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Not sure why the Los Angeles Times is writing about RushmoreDrive, the “black” search engine owned by Barry Diller’s IAC conglomerate, considering it originally launched back in April sometime. Maybe it was a slow news day today. In any case, it’s worth pointing out again what a bad idea this is — in my opinion at least. I’m not black, obviously, so I’m sure some people might argue that I don’t really deserve to have an opinion on the subject, but I feel compelled to write about it regardless. Do we really need racially-segregated search engines? Even after reading RushmoreDrive founder Johnny Taylor’s rationale for the service, I just don’t see what compelling purpose this serves.

Is it really that huge an inconvenience if someone searches for the word “Whitney” and gets something that is allegedly “white” like a museum of art, and what they were really searching for — Whitney Houston — is in fourth place? (Let’s ignore for the moment the possibility that they might actually search for “Whitney Houston” in the first place, or that they might even be looking for the Whitney Museum of Art) Do we really need a dedicated search engine so that black people can get results from “soul food” sites like chitterlings.com higher up than they might be in a “white” search engine? (I am not making these examples up, by the way — these are Johnny Taylor’s examples).

Continue reading “RushmoreDrive = Dumb idea”

Predictably enough, NBC head honcho Jeff Zucker — the guy who previously ranted about how he’d rather have TV dollars than a few measly “digital pennies” — is crowing about how the massive viewership numbers for the Phelps… er, Olympic Games illustrate the dominance of network television and the relative irrelevance of the Interweb when it comes to video. After all, don’t the numbers show that 97 per cent of all Olympic content-watching took place on the tube? (Let’s leave aside the fact that watching anything online at NBC requires you to use Microsoft’s Silverlight, which only works on Windows). So the Internet, in other words, is nothing but a rounding error.

It’s natural enough that Zucker would put things in that perspective. After all, his salary comes from network television advertising, of which he just finished pulling in a billion dollars worth, so it’s understandable that he would be a little smug. But I think Jeff would be wise to remember one thing: the Olympics aren’t like regular television. They come along once every four years, and they are a massive social phenomenon unlike almost anything else that you can think of when it comes to TV viewing, as Cory Bergman at Lost Remote also points out.

Continue reading “Zucker is wrong to be so smug”

As lots of people are reporting this morning (and as TechCrunch speculated a couple of weeks ago) AOL has bought the “lifestream aggregator” known as Socialthing, which came out of Colorado-based venture capital outfit TechStars. It’s an interesting move by a company that has so much else wrong with it, but at the size of deal we’re probably talking about — as far as I can tell, Socialthing was built by a couple of guys in a matter of months — it’s not likely to move the needle much in either direction. Is it a sign that AOL is suddenly getting with the whole Web 2.0 social-media program? Perhaps.

From a usability point of view, as someone who has been beta-testing Socialthing.com for awhile (post your email address in a comment if you want an invite) there are a couple of key differences between it and Friendfeed, which I’m a big fan of (my feed is here). While Socialthing is well-designed for the most part, one of the biggest differences that becomes obvious is that Socialthing groups activity in your “friendstream” by individual — so next to each friend’s avatar you see what they have done on Twitter or Flickr or whatever, grouped together. In FriendFeed, however, you see a river of activity based around the events themselves, so that you see a stream of whatever your friends are doing that is grouped by time rather than identity.

Continue reading “AOL buys SocialThing — but why?”

Twitter often gets a (somewhat deserved) rap for being shallow, filled mostly with people’s thoughts about the weather or what they had for breakfast. But every now and then something important happens, like an earthquake or a forest fire, and the service shows its true potential. The most recent example was the Twitter stream from a Chinese “citizen journalist” or blogger named Zhou “Zhuola” Shuguang, who got a visit from some government officials after he showed up in Beijing to blog about the Olympics. They said they were there to talk with him about a breach of the government’s “one child only” rule (which is more than a little odd, considering Zhou is childless), but it became obvious that what they really wanted was for him to leave Beijing.

Global Voices, the excellent global blogging project founded by Rebecca MacKinnon and the Harvard Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, caught wind of the detainment and started posting translations of Zhou’s Twitter messages, updating the post with each new message as it came in. Not only did several officials put Zhou in a car and drive him back to his hometown, but others also apparently went to visit his parents, saying they wanted to take them out for tea (one of the officials who detained Zhou was an executive with the Changsha Mining Group, the company that Zhou’s father worked for). In his last update the blogger said that he was unharmed, and that he was planning to return to Beijing accompanied by a journalist, in defiance of the authorities.

A fascinating story — or at least the core of a fascinating story — and all told entirely via Twitter. The “first draft of history” indeed.

Shane Richmond, the technology blogger for the Telegraph newspaper in the UK, took some time off and asked several guest bloggers to fill in for him by writing about the Internet and the future of the music industry. One of the most recent posts was by Mark Kelly, the keyboard player for a band called Marillion, who described the group’s experiences as they moved from the traditional label relationship to an independent model. It’s well worth reading, if you’re at all interested in the future of the music business and how artists are dealing with the Web.

