Month: December 2007

As plenty of people probably know by now, Gawker has lost several senior staff members over the past week or so, including managing editor Choire Sicha (which is pronounced “Cory Seeka” in case you’re wondering — I know I was) and writer Emily Gould. There is plenty of commentary around about why they left, including some coverage at Women’s Wear Daily, and from my friend, the lovely and talented Rachel Sklar at The Huffington Post.

What I found interesting was that both Sicha and Gould said that it was the style of writing at Gawker that they couldn’t take any more. In the WWD piece, for example, Sicha says:

“I just feel like, now that everyone sort of operates at the speed we do, who’s actually going to do the stuff that takes some time or some reading?…Everything has become knee-jerk like we are.”

And Emily Gould says:

“Whatever Gawker originally set out to do, it kind of did, and now it just feels over… I don’t want to say the meanest thing or the most shocking thing possible anymore, because it gets so old and so soul-killing. There is stuff I really care about. I’m not interested in tearing it down as much as describing it.”

Could this mean that the quick-shot, snarky remark or sarcastic rejoinder is not the be-all and end-all of Web media? I hope so. Not that sites like TMZ or The Superficial and Gawker aren’t fun — but everything can’t be them. In case you’re interested, there’s more coverage of the Gawker situation in the New York Times, including a nice roundup here.

At Portfolio magazine, media writer Jacob Bercovici says Gawker is a “monster” that has turned on Denton and is eating him, and Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick has some helpful tips for Nick Denton. For his part, Jason Calacanis compares Denton to Grendel and Gollum (why don’t you just say what you really think, Jason?).

First of all, let me just say that I don’t know Sam Sethi of Blognation — never met him, wouldn’t know him if I tripped over him, and haven’t heard anything pro or con about him since Mike Arrington sacked him (or he resigned) at TechCrunch UK last year. Even then, I had no opinion on the man. For all I know, he could be a prince of a guy, or he could be a complete jackass and liar who routinely slaughters kittens.

Even if the latter is the case, however, I’m not sure that writing the kind of hate letter Oliver Starr just wrote makes a lot of sense. According to the former Blognation writer, Sethi is a lying scumbag who continually promised money from some fictional venture-capital outfit and then failed to deliver on several occasions. And it’s not just Starr who feels that way — there are corroborating comments from two other former Blognation writers, Nicole Simon and Debi Jones.

For those who are interested, Sethi has responded that Starr left Blognation months ago, and therefore he’s not up to date with what’s going on — the imminent arrival of said VC funds being just around the corner — and there’s an implication that some money was paid out to staff, but Starr just didn’t happen to be one of them. Tom Raftery has more.

All that aside, I have to wonder what Oliver gains by writing a 3,000-word screed against Sam Sethi — and then not only posting it on Blognation (where it was quickly removed) but also on his own blog, and entreating readers to take screenshots, mirror the content on their own blogs, and otherwise maximize the public humiliation that Sethi is likely to encounter. Send ’em home in bodybags, in other words.

From the sounds of it — and Mike Arrington notes that he and Sethi didn’t part on friendly terms, so it’s not surprising he would post an unflattering email — Sam Sethi is more than capable of sabotaging his own relationships with VCs, rather than having Oliver jumping in to help. In any case, why play all this out in public? I’m not sure Oliver is doing himself any favours by taking the scorched-earth approach.

It’s like deja vu all over again, as baseball legend Yogi Berra reportedly said. Just as the Facebook news feed pushed the bounds of what users felt was appropriate in terms of privacy, and caused a backlash that eventually led to a mea culpa (Latin for “I screwed up big-time”) from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s new Beacon Web-tracking “feature” has done almost the same thing — except that it pushed the bounds of privacy as a way of serving advertisers’ interests, not users’ — and sure enough, here comes the mea culpa.

In addition to taking the blame for blowing it, Zuckerberg says that users will now be able to opt-out of the entire feature completely, with a simple click. And it seems as though Marky-Mark may have learned a thing or two about taking the heat: in the case of the news feed, the Facebook CEO at first tried to laugh off concerns and told people that they needed to chill out a little (I’m paraphrasing). This time he takes it on the chin right up front:

“We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.”

Maybe all of these new features and the frenzy surrounding them are God’s way of teaching Mark Zuckerberg humility 🙂 In any case, I don’t want to say that I told you so, but I kind of saw this coming. I expected that Facebook would push the envelope of what people were comfortable with, and that as a result of that the company would change its new service.

As nice as it might be to see Mark taking the hit and apologizing, however, you have to wonder: how many more times are they going to get whacked for similar ventures? I think Om Malik has a good point: if Facebook is a social network, then why not ask users what they would or wouldn’t be willing to tolerate before you roll out a new service?

A free music-download service on your mobile? Cool. Nokia’s new “Comes With Music” offer? Dumb. The details are sketchy so far, but it sounds like Nokia has done a deal with Universal Music to offer downloads of the record company’s catalogue for free, with the cost of the music built into the price of the phone. So far, so good. Unfortunately, it sounds like the files are also DRM-laden, and thus crippled.

According to The Register, the songs will be playable only on one PC (not Mac or Linux) and on a Nokia device, and that’s it. While they will not expire — as music downloaded with some other services does — you can’t burn them to CD or play them anywhere else, although there are hints that burning might be allowed for a fee. Seamus McCauley says that such moves say one thing to him: “uncomprehending death spiral.”

