A-Holes Gone Wild: Hollywood Edition

I don’t want to be a hater. I always tell people not to be haters. Just last night while I was watching a basketball game on TV, my wife came in and asked me to feed the dog. I looked at her and said gently “don’t be a hater.”

But every time I think I have my hatred of the MPAA and its other brother the RIAA under control, something like this happens.

A-Hole Number 1

Determined to take away all of our digital media rights, the MPAA now wants to force, via Congressional mandate, manufacturers of devices that can convert analog signals to digital ones (like camcorders, some handheld devices and computers) to include some sort of proprietary watermarking technology called VEIL (someone accidently switched the V and the E, so I will refer to it by its correct name). As best we can tell, the way it would work is that the recording device would seek out the EVIL watermark and respect any do not record instructions contained in the EVIL watermark.

A-Hole Number 2

A Princeton professor called the company that makes EVIL for the MPAA and asked if they would show him how EVIL works. Get a load of the response (as quoted in the Boing Boing story linked above):

[O]nly if he pays them $10,000 and signs a non-disclosure agreement. And they’ll only tell him how the decoder works — there’s no price you can pay to find out how [EV]IL encoding works.

As Cory and the Professor point out, that should end the discussion right there. But you can be sure the MPAA will continue lobbing bombs at media rights until someone makes them stop.

You Want a Bill, Here’s a Bill

How about a Congressional bill outlawing any attempt to restrict the fair use doctrine? Huh? How about a bill like that?

A-Hole Number 3

In the birds of a feather work together category, check out Cory Doctorow’s encounter with Brad Hunt, the guy leading the charge for the MPAA, as quoted by Thomas Hawk:

This Hunt’s an interesting character. I once was at a meeting with him where we had no Internet access, so I went and got the conference center to turn on an Ethernet jack. Before I could get hooked up to it and turn on a WiFi service for the room, Hunt grabbed it and hogged it for the rest of the afternoon, refusing to turn on connection sharing so that a room full of TV, electronics, and film people could get online too.

This little encounter says a lot about the MPAA’s views on both cooperation and the rights of other parties.

If we aren’t careful, the MPAA and the RIAA are going to completely destroy the fair use doctrine and take away all of our media rights.

I really don’t like those people.

Now I have to go meditate.

Don’t…be…a…hater…

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Personal Portals and the Ajax Attack

Richard MacManus posts today about the various personal portals that have recently come online and the effect of the same of the traditional portals like My Yahoo.

I have been thinking and writing about the both the new and old portals as well.

The New Spin

Along with social bookmarking and the 50,000 or so online calendars, one of the new Web 2.0 lines is the reinvented personal portal. Many of these applications are Ajax-based, which makes them easier to customize, on both the developer and user ends. Richard says, and I heartily agree, that:

[T]hey all use Ajax in the UI. For that reason there’s something uniquely “Web 2.0” about personalized start pages. But in other ways, they harken back to the dot com era when portals were all the rage (Excite, AltaVista, Lycos, etc). For example, the main aim of the game is still getting traffic.

Like a lot of Web 2.0 stuff, these portals are improvements on existing things, not the revolutionary new creations that some people like to believe (or more accurately, like to try to make us believe).

The New Players

That’s not to say these new players in the personal portal game aren’t worthy. In fact many of them are. I have already written about some of them already:

Pageflakes and Eskobo
Favoor

and several others are future contestants in my Web 2.0 Wars series.

Others that Richard mentions are Netvibes and Protopage. He also posted an Ajax homepages market review at ZDNet and mentioned LinkedFeed, ItsAStart, Zoozio and Wrickr.

Are Portals Still Relevant?

I absolutely believe they are. I have defended them here and here.

In a nutshell, I believe portals are still highly useful as newspaper alternative, to aggregate the sort of content that I find doesn’t really fit into typical RSS readers. Rather, these pages take content, often from RSS feeds, and display it in an organized, newspaper-like manner. This allows me to skim newspaper-type content in an online, but newspaper-like, manner.

I read blogs via a feed reader, but I still get my news, weather, sports, stock prices and similar content via a portal.

What About the Old School Portals?

While not as Ajaxy as some of the new players, I still find My Yahoo to be, by far, the best of the personal portals. Recent back-end changes have made it very easy to add RSS content to your My Yahoo page.

Richard makes a good point when he wonders when Yahoo will enable Yahoo Widgets content in My Yahoo. I agree that this is a good idea and I expect it will happen before too long.

Google and Microsoft are also involved in the portal game, via Google Homepages and Windows Live. While those applications are closer in look and feel to the new Ajax-based applications and backed by companies with huge mindshare and pocketbooks, I don’t like them nearly as much as My Yahoo, Ajax or not.

Conclusions

I view blogs, Ajax and all the other Web 2.0 stuff as complimentary to a good, old fashioned personal portal. And while Yahoo needs to be aware of the new players in the game and work to keep up feature wise, I still think My Yahoo is the best personal portal solution available today.

Some of these new players may pass Yahoo in the personal portal game, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

My money’s still on Yahoo to win.

