Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Putting Google’s capitalization in its place

by

Cory Doctorow is a brilliant science fiction writer and one of the most eloquent voices on the Net today arguing against corporate lock-downs of intellectual property. But in catching up on my RSS backlog recently I did trip over something of a whopper in the middle of an otherwise typically persuasive rant against an ill-advised digital rights management scheme (in this case, Google’s):

  Google’s really good at adapting to the Internet — that’s why it’s
capitalized at $100 billion while the whole of Hollywood only turns
over $60 billion a year.

This comparison is, as I’m sure Doctorow would admit, pure apples-and-oranges. “Capitalization” is a number you arrive at by taking a company’s current stock price — the last dollar amount that a buyer and seller agreed upon for a block of shares — and multiplying it by the “outstanding shares,” or total number of shares in the company known to exist.

Google is doing quite well, and its high stock price gives it all sorts of advantages, but there is no pile of $100 billion flowing through its coffers. Its revenue — what it “turns over” each year, the number of actual dollars flowing into its operations — is more like $4-5 billion. That’s impressive, but smaller by a factor of 10 than the number Doctorow cites for Hollywood’s gross revenues (I found $63 billion as the global revenue figure for American movie studios).

Capitalization is a purely theoretical number. In the case of companies like Google, much or most of the value of stock that adds up to $100 billion is not being traded. If all or most or even just some significant fraction of the holders of that value decided, “Hey, it’s time to cash in,” and sold at the same time, the share price would begin a quick slide, and the capitalization would evaporate. Revenue streams aren’t permanent either, of course, but they’re a lot more tangible.

Google’s high capitalization essentially means that investors believe its impressive profitability growth will continue. (Or maybe they just believe that it’s 1999 all over again and not buying would mean missing out on a new bubble.) One thing’s for sure: despite the company’s claim not to be focused on short-term results, its management must be acutely conscious of the need to keep that growth charging along.

Which, ironically, is probably why Google is beginning to lose its user-friendly footing and adopt the kind of unpleasant, user-hostile DRM schemes that inspired Doctorow’s wrath in the first place.

Furnace heat

by

I’ve always found that the music I love best, the music that stays with me through the years, is music that takes a little time to warm to. Songs that are instantaneously ingratiating are often quick to pale into boredom, but those complex enough to be initially off-putting reveal their appeal on third or fourth or fifth listen and become long-term infatuations.

Unfortunately, my life as a working parent these days does not leave as much room as it once had for third or fourth or fifth listens. And so sometimes I’ll check out a new band’s music and, if my auditory fancy is not instantly seized, I’ll put the CD or the files aside for months, even years. Frequently, this means I’ll miss the boat for an unconscionable length of time.

I certainly missed The Blueberry Boat. This album by the Fiery Furnaces was an indie-critical sensation when it came out in 2004. But the spectral nautical rambling of the album’s 10-minute opener, “Quay Cur,” didn’t grab me quickly when I brought it home, so it languished at the bottom of my pile, and I am only falling in love with it now.

It’s a collection of long story-suites (the band’s brother-and-sister creators, Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, have cited Who pop suites like “Rael” and “A Quick One While He’s Away” as influences) that hop restlessly from theme to theme, spitting off throwaway melodies and opaquely allusive, effusively articulate lyrics. The title track features an assault by pirates; “Chris Michaels” seems to tune onto the wavelength of a suburban gossip; “Mason City” takes snapshots of the 19th-century midwest from formal correspondence and railway company files; “Chief Inspector Blancheflower” seems to be a sort of Victorian policier unfolding in the mind of a bored typewriter-repairperson manque.

I hear fragments of everything from Phil Spector to Philip Glass in the mix; there are snarly-catchy guitar solos and even gospel flourishes (in the frantic “I Lost My Dog”). Some of Matthew Friedberger’s sound treatments hark back to the heyday of early Eno. (The fanfare at the start of “Mason City” sounds a lot like a sped-up outtake from Another Green World. And both Blueberry and Here Come the Warm Jets feature songs with “Paw-Paw” in their titles!) Other synthesizer flourishes fondly recall the bombast of the prog-rock era, though that label is one the Furnaces understandably do not embrace. One evening, when I turned up Blueberry Boat in my office, my wife shouted incredulously from the next room, “Wow — Emerson, Lake and Palmer?” Not exactly — but not crazy, either.

