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Former Merrill Lynch and Oppenheimer analyst Henry Blodget of Internet Outsider – which is where Henry pretends to still be an analyst, even though his legal settlement with Eliot Spitzer prevents him from actually becoming one again – has posted a long rant about Google announcing a proposed settlement in a “click fraud” case. Among other things, he seems upset that the search company disseminated this info by posting something on the official Google blog. Here’s what he says:

“To make matters worse, the company released its “statement” about the settlement on its blog. A $90 million payout on a critical issue at the forefront of every Google observer’s mind… and the company has an anonymous associate general counsel type up an “update” on a freaking blog. Google needs some new PR people, and it needs them now.”

Anyone agree with that? I’m not sure I do. I may not believe that the traditional press release is dead, but I would agree with Steve Rubel that blogs are serving the same function for many companies – and rightly so. Why shouldn’t Google put out news by posting something to the blog? I assume the company is still complying with disclosure in other ways, such as filing to various securities-related newswires and so on. And smart reports for wire services are watching the Google blog and filing stories about what they put there.

Want to keep up with Google’s statements on something? Subscribe to their RSS feed. I’m not sure why Henry thinks this is such a huge deal, unless it’s that blogs are somehow a joke and “real” companies do things the old-fashioned way, by sending out press releases and email spam and so on. How is posting on a blog any different than putting a press release on your website? Plenty of companies do that and no one complains.

Update:

Henry has expanded on why this bothered him. Still don’t see it, Hank.

Pete Cashmore of Mashable has a post that is a nice microcosm of what is both right and wrong about PR and marketing as they relate to the web and Web 2.0 – at least as nice an example as the recent kerfuffle over Wal-Mart and Edelman (incidentally, Marc, I think your post is a little over the top – I know people hate Wal-Mart, but I don’t think the hate should spill over onto Edelman).

Pete, who tracks Web 2.0 apps, writes about how he has gotten dozens of breathless emails and comments from people who work for Kosmix and Kaboodle, and how they have voted for their own companies in Pete’s Weblist review over 25 times. As Pete puts it:

“You’d think this was obvious, but clearly some startups need it spelling out: never, never, never promote your company by leaving fake comments on blogs. There’s absolutely no need to pose as a “happy customer” – just state that you work for the company from the outset. How hard can it be?”

A great point. There’s more to the story, though – someone who works for one of the companies Pete mentioned wrote a comment on his blog post, saying:

“Pete and all – sorry, our guys got a little over-enthusiastic when they saw we were on Mashable. Yes, naivety and awkwardness would both apply here. But…like most companies we’re very excited about what we’re doing.”

Very smart. The response, I mean. The commenting and multiple voting – not so much. You excited about your company? Great. But don’t spam websites and bloggers, don’t try to rig votes and don’t try to pretend that you’re a satisfied customer if you’re not. That didn’t get Nvidia very far. You know what works best? Honesty. If you’re pitching wine, just be like Hugh and say you’re pitching wine, and then send a case of the stuff to someone’s party and hope they write about it.

Maybe Google, which has become notorious for not providing Wall Street analysts with forward-looking financial “guidance,” was trying to give some surreptitiously. Or maybe someone just… what’s the term? Oh yes – screwed up. The search giant managed to inadvertently let some financial data loose on its website, which quick-thinking Google-watchers naturally archived before it could disappear, and as a result the company had to file a financial statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission or risk running afoul of disclosure laws. The gaffe caused the high-flying stock to stumble on Wednesday.

“I’ve seen a few bizarre things on the street, especially in the past year, and this would be close to the top of the list,'” Pacific Growth Equities analyst Derek Brown told the San Jose Mercury News. Not only was the financial data somewhat less appealing than many analysts had been expecting – both in terms of revenue growth and also what it says about pressure on profit margins for Google’s Internet ad business – but the slip-up didn’t exactly restore anyone’s confidence in the search giant’s ability to handle itself as a public company with a $100-billion market value.

