Category: Uncategorized

So Disqus has enabled support for video comments from Seesmic, which launched the feature on TechCrunch awhile back. Even Fred Wilson of A VC — who is an investor in Disqus — admits in his post that he isn’t sure about whether video comments work or not. And there are lots of people who are pretty sure that they don’t work, because you can’t scan them as easily as you can text, because they clutter up a blog and make it slow to load, and so on. And I must admit that when TechCrunch first launched them, I wasn’t too crazy about the idea either.

As I’ve said before on several occasions, I’m not really a video guy. I don’t think it adds that much to have video, unless (as Scoble notes in Fred’s comment section) you are showing someone something that relies on the visual element, like a new gadget or a new baby. But when I wrote my earlier post on the topic, I was mostly talking about video blogs — the ones that are exclusively video. Unless you’re Loren Feldman of 1938media (and let’s face it, who is?) that kind of thing reminds me of the Seinfeld episode when Kramer bought an old talk-show set and turned his living room into a fake talk show, but no one would go on.

That said, I’m actually thinking that video comments aren’t such a bad idea (some people continue to disagree). I don’t want everyone to use them, and I don’t want all the comments on a blog to be video — but in some cases it’s kind of fun to see Mike Arrington talking about Wired magazine, or to see Fred in person chatting into his web-cam. It is much more personal (which is why some people will probably never do it). But I actually don’t think it’s that bad. I think it adds a little variety — and if you don’t want to watch them, then you don’t have to. For an alternate (and hilarious) view, see this overview by Scrivs at Expert Idiot.

I know everyone is tsk-tsk-ing and waggling their forefingers disapprovingly at Mike Arrington for his response to Wired magazine’s drive-by blog attack on TechCrunch and its Washington Post partnership, but I for one am quite enjoying it. I actually thought Mike was pretty restrained in his latest post — and for what it’s worth, I took his Twitter message saying “eff you” to Wired as largely a joke (and apparently one fueled by drinks at the Time 100 party).

For whatever reason, Betsy Schiffman (who as far as I can tell used to be a Forbes real estate writer, and before that was at Associated Press) either has a grudge of some kind or has been implicitly or explicitly told to go after TechCrunch. I mean, come on: a “Butt Munch” category? As far as I can tell, the category applies specifically to Arrington — and Dylan Tweney of Epicenter has effectively confirmed that.

In any case, the Washington Post thing was totally offside, especially since Epicenter is clearly a competitor to TechCrunch. In my view, it was a mean-spirited jab, and I don’t blame Mike for responding the way he did. As far as I can tell, opinion seems split on whether it’s Mike’s fault for escalating things or whether Wired was in the wrong — and some people seem to be voting for both.

In the wake of blog posts and news articles about the use of Twitter during the earthquake in China (including one by me), there has been a fairly predictable backlash response — about how Twitter is just one of many tools that people can use to stay updated on news events, that it gets more attention because the “digerati” are enamored with it, and that the praise for Twitter is largely overdone. You can see aspects of these arguments in comments from Eric Rice on my post (as well as here), and in a recent post by Kaiser Kuo of Ogilvy’s Digital Watch.

All of these criticisms have some validity to them. Plenty of people have stayed informed about the Virginia Tech shootings or the tsunamis in Indonesia or similar events by using cellphone text messages, Facebook posts, Wikipedia entries and even the good old radio. I don’t think anyone is saying — as Kaiser puts it at the end of his post — that this episode saw Twitter “drive a nail in the coffin of traditional media.” If anyone is saying that, then they are stupid or being inflammatory. The point is not that anything is driving a nail into something else; it’s that new tools are emerging that can be used to some benefit.

No one is suggesting that Twitter replace the emergency broadcast system, or that Twitterers should be thought of in the same breath as “first responders” such as search & rescue personnel, which is what Eric seems concerned about. That’s ridiculous. But why shouldn’t we talk about how Twitter can be used to get information out about disasters? Kaiser Kuo himself spends much of his post talking about how Twitter “proved very useful as a means of quickly disseminating information gleaned from the mainstream media on the scene,” and how the broadcast nature of the service “made it better than simple IM.”

