Author: Mathew Ingram

Some things you wouldn’t think you would have to explain to people — and yet, every day new examples appear: tags on an inflatable water toy that say “Not to be used as a rescue device,” or a label on a chainsaw that says “Do not stop chain with hand.” Today’s contribution comes from Maine, where if there was a warning sticker on the wall at Warren Kremer Paino Advertising it would read: “Don’t sue a blogger just because he doesn’t like your work.”

That’s exactly what happened late last week, when the firm sued a Maine blogger named Lance Dutson for what it claimed was “copyright infringement, defamation, trade libel and injurious falsehood.” Dutson, who also does some web design and advertising work, complained about the ad campaign that WKPA did for the state of Maine, referring to the agency at one point as “some big company in New York with no ties to the state, pissing away tax money.” More about the lawsuit can be found here.

First of all, let’s forget about the idea that this is about copyright infringement (for posting some of the agency’s work) or about defamation or any of that bollocks, although my pal Scott Karp is quite right to point out that this lawsuit is a warning shot across the bow of all bloggers. If you want to be treated as journalists in some sense, that includes dealing with the risk of libel and defamation lawsuits. Still, this lawsuit is clearly about WKPA (which of course makes me think of WKRP, being of a certain age) getting its nose bent about some criticism.

As Steve Rubel points out, suing a critical blogger is a particularly thick-headed thing to do. How could this possibly work out worse for the firm? It must have gotten legal advice from the RIAA’s lawyers, who came up with the brilliant idea of suing music fans across America, including high-school honour students, retired veterans and people without computers. Compared to that, WKPA’s strategy actually looks smart — but that’s about the only angle from which it appears anything less than moronic.

Now, instead of searches for the company’s name on Google producing a list of links with Lance’s website high up — which the firm said it was afraid of — it will produce a far larger list of critical links, all of which are about what an ass the firm is. Nice work there, WKRP.

Update:

The agency has withdrawn the lawsuit.

(Warning: This post contains commentary about Dave Winer. By reading further, you have agreed — both implicitly and explicitly — to read about the often mind-numbing machinations involving the “Father of RSS” and those who have chosen to use their programming powers for evil instead of good. You hereby waive any right to complain later about the fact that it has given you a headache — ed.)

I wasn’t going to write anything about the latest development in the Dave Winer and Rogers Cadenhead saga, because I’ve probably wasted enough electrons already on that topic a few times in the past, but I couldn’t resist after reading a post Rogers did on the legal settlement that he and Dave managed to hash out after Dave sued him.

Part of the reason I couldn’t resist is that I find the whole thing fascinating in a strange way (Kent Newsome also seems unable to resist) because Dave is such a legend in the programming community, and yet still seems to spend a lot of time lashing out at people over slights (either perceived or real), culminating in the lawsuit against Rogers — a guy who has spent more time than he would probably like to admit defending Dave. This comment by Rogers is brilliant:

“I originally hoped one of us would buy the other out and launch the application, but we found a much stronger basis for agreement in a mutual desire to stop working together as quickly as possible.”

And later on, after noting that the publicity from the blogosphere undoubtedly helped his case, Rogers says:

“I’m not going to close the book on this debacle with any Panglossian happy talk about how it all worked out for the best. This was a completely unnecessary sphincter-fusing legal dispute that could have been settled amicably months ago without benefit of counsel.”

Well said, Rogers. Happy to hear that it’s over.

I wrote an item for my globeandmail blog that I thought I’d reproduce here, because some people who might be interested in it might not see it there:

It’s been a busy couple of days for small Canadian tech companies: a photo and video-sharing service called Pixpo.com, which is based in Victoria and has been around for a while now, and Ottawa-based telecom startup Iotum.com. Pixpo has released a new version of its media-sharing software — which has a couple of key differences compared with other similar services — while Iotum has announced a partnership with PhoneGnome.com, a company that sells a voice-over-Internet appliance for consumers.

Pixpo, which was founded by Colin How, allows users to share their photos, music and video without having to upload it to an external website or server, as most services such as YouTube.com and Flickr.com do. Pixpo’s software allows users to connect directly to the content on your PC, and provides a nice-looking interface so they can browse through thumbnails of your photos or watch video clips with the built-in media player. Mr. How said in an email that the service uses a modified “peer-to-peer” network with a series of servers that can cache or store popular content.

