Chris Boese's Weblog

What to think about the CNN.com redesign?

I've been checking out the screenshots and early weekend implementation of the new CNN.com redesign. Several of my journalist and non-journalist friends have been weighing in on links I've posted on Facebook (although my CNN buds have been keeping fairly quiet, as is proper. I did same in public forums when I worked there).

Disclaimer: I was a cyberculture columnist for CNN.com from 2002-2005, where I often had to advocate for certain "bloggish" types of discourse that were not generally permitted on the site because the online common wisdom or ways of knowing (crowd-sourced consensus on cyber-topics, usually) couldn't be traced to some important person quoted as saying "X" (an absolute requirement for CNN.com at the time), or because online "conventional" wisdom didn't necessarily jive with journalistic copyediting standards of "The Row" at that time.

Times have certainly changed, both in the network and with the site's embrace of citizen media (something I was also an early advocate for), and now, in its turn toward the site stylings of online "opinion writing" found at Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, among other blog and news aggregators (more on that below).

For what it's worth, a full archive of my CNN.com columns can be viewed here. I was employed by Turner Broadcasting from 2001 to the end of 2006, when I moved to NYC to take a position at Razorfish, ironically, the company responsible for the CNN.com 2007 redesign (UX and creative). I was not involved in the redesign at either company.

That should cover all necessary disclaimers. All I'm doing here is giving my impressions on the 2009 redesign (largely positive, I'll tell you why), in spite of my friends' initial reactions on Facebook (largely negative, I can speculate why), and what I think may have been lost from what I considered a visually stunning "liquid" (the gray modular look) redesign as proposed by Razorfish and executed by CNN.com in 2007.

What follows is my opinion and my opinion only, and in no way represents the views of any of my employers, past or present.

Spacey Gracey hits Huffington Post!

Link: Grayson Daughters: Government In Exile - Off The Bus on The Huffington Post.

Whoo hooo! My buddy, Grayson Daughters, is taking up a gig for NewAssignment.net and filing political reports for Huffington Post! Go gettum Grayson!

And even better, she goes wandering around my favorite Atlanta watering hole, Manuel's Tavern. So watching the video clip is a bit like being back at the old haunt. Made me want to order a draft beer and find my old Sunday night trivia team.

You know you really want to watch it now, right?

Steve Jobs: The Greatest Living Showman on Earth?

Link: Apple - QuickTime - Macworld 2007 Keynote.

Doesn't everyone sit and play Steve Jobs's new product introduction keynote addresses over and over?

I know, it's his schtick, and comedians should be parodying it, but he does it because it works, even with the predictable jeans and black mock turtleneck. Each time I try to guess how much more his hair has thinned, how well he looks in recovering from his illness. I have to care. What would my world be like without Steve Jobs in it?

In the world of traditionalist High Priests (Hierophants), he's a High Priestess. He sits between the two pillars in front of a pomegranate curtain, the bottom of the skirts of the Empress (the goddess of creativity). He says, "Come, let's see what's behind my curtain."

And we watch as he starts his reveal, peeling back the layers in the extended "and... and... and..."

Which would mean little if what was behind the curtains were not so utterly dazzling, were not such exemplary design. Put me in an audience with Steve on stage, and you couldn't make me leave, not for a movie premiere, or a cliffhanger of my favorite TV show. Right now I can't even think what it would take to upstage Steve, for me, at least.

Yes, I know this is demagoguery, and I'm very silly. Gush gush gush. I want to invent things with huge teams of engineers, like Steve has at his disposal.  In another age, he might be William Blake or Shakespeare or Picasso, but his canvas is technology and communication devices, communication revolutions. I've been on this ride since BEFORE 1984, and I'm not getting off any time soon.

Link: Apple - QuickTime - Macworld 2007 Keynote.

Here's another fun article on the topic:

Link: Apple's Steve Jobs: A man with plenty of options - The Boston Globe.

BOSTON CAPITAL

The iReality of options

By Steven Syre, Globe Columnist  |  January 11, 2007

What a show.

