You’ve probably heard about the writer’s strike by now. It’s a big dust-up where writers in Hollywood feel they should be compensated for online revenues, while major networks are saying that we should wait until there’s a market. The following clip is a humorous take on just that:

However, something that the writers and YouTube/Google don’t realize is that there is a tremendous opportunity here. As the line between traditional media and online media gets further blurred, something that becomes apparent (to the credit of the writers) is that content creation is key.

That’s what makes this period very interesting: what if all of the writers jumped to online media? I doubt they would do it, because other writers would jump into their traditional media roles, and there may not be enough cash in the online world right now to keep all of these writers.

But, imagine that YouTube/Google had deep pockets, and could snatch all of that writing talent. Screw dealing with NBC for display rights, imagine getting all of that creative talent to write original content that can only be found on YouTube. Essentially, Google would have created an instant online media network, with the best creators money could buy.

If nothing else, the writers should investigate this option to put more pressure on the networks. Just a thought.

I’d hate for them to make the jump, considering how the writers develop all the shows I watch on TV, but can you imagine online media content actually surpassing its traditional media counterparts?

I love the Internet. Did I mention I love the Internet? I do. I especially love shopping on the Internet. You go somewhere, click a few buttons, enter in your credit card and voila — a couple days later, some new shiny item.

However, one of the things that really frustrates the hell out of me are those stupid coupon code boxes. You know the ones. You’re cruising along, happy as a clam, and then suddenly:

If you’re in the know, you’re all set. However, if you’re like most people, you stare forlornly at that empty box, knowing that fabulous discounts are hidden away from you because you don’t know the secret password. It’s almost like it’s there to intentionally taunt you. Why oh why do online stores do this to you? Why can’t they just charge lower prices?

Apparently I wasn’t the only one feeling this frustration. A friend of mine started this site with coupon codes to bring help to the masses:

The idea is simple: providing a clearing house of coupon codes for folks who need it. If you know a coupon code, enter it on the site for others. If you need one, come to the site and look it up. They even have a bookmarklet so you can look up a site with just a click.

This is exactly what’s so great about the Internet: there’s a problem many people have, so someone writes a solution to it. Everyone can benefit from this solution, for free. Awesome. Now, if you don’t mind, I have some shopping to do.

Ever wanted to add a quiz to your site? Do you just like taking random quizzes? Quibblo.com is for you.

We’ve all been pretty excited about actually launching this thing, and it’s finally live! From a poll on how you’ll vote in 2008 to a quiz on what kind of cat you are, it has a broad range of topics. Plus, people can actually create their own quizzes too.

Some other good ones on site:

• Family Guy Trivia
• Match the song to the artist
• How healthy is your relationship?
• Arrested Development Quiz

Quiz sites aren’t exactly new, but this one is pretty slick. Check it out!

Finally, a social networking site that understands syndicated content. A friend of mine pointed out that you could now import your blog entries right into Facebook, which is something we’ve been wanting social networking sites to do for about a year now. Now, new blog entries I post here will show up in my Facebook profile under notes. This makes sense, because I already blog to this site, and now, people can get that same content syndicated to my profile.

Social networking sites have been reluctant to do something like this because they don’t want to encourage activity off site. This is wrong. People do in fact do things on the Internet on other sites, so having a way to interlink that content is a good idea [tm]. Another friend of mine syndicated his site into his MySpace profile, but there’s nothing automated to do this yet. RSS is not new. It’s designed for syndication. So, aside from blog readers, why is there a dearth of good implementations of syndication cross-site? It’s not like enabling this functionality will cause people to go in droves to set up their own blogs. Chances are, it’ll provide more dynamic content to the profiles of those who already blog on other sites, making those profile pages just that much more interesting.

So kudos to Facebook for understanding syndicated content. Let’s hope the other social networking sites follow suit.

Valleywag posted an article on why ZDNet’s article on six companies that could buy YouTube was asinine. In true Internet fashion, I felt a rebuttal to the rebuttal was in order.

First off, the ZD Net article does indeed pick off an odd selection of companies. Adobe? Sony? Really? However, dismissing media plays such as Time Warner is a little short sighted — even NBC is noting that stripping out content and doing it yourself is not the best route.

