Author: Mathew Ingram

I don’t fly to Boston much, but I’m still interested in the fight going on between Logan airport and Continental Airlines over public Wi-Fi. The airport — which is run by the Massachusetts Port Authority — shut down Continental’s wireless network last fall, and the airline has asked Congress to intervene.

Massport says it wants to avoid interference from a bunch of competing wireless signals, but the airlines (including American Airlines) argue that what it really wants is a monopoly on Wi-Fi, for which it charges $8 an hour. I’m with Fred Wilson (and others) on this: Wi-Fi should be a form of public infrastructure, like roads or bridges.

I also like an analogy I first saw in a Wired article by Paul Boutin: Wi-Fi is a condiment, like sugar or cream, or salt and pepper. Providing it is a service that you hope will make people want to come back to your establishment. Hardly anyone charges for the use of their washrooms either — not even airports.

There’s more discussion at WSJ writer Jeremy Wagstaff’s blog and at WiFi Networking News. Dana Blankenhorn at ZDNet has also posted on it, as has my friend Rob Hyndman.

Okay, maybe the first day of the new year is a little early to be calling someone the year’s biggest loser, but I’d like to start the bidding early by nominating Coldplay’s record label, which as far as I can tell is EMI (the record company the Sex Pistols made infamous).

A note inserted in the band’s latest CD — a label you can’t see until you buy the disc — has a laundry list of places you probably won’t be able to play the new CD you paid so dearly for, a list that includes many portable music players, most computers, CD players in cars, and other incredibly common places for playing music. Arif in Hyderabad found the note after buying the disc.

What is a company thinking when they do this? It might not be as bad as the comically inept DRM exploit that Sony tried to foist on an unsuspecting public, but it’s still a ridiculous way to approach your market or your customers. Assume that they are thieves, and tie their hands in every way imaginable so that they can’t enjoy their music as they wish — after they’ve already paid money for your product. Nice.

I’d like to hope that we could chip away at that kind of dinosaur thinking this year, but I’m not optimistic.

Does the fact that Jason Calacanis — of Weblogs Inc. — is successful again mean that we’re in another Web bubble? For many people in Silicon Valley in the late 1980s, Jason was a dot-com poster boy, as a profile in Wired points out. He built a photocopied and hand-delivered gossip sheet into an industry-leading magazine, and also had a reputation for throwing lavish parties. (Wikipedia has the abbreviated version of his bio).

Now, Jason works for AOL, which paid an estimated $25-million for his network of about 80 blogs. While that seems like a large enterprise, only a dozen or so of those blogs — such as Engadget.com and Joystiq.com — appear to get much traffic, and according to the Wired article the company had about $1-million in advertising revenue when AOL bought it. As the piece notes, “it’s not clear that $25 million is a sane amount for 10 disconnected employees and a network of bloggers who could jump ship at any moment.” That’s putting it mildly.

In typical Calacanis fashion, he isn’t content to bask in the glory of a bubble-style takeover of his company — he’s convinced that he could become chief executive of AOL if he wanted to (an idea that, sadly, might not be as much of a stretch as it should be). Paul Kedrosky gives Jason props for bouncing back from his first popped bubble, but others will likely see his return as evidence that the bubble mentality is back with a vengeance.

Among the blizzard of year-end predictions and forecasts on various blogs — some interesting and some not — is one that caught my eye from Steve Rubel over at Micropersuasion, who said that one of the things he really wants is a way of searching and tracking comments on blog posts. That’s something I’ve been thinking about too.

As Steve notes, sometimes the best thing about a blog post is the comments, but there isn’t an easy way to search or track them — although he notes that Elisa Camahort tags any post she comments on with del.icio.us so she can track them. Where are the searches from technorati.com or bloglines.com or icerocket.com that focus on comments? (Come on, Mark . You can do it).

Fred Wilson over at A VC expands on Steve’s comments with his thoughts — including the fact that it would be nice if there was a way to elevate the best comments on a post, something I’ve been waiting for as well. (Come on, Matt. You can do it). As Fred puts it: “Bottom line – blogs are conversations. We need to start treating the comments like the important content that they are instead of an afterthought.”

Well said.

