Category: Uncategorized

I must have missed this one somehow, but I just came across a Wired piece by veteran tech journalist and former Newsweek staffer Steven Levy, in which he describes — complete with some amazing photos (I only wish they were bigger) — the incredible three-storey library that entrepreneur and uber-geek Jay Walker (the guy behind Priceline) has constructed to hold all of his various books and other keepsakes. The list of things in this library will make your jaw drop open. It includes:

• a small earth globe signed by 9 astronauts
• rare books bound in rubies and other precious stones
• an early edition of Chaucer
• the chandelier from the Bond film Die Another Day
• the Bills of Mortality from London in 1665
• an instruction manual for the Saturn V rocket
• a 300-million-year old trilobite fossil
• the original hand prop from the TV show The Addams Family
• a hand-painted “celestial atlas” from 1660
• an original copy of The Nuremberg Chronicle, from 1493
• a working version of a Nazi-era Enigma machine

That’s apparently just a taste of what Walker’s 3,600-square-foot library contains, according to Levy, who says he is the first journalist to get a tour. I would give my right arm to have a few hours in there.

One of the highlights of last weekend’s Saturday Night Live episode — apart from the brilliant (as always) Sarah Palin impersonation by Tina Fey — was a clip in which George Bush, Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank talk about the Wall Street bailout and who is to blame, and then a succession of pathetic characters tell their stories. I recall seeing a Twitter message (I think it was from Mark Hopkins of Mashable) on Monday about how the clip was nowhere to be found. I didn’t think that much of it, because I assumed NBC had pulled it from YouTube for the usual reasons.

As it turns out, however, NBC pulled the video for legal reasons — in a nutshell, I think, it was afraid it was going to get sued. Although there have been a number of dark whispers from right-wing types such as Michelle Malkin about how the skit was yanked because it criticized Democrats like Pelosi and Frank (as well as equally dark whispers about how it was pulled because it criticized billionaire George Soros), according to NBC the skit was removed and re-edited because it “didn’t meet quality standards.” A website has since appeared that has the original clip, as well as a number of news stories and blog posts about it (it has a .cx domain name, which — in case you’re wondering — belongs to Christmas Island).

Continue reading “Behind the missing SNL bailout video”

Cartoonist and wine-marketing genius Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void asked marketing guru Seth Godin some questions recently, which he has posted on his blog. One of my favourites is when Hugh asks Seth what the hardest lessons are for a first-time author to learn:

“Books are souvenirs that hold ideas. Ideas are free. If no one knows about your idea, you fail. If your idea doesn’t spread, you fail. If your idea spreads but no one wants to own the souvenir edition, you fail.”

If I were a publisher, or an author’s agent, or teaching a class on writing, I would engrave that somewhere very prominent.

Online video hub Veoh put on a mini-conference yesterday in New York that would have been fun to attend, if only to hear former Disney head Michael Eisner make some of these comments in person:

• “At ABC, we started America’s Funniest Home Videos — so this isn’t the first era to watch a man get hit in the groin with a bat.”
• “Most of the studio video is repurposed, like Hulu. It makes NBC and News Corp feel like they’re doing something — I’m not sure it’s the right thing, but they’re doing it well.”
• “South Park is a radio show, basically.”
• “Appointment TV is gone. Targeted audiences are here to stay. If you can make an interactive commercial, that would be the way to go.”
• “Mass audiences are still possible, even on the internet. If I were at ABC, I’d sign up Palin and put her on a show the day after she loses the election. With that wink, she can go a long way.”
• “The most interesting thing to me about the Katie Couric video, was not the interview, but the comments on it.”

As a guy who has his hands in all sorts of online video pies, including attempts to create online sitcoms such as Prom Queen through an entertainment company called Vuguru, Eisner’s opinion is worth paying attention to. To echo his comment about Hulu, these may not be the right things to do, but at least he’s doing them well, and he’s experimenting. Eisner also seems to recognize that the secret to online video isn’t just repurposing TV content like Hulu is doing, but that “it’s about discovery, it’s about community, it’s about interactivity.”

Comments like “South Park is a radio show” also get you thinking about what is important about a show — is the animation what makes SP funny, or the audio? The same thing with the comment about how the most interesting aspect of the Katie Couric video was the comments, and how those could be commercialized. That shows a guy who is thinking creatively about where online media is going. And for what it’s worth, I think Sarah Palin would make a great talk-show host. Better than a VP.

It’s been over 25 years since MTV first launched, so plenty of people have probably forgotten what a splash it made at the time. A whole television channel about music? It seemed crazy in a way. A few years later VH1 launched, targeting a slightly older demographic, but with the same commitment to music (and in Canada, the iconic MuchMusic launched at around the same time). Now a music startup called LP33.tv wants to take up the same kind of position on the Web — an all-in-one community that features new bands, shows videos, allows fans to interact with their favourite artists and so on. But can it compete?

