Author: Mathew Ingram

From Marshall Kirkpatrick at Splashcast comes word of an interesting development at YouTube: the launch of a dedicated politics “channel,” hosted (if that’s the right word) by news and politics editor Steve Grove, which aims to aggregate all the political video clips that get uploaded to the Tube (so far there are only 10, and the channel has about 500 subscribers).

But I would expect this channel is going to involve more than just aggregating — or at least I hope so. I (and plenty of other people) have already seen Steve Grove interview Phil De Vellis, aka ParkRidge47, about why he created the Hillary Clinton Vote Different/1984 video, and if the new YouTube “editor” does more of that kind of interviewing things could get very interesting indeed (Phil De Vellis, incidentally, is going to be a panelist at the upcoming mesh conference in Toronto, which I am helping to organize).

With YouTube hosting a politics channel, and Huffington Post working with NewAssignment.net to field a bunch of citizen journalists, the upcoming U.S. election campaign could be very interesting indeed. If YouTube were still a small startup, this might be seen as a “power to the people” kind of move, but now that the video site is part of the Googleplex, there are already some — like Republican media strategist David All — who are concerned about the amount of power and influence Google has.

Wired magazine has been adding blogs over the past little while, and one of the new ones that I haven’t checked out until recently is GeekDad. Last night I took a look at it (after someone in the TorCamp “chat swarm” on Skype mentioned it), and it’s a pretty good read — and very eclectic. So I scanned the list of authors, and noticed some familiar names, including:

• Chris Anderson, Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief
• Steve Jurvetson, founding partner of Draper Fisher Jurvetson
• Kevin Kelly, editor at large for Wired magazine
• Warren Packard, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson
• Thomas Hawk, CEO of Zooomr
• Adam Grosser of Foundation Capital
• Andrew Anker, general manager of Six Apart
• Todd Lappin, inventor of the Telstar Logistics parking scam

All in all, quite a high-powered list of geek dads. I will definitely be keeping an eye on what they post, even if all my youngest daughter cares about right now is Webkinz — which the Globe had a story about today.

Update:

Bambi Francisco has decided to leave her job at Marketwatch and run Vator.tv full-time, which I think is the right move to make, and I wish her well. And Pete Cashmore notes that the whole conflict of interest brouhaha (or is it more of a kerfuffle?) has actually been pretty good marketing for Vator.

Original post:

When is a conflict of interest not a conflict of interest? When it involves a Web startup, apparently. Both the Wall Street Journal and ZDNet have written about Vator.tv, and how one of the key players behind the company — which does interviews with CEOs of various startups — is Bambi Francisco, the wonderfully-named tech writer for Marketwatch.com.

There are a couple of obvious problem with this, one of the first being that interviewing CEOs of startups is Bambi’s actual job, and now she is starting a company to do that separate from Marketwatch. But it gets worse: according to both the WSJ and ZDNet, Ms. Francisco owns a stake in Vator.tv, and her main partner and financial backer in the venture is none other than Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal and now a venture capitalist. Bambi’s coverage at Marketwatch has also mentioned both Mr. Thiel and some of the various technology companies that he has invested in or advises.

Could this be any more clear-cut an example of conflict? I don’t see how. And yet, Marketwatch editor David Callaway tells ZDNet that:

“the rigid rules of the past may not always apply to new media. Is there a potential for a conflict in Bambi’s case? Yes. Do I think we can avoid it? Yes.”

Matt Marshall of VentureBeat seems to feel that Ms. Francisco has been wronged in some way by the coverage of this story, and that it is “a non-scandal,” and many may agree with him. I am not one of them. However, he also comes to what I think is the correct conclusion: Bambi has to leave Marketwatch (to avoid what he calls “complications,” and what I would call conflicts). Either that or she has to sever her financial relationship with Vator, or make Marketwatch a partner in the venture.

