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(cross-posted from my media blog)

Don Dodge has some thoughts about newspapers and local content — like restaurant reviews, movie reviews, etc. — that got their start with a post from Greg Linden of Findory (which Greg said recently is shutting down, or at least going into hibernation) on the same topic. Greg’s post in turn was based on a very perceptive post by Rich Skrenta, CEO of Topix (a local news aggregator), about how newspapers generally suck at making their content available to search engines where they can become part of the “long tail.”

All of this drew some skeptical fire from my friend Rob Hyndman, who said in his post that newspapers shouldn’t own local search. His reasoning (expressed both in his post and in an email discussion with me): newspapers may have local content, but that doesn’t mean they can necessarily compete with other, better sources of content that are faster and more flexible than newspapers are — even assuming that papers can solve their archive and searchability issues.

Needless to say, I think that newspapers have a slightly better chance than Rob does, but that’s not just because I work for one. I will agree that trying to convince local-content searchers to come to a newspaper site — which Rob also criticizes in his post — doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense. But that doesn’t mean newspapers can’t make use of their content by making it easier for search engines and other aggregation mechanisms to find.

Maybe newspapers can’t compete with other local sources (like Yelp, which Mindy McAdam likes), either because they don’t have compelling enough content or because they don’t know what they are doing technology-wise, or because they are just clueless and handicapped in a variety of ways. But they can certainly do a heck of a lot better than they are now. Pramit Singh has some good suggestions at MediaVidea

Looks like round three (or is it round four?) of the “blog payola” debate is upon us, something I expected we would see more of in 2007. Over at The Blog Herald, my friend Tony “I Never Sleep” Hung has the 411 on a new PayPerPost-style blog review service called SponsoredReviews, which is reportedly about to launch in beta.

Tony has the details, and Mike Arrington at TechCrunch brings the outrage, in a post that says the “blog payola virus is spreading.” In a response in the comments, someone says that services like PayPerPost fill a need, and Mike responds that drug dealers fill a need too. The bottom line, he says, is that such services mean “misled readers, search engine pollution and credibility questions around the entire blogosphere. All for a few dollars a post.”

SponsoredReviews, like PayPerPost, appears to require disclosure — although it’s not clear yet whether that will be a general, site-wide disclosure like the one PPP allows, or whether compensation will have to be disclosed on each and every sponsored post, which is the way I think it should be done.

SponsoredReviews is also trying to carve out a variation on the model by allowing bloggers to set their own rates, with a bidding system determining the eventual payola level. And the service says that it will have a rating system, although it’s not clear what that will consist of.

I’ve got a great idea: How about instead of requiring disclosure, SponsoredReviews requires bloggers to post the details of the entire monetary transaction that led to the post in a small box next to the post — complete with all the various bids and the final price that was paid for the review. Transparency is good 🙂

I wasn’t going to write any more about the Apple iPhone and its closed nature (great post by Tom Evslin here), but it’s been bugging me and I can’t help myself. I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I am an Apple-basher, because I like Apple products a lot (although I don’t use many of them on a day-to-day basis, for a variety of reasons). I also just finished writing a piece for the Globe and Mail about how Steve Jobs and the team at Apple should get credit for seeing the value of great design. They make great products, there’s no question.

But Nick Carr’s piece earlier this week, which praised Steve for being the antithesis of Web 2.0, really got me steamed up, as Nick’s pieces often do (and I know how much he enjoys that). In a nutshell, he said that Steve is a true genius who couldn’t care less about what people want, and who has no intention of making devices that can be modified or improved (because by definition, of course, they can’t be improved). Hell, you can’t even change the battery in an iPod — isn’t that great? Thank God for geniuses like Steve.

As I mentioned in my comment to Nick — and to Scott Karp, who sang a similar tune in a guest post at The Blog Herald — this kind of attitude makes it sound like Mr. Carr is more than happy to take whatever the great man gives him, all because Steve is such a visionary and totally, like, a genius. How could we question the decisions of a genius? We should be grateful he gives us the benefit of his creative vision at all (here’s a list of all the things the iPhone can’t do).

I know I’m in some kind of bizarre alternate universe when I prefer to agree with Dave Winer, but DW makes some good points in his post on the topic here, in which he argues that — in addition to getting fawning treatment from the media — Apple is taking the wrong route by trying to lock users in with the iPhone. As Dave notes, millions of people would use Apple products without that kind of lock-in, simply because they are easy and enjoyable to use. Why the chains?