Just a week or so ago, the company’s chief financial officer made some comments about slowing growth that hit the stock as well – comments the company later tried to distance itself from. And when it comes to non-financial matters, Google seems to have difficulty keeping its trap shut as well: in addition to the forecasts for revenue, slides used for a presentation to analysts included details about hitherto unknown Google projects such as the “Gdrive” or Web-based universal file storage.

As one analyst said after Google’s initial stock offering, during which the founders gave an interview to Playboy magazine (which was also technically against disclosure rules): “Sounds like they could do with some adult supervision over there.” Former analyst and tech-stock lightning rod Henry Blodget says too many people are whining about “guidance,” and he’s probably right.

There’s been plenty of talk in the blogosphere about a New York Times story involving blogs and Wal-Mart. It seems a PR person with Edelman – the “Me2 Revolution” firm that recently hired Steve Rubel – sent out some emails discussing Wal-Mart’s position on various things, and some bloggers repeated parts of those emails without saying where they came from. That has produced all kinds of sturm und drang about whether bloggers’ ethics have been compromised, and whether Edelman somehow crossed a line with its blogger campaign.

Whenever one of these things blows up, which they do from time to time, I like to go to the source, which in this case is Edelman – a firm that I think gets Web 2.0 and the interactive conversation idea better than just about anyone. And Richard Edelman has a post on the topic that I think gets across some important points about the strategy, without getting all hot under the collar and defensive, or blaming it on a few rogue bloggers or whatever.

Among other things, he says that PR companies need to

“always be transparent about the identity of our client and the goal of the PR program. Second, we should ask permission to participate in the conversation, and be comfortable with any communication being made public… Third, we must reveal any financial relationship with bloggers, whether consulting or even reimbursement of trip expenses. Fourth, we must ensure that the information we provide is 100% factually correct.”

What Mr. Edelman sort of hints at without really getting into it is that bloggers – if they are to have any credibility at all – need to govern themselves the same way credible journalists do, as Jeff Jarvis points out. Want blogs to be seen as alternate sources of information, just like the “old” media? Then behave that way. In other words (among other things), declare potential conflicts, and don’t use material from PR companies without sourcing it. Can you get away with not doing those things? Sure you can. Lots of media outlets do too.

As I was saying to someone at the blogger get-together last night in Toronto, with Naked Conversations author Shel Israel, bloggers and the “old” media have to do exactly the same things in this new Web 2.0 world – win the respect and continued attention of their readers every day, with every article and every post. Want more on the subject? Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has plenty.

Continuing the theme of “network neutrality,” voice-over-Internet provider Vonage has raised the spectre of a “tiered” approach to the Internet in Canada in a filing with the Canadian broadcast regulator – the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission or CRTC, the agency whose name is almost as long as some of its meetings. According to a press release from Vonage, it is protesting the $10 a month “VOIP tax” that Shaw Communications of Calgary charges customers to “improve” their service (the filing was actually made in December, but not publicized until now). It’s an issue that has been around for awhile now.

Shaw, one of the country’s largest cable concerns – which is controlled by the Shaw family – doesn’t charge extra if you want to use Shaw’s own VOIP service. But if you use Vonage or Babytel or one of the other services out there, you will be offered the $10 extra charge to “improve” the quality of your phone calls. You don’t have to pay it, of course. You’re free to use VOIP without paying extra, but the clear implication is that the service might be of poor quality, and that Shaw isn’t likely to be interested in your complaints unless you paid your $10 fee.

Maybe it’s just me, but this seems a little like the bad old days in Chicago or some other corruption-riddled city, where you were free to run your business without paying “protection” money to certain parties, but if you didn’t then you were likely to find your store burning to the ground some evening with the police and fire department standing around watching. It’s no big stretch from what Shaw is doing – or other ISPs — to a multi-tiered Internet that charges extra for things like peer-to-peer music downloading, but doesn’t charge extra if you use the music service marketed by your Internet provider.

Is that what the Internet is supposed to be like? Not according to Vinton Cerf, who helped invent the darn thing in the first place. Whether the CRTC will take any action remains to be seen. For more thoughts on the topic, both of Shaw’s move and network neutrality in general, see Mitch Shapiro’s post at the always excellent IPDemocracy.com

According to a report in the Toronto Star by my friend Tyler Hamilton, it sounds like Toronto could soon join the ranks of North American boroughs with wireless access that covers most (if not all) of the city. The local utility, Toronto Hydro, put out a press release saying it’s going to announce something tomorrow, and Tyler’s story says the announcement is going to be a rollout of city-wide wireless.

