mathewingram.com/work

It may not be a $1.6-billion takeover, but Joost seems to be doing pretty well nevertheless, attracting $45-million in funding from a group of backers — including CBS and Viacom, two of the TV networks it has signed content deals with. Obviously, they have decided that Joost is the horse they want to put their money on when it comes to Internet television. As Om notes, among the other investors are Sequoia Partners (also a backer of YouTube) and Index Ventures, whose partner Danny Rimer made a gazillion or so dollars by investing in Skype before it was bought by eBay. So I would imagine that he probably likes Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom just a little bit.

Nick O’Neill of Webpreneur says that Joost is about to pull off “one of the biggest fear-driven deals in history” by playing on the networks’ fear of the Internet, and Kara Swisher says on her Boom Town blog that the networks like it because “It looks and feels like a replication of the old television broadcast model,” which is a point I have also made in the past.

The alarm:clock blog says you will watch Joost, but Adario Strange at Wired’s Epicenter blog says it’s too buggy and too much trouble. And over at NewTeeVee, Om Malik makes some excellent points about the growth of Joost and the weaknesses of the peer-to-peer model for something like video. The bottom line: It may not be as easy to do as it was for voice with Skype. Meanwhile, Heather Green has some comments from investor Danny Rimer about what makes Joost so great.

They’re baaaack. The rumours about eBay buying StumbleUpon have resurfaced, but this time it’s the Wall Street Journal that is breathing new life into the story — a tale that was sparked first by TechCrunch back in April. At that point, the site — which was created by Garrett Camp and two university friends in Calgary — was rumoured to have talked with Google and Yahoo as well as eBay, and the price was said to be in the $45-million range. Now, according to the WSJ, it’s more like $75-million. Not bad for a site that has 2 million users.

Does it make sense for eBay? When the rumours first surfaced I wrote a post saying that I didn’t get it, and I still don’t. Muhammad Saleem at ProNet and Pete Cashmore at Mashable wrote about how they could see it working, but I still don’t buy it. Maybe eBay has some kind of grand vision that I’m not seeing — or maybe it’s just desperate for growth of any kind. Scot Wingo at eBay Strategies has some more thoughts on it, and Valleywag says the only explanation is that eBay just has way too much money on its hands from its online auction monopoly.

Update:

Michael Geist has a typically well-argued post on the latest Warner Brothers camcordering nonsense here.

Original post:

(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

When you go to see a movie, do you get irritated by the guys sitting in front of you with their video cameras pointed at the screen, illegally “camcordering” the film? I don’t, because I’ve never seen one, although I’ve been to my share of premieres, including (most recently) Spider-Man 3. And yet, Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century Fox and other Hollywood studios have been screaming and yelling for some time now about how Canada is a hotbed of piracy. In the latest move, Warner Bros. said on Tuesday that it will no longer hold preview screenings in Canada.

So that means no more previews of Warner Bros. movies before the main attraction at your local multiplex? Well, no. The studio said that it is cancelling all “promotional and word-of-mouth” screenings. Those are the special showings that occur just before a big movie hits the theatres, which are usually open only to contest winners, movie reviewers, people who see an ad, and so on — in other words, a pretty unlikely place for someone to bring in a camcorder under their shirt. So if Warner’s move strikes you as mostly a symbolic gesture, that’s because it probably is — a gesture aimed primarily at keeping the pressure on Parliament to bring in new anti-piracy legislation.

There have been other gestures as well. Studios and movie distributors have been lobbying to have Canada placed on a high-priority international piracy “watchlist” along with countries like China and Russia. And Twentieth Century Fox made some vague threats earlier this year to hold back some of its top movies from Canadian release, because the risk of piracy was reportedly so high. One Fox executive said in January that Canadian cam-corder copies were “like an out-of-control epidemic,” and that the country had become “a leading source of worldwide Internet film piracy.” He said Canada accounted for close to 50 per cent of illegal camcorder copies.

As Ottawa law professor Dr. Michael Geist and others have pointed out before, however, there are a number of flaws in the movie studios’ argument — including the fact that there is no tangible evidence for that 50 per cent figure. The International Intellectual Property Alliance, which includes the Motion Picture Association of America, has previously said that Canada is only responsible for about 20 per cent of camcorder copies. And even though that number still seems high, the MPAA has said only 179 of the 1,400 movies released between 2004 and 2006 were camcorded (Warner says 70 per cent of its movies were camcorded over the last 18 months).

