mathewingram.com/work

Another one destined for the “No Surprise” file: HBO is planning to shut down its comedy-video site This Just In (I know, I’d never heard of it either) in August, according to Variety magazine. Why? Because — as one NBC executive admitted when the network shut down its InnerTube site, which was supposed to compete with YouTube — This Just In might as well have changed its URL to “nobodycomeshere.com.”

Two of the most succinct appraisals of this turkey come from a commenter on the TechCrunch post about it and from Om Malik at NewTeeVee. At TechCrunch, Ian Bell says: “Unfortunately this goes to show that you can’t just slap a site together, throw ads up on it, buy keywords and think it will be successful. A successful property requires its own culture and essentially a ‘soul’.” Bingo. And Om notes that gigantic conglomerates with multiple layers of bureaucracy and poisonous office politics are not exactly a great breeding ground for comedy:

“The big media, especially Time Warner (my former employer) is a tad clueless about this new video revolution. With a studio mentality, management by consensus and a bonus-driven culture, they are waddling in a world that moves at light speed.”

Double bingo. And examples abound of just how clueless network executives are, and how flinging money and press releases at something doesn’t amount to much in the world of online video: Come on down, Bud.tv — one of the most expensive, and yet almost criminally un-funny, sites you will ever see. And then there’s FunnyOrDie.com, which features Saturday Night Live star Will Farrell. Why does it work? Because it’s funny, that’s why.

Fortune magazine has a great overview of the issues facing newspapers, using the Washington Post as a core example — the implicit argument being: If a great newspaper with a fantastic Web property like washingtonpost.com can’t make it work online, then who else has a chance? There are no easy answers, but the Fortune piece sparks plenty of questions.

Starting right off the top, every newspaper of any size that wants to see the future they are staring down should pay close attention to the example used in the lead, of the sports reporter who files breaking news to his blog, then does audio clips and podcasts and online Q&A sessions and so on. The piece also contained a piece of information about the Washington Post that I didn’t know: almost half of Post Co.’s revenue comes from its educational division, which has provided it with a considerable amount of support while it experiments with online, just as the Toronto Star’s newspaper unit has been supported by its Harlequin book division.

My friend Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 — and others such as Lost Remote — have already put their fingers on the crucial point that the newspaper industry is struggling with: namely, when your entire business model is predicated on scarcity (i.e., the scarcity of pages for advertising), how do you deal with the sudden abundance that the Internet has created? Supply and demand gets thrown out the window and other dynamics take hold.

From my pal Paul Kedrosky comes a video clip from new Wall Street Journal tech video-blogger Andy Jordan, who went out into the park to see whether one guy’s iPhone would help improve his social life or not. Kara Swisher of All Things D has a clip of Andy explaining his new gig.

http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/452319854

File this one under the “No Surprise” heading in the VC database: Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, the guy who is probably the most closely identified with Web 2.0 apps — if only because he seems to have one of every kind of Web widget in the sidebars on his blog — has funded Twitter, the micro-blogging service with the 140-character limit.

For anyone unfamiliar with Twitter, it is like the status update on Facebook but without the Facebook part. It is a quick way of updating people on what you’re doing/thinking/feeling/eating, etc. If you’re Robert Scoble, it’s a way for you to spam thousands of people with details on your every thought and movement (just kidding, Scobie), and there are add-ons like the audio Twittergram and so on that I don’t really know anything about. At the moment, with Twitter and Facebook and Pownce.com and MSN and GTalk and half a dozen other things, I have so many status update services that I’m overwhelmed.

In other words, I’ve pretty much given up, and Twitter now just pushes blog posts out to whoever is following me, and I track some other people’s blog posts the same way. Is it worth investing in? Fred seems to think so (and so do Marc Andreessen and some others), although even Fred admits he’s not sure what the business model is. I’m not sure either.

The latest issue of Fortune magazine has an interview with Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster — who may qualify as the world’s tallest free-standing chief executive, at six foot eight inches — in which the writer asks Jim some questions provided by readers, and then asks some of his own. The answers are very similar to the ones that the Craigslist CEO gave to Mark Evans when he did a keynote interview with Buckmaster during mesh (there’s video of their chat here, thanks to mDialogue and Mark McKay).

One of the interesting things for me, because I’m nosy (occupational hazard, I’m afraid) came at the end of the interview, when Jim mentioned where he and his partner Susan Best like to go to relax: an organic farm called Emandal in Mendocino County. I figured it must be some kind of swanky resort with a gourmet chef, but I should have known better, given Buckmaster’s disinterest in such trappings of wealth.

As it turns out, Emandal is a tiny, unassuming family farm on a back-country road in the middle of nowhere and reportedly includes an ostrich named Huey. As it happens, one of the top results in Google for the term “Emandal” is a collection of photos from Smugmug of Jim and Susan enjoying their time at the farm (including a visit with Huey). Nice to see that Jim doesn’t just talk about not being interested in money — he acts like it too.

