Texas AG: MySpace Should Be Safer

My law school buddy and current Texas attorney general Greg Abbott has turned his attention to MySpace.com in the wake of another arrest of an internet predator.

From the Houston Chronicle article:

“Abbott said Web sites like MySpace – a social networking hub with more 72 million members – should make it harder to find profiles belonging to underage youth and should use software that automatically scans all uploaded photographic images and blocks those that are pornographic.”

As more and more governmental officials begin to take a hard look at the social networking services, MySpace and its kin should take meaningful and significant action to address this problem, even if it means a loss in user numbers. Because if they don’t address the safety issue in a meaningful and effective way, someone is going to do it for them.

Smoke and mirrors and baby steps aren’t going to satisfy the watchdogs much longer. And once the government gets into your business, it’s hard to get them out. Just ask Microsoft.

Second Life Land Giveaway

OK, I still own too much Second Life land, which costs me money since your Second Life monthly fee is based on how much land you own. I’m going to give away three tracts of land and here’s how it will work.

I have three tracts of land that I am going to give away.

Tract One

tract1 The first tract is a 3,872 square meter tract, with roadside frontage. It has a castle on it that I built myself (thus it’s unique). You can keep the castle or trash it and build something else.

This tract is located at Sabine 191,173,65 and is just up the road from my house and the other tracts I am giving away.

Tract Two

The second tract is a 2,496 square meter tract that is beside my house and behind the third tract described below. It has no improvements on it and is located at Sabine 215, 147, 63.

Tract Three

tract2 The third tract is a 2,240 square meter tract, also with roadside frontage. It has a house on it, which you can keep or trash and build something else.

This tract is located at Sabine 145, 123, 60 and is right beside my house.

The Rules

If you’d like some free land and even a castle or house to go on it, all you have to do is link to this post. I will gather the entries from three sources: Technorati, Google (see the “Other Blogs” links in the left column) and Trackbacks (as shown below). To be eligible, a trackback must actually link to this post (no nofollow tags).

On Monday, May 29, 2006, I will put all of the entries in a shoe box, shake them up and ask Cassidy, Delaney and Raina to close their eyes and pick one. Tracts 1, 2 and 3 will be given away in that order.

You can enter for yourself or a friend. Only one entry per blog, but if you have more than one blog, you can enter once with each. I just want to get this land off of my books and maybe gain some good neighbors in the process.

As a bonus, I’ll pay the first month’s land use fee ($25.00) for the first winner picked who doesn’t already have a Second Life account.

The Sportsification of the Internet

When I was a kid, long before they were almost good, I was an Atlanta Braves fan. I remember watching Hank Aaron, Dusty Baker and Ralph Garr in the outfield. I remember Jerry Royster, Biff Pocoroba and Phil Niekro. I followed their batting averages and ERAs by reading the newspaper and listening to the radio, often with an earpiece after I was supposed to be asleep. After TBS launched in 1976, I watched a lot of games on TV.

Baseball is a great game, because it is all about the stats. I kept a little handmade chart with my favorite players’ names, positions and stats. Throughout my youth I knew the stats for a lot of players.

It never even crossed my mind how much they got paid.

Now, everything about professional sports is all about the money. Every time a professional athlete is mentioned, his salary follows like a Sr. or Jr. Cal Ripkin, Jr. has turned into Chipper Jones, $13M.

It’s not just baseball. The important golf stats used to be stroke average and tournaments won. Now all they show in the papers is how many millions the player has earned this year. Tennis is the same way. The NFL is just as bad. Don’t even get me started on the NBA.

The evolution of professional sports from pastime and passion to business and bling bling turned many ardent fans into bored cynics.

theocho-758706 Now the same thing is happening to the internet. Go visit any of the popular sites that track and comment on the internet and internet related applications. While lip service is, for the moment, still given to how cool or useful an application or service is, the focus is clearly and quickly shifting to how much money someone has, will or might make off of that application or service.

Read TechCrunch for a week and you will see this trend. Look at how many of the posts on Techmeme (nee Memeorandum) have to do with money or the prospects thereof. In this age where every application developer and his dog are trying to live off of ad revenue and every consumer and his dog are buying TIVOs and XM radios primarily to avoid ads, more and more people and trying to stuff more and more advertising into their applications and content streams.

The mindset that made geekdom cool is dying in favor of the talk that made Wall Street insiders rich. It’s almost like the “if you build something cool, it will sell itself” approach has been forgotten and people are trying to reverse engineer from the other end of the rainbow- the much coveted IPO or sale to Yahoo.

Don’t get me wrong, money is good. Our economic system is based on people making money. Like everyone else with a real job, I spend a lot of my time trying to make money.

But every single thing in our lives shouldn’t be about money. Those parts of our lives that don’t involve money are shrinking rapidly.

We need to protect those parts of our lives the way we protect other things that are valuable to us. For two reasons. One, it’s important for our spiritual and physical well being and it helps give our kids a balanced view of the world. Two, for those less idealistic, reverse engineering a made fortune is no substitute for good business.

