Category: Uncategorized

For a number of months now, the online magazine Salon has been building a hosted blog network/media hub called open.salon.com, which launched this morning. According to a recent blog post by Open Salon director Kerry Lauerman a few weeks ago, the network has attracted about 1,300 bloggers while it was in beta. I came across some invites that Kerry posted on a number of blogs, including this one; other bloggers participating include this one and this one. One blog quoted from Salon’s invitation email:

“We don’t want to oversell it, but we really think that with the help of smart media people like you, we can begin to invert the pyramid of only a few people controlling the global conversation, and figure out new ways to liberate great ideas and great writing for an ever-growing avid audience.”

According to the description by Lauerman, the new Salon site or network is both a hosted blog community and a media hub or aggregator. When you go to the open.salon.com site, you get a “cover page” that features posts from a variety of blogs, as well as a tag cloud showing the most popular tags. The page also shows the most highly-rated posts — since blog posts within Open Salon can be given a “thumbs up,” much like other social-media sites (and some mainstream media sites such as globeandmail.com, which has a “recommend” feature on every story). If you set up a blog, you get to add friends, and then their most recent posts appear in your sidebar.

Continue reading “Salon builds it — but will anyone come?”

John Biggs’ post at CrunchGear about a video his coworker made lampooning Twitter (which I’ve embedded below for your viewing pleasure) provided hard evidence that the Hitler video meme is still alive and well, putting it right up there with “You’re The Man Now, Dog” as one of the longest-lived Internet memes. What’s fascinating about the Hitler video theme is that it’s so incredibly inappropriate and tasteless that it simultaneously makes some people outraged — at the idea that something so serious would be used to make fun of something so inane and ridiculous — and at the same time makes fun of those people for being so serious. Wired magazine wrote a great roundup of the Hitler meme back in May, noting that the same clip (from the movie Der Untergang or Downfall) has been used to make fun of Xbox 360 problems, Vista blue screens and fans of the Dallas Cowboys. Enjoy — or not 🙂

http://blip.tv/play/ih_F3GmJ5FQ

 

Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron has been dropping hints for some time now about a big deal involving his occasionally troubled video-blogging startup, and now the news has finally broken: Rocketboom has signed a seven-figure distribution and marketing deal with Sony. As described by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch, the arrangement is structured in such a way that the entertainment giant could either acquire Rocketboom if things go well, or relinquish control to Baron if they don’t.

Andrew gives his rationale for the deal in a post on his blog. Among other things, he notes in passing that the legal battle for control of Rocketboom with former host (and disputed co-founder) Amanda Congdon made it virtually impossible for the video blog to sign any partnerships or financing deals as other startups have.

Continue reading “Rocketboom: Sony signs rent-to-own deal”

At the risk of inciting the Apple faithful and iPhone devotees, I can’t help but note that the recent shenanigans with the App Store are more than a little disturbing. As Don Reisinger at Mashable notes, the store belongs to Apple, and therefore the company can do whatever it wants — including removing apps without warning, then allowing them back on, and then suddenly removing them again. And it’s entirely possible that the company had a good reason for removing the most recent app, Box Office. But was it because the app was insecure in some way? Because it breached the terms of the company’s developer agreement? Because it made the iPhone unstable? No one is saying.

It could be that — as some of the commenters on the Gizmodo post about the latest removal are speculating — Box Office infringed on some sort of trademark (there are reports that the app has been renamed “Now Playing”), or was unstable in some way and caused technical issues with iPhones. But there is no way of knowing. What’s interesting to me are the numbers of negative comments, including many from developers, who seem to be less than impressed with the way Apple seems to remove apps willy-nilly — without any notice or explanation — and who see this kind of attitude as being all of a piece with the company’s use of DRM and other overly intrusive strategies.

Continue reading “Apple to iPhone users: No app for you”

William Patry, a giant in the field of copyright law and a welcome voice of sanity amid the frequent clashes between copyright and digital media, has decided to end his blog (although he has since said he is reinstating his archive after initially removing it). His first reason for doing so — that he has become frustrated by the fact that people conflate his views on copyright with those of his employer, Google, and that he is tired of dealing with “the crazies” — is easy to sympathize with. As a prominent voice of reason, he has no doubt been the subject of many attacks from both sides of the issue. But it’s his second reason that makes me (and so do some others) more than a little depressed. As he describes it:

Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners.

Continue reading “Sad news for copyright: Patry quits blogging”

So Google is being sued by a couple who believe that their privacy was invaded when a photo of their house appeared on the Web giant’s Streetview service, which features 360-degree photos taken from a fleet of specially-equipped Volkswagen Beetles. And a privacy watchdog group has tried to bring attention to the issue by releasing a document that contains some photos of Google co-founder Larry Page’s house, as well a dissection of the likely route that he takes to work (assuming he doesn’t take the helicopter, of course). This, the group says, shows the “chilling amount of visual information” that Google has.

