mathewingram.com/work

Every now and then, I come across a blog post that hits so close to home that I just find myself nodding, wordlessly, as I read it. Choire Sicha, the editor at Gawker and former editor at the New York Observer (whose name is pronounced “cory see-ka,” in case you’re interested) wrote just such a post on a topic close to my heart: namely, newspapers and blogs.

Choire’s post is entitled “Newspapers Now Stuffed Full Of Blogs, But No Clue Where To Put Them,” and he scans the landscape of newspaper blogs from the New York Times and the Guardian to the Chicago Tribune and the Miami Herald, and finds plenty of blogs, but poorly organized:

“Nearly all newspaper websites mistakenly segregate their blogs off with the other blogs. They’re organizing by form, not by content.

Readers just don’t come to a newspaper’s website looking for a messy passel of blogs. They come looking for sports, or fashion, no matter what “form” it’s in. Old newspaper editors may think blogs are some crazy different variety of publication; readers don’t.”

I’m not sure Choire is quite right on that one. I admit that ghettoizing blogs doesn’t seem quite right either, or grouping them together just because they’re blogs. But I also think that if the word means anything to people at all, it means a personal take on something — and one that encourages (hopefully) reader interaction in the form of comments, etc. I often look for blogs because I know they will give me that, and I expect others do as well. Choire makes a good point about lots of bloggers “screaming into the void,” with nary a comment on them — presumably because readers can’t find them. In many cases, I suspect that this is because the papers in question are making fairly poor use of things like prominently displayed RSS feeds, keywords that are hooked into Technorati or some other blog indexing engine, and the ability to ping blog search engines with new posts.

Jeff Jarvis makes the point that blogs may not even belong on newspaper sites in the first place. Jeff is a big believer in the idea of keeping blogs separate, and forming a loose federation with a newspaper (which is what he does with his PrezVid blog), and I think that is an interesting way of solving the monetization issue while still keeping the blogger’s voice separate and distinct.

Plenty of room for improvement, let’s put it that way 🙂

While most of the major U.S. TV networks are struggling with the idea of YouTube and dipping their toes gingerly into new areas — such as streaming their new shows over the Interweb — CBS is pushing the envelope in a number of different ways. For example, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal, the network is setting up a site just for short-form video “mashups” and other content created both by CBS staff and by viewers.

The site, which is to be called EyeLab, is designed to appeal to Web surfers who have grown used to watching and sharing YouTube video clips or user-generated tributes to various mainstream shows — such as the collection of corny one-liners from CSI: Miami that a fan going by the name stewmurray47 put together and uploaded to YouTube. The clip has gotten more than a million views, which is enough to get a network executive drooling.

Steve Safran, who writes for the excellent TV blog Lost Remote, describes the conversation that he imagines taking place at CBS after someone mentions the David Caruso clip:

Executive Three: “You mean the thing I wanted pulled down from YouTube?

Executive One: “That’s the one. Anyway, it was a big hit.”

Executive Two: (Suddenly interested) “Oh. Really?”

Executive Three: How big?

Executive One: About one million views and counting.

(Executives Two and Three actually have $$ signs light up in their eyes)

According to the WSJ story, CBS has hired half a dozen video-editing twentysomethings to create mashups like the CSI: Miami clip — and the network also plans to find and distribute similar clips created by users and viewers as well. Hopefully CBS has contacted stewmurray47 about a job, since it was his clip that more or less gave the network the idea.

If CBS is looking for ways of using video clips to build audience interaction or interest in a show, it should take a look at what actor Adrian Pasdar is doing with behind-the-scenes video from the TV show Heroes. The actor, who plays one of the leading roles on the show, has uploaded to YouTube (using the name “buckshotwon”) dozens of clips of his fellow actors goofing around backstage, and each one gets between 15,000 and 20,000 views.

Whether CBS’s effort will be successful or not remains to be seen, but I think it is an interesting idea. Building a community around your content — or making it easy for people who enjoy that content in different ways to share it with each other — is one of the few tools that the TV networks have left (hopefully CBS will find ways of aggregating that content from wherever it is, rather than requiring everyone to sign up with yet another site).

Hat tip to LAist for the info about Pasdar and his video clips.

I was really hoping that the much talked-about meeting of senior Yahoo types that is taking place in Sunnyvale today — which Mike Arrington describes as a meeting of the “leadership team” — would turn out to be a barn-burner, a firecracker thrown into the sleepy boardrooms of the Internet behemoth that might get some people moving again.

