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Lots of people in the blogosphere post tidbits or smaller items when they either don’t have time for a longer post or they have too many things they’d like to write about. Fred Wilson does it, Kottke pretty much invented it (of course, I expect Dave Winer to take issue with me here), and Steve Rubel is pretty good at it too. So I figure what the hell – I know a good thing when I see one.

In that spirit, here’s a few things I came across recently:

• An analyst says Google is close to launching a downloadable music store to compete with iTunes. Mark Stahlman of Caris & Co. says “The music industry is broadly unhappy with the fixed pricing and lack of subscription options at the market-leading iTunes Music Store and likely to support alternative services.” I would say that’s a no-brainer.

• Bloomberg notes that Microsoft has signed a deal for 500,000 Windows-powered handsets for the U.S. Census Bureau, its biggest contract ever and a jab at handheld leader (and Canuck success story/legal punching bag) Research In Motion. Death knell for RIM? Hardly. More of a shot across the bow.

• Google Real Estate launches, with a search powered by both Google Maps and Google Base. When Base first came out, many people (including yours truly) wondered what the heck it was for. Well, this is part of the answer (and autos too perhaps). My friend Stuart says travel could be next.

• Singer Sandi Thom of London, England has been signed to a record contract with RCA based on the strength of her Internet shows, which she recorded and broadcast from her living room to an audience of more than 100,000. She was approached by several labels.

• Not much new in the Washington Post piece about traffic on the Internet being driven by blogs and social networks such as Myspace.com, but a nice quote: “The growth in blogging reminds us the Internet is fulfilling its original promise about participation,” said Gary Arlen of Arlen Communications Inc. “This medium empowers users in such a way that they can do what they want and be heard.”

• Phil Sim of Squash has a great, long rant about how the tech blogosphere is imploding, the whole thing is over, tech.memeorandum.com is going tits up, turn out the lights, etc. Of course, he is likely wrong, as several people (including Gabe of memeo and Paul Montgomery of Tinfinger.com) point out in the comments, but it’s a great rant nevertheless.

• A University of Connecticut physics professor says he is building a time-travel device, and expects that time travel (of a sort) could be possible within 10 years.

I was going to write a post about terms like “user-generated content” – which my boss at globeandmail.com, Angus Frame, and I had a discussion about awhile back, after he said how much he despised the term “citizen journalism” – but I don’t have to any more because Derek Powazek has a great post that says everything I was going to say, as well or better (hey, anything is possible). As he puts it:

“Can I make a suggestion? Let’s all stop using the phrase “user-generated content.” I’m serious. It’s a despicable, terrible term.” Let’s deconstruct it.

User: One who uses. Like, you know, a junkie.

Generated: Like a generator, engine. Like, you know, a robot.

Content: Something that fills a box. Like, you know, packing peanuts.”

Derek is totally right. “User-generated content” is something that a marketing ‘droid would say in a report to upper management or the accounting department, about all that stuff that someone produces somewhere that gets ads wrapped around it. It has no soul, it has no life, it has no meaning. Jeremy Zawodny has joined the fight, and so has Umair Haque of Bubblegeneration, and Jeremiah Owyang. Derek says:

“Think about the rest of the world. Writers produce stories or articles. Authors write fiction or memoir. These are words infused with meaning and romance. Can you imagine a writer saying “I am a content provider” when asked what they do?”

If you feel okay with saying you’re a “content provider,” then I hope you are writing stuff for the back of packages, or user manuals for enterprise-class printers or something like that. Why not just call it writing? Derek wants to call it “authentic media,” which is a nice try but has (ironically) a kind of fake ring to it. I’m going to continue to search for a good term – and it will be as far away from the term “user-generated content” as possible.

Lots of chatter about General Motors and its ad campaign for the Chevy Tahoe, which let consumers create their own ad campaigns. According to a number of reports, including this one from CNet, stupid old GM totally missed the boat with this one, and got suckered into hosting a whole pile of critical ads about how big and ugly and environmentally unfriendly the Tahoe is, etc.

As is often the case with these kinds of things, Mike Masnick of Techdirt gets it right when he says that it’s not clear GM screwed up at all. In fact, it might be the smartest thing that the almost-bankrupt (financially and creatively) car company has done in a long time. To quote Mike:

“In fact, by then being open about it, GM is getting even more mileage from this campaign, and making it appear that they are more open to listening to those who disagree with them.”