Journaling to Blogging

Eric Scalf has a great read on the transition from journaling to blogging.

I find his discussion of finding your target audience especially compelling. For me, the central difference between writing a journal (using the traditional definition) and a blog is the audience. A journal seems more like the online version of a diary (more on that below). Granted, the fact that it’s online indicates that the writer wants someone to read it. But the structure and the initial thought process is the same as the diary under the mattress: to chronicle your experiences for future reflection. In other words, it’s writing from the outside in.

Journaling is a powerful thing. Many years ago, I read two journals every day, written by people I don’t know. The first, The Semi-Existence of Byron, was written by a guy from Denton, Texas. I really got into his stories and the characters he wrote about. It was a really sad day for me when he quit writing. The link is still in my bookmarks, many years later.

The other was by a woman named (at least on the net) Tracy Lee. She was a photographer, wife and mother. I followed her story until she stopped writing it, around the time her husband graduated from law school.

Those were the two that I read consistently for the longest period of time, but I read others as well.

For a while I read the journal of a lady who was fighting cancer. Ultimately, she lost. Bob Clay and I were so touched by her story that we wrote a song about it.

Later I came across and followed another person’s struggle with cancer. I was sad when her son posted that she had lost her battle.

Heck, I even wrote a five day journal about the last time I saw my mother alive.

So I’m all about journals and the beauty of the personal word. Because they are written from the outside in, journals are generally more powerful on a personal level than blogs.

When blogging, you are writing not from the outside in, but from the inside out. You are adding your voice to a series of conversations about the topics that interest you. It is, by definition and by design, a communal experience.

In other words, while it’s possible for one person, with no interaction with others, to write a journal, I don’t think you can say the same about a blog. Blogs require the interaction that comes from links, comments and cross-blog dialog.

Which mean, simply, that blogs require at least some readers.

And that is why defining your audience is so important. To attract readers more effectively, we need to figure out who were are writing to. Maybe it’s just your friends and family, maybe it’s people who share your hobbies and other interests. Maybe it’s both.

The group can be narrow or fairly broad, but once we define who we’re writing for, we can begin to test our ideas for stories and topics against what we know about our target audience. Because blogs are no different that any other product or service, the more you please your customers, the more customers you will have.

Second Opinion: Rodolfo Segleau on Blogging

Rodolfo Segleau, a former Houstonian now living in Costa Rica, takes a look at my Five Steps to Good Blogging and how they relate to his blog.

Yawn of the Dead: Ask Tries to Become Relevant

I am profoundly underwhelmed by all the buzz Ask is getting lately.

So they canned Jeeves. Good, that whole shtick was silly from the get go.

Gary Price, Ask’s Director of Online Information Resources (which may one day join Plaxo Privacy Officer in the job name hall of fame), has a good summary of why Ask thinks it can become relevant. Gary admits that Ask is a work in progress, but sets forth some things that he believes will give Ask an advantage in the search engine sweepstakes.

Granted, some of that stuff, like the answer engine concept, is interesting. But Henry Blodget nailed it again today when he set forth his version of one of my core themes:

My theory about the search business, moreover, is not that “users will immediately switch to the best search engine,” but that users will use whatever search engine they are used to using–unless the gulf between that search service and the leading search service becomes so great that it cannot possibly be ignored.

Chris Sherman has nice things to say about the new look, feel and performance, but the fact remains that Ask has a small market share in a pretty mature space.

I’ll give Ask a try, but from where I sit, I don’t see the revolutionary advance it would take to get significant user migration.

TIVO Deathwatch: Money for Nothing and the TIVOs are Free

nailcoffin I haven’t written in a while about my beloved and soon to be obsolete TIVOs. Recall that TIVO was number one in my Top 50 Gadgets list, but that I believe DirecTV for all intents and purposes killed TIVO when it abandoned TIVO in favor of its own digital recorder line.

Since then, TIVO has been floundering around trying to hook up with the old enemy, the cable companies, while making a deal a day or so in the hopes that one of those deals will be the lifeline it so badly needs.

Today I read another story indicating that TIVO may give its boxes away in order to gain subscribers (I sure am glad I paid a grand a piece for our three HDTV TIVOs so I can use them to prop open our doors).

TIVO’s plan is to give the boxes away in exchange for either a higher monthly fee (in which case, they really aren’t giving them away- they’re merely entering the rent-to-own business) and/or a longer contract.

Here’s the great, big obvious problem with that: how does the customer know that the box it gets will be compatible with the television service for the duration of this longer contract?

Rewind a year or so. If I’d know when I chunked down three large for my HDTV TIVOs that a few months later (a) DirecTV would dump TIVO and (b) DirecTV would move to MPEG-4, making my boxes little more that expensive door stops, I probably wouldn’t have bought them. Having experienced that little slice of gadget bliss, why in the world would I sign anything resembling a long term contract that might require me to pay for service that no longer works with my television provider?