The only true roadmap to wealth is to do something really well. Build something people want or need. Provide a service that people will pay for. Shortcuts generally either implode on their own or end up as part of some greater fool exit strategy.

I hope we can stop all the madness before new social networking applications start showing up on The Ocho.

Non-Linking: It's Not About Reputation, It's About Ego

Richard Querin makes an excellent rebuttal to Steve Gillmor’s non-linking mania.

Sadly, all of Richard’s logic and common sense will be for naught, since the whole non-linking business is nothing more than a thinly disguised attempt on the part of Steve and a couple of his pals to separate themselves from the blogging community by declaring that they are blogo-stars and don’t need to be bothered with interacting with the rest of us. The reason Steve writes in indecipherable paragraphs is because if he said it in a way that people could actually understand, he would be laughed out of the room. By using big words and long sentences, he can pretend that if we were smart enough to understand him, we’d all fall in line.

On the last Gillmor Gang podcast I will ever listen to Steve actually said that he goes out of his way not to use significant content and ideas from other bloggers in his posts so he won’t have to link to them.

This cat thinks he’s special. And that’s fine. Go be special, but do it over there where I can’t see you. Because if I can see you, I will feel compelled to try to get you to see things logically and realize that these are blogs were are talking about here- not some secret path to fame and fortune.

Not engaging in the cross blog communication, which occurs via linking, is completely inconsistent with the purpose and beauty of blogging. It’s like turning the web back to 1995 when everyone had their little self-contained Geocities web page. It’s backwards thinking pretending to be forward thinking.

But blogo-stars don’t listen. Listening is for the rest of us.

Blind and Desperate

Am I the only one who thinks all of these “me too” services being thrown up by AOL lately are tokens of desperation and a lack of vision?

TechCrunch reports that AOL is about to release a “YouTube clone.” This is on the heels of AOL’s recent launch of a MySpace competitor.

It looks to me like AOL is thrashing around in search of something to grab hold of as the walls around its closed system crumble and fall.

I don’t know if AOL can save itself or not, but I don’t think trying to become a Web 2.0 company is the most promising way to try.

Steve Gillmor is the New Dave Winer

I used to be amazed at the degree to which Dave Winer would go out of his way to fight with people. As it turns, out Dave is minor league when it comes to fighting. The King of RSS has lost his blog-fighting title to the ZDNet Zinger.

After first deciding that links are no good and then writing some of the most indecipherable words ever put together, Steve Gillmor carps at Richard Querin and gets irritated at his pal Mike Arrington on the latest Gillmor Gang podcast. I got frustrated with Steve’s pissy demeanor after part 1, so I missed all the barbs I expect he flung around in the rest of the podcast.

Steve also managed to make Nick Carr sound like a down to earth, logical and reasonably friendly guy in the process. In fact, I got the impression that more than one of the other gang members were put off by Steve’s demeanor.

Thank goodness Doc Searls is still in the gang to provide a voice of reason to the podcasts.

I think what was initially a fun and interesting free-for-all debate has devolved into a soapbox for Steve to pick fights and act superior, and I find that boring. The spirited debate is what attracted me to that podcast, but lately, as old what’s his name points out, Steve just sounds angry at everybody.

I’m too bored with Steve’s act to even get into the merits of his argument, but I will say that if you make outlandish statements like this whole non-linking business and then get irritated when people react negatively, you are going to be mad a lot.

Bubble 2.0 Watch: He Said Thought Leaders

web20 Om Malik says that the thought leaders (a new “pre-owned car” word for my dictionary of needlessly fancy terms), along with investors and pundits, have lately begun to wonder about the whole Web 2.0 business.

Proving that thought leaders have been reading blogs for months, a “well known angel investor,” which I believe is a nice word for a rich guy who swoops down like an angel from heaven and tosses some cash at whatever science project turned business grabs his fancy in exchange for the possibility to get even richer by later selling said project to either Yahoo or some poor smuck in an IPO, wrote, according to Om, “that many of the Web 2.0 companies that were cropping up were targeting a niche audience. He found that many were me-too or forgettable permutations of some of the more established players such as Flickr, You Tube or Digg.”

Ya think? I and a bunch of other average Joes must be thought leaders too, since we have been saying that for months.

Om, who is generally on the money about things technological, goes on to talk about scalability and Web 2.0, arguing that eventually some of the advances that are being made in the Web 2.0 arena will find their way into the enterprise applications that run big business, sort of the way NASA’s velcro found its way onto my 4 year old’s tennis shoes.

Maybe. Eventually. But most big business is running enterprise applications that are 2 or 3 versions old, so Om and I will be retired before the benefitted versions find their way onto most corporate desktops. By then my grandkids will be hoping to get links from Om’s grandkids.

I continue to think that too many people are trying to stuff business, hobbies, old media and blogs into the same bag. I don’t know if it’s a mass scam in the making or if people who are used to writing about business and old media are just writing about what they know.

What I do know is that to judge success you have to start with perspective.

