Month: June 2008

My friend and fellow mesh 2008 organizer Mark Evans has a post about the iPhone and how it is just one part of a “razor and blades” market model — i.e., the carriers subsidize the phone as a lure, in order to sign you up for long-term contracts at usurious rates. Of course, in the typical razor and blades business, the same company benefits from both the giveaway and the ongoing revenue. In this case, however, Apple benefits from the giveaway — since it means that more people buy iPhones — but the carrier benefits from the ongoing revenue (Apple used to get a piece of that, but it has changed its model, which is part of the reason why its stock took a hit following the announcement at WWDC).

As I was reading Mark’s post, I was thinking about all of the talk following Steve Jobs’ keynote, about how the iPhone has become a platform now, meaning it is becoming more and more like a PC and less like just a communications device. This is clearly the future: a handheld that has a great browser, GPS with location-enabled services, integration with MobileMe cloud-computing type features, etc. Sounds cool, right? Except that (for Canadians in particular) users have to pay through the nose for every one of those bandwidth-gobbling services. For your average bandwidth-shaping and usage-cap throttling ISP, it’s a wet dream: charge per usage of everything, not just a flat fee.

What if when you used your computer, you not only had to pay for the bandwidth itself, but had to pay your provider every time you used Google Maps, or every time you sent a text message or a Twitter post or uploaded a photo? For a lot of people using regular cellphone plans (or the fake “unlimited” plans that redefine the word “unlimited”) that is an unfortunate reality. I love the idea of the iPhone — but I hate the feeling that if I were to use one, I would get taken to the cleaners in ways that I haven’t even thought of yet.

Update:

As Bob Warfield of Smoothspan notes, and Piper Jaffray is speculating, Apple is also potentially the beneficiary of the razor-and-blades approach, through the Application Store.

Update:

According to a statement on the Metallica site, the band only just became aware that their management company was telling bloggers to take down their reviews, and they have told everyone to go ahead and write whatever they want:

“Once we re-surfaced on Tuesday after a few weeks on tour in Europe, we were informed that someone at Q Prime (our managers) had made the error of asking a few publications to take down reviews of the rough mixes from the new record that were posted on their sites. Our response was “WHY?!!”

Original post:

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I wrote a post about how Metallica (or more likely, some elements of its management) actually seemed to be adapting to the new realities of the music industry, with a cool site called Mission: Metallica — where fans could get unreleased songs, video clips of the band in the studio, high-quality downloads with no DRM and so on. My friend Ethan Kaplan, the head of technology at Warner Brothers and one of our keynote speakers at mesh 2008 a few weeks ago, seemed proud of the site, and I think with good reason. It did a lot of things right.

So why has Metallica (or more likely, some of its management) suddenly taken a big step backward, by asking bloggers to remove their reviews after a private listening party? Who knows — but it sure looks dumb. And on lots of the blog posts and news articles that have been written about it, former fans are saying things like “Metallica is dead to me” or “this is just like the old Napster-hating Metallica). That’s not the kind of PR you want, obviously, and it’s a shame to see it coming so soon after the band did something that seemed so smart.

I’d like to add my voice to the chorus of critical responses to Nick Carr’s piece in The Atlantic that asks the question Is Google Making Us Stupid. Blaise Alleyne, a member of Techdirt’s Insight Community, has already taken a crack at why the piece is so irritating, but I’d like to add my two cents. Blaise is quite right to note that one of the irritating things is that Nick blames Google for the pursuit of “skimming” information quickly, as though this is something that was invented by Larry and Sergey, or something that only became popular because of the Internet.

But why? Skimming information has probably been around for centuries; I’m willing to bet that plenty of monks skimmed through their religious texts too, and Egyptians through the papyrus for that matter. The study that Nick mentions also looked at how university students behaved while using a couple of research databases. So let me get this straight — students skim things when they’re researching topics? Wow. That’s a real bombshell there. And the news that people skim information on the Internet doesn’t seem all that earth-shattering either; after all, there’s about a billion times as much info out there (broadly speaking) as there was a decade ago. Of course people are skimming.

