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(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

Outside of the geek-o-sphere, the term widget is often used interchangeably with words like gizmo or gadget or doodad (or the somewhat less popular doohickey) or thingamajig. All of these terms are used to describe a device or thing that either doesn’t have a name — or at least not one that is easily remembered — or whose existence may actually be in question, as in “why don’t they invent a widget that…” etc.

As more and more people set up their “digital me” sites, whether they are blogs or MySpace pages or Facebook sites, widgets are becoming the machinery that allows media and content of all kinds to be easily distributed (see my column in Thursday’s Globe and Mail about Facebook’s F8 platform). Bands allow their music to be embedded — or widgetized — in webpages, and broadcast networks such as CBS are experimenting with allowing their video to be turned into widgets. Companies like Brightcove are trying to turn widgets into micro-economies, with ads and interactive features that try to turn widget browsers into buyers.

In an attempt to quantify the “widgetization” of the Web, traffic measurement firm comScore has launched a widget-tracking service. According to its analysis, photo-related widgets are at the top of the heap traffic-wise, with Slide being number one with more than 117 million unique users in April, or almost 14 per cent of the available Internet audience. RockYou, which recently launched a Facebook widget, came second with 82 million (the survey measured only widgets based on Flash and didn’t track desktop widgets).

Update:

Om Malik at GigaOm has a good post on the topic of widgets, and says comScore’s attempt to measure widgets has a number of flaws (comScore’s methodology being one of them) and the whole thing strikes him as a bit of a jellybean contest.

Each time I write about iLike — the music-sharing application that is by far the most popular app on the new Facebook platform F8 — the numbers boggle the mind (and my mind doesn’t boggle easily). The first time, it was the day that Facebook’s new widget-sharing feature went live, and iLike had gone from having just 1,200 users to having more than 400,000 in less than 24 hours, and was trying to scrounge up server space.

The next time I wrote about it the feature had more than two million users. Pretty amazing, right? Well, according to the company’s blog, it now has over six million users. That’s about 3,000 times more than it had a couple of weeks ago, and the application is adding about 300,000 users a day — a rate of growth that is unlike almost any new application I can think of. In a chart at the iLike blog, the company compares its growth to Skype, Hotmail and ICQ, and I think those are probably pretty good comparisons. The big question, of course, is whether all of the people who have added the app to their Facebook profile will become regular users of iLike, and actually bring the company any revenues as the result of its stardom.

In other Facebook-related news, the blogosphere’s newest star — Netscape founder Marc Andreesen — has a look at the F8 platform. He says that his opinion is the platform is “a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry,” and notes that Silicon Valley shows that “in any fight between a platform and an application, the platform will always win.” In a nutshell, he says:

“Facebook is providing the ease and user attraction of MySpace-style embedding, coupled with the kind of integration you see with Firefox extensions, with the added rocket fuel of automated viral distribution to a huge number of potential users, and the prospect of keeping 100% of any revenue your application can generate.”

Marc goes on to do a fairly instensive, feature by feature analysis of the Facebook platform and the reasons for its success, and in passing mentions iLike as well — and how any app that hitches its wagon to the platform had better have the resources to scale quickly (anyone want to hazard a guess at what iLike is paying for servers right now?) I encourage you to read the whole post.

My reaction to the recent news that a newspaper blogger was ejected from a baseball game for live-blogging the event can be summed up in one word: moronic. Yes, I know that the league is well within its rights to throw the reporter out, since it is part of the agreement that newspapers (and other media) sign that they won’t do real-time game coverage. And my friend Mike Masnick at Techdirt may be right when he says it’s not a First Amendment issue. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s stupid, however. Is the league going to confiscate BlackBerrys and cellphones so that no one blogs from the stands now?

As Seamus McCauley says, baseball needs to enter the 21st century at some point, and now is as good a time as any. Dan Gillmor says that newspapers should hire fans to blog for them. There’s some discussion of the ban in the comments on the banned reporter’s blog, and former sports editor Joe Gisondi has a thoughtful post on the whole issue over on his blog. Eric Rice says people should live-blog every NCAA event in protest.