Steve Jobs is in a class by himself when it comes to the technology product launch as consumer spectacle. Jobs practically invented the concept years ago, and proved this week that he remains peerless in his ability to knock the socks off a normally jaded crowd. Apple Inc.'s glitzy iPhone isn't for sale yet, and the company doesn't even own the rights to the name. But the new phone is an unqualified hit.

The iPhone launch went so well this week that it was easy to lose sight of the fact that Apple and Jobs have a big problem on their hands. Apple's acknowledged past practice of backdating employee stock options and the company's investigation into its own actions leave a lot of serious questions to be answered.

Of course, Apple isn't the only company with a stock-option investigation on its hands. Nearly 200 public companies have been caught up in the scandal. Dozens of executives have retired, been fired, or otherwise pushed out of their companies, and a few have been charged with crimes.

Not everyone is incensed by the options scandal. Some see it as an empty creation of corporate governance scolds. Those skeptics have seized the Apple situation and posed a question: What are you going to do, fire Steve Jobs?

That's a good question because we could come to learn that Jobs did or failed to do things, crossing thresholds that got other chief executives fired. And that would be a disaster.

Steve Jobs is the force of ambition, innovation, and vision at Apple, influencing a big company to a degree matched by few other chief executives. He has built Apple into a real leader and made his shareholders huge amounts of money in the process.

Since Jobs returned to the company as interim chief executive in 1997, Apple shares have earned more than 34 percent a year. The stock has appreciated by nearly $10 billion in just the two days since the iPhone was unveiled. Whatever Apple's future, it depends heavily on Jobs.

While Apple was preparing for its iPhone launch, the options-backdating story dripped out in stages, and Jobs seems to be more involved in each new version.

More than 6,000 options grants were improperly dated at Apple, and Jobs sometimes recommended specific dates. The record shows Jobs himself was awarded options at a board meeting that never really took place. But Jobs did not get much, if any, personal benefit from the options that were later swapped for stock.

A small committee of outside directors, including Al Gore, investigated. Its conclusion: Two former executives were to blame. Jobs didn't appreciate the accounting issue. He's all clear.

Apple was never going to throw Steve Jobs under the options bus. But how should stockholders think about Jobs and all the other executives in similar situations?

That depends on the answers to these three questions:

How bad were the specific offenses? What was the motivation? What has the executive contributed to his company and its shareholders?

Apple's misdated options were widespread, but I'm still not sure how culpable its chief executive is. Some executives who lost their jobs were options-abuse pigs, but Jobs clearly does not fall into that camp. Finally, Jobs has directly created many billions of dollars of value for Apple stockholders in the past decade.

[...]

 

All talking at once? I remember asking this same question about chat rooms... in 1995

Link: Brian Williams: Enough About You -- Dec. 25, 2006 .

This goes along with the TIME magazine pick of "You" as Person (People) of the Year."

I approve of the choice, if not all the Web 2.0 hype (I really don't want to relive the crash again, if it's OK with you hypsters out there).

Brian Williams has the best rated of all the TV anchor blogs (so says TV Newser. I have to believe Brian Stelter at TV Newser, because the old media newspaper site requires a registration to get into its walled garden, and I refuse to do it). (BTW, doesn't anybody suspect some of those TV "celebrity" blogs are ghost-written?)

I'd venture it's because Williams is the best writer of the group, and maybe the smartest. Disclaimer: I used to be an English teacher. Rent a clue. The best blogs are facilitated by the best writers. Now go take another English class, you blogger-wanna bees, and start lobbying to pay English teachers more too. Ever since the start of the blog movement, people have dismissed it as mere solipsism, naval-gazing. But that's old media smoke screen, because the good writers and thinkers are out there, and that's what this is ALL about. YOU.

Blogs are like having the fun part of your English composition class never end, with a real audience, instead of grades. Those of you who secretly or not-so-secretly loved that class, you know who you are. You loved it because you were good at it, and the class gave you the freedom to flex and stretch your writing muscles, for some people, for the very first time time in their lives.

And you should also know that in the Blogosphere, YOU RULE!

So Williams says below that at some point the returns start to diminish, because everybody's talking, but there's not enough listening going on.

