Month: November 2007

Ego alert: I was on The Agenda with Steve Paikin — a current affairs show on TV Ontario — on Wednesday night, along with my friends Mark Evans and Om Malik, as well as Jesse Hirsh, a CBC commentator on media and technology, and Nancy Baym, a University of Kansas professor who writes the always excellent Online Fandom blog.

We were talking about Facebook (of course) and the Microsoft deal, but also about privacy and “social advertising,” and whether online social networking is a replacement for real face-to-face networking — stay tuned until the end to see Nancy lay into Om on that one 🙂 The video clip is here, or you can click on the image of yours truly below.

Virtually everyone thinks they’re funny — and the ones who think they’re the funniest are the ones who aren’t funny at all. Into that latter category, I would have to put the new “media satire” site 23/6 (which is apparently a play on the term 24/7 — but like the site itself, the name isn’t funny either). As Chris Albrecht points out at NewTeeVee, the unfunnyness of the site is more than a little sad, considering that News Corp. and HuffingtonPost have apparently been working on this thing for more than a year now.

For some reason, everyone thinks that satire — particularly political or news-driven satire — is really easy to do. After all, that guy Jon Stewart just sits there and reads the headlines and makes faces, and people think it’s hilarious, right? And The Onion gets away with murder too, just by writing takeoffs of popular news stories. How hard could that be?

Well, guess what. It’s really hard. It’s not that hard to do — it’s just really hard to do it well. After all, even The Onion misses from time to time. Maybe 23/6 can get into the swing eventually, but you have to wonder why they even bothered. It’s not like the political or news-driven satire game doesn’t already have a bunch of players. Portfolio’s media blogger doesn’t think much of it either.

One benefit of being owned by Google has to be the mind-boggling amounts of server space they have available, with something like 45 or 50 massive data centres located around the world and an estimated 500,000 servers or so in total (you can find them quite easily — look for the football-field sized building with no windows and a four-storey air-conditioning system attached, right next door to a big dam).

YouTube is rolling out some of the benefits of that arrangement: it just announced that uploaders can now use a multi-file upload tool, and the maximum file size has been boosted by a factor of ten to 1 gigabyte from 100 megabytes (although they still can’t be any longer than 10 minutes). Just think — that means high-definition versions of Soulja Boy’s new dance and the latest LOLcatz video are coming your way.

I remember awhile back coming across a post that Nick Carr did about someone who was using Amazon’s S3 remote storage service to do backups, and wound up getting a bill for a month’s worth of charges for hosting his data — and it was a single cent (the original post by Dave Gurnell is here, and Nick’s post is here). I thought at the time that it was pretty impressive, so I created an Amazon Web Services account.

I downloaded JungleDisk, a backup/storage app that acts as a front-end to S3. Then I uploaded a whole pile of photos as a test, which worked flawlessly, with my JungleDisk files and folders showing up as a network drive in Windows and a WebDav remote share in Linux and the usual drag-and-drop to add or move files and so on. A little while ago I got my first monthly bill from Amazon: 75 cents. Not bad.

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a post up at Read/Write Web about a relatively new blog-tracking and aggregation/filter site called Blogcosm, in which the creator of the service, a veteran geek named Scott Lawton — who claims to have been around even before Dave Winer invented blogging (which is just crazy talk) — talks about how he’s gunning for Gabe Rivera’s Techmeme.

I’m going to give Mr. Lawton the benefit of the doubt, because I’m a nice guy, but I have to say that his site competing with Techmeme.com is like me competing in a bike race with Lance Armstrong. At the moment, Blogcosm is a haphazard collection of blog info and rankings taking from other sites such as Technorati (which it might be able to compete with, given how far Technorati has fallen in the past year or so).

As for the design of Blogcosm.com — well, let’s just say that Techmeme may not be anything much to look at, but next to Blogcosm it looks like something that came out of Apple’s design lab. I mean, damn. I’ve seen sites that were designed using Microsoft’s PageMaker from 1998 that looked better. I agree that design isn’t everything (what we might call the craigslist philosophy), but still. It made my eyes hurt.

I think Techmeme is safe for awhile.

Update:

Please see my exchange with Scott in the comments below.

A New Music Express piece on Radiohead brings with it a rather large knee to the goolies for comScore, which came out with some numbers on downloads of the band’s “pay what you want” album In Rainbows (I wrote about comScore’s results here). ComScore said that its survey showed less than 40 per cent paid for the album, and most paid less than $4. There was quite a bit of skepticism about the results, however, since — as Ethan Kaplan of blackrimglasses.com pointed out — it was based on just a few hundred people. Well, here’s what the band said in a statement:

“In response to purely speculative figures announced in the press regarding the number of downloads and the price paid for the album, the group’s representatives would like to remind people that… it is impossible for outside organisations to have accurate figures on sales.

However, they can confirm that the figures quoted by the company comScore Inc are wholly inaccurate and in no way reflect definitive market intelligence or, indeed, the true success of the project.”

comScore has since defended its analysis, according to this MTV story, and there is a statement on comScore’s blog with more detail about the company’s methodology. For anyone who is interested, Canadian musician Jane Siberry has been allowing fans to pay whatever they want for her music for several years now, and keeps a running tally of how many paid and the average price in the sidebar of her online store. More than 90 per cent pay the “recommended” price or higher, and the average price is well above what a song sells for on iTunes.

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land (who claims to be on vacation) makes an interesting point about Facebook, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s claims that the company isn’t planning to do an IPO any time soon. He may not want to issue shares and file a prospectus, Danny says, but the social-networking site will likely have to start filing financial documents with the SEC soon — at which point it might as well go all the way and get a stock-exchange listing.

As Danny notes, U.S. securities rules require a company to file financial reports with the SEC if it has more than $10-million in assets (gee, does Facebook have that much do you think?) and more than 500 employees who hold stock options. At the moment, Facebook has about 300 employees, most of whom likely have options, and it is growing quickly. This SEC rule also snared Google, which confided in its prospectus that the clause accelerated its IPO offering.

Hilarious — and so true. (via the always excellent Fimoculous)

http://www.collegehumor.com/moogaloop/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1787501&fullscreen=1

 

My friend Mike McDerment, who co-founded and runs the online-invoicing service FreshBooks (and is also a co-founder of the mesh conference), is getting some well-deserved props for a simple gesture of kindness that he and the company extended to a customer in Fiji. It seems that this particular user read on the FreshBooks’ blog about some new crackers being available in Canada and posted a comment saying he couldn’t get them in Fiji. Two days later, he had a box sitting on his table, shipped to him by FreshBooks at the company’s expense. This kind of thing is not just nice — it’s great marketing. It’s the kind of thing people talk about, and blog about. It makes people feel good about your company. And it costs less than virtually every other kind of marketing there is. I’m surprised more people don’t make use of it. Nice going, Mike.

I have to say, when I saw the headlines on Techmeme about the “Internet van” that made history, I thought for a minute that they were all talking about the infamous Telstar Logistics van — but as it turns out, they were just talking about some old bread-delivery van that Vint Cerf and a bunch of the guys who developed the early Internet used to test some of their research. I think the Telstar van is almost as interesting. There’s more info here and here, but if you’re too lazy to follow the links I will sum up: Telstar is the company that Todd Lappin — a writer for Wired, and (until recently) Business 2.0 magazine — invented years ago so that he could get what amounts to free parking. Brilliant idea. Todd, if you have any I would love a Telstar Logistics golf shirt.