Month: October 2007

It’s not a huge deal, really — as Greg Sterling notes over at Screenwerk — but the news that Google has added social features to Google Maps is just another piece of the puzzle that is (or at least could be) the Web company’s emerging social net. The features aren’t rocket science, of course: user profiles that link to maps a person has created, reviews they’ve written of local businesses, etc. But it ties some things together in ways they weren’t before.

As many people have noted — including me in this post — Google has been working on what appears to be a unified social-networking approach that would bring together many of its existing services such as GTalk, Orkut, Maps, Picasa, etc. and let people create what amount to “activity streams” that others could subscribe to, hints of which first appeared in a post at Google Blogoscoped.

A heart-warming story — at least for those who have long thought that Amazon’s patent on the “one-click” buying system it uses on its website was stupid and should be struck down: the guy who has almost single-handedly been fighting to have the Amazon patent reviewed by the USPTO won his review, and many of the broad claims in the patent have been invalidated.

You can find out more on his blog, which is called IGDMLGD (for reasons that I haven’t been able to determine). As it turns out, the blogger is a chap named Peter Calveley, a New Zealander who has a science degree and a commerce degree and studied to become a patent attorney, although he has never practiced. His interest in the Amazon patent was apparently fueled by an unsatisfactory experience buying something on the website.

In an odd twist, Calveley has also worked as a motion-capture actor, wearing a capture suit in order to help create CGI battle scenes in movies such as Lord of the Rings. After realizing that none of the motion-capture actors were mentioned in the credits of the movie, Calveley protested this oversight and launched a campaign to have their contributions recognized.

In the case of the patent battle, Calveley managed to single-handedly do what Tim O’Reilly and others failed to do with their BountyQuest effort, which was designed to encourage people to search for and submit “prior art” that could invalidate patents such as Amazon’s, which O’Reilly has been criticizing for years.

I really wanted to like the Zonbu, a small, Mac Mini-style network PC that runs a modified version of Gentoo Linux and uses Amazon’s S3 (and a small built-in Flash drive) for storage — and best of all, costs just $99. It seemed like such a great idea, as Nick Carr describes here and Daniel “Fake Steve Jobs” Lyons gushes here. Okay, it has a really stupid name, but then who doesn’t in these Web 2.0 times.

In fact, the Zonbu might even be a great idea — except for the fact that it doesn’t cost anywhere close to $99. Or rather, it costs $99 in the same sense that a computer from Bill’s PC Warehouse costs $200 because it doesn’t include a monitor, keyboard, mouse or any software (which I’ve always thought was a little like taking the wheels and the engine out of a car and then advertising it for sale at $50). As Zoli Erdos points out in his post on Zonbu, the box actually costs about $250 when you go to buy one. In order to get the $99 deal, you have to sign up for two years worth of online data storage, which brings your total cost to about $400.

Okay, $400 isn’t a bad price for a networked PC with automated backup and a small form factor — except that you still need a monitor and a keyboard and mouse. I can buy a fully-configured Acer or HP desktop with all kinds of bells and whistles for $400. It might not fit under the counter or look good tucked onto a bookshelf, but it comes with a 160-gig hard drive, and I don’t have to call it a stupid name.

Greg Sterling at Screenwerk has an interesting post about a local café in his home town of Oakland called Rooz, which has posted signs saying “No Yelpers” — in other words, no customers who plan to bitch about the service or the food on the Yelp.com customer review site. Greg asked about the sign and got this response:

“What I was told, in a nutshell, is that the café staff has encountered a stream of would-be critics “with attitude,” predisposed to take issue with or be critical of the business.”

Greg says the staff argued that some customers were being deliberately snotty in their reviews “for entertainment reasons or to impress the Yelp community,” and weren’t being respectful of the impact their reviews might have on a small business like the café. The response from some of the Yelpers in question (not surprisingly) has been unapologetic:

“How DARE you ban my opinion?? And for this, I shall not return. EVER. Not the best business plan in the world buddy.”

As Greg notes, it seems a bit odd to pick a fight with your customers, even the snotty ones who give your place lacklustre reviews on a site such as Yelp. Maybe this café owner has enough customers, and doesn’t need to attract any more.

As expected, the New York Times appears to be seeing a substantial traffic jump now that its columnists and other opinion/editorial content are outside the newspaper’s “pay wall,” which was recently dismantled in favour of the Wild West known as the Interweb. According to traffic measurement firm Compete, the opinion section of the Times websites has seen traffic more than double since the move, and overall traffic to the newspaper’s site is up by 10 per cent.