Yeah, people said the same thing when first venturing into chat rooms and text-based VR space in the 1990s too. All kinds of wild claims, pro and con, about synchronous speech, because some people could only see it as a "horseless carriage," something that can only fit into a previously-existing concept of model of thinking.

But would the many talkers exist if no one were listening? Are all these blogs merely trees falling in a forest far away? No. That's why the term "USER" in UGC (user-generated content) is ridiculous. This is about INTERACTIVITY and online COMMUNITY. This is SOCIALLY-GENERATED CONTENT.

Starving artists and writers have affected the isolated garret mentality since forever. Now they can do it without getting consumption.

There were always voices that no one listened to. Some of those voices even turned out to be... oh, I don't know, EMILY DICKINSON? And some of those solipsistic self-publishers turned out to be... WALT WHITMAN? How about that? How on Earth did that ever happen?

And there was a reason online fans of the show Xena: Warrior Princess started cranking out novels and stories for an avid audience of other fans, creating a system of writers and readers feeding each other until... WOW, this nearly invisible little community started generating millions of hits, and new story installments started crashing servers, and even more impressive, the best of those fan-novelists graduated from that Xena "writing school" and published their original print novels, with a built-in fan base that some mid-list literary writers (and a goodly number of mid-list genre writers as well) would kill for.

Hey Brian, this isn't about an exploding cacophony of sound. This is about a SYSTEM, a feedback loop with its own thermostat. Let the system find its level, just like chat rooms did, before you pronounce it a Neo-Luddite horror (and Brian isn't doing that, btw, he's just being provocative and raising the issue, something smart people do, and I respect him for that).

Link: Brian Williams: Enough About You -- Dec. 25, 2006 .

NBC's Brian Williams From the Magazine | Person of the Year

Enough About You

We've made the media more democratic, but at what cost to our democracy?

By BRIAN WILLIAMS

Posted Saturday, Dec. 16, 2006

While the mainstream media were having lunch, members of the audience made other plans. They scattered and are still on the move, part of a massive migration. The dynamic driving it? It's all about you. Me. And all the various forms of the First Person Singular.

Americans have decided the most important person in their lives is ... them, and our culture is now built upon that idea. It's the User-Generated Generation.

For those times when the 900 digital options awaiting us in our set-top cable box can seem limiting and claustrophobic, there's the Web. Once inside, the doors swing open to a treasure trove of video: adults juggling kittens, ill-fated dance moves at wedding receptions, political rants delivered to camera with venom and volume. All of it exists to fill a perceived need. Media executives— some still not sure what it is — know only that they want it. And they're willing to pay for it.

[Heh, yeah. And there's a sucker born every minute. While there are some interesting innovations in marketing coming about these days, watching big media trying to "buy" authentic communities ought to be a hilarious spectator sport. Do these folks even REMEMBER the foolishness of the business community in the late 1990s?]

[...]

We've raised a generation of Americans on a mantra of love and the importance of self as taught by brightly colored authority figures with names like Barney and Elmo. On the theory that celebrating only the winners means excluding those who place, show or simply show up, parents-turned-coaches started awarding trophies — entire bedrooms full — to all those who compete. Today everyone gets celebrated, in part to put an end to the common cruelties of life that so many of us grew up with.

[Yaddah yaddah yaddah. Ask Emily Dickinson about twisting in your own angst. Talk to Walt Whitman about self-absorption. Ask Henry David Thoreau why his mother brought him groceries while he dove into his naval on Walden pond. Don't you just wish they'd have never done it? That they'd just shut up and gotten a life?

What's so different about people now? The publication? Emily Dickinson said "Publication is the Auction of the Mind of Man." She wanted her sister to burn all those poems, AFTER SHE DIED. That sure didn't stop her from sewing them up in little booklets and sending them around to all her friends in her avid letter-writing.

Oh, and those Victorians? Kept these amazing diaries and commonplace books. They wrote about and engaged their lives in a way our passive TV generation never had enough self-reflexivity to approach. So the Victorian epistolary tradition is being reborn online. So the commonplace books return, in a different form. And yes, the audiences for many of these is quite small, maybe even as small as the number of people Emily sent all her poems around to, many she never met in person, despite her voluminous correspondence.]

