SAN FRANCISCO--Tim Armstrong is such a tease.
The AOL CEO, speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday, didn't have any high-profile announcements like many of the other speakers at the conference. But instead, he hinted that one might be on the way.
"We have been working on something for the last three months that I think is a fairly substantial shift in our technology," he said. "When that's ready to announce, maybe we'll come back and talk to you about it."
Interviewer and conference organizer John Battelle tried to pry more information out of him, to little avail. But it sounds like it has something to do with the framework that powers AOL's network of blogs and content properties.
"It's a broader platform with more information around content and the creation of content," he said. "We see that platform evolving to a much higher scale."
Armstrong, who joined AOL in March after a stint as head of sales at Google, said that recently the company has increased its roster of journalists from 500 to over 3,000, and that over 3,000 pieces of content are posted every day to AOL properties. It's also now creating three to four times as much video as it was several months ago.
"We've hired people from places like The Wall Street Journal and ESPN," Armstrong said. "You're not just hiring a person, you're hiring the community they come with, and I think that has been an important part when you look at the network effects of that."
It's still not clear how AOL, currently in the process of being spun out from parent company Time Warner, will rake in profits from this huge investment in media content. Armstrong seemed unfazed.
"If you're not going to take risks and you don't think the future is bright," he said, "the Internet is probably not the right place for you."
For all I know, the folks who run PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, are fine, upstanding individuals.
I imagine that at times, they get a little over-excited about their cause. But at least they care about something.
For example, Monday, PETA's blog celebrated the organization's success in persuading a hospital in Missouri to stop shoving plastic pipes down cats' windpipes.
I can't be sure if the hospital was searching for a cure for hay fever or merely allowing its internists to have some rather unpleasant fun. Because I was struck momentarily insensate by the name of PETA's blog.
It's called the PETA Files.
Please say this quickly. Or even not so quickly. What collection of syllables do you hear coming out?
Is it me, or does anyone else conjure something truly unpleasant from the pronunciation of this name?
Did not one extremely well-meaning person tear their eyes, ears, and mind away from the subject of animal cruelty to say to themselves, and perhaps even to others, when this name was proposed: "You know, my friends. I think the PETA Files moniker might be a fraction problematic."
In all honesty, I am extremely concerned. You see, as I peruse the PETA Files, I see a post from Monday entitled "Ronald McDonald Gets Creamed."
I am no longer able to eat dessert.
Heaping criticism and scorn on media companies has worked well for Mike Masnick, operator of the popular blog Techdirt.
Mike Masnick thinks alternative business models for the music, film, and publishing sectors are out there. He wants to help find them.
(Credit: Dennis Yang)Masnick is the firey commentator who blasts copyright owners and anyone else he believes has failed to accept that in the Digital Age most of the control now rests with consumers. He strongly maintains, however, that there are still ways for entertainers, artists, and journalists to make money. They just have to be developed. Plenty of people of course.
Still, there's no denying that his brand of criticism has resonated with the growing number of techies, bloggers, and file sharers who believe art, news, and entertainment should be free. What separates Masnick, 34, from other notable old-media critics is that he isn't satisfied with just slamming music labels or Hollywood studios for failing to find alternative business models. He's gone looking for them himself.
Techdirt has begun experimenting with whether a content owner, such as himself, can generate meaningful revenue while giving away his main product. Instead of charging for his posts, Masnick offers fans a range of other items or services to purchase, such as a Techdirt T-shirt, spending a day with Masnick, or access to his stories before they're posted.
Over the past couple of years, the free model has drawn a lot of attention. For instance, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails stirred a lot of fanfare with their attempts at music giveaways.
In an interview with CNET News, Masnick spoke about his tests at finding a new publishing paradigm, copyright fights, and rage.
Q: Do you see yourself as the spokesman for the free content or anti-copyright crowd?
Mike Masnick: I don't think so. I might take a slightly different perspective on some of these things than some of those folks. There are a lot of voices in this discussion. I think I'm one of the voices and I certainly do have an audience. But I try as much as I can to focus the discussions more on the business side of it and where the opportunities are.
I recognize that there is always some controversy whenever we discuss these things, but I try to focus on some of the economics of it. That comes from my background and my business school training and the economics professors in school who got me thinking about this stuff. If you understand the economics you start to see it as inevitable. The idea of trying to hold back against it seems kind of silly. When you recognize the basic economic principals, then you realize there are a lot of opportunities there.
