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There are likely to be some long faces at NBC this week. The network — which has gotten plenty of attention this year for its ambitious embrace of Web distribution and its decision to play nice with YouTube, also known as the “Lazy Sunday” effect — has lost Michael Steib, the senior executive that has been steering its new broadband initiatives. And where is Mr. Steib off to? Why, Google, of course.

PaidContent broke the news first, noting that Steib was the general manager of strategic ventures for NBC Universal, and the guy who founded and was responsible for NBBC — or the National Broadband Broadcasting Co., the unit that the network launched in September after watching the viral success of the Lazy Sunday video clip from Saturday Night Live a year ago.

From the sounds of it, Steib is going to be working on “monetizing” Google Video and YouTube by creating some sort of ad program. “We are pleased to have Michael Steib join the Google team to help us work with advertisers to create effective, measurable video advertising,” a Google spokesman told MediaPost. Will it be pre-roll ads? Post-roll? Pop-ups? Ashkan says Google wants to create AdSense for video.

I missed the big rush of posts that hit Techmeme about the launch of Daylife yesterday, but from what I can gather just about everyone — including Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, a prominent investor in the project — is underwhelmed by it, if that’s a word (gratuitous Sloan reference). I wonder if the next shareholders’ meeting is going to be a little frosty 🙂

Paul Montgomery of Tinfinger says that he thinks Mike’s response could have something to do with his well-publicized dislike of the New York Times, which is a lead investor in the site, and Paul also notes — as do other blogs that have looked at Daylife — that mainstream-media content is featured awfully prominently on the site. In which case, why not use Topix or Newsvine or even Google News?

Some of the only kind words have come from Steve Rubel, who says in a response to a comment on his post that we should “put on our anti-geek glasses” and see it from the point of view of someone who doesn’t read Techmeme or visit dozens of blogs a day. Which is a fair point, but again I have to ask why we wouldn’t point someone like that to Topix or Newsvine or Google News.

I think a big part of the problem is that Daylife has been in stealth or development mode for a year or more, and it has some pretty high-profile people involved, including Jeff Jarvis — who seems to be taking all the criticism pretty well so far — as well as Craig Newmark, Dave Winer and the NYT. So I think the expectation was that when it launched it would be significantly different than Newsvine and Topix and so on. And it’s not.

Does that mean it won’t ever be any good? Hardly. From what Jeff says, more improvements are planned (including RSS, which does seem like a pretty major hole), so I’m willing to wait and see how the site develops. I hope it finds a way to add more interaction — comments, blogs and so on — in an interesting way. We could use some more experimentation in that department, and Jeff has the chops to be able to deliver it.

More commentary comes from David Weinberger at Hyperorg, Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0, Rex Hammock, Liz Gannes at Gigaom and Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests. And for a totally unvarnished and skeptical take, as usual, watch a video review from the inimitable Loren Feldman of 1938media.

LeAnn Prescott from Hitwise has an analysis of online calendars that has been getting a fair bit of traffic and commentary, since it shows that Google’s calendar — which has only been around for about six months — is growing strongly in “market share of Internet visits” (as Hitwise describes their proprietary measurement of traffic).

LeAnn says that Google’s traffic share has tripled since June, and that it appears to be close to matching Yahoo’s traffic, which has been declining sharply over the same period. All of which is great, and it’s nice to see that a Google property is growing — unlike, say, Froogle or Google Co-op, etc. But that’s not what struck me about the Hitwise chart. What struck me was how tiny the online calendar market is.

If you look away from the downhill slide of Yahoo’s line on the chart and the upward climb of Google’s line on the chart, what you notice is that even at its peak the market leader — Yahoo — had 0.008 per cent of all Internet traffic. After its slide, it is around 0.005 per cent, and Google is at 0.0043 per cent. In other words, all three of the online calendar leaders put together have a little over one one-hundredth of one per cent of Internet traffic.

As more than one commenter has noted, it would be interesting to see where 30boxes.com and some of the other online Ajax calendars sit in terms of traffic share. But what is clear is that Google and Yahoo are still fighting over table scraps, and that online calendars have a long way to go before they become a significant factor for Internet users.

