Google Video and the Swaggartization of Tech Titans

Google is now admitting that it screwed up the much ballyhooed launch of Google Video by not adequately promoting all the great free TV shows that could be bought, downloaded and watched in a tiny box on your iPod or computer. Somehow things would have been different if all those free shows for sale had been pasted all over the Google Video homepage.

Well, friends, now there are links to Brady Bunch and I Love Lucy episodes right there on the homepage. Buy as many as you want for $1.99 a piece. Or you can tune into TV Land any night of the week and watch them on your TV for free.

There’s also a link to the CSI-Name any City show that anyone who cares has already seen. You can buy it and watch it for a whole day for $1.99. That’s right, a whole day.

But it’s just cooler to watch them on your computer. Right.

Steve Rubel points out that this is the week for tech titans to fall all over themselves admitting their mistakes and promising to do better. He also says that smart people knew all along that Google was blowing it. He cites an article from January 10 questioning the announcement and content of Google video. Steve must have missed my post of January 6 where I asked if anyone was going to line up to pay to watch repeats of boring NBA games and otherwise free TV shows on their computers.

I don’t think the homepage has all that much to do with it. I just don’t think anyone wants to buy much of what they’re selling. For this to get legs, there will have to be a lot of stuff there ain’t right now. Fat, cheap pipe; better hardware on the receiving end to manage; and enough content providers to let you cut the cable. Among other things.

I can see a modest market for downloadable, DRM-infested video courtesy of frequent travelers who need something to watch while on planes and in airports. I use Movielink for just that purpose. So while people might want to download something to watch on the plane or train, how many people will do that regularly? My guess: very few.

For one thing, it’s a little hard to watch a video on a laptop or iPod, even on a long flight. I know, because I sometimes watch movies on my Tablet PC on long flights. But more often than not, I end up turning off the movie and reading a book or sleeping. Plus, people don’t like to pay twice and all of us already have access to these shows via our TVs and TIVOs. Finally, how many long distance commuters (a) prefer watching I Love Lucy to sleeping, talking or staring out the window and (b) have the means and methods to find, download and play I Love Lucy on their iPods or laptops?

I’ll say it again: Other than the occasional lottery scam video, I just don’t get the whole downloadable video thing. Maybe one day, but not today.

I think someone’s trying to create a market for a demand that doesn’t exist.

Can the Web Be a Community?

Blogspotting asks today if the lack of a community mindset might make it hard for the citizen media movement to take hold in the sprawling metropolitan areas many of us live in.

The question originated from Amy Gahran’s conversation about whether the lack of a broad community mindset with respect to the Bay Area might have contributed to Bayosphere’s demise.

Amy makes some good points. One of them, via a conversation she had with a friend from the Bay Area:

My colleague, who lives in the Bay Area, observed that in that region there’s virtually no awareness of the Bay Area as a community. People there, he said, tend to be more aware of and engaged with their towns or neighborhoods, not the “Bay Area.”

I expect that sort of thing is true for a lot of people. I live in Houston, but not really. Although I live barely 8 miles from downtown, I live in a town called Bellaire. My kids go to school there. They play sports there. The places we eat and the places we shop are there. Most of our friends live there.

I care about Houston, but I care a lot about Bellaire.

But I think the internet and the citizen media that’s a part thereof should be looked at from a different angle.

When I read and talk about tech, music or current events, it is the opportunity to converse with people from all over the world that drives me to the internet. I think the internet in general and the blogosphere in particular have to develop community awareness around topics, as opposed to geography.

I read Dwight Silverman‘s blog every day. Not because he lives in Houston, but because he writes well on topics that interest me. Similarly, I read Ed Bott every day for the same reason, and I don’t even know where he lives. Many of the folks I converse with on a regular basis are from Canada or the UK.

So for me the question becomes can we build cross-blog communities (not to be confused with clubs where you have to be invited to join) based on shared interests? I hope so, but candidly I’m not sure.

I talked about message boards the other day and explained why I think they are still relevant. The main reason is because there is more immediate give and take on active message boards. There are actual conversations you can follow as they meander around the topic.

It’s harder to do that with blogs. A lot of times it seems like bloggers are just talking over or at each other. To converse you have to listen. I don’t know how we do it, but we have to figure out how to stop talking at each other and start talking to (and listening to) each other.

Otherwise we’re just noise.

ScobleFeeds A-Z: The O’s

This is part fourteen of my A-Z review of Scoble‘s feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

There aren’t many O’s, but I found a good one:

Overdo’s Land of Nothingness (RSS Feed)

Overdo’s Land of Nothingness is a tech/general interest blog, with a lot of Microsoft tech tips, beta coverage and stories.

