Month: September 2006

Occasionally I like to break free from the Web 2.0/blogosphere-centric focus of this blog, just for the heck of it (I think the last time was when I posted a photo slideshow from my vacation in Florida back in the spring, which I cleverly justified by claiming I was demo-ing Bubbleshare). This one was so cool I couldn’t resist: Matt Marshall of VentureBeat.com had the bright idea of asking Christine Herron, a venture capitalist with the Omidyar Network who blogs at Christine.net, to write about some of the things she saw at the recent Burning Man festival, which I have always kind of wanted to go to — and she did.

One of the things she mentioned was the Mondo Spider — a “vehicle” of sorts that carries one passenger/driver, and looks like a gigantic metal arachnid, with articulated legs that lift and swing forwards. Extremely cool. The Spider is the brainchild of a group of mechanical geeks led by Jonathan Tippett of Industrialus, who started the project as part of Vancouver’s Junkyard Wars. There is some amazing video on YouTube of the Spider walking in its first public demo last month.

I haven’t been able to confirm it yet, but I have a feeling Jonathan is related to NowPublic founder Michael Tippett (more Spider video here too).

Update:

Jonathan sent me an email and confirmed that he and Michael are brothers, and also mentioned some of the co-creators of the Mondo Spider — including Leigh Christie (frame/drive train), Alex Mossman (“power pack” or hydraulic system) and Charlie Brinson (force calculations and coordination) as well as a key patent holder on the leg design, Joe Klann. On top of that, he added, were half a dozen “very dedicated volunteer fabricators.” Incredible work.

Wise words from my friend Alec Saunders, the CEO of Ottawa-based “presence-based” software company iotum, who writes on his blog about why he doesn’t do video clips or do a “vlog” as the kids say. Apparently vlogger Dina Kaplan of oneminutenews.tv talked Andy Abramson into doing a video post, but Alec says he has no intentions of following suit. Is it because he doesn’t think he’s attractive enough for video? No (although that’s probably one reason I haven’t done one — some people have a face for print, if you know what I mean).

Among other things, Alec says he doesn’t find video a very good way of getting information across, which is why he doesn’t follow many vlogs — and I would agree. Video is very good for some things, but getting across concepts or information is not one of them, unless you have a whole pile of time and some really compelling speakers who are properly trained and edited. What video is good for is entertainment (obviously) and also for giving you a sense of someone as a person rather than as a writer. A minute of watching Andy can give you a whole different impression than you get just reading his blog, and that is arguably worthwhile too.

None of this is meant to take away from the great stuff that is done by Rocketboom or my friend Amber MacArthur or any of the other talented video journalists and vloggers out there. I am not one of those high priests of print who thinks all video is trash. I just think it’s good for some things and not for others. Alec also makes another interesting point, which is that whatever information is in a video clip can’t be indexed easily or searched or referred to easily (although Google and others are working hard on that). I think that’s an important thing.

Although I have to admit it would be kind of fun to see a vlog-cast with Jeff Pulver and Alec and Andy all doing the Hawaaian shirt thing 🙂

Update:

Jeff — who is moving from emphasizing Voice on Net (which he pioneered) to Video on Net — has posted some thoughts about his use of video, and Mark Evans has a response here. Dina Kaplan has also posted a comment on Alec’s blog, which he has broken out as a separate post. Pulver blogger Paul Kapustka also has some points that are worth reading. And now the Scobleizer has weighed in — but of course, podcasting and v-logging is his game now 🙂 And Ben Metcalfe, who seems like a smart guy, makes a similar point to Alec’s, which is that video has to be consumed in a manner and at a speed dictated by the producer, whereas text can be randomized and indexed to a far greater extent. I would also join in my friend Rob Hyndman’s plea not to turn blogging into TV. However, Andrew Baron of Rocketboom notes that video-blogs are making their way into the top ranks of the blogosphere (at least as measured by Technorati) at an increasing rate.

I know that the widely blogged-upon comments by Universal Music chief executive Doug Morris about YouTube stealing money from his company are probably more of a bargaining chip than anything else, as Mike Masnick at Techdirt points out with his usual perspicacity. But they still amount to a cheap shot — and a sign of how retarded (sorry, I mean “developmentally delayed”) Universal’s thinking is when it comes to social media. I can hardly wait until Umair of Bubblegeneration.com weighs in on this one.

Contrast the threats from Mr. Morris (based on a questionable understanding of the laws regarding copyright infringement, as Mike notes) with what NBC is doing: not only trying to find new and different ways of “monetizing” their content on the Web, but setting up an entire entity devoted to doing that, as I wrote about here. They are also streaming their new fall shows for free, supported by advertising, as are several other networks.