Iotum, meanwhile — run by blogger Alec Saunders — has announced a deal to bundle its Relevance Engine software with VOIP devices sold by PhoneGnome. Iotum’s product uses smart filtering to determine which phone calls should be put through to a user based on the time of the call and who it is coming from, and can also determine where to send the call based on previous behaviour patterns or rules set by the user. PhoneGnome — which was started by one of the founders of Earthlink — sells a box that users can simply plug a regular phone into that provides VOIP calling, but allows them to keep their regular phone number.

Rob Hyndman recently tagged me with the “three things” meme — which is not to be confused with the “four things” meme that got Mark Cuban so worked up a little while ago (clearly the new medication is not working, Mark — I would go back to the old stuff).

The three things are supposed to be things that you would like to see occur in your lifetime, and Rob mentioned stuff like organized religion supporting contraception, while Sutha (who tagged Rob) mentioned real democracy and education for all. But being a contrary bugger by nature, my instinct is to avoid the easy stuff like ending hunger or allowing women to be ordained in the Catholic Church — both of which I would really like to see, by the way.

So here are my three wished-for things:

1) A real director’s cut version of Blade Runner (see the info under “director’s cut” at Wikipedia for more on this saga)

2) The return of the comic “Calvin and Hobbes”

3) The end of the designated-hitter rule in baseball

And now I am tagging Stuart, and Mark and Kent.

One of the concepts we’re trying to tackle as part of mesh (May 15th and 16th in beautiful downtown Toronto, get your tickets before it’s too late, etc. etc.) is the idea that Web 2.0 and blogs and all that they represent are fundamentally rewriting the rules for the marketing business — regardless of whether you are marketing a company, a product, a person, an idea or a political party.

As marketing whiz Seth Godin has written in his book Flipping the Funnel, which you can download from his website if you’re interested, one of the most effective ways to market something is to make contact with people on some kind of personal level and create a relationship, a dialogue — a conversation. As he puts it, “turn strangers into friends, turn friends into customers. And then, do the most important job: Turn your customers into salespeople.”

That (or at least the first part of it anyway) is something we — Mark, Mike, Rob, Stuart and myself — have done with mesh, more or less without even thinking about it. And the power of Web 2.0 has been a big part of the success we have had so far, in marketing a brand-new conference almost completely through word-of-mouth and the blogosphere. Less than a month after we launched the conference, we were halfway toward our ticket goal (we’ve still got a few left, so tell all your friends — heck, tell your enemies too).

Rob has his take on it here, Stuart has written about it as well and so have Mike and Mark. Stowe Boyd, who is coming to mesh, has also posted something, and so has Mitch Twist.

Flip the funnel and turn it into a megaphone, Seth says. Empower your customers or your users or your community and they will tell you what you need to hear, Tara says. Jump on board the Web 2.0 cluetrain.

If you haven’t been following the Canadian music industry (shame on you) then you might not know that a group of recording artists recently split off from the Canadian Record Industry Association or CRIA — which is pretty much controlled by the four major record labels for their own purposes — and formed their own group called the Canadian Music Creators Coalition. This is something that law professor and blogger Michael Geist has spent a lot of time on, if you want to catch up.

Today, the group had a press conference at the venerable Horseshoe Tavern, and Barenaked Ladies frontman and blogger Steven Page wrote a great op-ed piece that was in the National Post, Canada’s other national newspaper. For fans of Canadian music, the group of artists supporting the new coalition includes Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Chantal Kreviazuk, Sum 41, Billy Talent, Broken Social Scene and Sloan.

Here’s an excerpt of Steven’s excellent op-ed:

“We believe that suing our fans is destructive and hypocritical. We do not want to sue music fans, and we do not want to distort the law to coerce fans into conforming to a rigid digital market artificially constructed by the major labels.”

and another:

We believe that the use of digital locks… are risky and counterproductive. We do not support using digital locks to increase the labels’ control over the distribution, use and enjoyment of music, nor do we support laws that prohibit circumvention of such technological measures, including Canadian accession to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet Treaties. These treaties are designed to give control to major labels and take choices away from artists and consumers.

Music to our ears, Steven. More coverage at IPDemocracy and BoingBoing, as well as the aforementioned Dr. Geist.

It’s not really ironic — unless you use the broad Alanis Morrissette definition of that word — but it’s at least an interesting coincidence that just a day or two after Nick Carr lamented the fact that the Web is powered by numbskulls, someone would write what I think is an excellent overview of why the Wikipedia approach to synthesizing knowledge is a worthwhile one to pursue, despite the potential for being overrun by Mr. Carr’s numbskulls. And it’s an even more interesting coincidence that the writer in question happens to work for the same newspaper I do, the Globe and Mail.