Dr. Geist notes that one of the most recent studies of movie piracy found the majority of illegally copied movies – over 75 per cent — come from review copies or early releases that are sent to movie industry insiders, including reviewers at newspapers and magazines. Piracy experts say that camcorder copies are really only in demand for that brief window between when a movie is released for preview screenings and when the DVD is released. Canada obviously has DVD copiers too, but no one is saying we are an international leader (at least not yet).

Is camcordering a movie and selling millions of copies wrong? Of course it is — and we already have laws that make that a crime, although movie studios and distributors say they are too difficult to enforce. But it doesn’t help when the industry uses hyperbole and inflated numbers to try and make its case.

It’s only a few weeks until mesh 2007 — you can find more info at the site, including the full schedule of speakers and times, and there are still a few tickets left here, although they are going quickly — but there’s still time for one last mesh social event. So tomorrow night, we’re having a mesh meetup aimed at the political end of the Web 2.0 spectrum.

So if you want to hang with some other poli-bloggers and get revved up about the mesh panel with Andrew Coyne, Garth Turner, Phil de Vellis and Scott Feschuk — which will be looking at how the Web is changing politics — this is your chance. It starts at about 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Charlotte Room, which is near the intersection of King West and Spadina in Toronto. There’s more details and you can sign up at the Upcoming page.

Aaron Swartz is a pretty smart guy — after all, he co-authored the RSS 1.0 standard for feeds when he was just 14 years old, and while still in his teens was working with Lawrence Lessig on some of the plumbing behind the Creative Commons initiative. He has also edited thousands of Wikipedia articles, and was a co-founder of Reddit, the Digg-style social news engine that was recently bought by Conde Nast.

Phil Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped has posted a lengthy interview he did with Aaron via instant messaging, in which the 21-year-old talks about working at Conde Nast (he says he was asked to leave — and has made it clear he didn’t like working there, in blog posts such as the one I wrote about here), as well as his reaction to job offers from Google, his thoughts about Wikipedia and his views on sexism in the tech community. An interesting read. Aaron isn’t too clear about what he’s doing now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was something pretty interesting.

Update:

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch says he has been able to confirm the deal with some “senior people” (the Valleywag rumour was apparently the work of an “overzealous employee,” according to Mike — a little professional jealousy?), and the price is $250-million. Not bad for something that had revenue of about $6-million last year. Pete Cashmore at Mashable says that he has also confirmed the deal is happening. Mike runs the numbers on the deal in an update.

Original post:

Given the source, we should probably take this with a rather large container of salt, but Valleywag says that Photobucket is about to be acquired by MySpace. Rumour or not, this makes a lot of sense to me — a whole lot more sense than Microsoft and Yahoo, last week’s favourite rumour. Yes, the two have been feuding rather publicly, but that’s because their services are so intertwined with each other. Photobucket accounts for more than 70 per cent of MySpace’s photo traffic, according to Hitwise. In other words, it has pretty much the same relationship to MySpace as PayPal had to eBay way back when.

It made sense for eBay to bring PayPal in house, and I think it would make a lot of sense for MySpace to do the same. And Photobucket has reportedly been on the auction block — the only issue now is whether MySpace will pay what the company’s backers are looking for. I would say this one has an 80-per-cent chance of actually happening.

I have a lot of (okay, some) respect for Warren Kinsella, the political advisor/blogger/aging punk rocker who writes an op-ed column for the National Post. He speaks his mind, and sticks to his principles, and I admire the fact that his band is called Shit From Hell. But I have to say that his latest op-ed piece — about the rise of blogs versus Old Media — is kind of lame.

In his piece, Warren argues that the bid by Thomson for Reuters (along with Rupert Murdoch’s takeover offer for Dow Jones) discredits one of the latest theories about the media — namely, the theory that “the much-trumpeted New Media (to wit, the Internet and its bastard children, such as Web logs and the banned-at-Queen’s-Park Facebook) are about to supplant the Old Media.” Gather round, kids — this is what we call a “Straw Man” argument, in which a columnist creates a facile position (allegedly held by his opponents), which he then proceeds to dismantle with the greatest of ease.

Warren goes on to say that “the buzz about the New Media juggernaut has been, perhaps, a tad overdone,” and that “rumours of the traditional, mainstream media’s demise are somewhat exaggerated.” He also says that “most of the commentary that takes place online depends entirely upon the efforts of Old Media” (a phenomenon I am no doubt contributing to with this post).

