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Seth Godin is a smart guy, and a marketing whiz who regularly gets asked to talk about how to communicate better, and who has written a bunch of books about how to market yourself or your company, including the “purple cow” one that many people are familiar with. So why has he decided not to have comments on his blog? Apparently, Seth would much rather stand at a lectern and show a bunch of PowerPoint (or, more likely, Keynote) slides, and then get his fee and move on.

Web 2.0 — or whatever we’re calling it nowadays — is supposed to be about the conversation, isn’t it? It’s not much of a conversation if you’re the only one talking, a point I have tried to make several times in the past, including here and here . In fact, a blog with no comments is more like a traditional media vehicle, in the sense that it’s a monologue, one that sends a subtle message that the writer has all the answers, and you the reader are simply a receptacle, a passive audience with nothing to contribute.

We added comments on every story at the newspaper I work for, the Globe and Mail, because we would like to hear from readers — some of whom, it must be said, seem to like shouting or criticizing just for the sake of criticizing, but many of whom have intelligent and thoughtful things to say. The BBC has its “Have Your Say” feature for the same reason. In many ways, it’s the evolution of the letters section, or a more civilized version of call-in radio shows. We benefit from it, and so do our readers, and I would argue blogs do the same.

Seth says that it takes too much of his time to think about or weed out comments on his blog, and that he finds himself changing the way he writes because of what people say. This, apparently, is a bad thing. And yet, in a previous post — one which did have comments, for some unknown reason — Seth talks about how to have a successful blog, and number 27 is “Include comments so your blog becomes a virtual water cooler that feeds itself.” Good advice. But not for Seth Godin, it seems.

I think the “no comments” idea is related to the “no links” idea, which my M-list buddy Kent Newsome had a bit of rant about awhile back, and with good reason. As he points out, not linking — which Steve Gillmor and others seem to be promoting — is all about arrogance and vanity. And so, I would argue, is not having comments. It says that the writer believes no one has anything useful to contribute but them. And I think it makes Seth’s blog inherently less appealing, to me at least. Scott Karp seems to agree with me, but (not surprisingly) Dave Winer doesn’t. And Anne Zelenka has a great post about it here — always happy to see you in the quiet hallways of the weekend Internet, Anne. Kent says that non-linking and non-commenting bloggers suffer from faux agoraphobia.

I would just like to point out that — the title of this post aside — I have nothing against Joe Volpe, the Honourable Member for Eglinton-Lawrence, who is running for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. However, I would note that it seems rather odd that he would be getting so many donations from children. A bunch of other people think so too, so they put up a website poking fun at this odd turn of events — but it has been taken down (there’s a mirror here.

Apparently the Volpe campaign had the site removed. According to the story in the Globe and Mail, a staff worker named Brenden Johnstone wrote: “My Office has had the website suspended through CIRA [Canadian Internet Registration Authority] and CDNS [Canadian Domain Name Services] and it will be down as soon as 6 p.m.” Don’t like what someone has said about your candidate? Just have the site removed. Simple as that.

Needless to say, this caused a fairly predictable firestorm of criticism, all of which is described on the website of Stephen Taylor, a former candidate for the Conservative Party — who appears to be trying not to be too partisan about the whole thing, which is nice to see (although I’m sure some will disagree). As it turns out, CIRA did not remove the site, but the site’s domain registrar did, citing fears of a defamation lawsuit. Mention has also been made that the site was created using a fictitious name and address, which is not allowed for obvious reasons.