Mark says that the band was effectively dumped in 1995 by their label (EMI) after one of their albums only sold 300,000 copies, and then tried to work with an independent label but didn’t have much success. Starting in 2000, the group got its fans to pre-order a CD — having built up a list of more than 20,000 fans — and used that money to finance the recording of the album. The band did its own distribution online and through independent record shops, and over the next six years released three more albums the same way. Although Kelly doesn’t say how the band did financially, he says:

Continue reading “Music and the Web: One band’s experience”

As John Paczkowski at All Things Digital has noted, Apple’s market capitalization passed Google’s today, closing at $158.8-billion to Google’s $157.2-billion (as Senator Everett Dirksen is reported to have said, “a billion here and a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money”). Of course, as my friend Paul Kedrosky notes, Apple’s market value has eclipsed Google’s (albeit briefly) several times in the past year. Will this one last? Google’s business is arguably under more pressure as a result of the weaker U.S. economy and advertising market, but then Apple could always stumble (yes, friends, it could happen).

It’s become so commonplace now to think of Apple as a consumer products star — given the success of the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone — that I think we sometimes forget how far this company has come in just the past four or five years. Google has grown a phenomenal amount in that same span of time, with a share price that has increased five-fold, going from $100 to the current $500 level, and revenues that are now at $20-billion. Apple, however, makes Google’s growth look almost anemic by comparison: its shares have grown 10-fold, from about $16 to more than $170 at their current level, and revenue is at $30-billion.

Continue reading “Apple: A better stock than Google?”

I’m late on this news, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention today’s update to the Disqus hosted-comment service, which I’ve been using on this blog for some time now. As I’ve said before, I think Disqus is one of the best comment systems going, and now it has gotten even better. One of the main criticisms of the service up until today was that the comments made on a blog post were hosted by Disqus and therefore not available to the blog publisher should something go wrong. The update to the service makes it truly two-way, with a synchronization process for WordPress and the ability to export comments.

Disqus has also made it easier for bloggers to administer their comments, integrating the admin panel right into the WordPress admin dashboard. The initial version of the Disqus 2.0 plugin caused some problems for me and some other WP users, but within a matter of hours there was a fix — and the whole time it was being pushed out to users, founder Daniel Ha was responding on Twitter and through the Disqus support forum, and keeping users updated. That was one of the first things that impressed me about Disqus, actually: Daniel’s dedication to remaining in touch and both responding to and fixing problems quickly.

Continue reading “Disqus: Blog comments just got better”

There’s plenty of discussion out there (and I use that term loosely) about Twitter imposing limits on the number of people users can follow. This seems to have gotten started by a post from Brent Csutoras saying he ran into a 2,000-follower limit and was surprised by it, even though co-founder Evan Williams described the rationale for the limits on the Twitter blog in a post last week — including the fact that there is no hard-and-fast number for how many followers you can have, something he expanded on in a comment on GigaOm.

When I first saw these reports, I wondered the same thing that Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch does in his post: namely, who the heck can follow 2,000 (or more) people on Twitter? I realize that Loic LeMeur of Seesmic and the Scobleizer and others have tens of thousands of people they follow, and claim that this enriches their lives greatly, but I don’t think they mean the same thing by “follow” that any rational person would (and Loic’s argument seems to boil down to the fact that it’s polite to follow people back if they follow you).

If I recall correctly, Scoble has said that with 20,000 people on his follow list, he gets a tweet every second, or more. I would argue that’s just white noise at best — like having the radio on while you’re doing something else. It’s certainly not actually paying attention to someone. Twitter’s limits seem like a sensible response to “follow spam,” which has been on the increase, and I hope they don’t cave in just because some people want to brag about how many people they’re following.

I’m hoping that the brouhaha (or maybe it’s actually more of a kerfuffle) over whether or not TechCrunch50 co-organizer Jason Calacanis plagiarized something written 10 years ago by a former DEMO organizer is actually a clever, top-secret strategy to boost the Google News page-rank of both conferences. Because the alternative is that this is one of the most childish outbursts I can recall from a group of alleged adults — right up there with photo-blogger and Zooomr CEO Thomas Hawk calling a staffer at San Francisco’s MOMA an a-hole on his blog for not letting him take pictures in the museum’s atrium.

According to a post at TechCrunch and one at Alexander Muse’s Texas Startup blog, someone named Deb McAlister, who was once involved with the DEMO conference but apparently isn’t any longer, wrote to Muse and said that an email Jason sent around to his oh-so-private mailing list (don’t get me started on that whole fiasco) with tips for startups on how to do a demo was actually a blatant rip-off of something she wrote for DEMO founder David Coursey about 10 years ago. According to Ms. McAlister, approximately 1,893 of the 2,200 words in the Calacanis mail were “DIRECTLY lifted” from her piece.

Continue reading “Let’s all grow up a little, shall we?”

For a number of months now, the online magazine Salon has been building a hosted blog network/media hub called open.salon.com, which launched this morning. According to a recent blog post by Open Salon director Kerry Lauerman a few weeks ago, the network has attracted about 1,300 bloggers while it was in beta. I came across some invites that Kerry posted on a number of blogs, including this one; other bloggers participating include this one and this one. One blog quoted from Salon’s invitation email:

“We don’t want to oversell it, but we really think that with the help of smart media people like you, we can begin to invert the pyramid of only a few people controlling the global conversation, and figure out new ways to liberate great ideas and great writing for an ever-growing avid audience.”