We’ve heard this particular song before — bloggers just parrot or comment on what appears in the press, therefore they are parasites, etc. As Nick Carr has noted, however, not all parasites are bad. In any case, the part that bugged me about Warren’s piece was that no one I can think of (no one with a lick of sense, at any rate) has ever argued that blogs and Internet media will *replace* everything we associate with Old Media.

Enhance and extend, yes. Comment on, critique, yes (something columnists do as well, I might add). Expand, add to, help to illuminate, in some cases fact-check, certainly. But replace? Hardly. In other words, it’s easy to dismantle that particular argument, because it’s absurd.

From ALA TechSource, an online resource for librarians, comes a great review of David Weinberger’s book Everything is Miscellaneous.

“This book is dangerous. Everything is Miscellaneous takes all the precious ideas we are taught as librarians and throws them out the window. Structure, order, precise metadata, bibliographic control: gone, gone, gone, gone.

Even, for you edgier types, ye who tell of your Semantic Web and your RDF triples: old-school, good-bye, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

In what Weinberger describes as the “third order” of information, knowledge is no longer bound by either-or decisions, and “can be in many places at once; knowledge does not fit into finite boxes or even have a shape; and — most disturbingly, though in Weinberger’s hands, also most entertainingly — messiness is a virtue.”

Weinberger “explains this point repeatedly but no better than in a section discussing Flickr, where automated and human-supplied metadata create “a mess than gets richer in potential and more useful every day. … Third-order messes reverse entropy, becoming more meaningful as they become messier, with more relationships built in.”

As the ALA TechSource blog notes:

“The third order is most definitely not about attempting to perfect second-order rules and weld them to a third-order universe; it is not about predictive information; it is not about the primacy of accuracy over volume. The third order, in other words, is the opposite of how we do things in LibraryLand.”

In summary, says writer Karen Schneider: “This is, I repeat, a dangerous book. Ban it, burn it, or take it to heart. The most dangerous part of this book is not that Weinberger says these things, and so much more: the danger comes if we don’t listen.” Cory Doctorow has a review of the book at BoingBoing, and Cory is also the first in a series of interviews that Weinberger has done to go along with the book which are being made available as podcasts — and will include interviews with Arianna Huffington, Craig Newmark and others.

The AACS — the group of companies behind the encryption standard used in HD-DVD discs, whose encryption key was posted to Digg by about 10,000 people in the course of a day last week, which I wrote about here — just doesn’t seem to know when to quit. Despite the fact that its attempt to get BoingBoing and Google and Digg to remove the key string blew up in its face, the AACS now says it will continue its near-sighted campaign.

The lesson the AACS seems unwilling to learn is sometimes referred to as the Streisand Effect, in reference to the aging chanteuse who didn’t want photos of her home published, and only encouraged even more people to publish them. Is what happened with Digg petty? Perhaps. A lame attempt at civil disobedience? Maybe. An example of mob rule? Quite likely. But the AACS is still going to gain exactly nothing by trying to pursue its absurd strategy.

As someone once said (no one is quite sure who, but probably Mark Twain): “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” At the time it was said, it could only have referred to picking a fight with a newspaper publisher or journalist, since they were the only ones with the ability to publish whatever they wanted. Now anyone with a grudge, or an ax to grind, or a hobbyhorse to ride can be a publisher.

On a related note, Jason Calacanis talked to Digg CEO Jay Adelson and the EFF’s Fred von Lohmann on his podcast the other day, and it made for some interesting listening. Among other things, Jay said that at the peak of the submission frenzy, Digg was getting two submissions of the key every second, which meant that Digg was “essentially rendered inoperative.” The discussion over what to do about it, he said, “was an all-day thing.”

Adelson also said that Digg “is a living and breathing, user-controlled environment,” and that he “couldn’t hire enough people to moderate digg, it just wouldn’t be possible.” Digg tried to remove all the submissions — including some that posted the binary version, and some that posted links to a YouTube video in which someone sang a song containing the key.

But the bottom line for the AACS, as Fred von Lohmann said, is that “if they wanted to keep the key secret they did precisely the wrong thing.” And seem determined to continue doing it.

