Category: Uncategorized

I have to say I’m not a huge fan of Mahalo.com, the “people-powered” search engine from Jason Calacanis, but then I’m not really the target market (as Jason has pointed out in comments here before). And I can see how it might be useful to some people, if they’re looking for just one or two results. But as skeptical as I am, I look like Jason’s biggest supporter compared to Andrew Baron of Rocketboom, who wrote a recent post entitled “Why Mahalo is Fundamentally Flawed.”

I’m not sure what happened between Jason and Andrew, although I know that Jason offered Amanda Congdon a job after her acrimonious departure as the host of Rocketboom, and he also made some fun of Rockeboom (in what I thought was a kind-hearted way) in a recent Mahalo video. But still — Andrew doesn’t just criticize Mahalo for a few flaws in his post. He effectively accuses Jason of perpetrating a gigantic con, in which he pretends to set up a site to help people find search results, but in reality just wants to get them to click on his ads.

It’s interesting to read the comments on Andrew’s post as well: Jason shows up and gamely tries to respond to the criticisms, and also disproves Andrew’s claim that there are no positive reviews of Mahalo other than Jason’s (which Andrew wriggles out of by saying they aren’t credible). Then, after a comment from Duncan Riley of TechCrunch, the Rocketboom founder wonders whether Duncan’s comment came after a “nudge for a voucher,” whatever that means. It’s bizarre.

Just for the record, I have nothing against Andrew — he was a panelist at the original mesh conference last year, and we were happy to have him — and I think he was a pioneer with Rocketboom. But his vendetta against Jason seems more than a little over the top.

NewAssignment.net creator and journalism prof Jay Rosen’s latest venture just went live: Beatblogging is an attempt to improve the coverage of specific news areas or “beats” by using social-media such as blogs and wikis. In effect, Jay and his team — led by the indefatigable David “DigiDave” Cohn — want to help beat reporters use “crowdsourcing” methods (like Jay’s project with Huffington Post, the political-reporting effort OffTheBus.com) to draw knowledge from various sources.

The list of 13 participants is at Jay’s site, PressThink, and also at the MediaShift Idea Lab site that is part of PBS. It includes Wired digital-music writer Eliot Van Buskirk, a science reporter at the Houston Chronicle, a public-school reporter at the Dallas Morning News, a basketball writer at ESPN.com and a technology reporter at the Seattle Times. The San Jose Mercury News has some thoughts about why it’s taking part.

I think Jay’s idea is brilliant, and it will be fascinating to see how it develops. I wish there were some Canadian newspaper reporters taking part.

For anyone who’s interested, Michael Robertson — whose mp3tunes.com service is being sued by EMI for what the record label claims is copyright infringement — has posted a lengthy overview of the issues (as he sees them) on his website. There are links to the statement of claim from EMI as well as Robertson’s countersuit against the record company. I wrote about the latest battle (the founder of Linspire has been down this road many times before) a few days ago when the EMI suit was launched.

EMI’s suit is kind of ironic, given the comments that Edgar Bronfman of Warner Music just finished making about how the industry has wasted too much time suing people over the past few years. And if you’re nostalgic for those years, or just can’t get enough of the Metallica “sue them until they drop dead” approach, check out this comment from KISS front-man, reality-show star and all-around loudmouthed moron Gene Simmons in a recent Billboard interview:

“Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid’s face should have been sued off the face of the earth. They should have taken their houses and cars and nipped it right there in the beginning. Those kids are putting 100,000 to a million people out of work.”

 

From Nancy Baym’s always excellent Online Fandom blog comes news that a group of English football fans have effectively acquired a team. The group, which goes by the name MyFootballClub, consists of footie fans from more than 70 countries — and they are now the owners of Ebbsfleet United, a semi-pro club based in southern England.

The deal gives the group a vote on everything from the team lineup to who gets traded, according to an Associated Press article.

“This is a brand new concept, basically a massive trust,” said Roland Edwards, a director and club secretary of Ebbsfleet United in Kent, southern England.

Virtually every fan thinks that he or she can do a better job than the coach or the management of whatever sport they are watching. Now the fans of Ebbsfleet United get the chance to put their mouths where their money is. MyFootballClub sounds like an interesting story: according to the AP item, it charges its 20,000 or so members a $72 annual fee, and was founded earlier this year by former football writer Will Brooks.

According to a post at MacUser, the chairman and co-owner of Warner Music Group — Montreal’s own Edgar Bronfman Jr. — made some comments at a recent mobile conference about how music companies spent too long pretending that the industry’s business model wasn’t being threatened, and “went to war with consumers.” Here’s the money quote:

“We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong.