An internal memo from David Callaway to Marketwatch staff is here, but it doesn’t do much to clarify the situation (at least not to me). Let’s review one thing that Mr. Callaway seems to have missed: A conflict of interest doesn’t exist or not exist because *you* say it does — it’s something that your readers or viewers get to decide on. And in many cases, the appearance of a conflict is just as bad as having an actual conflict. Staci Kramer at PaidContent is right — making this about old vs. new media is a copout.

Meant to blog this earlier when I came across it, but a guy named Matt — a student at Stanford studying design and business — wrote a post the other day about a couple of special visitors who came to his class: Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the co-founders of YouTube. Matt says that he had the good fortune to go out to lunch with the two new multimillionaires, and asked them what the keys to the company’s success were.

The answer is fairly succinct, and not exactly a secret either, but still worth repeating: the first key to success was the ability to embed video, and the second was an infrastructure that allowed the site to scale quickly and easily. Sounds simple, but the first was unique when YouTube offered it — and I would argue it was also by far the most important of the two factors — and the second is a lot harder than it sounds.

Liz Gannes has a great post over at Om Malik’s NewTeeVee site that looks at Vimeo, a video-sharing site that I must admit I had kind of overlooked in the frenzy of interest over YouTube and Revver and so on. She describes how the site got started as a personal project launched by Jakob Lodwick and Zach Klein, the twenty-something founders of CollegeHumor.com, which was bought by media mogul Barry Diller’s Interactive Corp last August (Jakob and Zach also co-founded BustedTees.com).

According to Liz, Vimeo has shied away from the upload-anything, celebrity-focused, copyright-infringing YouTube approach and tried to focus on the home-movie crowd. The founders say they are trying to reinvent home movies for the Internet age, not reinventing television — an approach I think is in some ways much more appealing — and the site doesn’t even list the most-viewed videos, the way most such sites do.

But one of the most fascinating things about the NewTeeVee post for me was the video clip that Liz embedded from founder Jakob Lodwick, which I have embedded here. I highly recommend it.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/155054 w=400&h=300]

If you’re in Toronto and you’re interested in the future of journalism, and how it’s being affected by blogs and other forms of “social media” or “crowdsourcing” or “citizen journalism” — or whatever we’re calling it now — feel free to brave the sudden return of winter and come on by the University of Toronto tonight for what I hope will be a lively and informative discussion.

Yours truly is on a panel with my friend and former National Post journalist Mark Evans and advertising buyer Hugh Dow, on a panel moderated by the lovely and talented Amber MacArthur, the new media specialist for CityNews. It’s at the Robert Gill Theatre at 241 College Street and attendance is free, but seating is limited. You can register here.

Eric Savitz at Barron’s Online has an item about Yahoo and Facebook, in which he quotes Needham analyst Mark May as saying that Yahoo may have missed yet another boat by not acquiring the social-networking site — in much the same way it had the chance to acquire Google for $3-billion back in 2002 and passed. According to the Needham analyst, Facebook recently passed 21 million registered users, and ComScore says that 93 per cent of registered users log on at least once a month and 60 per centuse the site at least once a day.

“He notes that the site is the 36th most visited location on the Web, and the number one site for photos, with over 6 million uploaded daily. May notes that, according to eMarketer, Facebook was the most visited site on the web for both males and females aged 17-25.”

That adds fuel to the argument I made in an earlier post, about how Facebook’s growth is putting it close to MySpace, if not actually ahead — and MySpace is making $30-million a month, a figure that is expected to double by next year. Larry Dignan argues that News Corp. hasn’t figured out how to monetize MySpace, but that sounds like a pretty good start on monetization to me.

Doug Macintyre at 24/7 Wall Street also questions whether Facebook is worth much more than $1-billion, but I think he is being too conservative in his estimates — not just of what Facebook could make, but of what a company like Yahoo (or even Microsoft) would be willing to pay for a site that is growing at those kinds of rates, especially among the 17-25 age group.

According to several reports, Josh Wolf is either about to be released from prison or has already been released. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, he’s the young video blogger who was jailed for contempt of court — for refusing to turn over a video he made of a G8 Summit demonstration that turned violent — and wound up serving more than seven months, the longest a journalist has ever been jailed for contempt.

