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An idle thought for a Sunday afternoon: virtual worlds such as Second Life, The Sims Online and World of Warcraft are hugely popular online games, in part because they manage to combine elements of the real world with fantasy and the unreal, and also because they allow for all kinds of behaviour (good, bad and in between) to find a harmless outlet. Such behaviour includes malicious acts known as “griefing” in Second Life, adults pretending to be children for sexual purposes, and even the rise of what amounts to a virtual Mafia in The Sims.

The game Grand Theft Auto has also become hugely popular by allowing game players to engage in all kinds of nefarious behaviour, including theft, murder, assault and battery, prostitution, drug-dealing, and so on. So why isn’t there an online version of Grand Theft Auto, where people can form gangs and beat other players up, steal their virtual money, blackmail or extort other players, set up prostitution rings and so on? It seems like it would be a slam-dunk.

Obviously, there would be a risk of real-world violence being blamed on Grand Theft Auto, but that already happens. I’m only half-joking here. I think watching people’s behaviour inside such a game would be like an incredible real-world psychology laboratory in action.

Rex Sorgatz of Fimoculous.com may just be right — this clip on YouTube may be the funniest NBC promo ever.

Social networking and social media — sites such as MySpace.com and YouTube.com — are often written about as though they are universally a good thing. And there’s no question that it’s great to have places where kids can socialize online, so to speak, and share blog posts and photos and music, or where they can go and watch video clips of people trying stupid bicycle tricks or kittens trying to get out of Kleenex boxes or whatever. But as my friend Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 is fond of pointing out, there is a dark side to these kinds of networks.

A couple of stories I came across recently reminded me of that. One was actually fairly comical: a university student posted a picture of a teacher’s dog on MySpace, along with a note saying that he planned to kill the dog — which got animal rights activists and others all in a lather. However, it turned out to be part of a media assignment in which students were asked to do whatever they could to make the teacher’s dog famous (I would have said the student should have won hands down, but threatening the dog was not allowed).

Another story involving students and teachers saw some high-school students set up a MySpace page that they pretended had been set up by their teacher, confessing that she was a lesbian, etc. She is suing two students for defamation and libel, and one of the students is facing criminal charges. And another story that just recently broke in Toronto involves high-school kids videotaping each other having fist-fights and then uploading them to YouTube.

Obviously, these kinds of stories are just the tip of the iceberg. Others have written about adults trolling for sex with children on MySpace, and the social-networking site has been sued by the family of a 14-year-old girl who says she was sexually assaulted by a man she met through MySpace. And some critics of YouTube have argued that having a forum to upload video of people fighting or engaging in other questionable behaviour can encourage that kind of behaviour.

True? Who knows. It’s possible that YouTube and MySpace and VampireFreaks.com (the social-networking site for goths and emos that was associated with the recent shooting in Montreal) are just making it easier to discover things that have always existed, but were harder to come across before the Internet. In any case, I expect we’ll be seeing more of these types of stories — but the potential liability of MySpace or YouTube in such events remains a big question mark. And if you’re a parent, think about what the parents of Amanda Wenk went through — a high-school senior, she uploaded racy photos of herself and her friends and they spread around the Internet like wildfire, until she had become a quasi-celebrity.

Update:

Pete Cashmore at Mashable says Bebo — which is even more popular than MySpace in Europe — is cracking down on bullying and other behaviour.

(Note: This is a piece I just posted at globeandmail.com, based on an interview with Weblo founder and CEO Rocky Mirza):

As the founder of a UK-based online-gaming property called IBetX.com and an Ottawa-based auction site called UniqueAuction.com, entrepreneur Rocky Mirza knows a little about what people like to do with their money online, and he is hoping that they will want to spend some of it buying and selling virtual properties as part of his newest venture, an online “virtual world” called Weblo.com. Mr. Mirza has managed to get some high-powered backing for this latest project (which launches on September 26): a major shareholder is none other than Richard Rosenblatt, whose most recent company — a little thing called MySpace.com — was bought by News Corp. last year.

Weblo has a long way to go before it is as massive as MySpace, of course, but Mr. Mirza says he believes it has the same kind of appeal as a social-networking site, with one added element: money. And not the kind of virtual money that players use in a virtual world such as Second Life or World of Warcraft, but real dollars. In a recent interview, Mr. Mirza said Weblo is a little like the game of Monopoly, but “without the board and with real money.” Players buy the right to “own” real-world properties such as the Taj Mahal, and then make money by either renting out space to other players, or from advertising that runs on their part of the site. They can also make money by selling their properties to others (Weblo takes a cut of each transaction).

