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Baseball fan Allan Wood, who downloaded dozens of major-league games through the Major League Baseball service and paid good money for them (close to $300), wrote a post yesterday that got a lot of attention in both the blogosphere and traditional media: it seems his files suddenly stopped working, because MLB had changed the kind of digital-rights management it used and failed to tell anyone. Not only that, but they refused to provide any refunds or allow him to download the games again.

Wood has blogged about this problem before, but for whatever reason (because it got picked up by Techmeme.com perhaps? Or BoingBoing?) it got more attention this time — and MLB apparently heard about the rising storm of negative publicity somehow. An update to Wood’s blog says that he got a call from a representative for the league, who admitted that they had handled things badly, and said that everyone affected would be able to download their games again for free. Staci at PaidContent also talked to someone at MLB about it.

Score: Baseball – 0; Blogosphere – 1.

A great rumour from Valleywag, and one that actually makes some sense to me: Owen Thomas says he has heard that Digg is close to a deal to be acquired for about $300-million, but not by Google or Yahoo or one of the usual Web suspects — by a traditional media entity like the New York Times or the Washington Post. Implausible? I’m not so sure (Mike Arrington wishes Digg would just sell itself already).

As Owen notes, Digg recently signed a multi-year advertising deal with Microsoft for $100-million, and is likely worth close to $300-million on that basis alone (albeit at pretty nosebleed multiples of revenue, but hey — it’s no Facebook). But probably not to Google or Yahoo. How much traffic does it drive to those sites? Little or nothing.

To the New York Times or the Post, however, Digg could make a lot of sense. Maybe not $300-million worth of sense, you might argue — but still a lot. To a large number of younger, Web-savvy users, Digg is their front page. And yes, it’s still largely focused on technology, but so what? The NYT has already shown that it’s willing to get more “social media”-friendly with its BlogRunner purchase and integration.

As a commenter on the Valleywag post notes, Digg competitor Reddit was bought by Conde Nast last year and it has apparently continued to thrive — in fact, it drives several times more traffic to my blog than Digg does. Meanwhile, Allen Stern over at Centernetworks has some theories about why Digg might be ready to sell.

According to Compete, traffic at Digg has skyrocketed over the past year — to 18 million uniques a month from 3 million, to 51 million vists from 4 million, and to 200 million pageviews from 10 million. Not bad.

(this is cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

When Industry Canada came out with a study last week that found file-sharing doesn’t lead to reduced CD sales — and in fact may even lead to an increase in sales among those who download a lot — it came as a surprise to many, most of all the music industry, which has been arguing for years that downloads are killing the record business.

It also came as a surprise to Stan Liebowitz, an economist with the University of Texas, who has been studying the impact that file-sharing and other Internet-related technologies have on music sales for several years, and has repeatedly come to the exact opposite conclusion.

Prof. Liebowitz has been studying the impact of technology on copyright since the 1970s, when he did a study for the Canadian government looking at the effect of photocopying on the publishing industry (he concluded that it would not have an overly negative effect). He also wrote a study in 1985 looking at a new technology called the VCR, and has done research that he says shows radio also contributes to lower sales of traditional records and CDs.

On his website, Prof. Liebowitz takes issue with the study done by two researchers at the University of London, who were commissioned by Industry Canada. According to the University of Texas economist, who is also a director of the Center for the Economic Analysis of Property Rights and Innovation, the study has a number of methodological problems and also fails what he refers to as “the laugh test.”

In a nutshell, Liebowitz says, the Industry Canada paper is at odds with well-established research that shows a prominent decline in CD and record sales over the past several years, a period in which the use of file-sharing software has grown dramatically. If downloading either doesn’t affect CD sales or actually has a small positive effect, he says, then how can we explain that large a decline?

Continue reading “Music sales: Is p2p to blame or not?”

It may be the secret to monetizing Facebook’s gigantic user base (50 million and growing), but I have to say that my first response on reading about the proposals that Mark Zuckerberg outlined today was a mental picture of some guy barging into a party at my house and yelling about free pizza or T-shirts or something, and handing out coupons to all my friends while dressed up like a giant Coke can.

Just between you and me, if that were to happen, I would have to fight the urge to punch the guy. Bastardizing the community indeed. And yet, Facebook is hoping that if one of my “friends” starts bombarding me with every book he’s bought at Chapters or every movie he wants from Blockbuster, I’m going to feel so warm and fuzzy that I’m darn well going to go and buy a bunch of books and movies too.