The Center for Media and Democracy has a statement written by Josh, and as part of the deal with prosecutors the video blogger has posted a copy of the video he took of the demonstration on his blog. He writes: “During the course of this saga I have repeatedly offered to allow a judge to be the arbiter over whether or not my video material has any evidentiary value. Today, you the public have the opportunity to be the judge and I am confident you will see, as I do, that there is nothing of value in this unpublished footage.” He adds:

“I had wanted to reveal to you, the public, how ridiculous and without merit this matter is, but could not publish this tape until I had received assurances from the US Attorney that it would not be considered partial compliance and strengthen their claims that I might eventually be coerced.”

Watching the tape, it’s striking how incredibly innocuous it is — it starts with some young anarchists, the earnest type that anyone who has been to university has likely encountered, expounding their somewhat naieve views to a handful of onlookers, and then there is a quiet and sparsely attended march. The police show up, but there is little actual violence. Newspaper boxes are dragged into the street, but that’s about it.

At the end, it’s night-time and a police officer appears to be sitting on a man lying on the sidewalk. Officers arrive and tell the crowd to disperse (according to the federal grand jury that ordered Wolf to turn over the tape and testify, an officer was hit on the head and a police car was damaged by fire, neither of which are shown in the video). Worth seven months in prison? It’s hard to see how.

Have to give some props to Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget over at Internet Outsider for his post about YouTube and the recent stats from Vidmeter (PDF link here). Seems content from the almighty Viacom only accounted for about two per cent of YouTube’s traffic — and all of the removed content from Big Media accounted for a measly six per cent of the total. So much for the argument about “NewTube” — the joint venture between News Corp. and Viacom — eviscerating YouTube by taking all the valuable content away. As Valleywag says, it’s the kittens who should be suing.

Update: Pete Cashmore at Mashable has a fair point when he notes that the Vidmeter report looked only at the videos that had been removed from the site, so it might not be a statistically accurate portrayal of what is on YouTube — since not everyone has been as aggressive as Viacom about sending takedown notices (to be fair to Vidmeter, they note that in their report).

Still, food for thought. Liz Gannes has some thoughts on the subject over at NewTeeVee. And here’s more food for thought: the 6,700 or so videos that Vidmeter included in their sample — the most-viewed — generated more than 1.58 billion views in a little over three months.

Update:

Kyle Redinger, among others (including a commenter here) takes issue with the Vidmeter survey. And Henry Blodget has a response to some of those criticisms — which Viacom also made in a recent Reuters story — in an update on his blog.

Technorati CEO Dave Sifry has a new “state of the blogosphere” report out, although the first part of it reads more like a “state of Technorati” report — which my friend and fellow mesh organizer Mark Evans and some others believe is a bit of plumage-fluffing aimed at catching the eye of a potential suitor such as Yahoogle or MicroNews Corp.

Be that as it may, it is still interesting to see how fast Technorati.com has been growing: over 9 million unique visitors in March, up 141 per cent in a single quarter, and double-digit growth every month in page views as well. Not bad. It’s no MySpace, but still pretty good for a blog-search engine. But Dave doesn’t just want to be a blog-search engine — he wants to be a media company. Don’t we all, Dave. But I’m not sure a lot of traffic to Technorati’s tagged media pages really counts as being a media company, unless we are really stretching the definition of the term.

It’s obvious that part of Dave’s post is also designed to cement the impression that Technorati is the leader in blog search, a campaign he has also carried into the comments section of Robert Scoble’s blog, on a post the Scobelizer did about whose search is better. I think Dave should win some kind of award for the number of comments he left on Scobey’s blog, most of which (not surprisingly) are aimed at showing the deficiencies of Google’s search — although to give him full credit, he responds to criticisms from bloggers as well.