That seems a whole lot smarter to me than rattling the sabres and getting the lawyers all fired up. As James Robertson notes, the “clues aren’t very thick” over there at Universal, it seems.

Plenty of chatter about the launch of Microsoft’s Zune — will it kill the iPod, or will it suck? If you’re looking for technical details, Engadget is probably the best place, although the gang at PaidContent have been doing a great job of covering the story. I think the larger screen sounds great and so do some of the other features, but the wireless music sharing is the thing that interests me most. It sounds like a terrific idea — share songs with your friends! — but of course it comes with all kinds of restrictions from the legal wizards at the major record labels. Here’s what it amounts to, from this blog:

While Zune users can share an unlimited number of tracks, each individual track can only be shared once with any given user. Once shared, it can never be shared again. Also, each shared track is good for only three spins, or three days, whichever comes first, after which it disappears from the user’s device.

Does that sound like a great deal? Not to me, despite the somewhat breathless post over at TechCrunch. Admittedly, it’s better than nothing — but not by much. Why not have it time-limited in a different way, so that it expires after 30 days rather than such a short time or a puny number of listens? I know that the record companies need to protect their hits and they’re already taking it in the goolies from downloading, but still. And I know that Zune users will be able to share their own (sans copyright) music, as well as photos and album art or whatever. But I think the restrictions on copyrighted songs go too far.

Russell Shaw is right: sharing music is a deep-seated human desire. I think allowing people to share more would actually be better for the labels in the long run, but of course I have no real evidence to support that — although some studies have shown that those who download a lot of music (even illegally) also buy more music.

Got any good Web 2.0 jokes? Maybe one of them might be worth financing for a million bucks or so — just like Dogster and Catster. The gang behind the social-networking sites for pet owners just raised some cash from a group of venture investors, including blogger Michael Parekh, Josh Schachter of del.icio.us and one of the guys who founded Hot or Not. As Matt Marshall at Venture Beat notes, the site is devoted to pet lovers — many of whom post journal or blog entries by taking on the character of their pets.

Dogster started as a satire on the (then) popular social-networking site Friendster — but it is a joke that has become a profitable business with revenue of $100,000 a month and other enviable “metrics,” according to VC blogger Jeff Clavier here (Jeff is a member of the syndicate of investors). It’s not the first Web 2.0 joke to get financing, however: Consummating, a dating site for geeks, also started as a joke and was acquired by CNET last year.

Does the fact that something which began as a joke got financing mean that financing for Web 2.0 companies is a joke? Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves. And have a look at possible buyout/financing candidates on this list. How long until Dogster using the million bucks to buy this site?

Here’s an item I just finished posting to my blog at the Globe and Mail, which looks at some comments, reaction and eyewitness accounts from the shootings at Dawson College in Montreal:

Not surprisingly, much of the attention surrounding the shootings has focused on the blog that the killer maintained on a site called VampireFreaks.com, a kind of MySpace for “goths” and other angst-ridden teenagers interested in heavy metal music, eyeliner and (occasionally) Satanism and death.

According to the entry at Wikipedia — which has already been updated to add the connection to the recent shootings — the site started as a personal Web page, and now has more than 500,000 active users and about 3 million page views a day. As Wikipedia notes, VampireFreaks has been associated with two other criminal events: in one high-profile case, a girl’s postings on the site led to a mistrial in the case of a boy named Jonathan who was killed by his older brother and several friends, and in another case a girl and her boyfriend who used the site are accused of killing her parents.

But there has also been plenty of activity on other blogs. Naturally, many Montreal residents and former Dawson College students have posted their thoughts expressing shock, anger and other emotions about the events (the Globe’s ongoing coverage can be found here. But there have also been eyewitness accounts and other posts from those close to the college or at the school when it was attacked, including one from a LiveJournal blogger called “stylistix,” a longer eyewitness account from another LiveJournal blogger named David Sanftenberg, one from a blogger at Windows Live Spaces, a long post from Jay at a Montreal city-blog, and a personal account here.

There are other comments on various blogs, including this one from a former student on LiveJournal and another personal account from an eyewitness named Arileen here. I should note that there is no way of confirming whether or not any of these bloggers actually witnessed what they say they witnessed, or whether they are who they say they are. For the squeamish or prudish, some of the posts I’ve linked to use some graphic language, which isn’t surprising given the magnitude of what they are describing.

A hat tip goes to J. Kelly Nestruck and Darren Barefoot for some of the links. Several Flickr users have posted photos related to the Dawson College attacks, including Robert Lio and a user named Blork, who also has a blog post here. A user named esTes/Belz has created and uploaded a memorial banner for people to use on their webpages about the event.

