Month: January 2008

Now that the sturm und drang over the latest changes to Digg’s algorithm has died down somewhat — after the villagers made it all the way to the castle with pitchforks and lighted torches in their hands, only to relent and make peace with the lords of the manor, after Kevin and Jay joined a podcast — I think it’s worth looking at what happened. I must admit that when it first bubbled up on Techmeme, I sort of wondered what all the fuss was about. So Digg tweaked the algorithm again; so what?

The reaction from top Diggers such as Dave “DigiDave” Cohn and Muhammad Saleem, both of whom I know somewhat through emails and the Twitterverse (DigiDave is involved with NewAssignment.net, among other things) was strong and swift. An “open letter” was posted complaining about the secrecy with which Digg goes about its business, the reports of “bury” bots aimed at specific posters, the lack of responsiveness to complaints, and so on. In his recap of events, Muhammad notes how quickly the issue snowballed, and also how quickly it was resolved.

My friend Scott Karp notes at Publishing 2.0 that what has been happening at Digg over the past year or so — the continual tweaking of the algorithm to try and prevent “gaming” of the site, of which the last tweak is only the most recent example — shows that a completely open social-media network is bound to fail, and I would agree. The only point I would make is that there has rarely ever been an example of a completely open network, just as there has rarely ever been a completely democratic country or a completely altruistic act. Human beings are complicated.

For better or worse (and in some cases both at the same time) Digg is a kind of living research project into “social media” and how it operates — or perhaps evolves is a better word. One day it will seem like the model for how a collaborative news-filtering engine can arise almost organically out of the primordial Internet ooze, and the next day it looks like a “tragedy of the commons”-style train wreck, or a kind of proto-democracy on crystal meth, eventually tipping over into self-parody and irrelevance. It’s like an unstable chemical soup, prone to explosion.

But it’s also probably the best real-time, experimental social-media lab we have right now, and it is fascinating to watch.

Torrentfreak has the fascinating tale of an author — Brazilian-born “magical realist” novelist Paulo Coelho — who has been busily “pirating” his own books, including setting up a dedicated website to point potential readers to BitTorrented copies of his various novels. Coelho says in a video at the Digital, Life and Design conference in Munich (which I’ve embedded below) that when he uploaded Russian versions of his books to P2P networks, his sales started to skyrocket in Russia.

As Mike notes at Techdirt, this is more evidence that peer-to-peer networks and other methods of “piracy” can actually be used as alternative marketing and distribution methods. Coelho isn’t the only one experimenting with P2P networks and giving away his books — Techdirt has also written about other authors that have done the same thing, including Charles Sheehan-Miles, who notes that obscurity is much worse than piracy.

Mike also mentioned in a comment on my earlier music-related post that author David Levine, an economics professor and an expert in game theory and intellectual property, has put his new book Against Intellectual Monopoly up in PDF format on his website for anyone to download. Prof. Levine looks at why copyright, patents and other mechanisms for protecting intellectual property don’t actually do what they claim, and in fact have a largely negative effect on society in general.

http://en.sevenload.com/pl/bIjFXZD/380×313
Link: sevenload.com

Sometimes I read something and am rendered speechless — and not in a good way. I had that reaction this morning to a staggeringly dense opinion piece in PC Magazine by Lance Ulanoff, about the “dangers” of DRM-free music, and how this is not only going to cause the ruination of the entire content industry as we know it, but flies in the face of centuries worth of economics. We even get a charming little vignette of Lance talking to his young daughter about bartering, etc.

Lance, who is allegedly editor-in-chief of the PC Magazine network, says the digital content industry is “on the road to ruin,” and that with each step towards removing DRM controls and offering music for free, the music business is “digging itself in deeper.” Lance must be looking at the digging from the opposite side, because to me it sure looks like they are digging themselves out rather than in. Not our Lance though. He says that the digital economy is on the verge of collapse.

As Mike Masnick notes over at Techdirt, the economic “arguments” that Lance puts forward (and I’m using that term very loosely) are completely out to lunch. A lack of DRM controls isn’t making music lose its value — the effects of digitization and the economics of abundance are, as marginal costs of production fall to zero, or close enough to make little difference. Putting DRM controls on music isn’t going to somehow cause value to reappear by magic. Value has moved elsewhere.

Note:

This isn’t really relevant, but I can’t help myself: Lance’s article also uses the word “staunch” to mean an attempt to stop the bleeding (metaphorically) in the music industry. The word is “stanch.” Staunch means dependable.

Adrian Holovaty — the guy behind the ChicagoCrime-Google Maps mashup, and now the launch of EveryBlock — is a smart guy. And not just when it comes to things like coding, but in the way he thinks about media. When we think of journalism and the “news” business, we often just think about the obvious things, like the plane crashes or the Iraq war, but in your neighbourhood there’s a whole lot more than that you might consider “news,” or at least, information worth knowing. It could be a street closure, a crime wave, a local bylaw change, and dozens of other things.