Tell me about what you're doing with your experiments.
Masnick: Obviously, I'd been following what the different musicians have been doing and writing about it on the blog and talking about it at the various conferences, and we wanted to find how the different models were working and what's cool about them. The ones that we've liked and we've noticed are things like what Trent Reznor is doing but also what Josh Freese, and Jill Sobule, and some others have done with sort of setting up tiers of options.
So they really were focusing on connecting with fans in an interesting way but also offering different tiers of options so people can buy at different types of levels. We've seen that happen and we started to wonder what would happen if you applied that model to a publication rather than just the music business. We said 'Let's experiment with that. We've been calling it Connect With Fans, and Reason to Buy.
We didn't expect it to be our business model but we thought that we could learn something from it and understand the different issues that musicians have to go through and the media must go through in terms of experimenting with different business models and let's see what happens. That was the basic plan. We sort of took the Josh Freese and the Jill Sobule models as kind of the inspiration in terms of how we designed it. We set up tiers. I don't remember how many. I think it was 11 different ways that people could support us and get something of value back. We wanted to be clear that this isn't the NPR- or PBS-type model where we are begging for support. We want to make sure people are getting something of real value back. We wanted to make it fun, and cool.
As part of that, we got some different authors and musicians to take part as well. (One) of the different options is the Techdirt Book Club, which includes some books that we really like that really talk about these different issues, with all of the authors offering up signed copies. And the Music Club is four different musicians all agreeing to offer up something unique, that you can't get anywhere else. In some cases it's a signed book or CD.
We finally came up with this idea where Jill is going to take some notebooks and write out some lyrics by hand and then some doodles and drawings using up the first few pages of the notebook. And so for the people who buy the Music Club, they get a unique one-of-a-kind, hand-drawn notebook from Jill and also a signed copy of her CD. Some of the other artists, one of them created a CD that's just for this package that includes some tracks he's released before but also never-before-released tracks. (Note: most of the items Masnick referred to here were included in a $150 package called Techdirt Music Club. It has since sold out).
What made you attempt this?
Masnick: Partly it was to get the experience. It's an experiment and we wanted to see what happens. At times people would complain "Oh, you can't talk about any of this stuff because you're not doing any of it." We said "OK, let's see what happens. Let's find out what we learn." It's a little bit different than being a musician but we figure there's always going to be something you can learn from it.
How long will you keep this going?
Masnick: We don't know yet. We launched it and said let's see. One of the things we've been doing is running one-off promotions. We may keep doing that. We'll start shutting some of the tiers down and replacing them with new tiers. We'll do that for a while and see what happens.
Do you consider yourself a journalist, entrepreneur...?
Masnick: Well, there is a lot more to the company beyond the blog. It's not just me. We have eight full-time employees. The part that really pays the bills is the Insight Community. What we did is basically build up the community around Techdirt and have set it up so companies can tap into that community to generate insightful conversations, either for internal purposes--things like market research--or for external purposes such as branding.
Are you profitable?
Masnick: We are profitable. The project itself has definitely been profitable. We didn't want to set too high of expectations ourselves, we kind of wanted to see where it was going. Some of our basic assumptions we've learned were wrong but in a good way. We sort of naturally expected that least expensive levels would be the top sellers. That hasn't been true. To date, the top seller has been the package called the Approaching Infinity Package, which is a book based on a series of Techdirt posts about understanding the economics and business models. We took those posts and expanded on it a little more. People are buying that package, which also comes with a T-shirt. It is our best seller so far.
Who is your reader? Tell me about him or her?
Masnick: It is mostly him. There are definitely female readers and some active as well, but there is definitely a majority of male readers. It's a pretty broad mix. Most are from the U.S. We have a pretty decent-sized audience. We do have a pretty good international following, especially in English-speaking countries; Canada New Zealand, England. In the U.S., we're pretty spread out. A lot of our following is not Silicon Valley-based. We're not considered, I don't think, as a Silicon Valley blog. It's due partly because we don't talk about the latest start-ups. We talk more about economics and policy and lot of things that touch on different areas. We have less of a focus on the Silicon Valley scene even though we're based here.
What's interesting here, we've done a couple of reader surveys and stuff and the readers are sort of bi-modal. There is definitely a group of younger, late-teen, early 20s reader and another crew that's late 30s and early 40s. Those are the two high points. There certainly are a bunch of IT folks, and a lot of media folks, and a lot of policy and government people. We get a fair number of readers from the Washington, D.C. area. We get lawyers, a lot of patent lawyers like to get upset about what I say about the patent system. It's a broad mix because we don't get that deep into the tech aspect of it. Slash-dot is a heavy techie audience.