As Dave Winer points out, TechCrunch’s 53,000 or so subscribers is huge in blogosphere terms. 53,000 viewers would be a gigantic bomb if it were a TV show, which is measured in old media terms. Similarly, a Web 2.0 application that has a million users at $0 a month makes a lot less profit than my blog, which makes very little, but costs almost nothing to operate.

You can’t measure success in raw numbers. And you can’t judge a blog by old media standards.

Blogs are not businesses, no matter how many people try to pretend they are. A part of a business, yes. The business, no.

Similarly, most of these Web 2.0 applications are not businesses. A part of a business, yes (thus the sell to Yahoo business plan). But still not the business.

I think there are a lot of people trying to stuff a lot of square pegs in the old and familiar round holes.

As soon as they realize that won’t work, we’ll step back, get some perspective and see where we are.

Web 2.0 Wars: Quarter-Finals Round Four

The Web 2.0 Wars season has come to an end. The list of winners and playoff brackets were posted the other day.

Here’s how the playoffs will work. After taking a look at my prior commentary about each application, I’ll revisit each application and see what, if anything, is new. I’ll add an update for each contestant and pick the winner.

We are now in the quarter-finals and have already had Round 1, Round 2 and Round 3. It’s time for the fourth and final round of the quarter-finals.

Here are the contestants for the fourth quarter-final round:

Digg
Basecamp
Backpack
Technorati
Mercora

Digg is a wildly popular, user driven site that allows users to link to and vote on internet blog posts and news stories. It has huge mindshare and I greatly admire the technology, but as I’ve said many times I don’t like the news by contest process. There is also the potential for gaming which stories get top billing.

Basecamp is a web-based tool that lets you manage and track projects. Prices range from free to expensive. I like the fact that I haven’t seen a million of these and they actually charge for the service, thereby at least giving a nod to a legitimate business plan.

Backpack is an online information collection and storage application. Sort of like a turbo-charged on-line Onfolio or One Note.

Technorati is a blog search and tagging service. It has huge mindshare, and I’ve called it the backbone of the blogosphere- when it works. Unfortunately, it has regularly occurring hiccups.

Mercora is a music search service that stumbled across the finish line first in a weak heat. I got flamed for not picking StumbleUpon.

And the Winner of the fourth quarter-final round is:

This is also a hard round. I have been a devoted user and defender of Technorati, and I still like it, but my link numbers go up and down in a random fashion and I know for a fact (via trackbacks, etc.) that a lot of blogs are not being tracked correctly. Digg is a technological juggernaut, but I just don’t like news by contest. Basecamp has a business plan, but plays to a niche market. Backpack is cool, but in a crowded field.

Most people would give it to Digg in a landslide. But I’m going with a fading Technorati.

Technorati joins YouTube, Memeorandum (now called Techmeme) and Myspace in the Final Four.

Look for the semi-finals shortly.

If I’m to Be Your Camera

If I’m to be your camera,
then who will be your face?
-REM

After researching cameras for a while and considering the various alternatives, I bought a new digital camera. I wanted a digital SLR that would allow me to take photos semi-automatically, like my trusty Sony DSC-V3, and do a lot more manual stuff as I climb up the learning curve.

30D-775836 I settled on a Canon EOS 30D. I also bought a Canon Speedlite flash to use with it. My impressions so far are (a) it is a great camera that can do everything I want it to and more, and (b) I have a lot to learn about photography. I am going to take a camera class later this month, but so far it has been a process of trial and error. I happened across Darren Rowse’s excellent Digital Photography School blog. If anyone has any other sites I should bookmark, please let me know. My initial objectives are to learn the proper settings to take shots of the kids playing their sports and colorful shots in lower light settings and to learn how to manipulate depth of field.

Through reading the manual several times and trial and error, I have already flower-723925 learned a lot more than I knew before about the various camera setting. I am still confused by the practical interplay between aperture, shutter speed and ISO. I know what each term means, but I don’t yet know how to set each for a particular shot or which one to set first.

I took a hundred or so photos today, first of a birthday party and then of the kids and their friends swimming.

jumping-771950 The kids love to jump off the walls behind the swimming pool. Previously, getting a decent photo of them in flight was a hit and miss proposition, with at best one face sort of in focus and the rest of the faces blurry.

This camera will take 5-6 shots of the same jump, with every part of the picture in focus. This camera compared to my old one is more than night and day.

And that’s notwithstanding the fact that I am a mere novice at the digital SLR thing.

It’s going to be fun learning all this stuff, and I certainly welcome any bookmarks or pointers from the experts.

MPAA Lets Loose the Dogs of War

snifferdog-701085 Just when I thought we might go a whole week without the MPAA making a greedy fool of itself again comes word that the MPAA is training an army of dogs to sniff out all those pirated DVDs.

Of course so far it is an army of two: Lucky (not to be confused with Lucky Dog, our dog who cares not a whit about DVDs) and Flo.

And of course, Lucky and Flo’s noses, as good as they are, can’t distinguish a pirated DVD from a legal one. So I suppose if you carry a DVD through the airport, you may get the drug dealer treatment unless you can prove to the MPAA that you bought the DVD.

What’s next, a flock of movie sniffing pigeons who will join the MPAA in crapping all over its customers?