Valleywag’s commentary that other companies have their own technology plays in the video field is somewhat valid, but misses the traffic play. One of the reasons that sites like YouTube and MySpace are picking up so much business interest isn’t the technology alone. Sure, technology has a big part to play in this regard: MySpace came out with a social networking service that wasn’t the best at the time, and certainly isn’t the best now. There are many, many sites like YouTube online these days, and, as previously mentioned, many of the big players have their own video play. What else creates value there? It’s the network. As the top players look into leveraging the Internet as a media outlet, one of their primary concerns is building that networked base. Anyone can build the technology that powers MySpace and YouTube. Building the networked base is the tricky part. Google Video and Yahoo Video are trying to pick up marketshare in this department: they’re trying to eat YouTube’s lunch. The question is, would it be cheaper to just buy that lunch, rather than earn it, piece by piece? I agree with Valleywag that Yahoo is in an excellent position in this regard, by the by.

But how about Valleywag’s earlier article on YouTube’s anticipated demise? I think some of the points are valid, while others are not. Let’s take a look at each point:

• “It’s a money-sucker.” 100% true. It costs a lot of money to power all that bandwidth. Granted, when you’re dealing with that much bandwidth, you can get it cheap. So, while it’s probably costing a lot of money, it may not cost nearly as much as people might think.
• “The money’s not rolling in.” This was based on insider information that YouTube had ad revenue goals of $1 million for July and August, with June direct sales of $0. When did they decide to start the direct sales push? Keep in mind that deals on this level take a while to actually fulfill, unlike smaller contracts. Were those numbers based on a pipeline? It’s not sufficient to just write off all their revenue because of this informal direct sales quote. Those targets may be valid targets for the traffic they’re driving, based on other web property ad sales performance. (If, on the other hand, the direct sales team has been working for six months with those sales figures, then yes, that’s not a good sign.) Besides, direct sales are only one component of revenue. What other revenue streams are coming in for the site?
• “No one will buy it.” Arguable. The networking base does have value, and the technology has some value. It might take some restructuring, but it’s far from value-less. Of course, a price tag of one billion dollars (said with best Dr. Evil impersonation) may be a bit steep.
• “The press points to the piracy.” Any press is good press — if people are writing about it, then at least it’s being discussed. Even Valleywag noted for this point that “YouTube doesn’t really run on pirated work — most of this month’s most popular vids are original, and most borrowed clips are simple fair-use cases.” Anyone seriously considering this site will do their homework, anyway.
• “It’s boring.” Doom and gloom regarding content producers? So long as people can showcase their work and the technology is useful, interesting content will filter its way there. I don’t think there’s a shortage of content producers, nor that all the good ones will be snatched up by major media companies. As more and more people find the site and use it, there may be a decreasing signal to noise ratio, but some innovation can help with that.
• “The bloggers are revolting.” The blogosphere is user commentary, not news. Valleywag noted: “Boing Boing writer Xeni Jardin says it took a full day for YouTube to respond to the accusation that it planned to sell its users’ videos.” The important part here is that they responded. A day is not too long to respond. Again, any press is good press — if the bloggers are talking about YouTube, then it must have some value. Otherwise, why would they blog about it in the first place?
• “You can’t get porn.” This is a reason for its demise? They’ve taken a stance, and considering their advertising goals, it’s completely understandable. When you’re dealing with the next tier of advertisers and agencies, you have to make concessions like this. Besides, there’s more to Internet video than porn. Really!
• “It’s ugly.” The resolution can improve as either a) people get faster connections, or b) compression technology gets better. I’m sure YouTube will be more than willing to improve this quality, so long as the majority of its users don’t suffer from degraded performance. Besides, the quality must be good enough for current purposes — its popularity is proof of that.
• “Its competitors pay you money.” What is stopping YouTube from doing the same down the road, should they decide that’s compatible with their business model?

I don’t know how I keep ending up on the defending side of YouTube. I do think the billion dollar price tag is indeed too much. I also am surprised that it’s as popular as it is. I do think they have issues with copyrighted content, and management of those responsibilities. Yet, I keep seeing people bashing YouTube without good reason. It’s like it’s trendy. We may be building up to another Internet bubble, with overvaluated properties and too much emphasis on “Web 2.0″ and “social networking”, but to completely write off sites like this is to miss out on good potential. The problem is figuring out what the correct valuation is. And that is the mystery that is YouTube: how much would you be willing to pay?

YouTube has been drawing a lot of heat due to its questionable copyright stance. With a user-uploaded content base, it’s pretty much unavoidable that they will have copyright issues. It’s arguable whether or not YouTube’s financial success hinges on this — on the one hand, the copyrighted content is one of YouTube’s biggest draws, and it couldn’t have established such a user base without it; on the other, YouTube is a fantastic place to find original user-generated content. Also, as sites struggle with traffic in their video hosting, it’s nice to have YouTube as a mirror to supplement that load.

The latest in the debacle is a lawsuit from Robert Tur, over the upload of the video of Reginald Denny getting beaten during the LA riots in 1992. This lawsuit is asinine, and I’ll tell you why.

