Author Archives: Karl

Web Content by and for the Masses

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New York Times: Web Content by and for the Masses

…Flickr, acquired this year by Yahoo, is just one example of a rapidly growing array of Web services all seeking to exploit the Internet’s power to bring people together.

From photo- and calendar-sharing services to “citizen journalist” sites and annotated satellite images, the Internet is morphing yet again. A remarkable array of software systems makes it simple to share anything instantly, and sometimes enhance it along the way.

Inexpensive to create and worldwide in reach, the new Internet services are having an impact far beyond the file sharing at issue in the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday, which focused on copyright violations using peer-to-peer software.

Indeed, the abundance of user-generated content – which includes online games, desktop video and citizen journalism sites – is reshaping the debate over file sharing. Many Internet industry executives think it poses a new kind of threat to Hollywood, the recording industry and other purveyors of proprietary content: not piracy of their work, but a compelling alternative.

The new services offer a bottom-up creative process that is shifting the flow of information away from a one-way broadcast or publishing model, giving rise to a wave of new business ventures and touching off a scramble by media and technology companies to respond.

“Sharing will be everywhere,” said Jeff Weiner, a Yahoo senior vice president in charge of the company’s search services. “It’s the next chapter of the World Wide Web.”

…”We are now entering the participation age,” Jonathan I. Schwartz, the president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems, said on Monday at an industry conference in San Francisco. “The really interesting thing about the network today is that individuals are starting to participate. The endpoints are starting to inform the center.”

Yahoo! is launching MyWeb.

iTunes Podcast support launched

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Download the new client from Apple and iTunes will help you find, download, subscribe, and listen to podcasts on your PC. I’m using it right now at work and I gotta tell ya – if you have an iPod it’s a no-brainer, but even if you don’t you’ll love it just to listen to all that is available – and now easy to use.

Dave Winer will probably be the best source of coverage for publishers so check there for any potential impact on you.

Google Launches Video Playback Today?

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John Battelle’s Searchblog: News: Google To Launch Online Video Playback This Monday

Google will not disclose the raw numbers of videos that have been
uploaded to date, but the company will make all those which were tagged
as “free” available for real time streaming through the VLC player,
which Google has modified and will make available for download Monday
morning. The company also intends to make its VLC code available to the
open source community as part of their Google code project.

BTW, in unrelated news, did you know Jim Romenesko makes $152,163 a year? From his blog? Me neither. Despite what other bloggers think, I feel it’s well deserved and it helps to show you what becoming a recognized must-read in a on demand subject is worth as a blogger.

Tom Cruise Attacks Matt Lauer on Psychiatry

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A Couch Tom Cruise Won’t Jump On

…”You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do.”

Cruise looked like a man possessed — or at least in need of an Ativan — leaning insistently forward in his chair, hammering Lauer when the host suggested that some people were actually, you know, helped when doctors prescribed psychiatric drugs. Lauer sparred with Cruise specifically over whether it made sense for Brooke Shields to have sought therapy and taken antidepressants for postpartum depression — a decision that Cruise had previously criticized.

…As a top-level celebrity believer in Scientology, Cruise has been steeped in the lingo and policies of the late church founder, L. Ron Hubbard. (Hearing Cruise use a term like “ideal scene” during his exchange with Lauer would perk up the ears of anyone who’s been in Scientology’s orbit before.)

Hubbard launched his self-help movement in the 1950s with a book called “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health,” and from early on, he battled with psychologists and psychiatrists. Indeed, Hubbard once wrote in an internal policy statement: “Our war has been forced to become to take over absolutely the field of mental healing on this planet in all forms.”

BTW, Katie Holmes has a Scientology minder who is following her as she promotes “Batman Begins”.

And Scarlett Johansson was turned down for a role in MI:3 after she doesn’t embrace the “religion”.

Way, way more in a related thread at Metafilter.

Ok.. I’m turning tabloid.