As Clint Ecker has pointed out on his blog at Ars Technica, Steve is also guilty of using a little Microsoft-style FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) to justify his decision to lock down the iPhone. He tells Newsweek that it’s because Cingular doesn’t want people using third-party apps and disrupting the network, but realistically there is virtually zero chance of that happening and Steve knows it.

He wants the iPhone locked because that’s the way he has always liked his products — locked, inviolable, pure. It was that way even with the first Mac, where Steve didn’t even want to allow users to open it and install anything. Yes, the iPod is a great device, but would it be any less great if we could change the frickin’ battery ourselves? No. Would it be any less great if we could install software to do cool things Apple never thought of? No. But Steve won’t let us.

Update:

Lots of sound and fury about this one pinging around the blogosphere (and in the comments here). So far, one of my favourites is from Ethan Kaplan at Blackrimglasses — great rant 🙂

Along with Toronto blogosphere luminaries such as David Crow of Ambient Vector and DemoCamp fame, Mark Kuznicki of Remarkk, ex-Flockster Will Pate (soon to be a Torontonian, I hear), Eli Singer of CaseCamp and Tom Purves of firestoker, I attended the launch of Don Tapscott’s new book Wikinomics — subtitled “How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” — on Thursday at U of T. My first thought? Bob Rae looks a bit like a Muppet character.

My second thought was that Web 2.0 must be crossing some kind of Rubicon, when a guy like Don can get that many corporate types into a room for the launch of a book about wikis and blogs and peer-to-peer collaboration. And he does it by making it clear that Web 2.0 principles can help traditional companies like gold miners and manufacturers, and that it’s not just feel-good claptrap tossed around by twenty-somethings with fake dreadlocks and Hello Kitty T-shirts.

Will is right that Don, while not actually part of the Web 2.0 movement, makes a good “translator and diplomat” when it comes to explaining the benefits of Web interactivity to a skeptical, non-Webby crowd. If there’s one thing Don is good at, it is taking an emerging field or trend and giving an overview of why it’s important — pulling strands together, explaining them and packaging them in a way that is easily understandable for a novice. That is a valuable skill.

And Don is trying to walk the walk as well, with a wiki aimed at writing the last chapter of the book interactively, and a fledgling Wikinomics community powered by local social-networking platform PikSpot, which I am quietly (or not so quietly) proud to have known about before David.

Just one thing, Don: I couldn’t help but notice in your speech that you credited your daughter with introducing you to the wonderful social network known as “the Facebook” — better be careful, or you will be lumped in with George Bush, who recently referred to how much he liked using “the Google” 🙂

Update 2:

The Venice Project is now officially known as Joost. Why? Because.

Original post:

There’s one thing I still don’t get about The Venice Project, the secretive, TV 2.0, peer-to-peer project being put together by billionaire Skype founder Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom to revolutionize the boob tube (Om Malik has an in-depth look here). And that thing is this: Why is it called The Venice Project? Did they think of it in a cafe in Venice? Is the project almost under water? Do Venetians watch a lot of TV, in addition to having invented the Venetian blind? I’m not sure.

What I do know is that the player is very slick (yes, unlike my poor friend Mark Evans, I got an invite to the beta). The content, however, still leaves a bit to be desired. That’s not surprising, of course, but as Tony Hung pointed out awhile back, the bottom line is the content. A really nice interface, with lots of cool features and great useability, is only going to impress people for so long.

So far, the content consists of lots of HBO-type programs — a Green Day documentary, an interview with Nelson Mandela, episodes of The World’s Strongest Man, The World Poker Tour and (somewhat bizarrely) episodes of the old 1950’s television show Lassie. Some of the content comes in crystal clear, just like average quality television, while other programs are somewhat pixelated, like Web video often gets when your Internet speed is throttled.

As Ars Technica has pointed out, Internet speeds are also an issue The Venice Project is going to have to confront, since plenty of places — including this particular corner of North America — don’t have unlimited fibre-optic connections, and so cable providers like Rogers provide an “asymetrical” connection, which means I get tons of download bandwidth but nowhere near as much upload bandwidth.

