RizWords Weekly Roundup

I'm going to try to highlight a few things from the show this week that I think warrant further discussion. This may or may not become a regular feature. We'll see how you guys like it.

gPhone
Do I really need to say more about this? Check Episode 116 of RizWords (you may need to subscribe to the feed to listen). Also read these two posts. The second one contains links to other interesting coverage. Or just Google gPhone. Everyone's got an opinion now.

Two Unfortunate Investments (originals: here and here).
On Thursday we talked about VC put into startups Veveo.TV and Wis.dm. Both Art and I puzzled over the amount of money flowing into these two losers.

Wis.dm is basically an expanded form of the comments features on every website on the web, but tries to be the newest Web 2.0 to pull wisdom from the crowds. On Wednesday and Friday, I inaccurately referenced from memory the anecdote of Sir Francis Galton, who was from the 19th century, not the 17th, as I said. The anecdote itself was properly related, though, which can be found in his Wikipedia entry:

[T]he crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the butchered or the "slaughtered and dressed" weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts).

The example by which the term is defined dictates that yes or no questions aren't going to be the type of questions that the crowd displays it's wisdom, and I can't think of many other instances where a comment form is worth $9 Million in development time. My question: "Where's the beef?"

Similarly, Veveo is a puzzling investment, weighing in at between $14-28 Million. Veveo promises to index videos, making them searchable. Their big selling point? An autocomplete feature.

As we mentioned on the show, we sincerely hope these aren't signs of the end times (in terms of our current tech boom cycle). I certainly remember similarly stupid investments last time around. Either there are some highly charismatic PR folks at these firms, or there are some highly stupid investors over at the VC firms of Matrix Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, OmniCapital Group. I'm not familiar with the staffs of any of the companies (the startups nor the VC firms), so I really couldn't say. The type of money these firms are doling out though (North Bridge Venture Partners in particular), it's worth coming up with some worthless ideas, getting a Web2.0 design job done, and trying to get a zillion in VC.

I'm game, anyone wanna join me?

Digg's Very Prominent New Media Failure
A front page story over at Digg.com Friday morning was a something we covered on Episode 120: Homophobia Inc: Message of Hate Raises Hundreds of Millions of Dollars.

The type of story we love more than most others at RizWords is a story exposing Old Media screw-ups. What we hate is when a prominent New Media source like Kevin Rose's Digg promotes to the front page a piece of pseudo-journalism full of not only factually incorrect but borderline libelous content.

The piece prints falsehoods that could be discounted by doing only cursory research, alleging that the non-profits Christian Broadcasting Network, Focus on the Family, and Family Research Council devote the entirety of their organisations' energy into anti-gay agenda. Give those sites a cursory glance. Clearly they have other focus than just talking about their moral take on homosexuality (which, by the way, is a far cry from being hate-speech or homophobic).

Art and I both attempted to comment dissenting views on the forms, and within seconds, both our comments were buried.

My point being, the failure isn't the blogosphere. There will always be moronic drivel in the blogosphere. The failure is in Kevin's algorithm. The tripe was promoted to the front page before the Digg count reached 100. For better or for worse, Digg is a major New Media news source. If they want to avoid the fate of Dan Rather and CBS News, they should look at changing the system before more people realized how game-able Digg is.

Facebook: You Can't Look The Other Way Anymore
I did a blog post on the business side of the Facebook API, which has been covered on the show several times. The type of money trading in this space can't be ignored, and neither can the ease of entry. This week, not only was it revealed that Facebook wanted to get serious about good applications, but it was also revealed that Bill Gates is a Facebook user, as well as many other prominent Microsoft executives.

This isn't surprising to those of us who listen to Ken or Scoble, but with news like this coming out, it is getting hard to keep up thinking of reasons to stick around that ol' trailer park... especially in light of the way they like to beat up on the tenants.

That's about all the news that's fit to discuss. Any questions? Comment or email!

/rizzn

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RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech - EP55

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech
Episode 55 - download now - subscribe now - review us on iTunes!

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Due to a real big screw up on my part, yesterday's show notes are irretrievably lost. Here, however, are today's show notes:

George Bush has flip-flopped on the environment, and has decided to create a bumbling government effort to stop global warming, the same day that NASA proclaims it's a stupid idea:

Bush's 'new climate strategy'
Today's headlines are full of the news that President Bush is &; quot;unveiling a new climate strategy.&; quot; If your immediate reaction is cynicism, well ... looks like you learned something over the last seven years. Let's look a little closer....
NASA's Top Official Questions Global Warming

NASA administrator Michael Griffin continues to draw the ire of preeminent climate scientists inside and outside of NASA, as well as members of Congress, after apparently downplaying the need to combat global warming.

