mathewingram.com/work

Do you love it enough to give it all of your personal browsing info? That’s effectively what Google is asking you to do, with the release of its new Web History feature. The company has had a search-history feature for a couple of years now, but the new service effectively keeps track of wherever you go with your browser, every ad you click on, etc. A little Big Brother-ish perhaps? Maybe just a little. A touch of evil? Depends on how you look at it.

As with most such things, Google’s Web History isn’t really good or bad. All it does is create a giant file of all the places you surf — with your consent, of course, once you install the Google toolbar and activate the feature. What is in that giant file is up to you, obviously (and Ionut Alex. Chitu, the intrepid Google detective, has some tips about how to pause the feature if you go somewhere you don’t want Google to see). And what happens to the file is up to Google. So how much do you love Google?

As Danny Sullivan describes in a long and thorough post, there are many benefits to what Google is doing — and one of those benefits is that the company is at least being fairly transparent about the kind of information it keeps. Other companies, as he points out, keep similar kinds of information through cookies, but reveal relatively little about what they do with it.

As Anil Dash says, many people will get the heebie-jeebies over this, and as such it is yet another test of how much goodwill there is left towards what has become an Internet behemoth. Google blogger Matt Cutts has some thoughts here.

Just a couple of days after buying Tonic, which gave the company a PowerPoint-style application to add to its growing toolbox of Office apps, Google has announced that it is buying Marratech, a company that makes a NetMeeting-type video-conferencing tool and is based in Sweden.

This isn’t all that surprising, of course, since Google has clearly been building a Web-based Office suite ever since it bought Writely, which became Google Docs. One thing that surprises me, however, is that the application requires a download — unlike some of the other Web-based presentation or conferencing apps, such as Vyew and Zoho Meeting. I haven’t tried Zoho Meeting, but I have tried Vyew and it was easy to use and cross-platform (as is Zoho’s app, since it comes in an ActiveX, Java or Flash version). But what I don’t get is why Google wqould pin its hopes on something that requires a download.

I know that they could bundle it with the rest of the Google apps that you can download as part of the Google Desktop, as Mike points out, but I still sort of look at Google as being the king of the “works anywhere” Web-based app. Moving to something that requires a download is kind of an odd step, I think. Just my two cents. (screenshot via Amit Agarwal)

As reported by several sources, including Reuters and Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch (where the notion of an “exclusive” gets some debate in the comments section), MySpace has launched its widely-rumoured Digg-alicious news service, although Mike said that it would go live at 7 a.m. and all I get is a login prompt when I go there. Was the site not quite ready for prime-time perhaps? (Update at 12:05 EST — it is now live).

In any case, this new service from the geniuses at Fox Interactive Media (which owns MySpace and is a unit of Rupert Murdoch’s media and entertainment behemoth News Corp.) was reported to be coming in March, according to Terry Heaton’s PoMo blog. The service will pull in news from RSS feeds — although News Corp. says it will not favour its own services and newspapers — and users can also submit stories, and then vote on them. Apparently news services will be able to opt out and not have their articles displayed, according to News Corp.

Despite the fact that most people who go to such “user-generated” media sites don’t actually submit or perhaps even vote on stories, as Seamus McCauley discusses here (based on a new Hitwise survey), I still think this kind of thing could turn out to be very powerful, and that MySpace is smart to do it. MG Siegler at Parislemon says he is skeptical, and Seamus says that it is a missed opportunity, while The Last Podcast says it is just plain bad. Eric Berlin says MySpace missed the boat and should be focusing on getting user-generated content from its members.

The questions in my mind are these: What happens to Jason Calacanis’s Digg-ified Netscape? Or to Digg itself for that matter, which has been trying to branch out into non-tech news but without much success (as far as I can tell)? With 100 million members, MySpace has more than 100 times the audience that Digg does. Better yet, how long until Google News decides to add a user voting system? Now that would be fascinating.

Update 2:

Now it appears that Google has decided if it can’t have StumbleUpon, it will just build similar stumbling ability into its toolbar, with a “dice roll” feature that produces random links. Om Malik says that he thinks Google is lashing out at SU because they lost out on the acquisition, but I think it’s more likely Google decided they could build the same functionality for a lot less than $45-million.

Update:

Chris Sherman over at Search Engine Land says he got a comment from Garrett Camp, one of the founders of StumbleUpon, who says there is no truth to the rumours. But then, he would say that, wouldn’t he 🙂 And Muhammad Saleem at ProNet Advertising says he can see some synergies between eBay and StumbleUpon involving the latter’s word-of-mouth marketing potential. Pete Cashmore has some thoughts along the same lines.