As Valleywag notes, those extra pageviews are going to help the site’s bottom line, although they are likely still not enough to make up for the lost revenue from the death of TimesSelect. The important thing is that the newspaper’s columnists and other content are now part of the gigantic link-farm known as the Internet — and the growth in readership that they are likely to attract over time will almost certainly make up for the loss of the TimesSelect gravy train.

So Napster — the “new and improved” version — is going to try a Web-only strategy, after the (apparently) somewhat lacklustre response to its subscription-based downloadable software app and service. Smart move or desperate measure? Possibly a little bit of both. Let’s put it this way: it would have been a whole lot smarter, and a lot less desperate, if Napster had chosen to go the Web route a couple of years ago.

But then, what we’re calling Napster is really just a rebranded version of PressPlay, the lame record-company backed service, which was given the name that Roxio acquired out of bankruptcy — a bankruptcy that occurred after the RIAA sued Napster into oblivion and an acquisition by Bertelsmann AG was struck down by the courts. The real Napster died almost five years ago now, and the record companies spent the intervening years suing people and then getting taken to the cleaners by Steve Jobs and iTunes.

I have to say, whenever I see that logo with the cat (or whatever it is) wearing the headphones, I feel more than a twinge of nostalgia. For a brief period in the late 1990s, Napster was the best thing that had ever happened to the Internet as far as I was concerned. I know that it enabled rampant copyright infringement, etc., etc — but it was still a fantastically liberating piece of technology.

Napster says that it is preparing for the day when the major record labels (apart from EMI) finally see the light and start offering their music without DRM (digital-rights management) controls. Unfortunately, that day may never come — and even if it does, Napster is probably not the one that will benefit.

I’ve been meaning to get to this for days now, but I wanted to post about Jay Rosen’s lessons from Assignment Zero, the “crowdsourcing” journalism experiment he put together between his NewAssignment project and Wired magazine, with help from a team of people that included Dave “Digi-Dave” Cohn and Tish Grier. On a related note, Dave has also been working with Jeff Jarvis on the Networked Journalism mini-conference Jeff just finished putting together, and has a list of interviews with people who are involved in what might broadly be called social media in one way or another.

Among other things, Jeff admits that the trend story that Assignment Zero chose to focus its efforts on — the impact of crowdsourcing itself, and other “open source” approaches to media — was a little too “meta” and a little too big and subjective for the first project. And he quotes from Derek Powazek’s advice in his review of Assignment Zero lessons (which is here):

“Start with clear, simple tasks. This isn’t because the crowd can’t handle complicated ones – they can – it’s because they haven’t decided if it’s worth doing them for you yet.

People won’t do what you say because you just told them to. You have to inspire them to want to participate.”

Many of the issues that came up with Assignment Zero (and Wired writer Jeff Howe has his own take on the lessons here and here) didn’t have to do with the idea or even the execution so much as the co-ordination of volunteers and contributors. Finding out what people’s motivations are, how much they can do, what they want to do, and then dividing the work up amongst them is hard, Jay says.

“Dividing up the work into tasks people can and will do is among the trickiest decisions the project will have. Expectations have to be extremely clear or a crowd will generate a limitless number of honest misunderstandings.”

One of the potential solutions Jay talks about is having what the open-source movement calls “super-contributors,” whose job it is to help find and co-ordinate other contributors. While he says Assignment Zero did not “crack this case,” Jay told me that he thinks Off The Bus — the networked journalism project that NewAssignment is working on with The Huffington Post — is closer to a solution.

Assignment Zero and Off The Bus co-ordinator Amanda Michel writes a bit about participation levels here, and gives an example of the work Off The Bus is doing with “citizen journalists” here.

Let’s face it, the only reason I’m writing this post is so I can use a headline that features “LOLcatz“-speak, possibly my favourite Internet meme since the Star Wars Kid (although the “Dramatic Prairie Dog” is running a close third). Still, the news from VentureBeat that Google is working on a custom AdSense platform for Facebook strikes me as a great move by the Internet giant.

While everyone from Microsoft and Yahoo to Google itself is deep in talks with Mark Zuckerberg about doing deals for a stake in Facebook (which has three term sheets in hand with $10-billion valuations, according to Owen Thomas at Valleywag), Google is hard at work tunneling underneath the social-networking edifice and absorbing some of those clicks from within. Brilliant.

As Eric Eldon points out at VentureBeat, Google is effectively using the terms of Facebook’s widget platform — which allows developers to make money from their widgets — to do an end-run around Microsoft, which already has an advertising deal with Facebook that provides the bulk of the company’s $150-million or so in revenue.