How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.”

A stirring and heartfelt sentiment indeed. And totally true, of course. Unfortunately for Edgar and the rest of the music industry, those five or six years spent dithering and suing music fans have left the major record labels in a hole so deep it might be impossible to get out. And Warner’s fight against non-DRM music hasn’t done much to help.

It’s nice to see someone admit their mistakes, even if it is years too late — but then I suppose Edgar Jr. is pretty used to admitting his mistakes by now, after having to take the rap for his disastrous investment in Vivendi, which obliterated a substantial chunk of his family’s fortune (acquired through the Seagram liquor business) back in the first bubble.

Update:

Mike Masnick of Techdirt fact-checks his distant cousin Edgar’s memory of how things happened.

There’s lots of chat this morning about Yahoo and Google’s plans to make email more social — whatever that means. Brad Garlinghouse of Yahoo was apparently talking to Saul Hansell of the New York Times, who wrote about it on his Bits blog (he’s the technology editor at the paper as well), and Brad wants to make email into a sort of social hub. In effect, it sounds like he wants to make Yahoo’s email into a Facebook-style platform.

This makes Mike Arrington sad, since it’s yet another sign that Yahoo can’t seem to get its you-know-what together and focus on a single thing at a time. Yahoo 360, Mash, etc. But wait — isn’t Brad the guy behind the infamous “peanut butter” manifesto, which was all about Yahoo spreading itself too thin? So maybe he actually has gotten the go-ahead from Jerry Yang and the rest of the Yahoo brain trust to try this email thing. My only problem with Brad’s idea is that for me, email is pretty close to broken. And it’s not just spam — although that’s a big part of it. It just doesn’t work properly somehow. It’s all out of sync, and it’s hard to keep things straight (although Gmail’s default “conversation” threading helps, I find) and it’s not integrated with enough other things. Is Yahoo going to fix all that, or is it just going to pop up profiles and miscellaneous crap whenever someone emails me?

If it’s the latter, then no thank you. If Yahoo or Google can find a way to make email relevant, to make it more efficient, more like RSS maybe, then I’ll think about it. My other concern is that for people below the age of 25 or so, email is a virtually non-existent form of communication. Making email a social platform might work for fogeys like me, but what about the next generation? Shouldn’t Yahoo and Google be thinking about that too?

Well, Rupert Murdoch has been dropping pretty big hints that the Wall Street Journal pay wall is a-comin’ down pretty soon — and it shouldn’t be too hard to make it crumble, since Digg just put a pretty big hole in it. As Kevin Rose describes in his rather economical post on the subject (I counted 38 words, not including his name), articles at the Journal will start carrying the Digg button, and any stories that get Dugg will be free for readers who come from the social-bookmarking site. Mike Arrington has a slightly longer post over at Techcrunch.

It seems like everyone is getting into the TV game, but not on the talking box (as Forrest Gump called it) — on the Web. And in some cases, TV networks are trying to take the Web and turn it into television. Good luck to them. Here’s a roundup of some of the news:

— News Corp. unit Twentieth TV is working with Yahoo on a “Web on TV” show, which will no doubt feature the latest hilarious clips of skateboarders hurting themselves or kittens on an icy pond.

— Lifetime Networks is launching a TV-style platform as part of its relaunched website, and will create new shows just for the Web as well as streaming Lifetime content.

— Newsweek says it is going to create a political talk show that will run weekly on its website, and the magazine has hired the former producer of Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC to put it together.

In other media-related announcements, MSNBC’s redesign is live (just in time for Rex “Fimoculous” Sorgatz to leave and an old friend of mine to arrive) and it has a very cool Ajax-y feature that lets you move chunks of the page up or down depending on your interests.

And in the old-time newspaper world, a number of chains have done a deal with real-estate site Zillow to put their ads on the Zillow site and use Zillow features on their newspaper websites. For more, see this piece of commentary on CNET about newspapers and the classified conundrum, and see Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing for a post on the Zillow deal.

Ethan Kaplan of blackrimglasses, the Warner Music Group technology shaman and all-around smart guy, has a great post up about the pile-on effect that we all see from time to time on Techmeme, as well as a related problem: the incessant desire for “scoops” and “exclusives” that companies use to play blogs off against each other — using embargos and other cheap parlour tricks to get blogs to parrot whatever marketing slogan happens to come down the pike.