Now the obligatory confession: in an irony of life that I've not yet fully reconciled myself to, I write a daily blog full of intimate details about one of the oldest broadcasts on television. While the media landscape of my youth, with its three television networks, now seems like forced national viewing by comparison, and while I anchor a broadcast that is routinely viewed by an audience of 10 million or more, it's nothing like it used to be. We work every bit as hard as our television-news forebears did at gathering, writing and presenting the day's news but to a smaller audience, from which many have been lured away by a dazzling array of choices and the chance to make their own news.

[If you want to try to wrap your head around the differences in kind between that old media experience and this new media experience, look at how Josh Kucera wrestles with it here.]

[...]

Does it endanger what passes for the national conversation if we're all talking at once? What if "talking" means typing on a laptop, but the audience is too distracted to pay attention? The whole notion of "media" is now much more democratic, but what will the effect be on democracy?

The danger just might be that we miss the next great book or the next great idea, or that we fail to meet the next great challenge ... because we are too busy celebrating ourselves and listening to the same tune we already know by heart.

Williams is anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News
From the Dec. 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine

Yo Brian! Is this such a BAD thing?

I CELEBRATE myself;    
And what I assume you shall assume;    
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.    

I loafe and invite my Soul;    
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.            

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are crowded with perfumes;    
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it;    
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.    

The atmosphere is not a perfume—it has no taste of the distillation—it is odorless;    
It is for my mouth forever—I am in love with it;    
I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked;    
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

[...]

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

 

TIME magazine says: It's all about YOU!

Personally, I hate the acronym USG. User Generated Content. A complete misnomer for something FAR more powerful and far-reaching. User. Bleh. This is about social media and the power of social organizing, organic grassroots social organizing (as opposed to those astro-turf imitations of it).

So YOU are TIME magazine's Person of the Year. But since this is about collective social effects, maybe we should accept the nomination as TIME magazine's PEOPLE of the Year. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Link: Logic+Emotion: TIME's Are a Changing....

TIME's Are a Changing...

CNN reports on TIME Magazine's person of the year. YOU. TIME has embraced the fact that millions upon millions of people are giving up their evenings watching primetime, and choosing to create, co-create, collaborate, share, and produce original content instead (gotta love the simply innovative cover which reflects your face).

So I guess it's official.  This isn't a trend.

[...]

In essence it's as if they are saying. "Hey--we're a part of this whole thing too!". As a somewhat relevant aside, I took this picture with my phone and wrote the post on it as well, without touching a PC. All in under 10 minutes. Yes, times have changed as TIME suggests.

 

 

Documenting hysterical historical moments in the anals annals of the Internet

Ya ever wonder why the folks who started YouTube did it? How did they think up the seemingly simple but brilliant idea? Wonder no more!

Link: Eat The Press | "This Is Natalie Morales, Reporting From Uranus!" | The Huffington Post.

"This Is Natalie Morales, Reporting From Uranus!"

Clips like this are why YouTube was created:

No, seriously: Clips like this are why YouTube was created. According to YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim,* he was inspired to start YouTube after reading about how the clip of Jon Stewart on Crossfire clip Wired flew around the internet in an article in Wired. The piece, "The Bittorrent Effect" by Clive Thompson, who described how the clip reached approximately 2.5 million people, three times as many as the regular CNN viewing audience. Wrote Thompson, then: "The whole concept of must-see TV changes from being something you stop and watch every Thursday to something you gotta check out right now, dude. Just click here."

Karim said that when he read that, it hit him: "Now to get the biggest audience, maybe online is the way to go, and not television." 

[...]

This, of course, includes bloopers, like Natalie Morales using a rather unfortunate pronunciation of the word "annals"  above or Jane Skinner saying "cock" on FoxNews (twice). Goofy and mostly harmless, but funny nonetheless — and worth sharing. 

*The not-Steve Chen or Chad Hurley one who opted out of the company to go to grad school

Common carriers, hotels, and pimps, oh my! Net neutrality and the law

Link: The Spacey Gracey Review: The Magna Carta of Web 2.0.

