28 March 2006 >> My very first post to Brain Terminal, on August 22nd, 2001, covered Microsoft and its effects on the software industry. As a software developer who witnessed the rise of Microsoft from within the industry, I saw how the company’s dominance stifled innovation in virtually every market the company touched. Microsoft could simply announce a product—even if the company never actually intended to ship that product—and “freeze” the market as risk-averse technology purchasers held off on buying existing third-party products while waiting for Microsoft’s vaporware.

Now it appears that Microsoft’s size is stifling innovation within the company itself. And that is prompting some employees to start calling publicly (but anonymously) for the firing of Microsoft’s top management.

Beyond a certain size, it seems that all institutions become increasingly inefficient. Businesses at least face an incentive to be efficient: if they’re not, they risk diminished market status, the wrath of shareholders, and possibly even extinction. Perhaps these incentives will save Microsoft from its downward slide. Too bad no such incentives exist for government institutions, where inefficiency can always be papered over by handing taxpayers a bigger bill.

8 March 2006 @ 12:46PM >> London’s Daily Mail reports:

Surfing the Internet is now more popular than watching television, according to new figures.

On average, adults in Britain spend more time online at their computers - 41.5 days a year - than in front of the TV.

Government figures from the Office of National Statistics show that we spend just 37.5 days a year watching television.

It is believed to be the first time that using the Internet has overtaken what was traditionally seen as the nation’s favourite pastime.

Two-thirds of the survey respondents indicated that they spend an increasing amount of time online every year.

I suspect this trend is not limited to Britain, and it will be magnified as more people come online and as high-speed broadband connections become increasingly available.

This means that establishment media audiences will continue to become fragmented, and that there is a tremendous opportunity for distributing new content online. The traditional gatekeepers will find fewer and fewer people lining up at the gates.

5 March 2006 @ 5:52PM >> Ed Driscoll has posted an interview with me on do-it-yourself video production.

25 February 2006 @ 11:38AM >> Reader Matt Walliser writes:

Evan,

Recent news about iTunes hitting their billionth download made me think a little more about your post a while back about the recording industry not adapting to new mediums. If they’re not careful, they’ll obsolete themselves to Apple’s iTunes. Apple has made it so convenient to get music onto your iPod, that people don’t seem to mind paying a buck for a song. The lawsuits brought forth by the RIAA agianst people who download music can only serve to push people towards iTunes. If Apple creates their own label and plays their cards right, they could have channel dominance from top to bottom. The best part is, it’s being handed to them by the very channel they’re about displace!

While I’d hate for any one company to completely control music distribution, the massive success of iTunes is a wake-up call to an industry that has been hitting the snooze button on every previous wake-up call since the dawn of the Internet era. Maybe this time, the industry will pay attention.

24 February 2006 @ 9:17AM >> Over at TCS Daily, Ed Driscoll takes a look at the state of independent online video and declares that the days of the one-man TV network are “coming soon.”

Ed interviewed me for the piece, and I obligingly supplied him with this rah-rah quote:

Ten years ago, the expense associated with putting together even the most rudimentary online video would have put it out of reach for most people. Even if you had your own camera, you probably didn’t have video editing software or a computer capable of running it. If you did have access to an editing suite, then you probably didn’t have sufficient bandwidth to make the resulting video available online. And even with unlimited bandwidth, the people on the other end — the potential viewers — probably didn’t have enough bandwidth to watch what you made. Today, however, none of those are limiting factors. You can buy a usable consumer-level DV camera for around $500. You can buy a “pro-sumer” DV camera for under $3000. You can even shoot in high-definition HDV for under $5000.

And near-ubiquitous bandwidth availability is also a factor. Although high-speed broadband has been available in most corporations for a few years, broadband is just beginning to penetrate the home market in large numbers. This means that we’re really at the very beginning stages of mass viewing of online videos. We haven’t hit the inflection point yet, but I suspect we’ll see, within a few years, the same massive growth with online video that we saw with the web in the mid-1990s. Eventually, maybe 10 years from now, we’ll have full-screen, full-motion on-demand high-definition video available directly to the home [via the Web]. That’s the ideal video delivery platform, and if we’re still a decade away, it means there’s plenty of room to grow in this market.

My favorite quote from the piece, however, is Driscoll’s closing: “If Dan Rather could host a TV show for 25 years, why not you?”

3 February 2006 @ 9:33AM >> Since the beginning of the year, both Microsoft and Google have seen self-inflicted public relations disasters stem from their decisions to censor political content deemed inconvenient by the Chinese government. Now, Microsoft has decided to make own employees over its abrupt censoring of a Chinese blogger, Microsoft Corp. has formulated a new policy to deal with requests from a government that alleges that posted material violates its laws.