One of the highlights of mesh — for me and many others — was the chance to see Mike Arrington of TechCrunch call PayPerPost CEO Ted Murphy “the most evil man in the room” when Ted asked a question during the keynote conversation I had with Mike on the first day. As part of his “Rockstartup” video series, Ted had someone filming the whole thing — including a chat between Ted and Loren Feldman of 1938media — and the video has been posted to YouTube, and I’ve embedded it below. A classic mesh moment.

Bill Shatner, Montreal-born starship captain and former T.J. Hooker star, says he’s not mad that he didn’t get a role in the new Star Trek movie — although he does admit to being “disappointed.”

According to a post at PaidContent, the online audience for newspapers is growing twice as fast as the overall Internet population is growing. That comes from a study that Nielsen/Net Ratings did for (not surprisingly perhaps) the Newspaper Association of America. According to the study:

An average of more than 59 million people (37.6 percent of all active internet users) visited newspapers online each month during Q1, a 5.3 percent increase over the same period a year ago.

During the same time period, the overall internet audience grew just 2.7 percent.

The study also found that more than 88 per cent of newspaper website visitors have bought something online in the last six months, compared with less than 80 per cent of the online audience. And about four in 10 online readers or 40 per cent work in professional or managerial jobs, compared with one in three or 33 per cent of the Internet population).

If you’re like me — and I know I am — you have hundreds of feeds in your feed reader and not enough time to wade through them all. Finding a way to sort through them all and get to the posts that are most “important” or interesting is a conundrum that I and many others continue to wrestle with. It’s why Techmeme.com continues to be so handy, despite what some see as its “echo chamber”-type flaws (for the record, I am a big fan of Techmeme).

Ilya Grigorik and his team at Waterloo-based AideRSS — which launched today — are taking a page from Google’s book in an attempt to solve the RSS problem. In the same way that the search engine uses an algorithm called PageRank to sort pages based on who links to them, AideRSS uses a filtering system called PostRank to show you the posts in a blog’s feed that are getting the most attention in the form of readers, links, comments, Digg submissions and so on (Josh Catone has an in-depth look at Read/Write Web and Ilya describes PostRank on his blog).

Ilya was kind enough to give me a trial account to AideRSS, and while I haven’t had all that much time to play around with it (vacation in an Internet-challenged location got in the way), I think the company is onto something. I’m not sure if I want AideRSS to determine which posts I read all the time — I like a certain haphazard, serendipitous approach as well — but it is definitely worth monitoring, and like Google’s PageRank it will likely improve over time. My smart mesh friend Ethan Kaplan of Blackrimglasses has some thoughts here.

I know this isn’t a gamer blog or anything, but if you play Halo at all (or have ever played it and liked it), then this could be one of the coolest things you’ve ever seen — a full-scale, working Warthog, complete with four-way steering and dual mounted machine guns. Click on the picture to see a larger version.

In case you were wondering where Marc Andreessen got the material for his continuing blog series on startups, it looks to me like a lot of it probably came from his experience with Opsware — which has just been bought by Hewlett-Packard for a whopping $1.6-billion in cash. As Marc describes in his post, the deal is the culmination of more than seven years of toil, from starting the company formerly known as Loudcloud in 1999, to going public just as the tech sector peaked, to almost going under, to rebuilding the business and making it a leader in the industry. If anyone has paid their dues, it sounds like Marc has — and he just turned 36. In case you’re keeping score at home, it looks as though Andreessen will make about $165-million on the sale.

Just discovered that Amit Agarwal, who writes the excellent Digital Inspiration blog, has created a site with ASCII art images of 100 popular bloggers, including yours truly (I’m the one in the second row without a head).

Nice link bait, Amit 🙂

Still at the cottage, and crawling through my feed reader from time to time on one of the slowest dial-up connections since the mid-1990s, which is where I came across a post by my friend Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0, who asks whether newspapers should become local blog networks.

Scott makes what I think is a persuasive case for why the answer to that question should be yes. Blogs, he argues, are just a content-management system with a dumb name — and newspapers (smart ones, that is) could use them to expand the nature of what they do online in interesting ways.

Joel Spolsky is a smart guy who writes a great blog called Joel On Software — a blog on which he recently posted something that is completely wrong. Okay, not completely wrong, but more wrong than it is right. And I’m not just saying that because I have something against Dave Winer — I don’t. But I think Joel is wrong to tell us that we should learn something from Dave when it comes to comments on blogs.

This is something I have written a fair bit about — most recently here — because I think it’s an important question. In fact, I think it was one of the first big issues I tackled when I started this blog (that post also involved Dave Winer, who got mad at me for criticizing him over not having comments). A debate went around and around at that time about whether a blog without comments is still a blog, and my position then was — and still is — that a blog without comments may technically be a blog, but it is missing a giant part of what makes blogs powerful.

As Clay Shirky points out at Corante, there may be dozens (if not thousands) of examples of how comments are stupid and the people who make them are morons, as Joel alleges in his post. But at the same time, there are also plenty of examples of posts (including some of my own) in which the comments held more information and generated more thought and debate than the post that sparked them.

To be fair to Dave, he does allow comments — just not many of them, and only occasionally. That’s clearly the way he wants to run his blog, which is fine. And there’s no question that having comments requires some management, or what I call social gardening. But I think blogs — and blog readers and writers — are better for having them.