This would put the Big Smoke in the same league as Philadelphia, which gave Earthlink a contract to provide wireless that covers the city, and several California cities such as San Francisco, where Google and Earthlink have joined forces to provide municipal Wi-Fi coverage. Such efforts have come despite resistance from telecom players such as Verizon, which successfully got legislation passed in an attempt to block the Philly plan. New Orleans and Chicago are working on similar proposals.

The big question, of course, is what Toronto’s Wi-Fi will cost. Ever since coffee shops started adding wireless access and providers such as Spotnik and Fatport tried to turn it into a business, people have been wondering how to make money from Wi-Fi. If you’re a retailer, wireless is close to becoming a condiment – meaning something you have to have, like cream and sugar or public washrooms.

Will Toronto Hydro charge a monthly fee that can be added to your power bill? Will you be able to use PayPal, or tack it onto other city charges such as water or parking? And will it be $10 a month for all you can eat, or $40 a month for limited bandwidth? Those questions and more will hopefully be answered tomorrow.

Update:

More details about the plan here – it involves covering a big chunk of the downtown core, with 54mbps by the sounds of it, but no prices were given. Mark Evans has a great quote from Toronto Hydro on his blog.

Boy, it seems like only yesterday, doesn’t it? The day that U.S. regulators busted up AT&T, I mean, and created the seven regional Bell operating companies or RBOCs, also known as the “Baby Bells” — including Southwestern Bell, Nynex, USWest and BellSouth. And how many big telephone companies are there now? Well, there are four: AT&T, BellSouth, Qwest and Verizon. And it looks like soon there will be three, if AT&T gets approval for its $67-billion (U.S.) takeover of BellSouth. The company that is now calling itself AT&T is actually Southwestern Bell or SBC, which bought AT&T last year for $16-billion and assumed the name.

Over the past decade or so, AT&T had acquired Pacific Telesis and Ameritech (two other Baby Bells), while Verizon bought Nynex and Bell Atlantic, and USWest merged with Qwest. Of course, there was also that whole sordid mess involving Bernie Ebbers and WorldCom (the shell of which became MCI), but let’s not get into that. If it feels a little like AT&T has been putting itself back together again, that’s not surprising, since in many ways it is — or at least creating a duopoly where there was once a septopoly. As Mike Masnick at Techdirt put it recently, Ma Bell is “getting the band back together” for a kind of reunion tour.

And how is the company going to make this mega-deal fly, especially when it will create the single largest telephone company since AT&T was broken up? Get ready to hear a lot about how the telecom market is hyper-competitive and local phone service just doesn’t make money any more, how voice-over-Internet is killing the industry and carriers need more volume to be able to compete, and how the idea of “network neutrality” just doesn’t pay the bills any more, and therefore AT&T needs to be able to charge Google and Yahoo and others extra to get their digital info to users on time.

That’s a tune Ed Whitacre of the new AT&T has been singing for some time now, and this is only going to make him boost the volume, as my friend Mark Evans points out. But will regulators buy it, or will it sound a little off-key when it comes from one of the world’s largest phone companies? Vinnie Marchandani at DealArchitect has a good take on it, and Blake Ross has a satirical take on the press release that is worthy of The Onion.

I’d like to echo my friend and fellow blog-conference organizer Mark Evans’s post earlier today about conferences and un-conferences and camps and whatnot. It seems some noses got out of joint over the whole MashupCamp versus BarCamp thing, after Ryan King dissed MashupCamp by saying it had jumped the shark, and that it was a bad imitation of BarCamp (which he helped organize).

He seemed to be mostly reacting to a fluff piece about MashupCamp at CNet, but Doc Searls took it as an attack on David Berlind and rallied to the defence of his friend. Then Tara Hunt got into it over at Horsepigcow and took a few shots at Doc, who then apologized in a comment to her post, and updated his own to correct some of his remarks, like the gentleman he is.

