Author: Mathew Ingram

Well, that didn’t take long. It’s only been a few months since Google bought YouTube, and now it is signing deals with broadcasters — in this case, British Sky Broadcasting or BSkyB — to handle a host of video-related functions, including searching within video, feeding ads into video streams and providing a YouTube-style platform for uploaded video content from users.

Of course, Google was working on video search and video advertising for some time before it bought YouTube, but now it has the full package of abilities and tools to offer someone like BSkyB. It’s interesting that the company went with a British broadcaster instead of someone from the U.S. Google said the choice had to do with higher broadband speeds in Britain, but I wonder whether there isn’t some resistance from U.S. networks who think that they can do all of those things themselves, and therefore they don’t need Google.

According to the Financial Times story, the deal involves search and a YouTube-style hosting service to begin with, but will eventually be extended to video advertising on BSkyB channels, with advertisements stored on the broadcaster’s set-top boxes and then fed into video streams by Google based on its algorithms. “This is a really, really big deal for us,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt. “If it works, it will become our most lucrative deal from the get-go.”

It’s also the first time that Google will be providing the Gmail engine to someone else for use in powering their email — which BSkyB will offer along with the video tools — according to Google Operating System. And the Guardian says that the British network will also be offering Google’s VOIP services, as well as data storage and other services (the much-rumoured GDrive perhaps?). A pretty interesting deal, and possibly the blueprint for similar deals with other broadcasters.

Obviously, the death of CNet editor James Kim — who had spent days trying to find help for his family, stranded in deep snow in a remote valley in Oregon — is a tragedy. But it shouldn’t be blamed on the use of Google Maps. I’ve seen a few sites where that issue has been raised, including the Lost Remote blog and a Wired blog.

This is apparently based on the fact that the Kims took a forest-service road through the Oregon wilderness — called Bear Camp road — that is not plowed or maintained in the winter, took a wrong turn and got lost. According to a local news report, authorities speculated that the Kims might have used Google Maps, since both Yahoo Maps and MapQuest suggest other routes but Google recommends Bear Camp road.

On the Lost Remote blog, one commenter even asks whether a mapping service can be found legally responsible for leading people astray. A CNN story, however, notes that even some printed maps don’t specify that the Bear Camp route is not suitable for winter driving. According to the story, the 2005-2007 state highway map has a warning in red print that says “This route closed in winter,” but a Rand-McNally map doesn’t.

State troopers said the family had been using a printed map, but it wasn’t clear which one. This story says someone warned the Kims that the road was not maintained in winter (Shelley has also written about it). The bottom line is that the Kims could easily have found themselves where they were without being lured there by an online map. Whenever a tragedy occurs, the tendency is to want to find someone to blame, but Google is the wrong target.

Update:

More info on the mapping issue can be found here, here and here (thanks to Mike Pegg of Google Maps Mania for those links). And please read the comments here for some other perspectives and clarification. And according to this story, while the surviving members of the family were rescued by a helicopter hired by the family, they were first spotted by a recreational helicopter pilot who knows the area well.

Update 2:

James Kim’s father Spencer Kim has written an op-ed piece for the Washington Post about his son’s death and the problems that led up to it — from road warning signs being removed and gates left unlocked to media helicopters disrupting the search.

Nick Denton, the Gawker Media supremo who recently took over as editor of Valleywag (former editor Nick Douglas just popped up at Huffington Post’s Eat The Press), loves to take shots at a few people — including Jason Calacanis, who is apparently now an executive with venture group Sequioa Capital — and Mike Arrington of TechCrunch is definitely high up on that list.

Nick loves to use a graphic with Mike’s face and the logo “Red Herrington” (which is a shot on several different levels), and he never misses a chance to try and take the piss — as the British say — by making fun of TechCrunch or Mike’s various other interests. So it’s interesting to see Nick providing some friendly advice to his nemesis in a recent Valleywag post.

The reason for his advice was a comment by Mike in a recent profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, in which TechCrunch is described (somewhat breathlessly) as “Mr. Web 2.0,” a kingmaker among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.” At one point, when asked whether there is anyone against whom he holds a grudge, he says Nick Denton — because “Nick Denton is evil.”