The measures were detailed by Microsoft’s top lawyer, Brad Smith, at the Government Leaders Forum in Lisbon today.

Smith said Microsoft will remove blogs only when given proper legal notice. And even then, it will block access to that material only within the country where it is deemed unlawful. The site will still be viewable from outside the country, he said.

[...]

“Obviously, what we are trying to do with the kinds of principles we articulated today is ... obey the law in the countries in which we do business but also pay appropriate respect to the needs of our users, both those who put information up on a blog and those who want to read that information around the world,” Smith said.

10 January 2006 >> At Slate, Edward Jay Epstein discusses the future of movie distribution and what won’t likely be in it: the Blockbuster rental chain. Interesting timing, because this weekend, I noticed that the Blockbuster store closest to me is now empty and dismantled. That’s the second nearby Blockbuster to close since I moved into this neighborhood, and for all I know, none are left in Manhattan. Four other area video stores closed within the past year as well. And come to think of it, I haven’t seen a new video store open up within the last decade.

When I first moved into my apartment, I joined a local video store and rented some Woody Allen film. On the way to work one day, I went to return the tape. Surprisingly, the video store that I joined just two days earlier was completely gutted. But the drop-slot remained operational, so I put it to use. Down slid the tape case, and falling on the no-longer-carpeted floor, it popped open and the tape tumbled out.

The following day, I walked by the store again and noticed that the building’s roof was missing, as were the internal walls. The floor was covered in debris, but I could still see that Woody Allen tape sitting there on the floor, covered in sunlight and a fresh coat of dust. By the end of the week, the entire building was gone. Who knows where that tape is now...

It looks like the entire brick-and-mortar video rental business will be following the same fate, and maybe soon. We’re witnessing the death of an entire category of retailers. When was the last time that happened?

8 January 2006 >> Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and his wife Dr. Helen Smith have begun a podcast series. The inaugural podcast contains interviews with commentator Michelle Malkin and musician Audra Coldiron of Audra and the Antidote.

Earlier today, Stuart Browning and I were interviewed by Glenn and Helen for a future podcast. We discussed the digital video revolution, Internet video distribution, our production company On The Fence Films, Stuart’s short film Dead Meat on the Canadian healthcare system, and the latest developments with our upcoming film Indoctrinate U. That podcast may appear as early as next week. I’ll post a link when it does.

3 January 2006 @ 1:48PM >> Is Microsoft helping the Chinese communists suppress speech that they don’t like? It sure sounds that way.

Reporter Rebecca MacKinnon tells the story of Zhao Jing who blogs under the handle “Michael Anti.” MacKinnon notes that “Anti is one of China’s edgiest journalistic bloggers, often pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptible.” His blog, hosted on Microsoft’s MSN Spaces website, was recently shut down, apparently by Microsoft. So MacKinnon conducted her own tests, and discovered that MSN Spaces is systematically censoring words and removing blogs thought to be threatening to the Chinese regime:

On December 16th I created a blog and attempted to make various posts with politically sensitive words. When I attempted to post entries with titles like “Tibet Independence” or “Falun Gong” (a banned religious group), I got an error message saying: “This item includes forbidden language. Please delete forbidden language from this item.”

However I was successful in posting blog entries with non-controversial titles, but with politically sensitive words in the text body. For instance, a blog post titled “I love you” had “Tibet independence” in the text body, and a post titled “I am happy” had “Falun Gong” in the body [...]

This was on Friday December 16th. By Monday the 19th, the whole blog had been taken down [...] with an error message: “This space is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.”

Now, It is VERY important to note that the inaccessible blog was moved or removed at the server level and that the blog remains inaccessible from the United States as well as from China. This means that the action was taken NOT by Chinese authorities responsible for filtering and censoring the internet for Chinese viewers, but by MSN staff at the level of the MSN servers.

2 January 2006 >> A rap video spoof by a pair of Saturday Night Live veterans has become something of an Internet hit.

I can see why. It’s funny and different.

And it makes you wonder about the future of broadcast. Tivo and other DVRs give SNL an opportunity to be seen by people who are otherwise not in front of their TVs on a Saturday night, but the Internet got this video in front of people who aren’t in the habit of recording the show in the first place. That’s the way you build an audience.

It’s just another example of the increasingly blurred line between online and broadcast video. Can full-catalog video-on-demand via the Internet be far behind?