Andrew Bentley, the co-founder of LP33.tv, has a long history in the music business. His mother and father ran a number of popular music clubs in Britain when he was growing up, he said in a recent interview with me, and famous musicians were always around. Andrew wound up working at Virgin Music and then at EMI, but says he became dissatisfied with the bureaucratic approach that the company had towards the business, and the lack of imagination when it came to the Web. “I left after a meeting we had about the Internet, at which it was basically decided to sue our customers,” he says.

Continue reading “LP33.tv launches music community”

This has to be my favourite intellectual property dispute ever: according to reports from a variety of sources, including Associated Press and Haaretz, a group known as the Association of Lebanese Industrialists is planning to file a lawsuit against the state of Israel for “stealing” traditional Lebanese delicacies such as hummus (which is spelled about seven different ways) as well as baba gannouj, falafels and tabouleh.

As it turns out, of course, Lebanon doesn’t actually own the trademark to such dishes, but the head of the ALI says he’s planning to file something, and once he gets the rights he’s going to sue someone (it’s not clear who). The precedent, apparently, is the case that Greece launched to get the exclusive EU rights to the term “feta” cheese.

The only wrinkle in the Lebanese plan? A number of other groups — including the Palestinians — claim they invented the dishes Lebanon wants to trademark (The Guardian says that tabouleh was developed in Ottoman Syria, including what is now Syria, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan). Can’t they all just sit down and talk this one over?

Google is nothing if not helpful. It will suggest search terms, it will suggest driving directions for you on Google Maps, and now apparently it will suggest that you not send drunken emails late at night on the weekend. Is this what we really want from our Web services? Maybe Google could parse the content of my latest email and tell me whether I’m being a little too harsh with my mother-in-law in that email I just sent about Thanksgiving. Or maybe Google could suggest some other adjectives and adverbs I could use instead. Is that really the kind of help I need?

If we’re talking about protecting people from themselves, why not have a Google mobile GPS unit that can detect the proximity of donut shops or McDonald’s outlets and then send the user a quick text message: “Are you sure you want to buy that breakfast sandwich, Dave?” Just as the Gmail feature forces users who have had too much to drink to answer math questions (which wouldn’t stop my brother, whose math skills are impervious to alcohol consumption), the mobile service could force you to do some jumping-jacks or touch your toes, and if you were incapable of doing so it could disable the wallet function in your handheld.

Continue reading “Google needs to mind its own business”

As the markets see-saw between concern and outright panic over the fate of the U.S. financial bailout, the credit shock that’s rippling through not just North America but most of the Western hemisphere, and the potential for a severe economic downturn, anyone with a Web-based business that depends on advertising has to be asking: Is this the beginning of the end? If the U.S., Canada and to some extent even Europe are in the depths of a recession (or possibly even worse), what does that mean for online ad spending? The answer could mean life or death for some startups.

This debate has been going on for almost a year now. Google’s stock price came under fire around the end of last year and the beginning of this year because of concern that the search giant might see a downturn in ad spending that would hit the bottom line. Has it? A little, but not a huge amount (although some say that could change). In fact, there are those who argue that search-related ad spending is likely to be the most durable even in a shaky economy — in part because businesses can get more bang from buying AdWords than a newspaper ad or TV spot.

Continue reading “Is online advertising heading for a cliff?”

One of the new faces at The Daily Beast — the online magazine launched today by former New Yorker and Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown — is actually kind of an old face: Nick Ciarelli is the former teenaged blogger behind Think Secret, an Apple rumour site he started when he was just 13, and he has written a piece about how the tech company’s approach to rumours seems to have changed. Just a couple of years ago, Apple was happily suing sites like Think Secret (which shut down after the lawsuit), as well as Apple Insider and PowerPage for posting rumours about new products. Now, Ciarelli says such behaviour doesn’t seem to draw as much attention.

“There are signs that Apple … has thrown in the towel on fighting leaks. This year, advance details about a number of Apple products spilled onto the web, including photos of the iPhone 3G and the latest lineup of iPod nanos. In the past, Apple would’ve fought like hell — including threatening legal action — to get the leaks off the web. But when I spoke to many of the sites that published the images, all of them said that the company’s lawyers had been strangely silent.”

Continue reading “Has Apple really muzzled the lawyers?”

Every once in a while, a mystery comes along that seems bizarre but is just too powerful to resist. The twin mysteries of Steve Jobs and his car are just such a case. According to dozens of reports from Apple insiders over the years — reports that have surfaced in various ways on the Internet, and turned up again recently — the mercurial Apple co-founder and design visionary has a passion about two things when it comes to his car: Number one is driving without licence plates, and the other is parking in handicapped parking spots. Why does he do this? You might as well ask why there is gravity, or why the moon revolves around the sun.

According to some reports, Jobs routinely gets his licence plates stolen, and so he either a) has special dispensation from the California authorities to drive without plates; b) drives with a licence plate either on his dashboard or in his glove compartment, or c) doesn’t worry about the whole licence plate thing and just pays the tickets when they come along. According to some, the California government doesn’t go around handing out special permits, so it has to be either b) or c). There were reports that he had a special bar-code licence plate, but these have also been debunked.