So is Technorati the leader? The charts on Dave’s post look pretty good, although neither Hitwise nor Quantcast are infallible when it comes to measuring such things. But as Zoli Erdos points out, Technorati’s lead over Google may not be as large as it seems, and there is clearly still room for improvement — for example, Google’s blog search indexes comments as well as posts. And as I have written about previously, Sphere and Icerocket have their strengths (and weaknesses) as well.

In other words, blog search is still very much a horse race.

Update:

Allan Stern of CenterNetworks says that Technorati shouldn’t be compared to Google’s blog search at all, but to Google proper, which is a fair point. And Jim Kukral wonders in a post on his blog why Mark Cuban has let IceRocket die. Are you going to just sit there and take that, Mark? 🙂

Anyone who has done any looking into the history of the Internet eventually makes their way back to the invention of the mouse and the desktop metaphor at Xerox’s PARC, past that to the old DARPA days, past Ted Nelson’s invention of the term “hypertext” and back to the “Memex” envisioned by Vannevar Bush. But have you ever heard of the Mundaneum? Me neither — until I came across a fascinating article at one of my favourite websites, the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society.

Apparently, the Mundaneum was a kind of card-catalogue version of the Internet, created around the turn of the century by Belgian lawyer Paul Otlet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Henri LaFontaine. Opened in 1910, the idea was to collect all of the world’s knowledge on 3″ x 5″ index cards organized by topic. The project eventually grew to 12 million cards, classified according to the Universal Decimal Classification system developed by Otlet. In many ways, the Mundaneum was a product of the same impulse as Bush’s Memex and the early Internet (and the Library at Alexandria).

Otlet even came up with the idea for a kind of desk, shaped like a giant wheel, which would let users search through, read and even write on millions of 3×5 index cards.

“This new research environment would do more than just let users retrieve documents; it would also let them annotate the relationships between one another, “the connections each [document] has with all other [documents], forming from them what might be called the Universal Book.”

“Otlet imagined a day when users would access the database from great distances by means of an “electric telescope” connected through a telephone line, retrieving a facsimile image to be projected remotely on a flat screen.”

According to the Kircher Society piece, the Mundaneum didn’t really catch on for one reason or another, and it eventually wound up being housed in a refurbished parking garage in Belgium, and closed in 1934.

Topix, the local news aggregator that is owned by several big U.S. newspaper chains (Gannett, The Tribune and McClatchy), is doing what amounts to a relaunch of the site and adding “citizen journalism” or social media to the mix, as well as moving to a dot-com domain (it used to be dot-net). Founder and CEO Rich Skrenta — who describes on his personal blog how this came out of an attempt to “de-suckify” the site — has a blog post at Topix about the changes, and says:

“We’re now inviting members from our hyperlocal communities to take over the controls and help us edit the news.”

Topix (which recently raised $15-million) has been a bit of a wallflower at the social-media dance — perhaps in part because local news isn’t quite as sexy as national or international news — but as Skrenta’s post points out, the service has been growing fairly rapidly, and contributions from readers (in the form of posting in story-related forums) have also been increasing dramatically:

“We went from zero to 1 million users posting in our forums, and now have over 1,000 active local forums (5 posts/day or more). The traffic is growing 10-20% per month — and now accounts for nearly half of our total traffic.”

Skrenta says that Topix is getting about 37,000 posts a day, and the site was looking for a way of featuring the top 1 to 5 per cent of those contributions that actually add something to the story. Now, anyone can submit a story, or facts about a story, or an opinion, or cellphone photos, and they will be handled by what amounts to an editor.

In some cases, editors will be drawn from the pool of active contributors, in the same way that Wikipedia.org does — but in some cases, stories or tips or opinions will be handled by an editor from one of Topix’s member papers. It will be interesting to see how Topix fares with a model that is also being pursued by Newsvine and (to a lesser extent) Daylife.

Greg Sterling has some thoughts on the relaunch at Search Engine Land, and so does Jason Chervokas at the Social Media Club. Ross Mayfield thinks that there could be some old media-new media acquisitions coming as more media entities realize the benefits of the local community model.

P.S. On a completely unrelated note, Rich Skrenta created the first computer virus when he was 15.