As my friend Rob Hyndman notes, the Volpe campaign had a couple of choices — and for whatever reason, they decided to go with the stupidest one, which is to have the site taken down and then hope that the whole thing will go away. As someone on Stephen Taylor’s site remarked, this is the “pouring water on a grease fire” approach, which accomplishes nothing but spreading the fire even further. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

As usual, I’ve accumulated a pile of things I want to blog about, and might eventually — but until then, here’s a few links:

• NowPublic.com has gotten financing from Brightspark and some angel investors, as was mentioned at mesh a couple of weeks ago — founder Michael Tippett was on a panel there about the future of journalism, and did a great job of holding his own with Om Malik — and Pete Cashmore at Mashable.com has a post about how NowPublic wants to take a slightly different route in “citizen journalism” or “participatory media” (my preferred term, and I think Mike’s too).
• Stuart MacDonald, who knows a thing or two about airlines from his days running Expedia, has a great post about how little attention is being paid to the auction of spectrum for in-flight Internet access, something you would think more people would be interested in. I know I would, if only I could actually afford to travel anywhere. Maybe we should call in-flight Internet Hi-Wi 🙂
• Mark Cuban, the gazillionaire blogger and owner of the Dallas Mavericks (plus HD.net and some other stuff), has a post up about how journalism matters — although he says it needs to change (and I would agree). Carlo Longino of MobHappy and TechDirt.com, however, says on his personal blog that journalism is broken.
• Roelof Botha, the Web 2.0 guy at Sequoia Capital who spearheaded their investment in YouTube, talks to SiliconBeat.
• Another couple of journalism notes: Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz talks about the paper’s redesign and how it is being influenced by the web (Tim Porter’s take is here) and on a somewhat-related note, Globe and Mail editor-in-chief Ed Greenspon took some questions on the paper’s website, and had some interesting things to say.
• Jaron Lanier has written a long rant about the collectivist — and even flat-out communist — kind of “hive mind” he sees behind a lot of Web 2.0 such as Wikipedia, something that Andrew Keen got a lot of mileage out of, and a line others have parroted as well. Why we should take Jaron’s word for it just because he helped invent “virtual reality” way back when is beyond me. And Umair Haque of Bubblegeneration has a nice deconstruction of the piece.
• Last but certainly not least, the Pew Internet and American Life study is out and it has found that 50 million Americans are content creators.

Remember the “halo effect?” That was the term some analysts came up with for the boost in Apple sales that was expected to result from the smash success of the company’s iPod music and video players. The assumption was that all the love for the iPod would spill over onto the rest of Apple’s business, and that people would be drawn to purchase more Macs and iBooks and so on. There were several articles and analyst reports last year that said the effect seemed to be working — but now there are numbers that call those early reports into question.

According to the latest report from Gartner Group — obtained (ironically) by Apple Insider — Apple’s worldwide market share actually dropped in the first quarter of this year, to 2 per cent from 2.2 per cent in the same quarter of 2005. Even in the U.S., the company’s primary market, its share barely budged during the quarter, remaining more or less flat at 3.6 per cent (Gartner says the company’s share rose by one-tenth of one per cent). Even if you assume that lots of people held off buying because they were waiting for the new Intel models, that’s still not a great performance — and not much evidence of a halo.

If you’re wondering why it’s ironic that the Gartner report shows up on Apple Insider, it’s because the blog was one of several that were sued for leaking inside information about Apple products — a lawsuit that Apple just recently lost. Could Apple Insider be feeling a bit of what the Germans call schadenfreude?

Not to blow my own horn too much, but I did a podcast with Jon Arnold yesterday that I thought I would put up here for people to listen to if they’re interested. Jon is an independent telecom analyst here in Toronto, and among other things works with legendary VoIP pioneer Jeff Pulver of Pulvermedia.com on his conferences and so on. He’s got the podcast with me — which is part of his IP Thought Leaders series — on the Pulver site (click here to download the mp3 file from the Pulver site), but I thought I would host it here too, for all my loyal fans 🙂 Incidentally, the player below this post is powered by the Podpress plugin for WordPress, and you can click and download the file directly from the link near the player.