As usual, Mike over at TechDirt has what I think is a nice take on the blog plagiarism (or ‘splog’) problem that has afflicted some top bloggers, including Om Malik and TechCrunch. Mike’s response boils down to this: Ignore it (and it’s worth reading his reply to some of the comments his post got too).

Is wholesale blog-copying wrong? Obviously. Is Google making money from the AdSense ads that run on such sites? Yes. But I don’t think that means Google needs to police the problem, as Jeff Jarvis and some others believe. Do we really want Google to become a de facto website-content policeman? I would argue that we don’t.

Even Om isn’t sure what kind of response he wants to see. I have a hunch that Mike is right — anyone who matters will quickly realize that such sites aren’t adding any value, and therefore any AdSense revenue they gain will be fleeting at best. Maybe there’s a touch of Pollyanna in that, but I think the “reputation economy” — or whatever you want to call what we’re all doing here — should be more of a self-regulating mechanism.

As James Robertson notes, the issue of “fair use” is definitely a very grey area, since it covers feed aggregators as well as plogs. So what should be done? By all means, send the splogger a threatening note mentioning the DMCA (although be aware that you are using a badly-formed law that plenty of people dislike for plenty of very good reasons), but leave Google out of it.

One reason why people pay so much attention to what Google does is that it can change the landscape with a single move. Take the whole RSS feed-syndication thing, which — despite the relative popularity of Bloglines.com and NewsGator.com and their ilk — is still in its infancy as far as the bulk of Web users are concerned. That’s why things like Yahoo adding RSS support to its email app (much as I dislike having feeds in my mail) make a difference.

Now, the ever-diligent Niall Kennedy has managed to reverse-engineer the API (application programming interface) that Google uses in its Reader application, which sparked the interest of a couple of Google staffers — who said the company is close to releasing its API for public use. (Paul Kedrosky says the API announcement is also a way for Google to deke around criticism of its reader).

I’m not a programmer, but I think this could change things dramatically. For one thing, it could make it even easier for a few smart people to come up with easy-to-use feed readers — apps that are light-years ahead of Google’s own reader, which I happen to think is lame. As Niall has pointed out, Google has already made it relatively easy to come up with an Atom feed for your blog of choice, since Google’s app takes whatever feed it is given and converts it to Atom.

As more than one person has pointed out, RSS (or Atom) is plumbing — hopefully Google’s move will make it easier for people to just use the facilities instead of worrying about what format the equipment is based on. Phil Wainwright says he expects that RSS readers as we know them will eventually disappear (or be absorbed). So maybe Scoble is too late in his attempt to get Microsoft to buy NewsGator.

The morning of the transit strike in New York, I told a colleague that I expected a rash of stories about the benefits of telecommuting. There hasn’t exactly been a “rash” (whatever that is), but the New York Times did one over the holidays — which I first noticed because my friend Mark Evans blogged about it. It’s a good piece, because it points out that tele-work hasn’t really caught on as much as many expected it to, despite the widespread adoption of high-speed Internet connections.

Why? As the article notes, the main obstacles are psyschological. For example, lots of bosses assume (or at least suspect) that if a person working for them isn’t at their desk, then they are goofing off. Technology isn’t much help in that department, unless you include things like keystroke-loggers and similar types of monitoring, which is pretty Orwellian. And on the other side, there are benefits to being in the office that are impossible to duplicate over an Internet connection, even with instant messaging — you can’t bump into someone, which then jogs your memory (or theirs) or go for an impromptu cup of coffee.

Those intangibles are important. And as Mark notes, working at home takes discipline (a friend of mine actually put on a suit to go down the hall to his at-home office, so he would be in the right frame of mind). But at the same time, the benefits of working at home are undeniable — lack of commuting stress being just one of them. Another friend who does both says he works at home a couple of days a week because he gets a lot more done, but goes into the office a couple of days a week so that he can network with his colleagues.

And that’s why a little bit of both is the perfect mix, I think: a day or two at home, a few days in the office. The best of both worlds. Stuart MacDonald makes a good point in a comment on Mark’s post — a blend of both works fine in many cases, provided everyone is on the same page goal-wise (in other words, no bosses counting who’s at their desk and who isn’t).

Or should that be Merry ChrismaKwanzakah? Anyway, best of the holidays to anyone who happens to stop by. Thanks for reading. I’m gonna take a little break. And don’t forget to pick up your Festivus pole before the Airing of Grievances and the ritual Feats of Strength.