5 December 2005 @ 12:59PM >> A systems analyst recently discovered that Sony’s CD copy protection scheme can damage your computer’s operating system installation and leave your system vulnerable to hackers. Recently, the Department of Homeland Security took notice, leading to a rebuke from Stewart Baker, the department’s assistant secretary for policy, who chastised Sony: “It’s very important to remember that it’s your intellectual property — it’s not your computer.”

8 November 2005 @ 10:38AM >> Senator Norm Coleman describes the threat:

It sounds like a Tom Clancy plot. An anonymous group of international technocrats holds secretive meetings in Geneva. Their cover story: devising a blueprint to help the developing world more fully participate in the digital revolution. Their real mission: strategizing to take over management of the Internet from the U.S. and enable the United Nations to dominate and politicize the World Wide Web. Does it sound too bizarre to be true? Regrettably, much of what emanates these days from the U.N. does.

The Internet faces a grave threat. We must defend it. We need to preserve this unprecedented communications and informational medium, which fosters freedom and enterprise. We can not allow the U.N. to control the Internet.

Absolutely. Any organization that lets Libya, China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia sit on its Commission on Human Rights clearly can’t be trusted to keep the Internet free. Do we really want the likes of Fidel Castro having a say in what is and is not acceptable online discourse?

4 November 2005 @ 12:16PM >> Three years ago, I warned about music CDs that were deliberately corrupted by manufacturers in order to prevent copying. Because such CDs were really not CDs at all—they violate the published standard for music CDs—some computers had trouble handling them, and the corrupted discs could cause those computers to crash.

Now Sony Music, in an attempt to stem piracy, is putting out a new form of CD containing copy protection code that hides itself on your computer. The software, which is technologically similar to spyware and computer viruses, has no uninstall feature, and attempting to remove it manually can render your CD drive inoperable.

The Washington Post reports:

The CDs in question make use of a technique employed by software programs known in security circles as “rootkits,” a set of tools attackers can use to maintain control over a computer system once they have broken in.

People may differ over what exactly a rootkit is, but the most basic ones are designed to ensure that regular PC monitoring commands and tools cannot see whatever has been planted on the victim’s machine. Because rootkits generally get their hooks into the most basic level of an operating system, it is sometimes easier (and safer) to reformat the affected computer’s hard drive than to surgically remove the intruder.

Sony’s anti-piracy program installer pops up when you drop one of these content-protected CDs into your drive. If you agree to install it, there is no “uninstall” feature. [Mark Russinovich, who discovered Sony’s rootkit software,] was able to use his knowledge of rootkits and the Windows operating system to zero in on the offending driver files needed to run the software. Unfortunately, he found that removing the program also erased the system files that power his CD-ROM drive, rendering it useless.

Russinovich also discovered that the Sony program drivers are configured to load themselves in “Safe Mode” (a diagnostic mode of Windows that is useful for fixing problems with the operating system), which he said could make system recovery extremely difficult if any of the program drivers has a bug that prevents the system from booting.

30 October 2005 @ 2:03PM >> Early last year, I wrote about my battle with spam e-mails. Now say hello to splogs (”spam blogs”), the latest way for spammers to annoy you and degrade the utility of the internet:

At first glance, it seems like a regular blog. But look closer and you’ll see there’s something very odd about the blog’s content: It’s very familiar. Too familiar.

That’s because you wrote it, six months ago, on your own blog. The rest of the content doesn’t make sense: The same word repeated over and over again. There are ads all over the sidebar for products like Viagra and mortgage loans.

This, you realize, is a splog, and you’re the victim.

“Splogs,” or spam blogs, are the latest way for spammers to manipulate the blogosphere for profit. The phenomenon hit an all-time high recently, when Google’s blog-hosting service, Blogger, was inundated with more than 13,000 fake blogs spawned by a script (all have since been taken down).

[...]

While splogs may seem like a minor annoyance to the individual blogger, the overall effect of splogs is far-reaching. “What happens when all the search terms become infested with these splogs?” said Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome. “It makes it that much harder to find the stuff you really want to look for.”

30 September 2005 >> Yesterday, for the first time, I watched an entire TV show online—and I wasn’t breaking the law!

Google Video, a new beta-test site from the search engine company, made available the premiere episode of Chris Rock’s new sitcom “Everybody Hates Chris.”

Not only was the show pretty damn funny—it has now earned a coveted spot on my TiVo—but the picture and sound quality were impressive. There was no skipping or stalling, the video window was large enough to make for enjoyable viewing, and the quality of the motion and resolution was impressive.

Hopefully, this isn’t just a one-time publicity stunt; I’d love to watch more shows this way. Of course, since the online episode was free and it contained no ads, I’m not expecting this service to be a permanent fixture without some sort of modification to the business model.