The lawsuit notes that the video in question has been viewed over 1,000 times. Here’s the asinine part: “Tur is asking the court for $150,000 per violation and an injunction barring any further use of his material.” The injunction is fine. Asking for $150,000 per violation is ridiculous. So, for someone uploading a video, and 1,000 people watching it, Tur expects $150,000,000? Let’s look at the comparative revenue lost. Let’s say Tur had produced a DVD for release of this clip. The clip itself is pretty short, so it’d be a pretty empty DVD, but let’s say he filled it out with extras such as interviews with the cameraman. Let’s also say that somehow, he gets DVDs produced for free. Most DVDs come in at under $20 (some way cheaper), but let’s say he sells it for $20. (That’d be way better than the measly $10 he might pull from theatre showings, provided the theatres gave him all the proceeds and kept nothing.) Let’s also presume, as unlikely as it is, that all 1,000 people who watched the clip were absolutely going to buy it, but after watching the clip, suddenly were not due to the fact that watching a grainy low resolution YouTube clip was all they needed to sate their appetite. Total lost revenue in this best case scenario: $20 x 1,000 incidents = $20,000. What justifies this 7,500x increase to $150,000,000? Let’s say YouTube’s advertising was absolutely fantastic and able to do the impossible, generating a whopping $1 for every user that came to their page. Gross lost profit plus earned advertising revenue = $21,000. Still just a bit short of that $150 million mark. It’s not even like Tur is losing syndicated revenue from use of the clip in more traditional means — no documentary or news show is going to go to YouTube, download the video, and show it to circumvent Tur. In fact, any producer worth his or her salt would be extremely leary of using anything on YouTube, without making damned sure that the ownership of the clip was well worked out.

YouTube seems to understand copyright law pretty well, so they will most likely come out in the clear. YouTube staff didn’t upload the clip; end users did. In that sense, they might be classified as a common carrier. Internet newsgroups went through this debacle years ago, so it’s not like this is new. I am not a lawyer, but I believe that the most YouTube has to do is provide a means to report copyrighted content, and take it down if requested. They have done so. But Tur didn’t even ask YouTube to take down the work — he went straight to suing. In that sense, I side with YouTube on this.

Whether or not YouTube is right is arguable: one could successfully argue that a significant amount of their revenue comes from copyrighted material. One could also argue that it’s users, not YouTube, who are behaving badly. One could even argue that YouTube should monitor all content that gets posted. (That last one is a bit implausible, however: given the number of users, the number of posts, and the difficulty of recognizing copyrighted content without false positives and false negatives, it’s just unlikely that it could be done well.) Suing them over it is probably not going to get a huge result. Unless laws change, they appear to be in good standing. This isn’t a lawsuit about copyright infringement: it’s a lawsuit about seeing dollar signs. After all, with a $150,000,000 lawsuit, would you consider settling for, oh, I don’t know, $500,000? Possibly. However, if YouTube is smart, they won’t. Or every content producer is going to come after YouTube with their hand held out, asking for their cut. YouTube has great word-of-mouth power: as a content producer, you should be leveraging that for greater reach, not killing it! If I see a low-res clip on YouTube and like it, then I may buy the DVD. Even NBC has come around to this point of view. Tur should take note, because we’re all anxiously awaiting his DVD.

I sometimes read spam, for its amusement value. I’ve never bought anything from spam…well, unless you count all that Viagra, ink toner cartridges, and penis enlargement tools, but they don’t count, right? However, the Nigerian scams just annoy me.

The Nigerian email scam is nothing new: offer a total stranger a chance at an exceedingly large sum of money, in exchange for being a trusted contact in the United States. What gets me is how they keep updating the scam, to keep with the times. Take, for example, this recent formulation:

Dear Friend,
My name is Cpt. John Brett, representing a fraction of the 1st Armoured
Division in Iraq and i want you to read this.
In April 2003, Staff Sergeant Kenneth Buff of the United States Army
found US$160 million hidden by fleeing members of the Baath Party led by
former dictator Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Later, a search of the area revealed
more hidden loot, totaling US$650 million in all! For a detailed account of
the money found by the US Soldiers, please click on the following websiteto
have an insight of my mail to you
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/20/1050777165192.html and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2988455.stm
Recently, during a routine archaeological excavation of the area east of
Tigris River, I and my three other colleagus discovered 2 boxes of the
similar kind found by US Army! After careful examination we discovered
that it is $100 US Dollars bills totaling USD 12Million which we concealed
and packaged in one box hidden safely. But we need a trustworthy, upright
and business minded person who can keep this money for us till we arrive.
CAN YOU HELP? I do not have any foreign contacts. I will therefore
appreciate your help to move this money abroad for investment. If you are
interested, please reply urgently so that we can conclude the plan to move this
money. It will be 100% risk free! and we shall discuss sharing modalities upon
your acceptance of this transaction. and scan details will be sent to
you to back the genuineness of this deal,.
You will not be required to travel to Iraq. Rather through diplomatic
means and special arrangement to your country for you to clear and collect and
proceed for subsequent lodgment of the money into your designated
account pending my arrival as time can permit me.
Awaiting your immediate response.
Sincerely Yours,
Cpt. John Brett