Original post:

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch and Om Malik at GigaOm seem to have a kind of tag-team scoop going about StumbleUpon — the social Web-surfing app that was created in Calgary — being acquired by eBay for between $40-million and $45-million. Mike seems to have broken the story first, but gives Om credit in an update for narrowing the alleged price range, while Om has an update that mentions Mike as having pinned the likely suitor down as eBay.

Reports are that StumbleUpon, which got some venture capital money last year and moved to the Valley, has been in talks with eBay, Google and AOL, and that the company has signed a term sheet with eBay. The company has been the subject of acquisition rumours since November. Of course, there are no shortage of takeover-talks stories that don’t actually come to pass — including some that involve Canadian companies, such as the rumours that Albert Lai’s Bubbleshare was going to be bought by News Corp. (it was eventually bought by Toronto-based Kaboose).

StumbleUpon has developed a substantial following by doing one simple thing: sending people to random websites, at which point they can vote on whether they like the content or not. And the service can drive a lot of traffic to sites that get stumbled, although there are debates about how much value there might in that traffic, as there is with Digg.

With all due respect to Om, I don’t get his explanation of why eBay might want StumbleUpon, which seems to involve some kind of integration with Skype. But then, I never understood why eBay bought Skype in the first place, so that’s par for the course, I suppose. My friend Mark Evans says he doesn’t really understand it either.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t get most of the reaction to Steve Rubel’s little Twitter-related gaffe (Twaffe?), in which he said that he throws his PC Magazine in the trash, and now has had to apologize to the editor-in-chief of PC Mag, etc. First of all, you mean they still publish PC Mag? Who knew. I stopped subscribing years ago, and so did anyone else with any sense.

And secondly, yes I totally understand that it was probably unwise of Steve to say that about PC Mag, seeing as how Edelman pitches companies to PC Mag, and that we all have to watch what we say now, Twitter is not like instant messaging, etc. etc. Totally get that. But still — what the hell is Jim Louderback doing posting a long commentary on what Rubel did to some anonymous PR gossip rag like Strumpette? He has his own website, although it currently just hosts a bio and some links. Why not put it there?

Better yet, why not post a comment on Steve’s blog, or send him an email? Or talk to Edelman privately? Instead, he posts it on Strumpette, and muses aloud about penalizing Edelman in some way — not to mention that he takes what Rubel said completely out of context. What kind of person does that? It’s like overhearing someone say something offhand on the streetcar and then writing a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. Bizarre.

At the last mesh meetup we had — at the Charlotte Room on March 28th — our good friend and podcaster extraordinaire Leesa Barnes was good enough to work her magic with a microphone once again, and we’re going to be posting some of the results at the mesh blog over the next little while.

First up is Parker Mason, who blogs at BlogCampaigning, who talked to Leesa about the differences between Web 2.0 in Australia vs. Canada; what surfing taught him about never giving up; and how social media affects political campaigns. The podcast is here.

Thanks again, Leesa.

As horrific as the circumstances at Virginia Tech were, as a journalist it was fascinating to watch the information about the shootings filter out through the students and faculty at the college, by way cellphones and webcams, blogs and Facebook accounts, Flickr photos and LiveJournal updates. The Wikipedia page was updated minute by minute (the page of edits makes for interesting reading). Another example of “crowdsourcing” the news.

As others have described elsewhere, Jamal Albarghouti recorded gunfire on his cellphone and had it run on CNN and dozens of other networks and channels; Professor Dennis Hong set up a webcam on the windowsill of his classroom and then streamed the video of police activity to the frightened students inside a locked-down lab; other students uploaded photos to Flickr and their Facebook accounts. One Facebook group set up in memory of those killed had more than 17,000 members within hours of the shooting and now has over 96,000 members and 9,000 “wall” posts or messages.

Several students blogged about what was going on, reassuring friends and relatives that they were safe. The Roanoke Times ran a blog-style update story, a smart response to the event, and the Collegiate Times was providing regular updates as well. Not surprisingly, people started using the Net to search for the identity of the shooter — and came up with the wrong guy, as described by Wired’s Threat Level blog.

A failing of crowdsourced journalism? Perhaps. But as Robert Niles of the Online Journalism Review pointed out, traditional media muffs the details in the heat of the moment too — and that takes longer to correct.