After reading Kara Swisher’s description of what is likely to happen, however, I’m not sure I should be hoping for much of anything. Several hundred vice-presidents doesn’t exactly qualify as a “leadership team,” as far as I’m concerned. In fact, calling it a team at all kind of distorts the meaning of the word beyond all recognition.

Technically, it’s possible that something dramatically positive will come out of the meeting, and that it will add some real meat to Yahoo’s 100-day plan to turn things around. But I’m not holding my breath. And I fear that Valleywag’s source may be right when he or she says of the 100-day idea:

The punchline is that there is no plan. Yang was just saying it in a conversational, rally-the-troops sort of way, not realizing that the Street and the Valley were going to to mark that date in red ink and count the days… The first rule of being CEO: don’t set your company up to fail.

If the plan boils down to “rewrite our ad-serving code again to try and make it more like Google’s,” then I fear for Yahoo’s future even more than I did before.

Note: for those who might not get the reference in the headline of this post, it’s from the “all your base are belong to us” meme, more information about which can be found here.

Came across a quirky little story from Associated Press yesterday, but one that sort of made me think (and Danny Sullivan too, it seems). It seems that the U.S. Navy is planning to spend $600,000 (about the cost of a new wrench or toilet seat in military terms) to change the structure or appearance of a little-known Navy barracks unit near San Diego. Why? Because it looks like a swastika in Google Earth.

How many planes and helicopters have flown over that building in the 40 years since it was built? Thousands, I would assume. It’s probably been one of those quirky things that local pilots know, but hardly anyone else is aware of. Until Google Earth, of course — or Keyhole, as it was known before Google bought it. Someone first spotted it while using Keyhole in 2005.

According to several reports, the Navy realized the buildings would look like a swastika from the air after they were built, but decided that it wasn’t important because not that many people would be able to see it.

So it appears that Russell Beattie — who took a sabbatical from blogging for a year or so, for reasons I never quite understood — is, well… a little ticked at some of the criticisms that Scott Karp levels at the mobile Web in a post at Publishing 2.0. So ticked that he sprinkles his post liberally with the F word (a good, Anglo-Saxon word that I have no problem with).

I actually found myself nodding as I read Scott’s list of things he dislikes about the mobile Web experience. For example, Russell essentially calls Scott a moron because he complains about how most websites don’t automatically detect a mobile browser and send a mobilized version of their site — but that’s something that bugs me too. I have a script for my blog (from the excellent Alex King) that serves up a stripped-down version when it detects a mobile device. It’s not rocket surgery. But lots of sites don’t do it.

But Russell says this complaint just “highlights one’s inability to use a decent mobile browser and or the lack of effort to bookmark a site’s mobile version,” which I think kind of misses the point. It’s possible that Russell’s thoughts on that particular matter have something to do with the fact that he’s working on a startup called Mowser.com, which does exactly that — takes websites and feeds them through a transmogrifier that turns them into mobile-friendly sites.

I also happen to think that mobile sites could cut down on the advertising a bit, which is another of Scott’s criticisms. But Russell says that “complaining about a website having ads is like complaining it’s not 1996 anymore. Grow up.” Why not keep the ads on the full version of the site, where most people still go? That doesn’t seem like a huge deal to me either.

I have nothing against a little swearing to make a point — in fact, I’m in favour of it. And I like a strongly-worded critical polemic or two (and have written my share). But to me, Russell’s post seemed so angry and over the top that it made me wonder what else was going on. Rex seems to agree with me. I certainly don’t think that Scott said anything as moronic as Russ is making it out to be. Karoli has more at Odd Time Signatures.

I really don’t want to get into the usual pissing match that seems to occur whenever someone fails to bow down and worship Steve Jobs’ every move, but I can’t help myself. Why aren’t we seeing more outrage — okay, even a little bit of outrage — about the news that Apple twisted the arm of some guy’s ISP because he was uploading the code embedded in his iPod Touch’s memory.

According to several reports, this guy was in the process of uploading some of the code stored in his broken iPod’s flash memory, and all of a sudden his Internet provider cuts him off — at the request of Apple. As far as those who have been writing about it can gather, Apple was able to move so quickly because it has been monitoring IRC groups devoted to hacking the Touch.