And the advice from Nick? “If you’re in a good old-fashioned tabloid war, never let them get to you — and never ever let them know they’ve got to you.” In other words, chill out dude (which is exactly what Mike has said he plans to do, taking two months off to rest and ski at his parents’ place in upstate Washington). Or, as old military types like to say: “Illegitimus non carborundum” — which loosely translates as “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

I’ve talked with several friends about LinkedIn since the Business 2.0 puff piece profile hit the Web — calling the service “MySpace for Grownups” — and the reaction to the company ranges from puzzled indifference to outright revulsion. Like me, many people seem to have signed up because it seemed like a good thing to do at the time, but have gotten very little out of it except contact requests from people we would much rather not hear from.

Is that just a few anti-social people, or a sign of a flawed business model? I would argue it’s the latter. Yes, it’s true that LinkedIn is making money, primarily by charging people to send emails to contacts they don’t know (in other words, to send something that might be considered spam). But the Business 2.0 headline inadvertently points out what I think is the main problem: it isn’t really MySpace at all. In other words, it’s a so-called “social network” that isn’t very social, and I would argue that’s a fatal flaw.

Seamus McCauley puts his finger on it in a recent post at Virtual Economics:

Here’s the problem with LinkedIn – it doesn’t do anything. You sign up, you find some colleagues, you link to them and then…nothing.

Umair Haque of Bubblegeneration says that what LinkedIn is doing is “buying marginal profitability at the expense of scale” (thanks to Seamus for the link). As he points out, the service restricts what you can do — even within your own profile — to such a degree that it makes it virtually impossible to connect with people in any other way but the one or two authorized methods.

MySpace and Facebook and Flickr are popular because they make it easy to connect, share photos, send emails or messages, tag things, search, etc. (yes, you need approval to add someone as a friend on MySpace or Facebook, but you don’t have to pay). LinkedIn does none of those things. In fact, the only thing it does is make it easy for people to spam you with contact requests. Unless it finds a way to expand into a real social network, it is doomed.

Jerry Bowles has some thoughts on his Enterprise Web 2.0 blog, and says that the Business 2.0 article reads like “a wedding announcement written by the bride’s mother.” Good one, Jerry. And Seamus has posted an update to his previous post with some more thoughts about LinkedIn and how it needs to “let go.” And Chuqui is one of those who finds great value in what the network does.

Call it the OMpire — as Liz Gannes calls it, in a good-humoured jab at her boss — or the OMniverse, as Susan Mernit dubs it here, Om Malik’s blog dominion continues to increase. And that (as Martha used to say) is a good thing. Some of the fastest and smartest coverage of new media is coming from people like Om, and Rafat and Staci at PaidContent.org (where I noticed Jimmy Guterman’s name show up the other day), as well as Cynthia Brumfield at IPDemocracy.com.

New TeeVee, helmed by Liz with people like Jackson West and Russell Shaw contributing, will focus on anything to do with video online, from startups like Howard Lindzon’s Wallstrip to mega-deals like YouTube, as Om describes here. The GigaOm network now includes the main blog, Web Worker Daily, New TeeVee and the upcoming GigaGamez (a blog about the IP networking business has been taken back to the shop for some tinkering, Om says).

Very smart indeed, as Erick Schonfeld points out. Nice work, Om — although I still think it makes sense for you and Mike Arrington to get hitched. Now go get some sleep.

I’ve come across various versions of this story, but I still love hearing it: Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, gets asked by a couple of young kids from Stanford if he would look at their little Web search doo-dad, the one with a weird name. Halfway through a demo, Andy says “We could go on talking, but why don’t I just write you a check?”

Andy then proceeds to write out a check for $100,000 to Google Inc., a company that didn’t even exist yet for legal purposes. Larry says he left it in his desk drawer for a month while they got a lawyer and actually set up a company. This tale is told in their own words in the notes from an interview that John Ince did for Upside magazine back in January of 2000, which he has written about for the San Francisco Chronicle.