Update 2:

I just got off the phone with Jason DeZwirek, the CEO of Kaboose — which is publicly-listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange — who told me that the acquisition of Bubbleshare is the first in a series of steps the company plans to take to move its various family-oriented websites (including BabyZone, Kaboose.com and Funschool) into the social networking arena.

Jason said that the Kaboose network gets about 10 million unique visitors a month, which makes it the third-largest in the North American online family segment, behind Disney and Viacom (according to comScore). About 80 to 85 per cent of the company’s traffic comes from the U.S. The Kaboose CEO also said that the company is expected to post sales of about $22-million for 2006 and has $30-million in the bank.

Social networking tools for moms and families “is going to be a big initiative for us in 2007,” Jason said, and the Bubbleshare team will be part of making that happen. Kaboose expects to add social networking services both by developing them in-house and by buying other companies in that space.

For more details on Kaboose, check out my Globe and Mail blog here.

Update:

According to one source with some knowledge of the deal with News Corp., the deal fell off the table not because of the publicity but because Ross Levinsohn quit, and it was his idea. Without him, it couldn’t get any traction within News Corp. and so Bubbleshare went looking elsewhere.

Original post:

Not that long ago, there were some red-hot rumours that Bubbleshare — the Toronto-based photo sharing site started by serial entrepreneur Albert Lai — was about to be acquired by News Corp. for a price in the neighbourhood of $5-million. That deal reportedly fell through, however, and now I learn from my friend Mark Evans’ blog that Bubbleshare has been bought by Kaboose for $2.25-million (I’d like to point out that Jeneane Sessum wrote about it first, as she notes here).

Kaboose is a little-known Toronto company that owns a number of kid-oriented websites and networks such as BabyZone, and describes itself in its press release as “the largest independent, family-focused, online media company in North America.” As Mark points out in his post, this deal makes a lot of sense because Bubbleshare — while a great and useful service — has always seemed more like a feature than a standalone business.

The question of whether the News Corp. deal fell through because the details leaked out, a theory that emerged shortly after TechCrunch wrote about it, remains unanswered. I find it hard to believe that a little publicity would scare off a giant like News Corp., but you never know. In any case, congrats are due to Albert and the team for building a great service and getting a nice exit.

I will add my congratulations to those already expressed by Michael O’Connor Clarke, Alec Saunders and Jeneane Sessum. It will be interesting to see what Kaboose does with Bubbleshare, and whether the Toronto company plans to make a bigger push into the area of social networking — especially given the popularity of sites like Club Penguin, and Disney’s recent social overhaul of Disney.com.

Before too much time goes by, I wanted to take note of something that Muhammad Saleem wrote over on his blog The Mu Life about 7 ways to improve Digg. Muhammad, who is not only a top digger but also a top Netscape submitter and anchor, has clearly thought a lot about some of the flaws with the Digg model — including things such as the “Bury Brigade” and the problems with comments — and I think some of his suggestions make a lot of sense.

One of the most important recommendations, I think, is the first: Listen to the community. And I would add to that: “respond to the community.” If there’s one thing that Digg has not been terribly good at — during all the criticism about the changes to its algorithm to stop the “gaming” of the site, and the various other problems it has experienced — it’s responding to and interacting with the community.

At times, it seems like Kevin Rose and the gang want to have a community-run news site, but without having to actually deal with the community, or like they think that if they tinker with enough things behind the scenes it will become a smooth-running machine and no input from them will be required. I would argue they are wrong on both counts. A community isn’t a machine but a garden, and it takes work to cultivate and keep the weeds from taking over.

Muhammad has a bunch of other good suggestions, including retiring the Bury Brigade — which Steve O’Hear of ZDNet has been on the receiving end of — and being more explicit about the moderating and filtering of content that occurs behind the scenes at Digg. I encourage you to go and read the rest.

I know this is probably going to trigger a wave of enraged emails from Apple fans — or “Macolytes,” as I like to call them — but I can’t resist writing something about the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Steve Jobs and the backdating of Apple’s stock options, which Dan Farber of ZDNet wrote about recently. I wrote an earlier post about it here.