When DVD Jon hacks the DVD encoding scheme, or the Blue-Ray encoding scheme, or any of the half-dozen other things he has hacked and released into the wild — something that contravenes copyright rules just as much as what the iPod hacker was doing does — everyone cheers because he is fighting The Man, and information wants to be free, etc. etc.

But when The Man happens to be Steve Jobs, all of a sudden people seem to start singing a different tune. Meanwhile, in other Apple=hardass news, there’s this. Now it seems that we all need to add the term “bricking” to our vocabulary.

I must admit, when I read that BudTV had gotten a reprieve and was going to have its lease extended to next year, my first response was: Why? The site, an attempt to create a Funny or Die-style comedy video destination, was so painfully lame — despite the estimated $20-million that went into setting it up and getting various artists to create content for it — that I thought it would be better to euthanize it, and put it out of its (and our) misery.

That was my first reaction. But Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee has managed to convince me that BudTV should live on to fight another day. He makes a number of points, including the fact that Bud has spent a bunch of money on the site, and should give it a little longer to find its feet — and he also notes that people criticize large companies for not experimenting enough, taking risks, etc., and that we should cut BudTV some slack.

Good points, Chris. I’m going to give BudTV another chance. But at this point, they still mostly suck.

When the Soviet Union was under Communist rule, dissidents in Soviet countries exchanged information and commented on current events using photocopied newsletter-style publications called “samizdat” that were handed around from person to person. Now, the Internet allows dissidents and protesters of all kinds to get information out of totalitarian countries much more quickly (although there are still restrictions that authoritarian regimes — such as those in North Korea and China — can use to make Internet access difficult or even impossible).

The latest example of this phenomenon in action is the steady flow — or at least trickle — of information that has come out of Myanmar over the past week, as hundreds of thousands of Buddhist monks have taken to the streets to protest the totalitarian rule of the military junta that controls the country (formerly known as Burma). Although many of the posts are written in English, some are unreadable because they are written in Burmese, the language spoken by citizens of Myanmar (which is related to languages spoken in Tibet and China).

As a story in The Age notes, posting photos on blogs or even sending them via cellphone can put a Myanmar resident at risk of arrest, or worse. One blogger known as Moezack was posting photos of the protests regularly, according to a Myanmar native who runs a website for ex-patriates in Thailand, but his blog has since gone dark. Another prominent blog that has been posting updates comes from someone called Ko-Htike, who appears to work in the emergency department of a Myanmar hospital. He has been posting his thoughts as well as photos.

Another blogger named Mr. Jade has also been posting photos of the protests, including recent attacks on monks by Myanmar police and members of the army. According to at least one report, the army has been dressing soldiers in local police uniforms to try and disguise the fact that the military is part of the crackdown. One place Myanmar residents and ex-patriates have been getting information about the protests is a newspaper-style website called Mizzima. The site won an award from the International Press Institute earlier this year for its reporting.

Global Voices Online, a blog network spanning dozens of countries that was put together by Rebecca MacKinnon and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, has also been carrying news updates and commentary from bloggers in Southeast Asia related to the Myanmar protests. And so has another site for Myanmar ex-patriates called The Irrawaddy.

A blog called Justice and Injustice has photos pf the protests and a statement from someone named Aung Way that says: “We want three Fs. First we want freedom — we want freedom for our future; second, we want friendship — we want friendship between our army and our people; third, we want food — we want food to live peacefully.”

In a recent interview with the Jewish Journal — which I found via Martin Stabe, who wrote about it for the Press Gazette after finding out about it from Mark Hamilton, who got it from the Canadian Journalism Project, who originally got it from Romenesko — Seymour Hersh talks about online journalism. He says:

“There is an enormous change taking place in this country in journalism. And it is online. We are eventually — and I hate to tell this to the New York Times or the Washington Post — we are going to have online newspapers, and they are going to be spectacular.

And they are really going to cut into daily journalism. …We have a vibrant, new way of communicating in America. We haven’t come to terms with it.

I don’t think much of a lot of the stuff that is out there. But there are a lot of people doing very, very good stuff.”

An interesting viewpoint from one of the deans of investigative journalism in America. He adds that:

“I’ve been working for The New Yorker recently since ’93. In the beginning, not that long ago, when I had a big story you made a good effort to get the Associated Press and UPI and The New York Times to write little stories about what you are writing about.

Couldn’t care less now. It doesn’t matter, because I’ll write a story, and The New Yorker will get hundreds of thousands, if not many more, of hits in the next day. Once it’s online, we just get flooded.”