In an interview broadcast yesterday on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" program, Griffin was asked by NPR's Steve Inskeep whether he is concerned about global warming.

"I have no doubt that a trend of global warming exists," Griffin told Inskeep. "I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with."

"To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change," Griffin said. "I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take."

Griffin's comments immediately drew stunned reaction from James Hansen, NASA's top climate scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

In other interesting political news, we nominated another guy to the World Bank chief slot:

US nominates new World Bank chief
US President George W Bush has nominated Robert Zoellick, former deputy secretary of state, to be president of the World Bank. — His nomination will be considered by the World Bank's 24-member board of governors, although the US nomination has always been accepted in the past.

Turning to tech news, are we seeing a repeat of the Digg revolt, or is this just a bunch of whiny kids posting their angst-ridden comments?:

Mass Deletion Leads To LiveJournal Revolt
Green Monkey writes "LiveJournal has been suspending accounts suspected of promoting incest — except that many of them were communities for survivors of abuse and people discussing Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Even after being informed of the problem, LiveJournal apparently refuses to reinstate the banned accounts. LiveJournal's official news blog has filled up with hundreds of complaints protesting the decision, so we could have another Digg-style user rebellion brewing." Update: 05/31 11:50 GMT by KD : strredwolf writes to let us know that in their offical blog LiveJournal admits to botching the suspension, saying "We made a mistake and now we are going to try to fix it."

And in breaking news, technology gets better!:

Computers Outperform Humans at Recognizing Faces
seven of five writes "According to the recent Face Recognition Grand Challenge, The match up of face-recognition algorithms showed that machine recognition of human individuals has improved tenfold since 2002 and a hundredfold since 1995. 'Among other advantages, 3-D facial recognition identifies individuals by exploiting distinctive features of a human face's surface--for instance, the curves of the eye sockets, nose, and chin, which are where tissue and bone are most apparent and which don't change over time. Furthermore, Phillips says, "changes in illumination have adversely affected face-recognition performance from still images. But the shape of a face isn't affected by changes in illumination." Hence, 3-D face recognition might even be used in near-dark conditions.'"

Oh, and follow this link for a marketing tool to help you promote your YouTube video content: http://mashable.com/2007/05/31/tellyadder/

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RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech - EP35

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech
Episode 35 - download now - subscribe now - iTunes subscribe

• A member of the TechPodcast Network @ techpodcast.com. If it's Tech, it's here.
  
• Remember, if you're listening on the podcast recording, you can call into the show live if you tune in through TalkShoe.com at 2:30 PM EST every weekday.
• If you like the podcast (and you haven't already given us a rating), head over and do so, and don't forget to sign up for the discussion list.
• Other Podcast Plugs:
  
• TalkGirls comes on Tuesday nights. Check out the TalkGirls Podcast ... it's good times!
• Cotolo Chronicles: Frank is a good friend of the show, and an associate of the late great Wolfman Jack. Check out his podcast.
• NewsReal: Good friend to Art and I - has one of the best hours of news podcast each week.
  
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This is a story that really cracks the vernier on Obama's plastic smile. Underneath all that shiny new unspoiled politician lies the heart of... just another backbiting politician:

The Battle to Control Obama's Myspace
By Micah L. Sifry, 05/01/2007 - 11:15pm
In November 2004, Joe Anthony, a paralegal living in Los Angeles, started a unofficial fan page for then-newly-elected Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) on MySpace.com. Inspired by Obama's keynote address at that summer's Democratic convention, Anthony had never been politically active before. "I was just blown away," he told me. He put time into the site every day, answering emails from people wanting to "friend" the page, pointing them to voter registration information, and, once Obama threw his hat into the ring, telling them where to find out more detailed positions taken by the candidate.

By the time of Obama's official campaign announcement in late January, Anthony's Obama profile--which had the valuable url of myspace.com/barackobama--already had more than 30,000 friends, well more than the other contenders. Over the following weeks, it continued to grow at a rapid pace, generating lots of headlines about Obama winning the "MySpaceurl has only about 12,000. And it's under new ownership. Joe Anthony, one of the super volunteers of the Connected Age, has lost control of the page he started to the professionals on Obama's staff.