That’s the point, not whether Twitter is better than something else, or replacing something else, or the best thing ever.

“Smokey, my friend, you are entering a world of pain.” — John Goodman as Walter Sobchak, in The Big Lebowski

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang might be feeling pretty good about winning Round One with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the former basketball coach with the Young Frankenstein-style features and the pit-bull reputation. Unfortunately for Jerry, however, this appears to be a tag-team match, and Steve may have unwittingly tagged in The Terminator, otherwise known as Carl Icahn — a guy who was waging all-out proxy wars when Jerry Yang and David Filo were still shoving quarters into the Space Invaders machine down at the local video-game parlor.

According to several reports, including one in the Wall Street Journal, Carl has acquired about 50 million shares or so of the Internet giant, and may be planning to start a proxy battle so that he can shove Yahoo into the arms of Microsoft and get a nice pop for his trouble. That kind of thing is like falling off a log for Carl, a guy who helped define the term “corporate raider” and has gone after companies like RJR Nabisco, Texaco, Time Warner and Motorola. Carl has taken over companies — or been bought out by companies — in between lunch and dinner.

Ballmer apparently gave up on Yahoo in part because he was afraid of a proxy war, and/or was concerned that the company might do a deal with Google or otherwise muddy the waters and make it harder to establish a value for the company that Microsoft could live with. For Icahn, that kind of thing is like chum in the water — it means that there is something bleeding nearby, something vulnerable, something worth taking a run at. In other words, just the kind of scenario that my friend Kara Swisher describes so vividly in her post. If Jerry thought that Microsoft was his biggest problem, he may have another think coming.

After being hit with an eBay legal missile last month, Craigslist has responded with a projectile of its own: the company has filed a countersuit accusing the online auction company — which owns a 25-per-cent stake in Craigslist — with “unlawful and unfair competition, misappropriation of proprietary information, deceptive passing-off, business interference, false advertising, phishing attacks, free-riding, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and breaches of fiduciary duty.” According to the blog post by CEO Jim Buckmaster:

“We respectfully ask the Superior Court in San Francisco to enjoin this conduct and order eBay to (1) make full restitution to craigslist, (2) disgorge their related profits (3) restore to craigslist all shares of the company acquired by means of, or for the purpose of unfair competition, and (4) pay punitive damages for their malicious behavior.”

As you may recall, eBay sued Craigslist last month alleging a variety of behaviour on the part of co-founders — and controlling shareholders — Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, including the issuance of shares that diluted eBay’s stake below the 25-per-cent mark, as well as the creation of an even more dilutive “shareholder rights” agreement, otherwise known as a “poison pill” that had the effect of making it impossible for eBay to sell its stake to anyone other than Craig and/or Jim. Craigslist later made the statement public.

They’ve now done the same thing with their countersuit by posting the entire thing online. Among other things, the suit alleges that eBay tried twice to put executives from its Kijiji unit — which now competes head-to-head with Craigslist in the U.S. — on the board of the classified site. The lawsuit also says that eBay “has used Craigslist’s mark and name in commerce to confuse the public and illegally divert Internet traffic from Craigslist to eBay and its Kijiji site,” which appears to involve the buying of Google ads that linked to the eBay site but used Craigslist’s name.

The bulk of the suit seems concerned with what Craigslist says is eBay’s desire to gain access to “proprietary competitive information” to help Kijiji. My friend and fellow mesh organizer Rob Hyndman, a lawyer who specializes in technology startups, says that the lawsuit seems to be an attempt by Craigslist to “accomplish by litigation what it failed to accomplish by business planning and sensible precautions.”

Just a quick note to announce that if you were hoping to get a ticket to mesh ’08 next week in Toronto, you waited too long. We are officially sold out. If you’re still looking to attend meshU, however — the one-day workshop series focused on Web development and design that takes place the day before mesh — there are still some tickets available, although they are going quickly. You can register here, and there are more details at the meshU site. And even if you can’t come to the conference, you are still more than welcome to attend the mesh party, which is on Wednesday night and is being held at the Rockwood Club.