Update:

Robin Hamman has a great post about how journalists (including him) descended on some of the Virginia Tech bloggers, and how the “traditional” media have come to rely on social media such as blogs as a source during events like this. Are traditional reporters vultures, or are they serving an important purpose? Should they try to get access to bloggers, or just point to them? And my friend Tony Hung has some wise words about avoiding the flipside of the “wisdom of crowds” — namely, the mob mentality.

Accenture has a study out that interviewed senior media executives for their views on user-generated content — or whatever we’re calling it now — and found that they are not just taking it seriously, they are outright afraid of what it could do to their businesses. “Media and entertainment executives see the growing ability and eagerness of individuals to create their own content as one of the biggest threats to their business,” the survey said.

According to Accenture, more than half of the survey respondents said the rapid growth of user-generated content is one of the top three challenges they face today. More than two-thirds said they believe that social media, one of the largest segments of user-generated content, will continue to grow. Two-thirds said they believe that within three years they will be making money on user-generated content, with most of these saying they expect to make money through advertising and sponsorships. Others said subscriptions and pay-per-play — while a quarter of those surveyed said they don’t know how they will make money from user-generated content.

Those surveyed included industry giants like Roger Faxon, chief executive of EMI Music Publishing; Leslie Moonves, chief executive of CBS; Doug Neil, senior vice president of digital marketing for Universal Studios; and Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP Group PLC.

Maybe that’s why Microsoft passed on DoubleClick and let Google take it away for $3.1-billion — so then the Redmond-based behemoth could jump up and down (NYT link) and wave its arms and complain about how big, bad Google is taking control of online advertising.

After all, isn’t there a law or something about how much of a market a company can control, and how it can behave when it has that kind of market power? Oh yeah, that’s right — that’s the same law that Microsoft spend tens of millions of dollars arguing was wrongly applied in its case, a case that makes Google’s “control” of online advertising look like a Sunday school picnic. And yet, in a statement on the Microsoft web site, general counsel Brad Smith complains that:

“This proposed acquisition raises serious competition and privacy concerns in that it gives the Google DoubleClick combination unprecedented control in the delivery of online advertising, and access to a huge amount of consumer information by tracking what customers do online.”

Scoble says that the complaint “sounds a lot like Microsoft is now the company who had its ass kicked in the marketplace and is running to government regulators to get some relief.” Indeed. And obviously Scoble and I aren’t the only ones to notice the irony.

Came across a post by Bruno Giusanni — writer, author and European TED conference director — in which he reprints an essay he wrote for the inaugural issue of Knight Forum, a new online magazine from the Knight Foundation. The point of Bruno’s post and essay are contained in a terrific quote from Ethan Zuckerman, in which he tells journalists: “Don’t speak. Point!”

The point (pardon the pun) is that in a more connected and de-institutionalized world, journalists are no longer — with rare exceptions — the established authorities on a subject, but instead exist to discover and aggregate and collate and interpret what is out there for an audience that doesn’t have the time or inclination to do it all themselves. Giussani says the journalist’s job is to:

“Animate a group of people; to develop ways to organize how information is gathered and used, with the participation of what used to be called “the audience;” and to help people navigate an information landscape that’s increasingly crowded and constantly shifting.”

Giussani goes on to talk about embedding of media, Web 2.0 principles and the idea of a “read/wite” Web, and the concept of a media outlet as a place where a community can grow and develop. He also notes that the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination was effectively an act of amateur journalism, which is something I hadn’t thought of before.

Paul Kedrosky points to a fascinating study that was written about in the New York Times magazine this weekend (it figures that the one time I put aside the mag without reading it, it will have a fascinating story in it), which looked at the theory of “cumulative advantage.” This is also known as the Matthew effect — from the bible passage Paul quotes in his post — or the “rich get richer” effect.

Simply put, the theory is that if someone is popular — for whatever reason, be it real talent or just blind luck — he or she is likely to become even more popular, since people tend to gravitate towards things that are already perceived as being popular. In the study that is written up in the NYT magazine, a team set up a website where more than 14,000 participants signed up and were asked to listen to, rate and — if they chose — download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants.

The results showed clear evidence of cumulative advantage, says one of the authors of the study:

In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition.

At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict.

As the author notes, this kind of social influence — which might as well be called the Digg effect — “didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.” And that definitely complicates the tendency to believe in the wisdom of crowds when it comes to music or just about anything else.