I’m not even going to go into the stuff about people “losing the ability” to read longer articles or books, which is ridiculous. I may not have time to read books, but I certainly haven’t lost the ability — and I’ve probably read more longer articles over the past few years than I did in the years before that, many of them online (including Nick’s). In a lot of ways, the article didn’t just make me irritated, it made me sad. Nick is a clearly a smart guy. But for whatever reason, he would rather use his skills to try and defend silly arguments that appear to be contrary just for the sake of being contrary. He’s like a troll that writes really well.

Update:

For what it’s worth, Jon Udell seems to agree with Nick that his brain is being rewired somehow, and wonders whether that is a good thing, and I have had conversations with friends who say they share Carr’s concerns, and have found themselves wondering if their attention span is getting shorter. I think the best approach is something like cross-training: some of this, and then some of that. Too much of any one thing, whether skimming or in-depth reading, is probably bad.

I don’t know Russell Davies, but you would think that he ought to have some good advice about being interesting, seeing as how he organized an entire conference called Interesting2007 — and from what I’ve read here and there, it was a smashing success (and a great name that I wish I had thought of). And sure enough, he does have some good advice in a post entitled How To Be Interesting, and the first point is: Be interested. In other words, in order to be interesting to others, you have to be interested in things, curious about things:

“You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. If you find people (and things) interesting, they’ll find you interesting.”

The second point is related to the first: Be ready to share. Someone who doesn’t want to share their passion or knowledge with others is inherently uninteresting — except perhaps as some kind of icon or idol who is worshipped from afar. In order to be interesting on a genuinely personal level, you have to be willing to share some of your knowledge and interests with others. But as Russell notes, this doesn’t mean talking about yourself endlessly:

“Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and you’re good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself.”

That’s it, really. Two steps. Lather, rinse and repeat. Russell has some handy tips on how to help stay interested in people and things — blogging regularly, keeping a journal, getting a hobby, and so on. But it really comes down to variations on those two steps.

I know the train has already left the station on this one (what can I say — I got busy) but I still wanted to send a shout-out to my friend Om Malik on the launch of another new site: called NewTeeVee Station, it’s a spinoff from the online video site NewTeeVee, which is run by the excellent Liz Gannes and pretty much covers the waterfront when it comes to video (I know the strip of hot videos that runs along the top of the site is one of the first places I go to figure out what’s hot).

And now NTVS adds a more in-depth element, in the form of reviews and other content about the videos and those behind them, courtesy of former Variety and Daily Reel writer Liz Shannon Miller. As Liz describes:

“NewTeeVee Station is your guide to online video, pointing you to hot new memes, following the emerging stars of the web, and just generally indexing this new entertainment medium. Whereas in the past we covered online video shows like Ask a Ninja, Obama Girl and Wallstrip from a business perspective, now we’re also reviewing content for content’s sake.”

I think that’s a great approach to take. So many sites — not to mention traditional media — seem to see online video as a kind of sideshow, good only for videos with kittens and skateboarders hurting themselves, or maybe at most a Tay Zonday or Dramatic Chipmunk. It’s nice to see someone treating it like its own medium worth consideration and review. Congrats to Om and the rest of the team.

One of the latest “viral” videos making the rounds of music blogs, Twitter and email lists over the past couple of weeks is the new music video from Weezer, the band behind such hits as Buddy Holly and Beverly Hills. In the clip, singer Rivers Cuomo and the other members of the band appear along with a troupe of Internet “celebrities,” including Gary Brolsma (the Numa Numa guy), the Eepybird guys (Diet Coke and Mentos), Tay Zonday of Chocolate Rain fame and others.

It’s a great idea. At the same time, however, it’s also uncomfortably similar to a music video that Canada’s own Barenaked Ladies did last year, for their song “The Sound of Your Voice.” Although Tay Zonday doesn’t make an appearance, the Numa Numa guy does and so do the Eepybird guys — and so do some other YouTube “stars,” including Matt Harding (of “Where the hell is Matt?”), Tony Huynh (a Canadian YouTuber known as “the Wine Kone”) and Brooks “Brookers” Brodack. As in the Weezer video, some of the stars sing along, although the members of the Ladies don’t recreate their own version of the Diet Coke fountains.