The full interview is here.

Mike Arrington has a post up at TechCrunch about Parakey, the embryonic startup that featured Mozilla whiz-kid Blake Ross as a co-founder. According to Mike, some of the VCs who put money into Parakey are miffed that they only got cash after Facebook bought Parakey, while Ross and his co-founder got Facebook stock, which could be worth millions. Says Mike:

The acquisition price, say two sources close to the deal, was paid in cash and was “less than $4 million,” providing investors with just a 2x return on their investment.

This is how bizarre things are in Silicon Valley: Venture capitalists put money into an early-stage startup, and double their money in just six months, while the guy who sells his company gets no money at all — just stock in a company that might someday be bought or go public with a (theoretically) multibillion-dollar valuation. And the VCs are the ones who are pissed.

(This is a story I wrote for globetechnology.com based on an interview with Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy czar — I’m posting it here for those who may have missed it. Click here if you want to listen to the entire interview)

The man in charge of Google’s privacy policy says the Internet giant is working on a version of its controversial Street View service that won’t breach Canadian privacy rules, after federal privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart raised concerns about the service earlier this month.

Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, said in an interview from Montreal on Monday the company understands Canada has “struck a different balance” than the U.S. has in terms of what is public and what is private, and that Google is sensitive to those differences.

Street View, which has data available from seven U.S. cities but does not yet include any Canadian sites, is a tool that shows users street-level photographs of the addresses they are searching for. Some of the photos, which are being taken by a fleet of cars belonging to Immersive Media of Calgary, show individuals entering adult-video stores and urinating in public.

In comments earlier this month, Ms. Stoddart said that she had contacted Google and Immersive Media to express her concerns that taking photos of people — even in public — for such a service might violate Canadian privacy laws.

The United States has “a long tradition of saying that it is legal and appropriate to take pictures from public spaces and publish them,” Mr. Fleischer said. “But clearly, we’re aware that different countries around the world strike a different balance between this idea of a public place on the one hand and people’s expectation of privacy.”

Continue reading “Google working on Canuck Street View”

As PaidContent reported last night, satellite broadcaster EchoStar is acquiring SlingBox for $380-million. For anyone who doesn’t already know, Slingbox makes a gadget that seems so simple — but changes the way you think about TV and video content, in the same way that the TiVo-style personal video recorder does. The box allows you to stream content from your TV to virtually anywhere you have an Internet connection.

I remember talking to VOIP pioneer Jeff Pulver at VON Canada a year and a half ago and having him describe how he was sitting in a hotel room in Jerusalem watching TV on his laptop and decided to change the channel — at which point, his wife called him on his cellphone from their home in Long Island and yelled at him for changing the channel, because she was watching TV streamed from the Slingbox on her laptop in their bedroom. That story (along with my pal Stuart MacDonald’s post about watching TV on the train, which got him into the Economist) really helped to crystallize for me just how far TV has come.

According to an interview that founder Blake Krikorian did with PaidContent, the TV-streaming company will remain “platform-agnostic,” and as an update from PaidContent describes, Echostar is considering a split into two separate companies — one handling the satellite end and the other the set-top box technology. It’s worth wondering whether this deal will encourage certain parties (like, say, Hollywood or Major League Baseball) to step up their attacks on the idea. I hope Echostar is prepared.

I realize that the headline on this post will make no sense whatsoever to 99 per cent of the population, but I’m not about to let that stop me 🙂 It appears that Leah Culver of Pownce took a shot at the folks behind Digg over a new social-networking feature that she suggests was copied from Pownce — and to add insult to injury, she used a Digg post to do it.

What makes this story so odd, as Valleywag and TechCrunch point out, is that Leah is part of (or was part of) the Digg inner circle, and helped create Pownce with Digg founder Kevin Rose. She also reportedly used to be in a relationship with Daniel Burka, a (Canadian) UI designer who has worked on both Digg and Pownce. I realize that all of this strays into the Perez Hilton, celebrity-gossip end of the spectrum, but I still find it fascinating. Was it an inside joke? A 3 a.m. post that shouldn’t have been published?

More importantly for fans of Digg and Pownce, does this imply that there is tension between Kevin and Digg co-founder Jay Adelson? The picture Leah refers to in the Digg post (which I assume was a screenshot of the feature she mentions) has vanished from Flickr, which implies that she may have changed her mind — or been talked into taking it down. As we all know, however, nothing on the Internet is ever really gone.