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As many people who have been reading this blog for awhile probably know, I work for the Globe and Mail, a daily newspaper based in Toronto, where I’ve been working since 1994 or so. I’ve written about the stock market, the rise of the Internet, moved out West to write about oil and gas, and then came back in 2000 to be the Globe’s first online columnist and its first blogger (before anyone — including me — really knew what that meant). For the past year and a half or so, I’ve been the newspaper’s “new media” reporter, writing about all the ways in which the Web and social media are changing the business of online content for newspapers, magazines, authors, musicians, actors, artists and just about everyone in between.

A little while ago, I was offered an opportunity at the Globe that I got pretty excited about: a position that we’re calling “Communities Editor.” What does that mean exactly? To tell you the truth, I’m not quite sure.

Continue reading “Personal note: A job change for yours truly”

There’s much sturm und drang about online advertising, and whether it’s in a big hole or a *really* big hole. Judging by the graphic of a giant smoking crater he used for his post, Peter Kafka at All Things D apparently falls into the latter camp, and he also quotes Nick “The Dark Lord” Denton as saying that anyone who doesn’t expect ad rates to fall 40 per cent is an idiot (although, to his credit, Peter does note that Denton is always saying things like that). But one of the reports that everyone is using for fodder, which comes from the Rubicon Project, isn’t that bleak at all.

If anything, in fact, the Rubicon report indicates that online advertising is still growing relatively strongly despite the turmoil in credit markets and the slump in stock prices, and could even benefit as advertisers look for more quantifiable results for their spending, which online ads provide. The report also says that while overall ad rates tracked by the network dropped 11 per cent in the quarter:

Continue reading “Online ads: It’s called a flight to quality”

I would take this one with a large grain — perhaps even a boulder — of salt, but according to a report in The Register, wireless-handset maker Motorola is planning to get buyers of its new, ultra-expensive Aura handset to sign something saying they won’t sell the device on eBay. The report (from the usual unnamed source) says that buyers would be required to sell the handsets back to Motorola if they didn’t want them any more. This has drawn scoffs from a number of commenters at Gizmodo and elsewhere, and rightly so, since such a policy would almost certainly be a breach of the so-called “first-sale doctrine” (in the United States, at least).

In a nutshell, the first-sale doctrine — which was originally created to cover patented items, but has since been extended to cover copyrighted material as well, such as records and CDs — prevents a patent-holder or manufacturer from extending their control over an object or piece of content beyond the first sale of that object or content. In other words, “the first unrestricted sale of a patented item exhausts the patentee’s control over that particular item.” This is to allow buyers of CDs and other products to sell them through second-hand stores, or to loan them to friends.

Continue reading “Motorola: First-sale doctrine — what’s that?”

It’s one thing to turn a blind eye — as some networks do — to the uploading of pirated content that occurs daily on YouTube, MySpace and other social networks and services. To use one potential metaphor, it’s like the approach that some countries take to prostitution or marijuana: They know it’s out there, but as long as it doesn’t cause any trouble then they’re okay with it. It’s quite another thing, however, to do what MTV is proposing to do, which is to actually place ads alongside the content that is being infringed. That’s like legalizing prostitution or marijuana use and taxing it.

According to an announcement today, MTV has teamed up with MySpace and a company called Auditude to do exactly that (I mean sell ads next to copyright-infringing videos, not legalize prostitution and marijuana use). Theoretically, that means the network — and MySpace — could benefit any time someone uploads a clip from The Colbert Report or South Park or a music video, based on the advertising that Auditude inserts into the clip. As the LA Times story notes, YouTube rolled out similar technology earlier this year, giving copyright holders the option of monetizing their content rather than removing it. And some are taking that offer.

As more than one person has noted, the approach that MTV Networks is taking seems a little ironic, given that its parent company Viacom is still suing Google for $1-billion in a long-running copyright infringement case. Will that kind of lawsuit go away, as more content providers try to monetize their content wherever it appears, rather than suing to have it taken down? I hope so. What if Auditude or YouTube offered its identification technology as an open API, so that video clips posted by people like me could include ads? I think that would be a great solution. Bring it on.