The audio tapes from that interview are also being released in a special event described here (thanks to Paul Kedrosky for the link). One of the hilarious parts of the story behind the story is that Ince’s editor at the magazine told him to rewrite the piece and make it more skeptical because, he said, “I personally know these guys and they don’t know what they’re doing. They have no business model.”

What makes this even funnier is that — although it doesn’t look like it now — the editor was half-right. They did know what they were doing, but they didn’t have a business model (who needed one in 1999?). At the mesh conference last May, Paul Kedrosky described how he talked to two of the original VCs who funded Google and they admitted they were scared sh**less because they didn’t know how the company was actually going to make money.

Luckily, Google knew a good idea when they saw it — Overture’s search-related contextual ads — and built a $150-billion business in a little over 5 years. Andy, of course, looks a little smart.

There have been several forays into “citizen journalism” — or “networked journalism” as Jeff Jarvis likes to call it — with the BBC being one of the major media outlets to have invited users to submit photos and stories. ABC News is also working with Vancouver-based social-media site NowPublic, as described here.

Now, Yahoo and Reuters are getting into the game, according to the New York Times (reg. required). Starting today, photos and videos submitted by the general public — through a website called You Witness News — will be included in the news feeds that appear on Yahoo News and the Reuters website, and next year those submissions (which are vetted by editors) will start being distributed to mainstream media outlets as well.

The issue of payment continues to be one of the major sticking points in these efforts, which Seth Finkelstein likes to call “digital sharecropping.” The BBC has said that it will pay those who submit photos or videos, but only if they are significant in some way — and what would qualify as significant remains to be defined (would video of Michael Richards having a racist meltdown qualify?). Reuters plans to pay if photos are distributed to media outlets, but not if they just appear on Yahoo:

Users will not be paid for images displayed on the Yahoo and Reuters sites. But people whose photos or videos are selected for distribution to Reuters clients will receive a payment. Mr. Ahearn said the company had not yet figured out how to structure those payments.

Should “citizen journalists” be paid for photos when they are used, even on the Web? Freelancers get paid, even if they aren’t stringers. And if they are paid, how much should they be paid? Should they be able to retain the copyright and sell it elsewhere, or should they have to surrender their rights in order to be compensated?

These are some of the issues big media and new media have to confront. More on this from Cynthia Brumfield at IPDemocracy, Staci at PaidContent and Om Malik at Gigaom — three excellent examples of new media in the flesh. At ZDNet, blogger/columnist Steve O’Hear (who produced and appeared in the documentary In Search of the Valley) also has some thoughts.

What happens when the operating system you use doesn’t really matter any more? It started with dual-booting Windows and Linux, and using things like Crossover Office to run Windows apps under Linux (which is balky at best), and then things like Virtual PC for Mac, and now we have Apples with Intel chips that can dual-boot Windows and Mac OS-X with Boot Camp. But dual-booting is a pain, because you have to close everything and restart your computer.

Virtualization is where it’s at — running two operating systems side-by-side, so you can flip back and forth. I’ve never used it, but Parallels looks like a truly amazing experience. Windows XP and Mac OS-X running right next to each other, and the latest upgrade allows you to move Windows apps outside the Parallels window and drag and copy things from one OS to the other. Very cool. Michael Verdi has a screencast here.

There has been talk that Apple would include some form of virtualization in Leopard, the next upgrade to the Mac OS, but Apple executives recently quashed that speculation, saying the company is happy with Boot Camp and that Parallels involves “performance degradation.” By which they mean it causes your system to run a lot slower. Some Parallels users have said the same, but others have said for most normal computing tasks it runs fine (in other words, no video games or other graphics-hogging apps).

If you can run Mac OS and Windows on the same machine and use whichever program you want, and drag data back and forth at will between the two, what does an operating system mean? In a sense, it just becomes a visual preference rather than a system or standards choice. And if you spend most of your time using Web apps, the operating system means even less. We’re not quite there yet, of course, but would such a world help Apple or Windows more?