Jon and I talked a bit about the blogging I do for globeandmail.com, and about my involvement with Mark Evans and Rob Hyndman and Stuart MacDonald and Mike McDerment in the mesh conference that was held at MaRS in Toronto a couple of weeks ago. We also talked about the evolution that journalism is going through, and about how Web 2.0 is accelerating that, and a few other things. Incidentally, Jon has an interesting post on his blog about a Norwegian VoIP startup called Telio that is going public, and provides a nice contrast to the ongoing debacle that is the Vonage IPO.

As more than one person has already pointed out, the much-anticipated — and much delayed, and much criticized — Vonage IPO just keeps setting new records for how screwed up a public share offering can get. In what no doubt seemed like a Web 2.0-type gesture for a tech issue, the company offered its customers stock as part of the IPO, and that has turned into a gigantic boomerang that just clocked Vonage in the back of the skull. Since the stock tanked after it started trading, many of those eager investors are now saying they won’t pay.

Even if my friend Paul Kedrosky is right (which he often is) and the investors who grabbed those shares should have known what they were getting into — since skeptics on the Vonage IPO weren’t exactly difficult to find — the company is still caught between a rock and a hard place, or maybe two rocks and a hard place. It has now said it will reimburse the brokerage firms for any stock that disgruntled Vonage customers (see the Vonage forum here) don’t pay for, but all that’s going to do is piss off the ones who actually paid money for a stock that was tanking.

So then you have a company that is already losing money at a prodigious rate of speed — losing more last year than it made in revenue, which is no mean feat — spending more money to soothe the egos of the customers it convinced to buy shares. The only other option is to sue those customers, and what kind of marketing would that be? It’s a lose-lose-lose proposition, a rare money-losing hat-trick in hockey terms. It’s no wonder that Om thinks it’s a shoe-in for Business 2.0’s 101 dumbest things list. Mike Urlocker, a former tech analyst, has a nice take here.

Update:

Vonage now says that it will pursue legal action against those who don’t pay for their stock, but as I pointed out above, that is just one of the three losing options available to the company (the third being to do nothing).

Sometimes it’s just impossible not to hate Walt Mossberg. Okay, hate is a strong word. But still — not only does he have a plum job getting access to all the cool gadgets and tech stuff, and writing about it for the Wall Street Journal, but he also hosts the D: All Things Digital conference, which routinely gets people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt to show up and be interviewed and even hang around by the pool.

Case in point: Gary Arlen of Arlen Communications in Washington attended the conference and wrote about it for IPDemocracy, summarizing what Billg said in his interview — and describing how he buttonholed the gazillionaire over by the “poolside pastry/dessert table” and asked him what he thought about net neutrality. Not surprisingly perhaps, Bill said that he was “in the middle” on the issue, before being whisked away by Washington Post CEO Don Graham.

Among other things, Arlen says that Bill is convinced this is the year IPTV really takes off (it had better be, since Microsoft has been selling that vision to plenty of companies, including Verizon and AT&T). Of course, Bill also said about 10 years ago that ubiquitous pen-based computing was right around the corner, but hey — let’s not get picky. Here’s Arlen’s take:

IP “blows away the broadcast model,” Gates said, predicting that “this is the year all the pieces” will come together and eliminate the “dividing line between TV and the Internet.” Asked about the traditional broadcast model, he bluntly pronounced, “It’s gone. It was a hack.”

More coverage of Gates here, and at PaidContent, where they have a great shot of the Bill Gates “bobblehead” doll that Walt gave to the real Bill as a speaker’s gift. Very classy. And Eric Savitz at Barron’s has a list of the “schwag” in the bags given to D attendees (hat tip to Paul Kedrosky for the link), including a coupon for money off five office chairs from Steelcase. How Web 1.0.

Update:

Arianna Huffington of HuffingtonPost.com has a description of Bill Gates’ keynote — an account that is interspersed with notes back and forth between Arianna and actor John Cusack (hat tip to paidcontent.org for the link).