Honorable Mention:

Om Malik on Broadband (RSS Feed) (ineligible because I like every other living human read it)

Google's China Game

So Google has agreed to censor its web search results in China. No Tiananmen Square, no independent Taiwan. No Gmail, no blogs.

It sucks that Google has to do this, but I think, all things considered, this falls on the right side of the OK line. Here’s why.

There’s definitely an OK line when it comes to ignoring basic rights in the name of global expansion. For example, I would be outraged if Google agreed to censor out stories about successful business women or members of a particular religion just to get some deal working in some far away country that doesn’t share our views about equality and religious freedom.

On the other hand, I don’t know that the Chinese people have voiced any desire to avoid reading about Tiananmen Square or Taiwan. To the contrary, they are being denied that right by the government. The top down origin of this restriction is, at least for me, the difference maker. While Google can’t allow its Chinese users to read about these things, it can give them something- a Chinese Google- they don’t already have. Maybe by becoming a player in the Chinese internet, Google can, over time, be a force for positive change.

Most of the efforts leading to this positive change will ultimately have to come from within China, not without. So I’m not bothered by Google’s decision to give the Chinese people something as opposed to nothing.

Plus, as Mathew Ingram points out, Google is not the first major U.S. internet player to make concessions in the name of Chinese expansion.

To get carried away and claim that this somehow represents Google’s transformation into Darth Vader is simply naive. Americans sometimes seem to believe that everyone has to start acting like us immediately and that anyone who doesn’t is, well, evil. That’s just not the way the world works. The important thing is to seek positive change and avoid going backwards. Google’s China game is certainly not a giant step forward, but being realistic and trying to work within the system is not going backwards either.

We can draw lots of lines in family discussions at the dinner table and in newspapers and blogs, but positive change sometimes requires compromise. Once you draw the wrong line, the conversation is over and the battle lost. At least this way Google lives, in China, to hopefully fight another day.

Are Message Boards Old School?

One of Tom Morris’s many good links today is a post at Learnandteachonline about how message boards have gone out of fashion. Let’s think about this a second.

The idea is that more web sites have become blogs or blog-like, inviting a more decentralized conversation. While I certainly agree with that, here are the big four reasons why I think message boards still have a place in 2006 and beyond.

1) Topics and messages on a message board are more clustered, which permits a faster and more immediate conversation. Faster because you can read and respond to many threads in a message board in a matter of a couple of minutes. More immediate because posters can and often do post a series of responses within seconds of each other. Take tonight’s loss by the formerly great Wake Forest basketball team to Florida State. Within seconds of the end of the game there were teens of topics and hundreds of posts at ACCBoards.Com about the demise of the Wake Forest basketball program. It would take a lot longer to get all of those points of view if they were spread out over several blogs.

2) Most people don’t know what a blog is and most of the people who know what blogs are don’t care about them. If I tried to move my traffic from ACCBoards.Com to some blog, I’d lose most of my traffic and all of my advertisers. There are simply more people who have the knowledge and inclination to visit and read message boards than blogs. This may change over time, but we’ve got a long way to go.

3) While interactivity at blogs is encouraged, it follows (both figuratively and literally) the content posted by the blogger. In other words, the blogger’s content is king at a blog, whereas everyone’s content is equal on a message board.

4) Non-posting readers (called lurkers on message boards) are far more likely to wander around a message board with thousands of posts on a particular topic than they are to surf from blog to blog and read maybe (on a great day) 100 posts on a topic.

I think greater interactivity has taken some traffic away from message boards since their heyday, but I firmly believe that message boards fill a related but separate need that will continue for years to come.

Technorati Tags: message boards

MPAA Pirates a Movie

The good old MPAA has been accused of, gasp, wrongfully copying a movie.

Director Kirby Dick’s This Film Is Not Yet Rated looks at the motion picture ratings system created and run by the MPAA. He submitted the film for rating in November and specifically requested that the MPAA not make copies of the movie.

After receiving the movie, it seems the MPAA subsequently made copies without Dick’s permission.

I wonder if the MPAA is planning on filing suit against itself.

Technorati Tags: mpaa, movies

In Other News, the Sky is Still Blue

blue
Yep, it’s still blue

Everyone is all a tither about this statement from Susan Decker, Yahoo’s CFO:

We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google. It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.

Steve Rubel says:

I have no interest in using a product that the company doesn’t aspire to make best of breed. If search is no longer hip to Yahoo, then Yahoo Search is no longer hip with me.

Steve, guys, what do you expect? Is is better for us and for Yahoo’s shareholders if Yahoo continues to tilt at the cyber-windmill by making the impossible a major part of its corporate plan?

Face it, no one is going to surpass Google as the internet search leader. I know, I know, I know- Google passed Yahoo and Alta Vista and HotBot (which was Google before Google) and all those other search engines not all that long ago, but the race is over. Betamax and LPs used to have the largest market share too. Should Sony/BMG make it a corporate goal to make LPs the new media of choice?