Now if only Google Video would add “The Office”...

15 September 2005 @ 11:01AM >> Have you ever noticed how faddish science can be? It always seems like some food that we were told to eat more of ten years ago now turns out will kill us. It’s not just limited to dietary concerns; it happens with earth science as well. Did you know that just ten years before people started panicking about global warming, scientists were convinced the biggest environmental threat was global cooling?

This article by Peter Gwynne—published on April 28, 1975 in Newsweek—tries to stir up a panic about the impending “little ice age”. More >>

2 September 2005 @ 10:35AM >> In a posting aptly entitled “Recording industry announces plans to screw up remaining business model,” John Paczkowski at Good Morning Silicon Valley notes that some in the music industry are upset about Apple’s success with its online music store. Apparently, the store isn’t sufficiently bleeding customers dry, which may have something to do with its success:

The New York Times reports that some record labels, jealous of the profits Apple is making on sales of the iPod, are pushing the company to abandon the $.99 uniform pricing approach that has made iTunes so successful and instead adopt a multitiered model that would price songs by their popularity. New songs, they say, should be priced at up to $1.49; older, less popular songs at $.99 or less.

“I just think the music companies are now at a point where there’s too much money on the table not to insist [Apple accept variable prices],” Paul Vidich, a special adviser to America Online and former executive vice president of the Warner Music Group, told the Times. “The question is what do they want the profile of the business to look like going forward?”

Indeed. And beyond that, is the market for paid downloads established enough to sustain such a pricing adjustment in its dominant service? A sudden shift away from the $.99 sweet spot could send consumers fleeing back to the file-sharing networks.

Ironic, isn’t it, that the recording industry, which two years ago had no digital music strategy to speak of, is today trying to muscle the company that gave it a digital music revenue stream. “As I recall, three years ago these guys were wandering around with their hands out looking for someone to save them,” said Mike McGuire, an analyst at Gartner G2. “It’d be rather silly to try to destabilize [Apple], because iTunes is one of the few bright spots in the industry right now. [It’s] got something that’s working.”

For years, the recording industry has resisted the notion that its current business model is obsolete in the era of music-as-files. Even though the iPod and other MP3 players have effectively separated music from its physical medium, the industry itself has done little to embrace the mechanism that more and more people prefer for their music enjoyment. Instead, they’ve been busy suing teenagers who download music illegally and trying to prop up an outmoded distribution model. Music no longer needs to be trapped in circles of plastic, but the music business is so paralyzed by panic that they’re ignoring what customers want.

Is the industry so short-sighted that it would take the risk of knifing the most successful legal online music system? Probably. But disrupting the iTunes Music Store may just send many currently paying customers back to the illegal downloading.

If individual songs cost $1.49 each, many CDs would cost more if you bought them online than in a store. This doesn’t make any sense; the incremental cost of each album sold online is basically zero, whereas each CD obviously has the cost of materials embedded in the price. Many people will feel ripped off to pay a premium that provides them with nothing, so they probably won’t go back to legal online music buying. But it’s even less likely that they’ll go back to buying CDs, and that’s precisely the danger for the music industry.

31 August 2005 @ 12:12PM >> Every time I walk past the pit in Lower Manhattan, I feel a pit in my stomach. The physical destruction of September 11th, while massive, was still limited to a relatively small part of a large city. I can’t even begin to imagine what the residents of New Orleans are feeling, knowing that much of their city is lost. 80% of the city is underwater, and that water—filled with debris, raw sewage, industrial chemicals, and floating corpses—is still rising in many parts. Hurricane Katrina may have left one million people homeless, and those displaced from New Orleans may not be able to return for 3 to 4 months.

After September 11th, my strongest urge was to see the towers rebuilt, exactly as they were. No doubt, many New Orleans residents feel the same way about their city. Unfortunately, their city is a below-sea-level bowl built upon compacting sediment deposited centuries ago by the Mississippi River. And as that sediment packs down—about an inch every 33 months—the city sinks further below sea level. Even without a storm like Katrina, the long-term prognosis for New Orleans was not good.

Billions of dollars in insurance money, government relief, and donations from people here and abroad will now be pouring in to rebuild New Orleans. But as heartless as it may sound, we must question the wisdom of rebuilding New Orleans in its current location. Eventually, a rebuilt New Orleans will be hit by another storm, and until that happens, it will just continue sinking further below the sea.

Marvels of engineering have allowed man to triumph over nature many times before, but we should also pick our battles wisely. Simply put, in the 50-to-100-year long run, present day New Orleans most likely can’t be saved.

