Michael Arrington believes “Memeorandum is Changing the Web”. For those not familiar with it, the Memeorandum site has two sections, one covering politics, the other technology.
Memeorandum finds blog posts, newspaper articles and press releases that are being heavily linked to in near real time and puts them up on the site. The position and size of the headline is indicative of its importance (determined by number of links and other factors, such as how much people are writing about the linked content). The higher up and bigger the headline, the more important it is. And linking sites, the conversation, are clustered underneath the headline. This means you can find out in near real time what is important in technology (or politics), how important it is, and who’s talking about it…If I have limited time and I need to find out what’s going on, I turn to Memeorandum.
Like Arrington, I highly recommend the Tech section of Memeorandum. Though I haven’t spent much time on the Politics page, a question came to mind one day when I was looking for coverage of some political event. As I scanned the page’s listings, I wondered how Memeorandum’s ranking system deals with reported differences between the “conservative” and “progressive” sectors of the political blogosphere. According to a report by two bloggers from within the progressive camp:
Progressive blogs allow for greater interactivity with bloggers in their websites, including more comments, diaries, polls, requests for feedback, and chatting features that allow for the creation of communities within individual blogs…[while] Conservative blogs have a tendency to link to discussions on other blogs more often than progressive blogs.
If this is true, it makes me wonder whether Memeorandum’s ranking system is likely to favor one or another of these two blogging communities based on the different forms their respective “conversations” employ most intensively—the progressive sites relying more on intra-site dialogs, and the conservative sites making heavier use of inter-site links.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 7:07 PM | Print | Comments (0)
A John Battelle post on the battle for AOL is worth a read. (Battelle is author of a new book called “The Search, How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture”).
Following some insightful speculation as to the motives of Google and Comcast, Battelle concludes that:
This is a new game for Google, which has in the past pretty much set itself apart from the rough and tumble world of Big Bets Based on Business Strategy. My gut reaction to the news was that this was a bad idea - Google does not have the Media Player DNA, and in its core believes it should win through innovation, not dealmaking. This next stage of the company’s life should be very interesting to watch. My gut tells me that in the end, Google will get cold feet, mainly because the price (of either a deal or an acquisition) will be too dear, and AOL will fall to Microsoft, who will be willing to overpay. But watch Yahoo here, and Comcast - either one might decide to up the ante and change the game as well.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 6:31 PM | Print | Comments (0)
In a piece in today’s New York Times, John Markoff and Laura Holson shed some additional light of yesterday’s video iPod announcement by Apple, including Disney’s involvement:
Mr. Jobs…couched his presentation on Wednesday in the terms of a drama in three acts, starting with the introduction of a six-button remote control intended to make it possible to control video, audio and other functions on the newest version of the iMac computer. He later acknowledged in an interview that the remote might be used to control future Apple products, possibly heralding a strategic entry into consumer electronics for the living room.
Mr. Jobs’s second act was the portable video hardware…And the third act was the video source: Apple’s iTunes music store, which will add over 2,000 music videos, six short films from Pixar, and episodes of five television shows from ABC and the Disney Channel, including “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives.” Mr. Jobs said current shows would be available without commercials the day after they are shown on network television.
With regard to Disney’s involvement:
Toward the end of the event, Mr. Jobs introduced Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief, who said the Apple alliance reflected a Disney strategy of marrying content and technology…ABC shows like “Desperate Housewives” and “Lost” are already hits, and Mr. Iger is betting that children’s programming from the Disney Channel, including “That’s So Raven” and “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody,” will appeal to iTunes’ young customer base.
Analysts said Apple’s deal with Disney was significant because Disney had been the studio taking the strictest stand on copy protection in the digital era. The video offerings sold through iTunes will be encrypted with Apple’s own protection system, FairPlay, and while the system will permit backup copies, it will not allow the video to be transferred to a DVD for playing. And for an entertainment company looking to make an impact with a new video outlet, Apple’s player and online store were hard to match.
Update: USA Today reports that the Disney deal with Apple “earned a cool response from some of ABC’s affiliates - who weren’t told in advance that Disney would offer its most popular shows online.”
“We have a lot of questions,” said Young Broadcasting President Deb McDermott, a former head of the ABC Affiliates Board. “We want to be sure it doesn’t affect over-the-air viewing,” including reruns. She added that Disney’s willingness to distribute shows the day after they air “surprised me.”
“Of course it will erode ratings,” said Dene Callas of media buyer MediaCom. “It’s going to devalue the original” broadcasts as viewers use iTunes.” [But] Disney-ABC Television Group President Anne Sweeney argued that the deal could make the broadcasts more popular. “This is for people who are devotees of Lost and Desperate Housewives and missed a couple episodes,” she said. It may also bring in “kids who have heard about Raven and never experienced it.”Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 1:49 PM | Print | Comments (0)
As Cynthia noted yesterday, AOL, whose merger with Time Warner marked the peak of Web 1.0 inflated valuations, is now at the center of a potential realignment among industry giants, all of whom are jockeying for competitive advantage in the emerging world of Web 2.0. Its both ironic and significant that AOL, as Om Malik put it in a post advising Time Warner management not to sell off a controlling stake in AOL, is now the “Belle of the Ball.”
Though its too early to speculate how a potential bidding war for a stake in AOL will play out, one possible competitive scenario could feature two “grand alliances” between dominant players from the Internet, broadband-pipe and media sectors:
A Google-AOL-Cable Alliance that would include Google, AOL (including its Singingfish video search engine and the industry’s largest IM service), and Comcast and Time Warner, whose broadband pipes collectively pass roughly 60 million of the nation’s homes and have major investments and longstanding relationships in the content industry.