It’s kind of a guilty pleasure, but I can’t help it — I love reading Dave Winer when he gets on a rant (except maybe when it involves Adam Curry and the origins of podcasting). His latest is on iTunes, and having used it before with both Windows and Mac, I have to agree. Dave’s rant was apparently sparked by this post by Rex Hammock on his blog.

“The user interface on iTunes is awful. It’s the worst piece of crap I’ve ever used. People would tell me when I was a Windows user that it was because the Windows version of iTunes is crap but the Mac version is easy. Well, both programs are head-up-butt impossible to figure out. The user model makes no sense. When is something on the iPod? How many copies of the music do I have? Where the fcuk are they? How do you delete something? Is it really gone? Why does it wipe out the contents of the iPod when I don’t say it’s okay to? What did I do wrong? I swear, I have no idea, and I’m a professional software designer. What about the poor schnook who is just a user?”

Rob Hyndman says he has dumped iTunes as well, mostly because it’s a pain to use in a networked environment (memo to Apple: this is a big problem, and likely to get bigger). And David Berlind at ZDNet has some thoughts on the DRM issue as well.

So now it’s Microsoft that’s supposedly going to buy Opera, everybody’s second favourite alternative browser (next to Firefox, of course). Not that long ago, Google was reported to be the one looking at buying the company. Of course, Google was supposed to buy Riya too, but that never happened.

This one could wind up in the “nice rumour, shame about the facts” file as well. A spokesman for Opera says there is no truth to the rumour, and while companies often deny things that eventually turn out to be true, the denial wasn’t one of those weaselly “we can’t comment” denials – it was a flat-out “no way it’s happening,” kind of denial.

Could Microsoft be looking at acquiring Opera? Sure it could. After all, buying the company would probably cost about what Microsoft generates in free cash flow every half an hour or so. But why? Opera has about 1 per cent of the browser market, which makes Firefox look like a giant. It’s not a bad browser, but all the things that make it special – including the tabs and other doo-dads, as well as the stripped-down mobile version – are fairly easy to duplicate.

So the question is, why buy the company? Any goodwill that Opera has developed in the browser market would be annihilated by a Microsoft acquisition, so that’s worthless. The browser is free (thanks to a deal with Google). In fact, the Google rumour made way more sense, since Google doesn’t currently have a browser. Of course, that doesn’t mean Microsoft won’t buy Opera anyway – it just means I don’t think it makes much sense. My friend Paul Kedrosky says it makes as Microsoft “buying a lavender farm.”

It’s too bad that the popularity of Performancing.com’s blogging extension for Firefox seems to have turned into an anti-Flock thing, because I don’t think it has to be that way. I know people tend to see things in a kind of binary way — Performancing is great, so Flock is f***ed, as Paul Kedrosky so eloquently put it — but I think there’s plenty of room for both, or at least I hope so (Paul takes another crack at his thoughts on Flock here).

Chris Messina, who is Flock’s ‘director of experience and open source ambassador’ (that’s quite the title, Chris), has written an impassioned defence of where he thinks Flock is going, and why it makes sense. He makes some good points, but I also liked his comment on Paul’s blog, where he says: ‘I hope you get a lot of traction out of Performancing. It’s a decent piece of work and I’m excited to see more Firefox folks getting into blogging. Flock isn’t going to be for everyone and nor will Performancing. Isn’t it nice to have choice on the web again?’ (Miss Rogue over at horsepigcow has another take that I quite enjoyed).

People like Mike at TechCrunch shouldn’t feel like they have to come to Flock’s defence. The company and the app came under some fire for the early hype, and an initial version that was a lot more alpha than beta, but that’s the way things go. I’ve tried the Performancing extension too, and I think it is fantastic — and I must admit it made me question the need for a whole separate browser too. But we shouldn’t get religious about these things. I’m going to keep checking out Flock.com to see if they can change my mind. Choice is good.

It may be nothing but a footnote to the Google-AOL deal, but to me (and others like Stowe Boyd at Corante and Gary Price at SearchEngineWatch) the proposal to blend GTalk and AIM into a seamless instant messaging service is the icing on the cake — and if there’s one thing I love, it’s icing.