Many ISPs also have bandwidth “caps” or limits on how much you can download per month. For a peer-to-peer service like TVP, both of those things are the kiss of death. Ars Technica notes: “watching an hour’s worth of TV consumes an average of 320MB downloaded and 105MB uploaded traffic, due to the service’s P2P architecture.” Someone who watched a lot could use up their entire month’s allotment of bandwidth in no time at all.

Could Robert Cringely be right? In a recent column, he predicted that this year would be “the year the net crashed (in the USA). Video overwhelms the net and we all learn that the broadband ISPs have been selling us something they can’t really deliver.”

Update:

As Haydn mentions in the comments, there is a social aspect built in to The Venice Project that I forgot to mention — there are “widgets” built into the application (with more coming in the future), including RSS feed “crawlers” that run along the bottom of the screen and a see-through instant messenger window, where you can chat with friends about what you’re watching.

As Mark Twain once said, everyone complains about the weather but no one ever does anything about it. Well, lots of people complain about Yahoo too — about how it is big and bloated and unfocused and is losing ground to Google, not to mention the fact that its peanut butter is spread too thin — but is anyone doing anything about it? Eric Jackson is trying to.

Eric, a Yahoo shareholder and management consultant who writes a blog called Breakout Performance, is like Peter Finch’s character from the movie Network. He’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take it any more. So Mr. Jackson wrote a post called Yahoo Plan B, complete with a video clip of himself describing said plan, and sent it out to various places, including YouTube.

In a nutshell, Eric is trying to get a wave of shareholder support for change, in the same way that activist hedge funds and other prominent investors often do, except he’s starting with blogs and YouTube and wikis instead of a board seat and a couple of hundred million. He says:

Yahoo! is drifting; and its board and management have been too slow to act to this fundamental problem. As shareholders, we don’t have to sit by and watch this.

Activist Investing has principally been the domain of hedge funds — well, no longer. With the help of the web, blogs, and wikis, I’m asking all current and future retail investors in Yahoo! to join me in pushing for a change.

So far, Eric has gotten some favourable press at TheStreet, as well as from former trader David Neubert, and the Internet Outsider blog, written by former analyst and Bubble 1.0 cheerleader Henry Blodget.

Eric says he has received many emails of support, and now has shareholders with more than $1.7-million in Yahoo stock who are backing his campaign. Not exactly a hedge fund, but not a bad start. Good luck with the crusade, Eric.

Update:

Eric’s campaign now has a wiki as well, at Yahoo.Wikia.com.

Okay, okay, okay. Damn you, Steve Jobs. Yes, I want an iPhone — even though it costs more than a brand new computer would cost, and even though I probably won’t be able to get one in Canada until 2015, and even though I will have to sign up for a 10-year contract to even be able to afford it in the first place, and even though it doesn’t have 3G (although it likely will, as Luca points out here), and even though I will likely have to pay my remaining arm and leg for monthly data charges, I still want one.

Why? Because it is just so unbelievably cool. The full-length touchscreen. The multi-touch gestures. The full-featured browser. The 8 gigs of storage and iTunes support. The smart orientation sensing and automatic call-volume control. I could go on, but it’s too painful. I know, the touchscreen is a question mark — will it be slippery when typing? And that sleek shape is going to get all greasy and fingerprinted, just like the iPod does. But it just doesn’t matter.

Damn you, Steve Jobs.

Okay, so Yahoo finally fronted the cash (reportedly about $10-million) for MyBlogLog, the viral social network that a couple of guys started awhile back and that has been growing by leaps and bounds according to Alexaholic. As you can find out from any of the bazillion posts on Techmeme this morning, there was a rumour back in November of such a deal, but nothing came of it.

That explains the nervousness with which people posted yesterday morning about another acquisition report, this time from a blog called Marketing Shift — which put up a post, and then just as quickly pulled it down. Om Malik posted something and then retracted it, but last night got to retract the retraction, after getting confirmation from his buddy Scott Rafer, the CEO.

My favourite part of this story, as told by Om, is that the two co-founders of the company are friends from elementary school, and that they raised zero — yes, zero — dollars in financing from angels or VCs (of course, it helped that Scott probably brought in some money from his previous stint at Feedster Note Scott’s comment below). Now that is a Web 2.0 story.

This is great for the MyBlogLog guys, and as I have written before I am a big fan of the application. I like the way it connects people who read different blogs, including mine. I like looking at the pictures of who has been reading, and then clicking on the pictures to see who that person is and whether they have a blog. That is social networking, pure and simple.