Why are you so full of rage? You seem to think that the content owners are sticking their head in the sand. That also appears to really tick you off?
Masnick: I try to not think of it as rage. It's kind of funny, I actually think of myself as optimistic.
What I find frustrating is when I think people or companies are trying to hold back what the technology allows. Those are my concerns especially when we're holding back the opportunity. That's where a lot of this comes from. I've been writing Techdirt in one form or another since 1997. So it was started when I was in business school, looking for a way to keep myself in touch with what was going on with technology and business world and it was a good way of paying attention.
It kind of grew from there.
I know that some people have pleasures that are not entirely innocent.
They go to sites such as What Would Tyler Durden Do? or Dlisted to read the occasionally besmirching remark aimed at those more famous, wealthy, and beautiful than themselves.
Sometimes, the bloggers behind these bastions of moral sure-footedness prefer to remain anonymous. However, a court ruling on Monday in New York might change that.
Liskula Cohen, a Vogue cover model, won an interesting case against the nameless blogger behind the erudite site Skanks in NYC.
Judge Joan Madden ruled that Cohen is entitled to know the identity of the blogger as phrases such as "psychotic, lying, whoring...skank" might possibly be defamatory.
Initially, Cohen sued in January, asking the court to order Google, which was host to the site on Blogger, to reveal its author's identity.
In this proceeding, the judge declared that Google must inform the blogger that he or she should probably get a lawyer, as there is a risk of unmasking.
The blogger's lawyer claimed that the views expressed were "hyperbole" and that blogs "have evolved as the modern-day soapbox for personal opinions."
The lawyer also offered the view that blogs have "mere venting purposes, affording the less outspoken a protected forum for voicing gripes, leveling invective, and ranting about anything at all."
I wasn't entirely aware of that.
And the judge seems to have looked somewhat askance at these arguments. Especially, it seems, when she saw that the hyperbolic comments were placed near somewhat-provocative pictures of the model.
Judge Madden declared that placing such epithets as "ho" and "skank" next to these images might create "a negative implication of sexual promiscuity."
It is not for me to say why anyone would wish to create a blog called Skanks in NYC (the blog was taken down in March).
However, it will be interesting to see, as this lawsuit progresses, just what implications it might create for those who choose to blog anonymously and call people rather rude things.
As professional organizations become increasingly guarded about employees' use of social networks, British troops are actually being encouraged to use social media to talk about what they do--within limits, of course.
The Ministry of Defence has issued its Online Engagement Guidelines (PDF), 13 pages of recommendations for keeping in touch with friends and family via blogs, social networks, virtual worlds, and multiplayer games without endangering military personnel and activities.
The statement says, "Current and emerging Internet technologies, such as simple self-publishing, sharing of user-generated content, and social networking, are of growing importance to Service and MOD civilian personnel in their personal and professional lives." And the guidelines say service and MOD civilian personnel are free to talk about what they do for a living, so long as the content regards "factual, unclassified, uncontroversial non-operational matters." They must gain authorization from their chain of command if they wish to publish anything that relates to military operations, gives opinions about Armed Forces' activities, speaks on behalf of the service, or discusses "controversial, sensitive, or political matters." The guidelines even suggest that some employees should consider creating officially sponsored online presences to help communicate their work to the public.
Amid a litany of advice about what information should and should not be divulged under varying circumstances, the guide also reminds people to have a little fun, saying "Enjoy yourself. You have a great story to tell, and are the best person to tell it."
The announcement comes as the U.S. Marine Corps, and organizations including ESPN and some professional sports teams have put limits on how employees can use social media networks--if not banned the sites altogether.
For ESPN, the social-networking revolution will not be televised--or tweeted, blogged, or Facebooked. Not for now, at least, and not without ESPN's approval.
The sports network has apparently banned its workforce from posting any sports-related content on social-networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook without its permission. The news first came to light Tuesday when Ric Bucher, an NBA analyst for ESPN, tweeted that he had just received an network memo regarding tweeting:
The hammer just came down, tweeps: ESPN memo prohibiting tweeting info unless it serves ESPN. Kinda figured with was coming. Not sure what this means but
In a follow-up tweet, Bucher, who has more than 18,000 followers on Twitter, pondered the gravity of his tweet revealing the memo:
I'm probably violating some sort of policy just by telling you. In any case, stay tuned.
