Month: January 2008

Must be a slow news day over at Valleywag, where Owen Thomas is trotting out the old “Digg has secret editors” meme again (not only that, but it has the laughable “Exclusive!” tag). According to Owen, a top-secret source — let’s called him Deep Digg, in Watergate style — was approached for a job at the social-news site, and was given the inside dope on the secret cabal known as the Illuminati. Oh, sorry; wrong conspiracy.

Deep Digg was apparently told about how each topic at Digg has a secret ringleader known as a “moderator” (part of Digg’s appeal is clearly the arcane titles that the Enlightened Ones use; plus I hear they wear silk capes and get to twirl their moustaches). The moderator not only looks for spam and obvious morons, but gets to “adjust the criteria to make it easier or harder for a story to make it big” (gasp!) and this means that they… wait for it… “exercise editorial judgment.” Eleventy-one!

Of course, this was confirmed over a year ago now. Owen then trots out the old straw man about how this means Digg has “failed to match its aspirations as a perfect democracy of news,” something I don’t recall anyone ever claiming it was. This is similar to the shock and horror that Nick Carr and others express at the notion that Wikipedia has a “cabal” of insiders who edit articles and block disruptive people and so on.

Why is that so terrible? It makes sense — and far from being a negative from a business point of view, as Owen tries to convince us it is, it’s actually a positive. About the only thing I can agree with him on is the fact that they could be a bit more transparent about it, if only so that we don’t have to read any more breathless exclusives.

I must have missed it somehow — or perhaps it just didn’t sink in, because the words were just too ridiculous for my mind to comprehend — but an AT&T executive last week floated the idea of filtering everything that goes across the telecom giant’s network, according to this piece at Slate by law professor Tim Wu (who I would like to nominate as the new Larry Lessig) and also this New York Times piece. Apparently AT&T’s James Cicconi thinks that going through your virtual mail — opening every package and checking the contents — would a great idea.

It’s odd that this bizarre suggestion comes from a guy who is involved in legal affairs, since as Tim Wu points out in his Slate piece, implementing what Cicconi is talking about would undo decades of legal and regulatory history as it applies to the major telecom carriers, and open AT&T up to an almost limitless array of potential lawsuits and other legal action. At the moment, carriers are protected because they don’t filter things for copyright infringement, etc. Once they do, all bets are off.

From the sounds of it, AT&T has been talking to the record industry and the movie industry (i.e., the RIAA and the MPAA) about technology that could fingerprint copyrighted material — which brings me back to a topic I wrote about recently, in which I wondered what would happen if everything was “watermarked.” Could the telecom carrier argue that checking files for such watermarks or fingerprints wouldn’t be a violation of the common carrier principle, and therefore AT&T wouldn’t be exposed to liability? That may be what they have in mind.

For more on this issue, be sure to check out the debate that the New York Times has been running between Tim Wu and NBC lawyer Rick Cotton — which includes a proposal to redefine the concept of “fair use” — as well as an interesting post on Torrentfreak by Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, who argues that piracy is often a sign of an inefficient market. The New York Times piece in which Cicconi floated the filtering idea also has about 400 comments, many of which are worth reading.

Are the Digg guys bent on creating a media empire? Perhaps. The mini-Murdochs behind Digg and Revision3 — that is, Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson — have launched a new show called The Digg Reel, featuring the top videos submitted to Digg. It’s hosted by Jessica Corbin, who was a host on another Revision3 gadget show that got canned, and before that was on TechTV, the very same show that a young Kevin Rose was once a host on.

The Digg Reel is the same breezy kind of tech show most of us have gotten used to by now, with the cute girl/woman host with great hair — Natali del Conte, Joanne Colan of Rocketboom.com, etc. — introducing short clips. In this case, the clips include LOLcatz videos with titles like Weird Sleeping Cat, submitted by people with names like SmartAsseur. In other words, not exactly Masterpiece Theatre. But will the Digg gang watch it? Sure they will.

Whether anyone else watches it remains to be seen. At least this one comes from the same site that discovers such jewels of online content — fate has not been so kind to shows such as Online Nation, an attempt to bring Web clips to mainstream TV. And in case you forgot, Revision3 is “the first media company that gets it,” according to the website. There’s more on Digg Reel from MG Siegler at ParisLemon and Stan Schroder at Mashable.

Harry Shearer isn’t just a comedic actor — having appeared in many of Christopher Guest’s movies, as well as playing bassist Derek Smalls in Spinal Tap — but is also a blogger at The Huffington Post, and appears on other sites as well. One of the places he posts things is on My Damn Channel, a video site similar in many ways to Will Farrell’s FunnyorDie.com, and one of his recent “found items” was a video clip of CBS News anchor Katie Couric during her off-air moments at the primaries in New Hampshire.