Erick Schonfeld put up a post at TechCrunch last night about Cambrian House — the Calgary-based crowdsourcing software company — and how it was heading for the dead pool after failing to raise financing and being forced into a “fire sale” of its intellectual property and other assets. Since I know co-founder and CEO Michael Sikorsky, having interviewed him a few times (he was also on a panel at the mesh conference last year), I thought I would give him a chance to respond before jumping on the “Cambrian House is dead” bandwagon. According to Erick’s description in the TC post, what happened is that:

“After unsuccessfully trying to raise a new round of capital, it is our understanding that the startup has negotiated a fire sale of its intellectual property, assets, Website (and whatever community remains after the sale) to Spencer Trask, an old money, New York venture firm.”

Erick goes on to say that the Cambrian deal started with talk of an investment, then devolved into a simple asset sale. He adds that Spencer Trask is “basically buying the Cambrian House platform and its community for a fraction of the $7.75 million that investors have already put into the company” and plans on taking the assets and rolling them into VenCorps.com, a startup that is planning to take a crowdsourcing approach to venture capital, and that Toronto venture consultant Sean Wise will run VenCorps and “whatever is left of Cambrian House.”

The story Michael tells — which he has also put in a comment on TechCrunch — is different in several key ways: For one thing, he says Cambrian was able to raise money, and that the company turned down Spencer Trask’s original offer, not the other way around (as far as I can tell, Spencer Trask also isn’t related to the financier who backed Thomas Edison, although the company says it was “inspired” by him). He also says that Cambrian hasn’t sold any of its intellectual property, and will continue to develop the assets that it has, including several of the ventures that came out of the Cambrian fold.

At the same time, however, the Cambrian CEO admits that “our model failed,” in the sense that while Cambrian came up with lots of good ideas, there wasn’t enough follow-through in terms of developing them and turning them into companies or products, primarily because the crowd never stepped forward to do the developing. That’s the idea behind hooking up with Spencer Trask and Vencorps, he says — so that the venture company can locate willing entrepreneurs and match them up with worthwhile ideas, or at least that’s the theory.

Does this mean that crowdsourcing startup ideas doesn’t work? I don’t think so — but it shows that simply coming up with good ideas isn’t always enough. Someone has to execute them.

Update:

I got some more responses from Michael in an email, so I thought I would add them. Aidan Henry has also posted on Cambrian, as have others.

Q. There has been an asset sale to Vencorps/Spencer Trask of some of Cambrian’s assets?
A. YES. In particular: we sold a specific instance of our platform targeted exclusively at the Venture Capital industry.

Q. But not the IP or the existing community?
A. YES. However, we are encouraging our community to move to VenCorps because it represents the next iteration of the model. And, we obviously have a vested interest in it.

Q. And the idea is that Vencorps can better find teams to follow through on some of the ideas that the CH model brings forward?
A. YES. By evolving the model to VenCorps we accomplished the following: a) a scrub of our CH brand. a lot of people found it hard to type, hated the vikings, etc. b) no ideas without teams will be funded.

Q. Does CH continue as a corporate entity and if so what does it do?
A. YES. CH INC. continues, almost looking more like a VC or a holding company – take your pick. We have our handful of portfolio companies to manage which all use crowdsourcing, and one of them, chaordix is all about licensing/selling crowdsourcing platforms.

There have been lots of “whither Google?” stories in dozens of publications, and no doubt there will be dozens more to come. Some talk about competition from Microsoft on the advertising side, and some talk about how Google hasn’t really had any big hits apart from its ability to coin money on keyword-related search. But Adam Lashinsky’s latest piece for Fortune magazine puts its finger on what I think is one of the biggest issues facing the company: namely, the simple fact that it has become a gigantic entity (and one that is getting more gigantic every day), and it’s hard to be as creative or move as swiftly.

I encourage you to read the whole thing, but a couple of things jumped out at me: one was the fact that Google is hiring on the order of 100 people every week. When Google went public in 2004, it had about 2,000 employees — now it has almost 10 times that many. And with all of those employees, and the billions of dollars that the company brings in every quarter, Google has no doubt developed a bureaucracy of sorts, even if it is a bureaucracy composed of kids in Threadless T-shirts riding scooters on their way to the free massage area.

