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For something that was created by legendary Netscape founder Marc Andreessen — the Blake Ross of his day, for you Firefox fans — the social-media “engine” called Ning has kind of been flying under the radar for awhile. As Mike Arrington notes at TechCrunch, the initial release of the service was somewhat underwhelming, and so I think a lot of people sort of forgot about it. But it has steadily improved, and just rolled out some more enhancements.

I have some first-hand experience with Ning, because I decided awhile back to use it as a tool for helping to plan a journalism school reunion that I’m involved with. It’s been quite awhile since I was at Ryerson in Toronto (don’t ask how long or I’m liable to punch you), and many of my former classmates have scattered to the winds. After a couple of members of the group sent out some emails trying to get a reunion under way, it became obvious that having a single place to co-ordinate things would make a lot of sense. One or two people mentioned MySpace, but it seemed too — well, MySpacey. Then I thought of Ning.com.

The reason Ning came to mind was that a Toronto group — helmed by Mark Dowds — created a site related to a new “open office” concept called Indoor Playground. It seemed relatively simple to add members, send out updates, upload photos and had a nice, clean look to it, so I decided to try it out. In just a few minutes I had the site set up (there is even more customization available with the new features), and apart from a few glitches in getting people signed up — it’s invitation only — it was a no-brainer.

Further reading:

Om has some thoughts about the new Ning, and Scoble has an interview with Marc Andreessen and CEO Gina Bianchini up at Podtech — and Ms. Bianchini has a post on the Ning blog with some of the insights that she has gained from starting the company (I particularly like the “Underhype your service” one). Frantic Industries has a good overview of the service too. Steve O’Hear at ZDNet has some thoughts too, and Don Dodge wonders whether it’s any better than Live Spaces or Yahoo Groups.

When it comes to Google and video, most people probably think about YouTube or Google Video and the struggles that have been going on with Viacom pulling its content and the deal with CBS falling through, etc. (which I wrote about recently). But as a story in the New York Times reminds us this morning, there is another whole side to the Google video story, and that is the advertising side, where Google is moving to expand a trial project.

According to the NYT story, Google has signed on Dow Jones Co., CondeNast and others as partners for its video ad trial, which runs video content in Google ad space on websites — complete with post-roll ads — and then shares the revenue with the site owner and the content provider. As Cynthia Brumfield at IPDemocracy points out, this is much closer to Google’s “core competency” (as the business types like to say) than streaming clips from The Colbert Report on YouTube. And as PaidContent notes, it is an extension of a trial that started last year and was then expanded earlier this year.

There is obviously a lot of jockeying for position going on here. As the NYT story makes clear, one of the stumbling blocks is that the content providers — such as the Wall Street Journal, MTV and so on — want to maintain control over not just the content but the relationship with the advertiser as well. Although they seem open to experimentation, there is bound to be friction as Google inserts itself into that process.

A couple of things I’ve come across have got me thinking about the media business — broadly speaking — and just how profound the changes it is undergoing really are. It’s easy to dismiss them as just some kids on MySpace or a bunch of yahoos posting their juvenilia on YouTube, but it is really much more than that. Not a magical transformation by any means, but more like a rapid evolution, and a turbulent one at that.

One of the pieces that got me thinking was Scott Karp’s post over at Publishing 2.0, which he calls The Great Media Schism. In a nutshell, he says, the media industry is “dividing itself into content creation on the one hand, and content aggregation and distribution on the other.” And he is exactly right. From newspapers to movies, media titans are grappling with the fact that content and distribution no longer go hand in glove — and just because you used to control one doesn’t mean you still do, or will. “Content creation is no longer an easily scalable business,” he says. “In fact, many players in the new content creation game are not in it to build scale business, or even to make money at all.”

For some reason, that statement reminds me of the success of Craigslist.org, which has become an accidental business in a sense — a service that Craig Newmark decided to start because it seemed like a good idea, and people adopted, and which has become wildly profitable almost by accident. All of which makes the damage it has done to the newspaper classified business seem even more of an insult, since Craig didn’t even mean to do it.

The other piece that got me thinking was a story in the Los Angeles Times by author Neal Gabler called The Movie Magic is Gone. Gabler describes — in a piece not-so-coincidentally published at Oscar time — how the traditional movie industry is in decline, in part because:

“To the extent that the Internet is a niche machine, dividing its users into tiny, self-defined categories, it is providing a challenge to the movies that not even television did, because the Internet addresses a change in consciousness while television simply addressed a change in delivery of content.”