I don’t like to write about the Globe here on my personal blog, because it’s inevitably going to be seen as navel-gazing and/or pimping for the boss, but I do make exceptions — especially when it’s about Web 2.0 and social media and that sort of thing. In this case, I think the paper’s recent editorial on the topic of Wikipedia was damn good, and I would have linked to it if someone else wrote it, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t just because it appeared in the Globe.

What’s even more impressive is that it comes from the editorial board, which many see (rightly or wrongly) as the last bastion of conservative (small “c”) thought about such newfangled gizmos as the Internet, Web 2.0, wikis and so forth. And yes, I realize that it’s also somewhat ironic that the editorial I’m linking to is behind the pay wall, but hey — everyone is trying to find their way in this new media world, and different models are being experimented with, for better or worse. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Here’s a taste of what the editorial says:

A camel is a horse designed by a committee. That old saw nicely expresses the skepticism most of us feel about collaborative thinking. We have far more respect for the individual genius — Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein — who thinks great thoughts in splendid isolation. But the rise of the Internet and the brainstorming it enables should make us rethink that old prejudice. “Are many minds better than a few?” suggested a recent headline in the Economist. Quite possibly, yes.

It goes on to give a capsule history of the Wikipedia, and what it attempts to do, as well as some of the controversies that have arisen, including the Siegenthaler affair. And then it states:

The Wikipedia model is not perfect, but its success has implications that go far beyond how people conduct research. It puts a question mark over the whole idea that information must move from credentialed producer to passive consumer. That presents established companies and organizations with a big challenge.

That is the point, in a nutshell — a point that the Globe’s editorial writers link more or less explicitly to the concept of democracy itself, just as I did in a response to Seth Finkelstein on my recent “numbskulls” post (see below). As Winston Churchill once said, democracy is the worst form of government — except, of course, for all the others.

Nick Carr, the great shit-disturber that he is, has a post up about what he sees as Web 2.0’s biggest problem: in a word, it’s “numbskulls.” Or rather, the high proportion of numbskulls — meaning either stupid people or those with more opinions than actual knowledge — when compared with people who actually know something or have whatever skills are necessary (the capacity for critical thought, a command of English grammar, etc.). As usual, Nick isn’t afraid to come off as an elitist. In fact, I think he kind of gets a kick out of it.

His point is that projects such as Wikipedia.org aren’t as good as they could be primarily because the people who have the time to devote to them aren’t necessarily the best people to be doing so, because they don’t have the skills or the knowledge — and the people who do have the skills or the knowledge are too busy, or not interested, or get outnumbered by the numbskulls. Here’s a classic Carr riff:

“Wikis and other Web 2.0 platforms for the creation of content are often described in purely egalitarian terms – as the products of communities of equals – [but] that’s just a utopian fantasy… No matter how vast, a community of mediocrities will never be able to produce anything better than mediocre work.”

And then a little later, he paints a picture of Wikipedia.org as a tiny band of smart people (most of whom attended Harvard, no doubt) holding back the wave of human stupidity that threatens to wash over them:

“When you look deeply into Wikipedia, beyond the shiny surface of “community,” you see that the encyclopedia is actually as much, or more, a product of conflict than of collaboration: It’s an endless struggle by a few talented contributors to clean up the mess left by the numbskull horde.”

As usual, Nick has a point underneath all that elitism, and it comes into sharper focus if you read a post by Andrew McAfee that Nick links to. McAfee’s point, as he puts it, is that “there’s also a long tail among people, and it relates not to willingness to consume (i.e. demand) but rather to willingness to produce.” Ross Mayfield makes a similar point about the numbers of people who are willing to contribute to Web 2.0-type ventures, in a post about the “power law of participation.” Ross has also posted a response to Nick, which is here.

So how do you get more people to contribute — or fewer numbskulls? In a response to a comment I posted on his blog, Nick says that he wasn’t suggesting en elite group should pick who contributes and who doesn’t, although I think it’s fair to infer that from what he has written. In any case, how do you guard against the numbskulls? In a post of his own, Umair Haque seems to be arguing much the same thing I would, which is that Wikipedia-type models are self-regulating to some extent, although they probably need “super-users” to guard against vandalism.