The followup to Blueberry, apparently a tribute to the Friedbergers’ grandmother titled Rehearsing My Choir, has gotten a colder critical reception. But before making up my own mind, I’m going to listen to it at least a half dozen times — as soon as I get the chance.

The buck(shot) stops where, again?

by

I am not and almost certainly never will be a hunter, and I am in no position to judge the finer points of what happened on the quail-hunting expedition on which Vice President Cheney shot and wounded one of his hunting companions.

But the dance of denial, finger-pointing and cover-up that followed the hunting accident? That’s something anyone can see for the poor behavior it is — part of a pattern of secrecy and buck-passing that seems to be deeply etched in this administration’s DNA. Cheney and his retainers chose not to inform the press or the country in a timely manner. Then they decided that — in what even this city kid can see is a thoroughly unsportsmanlike fashion — the fault lay with the unfortunate victim, rather than with the veep with the wayward shot.

But I wouldn’t know a covey from a coven, so don’t take it from me — go read the Austin American-Statesman outdoors columnist, Mike Leggett, who writes,

 

Be a man. You shot a guy.

That would be my unsolicited advice for Vice President Dick Cheney.

You shot a guy. At least stay in town until he’s out of the hospital.

You shot a guy. Don’t blame the sun or the wind or the rotation of the Earth. And for goodness’ sake, don’t blame Harry Whittington.

Crystal ball hazing

by

Back around the New Year I flagged for future comment this passage from a Wall Street Journal piece about what to expect in the year ahead:

  “The first thing to expect in 2006 is Google or Yahoo will buy a major content company — such as a movie studio,” says Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer at Publicis Groupe Media, a division of an ad holding company that seeks out advertising opportunities in new media. “At the very least they will do some similar combo with a studio where they buy a 10% to 15% stake, much like the way [Google] has structured its deal with Time Warner” to buy a stake in AOL. “What Google and Yahoo need is
content.”

With all the respect due to anyone who bears the title Chief Innovation Officer, I must say I find this forecast incomprehensible.

Google and Yahoo have both built fantastic businesses by not assuming the costly burden of paying people to produce content but instead (in Google’s case) leveraging the information everyone else on the Web creates in building links or (in Yahoo’s case) leveraging the content provided by other companies and the attention of the people who use its services. Both Yahoo and Google have prospered by not paying for content. Why would they want to change that? Why should they? For their own egos? Because Hollywood needs an exit strategy?

Now, it may irk me that Yahoo News, which employs a skeleton crew of editors to repurpose the efforts of editors and writers at other outfits, has become the traffic-king of Web-based news — or that Google News, which employs an even cheaper crew of algorithms, is another contender for the crown. Those of us who’ve labored in the trenches trying to produce real original Web content may well feel some sense of pained injustice at that outcome. On the other hand, it’s undeniable that first Yahoo and then Google saw and savvily exploited a gigantic business opportunity that we old-media transplants, with the “content is king” mantra echoing in our ears, missed.

So, while Yahoo is indeed gently dipping its toes into original-content waters, I will be very, very surprised if it dives in head-first and buys a movie studio or other old-school content producer in 2006. And I think the odds are even more fantastically against Google doing so. Google looks like they’ll be very happy for everyone else to keep producing content; the prize their eyes are on is serving as a central broker for the advertising that supports said content.

2006 has a long way to go, but it will be worth checking back ten months from now to see where we came out.

Land rush

by

Sure, you can revolutionize the real estate market by doing a mashup of data and maps to create a nifty tool that lets anyone find the market value (or a market value, anyway) of homes across the land.

Agents? We don’t need no stinking agents, do we? “There’s just one thing left,” Jeff Jarvis says — “scheduling visits and accompanying the buyers.”

But hold on a quick second with that revolution — before any of this can happen, your nifty, agent-disintermediating tool has to work.

Right now Zillow’s site has a big red notice that says “Site seems slow? Close your eyes and envision your perfect home — by then maybe the server can handle our zillions of visitors.”