“Even if you think most people are tasteless or ignorant, it’s natural to believe that successful songs, movies, books and artists are somehow “better,” … if only because “that’s what the market wanted.”

What our results suggest, however, is that because what people like depends on what they think other people like, what the market “wants” at any point in time can depend very sensitively on its own history: there is no sense in which it simply “reveals” what people wanted all along.”

Fascinating.

Update:

As Ethan at blackrimglasses.com points out, this is also known as a “power law distribution” and can be seen in all kinds of behaviour, both online and off.

Way back in the mists of time, Internet-wise, there was Jenni-cam — a camera (and later, cameras) trained upon Jennifer Ringley 24 hours a day, regardless of what she was doing. That seemed kind of weird, but after awhile it wasn’t really that weird at all. Now there’s Stickam, where hundreds of people stream their video-cameras, and Justin.tv and now Ustream.tv, which lets anyone create their own personal version of the movie EdTV.

Not content to let Justin have all the fun, geek trailblazers Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo have been experimenting with Ustream. At one point today, I was watching Chris Pirillo’s webcam, which was broadcasting video of him watching Robert Scoble’s webcam, which was broadcasting video of him driving in the car. Fascinating stuff. About the only interesting part of the whole process was the discovery that a bunch of people seem to think Chris Pirillo’s new wife Latthanapon “Ponzi” Indharasophang is hot (and he agrees).

Is there such a thing as too much information? Twitter allows Scoble to update me and several thousand other people on his location every couple of minutes, and it’s the reason I know Jason Calacanis was in Barcelona. Thanks to Ustream, I know that Scoble was in the passenger seat on his drive with Maryam, and that it was raining — and I know that Chris Pirillo has two 21-inch (or possibly 30-inch) monitors on his desk.

What is the purpose of all this knowing? Who knows. As trivial as it all sounds — Chris calls it the “narcissystem,” which I think is pretty close to the mark — I did find it fascinating to listen to him describing how when he heard there was an earthquake, he got one of his Twitter followers in Acapulco to give him his Skype ID and interviewed him on the spot, with others conferenced in via a free teleconference service. Is this the future? Are we on our way to the metaverse?

Update:

Allan Stern at Centernetworks has some thoughts along the same lines, and so does Brian Solis. Jeremiah Owyang has more about the setup that Ustream did for both him and Scoble, which is similar to what Justin uses, and Rick Mahn makes an interesting point in Jeremiah’s comments: What if people had these rigs during the U.S. election campaign? Now that would be interesting. If I were Ustream CEO Chris Yeh, I would get together with Huffington Post and NewAssignment.net for their “crowdsourcing” Politics 2.0 experiment.

Interesting point from Jason at Webomatica, who says that “these real-time technologies rather seem like a step backwards to the days where you had to be at a certain place and time and pay attention or you missed it.”

In case you’re not familiar with the case of Josh Wolf, he’s the video-blogger and/or anarchist-troublemaker who was found in contempt of court for refusing to turn over his videotape of a demonstration in San Francisco (the video is on his website) and for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating an attack on a police officer and an arson attempt that took place during the demonstration.

Until his release earlier this month, Wolf had spent more than six months behind bars. If you believe that he qualifies as a journalist, that’s the longest time a journalist has spent incarcerated for refusing to turn over evidence to the state. If you don’t believe that he’s a journalist — well, then some guy who refused to co-operate with police just spent six months in jail. And for what? Because he didn’t want to turn over a videotape that doesn’t really show anything anyway, in a case in which the criminal charges for the events in question had already been dropped.

Salon magazine tries to get to the bottom of what exactly Wolf is, and what he thought he was doing by refusing to turn over the tape, and why he eventually decided to release it (although he didn’t have to testify) in a somewhat confrontational interview.

Part of the argument is that Josh Wolf didn’t describe himself as a journalist (he described himself as an artist, video-blogger, anarchist, etc.) and wasn’t affiliated with any kind of media outlet. In a Washington Post piece, blogger and lawyer Eugene Volokh argues that Wolf wasn’t entitled to legal protection because he wasn’t protecting any confidential sources.

Wolf and others have argued, however, that the First Amendment was meant to protect journalists from becoming instruments of the state, and therefore his resistance was crucial to the protection of those values. In interviews, Wolf has talked about how the First Amendment was originally written to protect pamphleteers such as Thomas Paine — who were arguably closer to being the 18th-century version of bloggers than to what we call journalists.

Also worth reading: Jackson West’s take on his friend Josh Wolf and the significance of the case at NewTeeVee.