In that post, I said that I thought Apple — and Steve Jobs — had been getting a free ride on the whole options thing because the company and its products are so popular, and I still think that (it’s either that or the legendary Jobs “reality distortion field”). As BusinessWeek suggests in this article, Steve Jobs is effectively untouchable. Everyone would much rather talk about how the iTV unit is going to be announced at Macworld.

Of course, it’s possible that everyone is willing to overlook the Apple case because a) they are tired of the whole options-backdating issue, b) they don’t think it’s really that important — or even wrong, as my friend Rob argued in the comments on my previous post — or c) the company has absolved Jobs of any direct liablity, and therefore the whole issue is effectively closed.

That could be. But as far as I can see it, the facts are pretty clear from the WSJ story: Steve knew about the backdating, and while he didn’t benefit from it, he either actively agreed to it or approved it. He also personally benefited from a huge grant that was backdated, although he apparently didn’t know about it.

As a blog called The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs puts it, this is the Hurd defense (named for the CEO of HP), which in a nutshell says “Did illegal activities occur? Yes. Was the current CEO in charge at the time of the illegal activities? Yes. Did the current CEO authorize said activities? Yes. And benefit from them? Yes. Therefore, the CEO is not responsible.”

Does that make sense? Only in Apple-land.

Nothing like a few contests to start the new year off on a good foot, right? I seem to have already won one that I didn’t even know I had been entered in: namely, the ultra-exclusive “Hottest blogger dudes of 2006” contest that my friend Leigh Himel of Oponia Networks put together recently in response to Amit Agarwal’s post about hot women bloggers. Thanks, Leigh.

And the second contest is something Allen Stern of Center Networks is calling BloggerMania I — a kind of blogosphere Wrestlemania, with Allen playing the part of Vince McMahon of the WWF. For some reason, Allen has decided to have a series of round-robin “matches” between different bloggers, and yours truly has been matched up with none other than Tara “Miss Rogue” Hunt, a partner at the PR company known as Citizen Agency, who blogs at horsepigcow.com.

And what is this contest based on — looks? Rhetoric? Argumentation? Sophistry? Cool sidebar widgets? That’s the worst part. Allen isn’t saying. According to his description, “I have received a few questions about what the bloggers below need to do to win. The answer is nothing. I will create the results based on studying each blogger’s style, posts, etc.” Great — I’m destined to lose, and will never know why 🙂

In his post, Allen says “If you are one of the challengers, you should do everything you can to get your community behind you! Remember, your community’s support may help you win!” So, there you have it, er… community. Get to work. I can’t let Tara — or the Number One seed in my category, Steve Rubel, win just like that.

Zoli Erdos has touched off the latest round in the omnipresent “what is a blog” wars, with a recent post looking at Google’s official “blog” and noting that it isn’t really a blog because it doesn’t allow readers to comment. Mike Arrington at TechCrunch — who to his credit has not only kept comments open but has participated in them, despite some flame wars with him as the target — posted on the topic as well as opening a poll on the whole issue of comments.

At last count, about 40 per cent of the 2,200 people who have responded think that the ability to comment isn’t a requirement, but enhances a blog’s content “dramatically,” and about 34 per cent say that commenting isn’t a requirement. The remainder think that a blog without comments isn’t a real blog — a case that I tried to make with this post back in February. After much debate, I modified that position to effectively agree with the largest group in Mike’s poll.

I know everyone likes to say that it’s about “the conversation” and so on, which is getting a touch overused as a metaphor (but is still essentially true, I think). The bottom line for me is simply that the comments on a post are often at least as interesting as the post itself, and in some cases much more so. In that sense, the post is like a magnet that attracts different viewpoints — some of which are bound to be moronic “you’re an idiot” kind of comments, but some of which are occasionally going to add huge value.

For example, I found the back-and-forth between Blake Ross and his critics on the Google issue (see my recent post) of even more value than the original post. Yes, I know that other bloggers are free to respond on their own blogs, but that’s hard to follow unless you work at it — having comments on a post is like a mini-aggregator of differing opinion. And if you are lucky, the signal-to-noise ratio makes it worth your while. In fact, that’s a good sign of a valuable blog.