I guess I’m just an old softie at heart, but for some reason this post by Joey “Accordion Guy” deVilla really brought a smile to my face — and almost a tear to my eye as well (don’t tell anyone). It’s about how Joey’s significant other, the Ginger Ninja, was looking through craigslist and came across an ad from two women who were coming to Toronto to get married and were looking for witnesses. What the heck, Joey thinks — let’s go. So he and the missus troop down to City Hall with accordion in tow, meet the lovely young couple and act as witnesses, with Joey playing “Praise You” by Fatboy Slim on the squeezebox. Some great pics, and comments from the women who are now married — and even one from craigslist founder Craig Newmark. Very cool. Update: Joey’s story made a lot of people happy on Metafilter too.

I must admit that when I saw the news about Apple releasing a version of its Safari browser for Windows, I wondered why the hell anyone would care, unless they happened to be Apple devotees who wanted a familiar browser to use on a Windows box. After all, if you want an alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Exploder 7 (and who doesn’t), there’s always Firefox, and it does lots of things that Safari doesn’t, such as supporting plugins. And then after reading more about it, I realized — like Stan Schroeder and Scott Karp — that it is a kind of Trojan Horse, designed to enable developers to work on apps for the iPhone, etc. and thereby become a kind of platform for future Apple widgets and software. Smart.

For what it’s worth, I think Safari is cool and everything — although it has a kind of retro feel to me for some reason — but I will echo the comments of several people who say it looks kind of fuzzy. For my money, Microsoft’s ClearType makes a huge difference when it comes to readability of fonts — particularly at high resolutions — which is why I’m not a big fan of most Linux installs either.

But I have to say that Safari moves pretty fast when loading pages. And in my totally unscientific tests, it used substantially less memory than Firefox and somewhat less than Flock, but not as little as Explorer (which if I recall cheats a little when it comes to RAM usage). Still, I have to agree with Leander Kahney of Wired’s Cult of Mac blog — as a user, why would I bother with Safari?

So a non-profit group called Privacy International — one of the groups behind the Big Brother Awards — has released a report that puts Google at the very bottom of the pack when it comes to protecting the privacy of its users, and Google blogger Matt Cutts is pretty pissed about it (congrats for sleeping on it before posting though, Matt). At first glance, he makes some good points about why he thinks the ranking is unfair.

Should Google get a lower rating than AOL, which released search data from thousands of users, or Yahoo and Microsoft — both of whom willingly sent user data to the Department of Justice, unlike Google? That seems a little harsh. And all because Privacy International found what it says are “numerous deficiencies and hostilities in Google’s approach to privacy that go well beyond those of other organizations.” The group has been down this road before with Google, in particular criticizing the company’s Gmail application for what it believes are infringements of users’ privacy (most of which are entered into willingly by users). But the biggest clue to why Google comes last is relatively far down in the report, where the group says that one of the primary dangers is “the diversity and specificity of Google’s product range” as well as the company’s “market dominance and the sheer size of its user base.”

In other words, Google has grown to such a size — and has its digital fingers in so many pies — that it can be seen as evil when a smaller company with fewer fingers might not. I think that is the company’s biggest challenge for the future: how can Google be as big as it is, and get so much information from so many users (again, most of it willingly) and not be seen as a threat? As far as the PI report goes, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land says it is flawed

If you attended mesh 2007 a week or so ago, the keynote conversation between my friend and fellow mesh organizer Mark Evans and craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster was likely on your list of highlights — I know it was for me, and I think it probably was for Mark too.

I wrote an earlier post about it, in which I mentioned how funny Jim was (in a very laid-back and understated kind of way) and how much insight he provided into the way that craigslist operates. Now there is some high-quality video of the entire keynote up at mDialogue.com, thanks to the hard work of Greg Philpott and his team, and also to the fine editing work of Mark McKay, who also filmed mesh himself (and was the winner of our mesh video award for this clip).

VentureBeat has a post up about the stock-market value of Google’s shares, and how it briefly eclipsed that of Cisco — Silicon Valley’s biggest and traditionally most highly valued company. Of course, earlier this year Cisco was worth substantially more, and could be again. But it’s still fun to play the market-capitalization game. So Google is at $160-billion (give or take a hundred million or so). That’s a lot, right? Not really.