If you know of any other posts, please let me know either by posting a comment or emailing me at [email protected]. If you have cellphone photos of the event, please send an email to [email protected]

Reader email:

Here’s an email I got from David Brown:

Dear Sir, I am a tourist from San Diego who stayed in Old Montreal Sept. 9-13. On Sept. 12 had breakfast at about 9 or 10am at a diner on McGill Street, which is at the corner of McGill and Rue NotreDame or Rue St. Jaques. The suspect in the Dawson Shooting was eating breakfast at that time with three other older men in a booth by the window.

He appeared to be relaxed and having a pleasant time. Almost no one else was in the restaurant at the time so the waitress might remember them since he did have a distinctive mohawk. I read that one of his last entries on his blog mentioned having eggs and toast. So the slight significance, or not. The eggs are very good there and a great value.

Video clips:

There are several video clips on YouTube.com that were apparently taken with cellphone cameras during the shootings. They include one uploaded by panzo69 and one from inside the college. There are comments on some of the videos from students and witnesses.

Comment from VampireFreaks:

A reader emailed to let me know that the website has posted a comment on the Dawson College attacks. It says:

so yes there’s been a lot of press lately regarding a shooting in montreal, where the person involved was a member of this site.

i offer my condolences to the victims and their families, it really is a tragic event. however we do not condone or influence this type of behavior in any way. just because someone goes around shooting people and happens to be a member of vampirefreaks, doesn’t mean that this website has influenced him to do such a horrible thing. the goth scene is a very friendly, nurturing, non-violent community and we are very supportive of our users and do not condone any illegal activities. we have an excellent team of administrators who moderate the site, and a useful system which allows all users to report illegal and suspicious activity. thank you to all the users who continue to help us moderate the site.

i do think this event is a tragedy, but i feel that this site is wrongly being associated with the shooting. i’m sure this kid also had accounts on various other sites, but the media likes to associate crimes with gothic culture because it makes a better story for them.

so, i just want to ask our members to really try to set a good example to the world, to show that we really are caring, responsible, non-violent people. in fact i believe we are more mature and responsible than other scenes, in that we value intelligence, part of goth culture is thinking for yourself and being more aware of the world, rather than just following the mainstream trends. don’t let a few bad seeds ruin our reputation, we are a great community.

Having been a columnist in a former life — before I discovered the joys of having my faults pointed out to me within minutes by blog readers — I’m aware of how easy it is to get on a roll when writing about a particular topic, to the point where perhaps the rhetoric gets away from you and the facts take a back seat. Today’s object lesson: Frank Rich, a columnist with the New York Times, who wrote an op-ed piece for the paper (which unfortunately is now behind the TimeSelect pay wall) about a famous photo of a group of people watching the towers fall on September 11, 2001.

In the column, Rich wrote that the picture was “shocking” because it showed that right after the attacks, callous New Yorkers had already moved on. As he put it:

This is a country that likes to move on, and fast. The young people in Mr. Hoepker’s photo aren’t necessarily callous. They’re just American. In the five years since the attacks, the ability of Americans to dust themselves off and keep going explains both what’s gone right and what’s gone wrong on our path to the divided and dispirited state the nation finds itself in today.

Okay, so here’s one of my favourite things about the Internet in action: David Plotz wrote a critical piece for Slate magazine, saying Rich was jumping to conclusions about what the people in the photo were or were not thinking about the attacks. At the end of it, he asked anyone who was in the photo to write in and describe what was happening — and someone did. Walter Sipser wrote in and said that he and his girlfriend were in the shot, and that they (like everyone else that day) were in shock. And he adds:

A more honest conclusion might start by acknowledging just how easily a photograph can be manipulated, especially in the advancement of one’s own biases or in the service of one’s own career.

Well said. Too bad the truth had to barge in and interrupt that great flight of rhetorical fancy you had going there, Frank.

My friend and fellow mesh organizer Rob Hyndman has been giving me the gears — in a nice way, of course — from his hammock down in the wilds of Eastern Canada, about my ambivalence over the issue of paying the top submitters to Digg (or Reddit or Netscape or any of the other 35 social networking sites out there). You can read his thoughts in the comments on this post of mine, which jumped off from a memo by Jason Calacanis of Netscape about how well they were doing.

Rob says that submitting sites to Digg — or at least doing so in the quantities that make you a top 10 Digger, although Rob didn’t make that distinction — is work, plain and simple, and therefore it should be compensated, whereas most Web 2.0 networks seem to be based on assuming that “pixies” will provide all their content for free (um, Rob, I think down East they’re referred to as “the wee folk”). I’m not really convinced, though. I think you can “pay” people in other ways (recognition, for example) and I’m not sure submitting sites to Digg qualifies as “work.”