It’s still being tinkered with here and there, but the schedule for mesh 2007 is pretty well baked, so we’ve put it up on the mesh site for your perusal. In addition to Mike Arrington, Jim Buckmaster, Richard Edelman, Tom Williams and Austin Hill as keynotes (media, business, marketing and society), we have some amazing panelists lined up, including:

— Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Cambrian House
— Rachel Sklar of Huffington Post
— Leonard Brody of NowPublic.com
— Simon Pulsifer, the “king of Wikipedia”
— Cynthia Brumfield of IPDemocracy
— Loren Feldman of 1938media.com
— Jeff Howe of Crowdsourcing.com
— Jen Evans of Sequentia
— Paul Sullivan of Orato.com
— John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing
— Mary Hodder of Dabble.com
— Steve Hermann of the BBC
— Liberal MP Garth Turner
— Nancy Peterson of Homestars.ca
— writer and comedian Scott Feschuk
— podcaster Leesa Barnes
— political pundit Andrew Coyne
— Christine Herron of the Omidyar Network
— Nora Young of CBC’s Not the Opera
— Paul Kedrosky of Infectious Greed
— Amber MacArthur of CityNews
— Scott Brooks of ConceptShare
— Lionel Menchaca, chief Dell blogger
— blogger/marketer Kate Trgovac
— Ethan Kaplan of blackrimglasses.com
— Jian Ghomeshi of the CBC
— McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves of Rapspace.tv
— Mike Masnick of Techdirt
— Deborah Kaplan of Zerofootprint.com
— Mark Dowds of Indoor Playground
— Rick Segal of J.L. Albright
— Leila Boujnane of Idee Inc.
— Jordan Banks of eBay Canada
— David Jones of Fleishmann-Hillard
— Maggie Fox of Social Media group

I figured what the heck, might as well just put them all on here 🙂 As I said, there might be some tinkering with the list, but that’s what it looks like right now and we are all pretty excited about it. Not long now — get your tickets while you can.

Update:

The latest version of the Wall Street Journal story at 4:19 on Friday afternoon says that the talks between Microsoft and Yahoo “are no longer active,” according to the paper’s sources — although “the two companies may still explore other ways of cooperating.”

Original post:

I wonder if Rupert Murdoch has any shares in Yahoo he’s trying to get rid of. Just kidding 🙂 But now would be a pretty good time to unload them. The New York Post ignited a firestorm of rumour this morning — and lit a fire under Yahoo’s share price too — with a story saying Microsoft is back in merger talks with the Internet portal. That pushed Yahoo’s moribund stock up by 17 per cent or so, adding about $6-billion to its market cap.

As the Wall Street Journal points out in its story, the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo is not a new idea. The two companies were reportedly talking a year or so ago about a possible deal, and now those talks have apparently been revived. But does it make any sense? That depends on how you look at it. It makes sense when you consider that Microsoft’s search and related assets are running a distant — and I mean distant — third in the market. And Yahoo, for all of its faults, is a big property with a snappy new engine behind its search, which is (theoretically) supposed to close the gap with Google.

That’s the “glass is half full” argument. The half-empty argument is that both Microsoft and Yahoo are lumbering behemoths with hardly an agile bone left in their sclerotic bodies. Most of their problems stem from the fact that they have accumulated immense bureaucracies — a big part of the impetus for Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous “peanut butter” manifesto — and a collection of legacy businesses that keep getting in the way.

They are like icebergs: not only is nine-tenths of them unseen, but they are slow-moving and difficult to steer. Impressive? Yes. Powerful? No doubt about it. But fast, or nimble or imaginative? No. Roping them together would do nothing but compound their problems.

Further reading:

Paul Kedrosky doesn’t think the merger would be a good thing, even though he has been speculating that Microsoft would probably take a run at Yahoo for some time now. Even Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget doesn’t like the idea. And Charlene Li of Forrester Research takes a look at both sides of the argument here. Seamus McCauley puts it well in his blog post at Virtual Economics: Yahoo plus MSN does not equal Google.

According to Mike Arrington — who interrupted his dinner with Brad Garlinghouse of Yahoo and Flickr creator Stewart Butterfield to do a blog post about it — Yahoo is effectively closing the doors on its photo service and migrating everyone either to Flickr or to another online photo service of their choice (Photobucket, Webshots, Snapfish, etc.). USA Today had the story too. Although there are details to be worked out, such as whether Flickr users will get free unlimited hosting the way Yahoo Photos users did or be forced to pay and upgrade to Flickr Pro, I think this is a smart move. Running two photo services doesn’t make any sense.

Maybe someone is finally paying attention to that “peanut butter” memo from awhile back — written, coincidentally enough, by Brad Garlinghouse. Danny Sullivan isn’t so sure that it’s a smart move because he thinks Yahoo Photos users will be pissed. Incidentally, Yahoo Photos hosts over two *billion* photos. Yes, billion. And Mike says that Flickr is going to allow users to upload video soon as well as photos — that should make things interesting.