I know that Mike Arrington at TechCrunch and Pete Cashmore at Mashable try hard not to get sucked into that vortex, and I’m sure that Richard MacManus and the gang at Read/Write Web do too, but it’s hard when everyone wants to be first. As Mike said at our mesh conference in May, being first is easier — if you’re not first, then you have to try harder to add value somehow. If you’re first, well… you’re first.

The problem, as Ethan describes in his own inimitable fashion, is that being first hardly matters any more. It’s not like anyone is going to be first for more than a second or two, and then the great tsunami of coverage will descend on the subject until it is obliterated beneath a pile of Techmeme.com posts. As Ethan says:

“It’s like is holding back an immense amount of water pressure then releasing it. In the end, can you tell who the first drop to hit you was? No. You only know that you are wet and uncomfortable.”

Well said. It’s unlikely we will ever get rid of the desire to be first — I think it’s one of the most primal desires of the journalist (and in using that term I include bloggers) — but I hope that more and more people will choose to focus on the issues that need to be talked about, instead of just the latest release of a Facebook/Google/MySpace widget that aggregates Web 2.0 social bookmarking spreadsheets or whatever.

Today’s cautionary tale about using Facebook comes from one Kevin Colvin, who appears to be a bank intern at the American division of Anglo Irish Bank — or at least that’s the story Valleywag has up, along with a charming photo of Mr. Colvin in a Halloween costume, which I have reproduced here for your enjoyment. I believe he’s some kind of elf or fairy of some sort — Tinkerbell perhaps.

In any case, it seems that Mr. Colvin booked off sick in an email to his boss, who sent a message back with an understanding comment about personal obligations — and included a compliment on Kevin’s wand, along with a copy of the photo that he had posted to his Facebook after a Halloween party. Not only that, but he apparently forwarded a copy of the email to a number of co-workers, which is how it wound up at Valleywag.

This isn’t the first time that someone’s personal behaviour has gotten them in trouble at work, and it’s unlikely to be the last. We can argue about whether it was right for Kevin’s boss to lift the photo and then publicly humiliate him in front of his coworkers by forwarding the email, but perhaps he wanted to send some kind of message to the rest of the staff. It may not be right, but it happens. Facebookers beware.

As several sites are reporting — including PaidContent’s UK division and Mashable — Bebo has launched a social-media platform with a pile of traditional TV and media partners including the BBC. Bebo often gets forgotten when people are writing about social networking, because the majority of coverage focuses on Facebook and MySpace.

But while Bebo was created in the U.S., it has developed a large European user base and has about 40 million users or so, which puts it not that far behind Facebook. And the partners it has lined up for its social-media launch include some major names — such as CBS, BSkyB, Channel 4, ESPN and MTV, as well as some smaller players. According to the press release, the Open Media launch will allow Bebo users to:

“store and curate within their personal profiles their favorite music and video content, and virally distribute that content throughout their ‘friends network’ and the wider Bebo community.”

On a related note, the word “curate” has become increasingly popular as a way of describing what users are doing when they pick clips they like and post them somewhere, or send them to friends — makes it sound all Latin and important, doesn’t it? A lot better than saying something like “I was goofing off and watching kittens on YouTube.”

Further reading:

— CNET’s Caroline McCarthy has some details
— info on ad revenue splits over at Contentinople
— the Telegraph has a take, along with some really craptacular ads
— Silicon Alley Insider calls Bebo’s offering the “anti-Hulu”
— PaidContent has a video interview with a Bebo exec

Does the “social radio” market — which features well-established players like Pandora and Last.fm — need another entrant? The gang behind Jango seem to think so. The site, which has been in beta for the past few months, opened up for full access Monday, and says it has 70,000 users already. Co-founder and CEO Dan Kaufman is the former CEO of Dash, a mobile-shopping startup that flamed out in 2001 (not that we should hold that against him, of course).

I have to say one thing about Jango.com: it’s pretty simple to use. When you hit the site you get a search box and a list of “stations.” You can choose a station, which is a pre-mixed selection of artists, or you can type in an artist’s name — at which point you are taken to a user page, without even having to sign up (you can create an account from the user page by just typing in your email and a password). My page is here. By choosing an artist’s name you effectively create a “station” based around them, which can made up solely of that artist, or artists that are similar. Jango suggests musicians and bands that it thinks you might like based on your choice, and then you get to choose from Jango’s list and add that artist to your station — or you can type in your own choice and add that. And that’s about it. You can click to buy a track through Amazon, and you can see who else is listening to a particular artist or station.

The site doesn’t have some things that Last.fm and Pandora do. It doesn’t have a widget, for example (like the one I have in my sidebar), although the company said that’s coming. But it is far easier to figure out and use than Last.fm, I think, which I find confusing and non-intuitive. And when it gets right down to it, one of the keys to such a site is the music recommendation part: in other words, how does it do in terms of suggesting related songs or artists you might want to listen to?