According to the description by Lauerman, the new Salon site or network is both a hosted blog community and a media hub or aggregator. When you go to the open.salon.com site, you get a “cover page” that features posts from a variety of blogs, as well as a tag cloud showing the most popular tags. The page also shows the most highly-rated posts — since blog posts within Open Salon can be given a “thumbs up,” much like other social-media sites (and some mainstream media sites such as globeandmail.com, which has a “recommend” feature on every story). If you set up a blog, you get to add friends, and then their most recent posts appear in your sidebar.

Continue reading “Salon builds it — but will anyone come?”

John Biggs’ post at CrunchGear about a video his coworker made lampooning Twitter (which I’ve embedded below for your viewing pleasure) provided hard evidence that the Hitler video meme is still alive and well, putting it right up there with “You’re The Man Now, Dog” as one of the longest-lived Internet memes. What’s fascinating about the Hitler video theme is that it’s so incredibly inappropriate and tasteless that it simultaneously makes some people outraged — at the idea that something so serious would be used to make fun of something so inane and ridiculous — and at the same time makes fun of those people for being so serious. Wired magazine wrote a great roundup of the Hitler meme back in May, noting that the same clip (from the movie Der Untergang or Downfall) has been used to make fun of Xbox 360 problems, Vista blue screens and fans of the Dallas Cowboys. Enjoy — or not 🙂

http://blip.tv/play/ih_F3GmJ5FQ

 

Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron has been dropping hints for some time now about a big deal involving his occasionally troubled video-blogging startup, and now the news has finally broken: Rocketboom has signed a seven-figure distribution and marketing deal with Sony. As described by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch, the arrangement is structured in such a way that the entertainment giant could either acquire Rocketboom if things go well, or relinquish control to Baron if they don’t.

Andrew gives his rationale for the deal in a post on his blog. Among other things, he notes in passing that the legal battle for control of Rocketboom with former host (and disputed co-founder) Amanda Congdon made it virtually impossible for the video blog to sign any partnerships or financing deals as other startups have.

Continue reading “Rocketboom: Sony signs rent-to-own deal”

At the risk of inciting the Apple faithful and iPhone devotees, I can’t help but note that the recent shenanigans with the App Store are more than a little disturbing. As Don Reisinger at Mashable notes, the store belongs to Apple, and therefore the company can do whatever it wants — including removing apps without warning, then allowing them back on, and then suddenly removing them again. And it’s entirely possible that the company had a good reason for removing the most recent app, Box Office. But was it because the app was insecure in some way? Because it breached the terms of the company’s developer agreement? Because it made the iPhone unstable? No one is saying.

It could be that — as some of the commenters on the Gizmodo post about the latest removal are speculating — Box Office infringed on some sort of trademark (there are reports that the app has been renamed “Now Playing”), or was unstable in some way and caused technical issues with iPhones. But there is no way of knowing. What’s interesting to me are the numbers of negative comments, including many from developers, who seem to be less than impressed with the way Apple seems to remove apps willy-nilly — without any notice or explanation — and who see this kind of attitude as being all of a piece with the company’s use of DRM and other overly intrusive strategies.

Continue reading “Apple to iPhone users: No app for you”

William Patry, a giant in the field of copyright law and a welcome voice of sanity amid the frequent clashes between copyright and digital media, has decided to end his blog (although he has since said he is reinstating his archive after initially removing it). His first reason for doing so — that he has become frustrated by the fact that people conflate his views on copyright with those of his employer, Google, and that he is tired of dealing with “the crazies” — is easy to sympathize with. As a prominent voice of reason, he has no doubt been the subject of many attacks from both sides of the issue. But it’s his second reason that makes me (and so do some others) more than a little depressed. As he describes it:

Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners.

Continue reading “Sad news for copyright: Patry quits blogging”

So Google is being sued by a couple who believe that their privacy was invaded when a photo of their house appeared on the Web giant’s Streetview service, which features 360-degree photos taken from a fleet of specially-equipped Volkswagen Beetles. And a privacy watchdog group has tried to bring attention to the issue by releasing a document that contains some photos of Google co-founder Larry Page’s house, as well a dissection of the likely route that he takes to work (assuming he doesn’t take the helicopter, of course). This, the group says, shows the “chilling amount of visual information” that Google has.

Does it really, though? All that the photos (one of which appeared at Valleywag some time ago) really show are the outside gate of Page’s home, with a few cars in the parking lot, and an aerial view of the top of his house and property. There’s a blurry figure who the privacy group speculates is a bodyguard drinking a pop, and then we get a closeup of the next-door neighbour’s alarm sign, which tells us they use a specific alarm service. The route to work, meanwhile, is simply a series of photos of the intersections that the group feels might mimic the path Larry may or may not take to the Google campus.

Continue reading “Group reveals (gasp!) Larry’s address”