RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech - EP49

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech
Episode 49 - download now - subscribe now

• A member of the TechPodcast Network @ techpodcast.com. If it's Tech, it's here.
  
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Succumbing to the pressures of the media around us, Art and I spend the first half of the show talking about presidential politics and campaigning, and whether or not Ron Paul has a real shot at winning this thing. Mark says 'maybe' and Art says definitely not. Noteable Futurama quote from the conversation:

On the TV, candidate Jack Johnson is debating candidate John Jackson

Johnson: It's time someone had the courage to stand up and say: I'm
against those things that everybody hates!
Jackson: Now, I respect my opponent. I think he's a good man. But,
quite frankly, I agree with everything he just said!
Fry: These are the candidates? They sound like clones.
[Squints] Wait a minute. They are clones!
Leela: Don't let their identical DNA fool you. They differ on some
key issues.
Johnson: I say your three cent titanium tax goes too far!
Jackson: And I say your three cent titanium tax doesn't go too far
enough!

Turning to actual news, Art and I comment on what can be a real positive move for the monetization of New Media video efforts:

Adsense For Video, Google Still Lagging

Google has announced a closed beta test of Adsense for Video.

According to the post on Inside Adsense, Adsense for Video consists of “in-stream” advertisements. Publishers define at what point the advertisements will appear for each video.

It’s a change in the right direction for Google. The previously announced advertising trials for YouTube consisted entirely of text advertising overlays that lead to video-on-video click to play advertisements; a form of advertising that can easily be ignored by the viewer. Whilst many may find in-video style advertising annoying, it at least comes with a guarantee that viewers are going to see the advertisement.

Adsense for Video, as it is currently explained lacks contextual delivery. Allowing publishers to select where a video is played may empower content creators, but it does nothing in terms of automatically optimizing advertising for the viewer.

Google appears to be lagging in this market; the technology to contextually serve advertising within video is already available, ScanScout providing such a service. Given the massive market share Google holds in the online video hosting marketplace through YouTube, it would normally be expected that Google would be leading development in this field. For reasons unknown, they are not doing so.

Looking for an alternative for Alexa? Your ship may have come in... Art and Mark both give positive reviews of Compete:

Compete API Open For Business

Web analytics startup Compete.com opened its API for public use today. Websites and applications can now access Compete’s data and incorporate it into their own products.

This is timely for the company, which competes directly with Amazon’s Alexa. Recenty, Statsaholic has been in a very public dispute with Alexa over use of its data, with both sides looking bad. That dispute recently went to litigation. As some services shy away from Alexa, either due to public perception or inflexibility over the Alexa APIs, Compete could grab additional market share.

In related SEOish news, Technorati's new changes to their search engine are not well recieved around the net:

Technorati's Authority
Technorati made some changes this month to show it's more than a blog search engine. "Technorati continues to grow well beyond its roots at the leading blog search engine; increasingly, we are the main aggregation point for all forms of social media on the Web, including blogs, of course, but also video, photos, audio such as podcasts and much more", noted David Sifry last month.

The site also introduced a score for each blog that measures the "authority". The pretentious name has one purpose: to cover the real meaning of the number. "Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has," explains Technorati's blog. So each blog that links to me (no matter if it's a spam blog or Slashdot) increases my authority with 1. Imagine what would happen if Google's PageRank was proportional to the number of links to a page in the last 6 months: the top search result for most of the queries should be a page from yahoo.com or google.com, sites that would have the PageRank 100,000. It would be easy to increase your PageRank: just create a new site that links to you; it's as important as a link from New York Times. But fortunately, Google found a better way to rank web pages:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.

Buzz Out Loud will probably be talking about this later today:

Senator Warns of Email Tax This Fall
cnet-declan writes "State and local governments in Washington this week began an all-out lobbying push for the power to tax the Internet, according to our article at News.com. A new Senate bill would usher in Internet sales taxes, and the Federation of Tax Administrators (representing state tax collectors) advised senators at a hearing on Wednesday not to renew a temporary moratorium limiting broadband taxes that expires in November. One irked Republican senator warned that unless the moratorium is renewed, we could start seeing email taxes by the end of the year. Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey blames it on the Democrats taking over, as do Yahoo and eBay lobbyists. Is this a non-hoax version of bill 602P?"

Mark talks of his experiences with red-light cameras, and applaud's Texas's move to ban them:

Texas Looking To Ban Speed Cameras?
There are all sorts of problems with things like speed cameras and red light cameras, starting with technical problems and moving on to the more serious questions about whether or not they make the roads any safer. Since they're usually offered in combination with private companies who receive a large percentage of the fines, it's often pointed out that these cameras are more about making private companies and government coffers money, rather than any real attempt at increasing safety. Still, they've only become more and more popular recently, with a new speed camera catching over a thousand speeders in a single day. However, it looks like Texas may actually be heading in the other direction. Jeff Nolan points us to the news that Texas lawmakers have approved a ban on speed cameras. The law also requires signs warning about red light cameras -- though, it's unclear if that will help, since studies have shown red light cameras often increase accidents, as drivers are more likely to slam on their brakes.