So what happened when Oprah, the Queen of All Media, mentioned on her show that the Kindle is her “new favourite gadget?” According to Ad Age, the amount of traffic to the Amazon website was about six per cent higher than usual on that day. That’s not a huge amount — but the article also mentions that the number of searches for the keyword “Kindle” rose by close to 500 per cent, which is a pretty big number. Traffic from Oprah’s site to Amazon’s, meanwhile, went up by more than 15,000 per cent.

As Greg Sandoval of CNET points out, Oprah is hugely influential with a certain demographic, one that is much larger than the initial geek/early adopter crowd that gravitates to things like the Kindle. The biggest issue for the device, in my view — apart from the fact that we can’t get them in Canada, of course — is that the Kindle is, well… butt ugly. Seriously, the thing looks like it was designed back in the 1970s, by someone who had seen 2001: A Space Odyssey too many times.

Continue reading “Can Oprah overcome the Kindle’s looks?”

Aaron Fotheringham is 16 years old and has been in a wheelchair since he was eight years old, as a result of spina bifida. But he didn’t let that stop him from attempting, and successfully completing, many of the stunts that his older brother and friends performed on their BMX bikes and skateboard at the local skate park. That includes what appears to be the first example of a wheelchair backflip — something that has landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records. Aaron, who turns 17 in a few days, has also performed a number of other stunts, including a 180-degree aerial, and you can see some of them here and here. He refers to what he does as “hardcore sitting.”

Click through to watch a video…

There are a few comic strips that stand out in my mind over the years. The first is Doonesbury, for obvious reasons — brilliant social commentary and wit — followed closely by Calvin & Hobbes, and then Berke Breathed‘s Bloom County. I still have a bunch of the collected Bloom County strips, and can recall many a Christmas morning spent enjoying them after getting one under the tree. The strip ended in 1998, followed by a related comic called Outland (which I didn’t like as much) and then a Sunday-only strip featuring Opus the penguin all by himself. Now Breathed has ended that one too, with a single panel showing his anti-hero snuggled in bed in the children’s book Goodnight Moon. It’s a fitting end for a true innocent like Opus, one of the great comic characters of our time. Salon has an interview with the artist, who says that he decided to end it because his anger at the political situation in the U.S. was bleeding through into the strip.

I’ve read a lot of articles about the financial meltdown in the United States and elsewhere, about the credit collapse and the rise of systemic risk, etc. — but few of them have contained a paragraph that is as telling as the one below, which is from a New York Times front-page feature on the crisis and its origins, and how the damage has spread:

On a snowy day two years ago, the school board in Whitefish Bay, Wis., gathered to discuss a looming problem: how to plug a gaping hole in the teachers’ retirement plan.

It turned to David W. Noack, a trusted local investment banker, who proposed that the district borrow from overseas and use the money for a complex investment that offered big profits.

“Every three months you’re going to get a payment,” he promised, according to a tape of the meeting. But would it be risky? “There would need to be 15 Enrons” for the district to lose money, he said.

The board and four other nearby districts ultimately invested $200 million in the deal, most of it borrowed from an Irish bank.

How on earth did we get to a point where a school board in small-town Wisconsin comes to the conclusion that in order to bolster its retirement plan, it should borrow tens of millions of dollars from an Irish (but really German) bank and then invest it in a complex, hedge-fund style investment? In what kind of world does that sound like a sensible thing to do?

In case you haven’t already heard about it, I’ve embedded the audio of a prank call involving two Montreal comedians and radio hosts — Sebastien Trudel and Marc-Antoine Audette, who go by the name The Masked Avengers — and the Republican candidate for U.S. vice-president, Sarah Palin. Despite the fact that this prank apparently took four days to put together, and the fact that most political candidates have an elaborate, multi-stage approval process that phone calls and other contacts have to go through, the comedians were able to have a long talk with Palin while doing a bad Parisian accent and pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Even assuming that Palin’s command of French is not that great, this is a pretty embarrassing phone conversation. You can also hear some of the interview here, where there are more than 200 comments.