Dominic Jones of Investor Relations Blog is on this side as well, as is AdRants. And Umair Haque, whose in-depth treatises on how to take advantage of “the edge” often make my brain hurt, also believes that CNet and others have gotten it wrong, and that GM is doing the right thing. As he puts it:

“GM’s finally woken up to the fact that it’s brand desperately needs authenticity – and this is a very nice way to end the bullsh*t and nonsense that became branding in the latter half of the 20th century.”

Admittedly, it’s difficult to think of GM as having actually done something smart – or at least avoided doing something stupid. But hey, anything could happen.

Update:

The New York Times has a story up about the controversy.

It’s one thing to talk about how Web 2.0 – or the “Dynamic Web” or the “Live Web” or whatever we’re calling it today – allows companies to start and even grow to an extraordinary size with a little ingenuity, some open-source tools and some moxie, but it never ceases to amaze me when a new one pops up. Thomas Hawk has a great post about one called Zoomr.com, which is an online photo-sharing service kind of like Flickr – which as we all know was started by a Vancouver couple (who appeared recently on the cover of Newsweek) and was then bought by Yahoo.

I got an email from the guy who started Zoomr a little while ago, and checked out the service, but I have to admit I wasn’t all that impressed. Great – another photo-sharing site, I thought. It has some features Flickr doesn’t have, but I didn’t think it was anything special. In fact, when it comes to Flickr competitors, I think Bubbleshare.com (another Canadian startup) has a lot more going for it. But then I read Thomas Hawk’s post, in which he describes how Kristopher Tate, the 17-year-old who started Zoomr.com, added a new feature while he was talking on the phone with Thomas.

“So while I was chatting with Tate about trackbacks at 10:32 a.m. this morning he wrote me, “yes, one big thing that I want to do is a sort of photo “trackback.” We then chatted a bit more about it and at 10:53 he wrote “Hmm, I think I’ll add the trackback feature in now.”

And just like that, trackbacks or refers were implemented. A feature that Thomas Hawk and others have been waiting for from Flickr.com for months, but which the larger site can’t implement because it is wrestling with integration of its servers with Yahoo, and so on. Yes, Zooomr.com is just another competing photo site, and yes it probably suffers from the same deficiencies as far as a business model is concerned that many other Web 2.0 companies do — but damn. That is cool.

My old colleague Richard Siklos, who now writes for the New York Times – he and I worked together as summer interns at the London Free Press in picturesque London, Ontario a couple of lifetimes ago – has an interesting piece in the NYT today called Death by Smiley Face, in which he talks about “purpose-driven media” and how it is creating no end of problems for regular old media like newspapers.

Jeff Jarvis thinks it is kind of old hat, and of course he is right, but it’s still worthwhile seeing the Grey Lady writing about it. My favourite part is where Richard writes:

These are new-media ventures that leave the competition scratching their heads because they don’t really aim to compete in the first place; their creators are merely taking advantage of the economics of the online medium to do something that they feel good about. They would certainly like to cover their costs and maybe make a buck or two, but really, they’re not in it for the money. By purely commercial measures, they are illogical.

As I commented on Paul Kedrosky’s blog, this gets to the heart of what newspapers have trouble getting their heads around. Craig Newmark of Craigslist.org often seems slightly baffled when people single him out as the guy who is killing the revenue side of newspapers, because it’s not like he set out to kill newspapers. He’s just using the natural economies of the medium to do something he sees as worthwhile, which kind of defines “purpose-driven media.”

The fact that what Craig and others are doing is taking away printed media’s bread and butter is almost beside the point. And the fact that he doesn’t even care whether he makes money at it just rubs salt in the wound.

Along with Mark Evans and Rob Hyndman, I sat in on a terrific presentation given Friday morning by Dr. Jeff Cole, the director of the World Internet Project (thanks to Jordan Banks of eBay Canada for inviting me). The WIP is a joint project organized by the UCLA Center for Communication Policy (now the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future) and involves research in more than 26 countries, including Canada, into how people use the Internet.

Not surprisingly, Dr. Cole – who is a compelling and funny speaker – talked a lot about how Internet use has increased, how broadband penetration has increased, how newspapers are dead, how TV is doomed, how the advertising industry is in major upheaval, and so on. Not a big news flash, at least not to anyone who has been paying attention over the past decade or so. One of the commenters on Mark’s post about the event asks why he was so impressed with the presentation – after all, this is all “superficial and obvious.”

