Author: Mathew Ingram

I can’t tell if Jason Calacanis is just trolling for some Techmeme reaction on a weekend (which he has certainly gotten in spades) or in a grump because he’s been sick, but his post about Facebook bankruptcy and closing off comments is a doozy. I’ll leave the Facebook part to Fred Wilson and others to respond to, except to say that it seems pretty simple to me: don’t want as many requests for things? Then don’t friend so many people.

The Facebook thing doesn’t bother me that much — like Fred, the Web and blogs are more important to me than some closed system, however appealing. And that’s why I find the part about Jason closing his blog to comments more troubling, for reasons I have expressed before, including a recent post about Joel Spolsky’s take on comments and one about Marc Andreessen also deciding to close comments.

Like Scott Rafer, I am more than a little disturbed by Jason’s comment that:

“If you don’t have a blog – which takes 10 minutes to setup – then maybe you’re not worthy of commenting, or others reading your comments.”

A comment typed in haste, perhaps — but that sounds pretty elitist to me. Yes, it’s easy to start a blog, but not everyone has the time or the inclination. By preventing those people from commenting, it’s true that you avoid the idiots as Jason says, but you also miss some thoughtful contributions as well, as Fred Wilson has also pointed out.

Update:

Jason says that his response to the elitism charge is:

“I’m 100% available to the entire world by SMS, email, AIM, Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, Twitter, and blog post. If someone want to reach me they can — that negates your whole elitist argument.

It is not my job to give people the platform, it’s their job to take it… It’s not elitism, it’s a meritocracy.”

Fair enough. But by building barriers, such as the “invitation-only” comments that Jason seems to admire, I think we are sending the wrong message to those who are still trying to wrap their heads around the whole blogging thing.

Well, it seems that Twitter is good for something: I watched a blog war (or at least a skirmish) blow up in real time via the “micro-blogging” app that just got funded by Fred Wilson at Union Square. First, Robert Scoble said that he was in an all-staff meeting at the company — and that Mike Arrington “got a lot of things wrong” in his recent post on the status of Podtech.

To this, Mike responded on his Twitter — directly to Scoble — that:

“If I got the story wrong, its because John wasn’t being clear in how he describes the company.”

and

“It’s bullshit to call this out publicly. I assume the off-record conversation is now fair game for TechCrunch.”

Fair game for this latest post by Mike, in which he writes that the previous post was one “Podtech pleaded with me to write, to counter the massive negative publicity they’ve been getting around the blogosphere,” and that he agreed to write it “after two phone conversations with Furrier and some independent digging.” I actually thought that Mike was pretty fair in that initial post.

In any case, he says now that:

“I’ve kept most of my personal opinions about Podtech to myself so far. I haven’t for example, said that I personally find 90% of Podtech content just slightly more entertaining than watching paint dry.”

Ouch. He also says that:

“I write stuff how I see it, which is not the same thing as what the companies involved necessarily want to see. Never confuse TechCrunch with your PR or marketing team.”

Game on. Should be a fun TechCrunch party tonight 🙂

Update:

In a Twitter post this morning, Scoble says:

“I’m tired of fighting with people in public about it. We’ll have the ultimate laugh if we make PodTech profitable … I certainly have lots of opportunities and would have left long ago if things were dire.

We ARE going through turbulence, though … and nearly every startup I know has gone through changes in direction, unstatisfactory employees, strategies that don’t work out etc …

What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. My show is doing very well, though, and I’m having a ball personally.”

Update 2:

Scoble just posted this to his Twitter, saying Gillmor told him Arrington was right “about everything.” Mike responded within minutes on Crunchnotes with this post:

The funny thing is that Robert and I were immediately laughing together at the TechCrunch party, just an hour or so after the big fight on Friday. He apologized. I apologized. Then we shot some video.

Another one destined for the “No Surprise” file: HBO is planning to shut down its comedy-video site This Just In (I know, I’d never heard of it either) in August, according to Variety magazine. Why? Because — as one NBC executive admitted when the network shut down its InnerTube site, which was supposed to compete with YouTube — This Just In might as well have changed its URL to “nobodycomeshere.com.”