A Yahoo-Microsoft-Telco Alliance that would include SBC and Verizon, whose local broadband access networks pass roughly the same number of homes as Comcast and Time Warner, and who are aligned with Yahoo (and, in the case of Verizon, also MSN) in the delivery of broadband service, and whose IPTV services will be built on a Microsoft software platform. And, as IPD and others reported the other day, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to interconnect their IM services in a direct challenge to AOL’s dominant AIM service.
In addition to these major groupings would be Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which has recently been on a buying binge in the Internet space, and which controls a global network of satellite TV systems, including DirecTV in the U.S., along with a broadcast network, local stations and a wide array of content assets.
In today’s NYT, Saul Hansell quotes Jordan Rohan, an analyst with Royal Bank of Canada:
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” [Rohan] said. “I don’t think Yahoo fears Microsoft. There is no animosity between them at a corporate level. But both Microsoft and Yahoo are increasingly fearful of Google’s power.”
As Cynthia noted in a post today, an article in today’s WSJ looks at Comcast’s efforts to move from a broadcast to a broadband business model. And, for more on how an investment in AOL could make sense for Comcast, see this piece, penned a few weeks ago by Will Richmond of Broadband Directions.
Hansell suggests that:
Time Warner appears to be in no hurry to complete a deal. It hopes to pick from one of several deals, and the longer the public discussion about rival bidders, the greater the improvement to AOL’s value, people familiar with the company’s strategy say.
Given all the players and interrelated sectors involved, this deal, depending on how it evolves, seems likely to send major ripples (and perhaps a tsunami or two) through virtually every sector of the media, telecom and media industries. And, as previous mergers have done, it could also impact political alignments in Washington, at a time when Congress is considering a rewrite of the 1996 Telecom Act.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 1:03 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The European Commission proposed yesterday a new online music licensing scheme that could make it easier for companies to jump into the online music business in Europe. The Commission’s recommendation proposes the elimination of territorial restrictions for music licensing (there are 26 countries in the EU), but also allows rights holders to determine the territory of their choice if a pan-EU license doesn’t fit their plans.
The recommendation also includes provisions for governance of the EU licensing scheme, how disputes are settled and the accountability of collective rights managers.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:26 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The question has been posed to me several times over the past year: are bloggers journalists? My reply has always been: there’s no answer to that question. But I soon won’t be able to say that given the legal and legislative moves afoot that could lay down a bright line between the two sets of scribes.
U.S. Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) has sponsored a bill, The Free Flow of Information Act of 2005, that could distinguish between bloggers and journalists, granting the latter greater legal protection under a new federal shield law. According to Lugar, who introduced the draft legislation following the jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller, bloggers “would probably not” be covered by the law.
This simple distinction has alarmed many First Amendment activists because it could pave the path toward the licensing of journalists, a nasty practice found in other countries. Dan Gillmor puts it nicely:
We’re moving toward a system under which only the folks who are deemed to be professionals will be granted the status of journalists, and thereby more rights than the rest of us. This is pernicious in every way.
Dan also has a better solution to the problem of divining between journalists and bloggers, if indeed there is such a problem:
Plainly, what’s at issue — if protection is needed — is the act of journalism, not whether the person doing it is a journalist. We can all do acts of journalism from time to time. Most of us are not journalists except at those times. Congress is clueless, perhaps by design, on this issue.
In a bit of synchronicity, the Delaware Supreme Court last week managed to both protect the anonymity of online bloggers while at the same time dissing the new form of digital journalism. The court protected the anonymity of a blogger known as “Proud Citizen” in a defamation suit brought by a city councilman in Smyrna, Delware.
Yet, in making its decision, the court said:
[C]ertain factual and contextual issues relevant to chat rooms and blogs are particularly important in analyzing the defamation claim itself… chat rooms and blogs are generally not as reliable as the Wall Street Journal Online. Blogs and chat rooms tend to be vehicles for the expression of opinions; by their nature, they are not a source of facts or data upon which a reasonable person would rely.
Wendy Seltzer at Copyfight said that bloggers should not be offended by the court’s put-down.
I anticipate some bloggers will object to this characterization: Blogs can be just as important for the dissemination of facts as newspaper sites; newspapers can be wrong. This is of course true. The Cahill decision is not denigrating blogs and chatrooms — they are entitled to First Amendment protections as strong as those of a newspaper — but rather recognizing the discernment ability of their readers.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:22 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Peter Grant has a good piece in today’s Wall Street Journal that dovetails nicely with the Journal’s scoop on the joint bid between Google and Comcast for a minority share in AOL. Comcast, the nation’s top cable operator, is not, as it turns out, blind to the mounting forces that threaten cable’s dominance in the consumer video market, and CEO Brian Roberts is banking that the company’s unified IP-based platform can ward off the competitive threat.
Brian Roberts, the chief executive officer of Comcast, is betting he can replicate enough of these newfangled services to prevent cable subscribers from defecting. One big advantage is Comcast’s longstanding relationships with Disney, Viacom, Time Warner and other leading programmers. But he acknowledges that a major cultural shift is necessary. “We’re genetically re-engineering ourselves,” he says.
Even one year ago it was inconceivable that cable’s solid role in delivering video services could be usurped by the Internet, but now with the advent of Web 2.0 and the rapid migration of video, audio and even high-speed services to mobile platforms, programmers see new revenue streams in alternative platforms that bypass cable.
But advocates of new TV-distribution technologies question how long programmers will stay loyal to the cable giants. Offering programs and movies on the Web, which is open to all, will be “too compelling from a content owner’s perspective,” compared with being enclosed within Comcast’s proprietary system, argues Jeremy Allaire, founder of Brightcove Inc., a company that helps businesses put TV programs online.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:00 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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