But as Mark notes, it is one thing to believe these things and even to have read about them – but it really brings those points home when someone like Dr. Cole lays out the picture in such detail, and with five years of intensive surveys and research to back it up. In particular, it was interesting to hear about how broadband changes the way people approach the Internet even in subtle ways, since it changes the process of getting online from being an occasional, almost ritualized event – in which people make lists of things they want to accomplish when they dial up, and then disconnect when they are done – to something that is far more a part of their lives all the time, using it now and then in small ways.

In that sense, Dr. Cole noted, the Internet has followed the same kind of evolution that TV did. People used to schedule their TV watching around a particular show, and then turn it off when that show was over – but more recently people simply switch the television on whenever they are in the room, even if they don’t know what they want to watch. In the same way, the Internet has gone from a destination for specific purposes to something that is just “always on.” At the same time, people have moved their PCs and Internet use out of the back room or office and into either the living room or the kitchen, which has made it much more a central part of their everyday lives.

There was plenty more that was fascinating in Dr. Cole’s presentation – how people feel more empowered politically and socially as a result of having the Internet, how it is making younger users more interested in becoming creators of content instead of just consumers, and other things that we hope participants at our mesh conference in May will be interested in discussing. For more of his findings you can read the World Internet Project summary report.

Anyone who has been following the Vonage IPO story – as my friend and conference-organizing colleague Mark Evans has, and as Om Malik has – won’t be surprised that the voice-over-Internet pioneer is rumoured to be shopping itself around. The prospectus for its initial public offering, which was on and then off, then back on again, has been out there for months with little or no interest, or at least not enough to make it happen. That’s not a great sign.

As I’ve mentioned before – and others have too, including Mark and Om – Vonage’s IPO smacked of more than a little desperation to raise some cash while the iron was even slightly warm, and the story at CNN/Money fits with that. Whether an IPO or a takeover, Vonage needs money big-time. Its marketing costs have exploded, thanks in part to those Woo hoo! commercials (which I actually kind of like, if only because I like the song), and it needs a river of cash flow to pay for the expansion it needs to remain relevant.

As Om and others have pointed out, research shows that cable VOIP services are taking share away from standalones such as Vonage – and doing so at an increasing rate. That means the window is rapidly closing, and the risk for Vonage (which was started by VOIP pioneer Jeff Pulver, whose VON Canada I am appearing at next week) is that it could become the next TiVo, a pioneer that winds up winning the early battle but losing the war.

As someone told me once, the pioneers get the arrows and the settlers get the land. Alec Saunders says buying either Vonage itself or the stock would be the “ultimate triumph of greed and stupidity over common sense.” Of course, as we all know, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen 🙂

Feel a chill in the air? That’s because Shel Israel and Robert “The Scobleizer” Scoble – authors of the blogging book Naked Conversations – got the cold shoulder from Amazon.com during a recent show-and-tell about blogs at the online bookseller’s HQ in Seattle. To be specific, they apparently got a frosty response from Amazon’s chief technology officer, Werner Vogels (hat tip to Toronto VC blogger Rick Segal).

Apparently, Vogels was pretty skeptical about the benefits of blogging and challenged the star bloggers to prove that it was worthwhile for a company like Amazon, and didn’t like the answers he got. Here’s what he says on his blog:

“Welcome to life at Amazon, we set a very high bar for our own works and we expect anyone that comes to sell us an approach to actually be prepared to really defend their ideas. Just because blogs are cool and everybody is doing them does not automatically mean that we should institutionalize them at Amazon.”

He also says that:

“I wanted them abandon their fuzzy group hug approach, and counter me with hard arguments why they were right and I was wrong. Instead they appeared shell-shocked that anyone actually had the guts to challenge the golden wonder boys of blogging and not accept their religion instantly.”

Perhaps all Vogels did was challenge them, but from Robert and Shel’s descriptions of it, my impression is that it was a bit more than that. Shel – who is one of the nicest guys around – says it was a very rude way to treat someone who had been invited to Amazon to talk, like asking someone into your home and then shouting at them about their taste in music. Shel says:

“Werner, if you want to have a public debate on how Amazon could improve its customer relationships with more employee blogs or corporate blogs, please name the time and place–as well as the neutral referee. I require only two rules. (1) Let me have my say next time, without you interrupting, and (2) Let’s both agree to the same agenda before we go public with it.”

It’s fine to challenge orthodox thinking, and obviously Vogels believes that Amazon.com is good enough at getting feedback that it doesn’t need blogs. Fair enough. But it sounds like he was rude, and just doesn’t want to admit it. And as Rick Segal hints in his post, it doesn’t help that the photo Vogels uses on his blog is an unsmiling portrait that looks like something they might post on The Smoking Gun. Sounds like he has a chip on his shoulder.