This growth has also led to departures, like the ones that Lashinsky describes — including that of Paul Buchheit, one of the developers of Gmail and the co-founder of FriendFeed.com, who is quoted in the article. As he puts it at the end of the piece:

“I was always so excited at Google, because I didn’t know what would happen next … then I knew what would happen next.”

That may not mean the imminent death of Google — far from it. But it is still a fact that companies cannot grow at the kind of rate that Google has been growing for very long; and when they do grow at those kinds of rates, they almost inevitably become less fun, less creative, less flexible. It’s almost a law of nature. Microsoft still has Nerf toys and free movie nights and that kind of thing too, but does anyone think it is as creative or flexible as it was a decade ago? I doubt it. Not even Bill Gates would make that claim with a straight face. Google’s biggest enemy now is itself, and its own slowing metabolism.

It’s hard to believe, but mesh 2008 — our third year — is just around the corner, and (I just can’t resist a plug) we are really close to selling out, so you’d better get in there and get a ticket if you’ve been procrastinating for some reason (meshU tickets are here). We’re pretty pumped about the content we have, which you can see by checking out the schedule of speakers and panels and workshops. But I wanted to update everyone on a couple of things:

— CBC Radio live taping: Up until a week or so ago, we had a spot in the schedule with CBC Radio host Nora Young’s name on it, because we knew that we wanted the former Definitely Not The Opera host to do a panel discussion about something for the society stream and tape it live for her new show Spark, but we weren’t quite sure what it would be. As you can see from the updated schedule, Nora’s going to be talking to Bill Buxton — the legendary user-interface expert and visionary from Microsoft — about whether physical location matters any more in these social-networking, virtual world, Twitter-type days we’re living in. Nora is also hoping to bring a second guest for the debate, which in the sports world would be referred to as “a player to be named later.”

— Social events: As my fellow organizer Mark Evans has noted on the mesh blog, we have a couple of great events planned this year: the first is a party after meshU finishes up, which will be taking place May 20th at The Drake, one of Toronto’s favourite funky watering holes. Everyone with a meshU ticket will get a complimentary drink, but others are also welcome to come and mesh. And the following night, after the first day of mesh 2008, we have a party at the Rockwood CLub on Mercer Street, just south of King and east of Wayne Gretzky’s. That one is sponsored by our friends at Social Media Group and all are welcome. We’re also having a kind of mesh wrap-up party after the second day, which our friends at Edelman are putting on at the Bar Mercurio.

That’s it for now, although there could be more updates to come. Stay tuned to the mesh blog or @meshconference on Twitter, or follow me (@mathewi) or Rob Hyndman (@rhh) for updates. Mesh on!

I wasn’t going to jump into this one, mostly because it seemed kind of “inside baseball” (i.e., not that interesting to lots of people), but as we all know one of the main things the blogosphere likes to do is blog about blogging, so I thought I would take a crack at the Ars Technica brouhaha. Exhibit A is MG Siegler’s post at ParisLemon about what he calls “another classic rip off” by Ars Technica. You can read the post if you need to catch up on the details, but basically MG is saying that the site rewrote his post and never gave him credit for the idea.

This isn’t the first time that Ars has had such allegations leveled at it. As Cynthia Brumfield writes at IPDemocracy, an incident involving a link to one of her posts occurred back in 2006 and has even made it into the Wikipedia entry on Ars. In the comments on her latest post, Ars writer Nate Anderson takes issue with Cynthia’s characterization of events, however, saying it was a mistake that was corrected quickly and that she should have tried to contact someone at Ars before she flamed them in a post. In a response, Cynthia said that she had heard from many others who had had similar experiences.

In the interest of balance, I emailed Ars founder Ken Fisher to ask him for a comment on the allegations, and he said that in the case of IPDemocracy, it was a simple mistake in which “the link got removed accidentally in the editing phase,” that it was fixed as quickly as possible and that there was “no intent to deceive.” As for MG Siegler’s post, he said that Siegler wasn’t the only blog to make the comparison between the iPhone and the game of Risk (this blog also did) and that therefore he didn’t deserve a link. In any case, he said, Ars didn’t see Siegler’s post and wrote its own version at about the same time (the site said it was published later because editors were busy).