My only lingering question is: what the heck is Yahoo going to do with it? Their track record so far doesn’t exactly fill me with optimism about how they’re going to make use of their new acquisition. Don’t get me wrong — I like the fact that they haven’t screwed up Flickr or del.icio.us, both of which I am a huge fan of. But that doesn’t mean that owning them makes a lot of sense either.

How have they been integrated or made Yahoo better? The short answer is that they haven’t (my friend Stowe Boyd is similarly puzzled). Maybe Yahoo has a master plan that I haven’t been able to figure out — but I’m not betting on it. Tony Hung has some thoughts about what the company should do with it over at Deep Jive Interests. And Don Dodge does the math and decides Yahoo overpaid.

I think the folks at Linden Labs have made some mistakes when it comes to creating their virtual world of Second Life, and there has certainly been plenty of debate lately about whether SL has gotten overhyped based on flawed numbers, but the latest move by Linden — to make the software that powers the world open source — is like a beam of sunlight. It’s huge.

In fact, if creating SL was like creating the world, then going open source is like the invention of fire, or maybe Ford’s invention of the assembly line. Having played around with Second Life a bit, I know that much of what is interesting about the world comes from non-Linden developers, whether it’s the ones who created the heads-up-display that lets you play golf, or the guy who sells roller skates from vending machines.

Not only will this accelerate that by making add-ons and plug-ins and mash-ups a lot easier to develop, but it might make using the SL frontend software a little more user friendly as well (official Linden statement here). In the same way that Firefox helped to strip down and focus the Netscape/Mozilla browser, open source development could help streamline and extend Second Life’s software in interesting ways. At least, that’s the potential.

Some people will no doubt continue to dismiss Second Life as a haven for sexual deviants (and admittedly, the flying pink penises don’t help), or not as good as World of Warcraft — which is presumably better because you get to kill things — but I think the virtual world has a lot of potential. Potential for what? For just about anything. Education, political activism, social engineering, entertainment. Kind of like the Internet. More thoughts about the implications at RedMonk.

Update:

The very smart Susan Wu, a VC at Charles River Ventures and former CMO at the Apache Foundation, has some thoughts about the open-sourcing of Second Life that are well worth reading.

Just came across Tony Hung’s post about filling in for Darren “Problogger” Rowse for a week while Darren takes a holiday, and I wanted to send him a shout-out (as my homies in the ‘hood like to say) and wish him all the best. He’s already off to a good start with a well thought-out piece on the kinds of things it takes to maintain and grow a good blog.

To be honest, I think the “10 best” blog post model gets overdone at times, but Tony has some good advice from his own perspective, and it’s definitely worthwhile reading. Tony has come a long way over the past six months or so with his own blog (in addition to now helping run things over at The Blog Herald), and has done it with smart writing, strong opinions and a lot of hard work.

In other words, he is a great guy to be handing out advice about how to develop and grow a successful blog. All the best, Tony.

From Karoli at Odd Time Signatures comes the story (via The Zero Boss, and prior to that Chris Winfield of the website 10e20) of one Chandler Kent, a 19-year-old college student who wandered into the sights of the Digg bury brigade. In this case, it was Chandler’s comment that got buried, and may have become the most buried comment ever. But there’s a twist.

As Chandler describes it in a long and hilarious post here, he posted a quick comment on a Digg link, saying he liked the site that was linked to, and (big mistake) attached his blog’s URL. This set off alarm bells as a “spam” comment — like the ones I get all the time that say “I am liking your content very much!” with a link to some porn or poker site — and so it got buried repeatedly.

Chandler also got some fairly abusive comments, which is typical of the mentality that one finds at Digg, and why many people have given up on reading the comments at all. His phone number was also posted by some unscrupulous Digger, and people even abused him via instant messenger.

More evidence of what is wrong with Digg, as Zero Boss notes. But there’s a happy ending, in a sense: Chandler’s post about what happened has gotten Dugg about 4,000 times, and he has used the criticisms about the crappy design of his website to start a contest to redesign it. Nice work, Chandler.

One of the things I love about Second Life is that bizarre things can happen at almost any moment. During an interview with a journalist from CNet, for example, a flock of giant pink penises might fly by (known as a “grief” attack). But what makes it interesting — and potentially important — is that the person whose interview was interrupted in such a manner, Second Life entrepreneur Anshe Chung, has threatened to sue YouTube for hosting video of the event.

