BlogDrome

Yesterday, the Associated Press announced that as of Jan 2006 they will require license fees for sites synidcating AP news service feeds.

What they risk, of course, is to wall themselves off of the web. Will they force Yahoo and Google to pay republishing rights or will their feeds be relegated to the other world of the MSM?

As more and more of you get your information from sites like this, the AP and other services that insist on taking their marbles home with them may lose further relevance. Many bloggers already refuse to cite sources they cannot link to. Links that go to sites that require registration are often marked (reg. requ.) to give readers with itchy mouse fingers a heads up.

The perception of information overload has been around for a long time. Lately. we've heard much about the so-called long-tail, which describes sites like BlogDrome where specialized information streams are put out for a relatively narrow audience. The question naturally arises; if we thought we were overloaded before we had grown such a long tail, what about now? How are you to cope when you have a large number of RSS feeds in your Reader and it becomes difficult to plow through all those additional sources? Of course, the purpose of BlogDrome is to do the digging and weeding for you. You return to our site or get our RSS feed because you understand that we are digging up the kind of stuff you don't usually find in the general press until it percolates to the surface. They prove daily, the folks we reblog, just how close to the cutting edge they live.

So that calls the question; how in the context of a wider and freer information hose, is one to think about the product of the MSM, or main-steam media? Our answer is that it all depends. There are clearly things that require the means the MSM possess in abundance. In making this point, Dan Gillmor cites the recent article in the NYTIMES in which the newspaper reveals that a very high percentage of the salmon sold as caught in the wild is actually pellet fed and farm grown. How could they be sure? Well they went out and bought the fish then sent them to an independent laboratory that could do the proper series of tests. That costs and the Times can afford it.

That's clearly not the kind of journalism we ordinarily expect from the content producers in the blogosphere. We qualify that because we've come to believe that when you remove nearly all the barriers to production and distribution, you unleash such a wide group of participants with so many means at their disposal, that we wouldn't be all that surprised to see a story circulating around the sphere that did require just that level of resources and discipline. More interestingly, chances are, a good story on a lightly visited site, will be picked up and redistributed. Social networking engines like Del.iicio.us provide one of the means. That's the way it works around here

So, we're not going to worry about overload.... it's a big world out there full of creative inquisitive folks and we celebrate that. We see some of you every day and look forward to gathering the kind of stories that make this unique angle on the sphere rotate on its own tilted axis.

There's an interesting tension between bloggers and Google News. G-News has rejected most bloggers from its database until recently when it began to selectively let some bloggers in. Needless to say, who G-News lets in the door is rankling a lot of feathers. As far as we know, the DymaxionWeb does not yet make news, according to the big G.

Two steps forward....As of today, the source links and attribution are back on track. There are still a number of kinks to work out but we expect to have those in check before the week is out.

We still haven't got all the kinks out of our upgrade to reBlog 1.0. Attribution links to authors and their sites do not show up as they should but we decided to go ahead and publish with the hope we'll have things ironed out soon.

Memes today range from more analysis of the impact on advertising and even newsgathering by what is coming to be called the "long tail", the ongoing controversy surrounding bloggers' rights to break news --see the Boing-Boing call for the defense against Apple's attempt to stifle news--, to the question of whether search engines that merely point to content files can be sued. It's one thing to go after a small site that provides links to bittorrent files and another to go after a major search engine like Google that might provide, say, a bittorrent specific file search capability.

It's also noted that as we approach the March 29th Supreme Court hearing on Grokster, the plot only thickens.

Enjoy the reads!

This week marks the start of a new series of Blogdrome using an updated version of Reblog software. The new software makes it easier for us to insert comments where the seem warranted. We want first and foremost for our selections to speak for themselves but will add a few words here and there where it seems we've got something to add.

Since we are looking for a diversity of opinions and input, the mere fact that something goes unannotated doesn't mean we agree. But we also have little interest in ambushing our fellow posters.

Kudos go the blogger who tracked down the website of the Minnesota shooter. In context, his interest in carnivorous plants is chilling to say the least.

On the eve of Dan Rather's last day as anchor at CBS, the MSM has turned its eye towards the blogsphere. ABC's Nightline tried to grapple with the blogosphere tonight in a report by John Donovan. Donovan talked with some bloggers but might have also gotten some quotes from Rather colleague Tom Fenton who has recently published a book on the shrinking ability of MSM to gather the news. Bloggers, of course, will come in all stripes and some will chase down a story the way a salaried and edited journalist might do but bloggers are mainly communicating what they think. The blogosphere is an open forum, an old time political meeting, a brawl. And just like the heckler in the back of the room or the demonstrators out on the street, bloggers may not always be pretty or right but they can and will have impact.

The net is not a megaphone as Donovan seemed concerned to think but an open forum, beggars, hucksters, bards and all.

In the blogosphere companies get formed, VC dollars get invested and the founders all claim "there is no business model". It sounds an awful lot like the politicians who deny they are running up to the day they declare. Maybe we are just too cynical but check out the statements coming from the founders of Odeo and Brightcove.