Luckily, things seem to have blown over, with Doc smoothing the waters and Tara accepting that, and Chris Messina (Mr. Tara Hunt) who writes a blog over at factoryjoe.com and was also an organizer of BarCamp, saying in a comment on Nick Carr’s blog at roughtype.com:

I really hope that these Camp Wars or whatever dissipate faster than they got started. Seriously, there’s no need to fight… there’s enough space in the world for more than one kind of camp. We’ve got our ideas, they’ve got theirs and that’s what makes this whole great experiment tick.

Hear, hear. As someone who is currently planning a conference, I’d like to say that there’s a pretty big spectrum out there, from the un-conference, barcamp, democamp model all the way to the big, expensive conference with speakers and panels and sponsorships and free lunches and Wi-Fi everywhere. We’d like to find a place somewhere in that spectrum where people can get together and have some fun and maybe learn something new, and hopefully we can do that.

Update:

Adam Green pointed me to Rick Segal’s post on the topic, which brings some much-needed perspective. Great idea about the bag of chocolate coins too 🙂

Lots of people are down on Digg.com, as I’ve pointed out before. I’m not going to mention them by name (cough, Umair, cough) but they have their reasons – which seem to revolve around Digg being a kind of trailer-park version of social bookmarking, filled with “pimply teenagers.”

Whatever. I for one love to sit and watch the stuff scroll by on Digg/Spy. The only thing that really bugs me about Digg is that Kevin Rose and his partner Jay Adelson look like they are both about 15 years old.

But enough about that. Digg has just added a great new feature – not to the regular part of the site, where you “digg” stories to vote them higher or lower, but to the comments. In effect, you can now “digg” comments too, to vote them higher or push them down lower. And when you’re reading, you can choose whether you want to see all the comments, or only the ones that have been “dugg” a certain number of times.

This approach is not new, as many people over at Slashdot will likely point out. The tech discussion site has had similar features from inception, which allow registered users to moderate or “mod” comments based on whether they are useful or not. And as Eric Berlin has pointed out in the comments on this post, Reddit.com has a similar feature. This type of self-policing comment function is something that we’ve been considering at globeandmail.com, where we were one of the first Canadian news sites to allow reader comments. And in my opinion this kind of thing makes Digg.com even more useful. Sorry, Umair.

This is a column I wrote for The Globe and Mail

Did you hear that giant whoosh, like the sound of air escaping from an enormous balloon? That was the sound of several million BlackBerry users heaving a sigh of relief yesterday, after Research In Motion Ltd. announced that it had finally settled its four-year legal battle with U.S.-based NTP Inc., the company that sued RIM for patent infringement. And there might have been a few sighs of relief in there from co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, too, who knows — after all, the current settlement is substantially less expensive than the $1-billion to $1.5-billion (U.S.) that some analysts were projecting the Canadian company might have to cough up.

Plenty of RIM investors were relieved, that much is clear. The stock jumped by more than 18 per cent in after-hours trading, erasing about six months worth of selling in an instant and boosting the company’s market value by $2.4-billion. Some professional investors were also glad to see the millstone removed from around RIM’s neck. “I’m glad it’s over,” said Matt Kelmon, a U.S. money manager with 250,000 shares of RIM who said he had been expecting a settlement of as much as $1-billion. “It was definitely an overhang on the stock . . . it was a good call to get it out of the way.”

In many ways, the deal is a win-win for the Waterloo, Ont., company. Not only does RIM only have to pay $612.5-million, less than half the amount of cash it has on hand (it has been building a reserve to pay any final judgment), but it gets a definitive deal instead of a vague agreement to work out a deal, which is what it wound up with last time. And best of all, it puts an end to the uncertainty and doubt hanging over the company like a cloud the past few years.

The impact of that cloud on the company’s business has been all too tangible: RIM also chopped its estimate of subscriber additions by more than 13 per cent yesterday, in part because of the uncertainty over the case, as it has done in previous quarters. And the firm said operating profit in the latest quarter will fall well below expectations, too — as much as 17 per cent below what analysts were projecting, even before taking into account the cost of the legal settlement.