Continue reading “Weblo wants to sell you the world”

Dear Larry and Sergey:

Dudes — long time no talk. Man, you guys must be busy as heck, what with all the billions piling up like that, and the new airplane and whatnot. You know, I kind of picture you guys as being like Scrooge McDuck, climbing around in a giant swimming pool full of coins and bills. Anyhoo, I just wanted to ask you whether you remember that big country just to the north of you — the one with the snow and the Mounties and the maple syrup. You know, Canada?

Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s pretty big. Okay, it doesn’t have a lot of people, but we’re right up there in the “best places to live” rankings and that kind of stuff. Part of NATO. The United Nations. You name it. So here’s what I’m wondering: How come Canadian companies can’t be ranked as “Qualified Companies” in the Google Advertising Professionals program? That’s what it says at Jennifer Slegg’s blog, and over at the Searchenginewatch forums.

According to Jennifer, your company can be a QC if you’re based in Somalia, Bosnia and Azerbaijan, but not if you’re based in good old Canada. So what do you guys have against the Great White North? We gave you Pamela Anderson and Mike Myers and Celine Dion for chrissake (okay, sorry about that last one). Even Paul Kedrosky, one of your finest venture capitalists, is secretly a Canadian. I will personally auotograph my copy of Bob and Doug Mackenzie’s 12 Days of Christmas in your honour if you do something about this situation immediately.

Your pal,

Mathew

Update 2:

Apparently Mike and TechCrush have come to an agreement — TechCrush has changed its logo and everyone is as friendly as could be. According to a post at TechCrush:

We had contact with Michael Arrington on a possible trademark infringement with Techcrunch, but we settled the matter quick and amicably. I got to know Michael as a decent and professional guy. Thanks Michael.

Mike has posted a chronology of events here. Still seems kind of pissed at Stowe Boyd.

Update:

Mike Arrington has responded in the comments section of this post, and says that he doesn’t want to go after TechCrush, but that his lawyer has suggested he might be in for trouble down the road if he doesn’t defend his trademark. As I mentioned in my response, trademark lawyers always say that kind of thing — it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to do it. I think maybe the disclaimer is the way to go. As for Dead 2.0, Mike says he loves it… he’s just not sure it’s the kind of thing an executive with a Web 2.0 startup should be doing. On that, he might just have a point. I still kind of hope it continues though.

Original post:

There’s a nasty mess brewing in the blogosphere, boys and girls — once again, the dark shadow of lawyers and trademark infringement is passing across our fair land (Ed: knock it off with the Lord of the Rings vibe already). It seems that TechCrush, a new site that promised to act as an antidote to some of the boosterism in the Web 2.0 sphere, has been smothered in its cradle by threats of legal action.

And who might those threats have come from? Well, the name of the site is a play on the name TechCrunch, which is the hub of Mike Arrington’s blog-publishing empire. Stowe Boyd apparently sparked the idea for the site when he said it would be nice if someone went back to take a look at some of the startups that Mike and his team write about so glowingly, to see if they made the grade or not. According to Stowe, Mike said that his lawyers were raising red flags about the trademark issue.

As Stowe notes, this has much the same flavour as the O’Reilly Web 2.0 trademark brouhaha, in which the publishing and conference firm sent a “cease and desist” letter to a conference that had the gall to use the term Web 2.0 in its name. In that case, however, O’Reilly was just concerned about brand confusion. What is Mike concerned about? A little criticism?

He certainly doesn’t seem too crazy about whoever is behind the blog known as Dead 2.0. Speaking of which, I think The Skeptic should remain anonymous — with or without Nik Cubrilovic’s help — if it allows him to keep taking shots at TechCrunch and other bubble-boosters. Food critics for newspapers get to remain anonymous so they don’t have to worry about the egos of restaurant owners while doing their reviews, so why not bloggers? My M-lister friend Kent Newsome has some thoughts here (and a great Neil Young reference in the title), and Shelley Powers has a good point too.

Clay “Power Law” Shirky, who I think is a pretty smart guy when it comes to the sociology of the Internet, has written a long post over at Corante about the idea of Citizendium — the “forked” version of Wikipedia that co-founder Larry Sanger has decided to create in order to try and fix what he sees as some of the problems inherent in the Wikipedia model.

One of the problems, as he sees it, is that experts are not given enough power in the current Wikipedia, and so Citizendium is designed to give them more. Experts — who will be defined by diplomas and other formal accreditation (although Sanger says there may be room to have non-accredited people elevated to expert status) — will be known as editors, and given more responsibility for topics they are expert on. In his post, Clay says that this is flawed because:

Experts are social facts — society typically recognizes experts through some process of credentialling, such as the granting of degrees, professional certifications, or institutional engagement. We have a sense of what it means that someone is a doctor, a judge, an architect, or a priest, but these facts are only facts because we agree they are.