The reality is that the Internet is unbundling the movie industry in the same way it is unbundling the newspaper industry and the music industry — dismantling or disrupting the traditional power relationships, in part by separating content from distribution. As Gabler puts it: “Much of modern media is dedicated to empowering audiences that no longer want to be passive.” And even when they do want to be passive, traditional content sources are finding a whole lot more competition for those eyeballs.

Further reading:

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan of HipMojo has some thoughts about the future of video, distribution and scalability. And please see the comment below from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.

Far be it from me to question the motivations of Bram Cohen, the genius behind the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol, who has finally launched (NYT link) the long-awaited (or at least, much discussed) movie download service that BitTorrent has been working on with the major Hollywood studios. It’s possible that he entered into the deal under duress, in order to avoid a blizzard of lawsuits.

But one thing is pretty clear by reading between the lines — or even just reading the lines themselves — in the New York Times story that is headlining Techmeme right now: the service as it is structured will almost certainly fail, and Bram Cohen knows it. The BitTorrent service will sell downloads of TV shows for $1.99 an episode, but will only rent movies, which expire 30 days after they are bought or 24 hours after someone watches them, thanks to the ever-helpful digital rights management features of Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 10.

BitTorrent co-founder and chief operating officer Ashwin Navin effectively admits that this is a dumb idea, and says that (NYT link) the company actually had agreement from the studios to sell movies outright for download, but the prices that the studios wanted to charge didn’t make any sense. “We don’t think the current prices are a smart thing to show any user,” he said. “We want to allocate services with very digestible price points.” Translation: We want to offer something that has a hope in hell of actually working.

Then Bram Cohen says that he thinks the new service will provide a compelling alternative to downloading illegally — but in the very next breath, he says: “We are not happy with the user interface implications” of digital rights management. “It’s an unfortunate thing. We would really like to strip it all away.” And then the real money quote comes right at the end:

“The sad thing is, it’s not about the money,” said Aaron, a 36-year-old San Francisco programmer who regularly uses BitTorrent to download movies illegally. “I’m not interested in renting a movie. I want to own it. I want total portability. I want to give a copy to my brother. Digital convergence is supposed to make things like this easier, but D.R.M. is making them harder.”

Bang. That was the door slamming shut on BitTorrent’s new service — or maybe the bullet in the temple of the studios’ hopes that they can somehow eat their digital cake and have it too.

From Cory at Lost Remote comes a link to what has to be one of the most creative — and elaborate — classified ads ever, which the Roanoke Times newspaper from Roanoke, Virginia put up as part of its search for an editor. If you have even a few minutes to spare, you really should check it out. And be sure to click on all the links in the toolbar at the bottom — it’s worth it. In fact, it makes me want to work there.

Much has been written about the “Shoemoney Affair,” in which the blogger known as Shoemoney wrote about a MyBlogLog hack that allowed unscrupulous types to spoof their identities, and was subsequently banned from the service, despite the fact that — as Tony Hung pointed out at Deep Jive Interests — MyBlogLog didn’t have a terms of service agreement that said anything about banning people (it has since developed one). The banning also happened despite the fact that, as Eric Marcoullier of MBL admits here, someone else had posted something about the same exploit over a month earlier (although it was on a French blog, and therefore might have been missed).

This all comes in the wake of several other MyBlogLog stumbles involving spam, which I wrote about recently. And while lots of people seem to enjoy taking shots at MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer and Eric Marcoullier and others, as though they were some giant evil corporation, I for one have been impressed with how quickly and honestly the team at MBL have responded to their various missteps and the resulting onslaught of criticism. In his latest post here, Eric says:

“A lot of people I respect immensely have written in to tell me that I screwed up, and after a point, it becomes impossible to avoid the truth. We banned Shoemoney originally to keep him from updating his list of User IDs on Wednesday night, which I think was the right thing to do. But after fixing the exploit, I should have unbanned him and thanked him for finding it. But I didn’t. I screwed up.”

Although there is still debate about whether Shoemoney should have been banned in the first place (like Steve Poland over at TechCrunch, I would argue he was just showing off, not being malicious, although Andy Beard doesn’t agree), Eric’s post is the kind of thing I like to see. With a small startup — albeit one that is now part of the giant Yahoo empire — it’s inevitable that mistakes are going to happen, as Caterina Fake points out in her post on the whole affair.