The thing is, the site isn’t slow, it’s non-functional, as far as I can tell, a good two days after its unveiling. Every single search I’ve tried has resulted in a “We’re sorry. We encountered a problem performing this search” message.

Launching a complex new service isn’t easy, to be sure. Bt I’d have thought Zillow’s team would have known that every single home-owner within earshot of their URL would be pounding on their site the moment it went live (that’s in addition to all of the Web 2.0 geeks and the real estate pros).

Well, it may not work — but at least it’s still free!

UPDATE: Nick Carr, at least, appears to have gotten Zillow to work — but he doesn’t like the quality of the data he found there.

An announcement about Salon Blogs — and more

by

We started the Salon Blogs program three-and-a-half years ago, in July, 2002. Salon’s business wasn’t exactly thriving at the time, but we knew that there was an explosion of energy and creativity happening in the universe of blogs, and we wanted to figure out a way for Salon to participate. We lacked the resources to build our own system, so we partnered with Userland Software, which provided the software for users and took on the work of running the back end for us.

In charging a modest fee for our product, we were rowing upstream, since free alternatives were already available and would only grow more plentiful. Nonetheless, we were delighted and proud to see a smart little community grow under the Salon Blogs banner. Writers flourished; projects emerged; more than one book contract was obtained.

Still, 2006 is a whole different universe from 2002. Salon — today, thankfully, on a firmer financial footing — is beginning to explore some new ideas and approaches to the realm that business types call “user-generated content” (or, sometimes, “social software”), visionaries call “citizen’s media,” and old-timers like me still think of as “interactivity.”

I have the good fortune, and the challenge, of leading this exploration for Salon: this is the main focus of my work here, for now. As a lot of you know, I served as managing editor from 1999 until late 2004, when I took a leave of absence to write my book. It was the best job I’ve ever had — but five years is a long time to be managing anything, particularly during the roller-coaster ride of those particular years. Since last fall, Salon has been fortunate to have Jeanne Carstensen in the managing editor’s seat — and I get to go build some new things, which has always been my favorite role.

Since, among other possibilities, our new projects may involve a new approach to blogs, we’ve decided to stop taking new sign-ups for the existing Salon Blogs program. It doesn’t make sense to keep inviting people in that door. One big issue is that the Radio Userland software that the program is built around — and that I’m still using for this blog — turned out not to be the ideal tool for this sort of project. It installs easily, but long-term maintenance can be hard, since the program and all its data sits on your own hard drive. (This post by Paolo Valdemarin explores the topic further.) Radio had some very cool features ahead of its time, including a great built-in RSS-feed reader; but for many users those don’t outweigh the essential awkwardness of hosting all your blog data on your desktop machine. That model, whatever its strengths and weaknesses, is one that the world has moved away from, and Userland is putting more muscle behind developing other products.

Current Salon bloggers should not be alarmed (though I know some will be anyway). Your blogs will continue to live at the same Web address they’ve always had. You don’t have to do anything or change anything if you don’t want to. Userland has assured us that they’ll continue to run the blogs.salon.com server for you. The updates and ranking pages will remain in place, too.

You can keep blogging as you always have — we’re not shutting anything down. I imagine some current users will decide to look at alternatives; for those who decide they want to move their blogs, we and Userland will do what we can to help you with the transition. Or you may want to wait and see what Salon has to offer as this year progresses.

While we don’t yet know exactly what it will be — that’s part of the fun — if it attracts the sort of creative spirit that Salon Blogs has, we’ll know we’re on the right track.

(For those of you interested in the discussion about these new Salon projects, there’s a letter to readers up on the site now, and also a discussion in Table Talk — world-readable, but only Salon Premium subscribers can post.)

Google, Slate and the reality of COPA

by

With the news of its unwillingness to turn over large quantities of data to the federal government, the spotlight has been on Google all week: What exact information does the Department of Justice want, why is Google refusing to provide it, whose privacy might or might not be compromised?

These are certainly important questions. But the Google glare has obscured, in much of the coverage, the nature of the case that has caused this strange collateral damage — the proceeding that has been variously known through the years since its inception in 1998 as ACLU vs. Reno, ACLU vs. Ashcroft, and now ACLU vs. Gonzalez.