Not surprisingly, such a statement — and the overall egalitarian tone of the rest of Shirky’s piece — draws the fire of Nick Carr, who says it is “fatuous stuff, which reveals, as if we needed to be reminded, that intellectuals make the very best anti-intellectuals.” Experts are experts because of their training, Nick says, whether they are architects or professors of romantic poetry. As Clay points out in the comments to his own post, however, he wasn’t so much talking about expertise as the perception of expertise, or authority in a particular field.

Clay has since posted Larry Sanger’s response to what he feels is a mis-characterization of what Citizendium is up to, or how editors will operate. But I think both men — and Nick Carr, for that matter — are avoiding what could be one of the biggest problems with the structure that Sanger is proposing, and that is experts arguing among themselves about who is the real expert. Anyone who has been around academics will know that they can be as venal and petty and childish as any Wikipedia troll, if not more so. Who’s going to referee that fight?

Just a quick administrative note to mention that I’ve been doing some housecleaning on the blog as far as widgets — and other plugins and add-ons, such as analytical tools — are concerned, because I’ve had a few comments from my faithful readership (thanks, Mom) about slow loading times, and the fact that occasionally the blog will just hang and not load at all.

I have a passion for widgets, and so I tend to load up on them whenever I come across one. If I’m reading a blog like Fred Wilson‘s or someone else who has a new widget or plugin — like Dead 2.0, which is where I came across the “democracy” poll plugin for WordPress — I have to download it and try it out. Unfortunately, though, some widgets are in beta or not hosted on robust servers, and so the blog will hang while it is waiting for a response.

I’ve removed the BlogMap widget and the Yahoo Finance widget for that reason, plus I got rid of the Swicki search I had because no one seemed to use it. I got rid of the GoodBlogs widget too, but then I put it back because I think it’s a worthwhile project so I’m going to cut them some slack when it comes to the response time from their servers.

I also axed the Google ads, in part because it was an experiment and in part because I only made about $2.50 in the past month or so (my friend Markus Frind of Plenty of Fish could probably tell me how to maximize that, but I’m really not that interested in the money at this point). I also trimmed the analytics that I had loading, like CrazyEgg — which is cool, but not really designed for a blog like mine — and Blogbeat, which was great but it has been bought by Feedburner and I’m waiting to see how that’s going to change the service. I still have Google Analytics and MyBlogLog and Statcounter.

If you notice the blog still loading slowly, please let me know — and if you come across any cool widgets, let me know about that too 🙂

Matt Marshall over at VentureBeat (formerly Silicon Beat) is taking some lumps for a recent guest-blog post that was extremely critical of the online part-planning site Evite, because the author, Auren Hoffman, is an investor in a competing site known as Socializr — a fact that isn’t disclosed until almost the end of the piece, in a kind of offhand way. My friend Paul Kedrosky has taken a shot at Matt, as have others.

As Paul notes, this is a risk that someone like Matt takes by letting others write pieces on a site like VentureBeat. Is Evite a glacially-slow site that could use a good update? Sure. But that’s not the point. The fact that Auren’s criticisms are all totally valid becomes irrelevant as soon as we discover that he is both an investor in a competitor and a friend of the founder.

Should Matt have run the piece from Auren at all? Plenty of commenters on his site seem to believe he shouldn’t have, although Matt says he believed it was a worthwhile commentary, and one he agrees with. I think it’s questionable, but if he is going to run that kind of thing I would recommend a disclaimer at the top, so that readers go into it knowing what they are getting. Andrew Fife has some thoughts here.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle recently (a kerfuffle is a little smaller than a brouhaha) over whether v-logging or video blogging is worth it or not. I wrote about it here after Alec Saunders brought it up, and everyone from Jeff Pulver to Robert Scoble has weighed in on it over the past week or so. Lots of discussion about whether video is the right way to get certain things across, is it too much bother, etc.

Now we have noted VC blogger Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures announcing that he has given up podcasting. Why? Fred says that basically it was too much trouble to put together a show, with all the equipment and getting guests and editing it down, and so on. He also says something similar to what I think Alec and I and others were saying about vlogs, which is that a big audio file is not necessarily the best way to get information across. My friend Stowe Boyd concurs.

That’s not to say it isn’t worth doing for other reasons — a podcast like This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte is fun to listen to for the entertainment value, especially when someone completely deranged like John C. Dvorak is on. But to me it’s more like a talk show than something you do because it has a huge amount of value to it. So it’s fun to listen to on the train or while you’re running, but it’s not something I would consider a must have.

I know my friend Mark Evans has been doing a podcast with his former colleague from the National Post, Kevin Restivo, and I know that podcasting consultant Leesa Barnes is probably going to call me crazy, but most of the time I just don’t see the point of some of the podcasts that are out there. Of course, I should probably add that I don’t see the point of many of the blogs that are out there either 🙂