So is a blog really a blog without comments? Sure it is, if only because the term “blog” is so viscous and malleable that it can mean just about anything. But I don’t think of BoingBoing or Google’s blog or other prominent examples as being “blogs” in my definition. Are they valuable? Sure. Interesting? Often. But – at least as far as I’m concerned — still missing something.

It will be interesting to see whether there’s any kind of official response from Google (apart from Matt Cutts’ post) to the recent kerfuffle (or perhaps it’s more of a brouhaha) over the “tips” that have started appearing at the top of its search pages — the ones that direct people to download Picasa, or use Blogger. Blake Ross, a co-founder of Firefox, wrote a critical post about it recently, which Mike Arrington then responded to.

Blake’s point seemed to be that by promoting its own services on result pages, Google is unfairly using its search platform to hawk its own products, and that a company whose entire existence is based on the idea of search results and PageRank as a meritocracy — in other words, a process that drives the best results to the top over time — should have faith in that process and allow its own services to appear wherever they appear in the search rankings.

Mike’s post expanded on this point, arguing that Google’s recent behaviour in that and other areas is a sign of Microsoft-like arrogance from the company, a criticism that my friend Mark Evans and others think is a little over the top. What is clear is that Google has grown to such a size that things people would previously have seen seen as innocuous — like small text links promoting the company’s products — all of a sudden seem like a huge deal.

I have a lot of respect for Blake’s position on the subject, and there are some excellent arguments back and forth in the comments section of his post (which the last time I looked contained more than 215 comments). But I think he and others — including Allen Stern at Center Networks — are being overly sensitive about Google’s tips. I think they are clearly set apart from the search results, and therefore are nothing but a harmless promo link (Danny Sullivan agrees with me).

It’s interesting to see how Google is being held to a much higher standard than another company likely would be, in part because it is so large now, and also because of its famous “Don’t be evil” motto — which is clearly causing way more trouble than it’s worth.

LeeAnn Prescott from Hitwise has a much-discussed report about Google’s blog search getting a greater “market share of web visits” (Hitwise terminology for a combination of page views and visitors) than Technorati, the original blog search engine. This has led Om Malik, among others to write Technorati’s eulogy.

I’m not sure whether the ascendence of Google’s blog search spells the end of Technorati and/or Sphere — another blog search tool, which has done deals with media outlets such as Time magazine to put a “Sphere It” button on their stories — but I am sure of one thing. Google’s blog search is better for one very simple reason: It doesn’t suck.

I should qualify that. Technorati can be useful for searching specific terms, and using the “authority” ranking is not a bad tool. But when it comes right down to it, I agree with Erick searching for posts on a topic through Technorati is just not very useful — or not as useful as Google’s blog search. As Zoli Erdos and others have pointed out many times (here’s his latest roundup), Technorati also has numerous technical problems that continue to crop up.

Searching related posts through Sphere, meanwhile, is quite honestly pathetic. Whenever I see a “Sphere It” button or link, I click it just to see what happens, and 99 times out of 100 it is a boatload of crap. I’ve seen links to things that literally don’t make any sense at all. Beside a blog post I recently saw a link that said there were over 1,000 related posts at Sphere, and I just knew that the vast majority were going to be functionally useless.

For the record, Mark Cuban’s IceRocket blog search isn’t much better. When I want to write about a particular issue, either on the blog or for a story at the Globe and Mail, I will almost always search to see if a blogger somewhere has linked to something that might present an alternative point of view or an interesting perspective — and I routinely wind up back at Google’s blog search.

Is it that Google’s algorithm is better? I’m not enough of a geek to know. You have to admit that Google knows search. And one thing I know for sure about their blog search: It is just better.

Update:

Mark Cuban, who is not only IceRocket’s founder but also clearly its chief evangelist, has posted several comments here defending his company’s blog search that are well worth reading. After giving it some thought, I would like to revise my original comment that IceRocket “isn’t much better” than Sphere. For some searches, it clearly is better — and arguably as good as Google. And no, I didn’t change my mind just because Mark beat up on me 🙂

Update 2:

I spent some time on the phone with Tony and Martin of Sphere (who responded in the comments on my initial post), and I think that — much as I like the imagery — “boatload of crap” might have been a little harsh when describing Sphere’s results. As Martin points out, some of the searches, including ones that use blog posts of mine as the source, bring fairly targeted and relevant results.