Thanks to Spacey Gracey for the tip to check out this Slate article that really piles on the metaphors (except for Common Carrier, where'd it go?) for thinking about copyright issues, YouTube, Napster, and Net Neutrality.

Here we go! Let's take the plunge with Mr. Tim Wu. My comments interspersed among key excerpts below.

Link: How the Bell Lobby helped midwife YouTube. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine.

Does YouTube Really Have Legal Problems? How the Bell Lobby helped midwife YouTube.

By Tim Wu
Posted Thursday, Oct. 26, 2006, at 4:28 PM ET

When Google bought YouTube, the conventional wisdom—expressed in op-eds, newspaper articles, and scary editorial cartoons—was that they'd also bought themselves a whole heap of copyright trouble. The New York Times used the phrase "litigation-laden landmine." Part-time copyright theorist Mark Cuban warned that YouTube would face the same copyright fate as Napster.

There's only one problem with these theories: the copyright law itself. Under the copyright code, YouTube is in much better legal shape than anyone seems to want to accept. The site enjoys a strong legal "safe harbor," a law largely respected by the television and film industries for the choices it gives them.

But the most interesting thing is where all this legal armor protecting YouTube—and most of the Web 2.0 (user-generated content) industry—comes from. It's the product of the Bell lobby—Google's bitter opponent in the ongoing Net Neutrality debates. So, while YouTube may be the creative child of Silicon Valley, it is also, as much, the offspring of Bell lobbying power.

Back in the early 1990s, when the "information highway" was the talk of the town, Hollywood and the recording industry worked hard to make Internet companies responsible for any and all copyright infringement that happened via the Internet. Jack Valenti, Hollywood's chief lobbyist, warned that without congressional action, "the information superhighway … will collapse the great wonder of intellectual property." The recording industry, for its part, dispatched Johnny Cash to rhetorically link Internet piracy and, yes, a "ring of fire."

[Heh. I remember that debate. I could never wrap my mind around it, because the Sony VHS decision MADE those Hollywood folks, but schizophrenic law that can't be consistently applied is really nothing more than protectionism. Basically, I figure Hollywood will lobby for anything that appears to protect its interests, even if there's no way the law can be consistently applied without more protectionist exemptions and loopholes.

That would be the point: make laws that only protect me, and only persecute those I don't like, even if we are both engaged in identical behavior.

The biggest irony in all the copyright debate, I think, goes back to a decision made by Marc Andreessen with Mosaic: for a graphic to display on a browser, a copyright violation MUST take place as that image is copied to the machine with the browser. That is the illusion of browsers: that you aren't stealing because it doesn't LOOK like you're taking something that isn't yours. Browsers hide the invisible FTP thingie behind http.

Just like magic! You'll notice that at no time do my hands leave my arms!]

[...]

Had that view prevailed, there would probably be no YouTube today, and also no free blog sites, and maybe not even Google or Web 2.0. What venture capitalist would invest in a company already on the hook for everything its users might do? But, in one of the lesser-known turning points in Internet history, Hollywood never got its law. Its unstoppable lobbyists ran into an unmovable object: the Bell companies, who own those "tubes" over which the Internet runs. In the mid-1990s, fearing a future of liability, the Bells ordered their lobbyists to fight Hollywood's reforms, leading to one of the greatest political struggles in copyright history. (This paper provides a history of this and other struggles.)

Hollywood employs legendary lobbyists, like Jack Valenti, but when they ran into the Bells, it was like Frazier meeting Foreman. The Bells quickly put holds on all the legislation the content industries wanted. Telecom lobbyists like Roy Neel, a close friend of Al Gore (and later Howard Dean's campaign manager), went to Congress and began saying things like, the "copyright law threatens to put a damper on the expression of ideas on the Internet."

Facing stalemate, in 1997 the industries settled on a compromise: something called the Online Copyright Liability Limitation Act, which became Title II of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (§512 of the Copyright Code). It is this law that makes YouTube worth paying more than what you pay for its videos. And its long-term effects have been enormous—you might call §512 the Magna Carta for Web 2.0.

Why? Section 512(c) of the law applies to "Information Residing on Systems or Networks At Direction of Users." In 1998, that meant Geocities and AOL user pages. But in 2006, that means Blogger, Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and, yes, YouTube—all the companies whose shtick is "user-generated content."