Wow, freshly updated to represent the War In Iraq! (The last update I recall reflected the tsunami disaster, which I thought was in really bad taste.) What’s more, by coming from a US soldier, it plays on people’s desires to support the troops, as well as being from an American, rather than just some random foreign national royalty. Who wouldn’t want to support a US soldier? It’s brilliant in terms of how it plays on people’s emotions. One would hope that whoever was replying to responses to this would have decent enough English skills to pull off actually being a US soldier. This wouldn’t be a problem if they stuck with the old “I’m a Nigerian prince routine”, but wouldn’t work so well for this.

The links to real articles is also interesting, because it lends additional credence to the whole affair. If there actually were large sums of money found, it could be potentially true, right?

Sadly, someone will probably fall for this. It’s the nature of spam: some small percentage will make the whole venture worthwhile, which is unfortunate. Let’s dissect this letter to see what people should notice:

• It’s from a US soldier in Iraq, but comes from an Italian ISP address (ending in .it, not shown in the above). Why would a US soldier have an Italian email address?
• The English is a little broken for a US soldier, which can be excused as some people are just bad typists or use bad grammar.
• The fact that it’s a US soldier plays upon our desires to help people who are fighting the good fight. Yet, the soldier in this email message is looking to defraud the US Army. So, we’re supposed to think well of this person and trust them, while at the same time, help them subvert the military overall? That’s a little bit of a mixed message.
• The guy needs “a trustworthy, upright and business minded person” to help him. So, of course, the best way to get someone like this is to email a total stranger? Would a person be trustworthy and upright if they didn’t mind putting one over on the US Army?
• In confessing to wanting to do something that would land a soldier in a lot of hot water, this guy just tells a total stranger everything up front. How does this person know that whoever he’s contacting isn’t military-friendly or ex-military? Seems like a lot of risk.
• Standard rules of “if something sounds too good to be true, it is” apply.

Oh Nigerian spammers. Have you learned nothing?

Today I got like a couple dozen blog spam messages. Nothing new there. What is interesting when I dug deeper, however, is that this didn’t look like a commercial attempt to get traffic. Yes, the same three URLs were in all the messages, but what this appeared to be is a means of being annoying. But not to annoy me. This spam was meant to be annoying to the linked sites.

Bloggers are in an ongoing war with blog spammers, trying to find any means of making the process simple and automated. One method is to develop a blacklist of sites and terms. By having a lot of bloggers report on spam messages, an automatic database of spam-related messages can be generated, off which keywords can be determined and a blacklist can be generated. What results is a handy filter for those who don’t want to be bothered with blog spam. Simple enough.

Except in this case. By seeding these three legitimate blogs, what this person was trying to do was to get these blogs blacklisted. It was reverse warfare: turn the tools of defense against the defenders. But why just these three blogs? No idea.

However, this is the most annoying sort of blog spam, even more annoying than the commercial posts. This is simply malicious, with no benefit to anyone. No one is building traffic, just ill will. Thanks a lot, jerk.

Andrew Teman recently posted a tirade against Attention Trust, citing this article by Seth Goldstein. To Andrew, this article made no sense. It was a company forming around a bunch of doublespeak, with no business plan, nothing. It’s almost like the 1990-era dot com boom all over again. I tend to agree. Andy calls for anyone to read that article and summarize what they do in fifty words or less.

Here it is, my fifty-words or less on what the article means: the effort of seeing stuff online should be treated as capital. There, I did it in eleven words. That doesn’t change the fact that this is a bunch of nonsense.

The idea they’re trying to play up is that machines are automating the process of demographic profiling and targeting. This is not only true, it’s efficient. They’re trying to place the targeting back in the consumer’s hands, to let them “traffick” in their “attention”, as it were.

This also, is nonsense.

There is no need to set up an attention trust, as it were, to let people treat their attention as currency. This already happens. We don’t call it attention currency, and we don’t need to. We do it automatically. The idea of “brokering” your attention is absolutely rediculous. What are they going to do, say “If you read this page, I’ll read that one”? This not only is not only dumb, it reduces the value placed on attention itself: it’s less valuable to have forced attention. Think of it this way: would it be more valuable to have someone who searched and found your site, or to have someone who was just pointed there?