Good local newspapers cover all of those things and more — but the information isn’t always easy to find. EveryBlock.com is an attempt to use the kind of aggregation and smart filtering that a search engine like Google provides, but on a smaller scale. So far, the service is still in its infancy, but the more data Adrian and his team can bring into the mix — including newspaper stories and blog posts — the more value there will be. I think it’s a great effort, as is another local service called Outside.in, and I wish we had something like it here in the Great White North.

Update:

Fred Wilson, an investor in Outside.in, says in a comment below that bringing the service to Canada is a top priority — which I’m glad to hear. And speaking of comments, it’s worth reading the TechCrunch piece on EveryBlock if only because of the comments that Adrian Holovaty contributes in response to the concerns from several readers.

Update 2:

I think it’s worth noting that Rod Edwards tried to do something very similar to EveryBlock with a site called Blockrocker.com, and didn’t have much luck actually turning it into a business. Why? As he says in his post at Techfold, people’s interests aren’t always aligned with their specific geographic location — although we often assume that they must be. That’s a good point. One of the benefits of the Web is that it makes your actual physical location almost irrelevant.

For a Web company, the downside to getting acquired — as Last.fm was by media giant CBS last year, for $280-million — is that you have to actually start making money, and that means coming up with a business model that will satisfy the guys in suits. I think that, combined with the lame demands of the major music labels, explains a lot about the news out of Last.fm about their new subscription service.

The upside of the new features? Music from all four of the big record companies will be available. The downside? You get to stream songs just three times — accompanied by advertising, of course — before you get the corporate “up-sell” offer, in which Last tries to convince you to pay for the subscription version of the service, which apparently features unlimited streaming (no word on downloads).

As Adam Ostrow at Mashable notes, the advertising-supported streaming is similar to the model used by Imeem. But will Last.fm really be able to make enough from that approach to pay the labels for every stream? Colour me skeptical. I don’t know exactly how much the labels charge for a stream, but I’m betting it’s a lot. The other question, of course, is whether subscription-based streaming will work at all — if I were Rhapsody or Napster I’d be worried about Last.fm eating into a market that doesn’t show much sign of actually growing, last time I looked.

Note for Canucks:

You’re out of luck. It’s available in the U.S., the UK and Germany (why Germany?), but not the Great White North.

As my friend Om Malik is reporting — and as founder Matt Mullenweg has confirmed on his blog — the company behind WordPress has landed $29-million in financing, including an investment from none other than the New York Times. This sounds like a great deal for an equally great company, one whose products I not only use for this and other blogs, but have recommended to dozens of friends and coworkers as the easiest way to get online, and many of them now use it.

As Om points out, WordPress is not only a blog platform — it has become one of the default publishing platforms for all kinds of online content, including some small newspapers. As CEO Toni Schneider notes, the hosted version of WordPress at WordPress.com has more than 2 million blogs and is now the number 12 site on the Internet in terms of traffic. And yet Matt Mullenweg, who I met when he came to the very first mesh conference in 2006, is as unassuming as can be — someone who just seems fascinated by what tools like WordPress can produce.

Matt and Toni say that the funds will go to build out the company’s server network and to add new features, including (I’m assuming) the recently announced upgrade of storage space on WordPress to 3 gigabytes. It seems clear to me that WordPress is well on its way to becoming something much more than just another blogging engine. Well done, Matt. TechCrunch reported last fall that Automattic turned down a $200-million acquisition offer, and now I can see why.

I wasn’t going to touch this one, because it seems so ridiculous that it’s not even worth debunking, but the idea that Google might buy the New York Times seems to have caught enough attention to still have a cluster of blogs writing about it on Techmeme — despite the fact that there’s about as much chance of Google buying the Old Grey Lady as there is of me buying the Eiffel Tower (which I think would look really nice in my back yard, over near the potted ferns, next to the kids’ swingset).

Someone named John Ellis wrote the piece for Real Clear Markets, a sister site to Real Clear Politics, which Ellis apparently has written for in the past. He’s also described as a venture partner with Kerr Creek Partners. I hope that John doesn’t use the same kind of reasoning for his venture investments that he displays in his Google-buying-the-Times post; if he does, then his partners are in for a rude awakening. Simply put, Google buying the New York Times not only doesn’t make any sense, it doesn’t fit with anything Google stands for.

Could it happen? Sure it could. And monkeys could fly out of my butt, as Wayne used to say on Wayne’s World. I’m not going to say it’s too stupid to happen, because I said that about eBay buying Skype and look what happened there — it was too stupid to happen, but it happened anyway. In any case, as my friend Ash points out at HipMojo, the main reason it won’t happen is because Google has no interest in actually producing content (except for encouraging people to submit comments on Google News stories, and look how well that’s turned out).