Tribute, coincidence or rip-off? Hard to say. There have been other similar homages to YouTube stars, including an episode of South Park called Canada On Strike that featured the Dramatic Chipmunk character (which is actually a prairie dog) and other YouTube celebrities. And Dan Meth produced an animated tribute to YouTube stars called The Meth Minute, which hit the Internet last year, not long after the Barenaked Ladies video. In any case, it’s clear which of the music videos the crowd really prefers: the Weezer video has more than 6.5 million views after just two weeks, and the Barenaked Ladies video has only 400,000 views after more than a year. How Canadian.

I’ll leave it to others much more informed than I am to parse through what Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced at the developers conference (although I am glad to hear that we Canucks will be getting a 3G iPhone soon, along with dozens of other countries). But I have to say that one thing really struck me while watching the live-blogging coverage at Gizmodo and Engadget and MacRumours: Jobs looked emaciated. I looked back through photos from the developers conference last year and the year before, and there were comments and blog posts then about how thin he looked — and this time he looked even thinner than that. You could see his collarbone through his shirt (photo courtesy of Engadget).

<img src="http://www.mathewingram.com/work/wp-content/uploads/wwdc-keynote_045.jpg" alt="" title="wwdc-keynote_045" width="333" height="254"

As most people probably know, Jobs was diagnosed with a form of pancreatic cancer in 2003 and was operated on in 2004 — after reportedly not seeking treatment for more than nine months, while he pursued a range of holistic therapies. Although pancreatic cancer is one of the worst forms of the disease, however, Jobs had a rarer form known as a neuroendocrine tumour, which can often be cured through surgery. That said, many cancers recur even after treatment, especially if they have metastasized (that is, spread to other organs such as the liver or kidney). Of course, there’s no way of knowing.

I’m not the only one who noticed Jobs’ size — it was commented upon by many people on Twitter, and Valleywag wrote a post saying that rumour has it he is on a strict vegan diet. Let’s hope that’s all it is. Note: Some people have told me privately that they think writing about Steve Jobs and his health is “creepy” or otherwise inappropriate, but I have to disagree. The man is the high-profile CEO of a major technology company, and arguably more important to the health and brand identity of that company than the CEO of any other company I can think of. His health is a matter of public interest, not just prurient curiosity.

Update:

Plenty of other places are talking about Steve’s gaunt appearance now, including the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times tech blog, Eric Savitz at Barron’s and Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider. The Apple Insider blog says that according to the company Jobs has been suffering from a “common bug.”

On a hunch, I would have to say the answer is probably no — headlines about the Apple developer event and speculation about what might be announced already fill up a third of a page or so at Techmeme, and Steve Jobs hasn’t even taken the stage yet. The TechCrunch gang started their live-blogging with a video of them getting lost on their way to the Moscone Center (hey, Mike — eyes on the road, buddy), and Jason Chen at Gizmodo seems to have gone a little loopy already because of the smell in the center, which he describes as “like a San Francisco bus smell”:

“a mixture of sweat, urine, desperation, more urine, just a little feces, saliva, Apple fever, bald dudes, a cupful more of urine, and urine.”

If you just can’t survive without a constant stream of Apple-related news and commentary, then the Scobleizer has some links he thinks you should hit and VentureBeat writer MG Siegler of ParisLemon has set up a FriendFeed room for live-streaming the keynote. Or you can always try out some Twitter-based tools as well, for that “totally immersed” feeling: Summize is tracking Apple-related terms (Warning: I left the site for about two minutes, and when I came back it said there were 763 new results). The excellent site Twistori is also tracking mentions of Apple and related words in (close to) real time. Namaste.

The New York Times this weekend had a good piece on Trent Reznor and his approach to the ongoing disruption of the music industry, which is to experiment as much as possible and in some cases — as he did with his most recent album — to give things away for free.

“It’s all out there,” he added. “I don’t agree that it should be free, but it is free, and you can either accept it or you can put your head in the sand.”

