Democracy in Media

Switching from Bloglines to Google Reader

I’ve been using Bloglines since the beginning of 2005 to manage all of my feeds. I switched momentarily to Rojo, but I still found Bloglines easier to use when it came to reading a lot of feeds quickly.

But Bloglines continues to frustrate. It routinely locks up and performs abysmally when it loads a long list of feeds. I often spend a few minutes waiting for some script to finish breaking before I can continue to scroll. I’ve now tried Google Reader for 24 hours without problems. It’s just as simple to use for large numbers of feeds as Bloglines.

I’m done with Bloglines.

Marc Andreessen’s Blog

….has motivated me to resuscitate this blog (yet again), especially this post about productivity. The truth is that I actually enjoy blogging. I typically write up articles that I want to post and then I leave them for editing and never wind up posting them. They then get stale and wind up in the dustbin. But the biggest problem is time. With CozmoTV and kids, blogging feels like a fifth job and all too often just gets bumped. Anyway, here we go again, we’ll just have to keep trying…

Clearwire or Someone like them is Going to Make a Fortune

Clearwire is getting a cautious coverage in the press. Nobody is singing their praises, but nobody really wants to bet wrong on McCaw either. But whether Craig wins or loses is pretty irrelevant to me. What it does mean is that the era of ultrafast wireless is starting. Craig is betting that it is a market already waiting for a solution, but even if he is early, he’s not early by much. Wireless broadband is going to be huge. 

Whether it’s a big centralized technology like WiMax or a Wi-Fi type network that is meshed and decentralized, wireless broadband is how the vast majority of consumers will access the Internet in 15-20 years (maybe even 10 as Clearwire is probably betting). It’s just cheaper to upgrade the network and keep pace with exponential growth of the underlying technologies.

And if the primary information devices are going to look like the iPhone or some derivative, wireless is foundational. I think Clearwire will probably not be a huge success, but even its failure will attract enough investment that someone will get it right. Whomever wins in this market is going to win very big.

Facebook and the Illusion of Privacy

I was going to write this post a few weeks back, but time just got away from me. Facebook came out with a service (News Feeds) that essentially scraped data from all your relationships in order to give you a personalized daily briefing of your social network’s activities. This is a very cool solution to the issue of information overload, especially when you start managing so many friendships. But, the user community revolted and drove Facebook back to the drawing board.

The primary complaint revolved around the invasion of privacy (even though the data assembled was about people with which you already had relationships). I’m sure this was pretty surprising to Facebook and a clear demonstration of the need to consult with your community before doing such large scale updates. But on the central theme of privacy and people’s desire to maintain it, some interesting developments are occurring.

Whether people like it or not, personal privacy is evaporating. Between the digital trails we leave online to our increasingly videoed, photographed, and otherwise documented physical movements, the world is becoming a very public place for anyone that knows how to ask the right question. Facebook was just showing people the power of the technological tools that any good coder already has at his disposal (and frankly, it was just a hint).

This type of assemblage of data, across all your activities is already occurring at an astounding rate. As this technology gets into the hands of more people, the ability for the average individual to really maintain any level of privacy that has been traditionally expected will go the way of the teletype. Facebook’s failure to successfully launch this service notwithstanding, similar services are going to start proliferating in the very near future.  And they will frankly be much more powerful and pervasive in their scraping abilities.

Accepting this as a probable reality will start helping us deal with the outcomes of this trend and start demanding equal access to all information, especially from places like the US Government (thanks, Obama). We are already living in a very public world and it’s about to become virtually transparent whether we bitch about it or not.  And to be honest, I'm not sure that that's a bad thing...

UPDATE: I just went over to TechMeme and noticed that Wired has a pretty good roundup of the same issues.

Gotta Love Mark Zuckerberg’s Authenticity

This shit is classic…

From The Wall Street Journal…

During one series of talks with Microsoft, Facebook executives told their Microsoft peers they couldn't do an 8 a.m. conference call because the company's 22-year-old founder and chief executive, Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, wouldn't be awake, says a person familiar with the talks. Microsoft executives were incredulous.

In an interview, Mr. Zuckerberg declines to comment on any talks. The young entrepreneur says he generally works late -- he recalls eating French fries recently in the parking lot of a local McDonald's restaurant at 3 a.m. -- and doesn't get to work early. "I'm in the office at 10:30 a.m. sometimes," he says.

Why Mark Cuban is Way Off Base with YouTube

Mark Cuban loves to beat up on YouTube. The main focus of his argument is that YouTube is a modern day Napster, steeped in the dark art of copyright infringement and ready to die a painful litigious death. But Mark has it very very wrong. Doubt about the extent of YouTube’s liabilities will certainly depress the price an acquirer is willing to pay, but it certainly isn’t the company’s death knell.