The urge to rebuild is understandable. I felt it after September 11th, when a relatively small portion of my city was knocked down. The folks who survived the near-total destruction of New Orleans need homes, and they deserve to see rebuilding done in their names. But should New Orleans be rebuilt where it is now? Unless the city is relocated, at some point in the future, we’re going to find ourselves in the exact same position as today.

There are some battles nature will always win. Let’s not compound today’s tragedy by guaranteeing a repeat in the future.

5 August 2005 @ 2:45PM >> Technorati, a weblog tracking service, recently reported that the number of blogs online doubles every five months. This led technology reporter Michael S. Malone to wonder whether blogs are subject to Moore’s Law.

What’s Moore’s Law?

Whenever you hear the word “doubling” related to anything high tech, the first thing that comes to mind is the Law of Laws in the digital world: Moore’s Law of Semiconductors. I probably don’t have to remind you of what it says: the performance of semiconductor devices doubles every two years.

Gordon Moore, one of the pioneers of Silicon Valley and a co-founder of both Fairchild and Intel, came up with this “law” in the mid-1960s while preparing for an industry speech. Basically, he tracked the capacity of all of his company’s memory chips up until that date ... and discovered, to his astonishment, that they made a straight line on a sheet of log paper. He then took a chance and predicted that this trajectory might be maintained for a few more years.

I saw Gordon make a follow-up presentation in the late 1970s. He was still amazed: the chart now included logic chips, memory chips and even microprocessors — and yet the semiconductor world was still clicking along at this mind-boggling pace, doubling performance every 18-24 months. And it worked along multiple axes: hold performance constant, and chip prices halved every couple years. Hold those two variables steady and chips got smaller at the same rate.

Malone cites former Intel CEO Andy Grove, who argued that industries can achieve faster advancement as they adopt more technology:

[W]henever you could find something that could be managed by digital systems — not an automobile but an engine computer, not a doctor but patient diagnostic and monitoring equipment, not a chromosome but gene mapping — it was like strapping that industry to a comet. Almost overnight the rate of change literally became exponential, improvements asymptotic, and miracles began to occur.

So, will Moore’s Law affect online media like blogs? Malone seems to think so:

That’s why we in the tech industry have become very attuned to the doubling curve. Whenever and wherever it pops up, we pay a lot of attention. And now, here it is, not surprisingly, characterizing the blogosphere. After all, the world of blogs has gotten a lot of early-PC and early dot.com attention over the last year, becoming one of those hot terms that everyone is using, and the tech playground towards which all of the usual early adapters have raced. It has also had some big early victories (pulling down Dan Rather, stealing readers from newspapers and television, setting much of the debate in the last presidential election), and it is beginning to show some of the early signs of consolidation (TechCentral Station, Pajama Media), the creation of larger and better-funded enterprises (Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere), industry organizations and conferences, and a growing support infrastructure (from search engines like Technorati, to free blogging services from the likes of AOL and MSN).

[...]

All of this suggests that the blogosphere is, like those other industries and professions under the regime of Moore’s Law, ripe for investment, for miracles and for the creation of great fortunes. When? There’s the real question. The PC industry ran for a long time under Moore’s Law before it finally found its destiny with the Apple II. Until then, a lot of very smart people devoted a lot of their lives and imaginations to personal computing with little in the bank to show for it.

24 June 2005 @ 5:52PM >> A press release from World Ahead Publishing—a publisher of conservative and libertarian books—charges that Google banned an ad for a book critical of Bill and Hillary Clinton:

Popular search engine Google reversed course late last week and banned a previously approved online ad campaign for a new book that documents abuses of power by Bill and Hillary Clinton. The surprise move prompted the book’s author and publishing house to publicly question if the politics of Google’s CEO - a financial backer of Hillary Clinton - played a role in this change of course.

“Google’s decision to reverse its prior approval and shut down this banner ad campaign reeks of political bias,” charges [author] Candice E. Jackson. [...]

The controversy comes at a time when the search engine giant is facing increasing scrutiny for claims of editorial unfairness by conservative organizations. Last month RightMarch.com, a conservative activist group, went public with claims that Google was rejecting its ads targeting House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi while at the same time running identical ads attacking Republican Leader Tom DeLay.

Representatives for Google - whose corporate motto is “don’t be evil” - attempted to defend the surprise ban on the book’s ads by claiming their policies prohibit ads that are against an individual. But while the ads for the book - which featured images of the book’s cover and pictures of the former First Couple - were suddenly deemed too offensive, Google happily accepts advertisements with headlines such as “Hate Bush? So Do We,” “Bush Belongs Behind Bars,” and “George W. Bush Fart Doll.”