In any case, I think the quality of submissions on such sites — as with other sites such as Flickr — has something to do with the fact that people do it because they *want* to, not because they are paid to. Would the quality of photos on Flickr be better if top photogs were paid? Maybe. But there wouldn’t be the variety, and that’s much of what I (and others I think) find interesting. It’s like artwork or craftsmanship of any kind — there’s something special about it because someone isn’t just doing it to make money.

Kevin Rose of Digg seems to agree. As he said at a recent conference:

It’s very important to us that there are no outside motivations for posting stories to Digg. When something makes it to the front page, the only motivation should be that the story was interesting to somebody, not that they were paid to do it.

There will no doubt be people out there who see Kevin’s approach as taking advantage of people, a form of Web 2.0 slavery in which someone else makes money from the effort of users. But don’t the people who submit photos to Flickr and sites to Digg and so on get something? Sure they do. Bragging rights, props from commenters, compliments, contacts — emotional payment of some kind. It’s not always about dollars.

Update:

Rob has posted some more of his thoughts on the subject on his own blog. And I came across a post by Savio, who brought up something interesting: he compares the paying of Diggers (or Netscapers) to the open-source community, which is discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. Most mature open-source groups have a small core of paid staff, which he calls a “maven trap.” Interesting idea. Scott Karp writes about another case of user-generated content here.

The TV networks get plenty of criticism for being totally out to lunch, so maybe it’s worth noticing when they try to do something right, or at least show that they’re interested in breaking down the walls (or some of them at least) between TV and the Internet. In that spirit, I think it’s interesting to look at what NBC is doing on a couple of fronts. The biggest development is the announcement on Tuesday that they are launching something called NBBC — the National Broadband Broadcasting Company — whose job it will be to distribute TV content online, through as many outlets as possible.

According to the New York Times, this all stems from the “holy sh*t” moment (my term, not theirs) that NBC experienced when they saw the hilarious Lazy Sunday clip from Saturday Night Live get viewed by about seven million people inside of a week — over the holidays, at that — and they wound up with bupkis. As an NBC executive said in the NYT story:

When ‘Saturday Night Live’ had a great clip of Lazy Sunday, YouTube made a lot of money off it… In the future, when we have a Lazy Sunday clip, NBBC will make a lot of money on it.

Fred Wilson of A VC thinks that NBC is being smart by “micro-chunking” their content (a term he got from Umair Haque of Bubblegeneration). Not everyone is convinced that NBC is doing things the right way, however. As the NYT story points out, the network is planning to take a much larger proportion of the advertising revenue than other video distribution outlets — but then NBC also spent vast sums of money to develop the shows it is distributing, unlike most of the content that is put up at Google or Revver.

It’s also worth asking whether NBC isn’t trying to be a little too “walled garden” about the whole thing (as Adam Kalsey says). It’s not clear what sort of restrictions there will be on the content as far as viewing it is concerned — will fast-forwarding be disabled, for example? — but what is clear is that NBC has no interest in letting you insert video in your blog or anything like that, even if there is a “pre-roll” video.

Jeff Jarvis says this is stupid (and has a typically shy and retiring headline: “Numbnuts Broadcasting Company”) and I think he might be right. Why not let people distribute your video for you? Brightcove can make it work — check out Jeremy Allaire’s keynote at the NAB conference for a demo — so why not NBC?

The other announcement from NBC is also interesting: the network is going to stream all of its new fall shows — using a new, large-format player on its site — for free, supported by ads. Does NBC know what it’s doing? That’s not clear. But hey, at least it’s trying.

According to a piece in Private Equity Week, the founder of Flock — the browser filled with Web 2.0 goodness wrapped around a chewy Mozilla center — has decided to leave and “pursue other opportunities.” According to the mag, Bart Decrem says that he is looking to move on and build another company, but that his sudden departure (in PE Week’s words) “isn’t tied to anything wrong with the company.” He will remain as chairman and a shareholder.

Valleywag isn’t the only one to smell a rat. Why would the founder move on and say he wants to build another company? He’s not even finished building the first one yet, for chrissake. It’s not as if Flock has become a massively successful enterprise and he can move on to bigger and better things — there’s still plenty of debate about whether there’s any point in developing another browser with Flickr and blog integration, since Firefox is so extensible. I like Flock, but it seems like a bunch of features tied together and disguised as a product.

A quote from Bessemer Venture Partners makes it sound like they need someone with talents Bart doesn’t have. Says general partner David Cowan:

This development has been anticipated since the day we started the company, and if it’s happening sooner than anyone expected, it’s only because of the traction we’re getting with partners that taxes the team for experience and resources.

Here’s Bart’s bio. He’s the former head of marketing and business affairs for the Mozilla foundation, and before that was involved with Eazel, a Linux desktop project. Pete Cashmore at Mashable wrote favourably about one of Flock’s recent initiatives: a private label version of its browser released in partnership with the photo-sharing site Photobucket.