Two of the most succinct appraisals of this turkey come from a commenter on the TechCrunch post about it and from Om Malik at NewTeeVee. At TechCrunch, Ian Bell says: “Unfortunately this goes to show that you can’t just slap a site together, throw ads up on it, buy keywords and think it will be successful. A successful property requires its own culture and essentially a ‘soul’.” Bingo. And Om notes that gigantic conglomerates with multiple layers of bureaucracy and poisonous office politics are not exactly a great breeding ground for comedy:

“The big media, especially Time Warner (my former employer) is a tad clueless about this new video revolution. With a studio mentality, management by consensus and a bonus-driven culture, they are waddling in a world that moves at light speed.”

Double bingo. And examples abound of just how clueless network executives are, and how flinging money and press releases at something doesn’t amount to much in the world of online video: Come on down, Bud.tv — one of the most expensive, and yet almost criminally un-funny, sites you will ever see. And then there’s FunnyOrDie.com, which features Saturday Night Live star Will Farrell. Why does it work? Because it’s funny, that’s why.

Fortune magazine has a great overview of the issues facing newspapers, using the Washington Post as a core example — the implicit argument being: If a great newspaper with a fantastic Web property like washingtonpost.com can’t make it work online, then who else has a chance? There are no easy answers, but the Fortune piece sparks plenty of questions.

Starting right off the top, every newspaper of any size that wants to see the future they are staring down should pay close attention to the example used in the lead, of the sports reporter who files breaking news to his blog, then does audio clips and podcasts and online Q&A sessions and so on. The piece also contained a piece of information about the Washington Post that I didn’t know: almost half of Post Co.’s revenue comes from its educational division, which has provided it with a considerable amount of support while it experiments with online, just as the Toronto Star’s newspaper unit has been supported by its Harlequin book division.

My friend Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 — and others such as Lost Remote — have already put their fingers on the crucial point that the newspaper industry is struggling with: namely, when your entire business model is predicated on scarcity (i.e., the scarcity of pages for advertising), how do you deal with the sudden abundance that the Internet has created? Supply and demand gets thrown out the window and other dynamics take hold.

From my pal Paul Kedrosky comes a video clip from new Wall Street Journal tech video-blogger Andy Jordan, who went out into the park to see whether one guy’s iPhone would help improve his social life or not. Kara Swisher of All Things D has a clip of Andy explaining his new gig.

http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/452319854

File this one under the “No Surprise” heading in the VC database: Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, the guy who is probably the most closely identified with Web 2.0 apps — if only because he seems to have one of every kind of Web widget in the sidebars on his blog — has funded Twitter, the micro-blogging service with the 140-character limit.

For anyone unfamiliar with Twitter, it is like the status update on Facebook but without the Facebook part. It is a quick way of updating people on what you’re doing/thinking/feeling/eating, etc. If you’re Robert Scoble, it’s a way for you to spam thousands of people with details on your every thought and movement (just kidding, Scobie), and there are add-ons like the audio Twittergram and so on that I don’t really know anything about. At the moment, with Twitter and Facebook and Pownce.com and MSN and GTalk and half a dozen other things, I have so many status update services that I’m overwhelmed.

In other words, I’ve pretty much given up, and Twitter now just pushes blog posts out to whoever is following me, and I track some other people’s blog posts the same way. Is it worth investing in? Fred seems to think so (and so do Marc Andreessen and some others), although even Fred admits he’s not sure what the business model is. I’m not sure either.

The latest issue of Fortune magazine has an interview with Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster — who may qualify as the world’s tallest free-standing chief executive, at six foot eight inches — in which the writer asks Jim some questions provided by readers, and then asks some of his own. The answers are very similar to the ones that the Craigslist CEO gave to Mark Evans when he did a keynote interview with Buckmaster during mesh (there’s video of their chat here, thanks to mDialogue and Mark McKay).

One of the interesting things for me, because I’m nosy (occupational hazard, I’m afraid) came at the end of the interview, when Jim mentioned where he and his partner Susan Best like to go to relax: an organic farm called Emandal in Mendocino County. I figured it must be some kind of swanky resort with a gourmet chef, but I should have known better, given Buckmaster’s disinterest in such trappings of wealth.