There’s not much in the clip really, apart from Couric fiddling with her mike, making fun of herself for getting nervous — “I say oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” she laughs — and talking about how bad she looks on one of the monitors. She talks about how John McCain’s wife has eyes that are a piercing light blue colour, and jokes that she probably thought Couric was weird. She makes fun of her husky voice, and complains about the quality of the mikes, and some other miscellaneous banter.

http://www.mydamnchannel.com/xml/mdc_embed.swf?episode=367

The thing I find really interesting is the comments that the video clip has gotten, not just on My Damn Channel’s site, but on other sites as well. There have to be close to 300 comments on the My Damn Channel site alone, and they are a fascinating mix. On one end of the spectrum, there are lots of “Boy, is she dumb for not knowing more about the candidates — look what idiots the media are” remarks, but at the other end there are lots of comments about how the outtakes actually make her seem a lot more warm and human than many people seemed to think she was.

Plenty of people seem to feel that the video clip could hurt Couric, who is fighting low ratings for her news show, because it makes her look ditzy or uninformed. But just as many or more say they may actually watch her now because she seems a lot more human. Fascinating.

Without going into too much detail, I’ve taken some lumps for supporting Gizmodo during the whole CES affair (see past posts too numerous to mention), and I admit that my defence of their prank with the TV-B-Gone remotes was somewhat less enthusiastic than it could have been — if only because the sophomoric nature of the situation didn’t really jibe with the great post on a free press and unfettered inquiry that Brian Lam of Gizmodo wrote after the fuss died down.

That kind of sums up a lot of my thoughts about Gawker and its overlord Nick Denton: sometimes it’s great, and sometimes it’s really not. Two recent items written by Denton — and described by Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider — summarize this dilemma, since they come from pretty much the opposite ends of the spectrum. One has gotten him in hot water with Scientology, and the other in hot water with Facebook.

The first item was a post about Tom Cruise, and included a video clip in which the actor talks about Scientology and how it is the only solution to the world’s problems, how he deals with SPs (i.e., “suppressive persons” — cult jargon for those who are negative on the church) and other topics, using that really determined voice and piercing gaze that I associate with his crazy motivational speaker character in Magnolia.

The clip was removed, but Denton found another copy and posted that, and says he will continue to do so despite any attempts by Scientology to force the site to take it down. Denton is also posting copies of the correspondence between Gawker and the church, in which the site claims it is justified in using the footage because it is reporting on a news event. In this one I am 100 per cent behind Denton, even if he is doing it primarily for the traffic. So in this particular case, Denton = good.

And the second item — the other end of the Gawker spectrum? A post about Emily Brill, the daughter of media mogul Steve Brill. The item seemed primarily designed to make fun of the girl for going on a vacation with her friends and for losing some weight, and used screenshots from her profile on Facebook. That breaches the site’s terms of use, of course — but that’s not the part I really care about. It just seems like an invasion of someone’s privacy for no real purpose. So she went to Cabo or whatever with her rich friends — so what. Denton = evil. See my problem?

Let me make this clear right off the bat: I think the idea of Flickr and the U.S. Library of Congress collaborating on a project to display historical photos is a fantastic idea. As described by Read/Write Web and by the Library itself (and by Flickr), it involves thousands of old pictures that are free from copyright being made available through Flickr. Great idea. The more people who get to see images from their cultural history, the better.

The other aspect of the project — the part where the Library of Congress asks people to add tags to the photos to help classify them — I’m not so crazy about. Don’t get me wrong, I think “crowdsourcing” of information can be a very powerful thing, since it lets companies make use of expertise that may be located in hard-to-reach or undiscovered places. And if the Library and Flickr were specifically asking old people or photographers to tag the photos, I would be a lot more interested.

The problem with letting anyone tag a photo is that their ability to do so properly is completely unknown. To take one example from the Flickr page, there’s a shot of a guy wearing old automobile goggles, behind the wheel of an old car — and people have tagged it “goggles,” “wheel” and “man.” So far, so good. However, the photo is identified as “Burman,” and someone has tagged it “burnam.” That’s not only unhelpful, it’s wrong. Is someone going to go through and check all the tags?

It’s possible that only people with a real interest in old photos will be bothered to cruise the Library collections and tag them, in which case this might be a self-regulating problem. I hope so. As you can see if you read the comments here — some from people whose opinions I respect — they seem to think I’m off-base, and that the data collected from those user-submitted tags will be worthwhile from a number of perspectives. But it seems I’m not the only one wondering about its utility.

There are two ways you can look at a popular Facebook app like Scrabulous, which is clearly an online version of Scrabble, one of the most popular board games of all time (at least for anyone with a cottage where it sometimes rains and there is no television). One is to see it as a rip-off of a company’s trademarked property — which is clearly the way that Hasbro and Mattel see it, since they have reportedly sent legal letters to Facebook asking them to remove the app.

The other way to see to see it, of course, is as a tribute to the popularity of Scrabble, and a kind of viral marketing for the actual game. There are dozens of (admittedly anecdotal) stories of people going out and buying Scrabble games to continue their online addiction offline. How many of those people would have bought a Scrabble game before Scrabulous came along? A tiny number, at best. So why not just buy the app from the developers for a couple of hundred grand and call it a day?