According to a purported copy of the memo posted on the sports blog The Big Lead, Bucher may just be violating the new policy (one point begins "Avoid discussing internal policies...").
In the memo, ESPN tells employees that it is "currently building and testing modules designed to publish Twitter and Facebook entries simultaneously" on ESPN Web sites and mobile platforms, and it plans to roll out the modules this fall.
"Personal websites and blogs that contain sports content are not permitted," according to the memo. But, it says, "If ESPN.com opts not to post sports related social media content created by ESPN talent, you are not permitted to report, speculate, discuss or give any opinions on sports related topics or personalities on your personal platforms(.)"
The memo seems to mirror efforts announced earlier Tuesday by the Marine Corps and the National Football League affecting their respective members and employees. And while one could argue that a military ban on using social-networking sites could ultimately save lives, the NFL is apparently just trying to save itself from some embarrassment.
Professional athletes ranging from Shaquille O'Neal to Lance Armstrong have long twittered about their observations on their respective sports experiences but not always with the approval or to the amusement of their coaches. In April, San Francisco Giants pitchers Barry Zito and Brian Wilson found their Twitter accounts getting the hook over some rather bizarre posts. But those posts paled in comparison to Washington Redskins tight end Chris Cooley, who last season posted a portion of his team's playbook on his personal blog--along with a photo of his penis.
So what is ESPN's angle? A spokesman for the network told The New York Times that, "we want to be smarter about how we do it," adding that Bucher's "interpretation of the policy is mistaken."
As for Bucher, he seems to have no plans to abandon Twitter. "My guess is I can still tweet about my vacation/car shopping, etc. Which I will do, if I can."
Hackers launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack that sporadically downed popular blog network Gawker Media over the weekend and on Monday, the company confirmed in a blog post early Tuesday morning.
When CNET News spoke to Gawker Media representatives on Monday, they were not yet sure what was causing the outages but had not ruled out malicious behavior.
The attacks appear to have been launched at Consumerist, a blog that Gawker sold to Consumer Reports last year but which is still hosted on the same servers. The motivation behind them is not yet clear.
The New York-based Gawker Media has sold or merged a number of its blog titles over the past few years, but it remains the parent company of several extremely high-profile blogs--often with an edgy gossip angle--like Gizmodo, Jezebel, and the eponymous Gawker.com.
DDOS attacks occur when hackers swamp a site with excess pings from multiple sources to bring it down; they can knock out entire hosting companies.
A mini-controversy is brewing following comments made last week by YouTube's leaders about how the video service is headed to profitability.
In the wake of YouTube's good news, Chris Dale and Aaron Zamost, two YouTube public relations types, appeared to gloat when they posted a blog designed to do some "myth busting" about oft-written assumptions about the company. Two of the "myths" are "advertisers are afraid of YouTube" and "YouTube is only monetizing 3 to 5 percent of the site."
Dale and Zamost were taking the opportunity to debunk these allegedly inaccurate assertions, but as Peter Kafka at the blog All Things Digital wrote, the Google duo did so without supporting their arguments with any hard facts or numbers.
"The Google folks are feeling ever more confident about YouTube's prospects enough to do some public chest-beating," wrote Kafka. "But not enough to actually talk about those prospects in concrete terms."
The criticism that Kafka and others appear to have is that if YouTube isn't willing to reveal exactly how close it is to profitability, than perhaps it's wise to hush up. Closing in on profitability isn't the same as banking the money.
YouTube has always declined to provide details about its finances and the secrecy bears much of the responsibility for the vast amounts of speculation. When you're the Godzilla of Web video, one of the biggest entertainment destinations, and one of the most disruptive communication tools to emerge since the telephone, people are bound to be curious about your business.
Perhaps YouTube failed to recognize that early in its history. It's hard to forget about YouTube's haughty attitude back before the Google acquisition in October 2006, back when the start-up was riding its first wave of popularity. That was when YouTube's public relations representatives put the beat down on reporters who dared inquire about the company's business model.
The line was YouTube was so popular, it could make money in a plethora of ways, so don't worry about it. The company would reveal everything when the time was right.
As we all know now, generating revenue hasn't come easy to YouTube. Eric Schmidt acknowledged in May 2008 that Google hadn't quite figured out how to make money from the video site. Learning how was Google's biggest priority last year, Schmidt said.