Let’s not even talk about the loony idea that I or anyone I know (and that includes a bunch of Facebook’s target demographic) making friends with a Sprite mascot of some kind, and engaging in all kinds of viral brand-building shenanigans with other Facebook users on a Sprite-branded page or through a special Sprite-sipping widget. Not going to happen.

I know that Facebook is a free service, as Zuckerberg pointed out during the Q&A, and so we can’t really complain about ads in our news feed or ads on our message page, or possibly even getting messages from corporations offering us things they think we might someday be interested in. I’m just saying that the prospect of that kind of thing fills me with dread — and generally speaking, dread isn’t an emotion that works well when you’re trying to sell something.

For more, see Eric Eldon’s post at VentureBeat, and some thoughts from Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider. Jeremiah Owyang calls it the rise of the “Fan-sumer,” but I think his portrayal of the new ad platform and its prospects is, well… overly rosy.

(this is cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

YouTube launched a Canadianized version of the popular video-sharing site at a press conference on Tuesday, the latest in a series of international versions that have been launched over the past few months, including YouTube Brazil, YouTube Poland and YouTube Ireland.

The press conference — which had a giant mockup of the YouTube home page as a backdrop, with a big-screen TV where the video player would be — featured a live performance by singer Naomi Streimer (who recently released a single on YouTube) as well as a panel of Canadian YouTube “stars” such as Mememolly, an 18-year-old from Ottawa who said she was inspired to upload videos by watching Lonelygirl15.

Even after all the panels and presentations by various YouTube staffers, however, one question remained largely unanswered: Why does a website like YouTube need a Canadian version? Does it matter where the videos come from? Does a clip of someone singing or a funny video of a cat have more impact if we know it’s a Dutch singer or a French cat?

In other words, do Canadians want to watch Canadian content or do they just want to be entertained?

With some sites, such as YouTube Brazil or YouTube Italy, there’s obviously a language issue. But Canada doesn’t really fall into that category, despite a YouTube executive’s joking reference to a search for videos related to the term “beaver tail” or the word “loonie.” (Memo to that YouTube staffer: Don’t quit your day job for a career in standup comedy).

As an example, two members of the YouTube “star” panel belong to a group of young comedians from Halifax called Picnicface. One of their YouTube clips is a fake TV ad for a Powerade-style sports drink called PowerThirst, which lampoons all the over-hyped language and ridiculously exaggerated claims that are used in such ads. It’s hilarious.

Does it matter that Picnicface is from Halifax? I’m not sure it does. In fact, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t, or at least not to me. I remember watching the clip a few months ago after it popped up in my RSS feeds and thinking it was funny. But it didn’t occur to me to care where it came from — it came from YouTube, and that was all that mattered.

Continue reading “Why do we need a YouTube Canada?”

In one of the first comprehensive looks at who paid what for Radiohead’s recent In Rainbows launch, comScore says that more than 1.2 million people used the download site in the month of October, and only 38 per cent of them paid anything for the music. In the United States, according to the traffic measuring company, about 40 per cent of the people who downloaded the album paid for it, and they paid an average of $8 (on a global basis, the average was $4).

There are a couple of ways to look at this. One is skeptically — after all, there were reports that Radiohead had 1.2 million downloads in the first two days, so it’s hard to imagine that it didn’t get substantially more in the next 20 days. As with most traffic-measuring firms, comScore also has a certain methodology that may or may be entirely accurate. It’s not clear what the survey was based on or how the firm got the numbers it is using (but like Ethan Kaplan, I think there are some big holes).

Another way to look at it, however, is that almost 40 per cent of people paid for something they could have had for nothing — and in the U.S., they paid the same amount as it would have cost to buy the album the regular way. That may not be great, but it’s not bad. On an unrelated note, the comScore press release contains a quote from a somewhat unusual music expert: Union Square VC and music fan Fred Wilson, who has more here.

Open cellphones, OpenSocial — it’s obvious that Google sees as its main competitive advantage a totally open (more or less) approach to data of all kinds. Just as it is trying to create a platform for the free movement of social data through OpenSocial, so it seems determined to create an open platform in the mobile arena.

I’ll say one thing: mobile is one of the places where we could all use a bit more openness. Right now, the mobile sphere is where the Internet was back in the early 1990s — it’s a morass of proprietary standards and walled-garden content, combined with the most usurious fees since the department-store credit card was invented.