Thanks to the Bells, all these companies are now protected by a "notice and take down" system when they host user content. That means that if Jon Stewart notices an infringing copy of The Daily Show on YouTube, Comedy Central can write a letter to YouTube and demand it be taken down. Then, so long as YouTube acts "expeditiously" and so long as YouTube wasn't already aware that the material was there, YouTube is in the clear. In legal jargon, YouTube is in a "safe harbor." Earlier this week, when YouTube took down 30,000 files after requests from a Japanese authors' group, that was §512(c) in action.

[...]

Stated otherwise, much of the copyrighted material on YouTube is in a legal category that is new to our age. It's not "fair use," the famous right to use works despite technical infringement, for reasons of public policy. Instead, it's in the growing category of "tolerated use"—use that is technically illegal, but tolerated by the owner because he wants the publicity. If that sounds as weird as "don't ask, don't tell," you're getting the idea. The industry is deeply conflicted about mild forms of piracy—trapped somewhere between its pathological hatred of "pirates" and its lust for the buzz piracy can build.

[This is the concept the NYTimes for some reason couldn't grasp in creating its locked stable of Times Select columnists. Some of my favorite columnists ever, but I refuse to read them now. Why? Because the Times chose to limit the influence of those influential voices, by removing them from the public sphere.

The Times chose financial reward over significant public influence (and abdicated any real effort to use those columnists to contribute to the national conversation on behalf of the public good). The Times didn't just act to jeopardize its own private interests. It also deprived the Commons of those columnists' ideas in the sense of a Jeffersonian "free exchange of ideas." To my mind, that means the Times is basically saying, "Screw the quality of national debate. We have no interest in contributing to the larger public good." I should note that official Times editorials are still freely available for all. The public presence of the monolithic Times "Editorial We" is probably how it rationalizes the TimesSelect abdication of public responsibility.]

But what about Mark Cuban's copyright argument? Why isn't YouTube in trouble in the same way Napster and Grokster were? The first difference, as indicated, is that Napster simply wasn't covered by the §512 safe-harbor law, and YouTube is. Napster wasn't "hosting" information at the direction of its users, but rather providing a tool for users to find and download predominantly infringing content. It may sound odd that Napster gets in more trouble for helping you find illegal stuff than YouTube does for actually hosting it. But that's the law and why YouTube should really, really thank its friends at Bell.

[Now this part appears to me to be a big pile of crap. Nothing against Tim Wu. I mean the argument distinguishing YouTube and Napster, because of hosting vs. directing. There's something more afoot here.

Ultimately FTP was the first real file-sharing program. Nobody wanted to go after FTP. Back in the BBS days of the dial-up walled garden Net (remember Pine?!), I knew entire BBS's devoted to trading photos, which were then zapped out to floppies that had to be hand-carried around. This was about 1990, when I observed this. I had a bunch of students who taught me how to find the BBS's. So much is made of Internet porn and naughty chat rooms now, but there was an entire network of those spaces in BBS land, far from the searching eyes of Archie and gopher. They worked out their hook-ups with a private BBS dialer, then used FTP for trades.

Napster was attacked legally because of its success, not because of its central architecture. Gnutella was just a semantic work-around because the legal heads wanted to make the central direction point (for non-hosted material) the deciding factor. To my mind, the common carrier argument should have been harped on to the wall with Napster.

I mean, can you imagine how the phone companies would scream if they were held accountable because copyrighted Musak fed over your phone line while you were put on hold, and you could make copies of it?

Or if phone companies and beeper companies could be held legally accountable because drug dealers use telephones to make their drug deals?!

I never could see why the FILE-sharing aspect of Napster was not the deciding factor in making good law. Instead, the Napster decision had no consistency, because it only applied to a company doing X on every second Tuesday while hopping on one foot, if wearing green shoes. I can't STAND inconsistent law that is not broadly applicable.]

