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I have to give the team at Flock a lot of credit. The browser — which is built on Mozilla code, but has all kinds of added social features — has been through hell and back over the past couple of years. First, the initial release was weak, and got dumped on by just about everyone. Then Performancing released an excellent blogging plugin for Firefox (now called ScribeFire), and my friend Paul Kedrosky said Flock was, well… fucked.

Since integration with blogs was one of the big features that Flock brought to the table, there seemed to be a good chance that Paul was right. But Flock kept on plugging away. Not long after that, Firefox announced that it was going to add social features through something called The Coop, and I wondered whether Paul was even more right than before. But The Coop didn’t really fly (sorry) and Flock kept on adding features and plugging away. Now, the company has come out with version 1.0 of the browser, and I have to say that it is pretty interesting. It’s not perfect, of course, but it has a bunch of cool features.

Not everyone is going to want a browser with all sorts of add-ons, including a media bar — which displays Flickr photos and other stuff — and a “People” sidebar with links to your Facebook and Flickr and YouTube friends and their content. Some may find all the different tools and windows confusing. But for the social-media junkie (yes I’m looking at you, Fred) it brings together a number of different social threads in an interesting way.

You can see Facebook updates and photos with a click, scroll through Flickr photos, drag and drop your own photos on a friend in your People sidebar to share them, post something to a blog and even use your sidebar as a notebook for future blog posts, dragging and dropping images and text to it. Mike Arrington is right that Flock should be able to upload images to a blog server rather than just to Flickr or Facebook, but that shouldn’t be too hard to do. And apart from that, Flock 1.0 is pretty sweet. Karoli likes it too.

Never one to miss an opportunity to be contrarian — although Andrew “I Hate The Internet” Keen has stolen much of his Prophet of Doom act — Nick Carr has a post about the New York Times’ subscription service, TimesSelect, in which he dismisses criticism of the venture as the misguided rantings of “free content” ideologues like Jeff Jarvis.

Carr refers to a Financial Times piece about a study by Matthew Gentzkow, in which the economist looked at the competition between the Washington Post print edition and Web edition. As the FT column describes it, Gentzkow analyzed the readership data from both the print edition and the website and came to some conclusions about how much one cannibalized the other. Says the FT:

“[Gentzkow] found that people who had access to fast internet connections were, other things being equal, less likely to read the print edition. He found reasons to believe this was specifically because of access to washingtonpost.com, not to the Internet in general.”

What are the reasons he found to believe this? I read (or tried to read) the entire paper online, and I still don’t know, in part because of sentences like this one:

“Both reduced-form OLS regressions and a structural model without heterogeneity suggest that the print and online editions of the Post are strong complements.”

And that was in the early part of the paper, where Gentzkow was summarizing his findings — before he got to the part with the long calculus-type formulas and algorithms. At one point, the economist says that according to his research on the levels of substitution between the two products:

“Removing the [news website] from the market entirely would increase readership of [the newsaper] by 27,000 readers per day, or 1.5 per cent.”

He therefore concludes that the Post has lost $5.5-million in newspaper revenue as a result of providing its news online for free. Does that make any sense? It might to an economist, but I would argue his thesis fails the reasonability test. If the washingtonpost.com website were to disappear or be locked behind a pay wall tomorrow, does anyone really think that 27,000 people would suddenly go out and start reading the paper edition?

Gentzkow clearly does. I think they would be more likely to just go elsewhere for their news, such as Google News or Yahoo News or MSNBC or CNN. It might be tempting — and make for a much simpler business case — to argue that a product like the Post competes primarily with its own website, and vice versa, but I don’t think that is the way things work.

A pay wall for the Post or the Times or any other paper simply blocks people out who then go elsewhere (my friend Rob Hyndman has more on that angle). That’s not a religious view, as Nick would like to portray it — in fact, I would argue that it’s a lot more “rational” than Gentzkow’s analysis. And I’m pleased to see that Fred Wilson appears to agree with me.

Another great idea from Flickr, which just recently announced that it would be adding geotagging and other features: the integration of photo-editing tools, in this case from Web-based editing service Picnik. Mike Arrington says he prefers Fotoflexer, which I’ve never tried, but regardless I think Picnik is a great addition.

I’ve often wanted to trim or crop or otherwise modify a photo of mine while I’m browsing them, but can’t be bothered to download it and then open it with Photoshop, etc. I’ve tried some online tools that allow you to import photos from Flickr into their service — which they can do once you grant them access to your account — but it’s still not as intuitive as using those tools right on the site.

I wonder how the Flickr announcement will affect some of those other services such as Flauntr.com and Preloadr.com.

Google announced something kind of cool: a Facebook app for Google News, which allows you to choose categories or feeds based on your own keywords, and then share those stories with others and see what stories your friends have shared. Okay, it’s not a cure for cancer, but I think it’s a pretty useful app as far as Facebook apps are concerned — although that’s not exactly a high bar to clear.