Of course not. The people who have to actually make the money have to be realistic. I think Ms. Decker’s statement is not only true, it shows that Yahoo is dealing with the what is, not the what was.

Rather than try to do the impossible, Yahoo should (a) buy Technorati right now, and then (b) follow Thomas Hawk’s Yahoo savings plan. Well, except for the TIVO part. I love me some TIVO too, but it’s dying on the vine thanks to abandonment by DirecTV and its deal-a-day approach to securing a lifeline.

Again, somebody tell me why Yahoo’s admission of the obvious is either surprising or disturbing?

Lessons from the Bayosphere

Dan Gillmor posted today about his experiences creating and trying to grow Bayosphere. He talks very frankly about the beginnings of Bayosphere, its successes, its failures and the conclusion that this well conceived and executed citizen media blog/website simply hasn’t worked as well as he’d hoped.

This is a must read for those who still believe I am wrong about the steep uphill climb faced by new blogs in 2006. I’m not saying this proves my point- it’s not about being right or wrong. I’m simply saying that if someone as well known and connected as Dan Gillmor can create something as good as Bayosphere, get the traffic Bayosphere gets and still conclude that it’s “obvious to anyone who’s paid attention, the site didn’t take off,” what does that say about the chances of a new blog created by some anonymous blogger without Dan’s reputation and experience?

Dan talked about his approach to community building:

We envisioned Bayosphere as a place where people in the San Francisco Bay Area community could learn about and discuss the regional scene, with a focus on technology, the main economic driver. My tech and policy blogging would be an anchor, hopefully attracting some readers and, crucially, some self-selected citizen journalists who’d join a wider conversation.

And the lack of collaboration:

Many fewer citizens participated, they were less interested in collaborating with one another, and the response to our initiatives was underwhelming. I would do things differently if I was starting over.

And, finally, the conclusion that I believe is telling for the potential new blogger:

The evidence strongly suggested early on that this was not likely to be a viable publishing venture for some considerable period without partnerships to bring in both readers and contributors.

Dan makes a lot of other excellent points about community building. Since any successful blog has to be, at least in part, a community, these comments are spot on for blog building.

He also talks about the tension between writing to communicate and the compromises that are required in the search for a profit. Again, all of this is part and parcel of the blogging vs business stuff I am so interested in.

Does this mean that growing a new blog is impossible? No, but it is an object lesson in how hard it is. And if it’s hard for Dan, it’s going to be harder for the rest of us.

More Discussion:

Darwinian Web
SiliconBeat
The Bay Area is Talking
JLuster.Org

More on the Battle for the Internet

David Isenberg has a good post on the network neutrality issue, that started out as a letter to one of the old media gatekeepers, on the battle for the future of the internet I talked about this past weekend.

He makes some very good points, but the one that really grabbed me is the following question: [Is] internet access a freedom, like freedom of the press, or a privilege that may be granted or withheld?

Clearly, the telcos want to couch it as a privilege they can parcel out (for a fee of course) to whichever web site will pay them the most money. The telcos want to play the role of traffic cop, directing people like you and me to certain websites by controlling the speed at which we go from where we want to go (slow) to where they are paid to direct us (fast).

The telecos (the same ones who want to ban municipal wi-fi in Texas) want the right to charge web sites and other bandwidth users for using their internet lines and infrastructure. We, the customers, have already paid our ISP for internet access. The telcos now want to charge our internet destinations for bringing us to them. Of course any destination that capitulates to this ludicrous demand will find some way to pass that cost through to us. So ultimately, we’ll all pay twice.

The answer, of course, is legislation requiring network neutrality. We need to nip this sort of thing in the bud. Here’s a list of email addresses for the members of Congress and other elected representatives (I don’t support the web site where this list is located, but it’s the best list I could find).

Otherwise, the internet, which has become central to our way of life, will become a privilege- and a more expensive one at that.

More recent discussion by:

PC World
Om Malik

Reading List

Here’s what’s on today.

Robert Gale links to an hilarious Ali G video.

Fred Wilson likes Last.fm more than Pandora. I like both, but Pandora works better for me. Plus the Last.fm player sounds horrible on my computer (though this may be a problem on my end since no one else seems to have this problem).

Thomas Hawk (my favorite photographer) joins a new blog network.

Blackberry loses its appeal. Personally, I’m bored with the whole Blackberry thing. Let’s liquidate both companies as a deterrent to future stupid lawsuits.

Frank Gruber talks about his TagCloud experience.

Steve Rubel confesses that before he landed in the blogosphere, he had a gig at another famous amusement park.

Amy Gahran talks more about her great idea for improving podcasts.