YouTube hosts and streams copyrighted content. No argument. But unlike the Napster days in which there was no evidence that this type of large scale ‘piracy’ actually helped distribution, today the signs are everywhere. Even the marketing departments of most major studios understand this when they upload their own copyrighted material to the site. But YouTube is, in its essence, a massive syndication platform for content. YouTube is not about monetizing this content directly; it’s about getting tons of people to watch a video clip at the lowest cost possible.

This type of massive low-cost syndication of low-quality streamed content is less than a year away from becoming the de facto launch strategy of professional and amateur content alike. While the lawyers may not understand this yet, the marketing guys certainly do. When content owners begin taking down copyrighted materials from YouTube, they become less culturally relevant. Has Jon Stewart’s relevance and consequent profitability to the studio declined as a result of his frequent free appearances on YouTube?

While I don’t have a great deal of confidence in the intelligence of the studio system, the positive impact YouTube is having on the distribution and relevance of quality television programming is soon going to become incontrovertible. Recent deals with Warner are the first indications of this effect. YouTube is quickly being woven into the fabric of a new video marketing and distribution model. The tearing of quilt is not in anyone’s interests, least of all the studios. This is simply about negotiating leverage in the fight over in-stream and localized ads (which I would argue will be minor compared to other revenue sources, but hey, they don’t know that yet.)

I didn’t write about YouTube’s compliance with DMCA rules (which it is almost certainly adhering to as rigorously as possible) because it’s almost irrelevant. This is all about money and value creation and who’s going to capture what kind of value when YouTube starts making real money (if ever). YouTube is where cultural memes are born and raised. And that, Mark, is a very valuable place to sit.

What the Apple iTV is Really All About

I’ve read a bunch of posts on the iTV announcement by Apple over the past couple of weeks. The posts have ranged from rhapsodic adoration of everything Apple to complete dismissal that anyone would pay such a price for a simple media extender. But I think it you look more deeply into what is going on here, the strategy of Jobs and company actually becomes quite clear and very compelling for the average consumer.

If you look at the iPod, it is essentially a portable mass storage device with an OS and display. You might only be able to display video at low resolutions on the device, but there is no reason why you cannot store high quality (or even HD) video on that hard drive. The iTV unit is Wi-fi (and likely USB) equipped such that it can stream video from a Mac to the TV. But really, all Steve has to do is add Wi-fi to the iPod and he can begin streaming high quality video from an iPod to the iTV (and even more reliably with wireless HDMI or similar technology).

In other words, the iPod becomes the remote by which you surf through your locally stored video content and then select for playback on the TV. Now, this solution doesn’t provide for playback of broadcast TV (which I think is a big problem), but nonetheless provides a very simple mechanism for replacing you universal remote with an iPod and your entire home theater set-up with an iTV. This is the type of simplicity everyone is looking for and that Apple is so good at delivering.

I think this type of set-up will occur within the next 12 months and will begin to put enormous pressure on cable, satellite and IPTV players. If they succeed, they become one of the first viable closed channel alternatives to studio distribution through existing MSO gatekeepers. I think Apple is going to eat their lunch very quickly. The response by the MSOs that want to survive will be to open their devices up in a way that Jobs seems pretty unwilling to do. It is their only strategy for continued relevance, but it is simply the lesser of two evils.

Apple is going to usher in the age of disaggregation between content owner, pipe and device in a way that is going to be very profound. Look for Microsoft to be a fast follower with the Zune (which will find limited success in the music market but fertile ground in the video market). The balance of power between open and closed distribution is being heavily distorted by a very talented dude. My hats off to Jobs for being able to bend the market in his favor, years after his strategy should have fallen apart. But it won’t last forever, Steve, it won’t last forever…

Blogging Again...

Blogging is Like Going to the Gym... It’s something I know I should do (and want to do); I just seem to have trouble finding the time to sit down and blog. Anyway, just like the gym, it’s great to be back and blogging again.

Scientology Video = Nowhere to Hide, For Anybody

Before all this social media stuff started, it used to be pretty easy to hide behind walls and establish public perceptions. You simply blocked out the mass media and retained tight control over the flow of information within your organization. Companies did it. Organizations did it. Religions did it. But all of a sudden, it doesn’t take reporters with rich budgets to break a story. It can be a single guy with a hidden camera or an individual with a blog or a trail of information searchable by Google.