Ellis tries to concoct some kind of logical argument out of the fact that a) the Times is cheap, and b) it would somehow help Google lobby the government if it owned a respected newspaper. You know what else is cheap, John? Nortel Networks. Should Google buy them too? That one would actually make a lot more sense than the NYT, since Google actually uses some of Nortel’s products and probably has some thoughts about networking. What Google knows about running a newspaper would fit into one of those stress balls they hand out to new employees.

The “Google triumphalism” never seems to stop. Google is buying Verizon (or should buy Verizon). Google is buying the New York Times. Google is going to give us all free medical care and faster-than-light travel, as well as non-polluting cars that run on Tic-Tacs. Spare me.

Since its public launch a couple of weeks ago, a new video-oriented website and community called BigThink has been called snobbish and “a YouTube for smarty-pants.” But Montreal-born Victoria Brown, who co-founded the site with her partner Peter Hopkins, told me in an interview that the site isn’t intended to be elitist or preachy, and stressed that anyone is free to contribute their thoughts on just about any topic.

That said, however, it’s clear that BigThink is trying to take the high road when it comes to content. Anyone who has grown even a little weary of the funny cat videos on YouTube or the coked-out Amy Winehouse videos on gossip sites such as PerezHilton may find it a refreshing change. Brown and Hopkins have seeded the site with video interviews featuring people like such as Moby, psychologist Steven Pinker, activist Aayan Hirsi Ali and Buddhist scholar (and Uma’s dad) Robert Thurman.

The BigThink site is divided into two large content groups: Meta and Physical. The videos — of which the site has more than 180 now — are done in the style popularized by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, with the subject looking straight at the camera, as though talking to the viewer. Most of the interviews are an hour long (although Ms. Brown says the site will be doing shorter, more news-focused interviews as well), but they are segmented by question and by topic, to make it easy for viewers browsing BigThink to find videos they might want to watch.

Continue reading “BigThink — an antidote to Perez Hilton”

I think some of the new features of Pownce are great, like the ability to import contacts, but I have to say that I still feel like it and Twitter are two halves of one great app. At one point, I was ready to write Pownce off completely — not so much because Twitter is so much better, but just because so many people I know are using it, and hardly anyone I know uses Pownce that much. But I’ve been reconsidering.

People I know that use Pownce use it mostly to do things that Twitter isn’t very good for — like sending files, for example. I have friends who send out mp3 files when they come across something good, and that has value for me. So does sending out events, although my friends do less of that. But for straightforward messaging, like ParisLemon, I use Twitter and so do most of my close friends and contacts.

In a lot of ways, I’d like them both to be put together. Why not an app that has a really good mobile client, that lets you chat quickly but also lets you send files? We used to have something like that: it was called MSN Messenger. I suppose we could use that — but that would be like driving your dad’s Oldsmobile instead of a nice, shiny hybrid 🙂

(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

As the federal government draws closer to introducing a new copyright law — a proposed update was expected before Christmas but was withdrawn at the last minute, after a vocal protest> involving a Facebook group set up by University of Ottawa law professor and fair copyright advocate Michael Geist, as well as other activity — various groups are jockeying for position.

The latest entry is a formal “platform” statement from the Creators Copyright Coalition, an alliance of 19 professional associations representing writers, musicians, actors and other performers whose work appears in print, on stage, on TV and radio, in movies and in galleries. The document isn’t online at the CCC website (at least as far as I can tell), but there is a copy of the platform here.

From the looks of the copyright coalition’s platform, its vision of the future is one in which everyone pays more in fees, and Internet providers are liable for any copyright infringement that is transmitted over their networks. Among other things (including a request that schools pay a fee to put on plays, something they are currently entitled to do for free), the coalition wants artists to have the explicit right to forbid — or to charge money for — the transfer of their work to another medium.

The CCC’s platform also wants the private copying levy, which adds a charge to the purchase of every blank CD in order to reimburse artists for illegal copying, expanded to include not just music but visual art, video, written content and other forms of art. The coalition recommends that “new tariffs be levied for the new categories.”

Finally, the group says that it would be “only fair” to require Internet service providers or ISPs to “assume the responsibilities” of ensuring that content on their networks doesn’t infringe copyright. The CCC recommends that Canada adopt a notice-and-takedown process similar to that used by the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, making the ISPs liable for infringement.

Note: The federal Privacy Commissioner has some concerns about the copyright legislation as well — in particular, the fact that some digital-rights management or DRM tools used by content companies can record information about people’s behaviour, in breach of privacy protections, as well as the fact that a “notice and notice” process being contemplated as part of the law for ISPs would require those ISPs to retain information about their users, in contravention of privacy laws.