Early last month, a similar controversy erupted when Google accepted ads targeting Republican Congressman Tom DeLay while rejecting similar ads targeting Democratic Congressman Nancy Pelosi. On May 9th, WorldNetDaily reported:

Google, the Internet’s No. 1 search engine, is still running attack ads against besieged House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, despite assurances by the company’s spokesman they were all pulled last week.

The issue of the anti-DeLay ads came to light when a conservative activist group discovered the ads and designed a similar campaign, using the same verbiage, targeting House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

When the anti-Pelosi ads were rejected by Google, RightMarch.com protested what it saw as political bias in Google’s content.

When questioned about the apparent double-standard by WND, Mike Mayzel, spokesman for Google, said both the anti-Pelosi ad and the anti-DeLay ad were pulled.

“Both ads were taken down,” he told WND. “Any assertion to the contrary is false. As soon as an ad is reviewed and found to be in violation of our policies, we take it down as soon as possible. Any suggestion we would leave some ads up longer than others for reasons of political bias is false.”

However, a search of Google’s site yesterday shows at least three more anti-DeLay ads still running[.]

As of this writing nearly two months later, anti-Tom DeLay ads are still running, despite Google’s assurances that they wouldn’t be. However, one anti-Nancy Pelosi ad is also running, which makes me wonder whether the problem is one of corporate political bias or simply one of bias—or incompetence—on the part of individual staffers who administer the ad approval process. Google may have dozens of employees who approve these ads, which could explain the inconsistent application of its policy.

Whatever the explanation, this kind of information doesn’t exactly help Google’s case:

A WorldNetDaily search of Google executive and employee political contributions filed with the Federal Election Commission showed nearly 99 percent of its $469,500 went to Democrats over the last three election cycles.

As a private company, Google is fully within its rights to accept or reject any ad it sees fit. However, if these charges are true, then the public should at least be aware of the fact that Google is making political calculations in the selective application of its ad policy. Google would also be wise to tighten up the application of this policy; the appearance of bias for a company that aspires to be the world’s gateway to the Internet would be devastating.

13 May 2005 >> A new net-based software service from the BBC aims to revolutionize the way online news and media are distributed. “BBC Backstage” gives software developers the ability to extract, reorganize, repackage and display content in new ways:

backstage.bbc.co.uk attempts to encourage and support those who have provided most of the innovation on the inernet - the passionate, highly-skilled & public-spirited developers and designers many of whom volunteer their time and effort.

In the past the BBC has not always encouraged such “amateur innovators”, however public-spirited their intentions and products. backstage.bbc.co.uk aims to foster a newly constructive and open dialogue with the wider development community using BBC content and tools to deliver public value.

Sounds promising. I hope other media firms will consider similar experiments.

10 May 2005 @ 6:48PM >> Just got done reading Glenn Reynolds’s latest article on the blog world vs. the establishment media over at MSNBC.com. At the end of the article, I noticed two enticing videos taken from the CNBC show Kudlow & Company. Larry Kudlow—a particular favorite of mine—had interviewed Reynolds, Roger L. Simon and Charles Johnson (of LittleGreenFootballs.com) about their new Pajamas Media blog venture.

So, as a man in my position might reasonably do, I clicked the link to watch the video. Much to my dismay, I was greeted with a message saying that my operating system was not supported. Oh, the humanity!

As a Mac user, I am apparently a second-class citizen at MSNBC.com. But why? Well, I’m not entirely sure, but just to prove that I can weave a conspiracy theory with the best of ‘em, here goes: the MS in MSNBC stands for Microsoft. Macs use an operating system far more elegant than any Microsoft offering, so perhaps the snub is some form of technological jealousy and/or calculated effort to make Macs appear “less compatible” than Windows-based PCs. Microsoft’s history in this regard is certainly less-than-stellar.

Why do I assume Microsoft is the perpetrator of this cyber-lockout and not the latter 60% of the acronym? Simple: MSNBC.com showcases NBC’s two cable news properties, MSNBC and CNBC, both of which have such dismal ratings that they can ill afford to erect artificial barriers between themselves and potential viewers.

The strange thing is, Microsoft has the technology to allow its videos to play on a Mac; my Mac has a program on it called “Windows Media Player” by a company named Microsoft. And I know it may sound shocking, but I’ve even managed to play Windows Media videos with it!