As for Apple’s iPhone, it may be sexy and fantastically useful, but it is still a bit like a mobile version of America Online as far as I can tell (just as Facebook is on the Web). Is that really the best we can do?

I don’t know whether Google is trying to control the whole mobile effort, or whether it just wants to piggyback on mobile as an ad platform, or maybe a bit of both. And there is certainly a concern, as Om Malik notes, that some of the company’s partners are less than stellar (yes, I’m looking at you, Motorola). But I think the quest for openness has to be supported in virtually every arena, if only because it makes things easier — and I would argue in the long run more rewarding — for users.

Further reading:

Search Engine Land has more on the news, and Silicon Alley Insider looks at potential winners and losers (Larry Dignan at ZDNet has some thoughts about that too). USA Today has a short Q&A with Andy Rubin, who is spearheading the Android platform project. The NYT has a story here, and the official Google press release is here.

The live-blogging press corps, meanwhile, consists of Engadget, as well as its evil twin Gizmodo, along with Silicon Alley Insider, CrunchGear’s John Biggs — who is taking questions via IM — and a blogger from PCWorld mag.

So a partner at Kleiner Perkins, one of the premier Silicon Valley investment firms, has apparently told Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher that they have “no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies any more.” For Web 2.0 devotees, this is a little like King Arthur telling you he’s really not that hot on the whole Grail thing any more, and you can stop looking now.

I wasn’t really aware of Kleiner Perkins doing all that much investing in Web 2.0 companies, actually. I always thought of them as playing in the big leagues — the Googles, the Ciscos, etc. But whatever. I guess the party is over now, right? Kleiner has taken away the punch bowl. All those startup CEOs hoping to get rich quick can go back to working at Kinko’s or whatever they were doing before Web 2.0 came along.

As far as I’m concerned, if KP’s comment means less money flowing into questionable startups with no business plan and a stupid name that’s missing a bunch of vowels, I’m all for that. I’m going to side with Tim O’Reilly, who posted a comment on Tom’s blog saying:

“If a company needs to identify itself as a “Web 2.0″ company rather than describing the problem they are solving, or the opportunity they are creating, then they are just playing the buzzword game, and aren’t worth investing in.”

If that’s what the Kleiner Perkins guy meant when he told Tom that they’re not interested in financing Web 2.0 companies any more, then I think he’s into something.

Just a quick post to mention that I was approached awhile back by the folks from Internet Evolution — the blogging and discussion-forum site set up by CMP and some of the team behind Light Reading (which I’m a fan of) — to see if I would contribute articles from time to time, which I agreed to do. Their list of contributors includes Cory Doctorow, Craig Newmark and infamous former hacker Kevin Mitnick (I come right before Quincy Jones on the list, which I must admit is kind of cool).

My first piece went up last week, in which I talk about the clash between the open nature of the Internet and the traditional walled-garden approach of content providers such as the major TV networks and broadcasters — sparked by my inability to watch any of the clips posted by Comedy Central at the new Daily Show site. The post is entitled The Flow of Digital Media is Unstoppable, and there are some smart comments on it already.

I’ve been meaning to mention this before, but Jay Rosen, the brains behind NewAssignment.net and its various spinoffs — including OffTheBus, the citizen-journalism political reporting venture with Huffington Post — has a new project that he told me about when we met for a drink while he was in Toronto for the Online News Association conference (he told the conference about it too).

In a nutshell, Jay’s idea is this: take social-media tools such as blogs, wikis, social-bookmarking and so on, and use them to help “beat” reporters at newspapers improve their coverage of that beat, by allowing sources to contribute their knowledge in a variety of ways. As Jay describes it:

“Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a “live” social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better.”

I think this is a great idea, and I hope Jay finds enough reporters (and newspapers) who want to participate. He says he has 7 or 8 of the 12 he is looking for already signed up. As I said to Jay when we met in Toronto, my only reservations are that some sources may not want it known that they are sources, and reporters may not be comfortable opening up about how they do what they do.

That said, I think it will be a fascinating experiment in Journalism 2.0, just as Assignment Zero (the joint research project between NewAssignment and Wired magazine) was.

Call me crazy, but I would really like one of these. You can picture a member of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen using one. The giant key that turns it on is the best part.

Basketball-team owner and billionaire TV dance-show star (what a mouthful that is) Mark Cuban has some thoughts about Google’s OpenSocial effort and the competition with Facebook. Among other things he says in his post — such as the fact that he suggested to Yahoo that they convince Facebook to license its API — Mark says Google may well be too late to the social-networking party.

