Month: February 2007

It’s not really about technology, or business, but it’s still an amazing story: Michael Holmes, a veteran skydiver with more than 7,000 jumps to his credit, had had his chute fail before — but never like this.

After failing to deploy, he couldn’t cut it loose, and then his reserve chute got tangled as well. Unable to control his descent, he plummeted 12,000 feet into the ground at about 80 miles per hour. Somehow, he avoided both the ocean (where he would likely have drowned) and a nearby parking lot, and crashed into a small clump of blackberry bushes. He came away from the impact with just a broken ankle and a collapsed lung.

There’s more info at the Mail on Sunday website, including comments from Michael about the jump. Incredible story.

The Mail on Sunday appears to have gotten YouTube to pull down the video, since it says it has been removed as a result of a copyright complaint from Associated Newspapers (which owns the Mail on Sunday). The newspaper has embedded the video here.

Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch has taken another run at Powerset, which has been hitting the headlines in the blogosphere because the company continues to raise giant sums of money and get all sorts of attention with very little to show for it. Mike figures that the “natural language” search startup could be a “house of cards” and that CEO Barney Pell seems to be staffing the thing with Yahoo engineers, in the hope that the company will eventually be acquired by Yahoo in its eternal quest to beat Google.

That’s all fascinating and everything, but I have to say the most interesting part of his post is the video clip, which features platinum-haired Valley girl Sarah Myers of d7tv.com doing a feature called “PartyCrashers” (Matt Marshall has the video at Venture Beat too). She gets giggly with several staffers and has a brief interview with Barney Pell — in which he says he will probably raise more money this year — but the video really gets good near the end, when she interviews some poor schmuck who has either been hit on the head with a large object, is mesmerized by Sarah’s platinum bob and party dress, or has had way too much to drink (or possibly all three).

His explanation of what Powerset does is so incredibly obtuse that it is hard to believe. At one point, he says: “We have a demo where you can, like, search web pages and, like, get results.” It’s incredible. I don’t know who this guy is, but he is just about the worst advertisement for the company it is possible to imagine. One investor who says he put $100,000 into the company posted a comment on TechCrunch that said he was “very worried about this company.”

Admittedly, an offhand comment at a party by some faceless staffer who has consumed too many free beverages isn’t a fair judgment on an entire company, but still. It’s hilarious and painful at the same time. And a warning for startups: everyone who works for you is part of your sales team.

Lots of chatter about Barack Obama’s new MySpace-style social network, which he just launched in conjunction with the start of his official bid to become the next POTUS. It’s at my.barackobama.com, and it has all the requisite tools of a supposedly Web 2.0 campaign — profiles, blogs, friend requests, and (of course) built-in campaign financing tools so you can help Barack make it to the White House. But does everyone get Barack as a friend, the way all MySpacers get founder Tom Anderson? Inquiring minds want to know.

Fred Wilson has some problems with Barack’s attempts to get all Web 2.0, including the use of Brightcove’s video player, but my problem with the whole thing is a little more philosophical. In part, I’m unconvinced that politicians and political parties — which are inherently even more artificial, controlled and paranoid than companies (and we all know how blogging and social networking gets treated at many of the latter, thanks to Wal-Mart and Edelman) — are really going to walk the walk, as opposed to just talking the talk. John Edwards has passed one test when it comes to defending bloggers associated with his campaign, but there are sure to be others.

And I also wonder whether it makes any sense to try and convince everyone to come and create a blog and invest time in all those other social-networking aspects of their lives exclusively at my.barackobama.com. Why not have a site that acts more like SuperGlu or Squidoo or something like that, one that pulls in blog posts and photos from Flickr and aggregates it all in one place, instead of making people go to Obama’s site to write or post? Of course, that would only increase the risks to the campaign, but that comes with the territory. And presumably Obama’s legion of volunteers could monitor the content.

I think there’s a risk that the social networks Barack and others are trying to build will become little more than Potemkin villages. My friend Rob Hyndman thinks that Obama could have what it takes, and that his site goes a long way towards following through on the promise of Politics 2.0.

It’s more than a little ironic that Craig “Craigslist.org” Newmark — the guy whose classified service is making $50-million or so a year more or less by accident, and eating the lunch of various metropolian newspapers in the process — is a big fan of journalism and of newspapers. I’ve come across many comments by him that express his respect for the craft, and the latest is an account of his talk at the WeMedia conference in Miami that Jemima Kiss (god, I love that name) posted on the Guardian’s Organ Grinder blog.

The way Jemima describes it, Craig talked about how political philosophers and thinkers Thomas Paine and John Locke were very much like bloggers (except their blogs were written on parchment), and that they caused their own “paradigm shift” in the media. Craig said there is also a place for traditional media skills such as editing and information filtering — something that doesn’t get talked about a lot in these days of “open source” journalism and participatory media. Craig says:

“Everyday I see what some call the wisdom of crowds, but the down side to that is that there can be mob rule, or panic, or low-quality information so what you need on top of that is another layer – the editors.”