Unfortunately, Nick, when you open yourself up to a conversation, sometimes numbskulls show up. Comes with the territory. And as Andrew McAfee argues, the benefits of doing so outweigh the risks, even in a corporate environment. But to make it work, a company’s management has to really want it to, and has to be willing to accept the bad with the good.

As a lead-up to mesh in May, the Gang of Five — that is me, Rob Hyndman, Mark Evans, Mike McDerment and Stuart “call me Chairman Mao” MacDonald — have been talking a lot (not surprisingly) about the themes we want to look at, and crawling the blogosphere for evidence of how Web 2.0 and blogs are — or aren’t — affecting media, marketing, business and society/politics.

We decided to look at that last one in part because of the effect that bloggers had on the coverage of the Iraq war, on the election of George Bush and even on events such as the Jayson Blair affair at the New York Times — but also because of the effect that bloggers like Michael Geist and Ed “Captain’s Quarters” Morrissey and Joey DeVilla had on the Canadian election, when they helped destabilize and possibly derail the candidacy of Sarmite Bulte, the record labels’ best friend.

But we want to talk about more than that during the panels on the Web and politics/society at mesh in May. Could blogs and other Web-based technologies help non-profit groups and disadvantaged groups gain more of a voice, and thus help affect policy? And even broader than that, what are the implications of “open source” tools such as Wikipedia.org on human society — do they make it better or just reflect the worst elements of human nature? Mark wonders what Jane Jacobs could have done with a blog, and Rob asks whether they turn the blogosphere into an echo chamber. Stuart has some thoughts as well.

There’s plenty of material there for an entire conference, let alone a few panels and keynotes. Hopefully we’ll be able to pack enough of it into the time we have, and get plenty of participation and comments from attendees. If you have any thoughts or links, you can post them here or head over to the mesh wiki and throw them onto a page, or tag them with our del.icio.us links (described at the wiki).

As Rob Hyndman has pointed out on his blog, in organizing the mesh conference coming up in Toronto this May, we have tried to drink as much of our own kool-aid as possible — figuratively, that is — by using Web 2.0 services and features in both planning the conference and in the actual setup, including del.icio.us tags. As Rob has written in the past, we’ve also have made great use of Basecamp, Writeboard.com, Google Chat, Writely.com and Mollyguard. For billing, naturally, we use SecondSite from Mike McDerment (one of the mesh organizers) and his team.

We’ve also added a wiki to the meshconference.com website, which David Crow and the Toronto BarCamp gang helped put together, which allows anyone who is attending to post an offer of a ride, or ask for one, or add links and comments to the various pages that have been set up there. There is also a page for each stream — media, marketing, business and society — with a list of the del.icio.us tags for each panel. Rob and Mark and I have already been tagging articles and blog posts that we’ve come across over the past month or so, to get the categories started, but we’d love it if others wanted to add things that they see too, and then our moderators and panelists will have something they can look over that will help them get up to speed (if they aren’t already).

So if you see a piece that has something interesting to say about how the “social Web” is affecting either media, marketing, businesses or society/politics, get out your del.icio.us labelling gun and tag away.

If you live in Canada and just can’t get enough of the domain-name game, Stuart MacDonald would like to hear from you. Stuart’s the guy who started Expedia.ca and has helped us whip the mesh conference into shape over the past couple of months with his mad shao-lin meeting skillz 🙂 And now he is the chairman of the committee that is in charge of nominating people for the board of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, which is in charge of .ca domain names. Get your applications in early — after you register for mesh, of course.

• Google bought Writely.com, which is great, but they might want to take a look at ThinkFree Office, which PCWorld really likes and which just launched an upgrade, including a gigabyte of free storage.
• Michelle Malkin has launched a conservative blogging and podcasting network called Hot Air (nice, self-deprecating name there Michelle). She calls it “the world’s first full-service conservative Internet broadcast network.” Lookout, Fox.
• Kathy Sierra, whose site I am growing to like more and more even though it makes my head hurt a lot, writes about “moving up the wisdom hierarchy.” Lots to think about.
• This makes no sense whatsoever: Skype says it will be selling music from EMI. Is there a business case here I’m missing, or is selling downloads now the online equivalent of selling gum at the cash register — it’s cheap and everybody likes it, so why not?
• Looks like one of my favourite comedians has a friend in high places: Sacha Baron Cohen, otherwise known as Borat, made some enemies by claiming to be from Kazakhstan — but now the daughter of the leader of that nation says she supports him.

