Month: August 2006

Courtesy of Kent Newsome’s blog, I see that the recording industry — having obviously failed to find any more babies to poison or dogs to kick — is going after guitar tablature sites such as Olga, as chronicled in the New York Times (as Slashdot points out, this isn’t the first time Olga has come under fire; the Harry Fox agency, which owns the publishing rights to most top hits, went after the tab site in 1998).

Like many other professional and amateur guitarists, including Kent, I have used Olga.net for years to find transcribed music that I am trying to learn (in my case, so that I can play old John Prine songs out on my back porch or at a campfire, rather than having to play Leaving On a Jet Plane or whatever my friends really want me to play). In many cases the music that I would come across was wrong or incomplete, but invariably someone would correct it, or post a different file so people could try them both. Kind of like an early version of social networking.

The industry (which comes under some heavy fire from J. Botter here), is arguing that tabs are a “derivative work,” and therefore are an infringement of the original artist’s copyright. Sadly, at least one lawyer (and guitarist) thinks that they might be right, and that the principle of “fair use” might not be enough to allow Olga and other sites like it to survive. I hope that he is wrong.

I think Thomas Vander Wal is right when he says this it is just another example of the tension between sharing and owning. More discussion here. And in a crashing irony, Joe Gratz — a recent law-school graduate — says the original closure of Olga was one of the things that got him interested in studying copyright law.

It’s been quite a week for meta-blogging (that is, blogging about blogging). First we had Nick Carr taking on what he called the “innocent fraud” of the open blogosphere, and now we have A-list blogger and blog-bible author Robert Scoble — ex of Microsoft — sparking a furore over what a blog is. Next, of course, we need Bill Clinton to help us define what the meaning of the word “is” is. But I digress.

The tough part about blogging where the Scobleizer is concerned is that he is way faster than I am. He’s not in Kedrosky-esque territory, but he’s getting close. In the time between when I first spotted the discussion he started on Techmeme and when I got around to writing this, he has already posted several follow-ups, and responded to dozens of comments on both his own blog posts and others. My wrists ache at the thought of that kind of output.

It all started innocently enough (don’t they all?) with a post calling bullshit on the fact that Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces is the world’s largest blog network. Then Scoble got into it with Mike Torres from Microsoft, after noting that more than half of what the company calls blogs are private — and therefore, Scoble argued, not blogs at all. That in turn led to this post, which drew a comment from Dare Obasanjo about how Robert was being “egotistical, narrow-minded and petty.”

At this point I think I can say that Scoble lost it. How can I tell? Because Nick Douglas of Valleywag posted a comment saying simply “Scoble, this is awesome.” I don’t think Nick meant an awesome display of intelligence and wit — I think he meant a great train wreck of a debate. At one point, Scoble even mentioned that Dare’s father is the president of Nigeria, as though that had anything to do with anything. He also trotted out the book he wrote with Shel Israel and the definition of blogging contained therein (interestingly enough, Shel stops short of supporting his co-author here).

I would never accuse Scoble of posting that kind of stuff just to get traffic, but man, it would be hard to come up with anything better if he did want to do that. At one point, he had four posts at the top of techmeme, each with its own little sub-network of related posts. Eventually he admitted he was wrong and said that Stowe Boyd had one of the best takes on the whole debacle (which I would agree with).

But my personal favourite comment was from someone called Deadprogrammer, who wrote: “The blog that can be described is not the eternal Blog. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things.” We can talk about what is a good blog and what is a bad blog, or what is an effective blog, or whatever — and I have had a crack at those myself, arguing that blogs without comments are not good blogs — but to ask what is a blog? That way lies madness, Robert.

We all know that YouTube is the number one place for video on the Web, right? Bigger than Google and Yahoo, with 100 million videos or so every day (although MySpace is gaining). And we know that its popularity, according to some, is based largely on copyrighted content like the Lazy Sunday video and the other TV clips and music videos people post, and that other sites offer people more financial participation in the popularity of whatever they post. And we know that YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley is a superstar and that dollar figures like $1-billion get thrown around a lot.

But is copyrighted video really what YouTube is all about? Obviously, there’s plenty of copyrighted content on there — some of which may have been uploaded deliberately by the creators, such as the new music video from Ok Go (choreographed using six Treadmill exercise machines running in different directions). And then there are the ever-popular “mashup” movie trailers like Brokeback to the Future, which is quite hilarious. But a lot of what is great about YouTube (for me at least) is the other stuff — the unusual, the weird, the bizarre, the extremely personal. And I suspect a lot of other people are the same.

