The New York Times launched today an expanded version of its online tech news section that reflects a savvy mix of traditional newspaper coverage and top-notch blogging. First, blended in with the Times' own reportage are online-only publications including Rafat Ali's paidcontent.org and IDG's publications (Computerworld, Infoworld, Macworld, PC World).
The selection of these two resources seems perfect for the newspaper of record. Paidcontent.org's writers, starting with Rafat himself, and IDG's collection of great trade reporters are solid, unassuming but nonetheless widely read scribes that obsessively and accurately document the development of everything from computers to government policy.
More interestingly, the section includes a new column called "Technology Headlines from Around the Web," which features relevant blog entries from hundreds of bloggers. The section, which has been called a Techmeme killer (although Techmeme is still better for tech junkies and bloggers), is populated both by technology and editorial choice.
The technology part is an automated algorithm developed by Philippe Lourier, the developer of Blogrunner, a content aggregation company bought by the New York Times last year. But Blogrunner's editors also scan the web for good stuff and monitor the selections for relevance. It's the best of both worlds.
Even cooler: unlike many newspaper web sites, the new NYT tech section links directly to the outside sources, rightly unfearful that readers will wander away and never come back again. On his bits blog, Saul Hansell, who is responsible for the revamping, writes:
We link off directly to other sites that we have no relationship with. We link equally to mainstream media and small blogs. Our job is to help people find the good stuff fast, both what we write and from others.
As an aside, I've noticed over the past couple of weeks an increased flow of traffic to this site from Blogrunner, which I thought was odd. Now I understand why because IP Democracy is one of the sites that pops up in the new section.
Also, Steve Rubel tweeted about the new section around one o'clock today, before the official announcement went out. So Twitterers (?) had word of the new section before anybody could blog about it.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:35 PM | Print | Comments (0)With all the excitement that web-delivered video generates, the vast majority of people still watch plain old multichannel TV. And the most interesting development in the plain-old-TV-service world is that the phone companies are doing a remarkable job at giving cable operators a run for their money.
Based on the Q3 07 numbers for the top four U.S.-based telcos, the phone companies continued to accelerate their video gains during the past quarter, although not quite as strongly as you might expect. During the quarter, the four telcos combined added 576,000 video customers, up from the 300,000 net new video customers gained during the year-ago quarter and up by 10,000 over Q2 07 levels.
The big gainer was, of course, Verizon, which added a net 202,000 FiOS TV customers during the quarter, ending Q3 07 with 717,000 of the fiber-based video customers, representing 15% of all homes capable of buying FiOS TV.
Even though AT&T and Verizon posted big gains from their FTTx initiatives, all the telcos continued to gain ground through their DBS partnerships -- AT&T added 140,000 net new DBS video customers during the quarter while Verizon gained 85,000 new DirecTV-affiliated customers. No wonder, then, that AT&T is rumored to be in the midst of buying EchoStar's Dish Network.
Unfortunately for the cable industry, there are few signs that this telco video growth will cool anytime soon. AT&T and Verizon continue to steadily expand their fiber-based video footprints and add bells and whistles that make telco TV attractive. Just today, Verizon announced it plans to expand the number of HD channels it offers up to 150 in 2008.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:33 PM | Print | Comments (0)
In a move that was all but expected, a group of consumer advocates and scholars have asked the FCC to force Comcast from mickeying with its customers' ability to fully using file-sharing applications such as BitTorrent. The Open Internet Coalition along with professors at the Internet practices of the Yale, Harvard and Stanford law schools are among the parties that contend that Comcast's efforts to delay the uploading of P2P files is a violation of the FCC's own policies.
Free Press and Public Knowledge are separately asking the FCC to demand a "forfeiture" from Comcast of $195,000 per affected subscriber, an amount double the typical fine because of what the groups contend are Comcast's deception in implementing its P2P practices without letting customers know beforehand.
The FCC's policies, as articulated in the famed "Four Freedoms," give consumers the right to access content and use applications of their choice but also give broadband providers the right to implement "reasonable" network management. Comcast contends that if it doesn't put some restrictions on P2P sharing, the network will crawl to a halt.
This is one of the first full-fledged test cases of network neutrality, and it could be a great one. At issue is the tension between unfettered Internet access on the one hand and the imposition of constraints that maintain the integrity of the network on the other hand. More specifically, the FCC is being asked to judge whether Comcast's P2P management practices are worth the price of limiting some users' abilities to use some applications.
It could very well be the case that Comcast (and every other broadband service provider) is justified in delaying P2P uploads. But the operator might now have to explain in detail what the threats of P2P are and how and why its technology is warranted.
Although Comcast may understandbly be reluctant to spill the beans on what it considers to be a security and network safety issue, history is replete with examples of network operators claiming the need to maintain network integrity as a reason for thwarting unwanted rivals (think AT&T and MCI). P2P applications aren't exactly rivals to Comcast or any other network provider, particularly given that Comcast isn't delaying downloads of videos, but something like Joost, premised on P2P technology, might someday pose a threat to Comcast's TV-based video service.
In any event, the FCC will likely do nothing about the petition. For one thing, there are no specific rules in place that Comcast has violated, merely "policy" goals. For another, the current Commission is more reluctant than usual to take up causes that it hasn't itself instigated. Markham Erickson, Executive Director of the Open Internet Coalition, said in a statement that "we hope the FCC will back up its policy statements with immediate action." That probably won't happen, but if it does, it's a good test case.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:11 PM | Print | Comments (0)
I haven't seen any good research on the issue, but I would suspect that the vast majority of Internet users have only the vaguest sense that most web sites, online applications and search engines track massive amounts of detailed data about their online activities. The goal of this data analysis is usually to deliver up targeted advertising that comports with the users' interests.
But this so-called behavioral analysis bugs a lot of people. Even though most web companies use the tracking data on an anonymous basis, a lot of consumer groups fear that no one is minding the ship to make sure that the anonymous tracking doesn't slip into personally identifiable treasure troves of information.
Yesterday, a coalition of consumer advocates asked the feds to set up a mandatory do-not-track list for the Internet that would, more or less, function the same way that the telephone do-no-call list works. This public call for action preceded an FTC symposium on behavioral targeting and privacy, which started this morning and will last through tomorrow. (Webcast of the event is here.)
The FTC meeting features a who's who of the Internet and consumer protection worlds, along with a number of leading academicians who study web-based privacy matters.
All this activity follows some big moves in the online advertising business, kicked off by Google's deal to buy DoubleClick and Microsoft's countermove to buy aQuantive. With that much tracking power consolidated into so few hands, it's only natural that privacy fears are on the rise.
Yet, unlike the telephone do-not-call initiative, this is not a consumer-spurred issue. No one out there in Internet land is feeling any pain from all the behavioral targeting. In fact, it's usually just the opposite. More and more relevant, and therefore interesting, ads and content are getting served up to users. Users are simply not aware of what's going on behind the scenes, and, I would argue, probably don't care about the data collection and won't care about it until some nasty public incident reveals that online privacy is a tenuous thing.
Perhaps the FTC's meeting, combined with the pressure by consumer advocates, will foster greater consumer understanding that every keystroke they enter, every link they click, is tracked and recorded somewhere by somebody.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:15 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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