I share stories I come across through either a del.icio.us feed (which is on my blog in the sidebar) and/or my Google Reader shared items (which are also in the sidebar), but lots of people don’t use those things, and may never use them. Google’s Facebook app gives them another way to see what stories their friends think are interesting, and to share their own picks from the headlines.

It will be interesting to see whether Google — which is about as data-obsessed as its possible for a company to be — will come up with any cool numbers based on what people have shared.

There seems to be quite the fuss today over Comcast’s “network management” approach to BitTorrent traffic, which according to an Associated Press story consists of intercepting packets and disrupting the connection between a downloader and the tracker (a nice touch to download the Bible in order to illustrate what Comcast is doing — I wish I’d thought of that). I’m not quite sure why everyone seems so surprised that this is happening though. Cable companies and telcos have been doing this for some time.

Some call it network management, some call it bandwidth or traffic “shaping” and others call it “throttling” (which conjures up a nice mental image of what carriers are doing to their customers). As Michael Geist has pointed out before, Rogers Communications — the largest cable company in Canada — has been doing this for the past couple of years at least. As Michael notes in his post, this behaviour seems particularly egregious considering that the downloading of music is currently permitted (or at least not explicitly banned) under Canadian copyright law, thanks to the Public Copying levy that gets applied to blank CDs and other media.

Rogers admitted to throttling BitTorrent almost two years ago, and argues — as most carriers do — that such services soak up bandwidth and cause their network to run too slowly for other customers (something I have yet to see conclusively demonstrated). But it’s not just Rogers: there’s a list of ISPs that do this kind of thing at AzureusWiki, where you can also find tips on how to turn on encryption to disguise the traffic.

Unfortunately, even if you encrypt the packets, some ISPs will respond by throttling anything encrypted on the assumption that it is probably BitTorrent or other software. As Michael points out in his post, this has caused some university researchers a headache because then their encrypted email slows down as it gets caught in the “bandwidth management” process.

Like those “unlimited” cellphone data plans that turn out not to be unlimited at all, this kind of thing is another example of how the cable companies and telcos try to suck and blow at the same time: they sell you their unlimited or high-speed plans, bragging about all the things you can do with them, and then charge or block you as soon as you try and do any of those things.

As anyone who has read this blog for awhile probably knows, I have been hard on Dave Winer occasionally (and I think with good reason, but I don’t want to get into that right now).

The fact remains, however, that Dave is a pretty smart guy when it comes to things like RSS — let’s not get into whether he “invented” it or not — and he also thinks outside the box when it comes to things like how newspapers and other media present their content, and that is something I’m interested in as well. So I think it’s only fair that I point out when I think he’s doing something interesting.

The thing in this case is his New York Times keyword index. It’s a simple thing, in a lot of ways, since it just scans the newspaper’s index and comes up with the number of times a certain word is used, then ranks them from top to bottom — but it also has a couple of additional features, including the fact that it displays the headline of a story when you hover over the number.

That’s a nice touch. And it’s an interesting companion to Dave’s “river of news” NYT feed (something I tried to recreate with my Twitter feed of Globe and Mail headlines).

I don’t understand why the Times — or other newspapers, for that matter — don’t provide that kind of alternative search or browsing tool themselves. It’s not rocket science (no offence, Dave) and it might even attract users who don’t want to use the linear approach that most papers default to. Why not have a keyword tag cloud too? The Washington Post had a demo of such a feature awhile back as part of its Post Remix lab project, but it never became part of the actual site, which I think is a shame.

I think plenty of readers would be interested in alternative ways of finding stories, just as they now use features such as the “most read” and “most emailed” lists the Times and other papers have. Why not add even more ways of slicing and dicing the news?

Even when you’re expecting a pretty amazing financial performance — as just about everyone (including me) was from Google’s latest quarter — it’s still something to see a company that is firing on pretty well all cylinders and has a commanding share of the market it operates in. I expect that watching Microsoft in its early years was very similar, as it came to dominate the desktop operating-system business and turned into a gigantic cash-manufacturing machine.

I know that there are many things that could happen to derail the Google train: online advertising could go soft, click fraud could become a bigger issue, etc., etc. It’s not as though bigger companies haven’t suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of a curve before. It could happen to Google.

At the moment, however, the company is at the top of its game — it’s in a dominant position in a rapidly-growing market, and despite having $15-billion or so in revenue, it is still growing at double-digit rates every quarter. That means it could very soon be a $30-billion company, and then people who thought $500 a share was too expensive are probably going to feel very foolish.

I know everyone is obsessed with when Mark Zuckerberg is going to announce the winner of the “Dance with Facebook for $10-billion” contest, but I found something he said during his interview with John Battelle interesting. He said:

“We don’t focus on optimizing the revenue we have today. It has always been our philosophy to run the company at around break even as we grow.”