On one end of the spectrum there are the stupid dog and cat videos and the “Evolution of Dance,” but there are also moments of real brilliance like the clip of 12-year-old “FunTwo” playing Pachelbel’s Canon note for note on the electric guitar. And then there’s people like the geriatric British pensioner who has become an unlikely star. But one of my recent favourites is “lonelygirl15,” who is carrying on a back-and-forth relationship with her boyfriend via webcam from her room.

Why do I find this fascinating? I’m not sure (Update: I totally missed a NYT blog post about her here). Lonelygirl — whose name appears to be Bree, and whose (apparently religious) parents prevent her from going on a hike with her boyfriend Daniel — is cute, but otherwise unremarkable. She stares into her webcam and talks about being mad at her parents, and at one point she and Daniel argue on camera about something or other. And yet, most of her video clips have been downloaded more than half a million times, and some have close to a thousand comments. She is number three in the “most viewed channels” this month, and number 25 on the most-viewed of all time.

I think that’s what I find fascinating. Is talking to complete strangers about your life somewhat disturbing and even pathological? Perhaps. And yet, it seems like a natural evolution from the blog, which evolved from the diary. Already, there are commenters who assume that Daniel and Bree are acting — and perhaps they are, in a sense. Maybe they too will get their own TV deal, just like another teenaged YouTube star called Brookers. Fascinating stuff.

Update:

The NYT’s Screens blog (by reporter Virginia Heffernan) has an email response from lonelygirl15 here.

Just a short post to note something that I think every current or prospective Web 2.0 startup should probably read — or actually, several things, all of which are related to the demise of Kiko, an AJAX-driven online calendar that got its start in Paul Graham’s YCombinator summer camp for geeks. Kiko has effectively shut down and has put itself up for sale on eBay. The first thing worth reading is a post at the blog On Startups, which looks for lessons in the failure of the well-regarded calendar app.

The post’s lessons are not exactly rocket surgery, so to speak, but they are worth reading nevertheless — including “Google is the new Microsoft” and “Have a plan B.” Equally interesting and worthwhile, ironically (since he is critical of the On Startups post), is a post by one of the members of the Kiko design team, who posted a comment to the On Startup blog with a link to his own version of the company’s demise. Richard White’s lessons go a little farther than the simplistic “Don’t take on Google” — he notes that the day Google’s calendar launched was actually one of the highest traffic days for Kiko, because all the stories mentioned it.

Among other things, Richard (whose post has a comment from Narendra Rocherolle of competitor 30boxes) notes that Kiko lost its focus at a crucial time and thus its launch was delayed — allowing 30boxes and Google to grab more of the spotlight — and that the team tried to make the app a little too feature-rich. Kiko co-founder Justin Tan also has a post-mortem in which he mentions staying focused, and argues that an online calendar is a worthwhile thing to have and not necessarily doomed to failure (Don Dodge disagrees). All in all, definitely worth reading.

Update:

Paul Graham has his own thoughts on Kiko’s demise, which boil down to “don’t fight Google”, but David at Signal vs. Noise disagrees, and Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 says that if Google is the next Microsoft then that’s actually a good thing. Umair at Bubblegeneration says not to cry for Kiko.

As a blogger, I naturally feel compelled to add my two cents (1.8 cents U.S.) to the blogosphere pile-up over Nick Carr’s comments on A-listers and the “innocent fraud” that blog proponents purportedly promulgate — that fraud being the idea that anyone can join the conversation, that there are no barriers to entry, that quality trumps relationships or marketing, etc. To that extent, blogging often seems to consist of bloggers blogging about other bloggers blogging (is is just me, or is there an echo in here?). Call it meta-blogging.

So why do we do it — is it because we love to write, love to think, love to have debates, like to get attention, want to get linked to on Techmeme, or to boost our Technorati rankings, or to get comments and links from other bloggers we respect and/or admire and/or envy? Yes. And to sell our books or get more speaking gigs or get invited to one of Mike’s parties, and so on. I think it’s a mistake to assume that any blogger (Nick included) is fueled by one specific desire or impulse. I would expect the vast majority are motivated by at least a half dozen, some of which may even be in direct conflict with each other. That’s just the way human beings are.

To that extent, I think my M-lister friend Kent Newsome is right when he compares blogging to songwriting, and I think my old-media pal Scott Karp is also right when he compares it to screenplays or manuscripts (incidentally, I notice that hardly anyone has made note of the fact that Kent is the one who got this debate started, which I think is at least a partial refutation of the “innocent fraud” argument). And yes, Rex Hammock is also kind of right when he compares Nick to a troll.