So what happens now? The simple answer is that RIM gets back to business, back to signing up new subscribers and new telecom partners, without having to soothe their fears about the outcome of the NTP litigation. There is also the chance that being free of that cloud of uncertainty might make Research In Motion a more appealing takeover target for someone like Microsoft — until now, the unsettled nature of the case made RIM a very unattractive acquisition. That said, with a market value of more than $13-billion and a trailing price-to-earnings multiple of about 40 times, the company is still far from cheap.

If nothing else, putting an end to the NTP case allows RIM to focus all its energies on remaining the market leader in the handheld e-mail market — and it needs all the energy it can get, as competition grows. Microsoft has released a new upgrade for its e-mail server software with BlackBerry-like functionality, Palm is offering similar services for its new Treo handheld devices — of which it sold almost as many in the most recent quarter as RIM sold BlackBerrys — and Finland’s Nokia is rolling out BlackBerry-style “push” e-mail features to its phones in the next year or so.

In other words, RIM still has a substantial fight on its hands, one that has been going on in the background while it waged its legal war with NTP. Now, at least, it can get both hands into the game instead of fighting with one of them tied behind its back.

My old media buddy Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 is pretty down on the recent remarks by Reuters CEO Tom Glocer, who spoke at an Online Publishers Association conference and had his speech blogged by Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com. Scott says media aren’t anywhere even close to Media 2.0 and that Glocer has “fooled 2.0 advocates like Jeff Jarvis into thinking he’s drunk the Koolaid” when he really hasn’t.

The Reuters CEO certainly wouldn’t be the first media executive to talk the talk without walking the walk, but at least from my reading of what Jeff wrote, and what Jeremy Wagstaff of the Wall Street Journal wrote over at his Loose Wire blog, I think Scott is being overly harsh in his assessment. Yes, the media have a long way to go – and yes, it’s easy for someone like Glocer to talk all fancy about “seeding the clouds” and “providing the tools,” in a brave attempt to prove that old media is still relevant. And yet, isn’t Scott the one who keeps telling us that old media is still relevant?

I think Glocer has a pretty smart view of what’s going on. He knows that consumers are seeking out information in different places and in different ways. As Jeff quotes him saying:

They’re consuming, they’re creating, they’re sharing, and they’re publishing themselves. So the consumer wants to not only run the printing press, the consumer wants to set the Linotype.

So Glocer wants media to be “seeders of clouds,” which Scott scoffs at (Scott scoffs – I like that). Media are already seeders of clouds, he says, because their stuff winds up on memeorandum.com and digg.com and triggers blog posts. True – but plenty of blog posts wind up seeding old media stories too, believe me, and more so every day. He also says that media doesn’t need to provide the tools, because the tools already exist elsewhere.

More than anything, Scott seems to be irritated that old media haven’t moved faster – and I share his frustration (if that’s what it is). But at least Glocer seems to be going in the right direction, and that has to be worth something, doesn’t it? Richard MacManus over at Read/Write Web seems to have a take similar to mine, and does a good job of rebutting some of Scott’s points.

Nick Carr, of course, manages to turn it into something that is about smart people versus stupid people. But he has since softened his tone somewhat, after reading more from Tom Glocer. In fact, Nick’s most recent post on the topic sounds almost reasonable 🙂

As anyone who has read my little “about me” description knows, I work for The Globe and Mail, a national newspaper based in Toronto, where I write about technology and business, primarily for globeandmail.com. We had a story come up a couple of weeks ago that has turned into an interesting exercise in what I will call (for lack of a better term) Journalism 2.0. It all started when Peter Nowak, who used to work for the Globe and is now the technology editor at the New Zealand Herald, wrote a story for us based on an interview he did with Steve Wozniak, one of the co-founders of Apple Computer.

“The other Steve,” as he is sometimes called, said some interesting things about the company. In particular, he said some things about the iPod, and about the switch to Intel processors. So far, so good. After the story was published, however, Mr. Wozniak posted some comments on a Macintosh discussion list in which he denied saying those things, and accused Peter of manipulating the interview and taking his remarks out of context (did he get a call from the other Steve? Who knows). Peter was naturally upset.