My friend Clive Thompson has a great piece in the latest New York Times magazine that looks at whether Web 2.0-type tools such as blogs, wikis and other “social media” can help the U.S. intelligence community get better at their jobs. As the article notes early on, most of the research that has been done on the attacks of September 11, 2001 has shown that many of the pieces were there to indicate that something serious was in the works, but no one put them all together.

The story begins with an anecdote about a young geek who shows up at his new job with the Defense Intelligence Agency expecting to find all kinds of great technology for tracking the bad guys, and instead finds an ancient computer network with either poor or non-existent connections between different intelligence agencies and instant messaging systems that were incompatible. What better way to get people sharing information than with wikis and blogs?

I can almost hear Web 2.0 skeptics like Nick “The Prophet of Doom” Carr and Andrew “Web 2.0 is Communism 2.0” Keen snorting with derision at this idea. Blogs and wikis for spies? What will they think of next. But Clive’s story deals with the downside of social media as well — including the issue of getting people to actually use the tools when they are available. Spies are notoriously secretive, even when dealing with other spooks. How do you get them to share?

When it gets right down to it, however, Clive’s story makes the point that intelligence is about information, and if you don’t have fast access to the right information then you are lost, as the 9/11 report made clear. And what is the Web but a tool for aggregating and finding information? Better still, because intelligence agencies are using Web 2.0-type tools on secure networks with restricted access, the signal-to-noise ratio should (theoretically) be higher.

Although they are fighting the inherent bureaucracy within the U.S. intelligence community — which is arguably larger and more entrenched than virtually any corporate bureaucracy — it’s nice to know that there are those who are fighting to use Web-style tools to help break down some of those walls. Andrew McAfee, the Harvard Business School professor who is a champion of “Enterprise 2.0,” seems to feel the same.

From the London Telegraph comes a rumour that Hitwise — one of the half a dozen web-traffic measurement companies whose stats show up in press releases, and are used as fuel for takeover rumours — is itself the subject of takeover talks, with the price tag reportedly an eye-popping 180 million pounds or about $350-million (U.S.). Joe Duck says this sounds about right if Hitwise charges its 1,200 or so clients an average of $2,500 a month for access to its data.

I’m not sure where Joe gets those numbers from, but let’s assume he’s right. That works out to annual revenue of about $36-million, which makes the rumoured takeover price between 9 and 10 times revenue. Joe says that’s “not outrageous” for an established and growing Internet company, which leads me to believe one thing — no, not that Joe is on crack, but that he has a very high threshold for outrage.

I think between 9 and 10 times revenue is bubble-type math. And yes, I know that Google sells for 15 times revenue; in fact, that actually helps my case. Obviously, traffic measurement is a hot area right now, primarily because advertisers are desperate to find a way of deciding where to put their money, and websites are desperate to find a way of proving they are the right place to put it.

Using page views as a metric, as Steve Rubel notes, is broken. But then, the different standards used by Hitwise and comScore and Nielsen and Alexa aren’t much better. As Matt Marshall pointed out, website measurement as a whole is a train wreck. Alexa only measures users who install a browser plugin and is biased towards the U.S.; comScore uses a piece of software that has been accused of being spyware; Nielsen phones people and asks them what they do; and Hitwise uses ISP log files.

What you typically wind up with is half a dozen measurements that all say something different — in some cases, one firm will show a website falling in popularity or flat, while another shows its traffic zooming. Is Hitwise any better than its competitors? Who knows. But any way you slice it, 9 or 10 times revenue is a boatload of cash.

Remember the “Million-Dollar Homepage”? A 21-year-old guy named from Wiltshire, England named Alex Tew came up with an insanely brilliant and at the same time ridiculously stupid idea: auction off individual pixels on a webpage to companies as advertising space, and then use the money to pay for university. As Homer Simpson once put it, Alex was stupid like a fox. Companies paid, in part because people wrote about the site, and last January the site sold its last pixel.

The total haul? $1.04-million. Alex paid for his first year of university two weeks after he opened the site, and raised more than $150,000 within just two months. He went to university but dropped out because he was too busy with all the interview requests and related opportunities. So what has Alex decided to do? As Natali explains at TechCrunch, he’s doing pretty much the same thing, but without the university tuition pitch, and for $2 a pixel instead of $1 — with a lottery to see who wins half of the $2-million purse.