What’s to keep the cable companies from doing what DirecTV did and dumping TIVO in favor of their own boxes? And even if they love TIVO, what happens when someone they don’t love or view as a competitor buys TIVO?

I would love to figure out a way to keep using TIVOs forever, but under the current state of affairs, I don’t see a safe and cost efficient way to do that.

It a shame, because TIVO brought life changing techology into lots of homes.

Origami: Will it Walk the Walk?

I tried hard not to write about the latest rumor craze in the blogosphere, I really did. But I failed.

I failed because it’s starting to dawn on me that, notwithstanding the dazed and confused manner in which Office Live was ramped up and released, Microsoft may actually have a marketing plan. Well, at least Scoble and the boys better hope they do. Because Microsoft is talking the talk about Origami. And after all this, if it turns out to be much ado about nothing, Microsoft might be about to set off one gigantic bozo implosion.

Everywhere you look today, someone is writing about what Origami is or is not. Scoble, who presumably knows, hints that it’s something Tablet PC-like.

The Buzz

The official Origami web page, in a goofy 2001: A Space Odyssey way, implies some sort of portable, hub-like, device.

John Markoff of The New York Times says there’s a video out there indicating that Origami is a hand-held, wireless touch-screen computer.

Some folks have suggested that it might be a media player aimed at the iPod market. Personally, I would love it, as long as it wasn’t hostage to DRM and other RIAA foolishness.

My Wish List

What I would really love to see is a device smaller than a Tablet PC and larger than a smart phone or iPod, that would allow you to play music files, access the net, take pictures, take notes (assuming they can actually get handwriting technology to work like it’s supposed to), synchronize all of that data with your desktop, and serve as a wireless modem for your laptop. Roll that out with some sort of national wireless broadband service and you’d get instant traction.

But There’s Risk

So here’s the thing Microsoft, you’ve built the buzz. You’ve got people interested.

You’re talking the talk.

Just make sure that when you finally pull up the curtain that whatever’s behind it can walk the walk.

Otherwise cover your ears, because the explosion, both bozo and blogo, will be loud.

Steve Rubel’s Social Media Tour Set

Steve’s Social Media Tour, which I talked about the other day, has been set. Here’s the schedule.

What a great way to knock down some gates. Candidly, I don’t understand why this isn’t getting more run in the blogosphere. People complain because A-Listers allegedly won’t give links, and here’s one giving interviews (and links, mind you) for 12 straight hours on a first come, first served basis.

If a few other A-Listers did stuff like this, all of the gates would fall.

Here’s the Technorati link numbers for the people who get tour stops:

53
182
109
4
6
1
34
1
60
112
73
9
14

Lots of people, including me, have had lots to say about all the gatekeeper business. Now it’s time to give credit where credit is due.

I’ll be covering this earth flattening event, and am looking forward to reading and hearing what Steve has to say, and ask.

I’m going to do what I can to help Steve open the gates a little, and I hope others will think about what they can do as well.

Mapping the Technorati Genome

Improbulus, one of my favorite bloggers, is trying to map out the Technorati genome and cure the indexing problems that she and others, including me, have experienced at one time or another.

Reading her post got me thinking about Technorati and the challenges facing it as it becomes the backbone of the blogosphere. Nothing in this post is in any way a criticism of Improbulus- she is only addressing her version of the issues I have already faced and wrestled with. These are just my current conclusions based on my experiences and what I have read about those of Improbulus and others.

I’m certain someone at Technorati will get her indexing problems worked out, because they always do. Granted, their email support is not going to win any awards, but the problems generally get fixed and Dave Sifry takes an active role in identifying and responding to problems.

Dave and Craig Newmark are carrying the banner as far as hip and proactive CEOs go. If I were some young guy just getting started, this blog would be devoted to convincing one of those guys to hire me. Proactive and involved CEOs set the tone for the entire company (I’ll write more on this another time).

Though I’m not on the payroll, I am still the self-appointed customer evangelist for Technorati. As such, I have to believe a couple of things where Technorati is concerned:

1) The engineers behind their hardware and software have had to deal with scale, both rate and amount, in a big, big way. That simply cannot be completely planned for and there’s simply no way to do it without hiccups and interruptions along the way. I remember the deluge of scaling problems we had when we first went live with ACCBoards.Com and our scale then was a drop in the ocean compared to what Technorati is facing.

2) Given the foregoing, they are doing one hell of a job keeping things running, improving reliability and adding new features.

3) Technorati continues to be, by far, the most accurate at finding tagged content, inbound links and other information bloggers and blog readers want and need. I use Google Blog Search and Technorati to search for content and to monitor my inbound links and mentions. Technorati does a better job, hands down. It shows more content faster than Google or any other search engine or database I’ve tried.

So while I have blogged here many times about the problems I’ve had getting indexed and while those problems are very frustrating at times, Technorati is doing about as much as can be expected given the enormous task it has undertaken.

Technorati is still a baby company. There’s lots to be done, but on the whole I’m pretty impressed with what they’ve accomplished so far.

And Dave, while you’re here, how about hiring that new spokesman I recommended?