Continue reading “Sarah Palin gets pranked by Montreal duo”

A quick note to virtual gods: If you create a virtual world, you’re probably going to wind up with virtually everything that occurs in the real world, and that includes crime, sex, economic upheaval and so on. No one knows that better than Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life, which has seen a variety of such behaviour over the years. This time, the virtual proletariat are up in arms about an increase in what might be called virtual taxes — the fees that Linden Labs charges for various features inside the world/game. In this case, it’s a fee increase for what are called “Openspaces.” Here’s a description from the Second Life blog:

“An Openspace is a type of private island that we made available for light use countryside or ocean … but Openspaces differ from normal regions in one particularly significant way; unlike normal regions that effectively get a CPU to themselves on the server, there can be up to four Openspaces on a single CPU (so 16 on a quad core machine), sharing the resource (hence them being ‘light use’).”

The issue, Linden says, is that people are using the Openspaces for things that they weren’t intended to support, and that is putting a strain on the company’s infrastructure. Just as cities and states raise taxes to pay for repairs to highways and so on, Linden clearly feels that it needs to charge more to offset the cost of maintaining these private islands. Sensible enough, yes? Not if you’re a Second Lifer. Or rather, not if you are a Second Lifer who has built a business based on the services and features that are attached to that Openspace. Here’s the problem as one person sees it:

“There is demand for the ‘original’ OpenSpace ‘void sim’ application: lower primcount, very few scripts, very few avatars–just very light load, and only in areas surrounding other, full-primmed sims. There is also a clear demand for heavier use OpenSpaces–still much lower density than full-primmed sims, but posing much more demand on the backend services than does the ‘void sim’ application. These need to be separated into two distinct products with different fee schedules; let’s call them ‘Void’ and ‘Low-Density’ sims.”

Don’t feel badly if none of this makes any sense to you. I’m pretty familiar with Second Life, and a lot of it makes my head hurt too. It’s a little like reading a science-fiction book, in which the author has made up new words for everything, and you have constantly flip to the index to figure out what everyone is talking about. The issue is whether Linden underestimated what people were going to do with Openspaces and priced them too low, or whether people are misusing the world somehow and should therefore be expected to pay more. Regardless, people are upset.

Continue reading “Second Life: The peasants are revolting”

As the mesh conference has grown — I find it almost hard to believe that we’re putting on our fourth next year, but we are — we’ve realized that we can’t actually do everything ourselves (funny thing, that) and so we’ve been reaching out more and more to the community. That’s what we’re doing now, in our search for someone to help with sponsorships and that kind of thing. Here’s the gist from Stuart’s post on the mesh blog:

In the past three years, mesh has grown from humble roots – five guys who just wanted to do something to talk about all the exciting things happening online – to become Canada’s Web conference. Now is your chance to be a part of mesh by joining us in part-time sponsorship sales.

So what’s involved? Mostly, it means working with the mesh gang to manage our existing sponsors and find new ones. So, what’s in it for you? You will earn a commission on each new sponsor you secure, and most importantly, an opportunity to help make mesh thrive.

Are you interested? We’d like to hear from you. Email your C.V. and other particulars to stuart (at) meshconference (dot) com.

I’ve been doing my best to remain calm, but I have to confess that it isn’t working as well as it usually does. I’m speaking, of course, about the tsunami that is currently wreaking havoc on the traditional media business, an industry in which I happen to have spent virtually my entire working life. The earthquake that created this particular tsunami occurred ages ago, and those who were paying attention have long since headed inland to safety, but the shock waves are now starting to hit with real force, accelerated by the economic uncertainty all around us.