I, Cringely on Adobe’s Macromedia Acquisition

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PBS | I, Cringely . June 23, 2005 – No Flash in the Pan

…Conventional wisdom says that Adobe needs this acquisition to bulk-up for the inevitable conflict to come with Microsoft. Conventional wisdom is occasionally wrong, however. I’m not saying that the acquisition makes no sense. Quite the contrary, I support it. But the lack of competition from Microsoft in Adobe’s traditional graphics markets comes down primarily to Bill Gates realizing that Microsoft simply hasn’t been in a position to compete with Adobe on a technology-for-technology basis. Gates tried to undercut Adobe’s PostScript with Microsoft’s TrueType fonts back in the late 1980s and was taken to the woodshed by Adobe. The professional graphics market wasn’t willing to give Microsoft the three tries it generally needs to get something right.

What’s changed is not the companies (brain-for-brain Adobe is still smarter in its niche), but the market. Microsoft’s endless quest for new revenue lines has settled on PDF as a target for its new Metro product, not just for graphics professionals, but for all of us.

The other thing that has changed is the mobile market, especially mobile phones — the PCs of tomorrow. Macromedia is making progress in the phone market and Adobe, for the most part, isn’t, hence the acquisition.

So it is a good deal all around, especially if Adobe can learn from Macromedia how to have fun.

But let’s get back to Flash for a moment, because I really do believe it is the key to this deal. What’s key about Flash is not just that it is installed on nearly every computer in the world, and that its influence is extending now into mobile phones. What’s key is that we all upgrade to the latest version of Flash as a matter of course, making it the ideal Trojan horse program of all time.

Let’s say Adobe/Macromedia had some little bit of code – a VoIP client, for example — they wanted to bring to market. Just make it part of the next version of Flash. Over the course of a few months and practically without effort, that little program would be installed and ready to go in hundreds of millions of computers. Then all Adobe would have to do is to announce it and the service could be up and running practically overnight. That’s the kind of market clout that not even Microsoft has. And that’s what makes Macromedia a bargain for Adobe even at $3.4 billion.

George W. Bush: “No nation can negotiate with terrorists.”

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Whiskey Bar: Negotiating With Terrorists

No nation can negotiate with terrorists. For there is no way to make peace with those whose only goal is death.

George W. Bush
Remarks to Reporters
April 4, 2002

After weeks of delicate negotiation . . . a small group of insurgent commanders apparently came face to face with four American officials seeking to establish a dialogue with the men they regard as their enemies. The talks on June 3 were followed by a second encounter 10 days later, according to an Iraqi who said that he had attended both meetings . . . further talks are planned in the hope of negotiating an eventual breakthrough that might reduce the violence in Iraq.

The Sunday Times of London
US ‘in talks with Iraq rebels’
June 26, 2005

Wow. So our administration is now making a distinction between “insurgents” and “terrorists”? So “insurgents” who car bomb innocent civilians aren’t terrorists?

Wow.

Illegal in America, Yet it Makes a Fortune From its People

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At PartyGaming, Everything’s Wild – New York Times

A giant in the online gambling business, PartyGaming is an often-overlooked megasurvivor from the dot-com crash of the late 1990’s. As hundreds of profitless commercial sites disappeared into the digital ether, PartyGaming’s popular gambling sites – like PartyPoker.com – soared, with revenues and profits growing exponentially year after year.

This week, the company will go public in what is expected to be the largest offering in years on the London Stock Exchange, one that will make billionaires out of its ragtag assortment of founders and major stockholders – including a California lawyer who earned her first fortune in online pornography and phone-sex lines. All told, as much as $9 billion is expected to be raised, with all of the cash going to private shareholders selling portions of their stakes.

But there will be no Wall Street investment houses lapping up fees in the giant deal, no victory dances in the offices of American corporate lawyers. That is because PartyGaming, based in Gibraltar, has no assets in the United States, and its officers or directors could risk being served with a civil suit – or an arrest warrant – if they came to the United States on business.

The reason? The Justice Department and numerous state attorneys general maintain that providing the opportunity for online gambling is against the law in the United States – and PartyGaming does it anyway. Indeed, of its $600 million in revenue and $350 million in profit in 2004, almost 90 percent came from the wallets and bank accounts of American gamblers.

To justify this, PartyGaming walks a very thin line. Providing online gambling is not illegal per se in the United States, the company argues – federal prosecutors just say it is. The company has already received an e-mail message from the Louisiana attorney general demanding that it cease providing online gambling in that state; PartyGaming simply ignored the communication and waited for additional action that never came.