In fact, the company isn’t even in the top 20 most highly-valued companies in North America — not even on the front page of the leaderboard, as a golfer would say. According to Yahoo’s stock screener tool (Google either doesn’t have one or I couldn’t find it), Google is still well behind Exxon Mobil ($461-billion), GE ($378-billion) and Citigroup ($260-billion). It’s still almost 50 per cent smaller than Microsoft ($283-billion) and is considerably smaller than Wal-Mart ($204-billion). However, it is well ahead of IBM ($151-billion), Intel ($123-billion) and Hewlett-Packard ($121-billion). Not bad for only having been a public company for about two years, I guess.

After reading about the stunt that Macmillan Publishers CEO Richard Charkin pulled at a recent conference, where he briefly took two laptops from a Google booth before returning them — followed by a grade-school-style taunt about the search engine getting “a little of its own medicine” — I posted a comment on his blog. For some reason it wasn’t accepted, so I feel compelled to make the same statement here. Because that’s how I roll 🙂

Even though he claims to understand the difference between the theft of physical property (a criminal matter) and the infringement of copyright (a civil offence), Mr. Charkin no doubt feels that he accomplished something with his stunt, since he got a lot of attention for his “cause” — which is to protest the scanning of books as a part of Google’s Print project, which requires that publishers opt out if they don’t want their books scanned and indexed. And yet, as Larry Lessig points out in a typically insightful breakdown of the flaws in this argument, intellectual property is in no sense the same as physical property, which is why we treat them differently under the law.

All Mr. Charkin has really done is to conflate the two — physical theft and copyright infringement — which makes it even harder for people to understand the difference, just as people talking about “coming into my house and stealing my property because I left the door unlocked” does (as former ZDNet blogger Donna Bogatin does here).

That kind of comment is based on a logical fallacy, and it doesn’t help the debate any. Mr. Charkin might as well burn a couple of houses to the ground in order to protest what he sees as errors in the federal fire code. Ars Technica has some thoughts on the subject here.

When Facebook — the social network everyone and their mom is on now — launched its new F8 “platform” initiative, one of the first to really take off was iLike. The music recommendation service, which also has a plugin for iTunes, is a way of sharing with others the music you like and of finding new music, much like Last.fm and Pandora do (the former uses what other people like to suggest new music, and the latter uses a pattern-matching algorithm).

In true Internet fashion, iLike has gone through a year’s worth of growth in a little over a week. As I wrote last week, the company went from having just 1,200 users to having more than 400,000 in a little over a day — which taxed its resources to the point where it doubled the number of servers it was running five times and still didn’t have enough capacity. Eventually, the company had to plead with Silicon Valley neighbours to provide extra servers. And where is it now? It has quintupled in size again, and has more than 2.2 million users.

That’s in a little over a week, remember — virtually the entire life-span of a company, from startup to (relatively) widespread usage, like one of those insects that is born, reproduces and dies in 24 hours. iLike hasn’t died, of course, but it certainly has had a wild ride. And according to an interview with the founder at the blog Online Fandom, the company is doing well and continuing to grow — and it has no problem with the fact that virtually its entire business at the moment (at least in terms of its user base) is predicated on being part of the Facebook platform.

In the Online Fandom interview, Ali Partovi — who co-founded the company with his identical twin brother — says that iLike’s functionality is “even better when deeply integrated in to the Facebook platform,” and that the company plans to continue to integrate the two. Unlike MySpace, which has blocked some widgets in the past (such as Photobucket) and caused problems for companies in the process, Partovi says that further integration with Facebook makes business sense for iLike.

“Fortunately, in contrast to the precariously-balanced Myspace widget ecosystem, making money on the FB platform is no harder than making money on our own site. In fact, the business model doesn’t change at all.”

Since iLike is a social application, which gets its strength from the widest possible sampling of users and their music, Partovi says that being part of a social platform makes perfect sense.

“People don’t wanna go somewhere separate just for music — they want music to enhance their existing online social life. Where would you rather see a notification that your buddies are going to see Snow Patrol: on a separate music website, or in the Facebook news feed that you’re already checking five times a day?”

Not a bad point. How the marriage works out down the road remains to be seen. And we can only hope that the Partovi brothers have read the pre-nup, which Sam Sethi describes at Vecosys.