This reminded me of what Jim Buckmaster and Craig Newmark have always said about craigslist.org, which is that they basically spend zero time thinking about how to “monetize” all the eyeballs and pageviews they get (about eight billion a month or so) and spend close to 100 per cent of their time thinking about their users and what they want and need.

That drives Wall Street types and venture capitalists crazy, and people like to use those quotes to make a point about how unrealistic Web 2.0 businesses are, etc. etc. — but from a certain standpoint it makes perfect sense.

Not that you shouldn’t be thinking about a business model, obviously. But that can’t be your number one concern. If it is, you will almost certainly produce a crappy service that eventually fails, because no one goes there.

A piece in Forbes notes that more than 500,000 people in the space of a couple of days decided to download the new Radiohead album via BitTorrent, even though they could have downloaded it from Radiohead and paid the same amount, i.e. nothing. Although Eric Garland of Big Champagne — the download-tracking service that provided the numbers for the story — seems surprised that they would do this, but I don’t find it that surprising at all (neither does Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch).

Not only are people used to BitTorrent, it’s a lot faster and easier than downloading it from Radiohead’s site was, according to many of the people who tried to do so. If you’re not going to pay for it anyway, why not use the most efficient method? In fact, Radiohead should have used BitTorrent to power their downloads in the first place, the same way that Linux distros like Linspire and Ubuntu do.

(This is my attempt at live-blogging the ONA panel on the future of news at the CBC in Toronto with Leonard Brody of NowPublic, Rahaf Harfoush — who did research for Don Tapscott’s book Wikinomics — and Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur. Note: I did this on a BlackBerry, so please excuse the typos)

Keen says citizen journalism sounds Orwellian, like a guy in a beret creeping around feeling very virtuous; doesn’t think journalists should necessarily be good citizens;

Brody says it’s a dumb term, like citizen dentist; says it is “the people’s view”; brand promiscuity; most younger readers don’t read just one thing, they search and read an average of 16 links on a story;

Rahaf (who is in her 20s) says she bought a newspaper a week ago — for her dad.

Keen says citizen journalism is part of a fetishization of the authentic, focus on the personal; cultural changes, has very little to do with media; take out your frustrations on something else — doctors or restaurants, don’t ruin media; big media has as much responsibility as anyone else; bowing to reality television and cult of celebrity;

Keen says big media should be less humble, more arrogant, more authoritative; saying we understand, you need a voice is … Recipe for disaster;

If you take that view, Brody says, you will be speaking to an empty room. It’s not good or bad, it just is.

Rahaf says having an arrogant journalist tell me what’s important, not interested in that; interested in a dialogue, and in individual voices.

Public view, human perspective and don’t trust single view — want to triangulate truth on my own Brody says; he says the vast majority of people don’t want to be paid; if they did it would be easier — love and ego are much harder to control;

Keen says when we generate something of value most of us want to be paid; not going to give away my labour for nothing; youtube model or wikipedia model, vessel they put their information into, bad in every way; one of the things that keep journalists honest is that they’re paid

Rahaf says that blogs have to develop a reputation, build up trust over time, effectively self-regulating; social contract

Brody says they want to be arbiters of their own truth;

Continue reading “Live-blogging Future of News panel”

It’s not a huge deal, really — as Greg Sterling notes over at Screenwerk — but the news that Google has added social features to Google Maps is just another piece of the puzzle that is (or at least could be) the Web company’s emerging social net. The features aren’t rocket science, of course: user profiles that link to maps a person has created, reviews they’ve written of local businesses, etc. But it ties some things together in ways they weren’t before.

As many people have noted — including me in this post — Google has been working on what appears to be a unified social-networking approach that would bring together many of its existing services such as GTalk, Orkut, Maps, Picasa, etc. and let people create what amount to “activity streams” that others could subscribe to, hints of which first appeared in a post at Google Blogoscoped.

A heart-warming story — at least for those who have long thought that Amazon’s patent on the “one-click” buying system it uses on its website was stupid and should be struck down: the guy who has almost single-handedly been fighting to have the Amazon patent reviewed by the USPTO won his review, and many of the broad claims in the patent have been invalidated.

You can find out more on his blog, which is called IGDMLGD (for reasons that I haven’t been able to determine). As it turns out, the blogger is a chap named Peter Calveley, a New Zealander who has a science degree and a commerce degree and studied to become a patent attorney, although he has never practiced. His interest in the Amazon patent was apparently fueled by an unsatisfactory experience buying something on the website.

In an odd twist, Calveley has also worked as a motion-capture actor, wearing a capture suit in order to help create CGI battle scenes in movies such as Lord of the Rings. After realizing that none of the motion-capture actors were mentioned in the credits of the movie, Calveley protested this oversight and launched a campaign to have their contributions recognized.

In the case of the patent battle, Calveley managed to single-handedly do what Tim O’Reilly and others failed to do with their BountyQuest effort, which was designed to encourage people to search for and submit “prior art” that could invalidate patents such as Amazon’s, which O’Reilly has been criticizing for years.