It’s always fun when a rumour — or a rumour-based news story, which is often the same thing — gets poo-poohed by just about everyone, and then turns out to be true. It happened with eBay and Skype not that long ago, and now it’s Scott McNealy’s turn to put one over on The Register and Techdirt and all the other websites and news services that said he wasn’t going to step down as the company’s CEO. Well, he has. The rumours have been going around for awhile now, which is why plenty of people thought they likely weren’t true. They started with Caris & Co. analyst Mark Stahlman, who said in a report in March that since McNealy had more or less managed to right the sinking ship of Sun’s fortunes, he might step down.

More recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that it was likely to happen, but they didn’t have much in the way of timing or details, and so The Register made fun of them for it, and Techdirt likewise poured cold water on the idea, noting that it probably came from Stahlman just like the earlier rumours, and therefore wasn’t any more credible. Maybe Scott timed his departure to make some of those sources look stupid. I wouldn’t put it past him.

As McNealy himself said, “After me, things get boring.” Although he grew quieter as Sun’s stock melted over the past few years (although it has picked up recently), it was fun during the heyday of the Bill and Scott wars to hear what McNealy was going to come out with next. CNET has a great collection of some of his gems, including calling Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates “Ballmer and Butthead” and Windows NT “a giant hair ball.” And despite the dead ends and strategic mistakes, the vision that McNealy and Sun had of “the network is the computer” is a lot closer to being reality than anything Microsoft has come up with.

Now Gates has moved on to become a “chief evangelist” and Scott is doing so too. Does that mean Sun is going to get bought by Google, as some would like to think? Probably not. But expect them to get a whole lot closer. Jonathan Schwartz and Google’s Eric Schmidt are not only former colleagues, but they think alike on a lot of topics. Things could get interesting. The new CEO has a blog post up.

According to a recent piece in the New York Post, Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs — now also known as the King of Digital Music — is close to winning his battle against the four major record labels, a battle he has been fighting for the past year or so. On the face of it, the issue is fairly simple: Steve wants to keep prices fixed at 99 cents per song, and the record labels want variable pricing. The reality is a little more complicated.

The natural assumption is that the big bad record labels want to push prices up and gouge the consumer even further — and let’s face it, that’s not exactly a stretch, given their history of that kind of thing. But is having Apple fix the prices at 99 cents a song any better? Sure, there are other music services, such as Rhapsody and eMusice and… well, I can’t think of any other ones (except my favourite, allofmp3.com). Setting the prices becomes a different thing when you control as large a proportion of the market as Apple.

Fighting the labels on variable pricing keeps prices of new songs at 99 cents, and therefore prevents the record companies from charging more for their big hits — but it also keeps prices of older songs at 99 cents, when the record companies might like to (and arguably should be able to) price them lower so they can make some money from their “back catalogue” — although some argue they have no intention of doing this.

So is keeping prices fixed at 99 cents a good thing? It is for Apple, but I’m not so sure it is for you or me (Chris “Long Tail” Anderson isn’t sure either). Obviously, a retailer can charge whatever they want for something and consumers are free to go somewhere else — I’m just not sure Steve should be getting all the high fives for digging in his heels on this one.

I’m not sure why, but I don’t really find it that surprising that Yahoo employee and mobility evangelist Russell Beattie has hung up his keyboard and closed the doors on his blog, even though he doesn’t really give any reason for the decision. I guess I’m not surprised because it wasn’t that long ago that Russell closed his blog to comments, something I criticized him for at the time — and I think shutting off comments might have been just the first step on a road that led to where Russell is now.

I’m not saying he was wrong to turn off commenting on his blog. That’s a decision each blogger has to make for themselves. As Dave Winer pointed out to me one of the last times I brought this up, Adam Green of Darwinian Web doesn’t have comments and that doesn’t make him a bad person (I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear that, Adam). I just happen to think that having comments, as much as it can be a major pain in the ass, is one of the key things that makes a blog a blog, rather than just a place where you put your thoughts or preach at people. It’s how you become part of the conversation.

So while Russell didn’t really give any reason for deciding to close his blog down, other than to say that he “just decided that I really needed a break, and that I’d really much rather start from scratch at another URL some other time when I’m ready to write again,” I think that shutting off comments was a sign of just being tired with the whole blogging thing, for whatever reason (Om reminds us that sometimes less is more). And closing the doors to the blog completely is obviously the end point of that process. Here’s hoping Russell comes back reinvigorated at some point and rejoins the conversation.