There may also be deeper differences. If the Internet were not a bookstore, or tubes, but rather a red-light district, YouTube would best be imagined as the hotel, and Napster, well, the pimp. YouTube, like a hotel, provides space for people to do things, legal or not. It's not doing anything illegal itself, but its visitors may be. But Napster, everyone more or less now admits, was cast as the pimp: It was mainly a means of getting illegal stuff. Right or wrong, we seem to accept the benign vision of YouTube as an entity which, unlike Napster, was basically born as a place to showcase stupid human tricks.

[This is my favorite paragraph in the whole story. Attack of the Metaphors!

Or as my witty friend in upstate NY used to put as his email sig:

May the metaphors be with you.

No really, I'm loving the hotel metaphor. The truth is, Internet law could not exist without metaphors, but we run into trouble when many metaphors apply at the same time. What to do, what to do? I've already shown my bias. I like law that looks at the FUNCTION of what is happening, and applies itself consistently across all different instances of that function. I'm making a MEANS argument.

What this article seems to indicate is that Internet law primarily uses an ENDS argument, with 800-pound gorillas as primary (and perhaps corrupt?) influencers of which ends shall be rewarded, which ends shall be punished. Napster was punished because it created a very successful end point that the powerful music industry didn't like. FTP has never been punished even tho it accomplishes similar functions as any other common carrier, because it was never so wildly successful as to threaten any deeply entrenched interests who demanded protectionist law.

And as it says above, YouTube seems to have a "Get Out of Jail Free" card, simply because it isn't bit-torrenting entire feature-length films that threaten entrenched interests. There's something to be said about flying under the radar, but it wouldn't be necessary if the law were actually consistent, and not applied in a biased fashion.]

 

Google Video fails to "get traction," so Google goes after YouTube

There is one paragraph from the New York Times story below that jumped out at me, for its complete and total irony. I'll make it bold, and see what you think. I've also got a few snarky interpretive comments below.

Link: Google Is Said to Set Sights on YouTube - New York Times.

Google Is Said to Set Sights on YouTube

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN  and PETER EDMONSTON

Published: October 7, 2006

[...]

Google is in discussions to acquire YouTube for $1.6 billion, people involved in the talks said yesterday. While the talks are in the early stages, and may fall apart, the size of Google’s offer may push YouTube closer to a deal. Other companies have also expressed interest and could swoop in with a higher offer.

Microsoft,  Yahoo,  Viacom and the  News Corporation, among others, have all visited YouTube’s headquarters in San Mateo, Calif., in recent months to inquire about buying the company.

[...]

A deal for YouTube would be the crowning moment for a property that emerged as a cultural phenomenon almost immediately after it officially began last December. Its site, which delivers more than 100 million video clips a day, allows users to share a broad array of offerings from news clips to home movies to spoofs — sometimes funny but often simply crude — created by ordinary users.

Almost single-handedly, YouTube has both popularized the sharing of videos and empowered would-be movie makers around the world. The site is also facing possible legal challenges over the unauthorized posting and sharing of videos. Yet a number of media companies would prefer to embrace YouTube as a partner, rather than treat it as a pariah, as was the case with Napster.

[...]

The $1.6 billion price tag, while seemingly rich for so young a company, makes sense, research analysts said.

“That’s expensive but not unreasonable,” said Charlene Li, an analyst with  Forrester Research. Ms. Li estimated that the company has about 50 million users worldwide, which works out to a purchase price of about $32 a user.

The deal would make sense from the perspective of both companies, Ms. Li and others said.

“Google Video has not gotten any traction,” Ms. Li said.

Despite Google’s broad reach as an Internet search service and its well-known brand name, Google Video has only a 10 percent market share, according to Hitwise, which monitors Web traffic. YouTube has a 46 percent share, and MySpace has 23 percent.

“YouTube figured out what Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and all the others in the marketplace didn’t,” she said. “It’s not about the video. It’s about creating a community around the video.

[...]

Gee, what was their first clue? You know, I suspect the odds are right up there with the chances of a camel passing through the eye of a needle, for big 900-pound gorilla companies to be able to magically "create" communities with a wave of their well-funded magic wands. This also reinforces what I discovered in my dissertation community ethnography.