We can’t applaud startups for their gung-ho attitude and then slam then when they screw up. I think Eric and the rest of the team at MBL deserve a lot of credit for admitting their mistakes openly and clearly. Let’s move on.

Like many shareholders of Yahoo — whose stock has climbed somewhat in the past few months, but is still well below where it was at the beginning of last year — blogger and management consultant Eric Jackson has been less than pleased with the company’s performance over the past year or so.

Although the Internet “portal” and search company has finally rolled out enhancements to its search-related advertising system, in an attempt to compete with the more successful platform run by you-know-who (hint: it starts with a G), Yahoo is still seen by many as lagging when it comes to its online strategy, or perhaps lacking one altogether. But rather than just complain, Mr. Jackson wrote a blog post back in January in which he tried to rally other disgruntled shareholders to his cause.

He described a refocused strategy for Yahoo that he called Plan B (including the removal of Terry Semel as CEO), and posted a video of himself outlining the idea to both his blog and to YouTube. As he put it in his original post

“Yahoo! is drifting; and its board and management have been too slow to act to this fundamental problem. As shareholders, we don’t have to sit by and watch this. Activist Investing has principally been the domain of hedge funds — well, no longer. With the help of the web, blogs, and wikis, I’m asking all current and future retail investors in Yahoo! to join me in pushing for a change.”

Eric’s campaign has been written about at TheStreet.com and the Internet Outsider blog, which belongs to former Wall Street technology analyt Henry Blodget, as well as Red Herring magazine.

And over the past couple of months, he has gotten a substantial amount of support from other Yahoo shareholders, including a couple of fairly large institutional shareholders whom he says would rather remain anonymous. In all, he says he has $29-million worth of Yahoo stock behind him, and recently filed the required papers to be nominated for the company’s board of directors.

“Some have told me I will need $200,000 to run a “proxy contest” to get elected to the Yahoo! board and — even with that — the odds are stacked against us, as most institutional shareholders tend to be “pro-management,” he says on his blog. “I don’t have $200,000, but I have a love for Yahoo!, the great employees who work there, and we have a plan that has merit — thanks to your input.”

Best of luck, Eric.

The New York Times Reader, a piece of software you can download to read the NYT on your PC, came out in beta last fall and I immediately downloaded it for a few reasons — including the fact that I am a geek, a newspaper journalist and a big NYT fan. And I have to admit that it was (and is) pretty slick. Thanks to Microsoft’s presentation software, it replicates the look of a newspaper, but updates itself when connected to the Web, etc.

Now the company has announced several similar readers for two British papers, Forbes magazine and a Seattle newspaper (PaidContent has more here). And like several other people, including James Kendrick of JKOntheRun, David Rothman of TeleRead and Bob Russell of MobileRead, I am left scratching my head and wondering what the hell any of these publications are thinking. Why on earth would anyone download multiple pieces of software — all of which are based on the same rendering engine from Microsoft — to read different newspapers? It makes no sense. (John Dowdell says that it might appeal to someone who only wants to read one newspaper, which I will admit is a possibility, but it still seems overly limiting to me).

I think it probably makes sense to the executives at the NYT, who approved the idea, or to similar executives at Forbes and Associated Newspapers — after all, the lure of such an idea is that it has the potential to replicate the same kind of physical control that newspapers enjoy in print, but in digital form. No cutting and pasting, no linking from the outside, no messy webpages or RSS feeds or any of that nonsense. Just a very pretty, very appealing, Microsoft-controlled walled garden.

There’s already magazine-reading software from Zinio.com that does quite a good job of replicating the look of a magazine on a PC, and is quite handy for reading offline on airplanes and so on. But a single piece of software allows you to download dozens of magazines, not just one. Will any of these publications agree to be bundled all together into a single reader application? Unlikely. That would make too much sense for readers.

Further reading:

David Hunter at HunterStrat shares my bemusement at the whole idea of a dedicated app for a single publication, as does my friend Rob, and James Robertson. And Don Dodge disagrees with me and points out that “the business of software is about business, not technology.” I would agree — but the business of software (or the business of business, for that matter) should also be about serving the customer.