Update:

There’s been plenty of blog posts – and lot of comments on posts, including this one – from both sides of this issue, including opinions from people such as Seth Finkelstein (who comments below) that Shel and Scoble should be able to take this kind of thing because it’s all part of “the conversation.”

As I responded to Seth, that’s all well and good, but it’s another thing to be sandbagged and shouted down (if that’s what happened) when you’ve been invited to speak to Amazon.com about something.

As for it all being part of the conversation, who says we shouldn’t apply normal standards of behaviour to online conversations as we do to offline ones? If we were at a party and someone was drunk and shouting or being belligerent (not accusing Werner of this, just an example), then I would have word with him, and I would hope other party-goers would too.

Scoble has posted a response to Werner here, and Werner has posted something akin to an apology here. In other news, he appears to at least be seeing the humour in what’s been going on, since he uploaded a nice mugshot to Flickr for us all to use 🙂

My friend and fellow tech writer Tyler Hamilton from the Toronto Star had a great piece in the paper the other day based on an interview with the Father of the Web himself, Sir Tim Berners-Lee (hat tip to Rob Hyndman for pointing me to it). Sir Tim said that he was “very concerned” that the big telecom companies were trying to impose tiers of service and other roadblocks that would change the neutrality of the Web. He said:

“It stops being the Net if a supplier of downloaded video pays to connect to a particular set of consumers who are connected to a particular cable company. It would no longer be an open information space.”

Among other things, Sir Tim said he fears a time when Internet access and all that it represents is filtered through the networks of these large telecom players, who then determine what sites and services work best and are therefore the most popular, and even co-operate with operating system makers to determine how the network functions. This would completely change the open nature of the Web, he said.

“The place you buy your shoes has been decided by the search engine, and the search engine was been decided by the browser, which has been decided by the operating system, which has been decided by the computer,” he said. “Then your choice of shoes is dictated by your choice of computer.”

Attempts to incorporate some kind of protection for net neutrality into U.S. legislation have so far had mixed results, and some of the major Internet companies are not impressed. The other Father of the Internet, Vint Cerf, remains concerned about the potential for harm.

Move over, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Sure, you guys likely got a few hundred million each from eBay for your stakes in Skype. But at 30, Friis is almost over the hill in dot-com terms, and Zennstrom is almost 40, which makes him officially a geezer. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the wildly popular university social network Facebook.com is 22, and his company is reportedly on the block for as much as $2-billion, according to an article at Businessweek Online.

Facebook was set up by Zuckerberg as a way for friends at Harvard University to meet each other and network about social events, in much the same way that Shawn Fanning set up Napster to help friends at university swap music. But while Shawn got tied up in lawsuits from the RIAA and his company eventually went bankrupt, Mark and his college pals — who dropped out to work on Facebook from a rooming house in Silicon Valley, according to this great piece in the Harvard Crimson — stand to become extremely wealthy. It is a private company, but Facebook appears to only have about five major stakeholders (although it has done a couple of funding rounds with VCs).

And who would pay a ridiculous sum of money like that for a university social network? Well, media giant News Corp. paid close to $1-billion for MySpace.com, which is a similar social networking site populated largely by teens sharing information on which bands they like. According to comScore MediaMetrix, Facebook.com is the seventh-most heavily trafficked site on the Internet, with more than 5 billion page views in February — more than Amazon.com, Ask.com or Disney.

It’s reasonable to assume, as Businessweek does, that Facebook.com would likely interest any media giant that wants to compete with News Corp. — and that includes Viacom, another media conglomerate run by a 70-year-old billionaire (Sumner Redstone). Young consumers are living online, and big media companies want to reach them where they live. And Mark Zuckerberg might soon be able to live pretty much wherever he wants to, instead of sharing a flat with a bunch of college buddies.

Update:

For what it’s worth, Rafat Ali over at paidcontent.org – which has a great track record on this kind of thing – says that Facebook has been on the block for awhile, and that everyone including Viacom has looked at it, and that the $2-billion figure is “at best, hearsay, and at worst media manipulation.” But Carlo at Techdirt points out that many people (including me, I confess) said similar things about Skype, and look what happened there. Om Malik says that they should have sold out for $750-million because they are slipping in popularity (Markus from plentyoffish.com makes some good points in his comment on my post)