Ms. Chung, a Second Life land owner and developer whose real name is Ailin Graef, didn’t threaten to sue because she was embarrassed (although that was no doubt part of her motivation). As Steve O’Hear describes in his post at ZDNet, she sent a “notice and takedown” letter under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because the video showed copyrighted artwork — in other words, her SL virtual character or “avatar” — without her permission.

Unfortunately, YouTube decided to take the video down (although at last check it was still on Google Video). I wish they had decided to fight instead, since the claim Ms. Graef is making is ridiculous and would likely never hold up in court. For one thing, there is the principle of fair use under copyight law; for another, allowing Ms. Graef to ban video of her appearance would theoretically allow anyone to have video of themselves removed provided they were wearing a piece of homemade jewellery.

As game designer — and now Second Life correspondent for Reuters — Warren Ellis notes, using the DMCA in this case opens up “a large and nasty-looking can of worms.” For more, check out Slashdot, and for commentary from deep inside the world of Second Life, check out Prokofy Neva’s piece in Second Life Herald.

I wish I could say I was surprised that all is not well at Backfence, the local “citizen journalism” site, where the second of the co-founders, CEO Susan DeFife, just left (the first, Mark Potts, left a few months ago) and about a dozen employees — out of a total of 18 — are being let go, according to a post by Peter Krasilovsky.

Potts is to act as interim CEO while the company tries to restructure itself, according to the post at Local Onliner. DeFife says that “Ultimately, we did not share the same strategic vision for the company as the board of directors.” The company got $3-million in financing in 2005 from a group of venture capital funds, including the Omidyar Network. Apparently, Backfence’s backers didn’t think things were going well, and pulled the trigger.

I don’t live in the areas covered by Backfence, which has 13 sites in three metropolitan areas (Washington, Chicago and the Bay Area), but I have taken a look at it from time to time because I’m interested in local citizen journalism efforts — and spent a bit of time looking at Backfence after it absorbed Dan Gillmor’s failed local CitJ experiment, Bayosphere, which I wrote about here. And it certainly never seemed like a thriving entity to me.

Like Frank Barnako, who has written about it here and who also wrote skeptically about it about a year ago, it just seemed stale and unappealing to me, not to mention a little bit like a ghost-town. I would agree with Frank that in order to draw people in, a local site has to live and breathe the area it covers, and have lively personalities and content. And maybe giving citizen journalists some financial incentive might help too.

How all that happens exactly, I don’t know, but it is possible to do local journalism — SunValleyOnline.com seems to be doing well, and so does Baristanet.com. And the Fresno Bee, owned by McClatchy, just finished acquiring a couple of local sites that seemed quite successful: ModestoFamous and FresnoFamous. Did the founders sell because it wasn’t a viable business, or did McClatchy want them because they had something the chain needed? Perhaps a combination of both.

In any case, I will leave it to others to decide whether Backfence failed because it took the wrong approach, or because local online journalism doesn’t work. My bet is on the former rather than the latter. Howard Owens has also written about the recent news, as have the gang over at PaidContent. Greg Sterling at Screenwerk says that winning with a locally-focused website is “like climbing Mount Everest.”

Update:

Tish Grier, who comments below, has written a post about local content and monetization here, and Fred “A VC” Wilson has written one as well talking about how he believes it isn’t about trying to attract a community but about aggregating posts from a community that already effectively exists — and I believe he is right. Someone is going to do that, either the local paper or a startup (or both put together, as the FresnoFamous case illustrates).

Update 2:

More on the saga here at Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment, and at Citizen Media Watch, where blogger Lotta Holmstrom got an email from Mark Potts about the restructuring of the site, and later did a short email interview with him. Greg Sterling also talked with Potts about the restructuring and some of the strategic changes he wants to make, and wrote about it here. And Robert Niles has a great look at building communities online at the Online Journalism Review, entitled “Fake grassroots don’t grow.”

Update 3:

The New York Times had a piece about a network of local “citizen journalism” sites called American Towns, but not everyone was impressed. Tish Grier, for example, said that American Towns is more like “citizen shovelware.” Good one, Tish. And according to a story in the Washington Post, Backfence appears to be headed down the tubes: One angel investor said that arguments between backers and founders has “destroyed the company” and that it has “downsized to a modest team of people and they’re out of money.” Someone who has spent some time on the sites posts their thoughts here.