Why? Because people hate entering their personal info into a bunch of different sites, he says. And if Facebook makes its API much more open than it has already, allowing the data it already has to move freely both in and out, then it will effectively be in the driver’s seat as far as its 50 million users are concerned — regardless of what Google and its OpenSocial partners do. I’m paraphrasing, but I think that’s the gist.

Joe Duck thinks that Mark is being too harsh, and that he’s just being lazy. Which may be true. But I would argue that most people are similarly lazy. Not because they literally can’t be bothered to type things in, but because they may not see any benefit to doing so — and some may even be approaching “social-networking fatigue.”

Would Facebook try to go it alone, and open up its own proprietary API rather than join the Google train? I don’t really know. But if it did try to do that, laziness — in effect, inertia — might keep many of those Facebook users and their data right where they are. Tim O’Reilly has some thoughts about the social Web and how best to make it work, and as usual they are well worth reading.

I haven’t decided whether to go and see Jerry Seinfeld’s Bee Movie yet, but I expect I probably will, considering my kids really want to see it. But I don’t really feel much desire to see it, even though I loved the old Seinfeld TV show and I think Jerry is generally very funny.

So why don’t I want to see the movie? Because the non-stop advertising and marketing for it has driven me up the wall — and according to the Movie Marketing Madness blog, I’m not alone. The stunt back in May with Jerry in the big bee suit at Cannes was kind of funny (although I didn’t need to see the clip a thousand times), but it’s been an unrelenting parade of Jerry and the bees for six months now.

Like TV Squad, the final straw for me was when NBC went Bee Movie-crazy and changed its on-screen logo to NBeeC, and dressed various cameramen and other staffers in bee costumes, and generally just went insane. New York magazine isn’t impressed either. I realize that Jerry is a much-loved comedian, but really — let’s get a grip.

It reminded me of the incessant popups and flashing banner ads I associate with really cheesy websites. So is that NBC’s fault or Jerry’s fault or the marketing team’s fault? It’s everybody’s fault, as far as I’m concerned. And I think it has probably hurt the movie rather than helped it.

Fascinating piece in the Times on Andy Rubin, the guy behind the Gphone project — about which we are supposed to be getting some details on Monday (although actual devices running the Google mobile OS won’t be coming until next year sometime, supposedly).

Along with the requisite geek-lord toys (retinal scanner at the door, giant remote-control helicopters, robotic hand that bangs a gong instead of a doorbell, etc.), we get some history on Rubin, who joined Google after it acquired his mobile startup, Android. That was his second attempt to change the mobile device business — with the first being Danger Inc., the company that made the Sidekick smart-phone.

Although the Sidekick was hip and achieved a certain geek cred, it never really took off (Ionut Alex Chitu has more on the Sidekick at Google Operating System). Why? I wish I knew. I tried out an early model and really liked it. It was a little bulky, but the flip-out screen was pretty cool — and better still, it was a device that was designed for instant messaging and web surfing. Maybe it was just ahead of its time.

If it was ahead of its time, then so was one of Rubin’s other big projects: WebTV. Although lots of people are talking about the convergence of the television and the Internet now, putting the two together just didn’t work when WebTV tried it. Why not? I wish I knew. I came across a number of older people who liked it a lot, because they could sit on the couch and write emails or look at websites, but it never really took off.

Maybe Rubin will have better luck with the Gphone. This time (from the sounds of it) it’s just software and not hardware — although Joe Duck thinks that Rubin’s presence suggests otherwise — and it is designed to be as open as possible. And that means it is following what I believe to be a universal law, namely: Open wins.

Michael Geist has a post about the results of a recent Canadian government survey of downloading and its effect on music sales, and the study (full text of which is here) came to two conclusions: one was that, in the case of those who download music, there was a slight positive effect on their purchases of CDs — in other words, they bought more than the average.

The broader conclusion of the study, which was commissioned by Industry Canada and done by two researchers from the University of London, was that when looking at the entire Canadian population, downloading (which is, after all, still a fringe activity) has no perceptible effect on music sales whatsoever. Michael has the money quote:

“The analysis of the entire Canadian population does not uncover either a positive or negative relationship between the number of files downloaded from P2P networks and CDs purchased.

That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.”

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone (except perhaps those who believe the PR campaign waged by the record industry). As far back as 2004 there was a study by the wonderfully-named Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf, which found that the impact made by downloading on music sales was “not statistically distinguishable from zero.”