This case, a challenge to the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), has dragged on for so many years that even people who once perceived it with great clarity have succumbed to varying degrees of fuzziness around it. We start with the misleading name of the original law, which leads many people (and many reporters) to assume, wrongly, that the law has something to do with stopping child pornography.

It is, in fact, a law that, according to its proponents, is intended to keep more garden-variety forms of Internet-based porn away from kids’ eyes. That’s not a goal I object to, either as a journalist or as the parent of young kids (they’re six now, though they weren’t even born when this case started). Unfortunately, COPA adopted both a much broader definition of the kind of content it aims to restrict and a harsh set of criminal remedies. The law says that if you publish material that is “harmful to minors” and you don’t use a credit-card verification check to make sure that everyone who accesses the material is a grownup, you’ll face extended imprisonment, hefty fines or both.

Which leaves publishers like Salon, along with other publishers who are plaintiffs in the ACLU suit, wondering exactly where the government would draw the line: which articles about sexual mores intended for adults? which pages of sex-ed information intended for teenagers? Who are we supposed to trust to draw the line between gross, “harmful to minors” porn and legitimate, First Amendment-protected expression — John Ashcroft and his ilk?

The government playbook in this matter is to say to publishers like Salon that are not commercial pornographers, “Hey, don’t worry, relax, you’re not the target here.” We’re supposed to trust the Bush Justice Department’s interpretation of the law and ignore what the law actually says. No wonder every court that has considered this matter to date has sided with the ACLU and against the government.

All of this explains why my hackles went up when I read Slate columnist Adam Penenberg, in an otherwise sensible column about the Google/Justice dispute, describe COPA as a law that “required that adult sites implement age-verification policies.” Any reader of that description of the law who doesn’t know more about it will think, “What’s the problem? Shouldn’t adult sites require age verification?”

The problem is, that’s not what the law says. Penenberg’s description plays right into the government’s spin; by describing COPA this way, he’s making it sound like a perfectly reasonable statute.

I emailed back and forth with Adam about this today, and as far as I can tell he believes he hasn’t written anything inaccurate. It’s true that COPA does “require adult sites to implement age-verification policies”; but that’s an incomplete description that fails to explain to readers why anyone would find the law problematic. Say there was a new law that aimed to reduce street crime by enforcing a universal national curfew; you could decribe it as a law that “required all convicts to stay indoors at night,” and technically you’d be right, but you wouldn’t be helping anyone understand why people would find the law objectionable.

I’m zeroing in on one sentence here because, really, it’s the crux of the issue at stake in the case. The press seems to have a very hard time providing a simple, accurate description of what COPA is. (The original Mercury News report on the Google dispute also garbled its attempt to summarize the law.) By describing COPA this way, Penenberg is simply assisting the government’s effort to deceive people into thinking that this extreme law is really nothing to get upset about. That, you know, upsets me.

What journalists can learn from software developers

by

One result of the whole Washington Post comments debacle is that, as Jay Rosen puts it, “We’re going backwards in our ability to have a conversation with the Washington Post.” The Post circles its wagons against the barbarians; its online readers and critics storm off, convinced more than ever that the newspaper “doesn’t get it.”

The word “conversation” is at the heart of the ideals that so many of the brightest lights and most ambitious prophets of blog-era journalism embrace. It began this trajectory in the hands of the Cluetrain Manifesto‘s authors; today it represents the hope for a new kind of post-media world in which a vastly broader spectrum of voices can speak and be heard.

Observers for whom “blog” is synonymous with “political blog” are often skeptical of this vision, because the conversations in the political blogosphere have become so closed-ended, repetitive and intramural. Political blogging in the rigid partisan landscape of 2006 too often resembles the parallel enforcement of party discipline. (Yes, there are many exceptions, but it is sad that they are exceptions.)

But you can find exchanges today that model the possibilities of a post-media conversation — where the actors in a field talk directly to each other, engaging and challenging and correcting each other. One place you can find them is the software world. It certainly has its feuds and its entrenched patterns of provocative trolling (just drop an anti-Macintosh comment and watch the group-mind hive buzz on cue). But, in following this field, I’m amazed, day after day, to see rivals and competitors lace their barbs with friendly banter and honest efforts at persuasion, or to watch critics and their subjects take on the awkward but fruitful back-and-forth that can actually move readers a few notches closer toward the truth.