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RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech - EP30

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech
Episode 30 - 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.
• 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.
  
• Sponsors:
  
• Try GoToMeeting for 45 days! Visit www.GoToMeeting.com/podcast to start your free trial today.
  
• Want $10 for free? Try Google Checkout today! Visit http://oblongbox.net/checkout/ to create your account and start with $10 off your first purchase.

There's this really interesting meme running through the blogosphere right now... Essentially the Drama Pot was stirred by who else? Jason Calacanis. The headlines and blurbs from different perspectives tell the story:

Technorati all a'twitter over telephone interview

From Jason C.: WIRED journo won't do email interviews—ironic. — A WIRED journalist pinged me for some comments on Michael Arrington and his A-list blogger status. I told the journalist to send me the questions by email and he refused. He said Dave Winer did the same thing.

From Dylan Tweney: Calacanis Won't Do Phone Interview — Cowardly — Jason McCabe Calacanis is complaining about a Wired reporter who wants to do an interview with him, but refuses to do it via email. He says it's "ironic" that a magazine covering the digital age refuses to use email for its interviews. — Ironic?

From David Winer Transcription errors — Jason Calacanis was contacted by the same reporter who contacted me. I'm mentioned in Jason's post, but somewhere along the line there was a transcription error. I did not offer to do the interview via email, I made a different offer. — Here's what I said: "Not generally doing interviews these days.

Good laws, bad laws, laws as big as your head... Art cut me off on this story... said I was boring. You decide:

Wait, There Are Good Internet Laws?
Law professor Eric Goldman has written up an article where he wanted to list out the best and worst internet-related laws out there. Coming up with "good" ones turned out to be a challenge, with just the law banning new internet access taxes and section 230 of the CDA making the list. Of course, you could argue that the safe harbor afforded by section 230 (protecting sites from the actions of their users) is based on so much common sense that there shouldn't need to be a law to back it up. Of course, when it comes to the "bad" list, there were way too many to choose from. The DMCA makes a couple of appearances (for different parts) and there are some other blasts from the past as well. It's pretty frustrating to read through the list, in part because so many of the "bad" laws aren't just bad, but were obviously bad from when they were proposed. Lots of people have pointed out why those laws would do more harm than good, but so far, politicians don't seem interested in correcting the mistakes they made with them. They passed the laws so they could claim they stopped some "bad" thing from happening online, even if the law did no such thing. It would be nice if politicians were actually held accountable for the unintended consequences of their bad laws -- especially when those laws do little to actually achieve what they were proposed to do.

MySpace Turns it's Lonely Eyes to Washington:

Law professor Eric Goldman has written up an article where he wanted to list out the best and worst internet-related laws out there. Coming up with "good" ones turned out to be a challenge, with just the law banning new internet access taxes and section 230 of the CDA making the list. Of course, you could argue that the safe harbor afforded by section 230 (protecting sites from the actions of their users) is based on so much common sense that there shouldn't need to be a law to back it up. Of course, when it comes to the "bad" list, there were way too many to choose from. The DMCA makes a couple of appearances (for different parts) and there are some other blasts from the past as well. It's pretty frustrating to read through the list, in part because so many of the "bad" laws aren't just bad, but were obviously bad from when they were proposed. Lots of people have pointed out why those laws would do more harm than good, but so far, politicians don't seem interested in correcting the mistakes they made with them. They passed the laws so they could claim they stopped some "bad" thing from happening online, even if the law did no such thing. It would be nice if politicians were actually held accountable for the unintended consequences of their bad laws -- especially when those laws do little to actually achieve what they were proposed to do.

And speaking of social networking:

Social Networks Are The New Porn

Since the rise of the internet in the 1990s, pornography has ruled the internet. While difficult to measure accurately, the online pornography industry

is estimated to be worth about $1 billion, and counts for about 13% of website visits in America (compared to search engines, which account for 7%). But it appears that new uses are about to overtake pornography in terms of online popularity.

The Economist is reporting that according to Hitwise data, pornography-related web activity is decreasing in America (as a proportion of total visits), as more and more people are opting to participate in social networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. Since the data presented is limited to February, a definitive conclusion is hard to make, but traffic to these social networking sites may have already overtaken traffic to sex-related sites, and if not, will probably do so any day now.

...pornographic content is often the first to take advantage of new media, from photography to videocassettes to satellite television. "Sex is a virus that infects new technology first," as Wired put it back in 1993. Once a new medium becomes popular, its usage is no longer dominated by porn.

The resulting implication is that the internet has matured as a medium for disseminating information, and therefore people are switching from using the internet for pornography to other uses.

Start the rejoicing, another loudmouth silenced:

It's True -- Rosie will leave the "View!!"
Filed under: TV, The View, Rosie O'Donnell TMZ has now confirmed the buzz that we exclusively reported last night: Rosie O'Donnell will announce on today's show that she is leaving "The View." And TMZ has confirmed that "View" honchos are already searching for her replacement.

Stay tuned!