How all this happened is a complicated tale that is still unfolding, and none of the parties involved--Anthony, the Obama online team, and the MySpace political operation--emerge from this story unscathed. Speaking on background, Obama campaign staffers are spreading word that Anthony just wanted a "big payday." Anthony in turn has posted a missive on his blog (that was originally sent to me as an email) accusing the Obama team of "bullying...[and] rotten and dishonest" behavior. However one parses those accusations (more below), the Obama campaign's reputation as the most net-savvy of 2008 has taken a big hit. And MySpace executives have been forced to take extraordinary action to resolve a dispute between two high-profile users of their invaluable site, one a passionate volunteer with a huge network of friends and the other a frontrunning presidential candidate who has helped make MySpace a new factor in the 2008 contest.

primary." Yesterday, the profile had just over 160,000 friends. Today, that This is more politics than tech, but it caught my attention, and I thought it deserved to be addressed:

Top Hamas official: Kill all Americans (Jerusalem Post)
Sheik Ahmad Bahr, acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, declared during a Friday sermon at a Sudan mosque that America and Israel will be annihilated and called upon Allah to kill Jews and Americans "to the very Last One."

In "Advancing-New-Media" news:

Give bloggers Capitol access

This is the first article in a weekly series, exclusively in The Hill, exploring the recommendations of the Sunlight Foundation’s Open House Project, which advocates online transparency in Congress.

Members of Congress are increasingly turning to bloggers as a way to communicate about public policy. Yet these citizen journalists who cover Congress lack what most mainstream reporters in Washington take for granted: access to the U.S. Capitol.

According to the Sunlight Foundation’s Open House Project, a collaborative and bipartisan effort to increase the House of Representatives’ online transparency, Congress can take several simple steps to improve transparency and foster a new spirit of openness. Giving bloggers credentials to cover Congress would be a groundbreaking way to shed light on the inner workings of government.

The debate over bloggers and online journalists on Capitol Hill isn’t a new one. In recent years, they’ve clashed with congressional press galleries as the Internet has grown in popularity and prominence.

And in what is probably the biggest tech/politics story of the day:

Digg Surrenders to Mob

To say what happened today on Digg was a “user revolt” is an understatement. The Digg team deleted a story that linked to the decryption key for HD DVDs after receiving a take down demand and all hell broke loose. More stories appeared and were deleted, and users posting the stories were suspended.

That just got the Digg community fired up, and soon the entire Digg home page was filled with stories containing the decryption key. The users had taken control of the site, and unless Digg went into wholesale deletion mode and suspended a large portion of their users, there was absolutely nothing they could do to stop it.

Digg CEO Jay Adelson responded on the Digg blog earlier this afternoon but it was clear he did not yet understand the chaos that was coming. The post only added fuel to the fire. Just now, co-founder Kevin Rose posted yet again on the Digg blog, effectively capitulating to the mob’s demands: He says

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Until today, it seems, even Digg didn’t fully understand the power of its community to determine what is “news.” I think the community made their point crystal clear.

Vive La Revolution.

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech - EP27

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech
Episode 27 - download now - subscribe now

• A member of the TechPodcast Network @ techpodcast.com. If it's Tech, it's here.
  
• Remember, if you're listening on the podcast recording, you can call into the show live if you tune in through TalkShoe.com at 2:30 PM EST every weekday.
• If you like the podcast (and you haven't already given us a rating), head over and do so, and don't forget to sign up for the discussion list.
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During the start of the show, we talked a little about FreeIQ. No one had a real idea about the service, no one had checked it out, but I stated my analysis as such:

FreeIQ - Paul Colligan talked about it today on PodcastTools. I've searched and found all kinds of positive press about the site, but I don't see the magic of what makes this site so special. Essentially, the best concise description of this site is YouTube for Affiliate Marketers, although it bills itself as a Marketplace for Ideas - which certainly sounds a whole lot more attractive. Anyone else have any info on this, and why I might be missing the boat?