The Nine Inch Nails frontman also seems to have changed his mind about the response to the album he produced by Saul Williams, which was offered as a Radiohead-style “pay what you want” download. At the time, Trent said that he was disappointed that only 20 per cent of people who downloaded it paid. But in the NYT piece, he says:

“The numbers of the people that paid for that record, versus the people that paid for his last record, were greater,” he said. “He made infinitely more money from that record than he did from his other one.

It increased his name value probably tenfold. At the end of the day, counting free downloads, it was probably five or six or seven times higher than the amount sold on his last record. I don’t know how you could look at that as a failure.”

My friend David Usher — who was on an excellent mesh 2008 panel about the future of music and the Web — said in a recent blog post that it’s easy for Trent and Radiohead and other multimillionaire musicians to pull what he called “stunts” like that, but it’s not necessarily a new business model for the vast majority of artists, and I think he is right. But I also think he and Trent share a lot of the same thoughts about what artists have to do in order to succeed in this new environment, and that is to focus on their music and on their fans, to build as direct a relationship with them as possible, and let the chips fall where they may.

Incidentally, David has thought a lot about these issues, and is as smart and perceptive about the business side of what he does as he is talented at the music side — I highly recommend his blog, CloudID.com, if you’re interested in what an artist thinks about new media, and you can follow along as the new album (whose release date he announced on Twitter) comes together at DavidUsher.com.

There’s a great piece in the Los Angeles Times about Mayhill Fowler, the 61-year-old “citizen journalist” who has become a lightning rod for critics of the practice, after not one but two somewhat embarrassing scoops from the U.S. campaign trail, the first of which involved Barack Obama and the second of which — just last week — involved former president Bill Clinton. Fowler is one of dozens of amateur reporters covering the campaign as part of the Off The Bus project, a joint venture between Huffington Post and Jay Rosen’s New Assignment venture.

Much of the fuss centers around how Fowler got the quotes that sent shock waves through both the Obama camp (after the candidate dismissed some voters as “bitter and obsessed with guns and religion”) and the Clinton camp (after the former president called a Vanity Fair writer a “scumbag” among other things). In both cases, it wasn’t clear that she was a reporter — in the first case, she was at a fundraiser for Obama supporters, and in the second she was in a lineup of Clinton fans and didn’t identify herself, or say that she had a tape recorder. In his response to the Obama incident, Jay Rosen wrote:

“When Arianna Huffington and I conceived of OffTheBus in March of 2007, we talked about this possibility: A contributor of ours gets invited to a fundraiser and tells us what the candidate said there. We knew it was likely because we would be opening OffTheBus to people who were active in politics. We decided that if we trusted the writer, we would probably run the piece, after doing what was necessary to verify the words of the candidate.

We knew there could be problems with this approach, and possible disputes with the campaigns. But we also felt that participants in political life had a right to report on what they saw and heard themselves, not as journalists claiming no attachments but as citizens with attachments who were relinquishing none of their rights.”

Jay has also responded in comments to Politico writer Michael Calderone about the Clinton incident, in which he said that it might have been better if Fowler had taken the time to identify herself to Clinton, but that he could see why in the heat of the moment she might not have. (Update: The New York Times has a piece about Fowler as well, with some comments from Jay and from a political reporter at Newsweek who thinks what she did makes it harder for “real journalists” to do their jobs). I think Neil McIntosh of The Guardian put it best in a post called “Who’s a Journalist, Who’s Not and Why It Doesn’t Matter Anyway,” saying:

I’m not sure how traditional journalistic rules of engagement (off the record, on the record, scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours) can be enforced when everyone has a camcorder in their pocket, and an easy way to reach millions via WordPress and some Googlejuice. In the reporting of public, or semi-public, or even private events where there are more than a few present, the only battle left is over who does the story best, and gets it up first.

This isn’t that new, really (just Google the term “macaca” if you don’t believe me). The category of people known as “journalists” is becoming more fluid than it has been in the past, that much is for sure. Some will argue that it’s a good thing — that it will prevent cozy journalists from missing stories like Kennedy’s philandering or Nixon’s alcoholism or the Bush government’s rigging of data supporting the war — and others will argue that it’s bad. But it is happening nonetheless, and we’d better get used to it. For what it’s worth, I think it’s good.