One little example from this past week: As the Post was shutting down its comments, a tech-industry blogger named Mike Arrington, whose TechCrunch has become a hot water-cooler for the Web 2.0 crowd, was posting a critique of Ning — the roll-your-own Web application factory backed by Marc Andreessen that launched in October. Arrington wrote, in Ning — RIP?: “The reality of Ning is that it’s lost whatever coolness it had, no one uses it and Ning is going to have a very hard time getting people’s attention when they finally do roll out better functionality.”

Diego Doval is a developer for Ning. Yesterday he responded to Arrington (I found the link via Dave Winer). The gist of his post is that Arrington basically got it all wrong — the facts and the spin. But Doval didn’t flame his critic; he just patiently walked through his points and thanked Arrington for inadvertently showing him and his company how much better a job it needs to do to get the word out about its product. Scroll down to the comments on Doval’s retort and the first one is from Arrington — thanking Doval for the great post.

Now just imagine how this sort of conflict would have played out if we were dealing with, say, a liberal blogger who mangled some facts and a conservative critic (or vice versa).

Of course, the emotions engendered by political debate are of a different order from those inspired by software development. But, you know, they’re not that different — there’s pride and ego and anger and passion about the future in both realms. What the software universe lacks (except, perhaps, on some old-line corporate campuses, in certain corners of the open source world, or in the extremes of Mac fandom) is the emerging tribal behavior patterns of the political blogosphere’s ideological camps. It’s a lot easier to have a real conversation when you aren’t looking over your shoulder at a crowd that expects you to toe a particular line.

Noises off

by

In turning off comments on a blog that it had recently opened as a channel for dialogue with its readers, the Washington Post today followed the same road that the L.A. Times went down last year when it shut down an experiment with wiki-based editorial reviews. Instead of grappling with the flood of input from their customers, these institutions are throwing up their hands and reasserting the one authority that they are most comfortable with — control of the mike.

The Post had been trying to contain a brewing controversy over a piece by its ombudsman, Deborah Howell, which enraged many readers by stating (incorrectly, as Howell eventually admitted) that Democrats as well as Republicans had received contributions from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. (It’s Abramoff’s clients that directed some portion of their cash toward Democrats, though the lion’s share seems to have wound up in Republican pockets.)

Post readers thronged the paper’s blog with complaining comments. Unfortunately, we can’t read those comments now and decide for ourselves whether the Post was right to turn them off — the paper didn’t just block further comments, it effaced the entire body of reader contributions.

CBS News blogger Vaughn Ververs reports that the many comments he read were angry or disrespectful and many called for Howell’s head, but they weren’t “hate speech” or explicitly personal attacks. Of course, maybe we never saw those: A “late update” to Post Web editor Jim Brady’s discussion of the decision suggests that Post editors were already pounding the “delete” key like mad, and getting tired.

What’s obvious is that, like the L.A. Times before it, the Post was sadly clueless about how to deal with the situation. If, in 2006, you’re an iconic media institution that’s seeking to give the public a platform to vent its disagreements and complaints, you should plan for a certain volume of problems. You should expect some disrespect. You should state what standards you intend to enforce, and you should have a plan for how you expect to enforce them.

Instead, we have the repeat spectacle of newspapers naively opening their doors — imagining, it seems, that they are going to have a little tea party with their readers — and then, shocked at the volume and the vitriol, slamming the same door shut again.

Ververs tries to lay some of the blame for the Post’s abrupt retreat at the users’ feet: “More than that, the news audience has been terribly served by a few loudmouths incapable of having a rational discussion….Real dialogue, after all, is a two-way street.”

I don’t doubt that there were a lot of obnoxious loudmouths posting screeds on the Post blog. But that’s a given, an inevitability. Hosting any kind of forum means taking measures to keep the loudmouths from swamping the rest of the speakers.

I wouldn’t expect newspaper editors to start out as experts in that difficult art. But it’s not too much to expect them to try to learn it — or simply to acknowledge that, if they want to host a dialogue, it’s part of their job.