I think the problem, at least from my perspective, is twofold: One, Sphere draws relevance from the entire post as well as from the rest of the blog — therefore, if a post is short and/or the blog writes about a lot of different subjects, then a Sphere search isn’t going to come up with results that are all that relevant (Tony says it didn’t work particularly well on Scoble’s blog for that reason).

What happens in those cases is that Sphere comes up with a lot of related posts, which is why on some blogs I see a Sphere widget that says “56,975 related posts” and the first thing I think is “bullshit — there can’t possibly be that many related posts.” (Tony agreed with me on that one).

The bottom line is that Sphere is still trying to find the best method, just as Google and IceRocket are. I appreciate Tony and Martin taking the time to talk to me about it, especially after I dumped on them.

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Just checked in with Techmeme after a few days of eggnog and tobogganing, and what did I find but another ethical dilemma brewing, this time courtesy of Microsoft (although Edelman appears to have played a role as well). I predict that the blogosphere-as-ethical-minefield meme will continue to be a hot topic in the year to come, if only because there seem to be a ton of unresolved issues, not to mention a vast difference of opinion on what’s right and what isn’t.

Reading through the various posts on it, like Joel Spolsky’s or Judi Sohn’s at Web Worker Daily — who wins the prize for my favourite headline, with “There ain’t no such thing as a free laptop” — and the comments on some of those posts, including the ones at Brandon LeBlanc’s blog (he got one of the free Microsoft laptops with Vista but didn’t say so for a few days), it seems as though some people think keeping the laptops is just fine, and others think it is a heinous crime.

As with many of the other ethical issues the blogosphere is wrestling with, this one also occurs in traditional media, particularly in the technology area, where reviewers are often given software and hardware to test. Sometimes the understanding is that the reviewer will keep it (if it isn’t of huge value), but in the vast majority of cases it is sent back. Are there reviewers who keep things they shouldn’t? Sure there are. Does it affect their credibility? Who knows.

Ed Bott thinks that bloggers should be able to keep the free laptops, and says he isn’t going to lose any of his faith in the credibility or trustworthiness of Brandon LeBlanc or Long Zheng as a result of them keeping it. His argument is that trust is something you build up over time, and that it takes more than a free laptop to demolish it — and I would agree, to a point.

But I also think that a blogger trying to build up credibility and win an audience is fighting an uphill battle to begin with, and accepting freebies without disclosing them is a very slippery slope, and that’s why my position on PayPerPost has also been that payment is fine provided it is disclosed. The FTC seems to agree, given its recent decision on word-of-mouth marketing.

As Tony Hung points out at Deep Jive Interests in this post on PayPerPost buying Performancing, bloggers want to be compensated and many people don’t see anything wrong with that, and neither do I, provided it is disclosed. Anything else, in my opinion, is on the slippery slope. If you think you’re able to keep your footing on that slope, be my guest — but don’t be surprised if you wind up at the bottom.

Just a quick note to my legions of devoted fans to say that posting will likely be sporadic over the next few days, as a result of the combined holidays of Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa and Festivus — all of which I have chosen to celebrate, in an attempt to accumulate as many presents and as much food as possible. If you have a lot of time on your hands and want to stroll through some Ingram family photos from the past year, our digital Christmas card is here. Best wishes (of whatever season) to all of you.

And now, the standard disclaimer, as approved by my solicitors:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all together with a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2006, but not with due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make Great Britain great not to imply that Great Britain is necessarily greater than any other country and without regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith or otherwise or sexual orientation of the wishee.

Continue reading “Happy ChristmaHanuKwanzivus to all”

Update:

Mike Arrington posted what he says is an exclusive screenshot of a Wikia search page, but Jimmy Wales has said that Mike’s post is all wrong and that the screenshot has nothing to do with what he’s working on. In a comment on Rex Dixon’s blog, Mike says that his source is pretty good and he thinks what he saw was an early version of Wiki Search. Meanwhile, Rich Skrenta has said that Jimbo is also interested in reviving the Open Directory Project in some way — another attempt at people-powered search that has fallen on hard times (hat tip to Techdirt for the link).