Continue reading “Blogs and the attribution dilemma”

Like many others, I woke up this morning to Twitter messages about a disaster in China: a magnitude 7.8 (at last report) earthquake in the southwest, with thousands of people either dead or injured. Much like the forest fires in California last fall and other recent news events, Twitter became one of the main sources of on-the-ground reporting — even before CNN started picking up what was happening, and with more personal detail. During such times, Twitter seems like a crowd-sourced reporting tool, much like what NowPublic.com has created but with cellphones and 140 character messages as the medium.

In any disaster, one of the first things that people look for — not just journalists, but readers too — is the eyewitness account, the first-person description, the man on the scene. Whenever something like the earthquake happens, thousands of editors and producers at newspapers, radio programs and TV networks clog the phones trying to reach someone, anyone, who can provide a personal account: they call homes, schools, stores, friends, distant relatives. What was it like? Where were you when it happened? What happened next?

Twitter is able to supply all of those things — and it’s also self-directed. People can post messages about whatever they wish, rather than answering only the questions that a producer asks them. In the study I wrote about recently that looked at Twitter and Facebook and Wikipedia as disaster reporting tools, one of the comments about the California fires was that the media focused on celebrities and how they were affected, but Twitter and other sources gave a more complete version of events and how they were affecting everyone. Paul Kedrosky calls it the democratization of headline news.

Obviously, 140-character messages don’t take the place of reported stories that check facts and determine what exactly happened, or pull together various reports into a coherent whole. But they are a compelling part of that story — and journalists who know how to take advantage can produce something much more complete with the help of all those Twitter reporters in the field. Journalism has been called “the first draft of history,” — and now the people putting together that draft have even more help in getting it right the first time. For more sources and info, check out the post at Global Voices Online.

The debate over whether Twitter has become so important a form of communication that it should be standardized — and thereby removed in some sense from the company that created it — has been going on for awhile now, and recently reared its head again on the Gillmor Gang, the podcast run by tech guru Steve Gillmor. As described by blogger Chris Gerrish, the discussion focused on how a more decentralized Twitter-style “micro-blogging” standard could effectively take over from the service, something Gerrish calls “A Venezuelan moment,” in what I assume is a reference to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and his various nationalization schemes.

I wrote about this awhile back, and many people scoffed at the idea that Twitter was important enough to be having these kinds of conversations, although Marc Canter has compared it to the domain name system that powers the Internet, and Dave Winer has said he’s afraid that losing Twitter could be like losing Web pages from the early days of the Internet (although he has praised Gerrish’s post).

A couple of fascinating side-points to this debate: The first is Steve Gillmor’s long and (in classic Gillmor style) rambling and fundamentally disjointed guest post on TechCrunch about this debate, in which he compares Twitter and “the cloud” to the blood-brain barrier (incorrectly, according to one commenter) and compares Yahoo to Hillary Clinton, then closes with a quote from a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song. One commenter calls it “lazy, badly-written, undergraduate nonsense,” while another refers to it as “possibly the worst TechCrunch post ever.” As Joel Spolsky has written in the past, Steve Gillmor is not an easy guy to understand even at the best of times.

The other interesting thing is a comment made on Gerrish’s post by none other than Blaine Cook, the former chief technology architect at Twitter, who recently departed the company in what became a controversial exit. In addition to saying that he built the service’s “track” feature in just 12 hours, Cook suggests that allowing other services to “federate” or integrate with Twitter’s features wouldn’t be difficult at all. Could Twitter become a kind of micro-blogging standard?

There seems to be a mini-bitchmeme brewing, sparked by VC blogger Fred Wilson’s recent post about Disqus, which is the commenting system that I use on this blog and many others use as well. Why Fred decided to write about Disqus at this point I don’t know — maybe to give the company some free publicity, who knows. In any case, he listed three reasons why he thinks every blogger should use it, including:

• threaded discussions
• email replies
• shared profiles

That was followed relatively quickly by a post from David Risley, in which he said that Disqus seemed “stupid”, primarily because the comments are hosted somewhere else, and therefore they don’t integrate with a blog’s existing comments and if Disqus disappears then those comments are gone for good. Others have noted that Disqus doesn’t support trackbacks either — which I have also mentioned in the past as a drawback of the system, and something I would like to see.