I hope Tim O’Reilly’s houseboating trip on Lake Powell was relaxing, because he came back to a boatload of stress as a result of his company’s association with a “cease and desist” letter that CMP Media sent to a (non-profit) IT group in Ireland for using the term Web 2.0 in relation to a conference. There’s more on the history of it all here if you’re interested. Tim has now posted a long dissertation on what happened and what he thinks of both the Web 2.0 trademark (which wasn’t his idea) and the blogosphere’s “pile-on” response.

I will say this — after reading it, Tim strikes me as just the kind of stand-up guy and all-around straight-shooter that my friend Paul Kedrosky described him as in a discussion we had about the whole mess. And he is right that the whole affair turned into an unpleasant kind of schoolyard pile-on that had a nasty tone to it, which is unfortunate. That said, however, I’m pretty sure Paul still thinks that applying for the trademark was a wrong-headed thing to do, and I do too — and not just because I helped organize the mesh Web 2.0 conference earlier this month in Toronto.

One of my fellow organizers, Stuart MacDonald, firmly believes that O’Reilly was right to try and enforce its trademark (although it hasn’t been approved yet), but I tend to agree with Rob Hyndman that Web 2.0 is not something that is really trademarkable. As Marty Schwimmer of The Trademark Blog notes in a short post on the whole controversy, “If you coin and promulgate a term, you can sell it as a buzzword or you can sell it as a brand, but under trademark law, it’s virtually impossible to do both.”

O’Reilly has done an amazing job of spreading the gospel — so to speak — of Web 2.0, and they are justifiably proud of that. But trademarking it at this point is a dumb thing to do, and towards the end of his post it seems like Tim is coming around to that way of thinking too. I encourage him, as Chris Messina and others have, to offer Web 2.0 up as a Community Mark and turn this sh*tstorm of negative publicity into something positive. I think James Robertson has a good perspective on the whole thing here, and Don Park makes a very good point on his blog.

I know it can’t have been easy being stuck in the glass elevator in Apple’s cool new store in New York, but since no one died in this tragic accident, I feel safe in making what I consider to be the obvious comparison with Apple “locking” people into iTunes via its use of DRM and a proprietary music format. I know, I know — I should grow up.

Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 has a post in which he questions the somewhat gushing tone of an op-ed piece in the New York Times over the weekend about net neutrality. Scott says that his problem with the piece is that the great promise of a democratic Web is an illusion.

The problem with the democratic web ideal is that no one really owns their own press — not me, not the rest of the blogosphere, not Yahoo, not Google. Why? Because none of us owns our own internet access.

Since the cable companies and telecom companies own the Internet, he continues, then it can’t really be truly democratic — in the sense of being an instrument of the people — unless Congress explicitly says that Internet access is a public utility. Part of what Scott seems upset about is that fuzzy terms like “net neutrality” don’t really help the discussion, and I can sympathize with him there. It doesn’t help that the telecom industry has cleverly called its counter-campaign “Hands Off The Internet,” so both sides are effectively claiming that they want things left as they are and the other side wants to change them.

As I put it to Scott in a comment, however, I think the telcos are guilty of moving the goalposts, as I have mentioned before. According to a recent book called Broadband Scandal, the telcos got all kinds of favourable deals from the U.S. government a decade or so ago, in part by promising that everyone would soon have a super-fast connection capable of handling phone calls, TV-style programming and so on. Now it seems as though they are asking for the ability to charge more for delivering what should already be here.

In addition, as Craig Newmark of Craigslist mentioned in his recent debate with a telecom lobbyist in the Wall Street Journal, network experts say that there is still a large quantity of “dark” fiber out there (some of which Google is rumoured to have been buying), which would tend to refute the argument that the Internet is somehow getting “full.”

In any case, I would disagree with Scott’s premise: it’s not so much about democracy as it is about open access — and the telecoms are quite used to dealing with such things, since the telephone network was effectively treated as a public good through “common carrier” legislation. All the net neutrality folks are talking about is doing the same thing for the Internet. If that requires treating the Internet like a utility, then so be it.