The Scientology videos that have been popping up on YouTube, Google Video and the like are a reminder of how fundamentally different the “media” of today operates. As control and production shift to the edge, retaining control over information flows will become increasingly difficult and eventually impossible. It’s my personal view that this process is the key to resurrecting the democratic ideals of this country. And as much as I like my privacy, the erosion of these boundaries won’t stop at institutions. It will flow all the way down to the individual. Privacy will become a thing of the past, but it’s a trade off I’m willing to take for transparency throughout the entire system. I just don’t see any other way.

The Problems with “An Inconvenient Truth”

First of all, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is a fantastic movie. There are a few graphs that will haunt you (at least if you believe the film is mostly accurate) and a few scenes that should have you looking at the world a little differently (I keep thinking what San Francisco would do with the Embarcadero under about 10 feet of water). It also shows you how little production polish is needed to convey a message powerfully. But that being said, I have two major gripes…

First of all, I was pretty dismayed by the call for action at the end of the film.  The film conveys that this is an immediate problem that requires revolutionary thought and action (the urgency of which I think few people were aware of walking into the film). I expected an equally compelling call for action… but what did we get? A call for individuals to conserve?!? To ride a bike instead of drive?!? This is the same tired message that environmentalists have been touting for decades and it has never worked.

Individuals don’t act on this issue because you’re asking them to make difficult sacrifices without any guarantee of others doing the same. It’s like telling someone that they must go on a diet to lose weight, but the results of their diet depend directly on the actions of everyone else in their neighborhood (or in the world). You might eat carrots for a month, but if Bob your neighbor’s been drinkin’ a six pack of Bud every night… well, sucks to be you. It’s all just too difficult and indirect. Hell, this was one of the primary complaints about Kyoto. Hey, what difference does it make if we follow this protocol and China doesn’t?

The only way to coordinate the activities of millions (actually billions) of people is through coordinated government intervention. Conservation is part of the message, but it must be coordinated conservation if it is to work, especially I the time frames that Al is talking about. And the only way you can really ensure coordinated conservation is to pass laws that clearly establish penalties for bad behavior and rewards for good behavior. A carbon exchange (as well as exchanges for other greenhouse gases) seems like the best I’ve heard and at least worth a shot. But asking Bob to quit driving his SUV on the off chance that everyone else in the world decides to do the same… Good luck, it just won’t happen fast enough. And it’s not even worth clouding the message with such a comical suggestion.

(BTW, the carbon exchange would probably also result in some welcome side benefits such as massive investment in technologies that could reverse current greenhouse gas emissions. Make anything profitable enough and people will find a way. After all, we don’t just have to curb current emissions; we have to fix the damage already done.)

Anyway, the point is that there should have been a nice simple message. “We’ve come up with a great piece of legislation (I think Gore knows how to do this). This piece of legislation does X, Y, and Z. (Again, the greenhouse gas exchange would be a good start). If you believe that this global warming thing is real and a big problem, tell your local congress people that they must vote for this piece of legislation. Get your friends to write the same letters. Don’t try to run for office (another suggestion in the film); you won’t win (98% of incumbents are reelected; it’ll simply take too long to change the composition of Congress). Just get everyone, including the company you work for, to put pressure on your local representatives to pass this specific piece of legislation.” No lifestyle change, no impossible diet, just a nice simple message that is easy to remember and relatively easy to execute on.

My second gripe is why the hell Al decided to distribute this film the way he did. Again, nothing revolutionary about that abysmal strategy. I mean, Gore started Current TV, right? He supposedly understands this whole new media business and the power of individuals to spread the message. And he opens his movie on 77 theater screens!?! This movie is not about making a profit; this movie is about getting the message out. Why would he possibly open this film on such a small collection of theater screens?!? He got tremendous press buzz leading up to release and the buzz is now beginning to fade right as the film is finally reaching a decent number of screens. It’s like he’s tried some terrible hybrid release strategy; borrowing from old release timetables and new viral marketing techniques. “Hey, let’s try to grow the film virally, but make it extraordinarily difficult to find and watch.” This isn’t a new nightclub or a Sidekick 3, this is supposed to be a call to action.

Gore should have released this film as a high quality download via the Current TV website, climatecrisis.net, an-inconveneint-truth.com, etc... He then should have published a low quality version for free with every major streaming video platform available (YouTube, Google Video, Brightcove, etc.) Include a link with all of these videos back to the high quality version at Current. If he wants to make some money for charity, solicit money for versions of the movie as DVD and sell right through Current or Amazon, or whatever. Release in theaters at the same time, you’ll still sell the same number of tickets (probably more). Whatever you want on the theater side, just get massive Internet syndication working as quickly as possible.

Remember Al, time is of the essence.