Natali figures people will be too smart this time, because it’s already been done, and because it’s obvious that the new site Pixelotto is just a marketing ploy, and not some innocent student trying to pay for his calculus books. I’m not so sure though.

As more than one commenter has pointed out over at TechCrunch, the secret is publicity — if it gets written about, companies will want to ride on that wagon no matter how stupid it might seem. And there’s no question it is unbelievably stupid. The original site looks like a bad acid trip, with tiny banners crammed up against each other, completely unreadable. Is that good marketing?

In the end, of course, Alex laughed all the way to the bank — and likely will again. Anyone who comes up with a new definition of the “tax on the stupid” (as I like to call lotteries) deserves everything he gets.

Having written a few editorials, I know that it is a difficult art. The best editorials have a strong point of view — a way of gracefully cutting to the point of an issue — but enough nuance to make it clear the writer knows what he or she is talking about. The worst are all bombast, displaying an ignorance of the facts that undercuts the editorial’s argument. Unfortunately, it seems as though a recent editorial about Google in the Wall Street Journal fell towards the latter end of the spectrum.

The point of the editorial (which is behind a pay wall) is stated up high:

The firm’s practice of downloading and reproducing books, articles, photographs and other creative materials without approval of the copyright owners is legally ambiguous… Google pits the rights of intellectual property owners against the Web’s ability to “democratize” information for everyone.

There’s nothing wrong with that point — what Google is doing is legally ambiguous, and there is an inherent tension there between Google wanting to index information and content owners wanting it not to.

So far, so good. But then a little further on, things get confused, as Tim Lee at the Technology Liberation Front describes it. The WSJ editorial writer cites a paper that Tim wrote for the free-enterprise Cato Institute, but mostly gets it wrong. It says his paper argues that “transformative” technologies like search engines should be exempt from many copyright lawsuits — but as Tim points out, all he was doing in his paper was summarizing what the U.S. courts have said.

He also notes that the editorial says Google “claims “a legal safe harbor” from copyright infringement under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows Internet firms to provide a thumbnail of copyrighted material.” But while there is a “safe harbor” clause in the DMCA (which leads to the so-called “notice and takedown” rule), it has nothing to do with thumbnails.

Then the WSJ talks about how Google is claiming

A right to reproduce and distribute intellectual property without permission as long as it promptly stops the trespass if the copyright owner objects. That’s like saying you have a legal right to hop over your neighbor’s fence and swim in their pool — unless they complain.

The first problem is that Google isn’t asserting any such thing; the DMCA explicitly confers that right. It also isn’t anything like climbing over a neighbour’s fence, since that has to do with property rights and not copyright, and they are very different (for what should be obvious reasons).

So an editorial that has a good point gets all confused in the middle, loses track of the facts, and then employs a dubious metaphor. I would give it a B minus, or possibly even a C, given how important the topic is. Mike Masnick over at Techdirt is similarly unimpressed.

Update:

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has a long and thoughtful post on the subject of the content business and aggregation, and so does Tim O’Reilly.

Original post

Jack Shafer, who like me is an old-media geezer, has a great piece in Slate about the newspaper business, the primary point of which is that the industry has been confronting an oncoming freight train — and having endless meetings and focus groups about it — for more than 30 years now. To that extent, the apocryphal frog in the pot of water (who never notices as it heats up) is probably a better metaphor, since it has been coming so slowly that it’s easy to ignore.

There are some nice bits in Jack’s piece, including a description of the Newspaper Readership Project from 1976 and a Los Angeles Times story written about it entitled “Newspapers Challenged as Never Before,” and an amazing statistic: “The number of U.S. households and the combined circulation of all daily newspapers was almost at par — about 70 million households versus 60 million in circulation. Today, the number of U.S. households exceeds 100 million, but daily circulation is flat or down a couple million from the 1970s.”