Will a dedicated application just to replicate the look of a particular newspaper be enough of a service to make these readers fly? I don’t think so. The newspapers in question might want you to think that they came up with this idea to help you as a reader, but I think the real reason is that they are trying desperately to think of a way to maintain their control. And my experience is that that kind of motivation tends to make for a crappy product.

As the word “paper” becomes less and less a part of the newspaper world, things like video are becoming more and more common. While there are some exceptionally well-designed video efforts out there — such as the Washington Post’s OnBeing, which I wrote about recently — there are also some that are, well… underwhelming, if that’s a word.

Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism blog says that his hometown newspaper in Bolton is one of those that seems to be struggling with the whole concept. In fact, Paul says its efforts are “the worst attempt at online video I’ve seen so far.” And Kurt Anderson has a piece at New York magazine in which he writes about some of the video work that the New York Times has been doing — including film critic David Carr’s Oscar blog Carpetbagger. He also mentions David Pogue’s tech videos, which I have to confess I find exceptionally irritating. But maybe that’s just me.

“In the online archives of U.S. papers are thousands of videos, among them dozens of exceptional short docs, more like miniature Frontlines or public-radio-with-pictures than like network-news segments, available anytime. This is video-journalism-on-demand.”

In other recent newspaper video news, the New York Times just announced that it is going to dip its toes into the “user-generated content” field by allowing couples who want to be featured in the wedding announcements to send in video talking about how they met, or a clip from their wedding. Fittingly enough, an NYT staffer describes the effort in a Google video interview, and says that the paper decided to do it as a way of experimenting with video.

Update:

In a followup post, Paul says he came across some video at the Eastern Daily Press website that fits his definition of really well-done video content.

Every now and then some ancient blogger will post a world-weary, “been there, done that” missive about how blogging is tiresome, bordering on useless, and so they are giving it up, etc. The implication being, of course, that blogs are a kind of juvenile pursuit, like skateboarding or body-piercing, and that eventually everyone grows up and puts such things behind them. The latest entry in this genre comes from Dee Rambeau of the Marcom blog, which I got pointed to by Student PR blogger Chris Clarke.

Rambeau is apparently one of a number of PR professionals who contribute to the blog and teach PR at Auburn University in Alabama, in the school of communications and journalism. Number one on his list of world-weary reasons for quitting the blog game? Because he was “in early” (he started posting in 2004). Why this means he has to stop now isn’t clear, at least not to me — except perhaps that he has run out of things to say. Rambeau then veers into whether corporations should blog, and says that he has come to the conclusion that blogging “is not a positive thing for business, rather it is a negative.” In fact, he says, for a public company with shareholders, blogs are “useless and irresponsible.” Personal blogging is fine, he says, but they don’t really matter because blogs are primarily “an exercise of EGO.” Then he says:

“I’m tired of blogging. I’m done. What I have to say…I’m going to keep it to myself. There is soooooo much noise out there. I’m tired of contributing to it.”

“I will contribute to MarcomBlog in the future but I’ll not be adding to my own blog. My writing is going to be private and I hope to publish a book.”

I have to say this whole post rang false for me in a whole bunch of ways. Should public corporations be careful about blogging? Obviously. But useless and irresponsible? That’s a bit much. I guess it was useless and irresponsible for JetBlue’s founder and CEO to post a video on YouTube apologizing for the way his company has treated customers. No PR value there, I suppose. Or for a company to use their blog as a way of responding to customers, like Dell has — no value there, I suppose. Good lesson.

What it reads like to me is that Dee Rambeau has lost interest in blogging, and/or has run out of things to say, and that what he does have to say he will keep to himself (the point of which is what exactly?) and/or publish in a book — the implication being that doing so is a much more civilized and worthwhile effort than writing a “blog” (and books aren’t about ego, I guess). To which I would say: Thanks for leaving, Dee. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Update:

Please see the comments below for some responses from Dee Rambeau and from Robert French, the Auburn PR teacher who runs the Marcom blog.

If I can get self-referential for a bit, I did a podcast interview type of thing with Maggie Fox of Social Media Group recently, and she has just posted it to her blog and made it available for download in iTunes, etc. The direct link to the file on Libsyn is here if you want to have a listen. Maggie did a great job and I really enjoyed doing it.