Having just hung up a Skype chat with good friend in rural southwest France, a call that certainly would have had a different feel and pace if the Sprint or Verizon billing machine had been ticking in the background, I have to wonder whether Skype will find a viable business model or like Napster and other ubiquitous peer to peer names will end up little more than a familiar brand name. Om Malik has a piece (see below in BlogDrome) on his site Om Malik on Broadband in which he picks up signs of grumbling around Skype's paid Skypeout service that hooks computer users with dial up services --regular Skype is a computer to computer service; users of the paid service (1.5cents a minute US to Europe) complain of the lack of customer support facilities. Skype, truly the little company that could, is up against the world's large telecommunications conglomerates as well as a number of smaller better funded VOIP only companies like Vonage.

As I write this there are nearly 2 million Skype users presently on line. Still, the company has resisted the advertising model and outside of Skypeout, which according to Om's piece, may eventually present more problems than revenue, has no way to directly generate cash flow since downloads of the software are free as are Skype to Skype connections. In many ways the company model fits what became the standard Internet marketing mode: first get the user base then figure out how to capitalize it. It will be interesting to see how this turns out. In the mean time it's clear that for millions of people around the world, pre-VOIP days have already gone the way of those of the village blacksmith.

There was blood in the water in the blogosphere this weekend and it made a lot of people unhappy. After all, a second "Liberal leaning" TV executive would lose his job because of blogosphere coverage. Could it be a "mob lynching" as was heard from some quarters or the new "McCarthyism" as another pundit offered.

Authoring one attack was Bertrand Pecquerie, an expert in newspaper syndication and press networks, who is the Director of the World Editors Forum, the organisation for editors within the World Association of Newspapers (WAN).

James D. Miller, Assistant Professor of Economics at Smith College and contributor to online tech-site Tech Central Station (TCS) has warned that "blogs may soon make many Americans afraid to speak their minds".

Not likely. This is more a case of a badly handled quote from a highly seasoned journalist who should have stood behind what he is reported to have said or provided a proper and timely response if there was an error. By relying on Old Media's code of omerta, CNN and Eason Jordan (the parting executive) somehow let the story spin out of control. The message loud and clear is that media is no longer a one way street. There are consumers of content out there and they will (and most assuredly should) want to enter into the dialogue. The real question should now be why Jordan and CNN caved. It's not enough to say that Jordan cares too much about the journalists he sends into harm's way.

Whether mainstream media likes it or not this story still has a chapter or two to go. The video of the event will come out and there will be an attempt to learn what the words Jordan said actually were meant to mean.

Score one for the blogosphere where embargoes get hop scotched. It's now official that ASKJ has snapped up Bloglines. But the action only began there: we heard that Ask.com was up for sale and being pursued by an elite group of content companies. Google made two moves towards expanding its stock of wares. Mapquest was given notice that it and its look-alike at Yahoo no longer are the only map guys block. If this wasn't enough, Google released a new feature that displays images from Google Image Search above Google web search results when they're relevant to users' search queries. When users search for queries on the Google homepage, they may see relevant thumbnail images at the top.

IBM, Sony, and Toshiba released information on the long anticipated, highly efficient new Cell chip, which they claim will revolutionize the industry with clock speeds of more than 4 GHz.

Where there's smoke, there's fire, we have to assume. If so, the word around the blogosphere is that AskJeeves has purchased Bloglines, the popular, browser-based RSS delivery system. Last we checked, however, there is still no official announcement. Last week AskJeeves announced its quarterly results showing a gain in revenues year over year but nothing to get investors excited about. Bloglines has been in the process of incorporating context-keyed advertisements into its format causing some bloggers to block the hyperactive Bloglines crawler.

Our favorite meme of the day is the story circulating that we are at the dawn of surreptitious, remote RFID injection attacks. We once suggested getting an RFID jammer, you may have to double up that order with an RFID personal body scanner. Amazon will ship for free.

Then there was the ham-handed attempt by Mickey Dee to spawn a blog discussion of its Super Bowl ad campaign. It took all of about two blogoseconds for that ploy to be outed.

Googles problems with the French courts continue regarding the sale of competitive ads around hits on French brand names. French judges, it seems, don't view the activity as they might rue St. Honore vetrine ads.

We were also intrigued by Om Malik's assertion that the shift from a US-centric web to a truly global Internet will be industry disruptive.

In "So, who's Next to Fall" we get to find out why Verizon is keeping mum on the AT&T SBC deal. The speculation is they are going to scoop up MCI. or, wait a minute.... will it be Sprint.

We know it will be someone, otherwise the Washington TV waves would be filled by advertising by some group specifically funded to lobby Congress pro and con.

Meanwhile, all we have to say is that "it's the backbone, stupid!"

So whats' new? Today, the Blogosphere is awash with Google rumors. The meme du jour was word that Google has been registered to sell Internet domains. What could that mean, people wondered out loud.

Meanwhile GOOG reported a billion dollar quarter even as MS officially launched its Google killer search service. Let the games begin!