Since Pete had recorded the interview, he transcribed the questions and answers from the relevant sections of the interview and sent them to us at globeandmail.com, and he also digitized the interview and turned it into an Mp3 file. We attached his explanatory note (with a link to Mr. Wozniak’s comments) to the top of the original story, and also included links to both the Mp3 file and the transcript. Pete did the same at the New Zealand Herald. The idea was to allow readers to look at the interview and listen to it themselves, and then come to their own conclusions about who was right.

And they did exactly that. Someone posted Pete’s piece at the Herald on Digg.com, and in less than an hour it had more than 700 diggs and about 100 comments – many of which were supportive of Pete. Not all of them, of course. But even the debate itself makes for interesting reading.

Ever wondered why digital music – the legal kind, that is – costs so much? After all, at 99 cents a song, you wind up paying the same amount for all the songs on a compact disc as if you had bought the CD in a regular store. You might have blamed iTunes for that, since it was the first to make a big splash in the market, and is now the undisputed leader. But Apple CEO Steve Jobs has actually been doing his best to keep prices low, since the the major record labels (there used to be five but now there are only four) want to crank them up. That position seems to have set off some alarm bells in anti-trust circles, since it smacks of collusion.

Crusading New York attorney and gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer started looking into the practice late last year, and now the U.S. Department of Justice has said it is investigating too. “The Antitrust Division is looking at the possibility of anti-competitive practices in the music download industry,” Justice Department spokeswoman Gina Talamona said, without providing any further details. Several of the major labels have already reportedly received subpoenas.

This isn’t the first time the major record labels have been investigated for collusion or price-fixing. The Federal Trade Commission looked into similar allegations involving old-fashioned CD sales, and the case was eventually settled with a financial payment from the record companies. According to the complaint, the labels kept prices high by preventing Wal-Mart and other retailers from lowering prices, and by doing so they overcharged music buyers by almost $500-million (U.S.). As part of the settlement, the labels paid $67-million in cash and gave $76-million worth of CDs to the states that filed suit for use in schools and libraries.

I guess I haven’t been going to my Yahoo portal page at My Yahoo recently, because when I did just now I noticed that it has gotten all Ajaxy. Until recently, Yahoo had kind of been holding up the old Web 1.0 banner singlehandedly with its My Yahoo portal. In his recent roundup of Ajax portals such as Netvibes.com (my current favourite) and Google’s IG, ZDNet columnist and blogger Richard MacManus noted that Yahoo was “still mostly an old-style portal.”

But it seems the Yahooligans have been busy. Whereas you used to have go through a time-consuming process to alter the layout of your page and where various boxes go, My Yahoo pages now allow you to drag the various elements around however you want, just like those other Ajax sites, which is a whole lot easier. Yahoo also seems to have implemented an Ajax-type “mouseover” feature when you hover over a headline in the news wire modules, which gives you the first paragraph of each story.

This doesn’t seem to work with all the wires – for me, it worked on the Associated Press technology feed, and the Reuters technology wire, but not on the Marketwatch.com wire or the Reuters market report wire. Still, it’s a great feature to have if you’re quickly surfing the headlines. Nice work from Yahoo – which also has an open API (application programming interface) I believe, which means we could theoretically see modules developed by others plugged into My Yahoo. The “old guard” isn’t dead yet, it seems.

Just a quick note to update anyone who was interested in my previous post about a Web 2.0 conference in Toronto that Mark Evans, Rob Hyndman, Mike McDerment, Stuart MacDonald and I are organizing.

We have a venue nailed down – the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto – and we have our dates, so you can book your calendars (how long until we can do that in our Google calendar?).

Just put a check mark next to May 8th and 9th and write in the description field “Attending a kick-ass Web 2.0 conference in Toronto with some of the top bloggers in North America as keynote speakers, and a host of interactive panel discussions and workshops on the key issues surrounding blogs and Web 2.0.” (Okay, that probably won’t fit unless you write really small).

We expect to have a website up within the next couple of weeks so everyone can register and get more info. Any thoughts? Drop me or one of the other organizers a line.