MSNBC.com shouldn’t require visitors to use Microsoft’s player at all, much less require that they also run the Windows operating system. They have every right to do so, of course, but it’s strikes me as short-sighted from a business standpoint. The incompatibility certainly can’t be a technological hurdle. After all, if a two-bit punk like me can figure out how to set up a website that serves QuickTime, RealPlayer and Windows Media files to Macs and PCs, Windows and Linux alike, surely the mighty Microsoft can get it done. So why doesn’t it? That’s a good question...

6 January 2005 @ 9:27PM >> Bill Hobbs is a Tennessee-based political blogger who’s relatively happy with Google AdSense, despite the poor targeting of ads:

I have the AdSense service running on HobbsOnline and I don’t mind the off-target ads. In fact I find them kind of funny in that an informal online poll of my readers last year found that about 85 percent of them supported the re-election of President Bush. AdSense won’t generate much revenue. It took me eight months to accumulate the first $100 in revenue and it’s going to take three months to accumulate the next $100. Not huge, but not horrible either.

I just sent Bill an e-mail in response to his post. Here’s an excerpt:

While it is true that I was frustrated by the insulting nature of the mistargeted Google ads, there certainly was a humorous aspect as well. Although, had the election not gone the way I wanted, I suspect that my ability to see the humor in it might be a little dampened.

My real gripe with the ad mistargeting was knowing that it would cost me revenue. If I’m going to whore out the side margins of my site, I might as well maximize the revenue. (Why be a street-corner hooker when you can be a high-priced call-girl?) Serving up ads that are irrelevant for large portions of my site’s audience means that they will be generating far less revenue than if the ads were targeted properly. So, if I’m going to sell space that ends up insulting my audience AND the selling of that space isn’t resulting in the income that it could/should, then it doesn’t seem worth it to me.

Bill also mentions an ad service called BlogMatch Network that might be worth checking out. I tried signing up for BlogAds several days ago, but have not yet heard back from them. Not an auspicious start.

6 January 2005 >> Google’s ad serving technology has a long way to go if it is going to be widely used on opinion sites that discuss current events and politics.

After not-quite-three days, it became clear that the mistargeted ads I wrote about earlier are considered a feature of AdSense and not a bug. After writing Google about the problem, I got this response:

We understand your concern with the types of ads that are being displayed on your site. Please note that at this time, AdSense only targets ads
based on overall site content, not keywords or categories. Our AdSense
crawlers automatically determine which ads to display after gathering
information about the content of your pages.

If you’d like to display ads related to specific topics on your website,
we recommend including more text-based content about these topics on your
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Well, I can’t imagine this site getting much more text-heavy than it already is, so it’s obvious that the system is working as Google intends. That’s fine, but I don’t think that system is going to work for a vast majority of sites like mine.

I could live with the occasional mistargeted ad, but it seemed that a vast majority of the political ads were inappropriate for large segments of this site’s audience. I could even live with the many ads that highlighted positions different from mine, if some of them weren’t so downright insulting. One ad referred to Bush voters as “dumb,” while another sold t-shirts that labeled Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld “asses of evil.” Now, I may not be a wise Big Media professional, but even I know that insulting your audience is not a good way to encourage it to stick around.

I had planned on running the Google ad test indefinitely to see what kind of revenue it would generate. Frankly, I was encouraged by Google’s compensation on these relatively low-volume days (volume spikes when new articles are posted or when sites like Instapundit link), but I suspect I can do just as well—if not better—by a system that accounts for the preferences of this site’s audience. After all, isn’t that what advertisers are paying for, a distinct and well-defined audience?

I hope Google eventually allows sites to describe themselves better so that the ads can be more accurately targeted. It wouldn’t take much, just allow site owners to tick off a bunch of checkboxes that help categorize things, and allow advertisers to do the same. If online dating services can automate that sort of matching, why can’t Google?

Just about everything else about Google’s system was a pleasure to use. It’s simple, it’s easy to integrate, the reporting tools are great, and the compensation is decent. But this one big glaring omission is the deal-killer for me, and I suspect I’m not alone. If Google fixes this problem, I might be back.

4 January 2005 >> Several hours ago, I started to test the integration of AdSense—Google’s ad serving technology—with Brain Terminal.

Google’s system places ads on the page based on the content of that page. It uses combinations of keywords to determine what ads to place. As you may have noticed, this technology does not lead to perfect ad targeting.

If you were to judge Brain Terminal based on the Google ads shown thus far, you might get the mistaken impression that you were looking at MoveOn.org or DemocraticUnderground.com.