Does it really, though? All that the photos (one of which appeared at Valleywag some time ago) really show are the outside gate of Page’s home, with a few cars in the parking lot, and an aerial view of the top of his house and property. There’s a blurry figure who the privacy group speculates is a bodyguard drinking a pop, and then we get a closeup of the next-door neighbour’s alarm sign, which tells us they use a specific alarm service. The route to work, meanwhile, is simply a series of photos of the intersections that the group feels might mimic the path Larry may or may not take to the Google campus.

Continue reading “Group reveals (gasp!) Larry’s address”

Reading through Brian Solis’s excellent guest post over at TechCrunch about the new SEC disclosure rules reminded me that I wanted to write something about them, and would have done so if my Rogers internet connection hadn’t gone down for about five hours today (thanks a lot, Ted). I know the announcement got covered a fair bit, but I think this development is pretty ground-breaking and potentially game-changing (there’s a good overview at IR Web Report). In many ways, the SEC is really just recognizing the digital media explosion that has occurred over the past couple of years. Better late than never, I suppose.

Brian says it could (or should) mean the death of the press release. But will it? I doubt it (and so does John Furrier). That’s because the issuing of press releases happens for a whole host of reasons, apart from just the need to fulfill federal disclosure requirements, otherwise known as SEC regulation FD. Lots of companies will happily push out meaningless press releases, with no “social media” features such as links or audio/video clips, either because they are blissfully unaware of what they are missing, or because they know that lots of papers and websites will run them verbatim anyway (which they will).

Continue reading “SEC says blogs = proper disclosure”

When I saw the news about the launch of Delicious 2.0, I can’t say I felt a huge wave of joy, despite the fact that I am what most people would probably consider a hard-core Delicious user, with about 10,000 webpages saved since I started using it. But not only didn’t I feel any joy at the news, I didn’t really feel anything at all. In part, that could be because the new Delicious interface has been rumoured to be coming any day now for about a year (or perhaps even more, I’ve lost track). Now that it has arrived, it’s definitely anti-climactic at best. It also seems a lot slower than the old one, even though it is supposed to be faster. Maybe 10,000 bookmarks is just too many for it to handle.

But that’s not the only reason I’m ambivalent about the launch. Adam Ostrow put his finger on it in a Twitter message, in which he said that he never bookmarks things any more — he either remembers something, or searches for it, or asks someone else if he can’t remember the details. It has occurred to me over the past year or so that while I religiously bookmark things, often dozens of them in a single day, I rarely go back and look them up. If I’m writing about something and I remember some details, I type them into Google and eventually track the page down.

Continue reading “Delicious 2.0: Who bookmarks any more?”

You have to hand it to Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the two East Indian brothers who came up with the Facebook game Scrabulous — the fairly obvious ripoff… er, tribute to the Hasbro-owned board game Scrabble. After reportedly failing to arrive at an agreement that would see Scrabulous transferred to Hasbro’s control, the game company launched its own official Facebook game and then sued the brothers for trademark infringement. So what did the brothers do? Last night, they launched a very similar game called Wordscraper (Mashable was the first to spot the new game, and posted about it on Twitter).

So what does Hasbro do now? It’s not clear that the new game trespasses on anything legally protected. It doesn’t have a similar name, the board looks different and there are some different rules. Obviously, the concept of spelling out words and earning points is the same, but that’s not the kind of thing that trademark or copyright law is designed to protect. As a patent and trademark lawyer explained to Caroline McCarthy of CNET’s The Social, the idea of a game can’t be legally owned — only the real-world expression of that idea.

Continue reading “Hasbro and Wordscraper spells F-A-I-L”

This one is a real can of worms in more ways than one, but I can’t help myself. I recently came across (as many other people have, judging by my FriendFeed and Google Reader shared items) a piece by Duncan Riley at his new site, Inquisitr, in which he embarked on a fairly extended rant about Techmeme and how he believes he has been slighted by Gabe Rivera and the secret tweaks he makes to the ranking system on the site. Duncan’s overall message seems to be that he doesn’t mind — and yet, you can tell that it rankles more than a little that he hasn’t had a post appear on Techmeme in over a month.

One of Duncan’s theories (which he tosses out there almost as an aside) is that Mike Arrington’s friendship with Gabe has something to do with it — both because TechCrunch’s posts show up even when Duncan argues they really shouldn’t (because they have no links to them), and because he believes that Mike has something to do with his lack of presence on Techmeme. Why would that be? Didn’t Duncan used to write for Mike? He sure did, and Mike and the rest of the TC team said lots of nice things about him when he left to start Inquisitr — although Mike’s post doesn’t seem to turn up any more at the old link.