From a legal perspective, Hasbro and Mattel are no doubt totally within their rights to have the app removed, or to sue, or do whatever they wish to protect their trademark. But from a marketing perspective I think they are missing the point. It reminds me of Coca-Cola’s initial reaction to the Eepybird video with the Coke and the Mentos — they said they were considering legal action, because “that’s not how we want consumers to interact with our brand.” Morons.

Eventually someone at Coca-Cola saw the light, thank God, and realized that how people interact with your brand is pretty much up to them, not you. If you’re smart, you will be glad they are interacting with it at all, and you will find a way to capitalize on it. I think another way to look at Scrabulous is as the online version of a tribute band, or like the fansites that specialize in fiction based on Star Trek or Star Wars — some companies see that as trademark infringement, others see it as an opportunity.

Dave “DigiDave” Cohn, the one-man editing and assignment desk behind several NewAssignment.net projects — including Off The Bus (a joint venture in “crowdsourced” political reporting with The Huffington Post) and Assignment Zero (a joint effort with Jeff Howe of Wired magazine) — has a great overview of all the different projects that Jay Rosen’s brainchild is or has been involved in, including:

BeatBlogging.org: Reporters with thirteen news organizations have agreed to try using the Internet — including tools such as blogs and wikis — to build a network of sources that can help them become smarter about their beat.

OffTheBus.Net: In which motivated individuals agree to keep tabs on an election campaign and file reports to The Huffington Post and NewAssignment.

ReadableLaws.com: A lab experiment aimed at using a wiki to turn legal jargon into plain English.

Assignment Zero: The project with Wired looked at the phenomenon of “crowdsourcing” through interviews and feature stories, and while it wasn’t a big success it was a learning experience according to Dave and Jay.

Polling Place Photo Project: A lab experiment that saw people from all over the U.S. track what their polling place looked like on Super Tuesday, and this year was copied by the New York Times.

Some great ideas from Jay and Dave and the rest of the NewAssignment team — and plenty to look forward to in 2008.

Thanks for all the great toys, Uncle Steve, but did you have to go and break the Internet? I and about 7,000 other people were all signed up to get Twitter updates from MacRumors, but I never saw a single one — and in fact the entire Twitter.com network was virtually unusable for several hours, with one message trickling through every 20 minutes or so. I had several friends send messages saying the entire Internet was slow.

As my friend Paul Kedrosky notes, you could almost see the sparks and smell the burning gears as the Interweb tried to handle the load. Even your alter-ego, Fake Steve Jobs, got creamed by you and all the live-blogging hordes clogging up the Internet with all the details of your wonderfulness. He couldn’t get Twitter to work, after also failing to make CoverItLive work as a live-blogging platform. Even the Apple store was down at one point.

CrunchGear.com was another site that tried to cover the keynote with CoverItLive, the app I featured recently — which I still think is an excellent solution, but appears to have been unable to handle the combined weight of billions of Apple fans’ hopes and dreams, each one clicking refresh every two seconds at Engadget or Gizmodo.

Speaking of which, Engadget was slow to awful much of the morning. The best site of all: MacRumorsLive.com, which had an Ajax auto-refresh. You other guys ever heard of Ajax? You should check it out.

Update:

There’s a message from Keith McSpurren of CoverItLive at CrunchGear apologizing for the failure of the live-blogging app, saying it was effectively a “loose screw” that took the whole service down (and for extra points, check out the back-and-forth ribbing between Mike Arrington and John Biggs in the comments at CrunchGear).

John Gruber of Daring Fireball is officially A Smart Guy, especially when it comes to Apple stuff — but he’s not (at least from my reading of his blog) the stereotypical “Steve Jobs is God” fan-boy, which means he actually thinks about things before he says how great they are. After reading his predictions for the keynote today, I think most of what he says is probably pretty close to the mark, although I should point out that I have no reason for saying that other than it sounds reasonable. Apart from being bashed once by Fake Steve Jobs, I have no relationship with The Great Man.

John figures Apple is going to launch an ultra-portable with no DVD drive and only Wi-Fi — the “Macbook Air,” as some have been calling it. This one makes sense to me as well. I think plenty of people are looking for something small and light, and wireless is ubiquitous enough at home, at work, in hotels and so on that you could use something like that without too much trouble just about anywhere. I also think he’s right that a tablet may be in the works, but isn’t likely to arrive soon.

That said, I think John is reaching on a couple of things — one being his wish for some kind of built-in wireless for the Macbooks that isn’t Wi-Fi. I share his desire for that, but I just don’t see Apple building Wimax or anything like that into a Macbook at this point. And he also mentions Apple TV, one of the few less-than-stellar products Apple has come out with, and says he’s hoping for Apple TV 2.0. But why? Lots of people seem happy just using a Mac Mini to do what Apple TV is supposed to do. Why not leave it at that? I don’t see Apple TV as a must have.

If you want to track the keynote live — and who doesn’t? — MacRumors is sending out Twitter updates, and CrunchGear is going to be using CoverItLive, the app I wrote about recently.