her response: “We came by this material entirely legally: we were provided it by a third party voluntarily, we did not use any improper means to solicit any Dell employee to breach any agreement he may have had with you.”

One of the funny parts is when the Dell lawyer sends a second email at about 2 a.m., saying “Thank you. Note, though, it has been almost nine hours since we made the request, yet the posting is still up.” In her response, the Consumerist lawyer starts with:

“Despite some suggestions to the contrary among some of our fellow beings, most humans need to sleep. Some of us also receive hundreds of emails a day and have to deal with every one of them. I received this email at 12am last night. It is 7am now. That’s a pretty good turnaround.”

Hilarious. I have a feeling my friend Lionel Menchaca, the head blogger at Dell — who we had on a panel at mesh a couple of weeks ago and who is a wonderful guy, and the architect of Dell’s successful blogger outreach program — would cringe if he read any of that exchange. Update: In fact, Lionel has cringed (or at least it reads that way) and has responded with a mea culpa here. Much props to him for doing so.

Today’s exercise in childish behaviour — which comes just days after the bitch-slap fest between eBay and Google — comes courtesy of a record industry executive with a skin so thin it’s a wonder his organs don’t fall out. BoingBoing has the story here, and a link to the website of one Andrew Dubber, who teaches at a British university and writes a blog about the music industry (his site was down for awhile but is now back up).

It seems Mr. Dubber linked to a Download Squad post that was critical of the RIAA’s lawsuit strategy, and a certain record executive named Paul Birch — who sits on the board of both the British record industry lobby and the international version of the same thing — sent an email saying that he didn’t think Mr. Dubber’s comments were appropriate, since his university gets government funding. At the end of the message, Birch said that “if you persist then I shall make a formal complaint to the University.” P2PNet has the text of the post.

Birch seems incensed that a university professor would post his opinion to a personal blog — imagine the nerve. As Mike Masnick notes at Techdirt, it’s this kind of ridiculous outburst that gives the entire industry an (even worse) name. Download Squad has a response to the situation here.

Scott McNealy of Sun said it many years ago, and we keep proving that it’s true in small ways (and sometimes big ones) every day. The latest is the news that a young woman’s Facebook and/or MySpace comments might become evidence in a court case (goes to state of mind, your Honor).

Why should this surprise anyone? If emails and personal letters and so on can become evidence, why not Facebook comments? Because Mark Zuckerberg promised you they were private? In Canada, just off the top of my head, we’ve already had at least two cases in which a person’s postings on the social network known as VampireFreaks.com became an issue. Once you type them into your browser, your words become part of the public record — or at least they could become part of it. If you don’t want to take that chance then don’t type them.