As I wrote in an earlier blog post about Andrew Keen — author of Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture — we had a Q & A with the notorious Web 2.0 skeptic at globeandmail.com today, but despite my best efforts we didn’t get nearly as much back-and-forth as I was hoping. The full version is here (and, as is often the case, there’s some good responses in the comments) and James Robertson has some thoughts on the Q & A here.

Rachel Sklar, the lovely and talented Huffington Post blogger (and a star panelist at mesh) asked Keen:

“Who gets to be the arbiter of what is Good For Culture and what is Bad For Culture – some snobby on-high culture dude logrolling his buddy’s crappy book of “art” photos or the public, who votes with their eyeballs and their mouse clicks and their time?”

To which Keen responded:

here has always and will always be an arbiter of taste. Web 2.0’s idealists suggest otherwise — but behind their “democracy” is either an algorithm (easily gamed) or a new elite of generally anonymous tastemakers who are shaping wisdom of the crowd sites like reddit and digg. I like professional arbiters — reviewers, editors, agents, talent scouts.”

And I think Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist and Blogcritics.org made a good point when he said:

“You’ve described “The Cult of the Amateur” as “not designed to be particularly fair or balanced.” What standard would you hold to the blogs that exist in your “digital forest of mediocrity”?

Is it possible in your view that some small percentage of the many millions of blogs add to the overall culture by some broad definition?”

To which Keen responded:

“Good question. I think that the percentage of good blogs is lower because the system has no filters. At least mainstream media has professional filters which, if not ideal, certainly gets rid of some of the dross and finds some jewels.

Professional filters don’t always work and tend toward somewhat conservative, populist and predictable taste. But I prefer to have my culture served up to me by professional tastemakers than an algorithm or by anonymous people on the Internet acting in the name of the virtuous crowd.”

In the end, that is the question — would you rather restrict yourself to the populist and predictable that gets served up by professional tastemakers, or do you enjoy a little more variety and spice, and are prepared to wade through a little dross to get to it? We have Keen’s answer.

And just between you and me, I have a feeling Mr. Keen is probably a lot less bombastic in his views than he makes out — extreme opinion gets lots of attention, as all good Internet trolls know. Kevin Marks puts Keen firmly in that camp, and so does Doc Searls.

Okay, maybe he doesn’t hate it — or at least not all of it. After all, the New Yorker and the BBC and the Oxford English Dictionary are available on the Internet, right? (or at least parts of them are). But it’s clear that Andrew Keen doesn’t like what the Web is doing to our Culture with a capital C, and that’s why he’s written a book called “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture.”

He joined us at globeandmail.com for a virtual Q&A session this afternoon, and I managed to pass along some questions from friends like Rachel Sklar and Eric Berlin. I wish I had had a bit more time to rustle up even more 🙂

To Keen, the current “Web 2.0” focus on interactivity and “user-generated content” (what a horrible term) — with blogs and wikis and forums and Digg-style voting and so on — is bordering on Marxism, as he wrote in a widely-circulated opinion piece last year. In other words, it celebrates the contribution of the individual regardless of whether that individual has any talent, and Keen believes that this is stamping out the finer things in our culture, which presumably include the opera, classic literature, the Philharmonic, etc., etc.

It’s easy to criticize Keen on any number of fronts. Lawrence Lessig takes Keen to task for criticizing the sloppiness in the “blogosphere” and then making exactly the same kinds of sloppy mistakes in his book. “Here’s a book,” Lessig writes, “that has passed through all the rigor of modern American publishing, yet which is perhaps as reliable as your average blog post: No doubt interesting, sometimes well written, lots of times ridiculously over the top — but also riddled with errors.”

Lessig concludes that the only possible answer is that Keen is “our generation’s greatest self-parodist.” He has also set up a Keen Reader wiki so that everyone can contribute their own errors from the book.

Assuming we are actually supposed to believe that Keen is serious, one thing he avoids in most of his arguments is that “user contributions” are a cornerstone of our democratic society. If the process of saying what you think of something (or someone) allegedly works for electing governments, why is it so absurd to apply those principles to the production of other things? No one is suggesting that works of art should be designed by committee — but the only people threatened by “user-generated content” or other Web 2.0-style features are those who have achieved their lofty status solely through being anointed by the cultural aristocracy.