But one of the things that really struck me was Jack’s comparison of newspapers to other forms of media, including TV and music (an extension of the argument made by William Bulkeley in a recent WSJ piece). Just as people grew frustrated with compact discs when technology came along that allowed them to sample or download just the songs they wanted, so newspapers are under pressure because people don’t necessarily want to sit down and read all the stuff in their newspaper, and now they have an alternative.

In that sense, the Internet is far more threatening that either radio or TV. Yes, both of those also put pressure on the news-gathering part of being a newspaper, but they were also very similar forms of media — you had to listen or watch at a specific time, and that had limitations. The Internet is always on, and there is as much or as little information as you could possibly want. Information is being atomized and distributed, and that is very difficult to compete with using traditional tools.

(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

Given the kind of publicity that Bram Cohen and BitTorrent have recently gotten by announcing deals with Warner Brothers and other movie studios and content owners, it’s worth noting that a Toronto-based company got there long before BitTorrent — at least in terms of the technology, if not the public awareness.

OpenCola was a technology startup with a peer-to-peer (P2P) application of the same name that was similar to Kazaa and Limewire, but years before either of those would become household names. On Thursday, the successor to OpenCola announced a $5-million financing deal with two Japanese venture-capital funds.

In the late 1990s, a young programmer named Justin Chapweske had developed a technology he called Swarmcast that was designed for sending large files over the Internet. It did this by chopping each file up into tiny bits, distributing those bits to many different hosts, and then allowing users to download those bits from any location — at which point the software would reassemble them into the original file. In other words, exactly the same process used by BitTorrent, except that Swarmcast was developed in 1999 and BitTorrent didn’t appear until 2002.

Justin wound up joining Toronto-based OpenCola — whose founders included Cory Doctorow, one of the editors behind BoingBoing. Unfortunately, that coincided with a downturn in technology markets, and OpenCola did not survive. The technology was sold to Waterloo, Ont.-based Open Text Corp. Justin Chapweske later started another company called Onion Networks and eventually reacquired the rights to the Swarmcast technology.

So why is BitTorrent a relatively well-known name and Swarmcast is not? Because the two took different approaches to commercializing their software. Bram Cohen chose the “open source” route and released the code for his software so that anyone could use or distribute it (so long as they didn’t charge money for it or claim it as their own). It quickly became the technology of choice for downloading everything from cracked software and illegally copied movies to pornography, although it was also used for distributing large files such as the various flavours of the Linux operating system. And that in turn got the attention of content owners.

Swarmcast, meanwhile, decided to focus on working behind the scenes with companies that would have an interest in distributing large amounts of content over the Internet — including distributing digital films to movie theatres. The company also helps power MLB.com, the major-league baseball service, which distributes huge quantities of video and audio to baseball fans. Not as sexy as doing deals with Hollywood movie studios, but not bad either.

Is Arianna going to huff and puff and blow the traditional media down? According to the New York Times (reg. required), the Huffington Post blog network is getting into the journalism business in a big way. The site only started 18 months ago but has become a serious online player, with 2.3 million unique visitors a month — more than some mainstream newspaper websites.

Huffington says it has hired Melinda Henneberger, a former New York Times reporter and Newsweek staffer, as its political editor, and plans to hire “a number” of other journalists to help it produce online journalism “with attitude.” The Post is already doing something along those lines with its Eat The Press feature, whose editor Rachel Sklar is a Canadian transplant.

This is obviously what Huffington has planned for the $5-million in financing the site got from Softbank Capital earlier this year (it also has funding from Greycroft Partners, backers of Rafat Ali’s online media shop, PaidContent). Arianna said she will be hiring investigative journalists and reporters with video expertise. They will travel, have deadlines and (gasp!) get paid, just like “real” journalists.

Coincidentally, there’s been a lot of talk over the past few days about Kevin Maney’s recent piece for USA Today about what to do with newspapers — which my friend and former journalist Mark Evans discusses here. In my view, newspapers had better get their running shoes on, because online media like Huffington Post and PaidContent are already halfway down the track.

Update:

As Jeff Jarvis notes, this announcement comes just over a week after two senior journalists left the Washington Post to join an online media startup that plans to focus on multi-platform political reporting.