About the only value I see here is the potential to build on word of mouth referrals. This is not a new concept either.

The kicker here is the lack of a true business plan. It’s like a bunch of people got together, got high, and said, “Whoa, think about the Internet and people and stuff. We should do something with that.” Providing textual references and vague ideas will get you nowhere, except, I guess, with the blindly investing VCers. They could have redeemed themselves by giving an inkling of how this was going to provide value to anyone.

I love Dreamhost. There, I’ve said it. I can’t help it. I’ve been using them for a few months, and so far, they’ve been great. I’ve switched between three different hosting providers, and so far, have loved them the best. Read on for why.

When looking for a web host, there are a three main considerations: reliability (uptime), features, and price. Rarely do you find all three in one place.

When it came to uptime, I came from a host that had rather spotty issues in that regard. They would go down for a few hours at a time. They would have a crash, restore from backup, and my site would have reverse-aged itself a week. One time, after a particularly nasty crash, they were redirecting my site to someone else’s poster site, because of some DNS issues. I decided it was time to move on.

When it came to features, I found that on a previous host with great uptime, features were quite lacking. No shell accounts, no scripting, no options. I’m beyond the point where I want to concern myself with static pages — that’s just so 1990’s.

As far as price went, I went from being gouged with the reliable host, to getting a good rate at the other host in exchange for that reliability.

Then, a friend told me about Dreamhost. I’m generally skeptical of new services, so I decided to do a little research. How reliable were they? What did they offer? What were their prices like? The answers to those questions are “very”, “a lot”, and “good”.

Reliability is reported to be and has been good. I haven’t had downtime yet (knock on wood). It may not have the reputation of pear Networks, but they have a good standing in the field.

Some things people look for as far as features go include shell access, FTP access, IMAP mail, POP mail, web mail, multiple accounts, Perl, spam filtering, PHP, one-click installs, and fine-grained DNS control. Check. This is a full-fledged host in that regard. If you like to develop your own applications in Perl / Apache / PHP, that’s not a problem. They even have procmail support, if mail processing is your thing.

However, all is not well in Dreamhostville. You can forget about CPanel and WHM. In fact, no reseller accounts of any kind. (Webmaster referrals don’t really count, but they are nice.) No Fantastico either. Those are dealbreakers for many publishers. The homebrewed control panel at Dreamhost isn’t as easy to use as CPanel, nor does it offer as immediate results. Doing a one click install of Wordpress? No problem! Click this button and…come back in an hour. Some manual setup also may be needed to tweak settings. This is fine for me, as a reasonably tech-savvy user. I wouldn’t put my wife through it unattended, though.

When it comes to price, Dreamhost also shines. For $9.95 a month ($7.95 if you pre-pay for two years) you get 2,400 MB of disk, 120 GB of monthly bandwidth. That’s nothing to sneeze at, though at only one domain, it’s a little limiting. Stepping up to the next level at $19.95 a month ($15.95 if you pre-pay for two years) gets you 7,680 MB of disk, and 192 GB of monthly bandwidth, for 15 domains. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with 3,000 email accounts and 375 shell accounts.

What got me to write this post, however, was none of that. Rather, it was their insane newsletter. Here’s a random quote from it:

In actuality, I love dog food! In fact, I was just in China for my honeymoon and ate a lot of “dog” food. And I’m not talking about Purina.

I don’t think he’s serious. That’s just the sort or weird, random flavor their newsletter has. However, it wasn’t this quirky character that made me write, either. It was this:

Every week, your plan limits will grow as follows, at
absolutely no charge:

L1: 20MB disk and 1GB bandwidth each week!
L2: 40MB disk and 1.5GB bandwidth each week!
L3: 60MB disk and 2GB bandwidth each week!
L4: 80MB disk and 2.5GB bandwidth each week!

Wait…so as long as I host with Dreamhost, they’re going to keep upping my disk and bandwidth limits? For no apparent reason? They were already reasonably priced, but apparently, they like to keep pushing the edge. I have to appreciate a company that continues to go that extra step, rather than just resting on their laurels.

So, I’m not going to go so far as to say they’re perfect. They’re not. They’re not even the most user-friendly: it helps to either be a techie, or know someone who is, to help you through the setup. However, I am going to say that as far as reliability, features, and pricing are concerned, they’re the best I’ve seen and used so far. Plus, they continue to try new things, to see what they can do to offer their users even more. I like that. Let’s hope they continue to live up to their reputation.