Keen — who ran a dot-com that ultimately failed in the first bubble — says in the book that “Democratization, despite its lofty idealization, is undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience, and talent.” I would argue the Internet helps to do the exact opposite — it helps to support truth (by making it easier to find errors), it improves discourse by broadening the available range of opinions and commentary (assuming you like that sort of thing, which Keen presumably doesn’t), and it helps to reveal expertise, experience and talent in places we may not have thought to look for it.

Yes, the Internet also produces a lot of sound and fury for no purpose — and there are a lot of idiots and pompous windbags that use the Web as a platform for misinformation or outright falsehood. In other words, the Internet is a reflection of humanity in all of its variety, both good and bad, and ultimately we find in it whatever we are looking for. Keen looks for the cheap and crass and useless, and he finds it. It’s too bad he isn’t helping us find the good stuff.

In a recent post, my friend Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests has taken an audio interview that David “Everything is Miscellanous” Weinberger did with Craig Newmark of craigslist.org and concluded that Craig was essentially just in the right place at the right time and lucked into what has become one of the most successful online communities around — one that could be worth as much as $500-million, depending on how you measure such things.

As Tony describes it, “Craig Newmark is no visionary. He’s no guru. And he’s no soothsayer. He’s a guy who lucked into his business, and it continues to succeed in spite of his lackadaisical efforts at starting it and running it.” Because he was early, he gained a “first mover” advantage, Tony argues, and therefore developed network effects that now make the site virtually unassailable. But what really seems to tick Tony off — as it does most of Wall Street, I’m sure — is craigslist’s determination not to monetize itself:

“Not wanting to take advantage of an enormous opportunity to create an efficient business and maximize revenue — especially to do more Good … well, that doesn’t strike me as being wise. It just strikes me as being lazy.”

Lazy? Maybe. In fact, in his keynote with Mark Evans at the mesh conference last week — which we will hopefully have video of soon (and which Tony himself live-blogged ) — Buckmaster said laziness is actually one of the reasons why craigslist makes any money at all. He said implementing fees was one of the laziest ways to cut down on job-listing spam, instead of trying to come up with new and complex technological solutions. But it worked.

I think craigslist’s success is a lot more nuanced than Tony suggests. Yes, Craig was lucky with the timing — but I think that his and Jim Buckmaster’s laser-like focus on the user, without being distracted by the lure of AdSense and banners and pop-ups and so on, has a lot to do with why the site has become as successful as it has, and has stayed there.

If craigslist had gone the same route everyone else has, the uniqueness of the service would have been lost and it would have floundered and failed. You can’t separate one from the other.

(cross-posted from my Globe blog)

First it was “Brookers” — YouTube sensation Brooke Brodack, 20, who did skits in front of her web-cam and was signed to a TV development deal by Carson Daly Productions last year — and then came David Lehre, who is also developing comedy shorts and other material for MTV after his short films became popular on YouTube (Washington Post story here).

Now Justin Timberlake has signed YouTube singing sensation Esmee Denters to his fledgling record label Tennman Records, and will reportedly have her as his opening act in several European cities (she is from the Netherlands). Another female singer who calls herself Ysabella Brave has also been signed to a recording contract after a rise to popularity that has seen her video clips viewed more than 3 million times on YouTube (I wrote about her here).

Sandi Thom, a British singer who played shows in her apartment and streamed them over the Internet, was promoted as a Web sensation last year, but it turned out that she had already signed a contract before she started getting popular for the impromptu Internet shows.

In addition to Brookers and Lehre, other YouTube stars who have been signed to deals include Lisa Nova (who signed with The Daily Reel) and Little Loca (who signed to do a reality TV show with the CW network). And NBC said recently that it has signed three Web comedy stars — including one from YouTube and one from MySpace — to work on its new DotComedy website.

The TV blog NewTeeVee, meanwhile, says that William Sledd, a former Gap employee whose YouTube videos are number four on the most-subscribed list, has signed a deal with Bravo to bring his gay-themed clips to the channel’s website (the Los Angeles Times had a story recently).

Looks like the Web is becoming the farm team.