Like others, I’ve found Last.fm and Pandora to be sketchy on that front, particularly with some artists. Jango did not too badly with the few I gave it, although it remains to be seen how it performs over the long term. And when it comes to competing with Pandora at least, Jango has one killer feature: it’s available to Canadians, whereas Pandora is not — it cut off access to Canuck users earlier this year because it hadn’t acquired the appropriate licenses.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt definitely has a point: mp3.com and Linspire (formerly Lindows) founder Michael Robertson does seem to have a way of getting sued. I’m not convinced that it’s a deliberate strategy on Robertson’s part, as the Techdirt post suggests, but it certainly seems to happen with alarming regularity. I guess that’s what happens when you spend most of your time trying to drag the record companies kicking and screaming into a new business model. The latest suit is from EMI, which has a long and tangled history with the entrepreneur.

The first go-round came with mp3.com — and in particular a service called MyMp3, which allowed you to upload your music to the company’s servers and stream it from anywhere. Even though the service checked to see whether you had the right to the CDs you were uploading, the record companies saw it as unauthorized copying and therefore copyright infringement and sued. Universal later acquired the assets of the company (CNET bought the domain name). After launching a Linux-based competitor to Windows (and being sued by Microsoft), Michael Robertson launched another online music venture called mp3tunes.com, with a number of features. In addition to the ability to store music online and stream it to anywhere, the site allows users to “sideload” songs from other websites, in effect, transferring them to an online locker run by mp3tunes. This works for songs acquired legally, but also apparently for songs acquired illegally.

And so, another lawsuit: EMI says that Robertson is effectively trying to do much the same thing he did before. And that’s not all the lawsuits, either. In addition to mp3tunes, the entrepreneur started another service called AnywhereCD.com earlier this year, which allowed users to buy CDs and have them shipped — but also allowed them to download mp3 versions of the songs right away, in DRM-free format.

One of the service’s original partners was Warner Music, but that deal fell through within days of the launch (as I wrote here) because WMG didn’t like the DRM-free download option. There were suits and countersuits, and while the two sides eventually settled, the venture wound up going under. One thing is for sure: music fans may be getting screwed in various ways, but the lawyers are making out like bandits.

There’s a story in the Guardian today that says Google is working with American Idol creator and producer Simon Fuller — who also gave the world the Spice Girls — on some sort of top-secret TV project that will apparently revolutionize the medium as we know it. Is Google going to get into the creation of content?

Colour me skeptical. For one thing, Google doesn’t know anything about content — nor does it want to know anything, as far as I can tell from what Eric and the boys (Larry and Sergey) say about what they see as Google’s business. Finding content, yes; indexing content, obviously; maybe even aggregating content in some smart way. But creating it? I don’t think so. I could see Google doing a deal with Fuller to distribute content through a YouTube channel, for example, or some other kind of arrangement. But I don’t see the company getting any further involved in content production than that — unless Larry or Sergey want to wangle a walk-on role in Heroes, which I’m sure they could probably swing without too much trouble.

Maybe in part this is another example of what I wrote about yesterday — that Google is seen as the company that can save just about anything, and that rumours like this one boil down to the fact that people think TV sucks, and they wish Google would fix it somehow.

So TMCNet blogger Rich Tehrani says he has heard rumours that Google is going to acquire Sprint. This is a subject that others have raised as well, most often in connection with the much-hyped “Google phone” — which we now know isn’t a phone at all but an open platform. In other words, it’s even less likely that Google would buy Sprint than it was before.

That’s not likely to stifle the rumour mill, however. Why? I think it’s because Google has effectively become the saviour of everything. What was once a tiny company with a simple service that everyone used and/or liked has become a globe-spanning colossus with a market value bigger than the gross domestic product of a medium-sized country — and so the implication is that Google can do anything.

What people mean when they say Google should buy Sprint is “Sprint sucks.” When they say Google should come out with a phone, they mean “the cellular phone industry sucks.” Similarly, when they say Google should buy Yahoo, or Microsoft, or China, or whatever, that’s shorthand for “those things suck. Google would fix them.”

Would Google buying Sprint make any sense? Not really. Despite the attempt to compare it to Google buying YouTube or Google buying Keyhole (which became Google Earth), it would not be anything like either of those deals. Sprint Nextel is a gigantic conglomeration of telephone poles and legacy PBXes and customer-service desks and trucks and cable. Google needs that like a hole in the head.