Continue reading “Is it Duncan Riley, or is it Techmeme?”

The micro-cap, sub-angel type of financing practiced by Paul Graham’s Y Combinator isn’t for everyone, and there are some who believe that it’s virtually impossible to do successfully — but Y Comb seems to be pulling it off regardless. I have no idea how much they put into Omnisio, but to sell it to Google for a rumoured $15-million in cash about four months after it launched has to be some kind of record (and becomes the latest in what is a surprisingly large list of Google acquisitions). Congrats to them and the three Aussies who started the video-annotation tool.

Further reading:

Chris Sacca, former Google head of Special Initiatives turned angel investor, has some thoughts about his investment in Omnisio (hat tip to MG Siegler at VentureBeat for that link), and Rashmi Sinha of Slideshare has some thoughts about the deal as well.

From the excellent Torontoist blog comes news that a Canadian band — The Craft Economy — has one-upped their previous CD experiment, in which they stapled free CDs to telephone poles, and has included with their new batch of discs a statement criticizing the proposed federal copyright bill, C-61. The packages started showing up this week on poles in Toronto and Guelph, with copies of a CD containing demo versions of two Craft Economy songs (Menergy and The Crash, the Wagons and the Dying Horses) as well as a typed statement about the evils of the proposed copyright legislation. The statement says in part:

This is far and beyond and more bizarre than the heavily criticized DMCA in the USA. Copyright should protect the rights of artists and producers of creative content, but it should not suppress creative and artistic expression.

The Craft Economy has licensed our music, including this CD, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 license. This license gives you the freedom to share our music with your friends and enemies, and remix and use it in new and creative ways, provided you attribute the work back to us, and you don’t make money off our work.

It’s fair for you and us. This is the way art should work.

Continue reading “A free CD — and a Bill C-61 protest”

This is pretty darn cool, I have to say. If you’ve seen the Lord of the Rings movies, you probably remember a scene or two involving a magical orb or sphere (known as a “palantir“) with which magicians like Saruman can see across vast distances. Well, Microsoft seems to have something pretty much like that, at least in prototype form. Todd Bishop of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer got a close look at one, and watched as a researcher moved photos around, created a virtual 3D globe and even moved through a 360-degree webcam projection of a city street. Of course, palantirs could be used by Sauron to see whoever was looking into them too — hopefully Microsoft isn’t working on that angle.

http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/1526070353

 

So the hammer has finally come down on Scrabulous, the Facebook game developed by two Indian brothers that become a viral hit only to be sued by Hasbro, which owns the licensing rights to the Scrabble board game. Trying to play the game now brings up an error message saying it is unavailable to U.S. or Canadian residents. Electronic Arts, meanwhile — which licenses the rights from Hasbro — has launched its own official version of the game on Facebook, although whether people will make the switch to the new version or not remains to be seen.

I’ve been kind of fascinated by this case ever since it first appeared. Not just because Scrabulous became so popular so quickly, but also because it seemed to boost interest in the actual board game itself, with stories of people addicted to the Facebook game going out and buying real-world copies for the first time. My first reaction was to cheer for Scrabulous, and wonder why Hasbro or EA didn’t just buy the app from the Agarwalla brothers and take advantage of all the free marketing their game was getting through Facebook. Mashable makes the same point here.

Continue reading “Was Hasbro right to kill Scrabulous?”

From Jeff Jarvis comes word of the launch of Ledger Live, a daily video news show from the newsroom of the New Jersey Star-Ledger newspaper. Designed and produced with the help of video journalism pioneer Michael Rosenblum, who has helped newsrooms in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere turn journalists into VJs. The Legder Live broadcast, as Jeff notes, isn’t the typical broadcast TV-style show with a studio and hosts with makeup and hairdos and teleprompters. It’s reporter Brian Donohue sitting at his desk talking about the day’s big stories and throwing to some of the video reports the paper is working on. I think it’s really well done — a great concept, well executed.

Ledger Live – 07-28-08

http://tribeca.vidavee.com/advance/trh/embedAsset.js?vtagView=on&embedded=yes&showEndCard=off&loadStream=off&autoplay=off&width=470&height=264&shareWidgets=$shareWidgets&vtag=yes&startVolume=50&hidecontrolbar=no&textureStrip=yes&displayTime=yes&volumeLock=off&watermark=yes&skin=v3AdvInt_nj.swf&link=http://videos.nj.com/star-ledger/2008/07/ledger_live_072808.html&dockey=357EFC68B7705254CBEA5C6FEAC4495F