This story made me go "huh?!?" as in "Don't we live in a democracy/republic?":

Arcane Senate Rule Helps Preserve Antiquated Senate Practice
Back in February, we pointed to a story about the absurd system that Senators use to disclose their campaign contributions. Unlike their counterparts in the House, Senators don't have to file their contributions electronically, and instead file them using a tortuous process that involves needless photocopying and hand entry of the data. Not only is this time consuming, but it also costs taxpayers $250,000 per year. That's not a whole lot by government standards, but since it's a total waste it's still depressing. It looked like the Senate was all set to scrap the old system, but just as it was set to come to a vote, another arcane Senate rule came into play as Senator Lamar Alexander stood up and announced that on behalf of an anonymous Senator he would block the vote. Yes, the Senate has a rule that allows an anonymous coward, as we'd call them around here, to block any vote. So at this point it's not clear if or when electronic disclosure will be adopted in the Senate. It's lovely how democracy works, isn't it?

Also in competition with GoToMyPC!

Google Acquires Marratech; Gets Into WebEx Territory
After reporting a monster fiscal quarter (the company has close to $12 billion in cash sitting around now and has hired nearly 2,000 new employees this year), Google made a quiet announcement on its corporate blog tonight - they’ve acquired Swedish startup Marratech for an undisclosed price.

This is the first I’ve heard of Marratech, which is broadly in the e-meeting space and certainly competes with WebEx (recently acquired by Cisco for $3.2 billion). Users are able to communicate via text chat, VOIP and video, and share applications in a virtual meeting.

Their service requires a download, whereas most of the newly released e-meeting solutions are browser based (and therefore have less functionality). The Windows version of the software is 31 MB; the Mac version is just 9 MB. Google already has software on many computers with their GTalk, Desktop and Toolbar applications. Bundling this in isn’t unthinkable.

Google’s enterprise ambitions move forward another step.

And in other Google News (is it just me, or are they just dominating news lately?):

Google Spreadsheets Adds Charts
Google Spreadsheets finally added charts. This feature has been developed for many months and was one of the biggest lacks from Google's spreadsheet application.

You can create more types of charts: columns, bars, lines, pie, scatter, add labels and a legend. Just select the columns you want to plot and click on the new chart icon. After inserting the chart in the spreadsheet, you can save it as a PNG image or edit it.

The charts are rendered as SVG in Firefox/Opera and VML in Internet Explorer, so they don't require plug-ins. As usually, Opera is not officially supported, so you'll find things that don't work as expected.

Art really went off on this story:

Goodbye Alberto?

Today’s hearing was disastrous for the Attorney General. Senate Republicans were hinting that he should quit left and right.

Take Jeff Sessions (R-AL) for example:

“At this point, I think (Gonzales) should be given a chance to think it through and talk to the president about what his future should be,” Sessions said, adding that he was most troubled by Gonzales’ inability to recall attending a meeting at which the firings were discussed. Documents provided by the Justice Department show he was present at the Nov. 27, 2006, meeting.

Psst. Alberto…maybe you should (wink,wink) talk to the President about your future (nudge, nudge) and say no more, yes?

Then Tom Coburn (R-OK) just came right out and said it:

“The best way to put this behind us is your resignation,” Sen. Tom Coburn (news, bio, voting record) of Oklahoma bluntly told Gonzales, one conservative to another. Gonzales disagreed, rejecting the idea that his departure would put the controversy to rest.

Alberto, your top aide is already gone. Another one is pleading the fifth. Nobody really cares about them except that they lead back to you. If you quit, this will put this controversy to rest. You got caught in a lie about something you didn’t even need to lie about, and now you have to pay the political penalty for losing your party’s trust.

But will he quit? I certainly have my doubts since he’s stuck in there this long. I thought for sure he was going to be gone a week ago.

But with this President’s numbers where they are, I think we’ll be seeing Alberto’s walking papers sooner rather than later.

Yesterday, we discussed the possible Death of Digg... is this going to keep them alive?:

Digg API, Digg Party, and Digg Dominance?

Just caught this on the Digg blog: they’re officially launching the public API and a Flash application toolkit.

Additionally, they’re launching a contest to find the best visualizations and applications built on the API and toolkit. I haven’t been privy to any projects built on Digg before, but as far as I’m aware, there was already the ability to build a few things on Digg.

Just like the Facebook API, this is likely to solidify Digg’s position at the top of the tech news food chain. Once you have an easy API, and hundreds of apps plugging in, there’s really no way for the competition to catch you. It also means, most likely, that getting on Digg becomes even more valuable, and the brokenness of that system is exacerbated.

/rizzn