But for all the talk about creating communities, I think there is one traditional marketing angle that YouTube has that other companies are overlooking. The service isn't just viral (in that you can post the code and run the Flash-swapped video on your site, something most web site owners admittedly DON'T want, to the point of complaining of people taking their deep-linked image code and server load time and punting it for free on another site): it also is remarkably branded.

I'm referring to the YouTube brand in the corner of every punted video. For ANY online viral video service to compete, it has to have a way to brand the video on every site it appears on, like that YouTube watermark in the right corner, and the distinctive large centered play button.

Sure, anybody can watermark anything, and there's nothing really brilliant about the YouTube interface design (if anything, Flickr is a far better-designed social media sharing service. YouTube link placements drive me crazy). Which just goes to show you, interface design has very little to do with YouTube's success. Should I be depressed about this, as a designer, or should I be happy that communities trump design? I did learn this truth definitively in my dissertation, after all.

So if you have "Google Video" watermarked in a corner or whatever, is that just as good as the YouTube watermark? No. By the power of repetition, the YouTube watermark doesn't just brand the video, it communicates a message, over and over again, a message of revolt against traditional media, traditional television video providers and producers. It says "This is about YOU." It says "This is YOUR Tube."

Now, Napster was just a word that made me want to take a nap, so I'm not saying this is a be-all and end-all factor.

But I still think the communicative message of the YouTube brand and watermark make it a tough standard for any competitor to fight. Better interface design, better features, even a 900-pound gorilla like Google can't fight it.

It has a first-mover advantage, a thriving community, and a brand that makes each and every user want to thump his or her chest and say "This is MY Tube!

Democratized Media: YouTube for whistleblowers?

FORGET "TWO CHINESE BOYS" LIP-SYNCHING TO THE BACKSTREET BOYS.

The applications for YouTube continue to expand. I keep wondering what the "Democracy Now" journalist Amy Goodman and videographer Max Stahl could have done with YouTube.  When they were in East Timor in 1991 with important footage of civilian massacres, they almost got their video taken away by the Indonesian police. They had to smuggle it out of the country in a different way, but what if they had been able to upload it straight to an open posting video site like YouTube?

The Rodney King effect, writ large?

But would it be harder to fact-check and refute a video than it is to fact-check and refute a blogger?

Link: ABC News: Desperate Whistleblower Turns to YouTube.

Link: YouTube - Homeland Security - Coast Guard Issues.

Desperate Whistleblower Turns to YouTube

Former Engineer Accuses the World's Biggest Defense Contractor of Knowingly Jeopardizing National Security

By JONATHAN SILVERSTEIN

Aug. 29, 2006 — "What I am going to tell you is going to seem preposterous and unbelievable."

Those are a few of the first words of a video posted on YouTube by former Lockheed Martin engineer Michael De Kort, claiming that the defense contractor had built and the Coast Guard had accepted a number of boats that fall far short of government standards and leave our national security in question.

De Kort had tried going through the chain of command at Lockheed, and had contacted the government, the Coast Guard and various members of Congress, but no one seemed willing or able to help.

"YouTube was my last best shot — I never wanted to do this publicly," he explained. "I had gone there to look at entertaining videos and saw that hundreds of thousands of people were visiting the site, and I thought that if there was something that was novel … maybe just the fact that I was doing it would be the story."

[...]

Atlanta Media Bloggers group is going great guns

Link: Atlanta Media Bloggers.

I have recently fallen in with a great group of folks that meet monthly here in Atlanta to talk all things blog and media, and along the way, I got roped into putting up a new blog site for the group.

What I mean to say is, HEY, CHECK OUT THIS GREAT NEW GROUP BLOG!

I've had that un-used design lying about, and it was too fun not to use as a cool clubhouse for the group. I was always big on clubhouses and building forts when I was a kid, and I was hanging out with a terrific graphic designer last year, Denny Lester, who had a new Wacom tablet and wanted an excuse to play with it. This is what came out of that. I can't stop staring at it.

More importantly, I've met some very interesting folks in this group who are expanding my mind and perspective daily, and the contributions of the variety of group members are already giving this new blog an eclectic and interesting flavor.  These are discussions I hope to participate in often.

Watch for more cool things to keep showing up on this site!