Craig went on to say that the blogging model is exciting but it “generally means speaking the truth and checking later,” Jemima says, while professional journalists do the fact-checking first. In many ways, Newmark said, newspapers may have been the precursor to the Internet. Interesting idea, that. The rest of Jemima’s roundup is also worth reading.

Some pretty big developments at Vancouver-based NowPublic, the “citizen journalism” or “participatory media” site, or whatever your preferred term is. One of them is that PaidContent says the company, whose site just underwent a redesign and relaunch, has signed a partnership arrangement with the Associated Press newswire. The two are going to collaborate on news coverage, although there aren’t really a whole lot of details — either in the PaidContent item or in the news release from the wire service.

AP vice-president Jim Kennedy says AP “has a long tradition of pursuing citizen contributions in breaking news events worldwide” and “this relationship will make that connection even stronger and result in more news and images from people who are in the right place at the right time.” Interestingly enough, NowPublic’s “Actual News Guy” Mark Schneider says in a comment on the PaidContent story that the company is looking for a correspondent in Second Life.

The other development came yesterday, and it is that MSNBC founder and former editor-in-chief Merrill Brown has joined NowPublic as chairman of the board. The release says that he “was on the front lines at MSNBC when the Internet transitioned into the number one place to consume news and content,” and that he will “help us to continue building the next-generation wire service.”

Big moves for NowPublic — it will be interesting to see how it develops.

Human beings are funny. If you’re the underdog, the plucky startup going head-to-head with a big player, people will root for you regardless of whether you have a hope in hell of actually succeeding — but as soon as you become the dominant player, they will dump you in a heartbeat and start rooting for the next underdog. Google knows this better than anyone. Not that long ago they were the one getting all the cheers, and now we are all looking at companies like Powerset as the next potential “Google killer.”

For a company that doesn’t even have a real product yet, Powerset continues to get a surprising amount of publicity, including the story in the New York Times and a long feature at VentureBeat about the company’s licensing of natural-language search technology from Xerox’s legendary PARC research centre. Mike Arrington goes so far as to call Matt Marshall of VentureBeat a “cheerleader” for the company, which got $12.5-million in venture financing last year (contingent on the licensing of Xerox’s technology, according to Matt). He also points to a long treatise on natural language search that Danny Sullivan wrote here, which is worth reading.

Is Powerset the next big thing in search? Perhaps. But right now, it seems like a straw man dressed up in hopes and dreams, sent in to battle the now seemingly invincible Google. My friend Paul Kedrosky seems similarly skeptical of Powerset’s chances.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman and publisher of the New York Times and son of the man who preceded him in that job, gave a relatively revealing interview (for a Sulzberger at least) to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz recently, which I found through a link at Journalistopia. Like Danny Sanchez, I was struck by this comment:

Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years? “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” he says.

Sulzberger also says that the Times has doubled its online readership to 1.5 million a day — which is larger than its print subscriber base of 1.1 million. And he admitted that “Once upon a time, people had to read the paper to find out what was going on in theater. Today there are hundreds of forums and sites with that information,” but says

“The paper can integrate material from bloggers and external writers. We need to be part of that community and to have dialogue with the online world … we are curators, curators of news. People don’t click onto the New York Times to read blogs. They want reliable news that they can trust.”

Oh, and if you were thinking that maybe the Times might reconsider its pay wall, and/or offer its new Times Reader software to readers for free? Doesn’t sound like Art Jr. feels that way.

I’d love to be able to write about Yahoo’s new Pipes feature/service/thingamajig — if only so that I could cram in a bunch of puns about the pipes getting full or calling the plumber, etc. like some of the comedians here — but in what has become an all-too familiar event when a new service launches, it has been taken offline due to server overload (and while we’re on the subject, why didn’t they call it Yahoo Tubes? Much better name).

That might be understandable if we were talking about a couple of guys working out of their college dorm room, or someone’s basement in SoHo, with a few old roped-together SparcStations and a leased line from Verizon or something like that. But why wouldn’t Yahoo — which no doubt has half a dozen football-field sized server farms stationed around the continent, with hundreds of thousands of PCs humming away inside — put a few more servers online for their new toy? Going down right out of the gate just looks so bush league.

As for the service itself, I know that people like Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web like this idea of remixing RSS feeds and other things, and Jeremy at Yahoo does a good job of describing the thinking behind it — a guy I like to call Radar O’Reilly (old M.A.S.H. reference) calls it a “milestone in the history of the Internet” — but I just don’t get it.

This looks like pretty hardcore geekology, it seems to me. Not that it isn’t of value, but definitely something that would appeal mostly to people building other things, rather than as a consumer-facing service. If I ever get a chance to actually look at it, maybe I will think differently.