A couple of months ago, Flickr announced that it would be integrating Picnik’s online photo-editing tools into the site, and now it has happened — and I have to say it is pretty cool. I’m not a professional photographer by any means, and not even semi-pro, but I do like to take pictures and I like to edit them to try and make them look as good as possible. And I’m a big user of Flickr (my photostream is here).

I’ve used Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, and I’ve used The Gimp on Linux and a bunch of other programs, and for big changes they are still the best. If all you want to do is crop and lighten and sharpen, however — which for the vast majority of photos is all I really want — then an online tool like Picnik works just fine.

So far I’ve tried it out on a few pictures and it worked great, although saving the photo after I was done took awhile (as MG Siegler also notes at ParisLemon). Still, a nice addition to Flickr’s tools. Update: Someone from Box.net emailed me to let me know that Picnik is also integrated with their online storage solution, so you can edit any photos that are stored on Box as well.

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch seems fairly optimistic about Technorati’s latest attempts to refocus the site, and perhaps it would be fair to give the new CEO a little time before we assess his chances of failure, but I must admit that I’m underwhelmed so far. It’s great to say that the site wants to get back to focusing on bloggers, but slapping up a home page that tracks blog posts and creating a “Blogger Central” page doesn’t really do it for me (although Winextra seems to like it).

As for the “Percolator,” I don’t see how it’s really any different from Technorati WTF or Technorati Explore, or any of the other attempts the site made in the past to become the aggregator of choice. Mike says in his post that he goes to Technorati several times a day, and sees himself using it a lot more if these changes catch hold. I’m not sure what Mike is doing there two or three times a day, but I know that I hardly ever go there, and I haven’t noticed my life or blogging suffering as a result.

As far as I can tell, Percolator is no better than Techmeme.com — and in fact not even in the same league really — or Propeller, or even Blogrunner for that matter (now owned by the New York Times). I think Technorati is going to have to do a little better than that to show everyone it’s back on track. And MG Siegler at ParisLemon is right, they could start by trying harder to get rid of the splogs in their links.

So as Matt Marshall reports at VentureBeat today, the Los Angeles Times has taken a stake in Mixx — a relatively new Digg-style social-bookmarking site whose main claim to fame is that Mike Arrington recently said that people were leaving Digg to go there — and will integrate Mixx buttons into its site in the same way that the Wall Street Journal recently added Digg buttons to its news stories.

I have to admit that I don’t really get why the Times would do this (the paper has apparently bought a stake in the site as well). Don’t get me wrong — I’m in favour of having social-bookmarking tools integrated in a news site, whether it’s Digg or Mixx or Stumbleupon or del.icio.us or whatever. I think that’s a smart thing to do, because it encourages people to submit your stories to those sites, which can increase traffic and (hopefully) readership as well. But why get into bed with Mixx?

Some people — like my friend Jason at Webomatica and Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web — like Mixx, and I will admit that the site has a nice, clean look. But the fact is that Digg is still orders of magnitude larger. If you do a Compete.com chart of the two, Mixx is a flat line. The top most-recommended stories or links on Mixx have about 20 votes, while the top stories on Digg routinely get more than 2,000 votes.

Is the LA Times betting that somehow Mixx will become the next Digg? Or is it just looking for a social-bookmarking site to cozy up to because everyone else is doing it? Or maybe the paper is interested because the company includes a former USA Today exec, a former Associated Press exec and a former Yahoo exec. Either way, I don’t see what there is to be gained by picking one social tool over the others.

According to a piece in the New York Times today, MySpace is launching a service called Transmissions, which is aimed at bands and artists who want to use the social network to enlarge their fan base. The site says that it is offering them the opportunity to name a studio of their choice and then record whatever they want — at which point MySpace will stream the content and give users the opportunity to buy copies of the song or the video or both. The company said it sees the feature as being like MTV Live, but with more real-time delivery.

Forgive me for straying into what be Oprah/daytime talk-show territory, but I did think it was interesting that Nancy Makin — who recently appeared on both the Oprah show and on Diane Sawyer’s show talking about her miraculous loss of more than 570 pounds over three years — effectively gave credit to the Internet for saving her life.

There are more details here, but the essence of the story is that Nancy weighed more than 700 pounds, and hadn’t left her house for about 12 years, when a relative gave her a computer and an Internet account. According to Ms. Malkin, she never actually went on a diet or got stomach-stapling or any of those drastic procedures — instead, she started joining discussion groups on the Internet, and as she started spending more time there, she spent less time eating.

Three years later, she weighs about 170 pounds and says that it was the non-judgmental nature of the groups she found on the Internet — the fact that they didn’t know or care that she was grossly overweight — that helped draw her out of her shell and gave her the strength to stop eating. Nice to see the odd good-news story about the Web now and then.

It’s no “Dramatic Chipmunk,” but it’s still a wonderful combination of cute, yet somehow disturbing at the same time.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYzjQf2mC7M&rel=1&border=0&w=425&h=355]

In case you’re wondering, I believe it’s a lemur — a kind of monkey from Madagascar. Click here if you’re reading this via RSS.

(via Presurfer)