For the record, Daniel Ha of Disqus has promised that both trackbacks and data exportability are coming to Disqus, which would remove a couple of the major complaints about the service. But even with those flaws — or missing features — I am happy to use it, and Fred puts his finger on one big reason why: the ability to respond to comments instantly via email (and also to approve or delete spam via email). As Fred notes, this is huge. And it is handled seamlessly.

Spam — which Don Dodge mentions as an issue in his post — has also been virtually eradicated. I think in the months I’ve had it integrated with my blog, I’ve had Disqus email me twice or maybe three times with a possible spam comment, and in each case I simply replied with “delete” or “approve” and it was handled. Like Fred and Howard, I would encourage anyone looking for a better comment system to give it a try. The benefits far outweigh the drawbacks, as far as I’m concerned. Carlos says he thinks that Google should buy Disqus.

One of the interesting things about Twitter is that an entire ecosystem of tools has emerged that take the data from Twitter and slice or dice it in some way. There’s Tweetscan and Summize and Quotably for search, for example. But some other services aren’t really tools so much as they are toys — but interesting toys. Twitterverse.com is one that shows you a tag cloud of popular keywords, etc. from peoples’ Twitter messages (which I refuse to call “tweets” because it sounds stupid). You can see them for the past hour, the past five hours, or the past 10 hours. Here’s a list of the recent popular keywords from Friday:

most popular: day going one time twitter work

next most popular: home lunch need new really think

Then there’s a tool (or toy) called Twistori.com, which I think is really cool: there’s a list of words on the left-hand side of the page — love, hate, think, believe, feel and wish. When you click one, you get a real-time (or close to it) display of Twitter messages with those keywords in them that scrolls by on the screen. It’s kind of hypnotizing in a way. Here’s some of the ones that scrolled by on Friday afternoon:

love: working with Canadians margaritas for lunch when i know exactly what to do buttered popcorn jelly beans Trent Reznor’s lyrics having lunch with my mom the rain my foster parents Twitter	hate: nitrogen talking to my insurance company airports when i’m all itchy and stuff those robotic voices my work computer deja vu the Red Wings Twitter
feel: so lost like i am cramming for a final like i am being followed bad but not guilty extremely safe old like i’m on drugs, minus the high a little lost sick exhausted	wish: i were going to the ballpark i was still asleep i was outside michigan had more job openings i knew what bit me last night i was never born i could go back and punch myself i was in nashville people would do their jobs

Interestingly enough (if you’re into this kind of thing), there’s a small note at the bottom of Twistori that says it was inspired by WeFeelFine.org — which is a very similar type of tool or toy, that actually turns out to be an artistic creation designed by the very talented Jonathan Harris. His specialty is information design projects that are also art, and others include tenbyten.org and phylotaxis.com.

Some of you may have seen this already, since it has been passed around on Twitter, but I just had to point to Rick Segal’s hilarious blog post about a startup that did everything right in its business plan — right up until it sent the document without clicking the “accept changes” menu item in Word. So when Rick (who is a VC with J.L. Albright in Toronto) looked at the impressive business plan, what he saw in the margins were all the edits and comments made by the team and their advisors, including:

• “Segal used work for Microsoft so skip the name dropping, save it for the afternoon meeting, they are clueless about Redmond.”
• “When you talk through this point on your slides, make Chanukah jokes, he is Jewish and will get them”
• “I’d delete this section since we don’t have these features on the roadmap and haven’t figured out how to code this unless you believe the investors won’t catch this.”
• “VCs are typically stupid when it comes to this section so be prepared for a dumb question blizzard.”

Hysterical. I’m trying to imagine someone on the executive team at that startup — or on their advisory board — reading the post and gradually realizing with horror that it’s theirs. Priceless. For what it’s worth, Rick says he thought it was funny and wouldn’t hold it against the company. For other examples of the dangers of Word’s “track changes” function, you might want to talk to the British government, or to someone with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, or someone in the Bush administration’s environmental unit, or lawyers for the SCO Group. You can find lots more examples here.