It may take some technical voodoo, but at least it takes us down to two main networks — since Microsoft and Yahoo have said they plan to make theirs interoperable. I’ve been using Trillianand Gaim (which Paul Kedrosky over at Infectious Greed also seems to like) because I know so many people on other networks, and I haven’t used GTalk because I know most of them won’t switch applications just to talk to me.

And why should they? It’s like asking people to get a new cellphone because your phone can’t call theirs. It’s absurd — and that means it has to change. Will Microsoft or Yahoo ever agree to make their networks compatible with GTalk? It seems pretty unlikely right now, since all the big companies seem to see IM as a kind of Trojan horse that can bring VOIP and a host of other services to users, and help achieve “lock-in.”

I think they are wrong. Lock-in is something that very few companies achieve (operating systems being one of the main exceptions) and it’s particularly unlikely to happen when — as with IM — the whole point of the software is to be more connected and communicate with others. Anyone who facilitates that, whether it’s Trillian or Gaim or Meebo and other Web-based IM clients, will benefit.

Update:

Julian Bond at Voidstar has some interesting thoughts on the IM front as it relates to VOIP, and the Googletalk blog has some more info if you’re interested in that angle and how it relates to Libjingle.

Unlike Dave Winer, Adam Curry, Robert Scoble and other stars of the blogosphere, I don’t have an entry at wikipedia.org, so I don’t have to worry about how I would handle it if someone kept editing it to downplay something I did (as Adam Curry caught hell for doing). And I don’t have to worry about editing it myself to downplay something someone else did, as Wikipedia founder (cofounder?) Jimmy Wales is accused of doing.

Ironically — or maybe not — one of the places to find out more about Adam Curry’s misbehaviour is at the Wikipedia itself, where there is a note about his editing of the entry on podcasting, and links to more information. Someone who has been helping to dig out details about the editing by both Curry and Wales is Roger Cadenhead. He noticed that Wales had repeatedly edited the entry on Wikipedia itself to remove references to another early staffer, and to change descriptions of an earlier venture into erotica.

I have to say that I think a lot of this — particularly the Curry stuff — is kind of petty and irrelevant. Curry said he made a mistake, and whether anyone believes him or not is up to them. Maybe it’s just fun to slam him because he’s a former MTV video jock and movie star — whatever. The Wales incident is more troubling because he’s the public face of wikipedia.org and what he has done raises questions about who gets to edit what — even more so than the Siegenthaler affair. In that sense, I think Roger is doing a public service by pointing out what’s going on — and at the same time showing how the blogosphere can be a self-regulating exercise.

According to a report in the New York Times, Google has decided — in part because of pressure from America Online — to experiment with graphical, image-based advertising on some of its pages. Although the early reports were that this would be restricted to ads for AOL content as part of the $1-billion deal between the two companies, the NYT says the ads will be open not just to AOL but to any advertiser.

John Battelle’s comment on this is a simple “My, my, my.” John also warned Google recently not to “jump the shark,” because of rumours that the company was going to give AOL content preferential treatment on its search pages — something Stuart MacDonald and I discussed a bit on the comments on this recent post.

As someone commented on John’s blog, this is going to be a “tricky balancing act” for Google to pull off. On the one hand, while it may irritate the purists who like the plain look of the company’s websites, as Danny Sullivan notes, graphical ads are a reality that we all put up with just about everywhere else, including our own blogs (unless you’re too puny to get advertising, like me).

At the same time, however, the more Google becomes like everyone else the more risk there is, since that uniqueness is arguably a big part of what makes people pay the astronomical sums they do for its stock. How will it handle the changes that its deal with AOL involves? And will it be worth it?

Tom Raftery says he hopes it’s just a trial balloon that will get shot down, and Cynthia over at IPDemocracy figures it’s only a matter of time before video starts showing up too. And then what — pop-ups? Henry Blodget at Internet Outsider thinks it’s inevitable, and so does Stuart MacDonald in the comments on this item.

Update:

Marissa Mayer has a note up at the official Google blog about the AOL deal and what it means. ‘Business partnerships will never compromise the integrity or objectivity of our search results,’ she says, and ‘there will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.’ So apparently the motto ‘do no evil’ extends to evil advertising. But Danny says there is still some wiggle room for the company.