People write screenplays and poems and songs (and paint and draw and sculpt) because they feel compelled to do so, because they believe they have something to say, because they want attention, because they want to make money, or all of the above. They may write one thing for money and another for love, and another for attention. And why do we pay attention to them? In some cases it’s because they shock, or titillate, or because they express something unique, or because they are very good at what they do — or all of the above.

I will note one thing, as I mentioned on Scott’s blog: Nick has responded to many of the people who commented on his post, but he hasn’t answered the question I posted there, which was “Why do you blog, Nick?” I’d be interested in hearing what Nick came up with for an answer, but I suspect it is “all of the above.”

I’ve been meaning to write about a recent post by PR blogger Steve Rubel entitled “reinventing the media interview,” and a friend’s e-mail this morning jogged my memory and reminded me that I hadn’t done so yet. His e-mail also mentioned a response to Steve’s post by British journalist Ian Delaney, who blogs at Two Point Ouch and is apparently writing a book on this whole Web 2.0 thingamajig we’re all wandering around in.

Steve described how bloggers such as billionaire Mark Cuban and Web-programming guru Dave Winer are trying to reinvent the media interview — in Mark’s case, by only doing interviews via e-mail so that he can run the transcripts on his blog if necessary (something Mark’s nemesis Patrick Byrne of Overstock has also done, ironically enough), and in Dave’s case answering questions on his blog so that everyone has access to the answers. Steve (who works for the Edelman public relations agency) says in his post that “there is lots of room to innovate here” and that he wants to “open this entire process up.”

I don’t know Ian Delaney, but I get the feeling that he would like the process to stay exactly the way it is, thank you very much. He says the kind of thing Steve is advocating would be bad, because it would lead to weaker published interviews, long delays between question and answer, and “over-polished and cloned responses” from PR types. He also suggests that allowing interviewees to “open up” the traditional process would subvert one of the goals of certain media interviews, which is to put CEOs on the spot.

Maybe it’s all the relaxation time I’ve had on vacation, but I can see the merits of both arguments, and I don’t necessarily think it’s an either/or kind of question. If you’re a CEO like Mark who feels that you get subjected to drive-by interviews that misrepresent your views, then I think doing interviews by e-mail makes perfect sense — but it only works if you are as direct (and fast) as Mark is, which is quite rare in a CEO. Likewise, I can see why Dave wants to respond on his blog — because he sees the value in having his thoughts become part of the blogosphere record (such as it is).

I sympathize with Ian’s concern about how “reinventing the interview” might affect the hard-hitting Q&A with the CEO of a chemical company, but I would also argue that this kind of interview is hardly a daily event. Not only that, but I don’t think we’re in danger of being swamped by blogging CEOs, regardless of how persuasive Steve might be. And having spent days preparing for canned, smoke-and-mirrors CEO interviews that reveal little and yet are so momentous they have to be written about, I would kill for a fast e-mail chat with someone like Mark.

A little more openness on both sides would probably make things a whole lot more interesting for everyone. There are competitive issues as well to consider, however, as my friend — and competitor — Mark Evans points out.

Much as I’m conditioned to dislike Microsoft products, which in general are bug-ridden and overly-controlling pieces of bloatware (not to put too fine a point on it) I’ll be interested to see whether the company’s new blog tool, Windows Live Writer, can live up to some of its early billing. Why? Because I have to admit that having tried most of the tools out there — including the Performancing extension for Firefox, w.bloggar, Canada’s own Qumana.com and several others — I have yet to find one that does everything I want it to. Could Microsoft have what it takes? Stranger things have happened. And let’s face it, Microsoft is pretty good at taking all the features other companies have come up with and aggregating them.

So far, Om seems pretty excited about Live Writer, Mark has given it a good early review, and Elliot Back seems to think it does a pretty good job too. My friend Paul Kedrosky, however — who is no slouch in the software programming department himself, having put together one of the first blogging platforms back in his GrokSoup days — is less than enthused, saying it is buggy and not very smart when it comes to configuring itself for his blog. I have to admit that his description sounds a lot more like the Microsoft software I’m used to, particularly when it comes to the early versions of the company’s products (please don’t send Steve Ballmer over to my house to convince me I’m wrong, he always winds up breaking something).