Original post:

I’ll say this much: Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has no shortage of hubris. Instead of saying he plans to launch a “social” search engine using Wikipedia-style co-operation strategies, he comes right out and tells the Times that he’s gunning for Google. Why not reach for the top, right? So Google has a few thousand PhDs and about $40-billion in cash. Big deal.

Like many people, my first impression of Jimbo’s new idea was that it has a really dumb name: Wikiasari, a Hawaiian-Japanese hybrid that is likely to irritate people from many different cultures. And my second impression was that Jimmy has a bit of a mountain to climb with his “social search” proposal. As Pete Cashmore at Mashable notes, this kind of thing has been tried before, and more or less, well… failed.

In a comment on Niall Kennedy’s post about Wikiasari, Greg Linden of Findory — which finds relevant blog posts and news articles based on things you have read before — points to a piece that Chris Sherman wrote at SearchEngineWatch awhile back about social search and how it doesn’t really work all that well, especially as the Web continues to grow.

No matter how many people get involved with bookmarking, tagging, voting or otherwise highlighting web content, the scale and scope of the web means that most content will be unheralded by social search efforts. The web is simply growing too quickly for humans to keep up with it.

That doesn’t mean that social search efforts aren’t useful—in most cases, they are. It simply means that people-mediated search will never be as comprehensive as algorithmic search.

Mashable also makes a good point, which is that a social search engine could easily wind up being just as distorted by ulterior motives as a service like Digg is, since there would be even more incentive to get to the front page of search results. Wikipedia is already criticized for the way its internal group of editors control entries from behind the scenes. What if their actions meant the difference between hundreds of dollars and millions of dollars in advertising?

Jimbo also takes a whack at Google’s search results in the Times piece, by saying that if you search for something like “Tampa hotels” all you get “is crap.” But I searched for Tampa hotels and got half a dozen totally relevant listings for hotel directories, local Tampa search sites and so on. How is that not relevant? And how would people-powered search provide anything better for me if I wanted to find a good hotel? Jimmy’s got a bit of work to do.

(cross-posted from my media blog)

In a recent blog post, Anil Dash of SixApart wrote about the fallout from a comment that Seagate CEO Bill Watkins made to Fortune magazine, in which he said that his company’s products help people “buy more crap and watch porn.” The comment — which was made during an informal dinner with bloggers and reporters in San Francisco — apparently got Watkins into some hot water within the company, and so he sent out a memo to employees saying:

Unfortunately, and unwisely, I also used pornography as an example to illustrate a point. Fortune Magazine chose to focus narrowly on this example in their headline.

They are in the news business and eager to get their reader’s attention and I should have known better. Even though I believe Fortune’s headline writers took my comments out of context, I want you to know that I am sorry if this has in any way offended anyone.

As the original Fortune piece noted, Watkins is well known for being a colourful personality who likes to speak his mind. Some of those writing about the incident, incuding commenters on the followup post on Fortune’s The Browser blog, are afraid that the magazine’s choice to feature the quote prominently (including in the headline) might dissuade Mr. Watkins and other CEOs from being candid.

That may be — but it’s unlikely. What’s more likely is that the Seagate CEO feels completely comfortable with what he said, but issued the memo as a face-saving measure. After all, his comment wasn’t as bad as the one Ratner Jewellery CEO made in 1991, when he said (among other things) that a decanter set his company sold was cheap because it was “total crap.” The company’s share price fell by almost a billion dollars and he was soon the ex-CEO.

As Anil notes in his post, the Seagate incident was the result of a series of otherwise reasonable decisions: Watkins jokes around with bloggers at dinner, Fortune spots a salacious and funny quote, and an editor highlights it (editor Jim Ledbetter discusses his decision in the comments on the followup item). The Seagate CEO then says he is sorry, and life goes on.

Update:

John Furrier of Podtech has posted a comment to say that he was at the dinner with Watkins, and that he described in a post here that he thought Fortune blew the Seagate CEO’s remarks out of proportion.