Continue reading “Steve Jobs and the licence plate mystery”

Maybe it just makes for a great headline. Or maybe Nick Denton’s powers of deception are so advanced, like Steve Jobs’ legendary “reality-distortion field,” that he can get people to focus on what he’s holding in one hand, and ignore what’s in the other. How else to explain why so many people focused on Gawker Media’s 19 layoffs, while downplaying the fact that Gawker is hiring 10 new staffers at the same time? (Joe Weisenthal at PaidContent was the only one to get hiring into the headline).

For the math-challenged, that’s actually 9 layoffs, not 19 — and at the end of the day, it’s not 14-per-cent reduction in staff either (yes, Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider reported on the new hires, but he still had a headline about 19 layoffs). This is classic Denton. As he himself admitted in his lengthy memo — which in typical fashion he encouraged his own employees to leak — he has done this several times before: battening down the hatches for a downturn, cutting staff and/or pay levels and selling underperforming titles, moaning about a decline while making money hand over fist.

Continue reading “Nick Denton: Master of deception”

Taking the train to work this morning, little did I know that I would get sucked into a blog- and Twitter-storm over the essence of journalism, social media, “citizen journalism” and a bunch of other topics. That’s how things roll in the blogosphere: one minute you’re reading Twitter, and the next minute you’re trying to defend journalism, or being attacked for not defending it, or some combination of the two. My mistake — and I do think it was a mistake — was to post a Twitter message after seeing a report on CNN’s iReport “citizen journalism” portal about Steve Jobs having a heart attack (a link I got from a Twitter post by Loren Feldman).

I said there were reports of a heart attack, but that they were unverified. A minute or two later, I said that the sources were iReport and a comment from someone at Digg who said they heard it on the news. A few minutes later, I said that it could easily have been a troll, or someone trying to move the stock price (which did drop as a result of the news). A few minutes after that, someone pointed to a report at Silicon Alley Insider, that said Henry Blodget had called Apple and gotten a denial, as others subsequently did. All’s well that ends well, right? Well, maybe not (Henry’s justification of his own reporting of the rumour is here).

Continue reading “Steve Jobs: Citizen journalism didn’t fail”

It happened amid the stream of Twitter messages about the vice-presidential debates between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, so a lot of people probably missed it, but Allen Stern of Centernetworks said something that really caught my eye: “it’s clear the link economy is broken.” Why did he say that? The link in his message went to a post at CNET’s “The Social” blog by Caroline McCarthy, about how Friendster now supports Facebook apps — a post that contains nine links. Of those nine links, two-thirds are internal only; in other words, they link only to CNET articles. The other three link to the Friendster website, the Facebook website and the Bebo website, which means they add zero value (or almost zero) to the overall post.

This is an issue that comes up periodically (one of the last ones to bring it up was Tim O’Reilly, in a great post). It’s fueled by the desire on the part of sites like CNET to prove how authoritative they are by making it look as though the only stories worth linking to are their own. I have nothing against CNET as a news site, and I think Caroline does some fine blogging, but to say that their internal links are better than anything else they could possibly link to is just ridiculous. It seems obvious that they either didn’t even bother to look for other information to link to, or there’s an internal policy to promote their own material. Both of those things are wrong.

Continue reading “Is the link economy really broken?”

No matter which side of the political fence you’re on, there’s no question that the Obama campaign has been light-years ahead of the competition when it comes to taking advantage of social-media tools, whether that means blogs or YouTube or Twitter or pretty much anything that comes along. Now it’s the iPhone: users of the Apple device can download a free app through the App Store that turns their phone into an Obama campaign office, including sorting friends into the states they live in, to make it easier to call people and get out the vote when election day comes around.

This is a slick little app, even if it could have used some other features, as TechPresident notes (more GPS integration would have been cool, for example). At the same time, however, it’s even more impressive that this app was put together not by a company hired by the Obama campaign, but by a handful of passionate supporters who put their own time and resources into doing it. The campaign was then smart enough to recognize it as being a great opportunity, and gave it the official blessing. Smart.

After years of barely changing at all, Google has unveiled a major change for its Google Blog Search tool. As a whole bunch of people are reporting, the site now provides a kind of “meme-tracker” view of what’s being written about. It’s much like Google News, but next to the main headline there’s a little box that says “92 blogs over 15 hours” or words to that effect, telling you how many other blogs have written about the topic. When you click on that text, you get taken to a page with all of the various blog headlines and a cool little graph that shows the activity on a timeline.

More than one person is calling this a “Techmeme-killer” (because of course new things always have to kill old things or it’s just no fun). But is it? I don’t think so. For one thing, I like the fact that Techmeme.com is kind of dynamic — even if I don’t really understand how it operates. Blog posts go from being a sub-link of a sub-link to being a headline post, then disappear altogether; others form their own sub-group and then get reabsorbed, and some form headlines without any links at all, which makes some people mad. It may be a black box, but I kind of like that. Fred Wilson says that he likes it because it’s more personal than just an algorithm.

Continue reading “Google: Should Techmeme be worried?”