Bad news has been trickling in for months, or even years — newspapers cutting back staff, closing editions, companies on the ropes financially. But it’s been a thousand small cuts, mostly at smaller publications, and so it hasn’t really had as much impact as it might otherwise. It seems to be accelerating though, and now it’s not just small papers or magazines but ones that everybody has heard of. It hit home recently while reading through a summary of industry news that I get daily from the folks at I Want Media. Here’s a sampling of recent headlines:

— “Newark Star-Ledger cuts 40% of staff”
— “TimeWarner to cut 600 jobs in magazines”
— “Gannett to cut 3,000 newspaper jobs”
— “Orange County Register to cut 110 jobs”
— “LA Times cuts 10 per cent of staff”
— “Thomson Reuters eyes massive layoffs”
— “Washington Post profit falls 86 per cent”
— “New York Times debt cut to junk”

Continue reading “Media: Okay, so is it time to panic yet?”

Internet Evolution is a site owned by United Business Media — the company that publishes magazines such as Information Week and Light Reading, and puts on conferences such as Web 2.0 Expo — and its goal is to create a kind of digital think-tank, where ideas and commentary can flow around some of the big issues facing technology and society. I write for them from time to time, and they asked me to mention that they are looking for some site moderators, whose job it is to keep an eye on things and to post thoughtful comments and links in order to keep the conversation going. In return, they get the chance to read some interesting and thought-provoking commentary, and they also get perks like Starbucks gift cards, T-shirts and even cash. If you’re interested, drop them a line at [email protected] and tell them I sent you.

I just love the Internet sometimes. Thanks to a link at Metafilter, I just found out that the entire text, data and images from the Archimedes Palimpsest have been released on the Web under a Creative Commons license. Palimpsest is an odd word that refers to a manuscript that has been scraped or wiped clean and had something else written over top of it, and that’s exactly what the Archimedes manuscript is. It’s actually what’s known as an “euchologion” or prayer book from the 11th century, but in order to save money the authors reused some parchment they had lying around — and that happened to include a copy of a manuscript by the Greek scholar Archimedes, including several treatises that don’t exist in any other form. It took four years to dismantle the manuscript and prepare it for imaging, something that was done with some help from the Canadian Conservation Institute, and then to scan and use optical-character recognition and translate the text. All of that material is now online.

Lots of talk about Hulu, the video portal from NBC and News Corp. that is celebrating its first birthday. Brian Stelter has a great piece in the New York Times about the site, and how it has succeeded in part by not plastering everything with ads (a lesson I sincerely hope others take to heart as well). I have to admit that like Mike Arrington at TechCrunch, I was — how can I put this delicately — somewhat skeptical of Hulu’s chances. Not surprising really, given how the major networks (yes, I’m looking at you, CBS) had screwed things up royally with online video.

And yet, Hulu arrived and it didn’t suck. It has a nice interface, it shows pretty good quality video in a nice wide player, and it lets you pause and even embed video. It’s not available outside the United States, of course, but there are ways of getting around those restrictions if you really want to. There’s lots of great content on Hulu too, including some of my favourite old TV shows like Time Tunnel and I Dream of Jeannie and whatnot. So all in all, it’s done pretty well for itself — and it has the numbers to prove it (although not enough for Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee).

At the same time though, I must admit that something bothers me about Hulu (and not just that as a Canadian, I have to jump through a bunch of hoops just to watch something on it). Andrew Baron, the founder of the online video show Rocketboom, came close to the mark with some comments he made on a Yahoo group recently in a discussion about Revision3 and some of the cutbacks they’ve made in new shows. I think what bothers me about Hulu is the same thing that bothered me about Joost: namely, the fact that all the content is… well, it’s just TV on the Web. Where’s the fun in that?

I mean, I like being able to watch or embed that hilarious episode of Saturday Night Live — which seems to have turned off the geo-blocking, since I’ve embedded one in this post — or a clip from South Park, or whatever. But apart from the ability to embed it somewhere else (which I admit is a huge step for a network to take with its content) there’s very little you can do with it. And there’s nothing else but content from major networks and studios — no related content from elsewhere, no uploading allowed, no way to get anything *into* Hulu at all. Maybe I’m just hard to please.