In any case, I’m going to give it a try because I’m still looking for the right tool. As it stands now, I mostly use the Web interface to my WordPress blog to write posts, because it’s just easier that way. I can enter HTML directly if I want without having to screw around with a GUI posting interface, and uploading and inserting pictures is a breeze. I had problems with both of those things when I used Qumana and Performancing.com, although I must say the latter was handy because it was integrated right in the browser — and there I have to agree with Paul that having another app I have to install on every machine doesn’t really appeal to me.

I confess that I’m no expert on Second Life. I’ve tried it out several times, for differing periods of time, and I’ve done a bunch of things including customizing my avatar (Mathew McFly) a bunch of different ways. I’ve learned how to fly and how to build rudimentary objects. I’ve danced at a party with a complete stranger — who ran a script that allowed us to dance completely in sync — and was given money by another complete stranger so I could tip the dancer. The other day I even paid some Linden dollars to hit a few virtual golf balls at a Second Life driving range.

So while I’m not an expert, I know a thing or two. I’ve even written about how companies like American Apparel are setting up virtual stores to sell their products to avatars, and how bands like Duran Duran are setting up shop in the virtual world as well. But then I came across the following passage about a “preview pile-up” in the game, and I realized there is a whole lot that I don’t have a clue about. Try to follow this:

“The preview grid took an avatar bashing this afternoon when Vektor and Brent Linden organised a mass pile-on to the preview grid. It was the first time I had participated in a formal pile-on as far as I remember, I have been to the preview grids, but not normally when the pile-ons occur. I was in early, building a waterfall and playing with Starax’s wand.”

“We were asked to join the official preview testing group, and the spam commenced. People worrying about their inventory, others telling them off, people complaining about the people complaining. I crashed. When I came back the sim seemed to have rolled back – from a fully finished waterfall with rocks etc, I had two prims left.”

There’s more. Just for fun, have a read through it and try to figure out what they’re talking about. It’s like reading one of William “Johnny Mnemonic” Gibson’s short stories where he makes up all this weird slang that you have to just immerse yourself in until it starts to make sense. Needless to say, I’m not quite there yet.

From my del.icio.us account — I’m “mathewi” if you want to add me to your network. Or tag something “for:mathewi” if you want me to see it.

• Steve Rubel has a post I meant to write about “reinventing the media interview,” using Mark Cuban (who likes to post the email transcripts of interviews with journalists to correct the record) and Dave Winer (who posted on the topic recently) as examples.
• A writer at the New York Times gets a letter from the mother of “FunTwo” — the 12-year-old guitar-playing prodigy whose electric version of Pachelbel’s Canon on YouTube has to be seen to be believed, and has been diownloaded about 7 million times.
• Supr.cilio.us has a great survey of “what Web 2.0 means” that includes some hilarious responses, including one that says it means “life inside the static” (not quite sure what that is supposed to mean, but it sounds great).
• Through Lisa Williams at the great local Watertown blog H20Town, I came across the first post by Watertown resident Michael Megna, who has cerebral palsy and spent 16 years at an institution for the mentally handicapped because he was thought to be retarded. Like Lisa, I think this is one of the most amazing first posts I have ever read.
• CNet has an interview from behind bars with Josh Wolf, the video-blogger who was jailed for refusing to turn over footage that he filmed of a protest that authorities are interested in. He is getting support from (among others) Judith Miller of the New York Times, who was jailed for refusing to identify a source.

Stock and bond traders are used to the idea of getting income from a future stream of earnings — established musicians have even sold financial instruments whose value is based on future sales of their classic hits or “back catalogue,” a product pioneered by David Bowie. So why not a “bond” based on the future earning potential of some smart young lad about to enter university? Ron Steen figures it’s about time for such a thing, so he has listed himself on eBay (hat tip to Nick Carr for the link).

What Ron is offering is the chance to bid on payments that amount to two per cent of his annual income for the rest of his life, payable by cheque once a year until he is 65. Wisely, Ron has left any potential inheritance income out of the picture, but he has agreed to pay the winning bidder two per cent of any future “windfall” income such as lottery winnings (although he warns that he doesn’t buy lottery tickets).

Ron — who describes himself as a “really good guy” with a “dynamic personality” and a “team player who is willing to learn” (he also says he has no drug or alcohol problems and his car is paid off) — says he will be entering Cal State university in the fall, and wants to pay for his tuition with the money raised by his auction. The starting bid is $100,000.

Update:

For what it’s worth, Lazymotivation.com says that Ron’s idea isn’t really that great an investment (debatable) and that Ron may or may not be lying about his SAT scores.