As it turns out, Emandal is a tiny, unassuming family farm on a back-country road in the middle of nowhere and reportedly includes an ostrich named Huey. As it happens, one of the top results in Google for the term “Emandal” is a collection of photos from Smugmug of Jim and Susan enjoying their time at the farm (including a visit with Huey). Nice to see that Jim doesn’t just talk about not being interested in money — he acts like it too.

One of the highlights of mesh — for me and many others — was the chance to see Mike Arrington of TechCrunch call PayPerPost CEO Ted Murphy “the most evil man in the room” when Ted asked a question during the keynote conversation I had with Mike on the first day. As part of his “Rockstartup” video series, Ted had someone filming the whole thing — including a chat between Ted and Loren Feldman of 1938media — and the video has been posted to YouTube, and I’ve embedded it below. A classic mesh moment.

Bill Shatner, Montreal-born starship captain and former T.J. Hooker star, says he’s not mad that he didn’t get a role in the new Star Trek movie — although he does admit to being “disappointed.”

According to a post at PaidContent, the online audience for newspapers is growing twice as fast as the overall Internet population is growing. That comes from a study that Nielsen/Net Ratings did for (not surprisingly perhaps) the Newspaper Association of America. According to the study:

An average of more than 59 million people (37.6 percent of all active internet users) visited newspapers online each month during Q1, a 5.3 percent increase over the same period a year ago.

During the same time period, the overall internet audience grew just 2.7 percent.

The study also found that more than 88 per cent of newspaper website visitors have bought something online in the last six months, compared with less than 80 per cent of the online audience. And about four in 10 online readers or 40 per cent work in professional or managerial jobs, compared with one in three or 33 per cent of the Internet population).

If you’re like me — and I know I am — you have hundreds of feeds in your feed reader and not enough time to wade through them all. Finding a way to sort through them all and get to the posts that are most “important” or interesting is a conundrum that I and many others continue to wrestle with. It’s why Techmeme.com continues to be so handy, despite what some see as its “echo chamber”-type flaws (for the record, I am a big fan of Techmeme).

Ilya Grigorik and his team at Waterloo-based AideRSS — which launched today — are taking a page from Google’s book in an attempt to solve the RSS problem. In the same way that the search engine uses an algorithm called PageRank to sort pages based on who links to them, AideRSS uses a filtering system called PostRank to show you the posts in a blog’s feed that are getting the most attention in the form of readers, links, comments, Digg submissions and so on (Josh Catone has an in-depth look at Read/Write Web and Ilya describes PostRank on his blog).

Ilya was kind enough to give me a trial account to AideRSS, and while I haven’t had all that much time to play around with it (vacation in an Internet-challenged location got in the way), I think the company is onto something. I’m not sure if I want AideRSS to determine which posts I read all the time — I like a certain haphazard, serendipitous approach as well — but it is definitely worth monitoring, and like Google’s PageRank it will likely improve over time. My smart mesh friend Ethan Kaplan of Blackrimglasses has some thoughts here.

I know this isn’t a gamer blog or anything, but if you play Halo at all (or have ever played it and liked it), then this could be one of the coolest things you’ve ever seen — a full-scale, working Warthog, complete with four-way steering and dual mounted machine guns. Click on the picture to see a larger version.

In case you were wondering where Marc Andreessen got the material for his continuing blog series on startups, it looks to me like a lot of it probably came from his experience with Opsware — which has just been bought by Hewlett-Packard for a whopping $1.6-billion in cash. As Marc describes in his post, the deal is the culmination of more than seven years of toil, from starting the company formerly known as Loudcloud in 1999, to going public just as the tech sector peaked, to almost going under, to rebuilding the business and making it a leader in the industry. If anyone has paid their dues, it sounds like Marc has — and he just turned 36. In case you’re keeping score at home, it looks as though Andreessen will make about $165-million on the sale.

Just discovered that Amit Agarwal, who writes the excellent Digital Inspiration blog, has created a site with ASCII art images of 100 popular bloggers, including yours truly (I’m the one in the second row without a head).

Nice link bait, Amit 🙂