For Google's part, if you give the company the benefit of doubt that YouTube is becoming profitable, then Dale and Zamost have likely been forced to stay quiet while a stream of erroneous analyst reports floated past. Their blog appears to be a venting of frustration.
In November, Screen Digest analyst Arash Amel predicted YouTube would generate $100 million in U.S. revenue and eventually be outpaced by Hulu. In March, Jefferies & Co stated that YouTube would account for only roughly 3 percent of Google's net revenue this year, or $500 million. In April, Credit Suisse projected YouTube would lose $470 million this year. Some of the projections gave rise to subtle headlines, such as "YouTube is Doomed."
In the analyst reports, many of the same weaknesses are repeated: YouTube revenue is hurt by its inability to draw advertisers to user-generated content. For that reason a small percentage of the site's videos can be turned into cash.
"This oft-cited statistic is old and wrong," wrote Zamost and Dale. "In our view, the percentage is far less important than the total number of monetized views, and we are now helping partners generate revenue from hundreds of millions of video views in the U.S. every week (and billions worldwide)."
As for advertisers rejecting user-generated content, Dale and Zamost state that not only is that inaccurate, but they note YouTube offers hundreds of TV shows and films.
"Advertisers just want control," Dale and Zamost wrote in their blog post. "So, we're continuing to develop tools and targeting products that give advertisers more control over where their ads appear on the site."
In the end though, Dale and Zamost and YouTube and Google should remember, none of their nibbling at the edges of the debate is going to stop the guessing about YouTube's numbers, which likely won't stop even when YouTube does become profitable. Google won't be required to reveal actual revenue or earnings numbers until they become "material."
That could be a while.
After almost two years without providing any support, Yahoo has finally decided to shut down its blog-centric social Web site Yahoo 360 Degrees completely on July 13. During its more than four years of existence, the site has never actually been out of the beta stage.
(Credit:
Dong Ngo/CNET)
In an e-mail to its members, the company said, "We will be officially closing Yahoo 360 on July 13, 2009, to focus our efforts on making your new profile on Yahoo the place where you connect with the people who matter to you most. As a result, you will need to move your 360 information to your new profile before this date. After July 12, 2009, your content on Yahoo 360 will no longer be accessible."
Yahoo 360 was launched in March 2005. The site never became big in the United States and in October 2007, Yahoo decided to stop providing support for it.
However, in other countries, especially Vietnam, the site has been the most popular blogging portal. For this reason, Vietnamese users can migrate their Yahoo 360 content to Yahoo 360Plus, a product specifically made for the Vietnamese market that the company announced a year ago.
Last August, Yahoo also shut down Mash, which was another failed attempt into social Web sites.
This is sad news for thousands, if not millions, of people worldwide, since for a lot of them the blogs posted on Yahoo 360 and the friends they have there are part of their lives. Yahoo recommends that Yahoo 360 users immediately move their blogs to their current Yahoo profile to save them and download their contacts onto a computer. There are also options to migrate blogs to other blogging sites.
You can find out more information on how to do that here.
Google has apologized for a promotion in Japan that violated the company's own search guidelines.
"Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products. It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google's search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident," Google marketing manager Koji Baba said, according to a translation in Asiajin. (It generally agrees with the Google Translate version.)
Google didn't say exactly what violated its rules, and didn't respond to a request for comment, but Asiajin believes that it has to do with a promotion under which bloggers were paid to write about a new Google Japan feature. The site pointed to several blogs about the feature that disclosed their relationship with CyberBuzz, "one of the biggest pay-per-post agencies in Japan."
Update 2:20 p.m. PST: Google said the problem was in fact that Google had hired CyberBuzz, which was paying for blog postings. The practice violates two company policies, and the company is trying to get the bloggers to remove the posts in question, according to spokesman Gabriel Stricker. The violations are as follows, he said in a statement:
First, we have strict policies against doing anything that would artificially promote the ranking of our own properties. Having outside blogs write about our promotion and link to our site may have had an impact on ranking, which is not acceptable under our own guidelines.
Second, we believe in being open and direct with our users, and we don't condone these kinds of opaque communications. Our internal guidelines are committed to transparency, and this wasn't sufficiently transparent at all.
Because of the way Google's PageRank algorithm works, external links to a site can elevate its position in search results. Google spends a lot of resources trying to protect against people in effect buying a high search rank.