Aside from the humorous aspect of seeing a “Hillary for President” ad on the front page of this site—no joke, that was in the very first set of ads placed by Google—it means that the GoogleAds may not be as effective as hoped. I suspect that the percentage of Brain Terminal visitors clicking on Hillary ads will be far less than, say, over at DailyKos.com. Fewer click-throughs means less revenue. Less revenue means a greater likelihood that I will end up trying a different system, such as BlogAds.

I will let the Google AdSense test run its course, and hopefully the targeting will get better over time. (I can exclude certain URLs from the advertiser roster, but the exclude list can only be 200 entries long.) If I am lucky, AdSense will sense which ads have a high click-through rate on this site and will put them into the rotation more frequently. We shall see.

In the meantime, please post your comments about the AdSense test in the discussion forum. Primarily, I’m interested in hearing about browser display issues; it is possible that this new ad code will result in formatting problems with certain browsers. If so, I’d like to be aware of these problems and fix them if I can.

Thanks for bearing with me during the test, and please don’t get too insulted by any of the ads, such as the “How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb” ad now appearing on the front page. Think of it as an opportunity to practice your meditation techniques.

13 December 2004 >> Any tech junkie who travels extensively is undoubtedly familiar with the pangs of withdrawal suffered when decent Internet access is nowhere to be found. There are many folks like me whose work depends on frequent, reliable access to e-mail and the web. Most of my business communication, in fact, is done by e-mail. Even the voicemail from my home phone gets sent to my e-mail inbox, freeing me from having to constantly call in and check for messages. More >>

2 July 2004 @ 8:25PM >> I don’t use Microsoft Windows. The bugs, viruses and pop-up ads that plague Windows users would drive me crazy. Actually, they drive me crazy anyway, because being my family’s only techie means that I am often asked to act as a surrogate customer service representative for Microsoft.

Recently, my neighbors started having problems with their Windows machines. Then my girlfriend started having similar problems. The system would slow down, refuse to connect to the Internet, and would generally behave unpredictably. My solution was to install Mozilla Firefox, a web browser that traces its lineage back to Netscape. (Remember them?)

Since replacing Internet Explorer with Firefox, the problems have gone away. (Note, however, that viruses can also be transmitted by e-mail, so don’t open any attachments unless you know exactly what you’re doing.)

Apparently, I’m not alone in recommending that people stop using flawed Microsoft products like Internet Explorer: today, I read that the Department of Homeland Security is suggesting that people avoid using IE:

The Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team touched off a storm this week when it recommended for security reasons using browsers other than Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer.

The Microsoft browser, the government warned, cannot protect against vulnerabilities in its Internet Information Services (IIS) 5 server programs, which a team of hackers allegedly based in Russia has exploited with a Java script that is appended to Web sites.

The particular virus initiated this week inserts Java script into certain Web sites. When users visit those sites, it initiates pop-up ads on home and office computers, and allows keystroke analysis of user information. The target is believed to be credit card numbers. CERT estimated that as many as tens of thousands of Web sites may be affected.

If you have to use Microsoft Windows, I would very strongly recommend against Internet Explorer. And, if you have the luxury of choosing which operating system you use, try Apple’s Macintosh OS X, and you’ll see what computing is like when you don’t have to constantly fight your computer. Apple’s Safari web browser—included with Mac OS X—is excellent.

21 April 2004 >> After more than ten years in the software industry, I’ve seen projects large and small implode for a variety of reasons. Although the process of software development starts off like a traditional engineering task, beyond a certain level of complexity, software takes on biological properties.

To run smoothly, software must be in perfect balance. Changes to the environment can disturb that balance; a change in one area can cause problems in seemingly unrelated areas. That’s why software maintenance tends to get exponentially more complex for each incremental increase in the amount of code in a given project.

Despite having seen projects disintegrate in stunning fashion, I was still surprised by the extent of the damage done by a failed software upgrade at AT&T Wireless. An article in CIO magazine details the horrors “that cost the telco thousands of new customers and an estimated $100 million in lost revenue.”

9 January 2004 >> Spammers and anti-spammers are engaged in an arms race. For every spam-blocking technique that’s created, spammers eventually devise a way to circumvent it. Although there is no way to guarantee complete freedom from spam—at least not with the technology that currently delivers Internet e-mail—there are ways to defend your inbox against spam. More >>

21 May 2003 >> The success of Apple’s new online music venture shows that people are willing to pay for things that they could otherwise steal. The trick is relaxing the restrictions that competing systems have imposed on paying customers. Will the music industry take note and completely abandon intrusive “digital right management” schemes? Let’s hope so. If they need any more convincing, they should heed the lesson learned repeatedly by the software industry: pissing off paying customers isn’t good for business. More >>