Maggie — whose consulting company specializes in helping companies with blogs, podcasts and other social media — has been doing a series of interviews with people as part of the Social Media Collective (which both she and I belong to). The SMC is a group that Jerry Bowles has put together of bloggers that write about or are involved in social media and new media, and he has a sort of group-aggregator blog at socialmediatoday.com where you can read posts from all the various members.

I don’t expect anyone (other than maybe my mother) to listen to the entire podcast, but if you’re interested, we talked about the mesh conference how I got into blogging, the Globe’s perspective on blogging, the challenge of maintaining a civil discussion now that the paper has given readers the ability to comment on any news story, the introduction of group moderation to the comments at the Globe, and the question of whether spending too much time online makes people anti-social.

(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

Not that long ago, Google seemed to be carving out a brave new world in online video. Just before it bought YouTube for the eye-popping sum of $1.6-billion, the company announced that it had signed deals with several content providers, including CBS, and there was talk of a wide-ranging deal with the latter to carry TV and radio programming, sell ads around it and share the revenue — an arrangement that the two were supposed to announce at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Instead, as the Wall Street Journal reported in a recent story on Google’s TV troubles, Les Moonves of CBS said he couldn’t sign off on the deal and the big announcement with Google CEO Eric Schmidt was cancelled. Sources apparently told the WSJ that there were disagreements between CBS and Google over the length of the agreement, the content that would be included and so on. And Google has been having difficulty with other potential partners as well: Viacom, for example, has gone back and forth on its relationship with YouTube — last fall, it ordered the site to remove dozens of Comedy Central video clips and other material, but then the two signed an agreement to work together on content sharing.

Viacom, however, reportedly got impatient with the pace at which Google was introducing content controls, and recently ordered the company to pull about 100,000 videos from YouTube. And now Viacom has signed a content-sharing arrangement with Joost, as I discussed in an earlier post.

Are the networks just hoping to get more money, or are they leery of getting into bed with Google and not being able to get out again? One thing seems pretty clear: It’s not going to be quite as easy to forge relationships as Google may have thought when it first acquired YouTube.

Further reading:

PaidContent has a nice summary of all the things that haven’t been going Google’s way lately, and Business 2.0’s Next Net blog wonders whether Big Media needs YouTube or not. Cory at Lost Remote has also written about it.

Update:
The Wall Street Journal’s story has been confirmed by CNet and by Reuters. No financial terms disclosed (Viacom’s typical deal is apparently to get two-thirds of the ad revenue), and CNet says that the arrangement — at least in the beginning — won’t include some of Viacom’s premier content, including Comedy Central shows such as South Park and The Colbert Show.

Original post:

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal this morning (reg. required), entertainment colossus Viacom has signed a distribution deal with Joost, the peer-to-peer streaming television service that Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom started up with the billions they made selling Skype. Viacom, of course, is the same entertainment colossus that recently ordered YouTube to take down 100,000 videos.

At the time, that looked to me like a negotiating tactic on Viacom’s part, a way of exerting pressure in order to get some leverage over YouTube, and perhaps get a better deal — in other words, more money. Viacom also seemed irritated that YouTube hadn’t come up with the anti-piracy measures it promised to deliver back when it signed a deal with CBS and other content owners just before Google bought the company. And now it seems obvious that Viacom, which bailed out of a proposed “YouTube killer” some of the other networks were proposing, is looking for some competition so that — as Larry Dignan points out at ZDNet — YouTube doesn’t wind up owning the relationship with the viewer in the new digital TV universe.

Can Joost become a credible competitor for YouTube? That’s the billion-dollar question. Having tried the beta, which keeps improving, I think it is definitely going to be a horse race. YouTube has the content — and unlike some TV snobs, I am a big fan of the cat videos, comedy clips and undiscovered singing sensations — but the quality and the interface are underwhelming at best. Joost, by contrast, has a slick and intuitive interface and looks good (mostly) even at full-screen. Much more TV like, whereas YouTube is still Web TV.

If Joost can provide compelling content as well as having those other strengths, then GooTube could definitely have a competitor on its hands.

Further reading:

Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget isn’t so sure whether Joost is the right model, and neither is Stan Schroeder. The always insightful Mark Cuban has some thoughts about Google and video, and my friend Scott Karp wrote recently on the topic of online video and monopoly. Meanwhile, Steve Bryant at GoogleWatch has an excellent list of things that Google could do to make YouTube not just look better but work better. And Cynthia Brumfield at IPDemocracy says Joost has thrown GooTube a knuckle ball.