Archives: April 2006

How the Americans got cell phones right

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 30, Categories: mobile

I never thought I'd be writing this. When I covered technology in Europe at the turn of the century, it went without saying that the U.S. was backward in cell...

Forrester Adds Blogs

Posted by: Heather Green on April 29, Categories:

Shouldn't be a surprise that after Forrester analyst Charlene Li said she brought in $1 million in business using her blog, the research firm should put together a new blog on tech and marketing.

Why drowning in data means an end to privacy

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 28, Categories: Inside Companies, email

We're up to our necks in data, maybe to our ears--or beyond. IDC's Susan Feldman cites a study showing that office workers spend an average of 14.5 hours per week...

Who says the east coast has no mighty redwoods?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 28, Categories:

Springtime in the Berkshires, and I see a majestic tree towering above the scrawny pines. Naturally, it was a cell-phone tower in a silly disguise. It's not a bad idea...

Firefox's Videos Keeps the Community Rolling

Posted by: Heather Green on April 28, Categories:

Keeping its theme of making its community it's biggest proponents, Firefox announced the winners of its Firefox flicks campaign today.

Pledging Allegiance to Chinese Censorship

Posted by: Heather Green on April 27, Categories:

BW's Bruce Einhorn has a story that provides insight into a new censorship campaign in China.

Reporters and the Eddie Haskell syndrome

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 27, Categories: mainstream media, society

This post from Knoxville discusses the waiter syndrome: Judge people by how they treat others, not by how they cowtow to power. It reminded me of an article I read...

AOL Launches New Network of Financial Blogs

Posted by: Heather Green on April 27, Categories: blog business

AOL today is kicking off a new blogging network,called bloggingstocks.com that features bloggers posting about individual stocks, ranging from Google to Time Warner. This is the first step AOL has taken to come up with new services since it bought Weblogs Inc.

Is advertising killing search?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 26, Categories: search

I've given up on Google for travel. The results are too polluted with optimized sites that fail to give me the answers, phone numbers and addresses I need. So instead...

This Week's Podcast with NowPublic's Michael Tippett

Posted by: Heather Green on April 26, Categories: Citizen Media

In this week's BW Cutting Edge podcast, Michael Tippett, the founder of NowPublic, explains the startup's approach to citizen-controlled media. Based in Vancouver, enables collaboration between traditional reporters and the public.

Many Shades of Community

Posted by: Heather Green on April 26, Categories:

Community life exists apart from social networking. A quick tour of a few different kinds of communities, hopefully to get the ball rolling and encourage you to suggest others that you care about.

Dilbert Goes Open Source

Posted by: Heather Green on April 25, Categories: digital media

Scott Adams is using his blog to collect story ideas for a Sunday comic.

Argument: Is search engine optimization equivalent to spam?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 25, Categories: search, spam and other abuses

Stephen Arnold, author and president of Arnold Information Technology, has ruffled feathers at this Search Engine Meeting by equating search engine optimization with spam. It makes people here furious, because...

Could vertical search supplant SEO?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 25, Categories: search

I'm at The Search Engine Meeting in Boston listening to Vivisimo's Raul Valdes-Perez promoting vertical search. In his vision, companies will aggregate their own information universes, discreetly putting their own...

Businesses Talk Back at Judy's Book

Posted by: Heather Green on April 25, Categories: comments

Judy's Book, the online community where people share recommendations about local businesses, is providing a new service that lets alerts businesses when someone talks about them online. It keeps word of mouth going.

Brightcove Opens Up

Posted by: Heather Green on April 24, Categories: digital media

Brightcove is opening up to all comers this weeek. The startup offers a publishing, distribution and advertising platform for big and small producers to produce their own online video channels.

ITunes to Add Advertising, AdAge Reports

Posted by: Heather Green on April 24, Categories: advertising

Apple plans to add advertising in a very selective way to iTunes, AdAge says. But they have the structure to do much, much more, especially when it comes to podcasts, which are still in search of a business model.

Blogs: They Dance, They Sing

Posted by: Heather Green on April 24, Categories: blog technology

A new blog technology called MyChingo lets you hear readers comments, rather than read them. Will audible blog spam be next?

Search engine conference in Boston

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 23, Categories: search

I'll be at this search engine get-together in Boston on Monday and Tuesday. If you're there, let's have coffee during one of the breaks. I'll be talking to people at...

BW's Rob Hof spawns an avatar

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 22, Categories: BusinessWeek, digital media, society

Here's a fun cover story by BW's Rob Hof about virtual gaming. I especially like the end, where he gets mad at a few virtual squatters who have invaded his...

RSS And Podcasting Turns Castrol Motor Oil Into a Media Co.

Posted by: Heather Green on April 21, Categories: RSS

How Castrol Motor Oil used podcasting and RSS to transform itself from an advertiser into a media company.

Babe Ruth would languish in a world of business process outsourcing

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 20, Categories: skills, society

Last night in Philadelphia, I watched a pitcher almost singlehandedly win a baseball game--with his bat. The pitcher was Cuban-born Livan Hernandez. He's a veteran for the Washington Nationals. He...

Save the Internet--and tell me why it's in danger

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 20, Categories: society, spam and other abuses

OK, maybe I've been in a math-bubble for two months. But when I read Jeff Pulver's plea for a movement to save the Internet (thanks Joho), I'm not sure what...

Photobucket: One Big Under the Radar Startup

Posted by: Heather Green on April 20, Categories:

Photobucket is a company that has bootstrapped its way into attracting aroung 14 million users. And they're adding 2 million users a month. Founded in 2003, the company says its cash flow positive and has in total raised $2.5 million in venture money.

One cafe, one pad of paper, a sharpened pencil

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 19, Categories: society

Ernest Hemingway had a simple formula in his Paris days. He'd go to a cafe in the morning with a pad and a sharpened pencil. Then he'd write. Not to...

Agent says hostage book could be big: Duh!

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 19, Categories: society

An literary agent who wants to represent freed hostage Jill Carroll says that her book, if she chooses to write one, would be big. I have no reason to disagree....

Bw Podcast with Backfence's Susan DeFife

Posted by: Heather Green on April 19, Categories: Citizen Media

Susan DeFife, the president and CEO of Backfence, talks about the startup, which provides tools for community journalism. Backfence, launched in the Washington, D.C.area a year ago. Now it's expanding, in part through the recent acquisition of Bayosphere, the San Francisoc Bay service started by citizen media guru Dan Gillmor.

Why Veoh is Having a Big Day

Posted by: Heather Green on April 18, Categories: digital media

Veoh, the online video startup raised $12.5 million and the collective reaction question across the Web seemed to be What? Veoh's CEO explains his strategy, and then we do a little runthrough of a lot of video services trying to figure out their different market positions.

Podcast Mania: FeedBurner Tracking 44,000 podcasts

Posted by: Heather Green on April 18, Categories: podcasting

FeedBurner, the service that helps manage, measure, and put ads in RSS feeds for big and small publishers, says that it is now handling 44,000 podcast feeds.

Social networking sites will lead to more snooping on workers

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 18, Categories: research, society

Visible Path has raised $17 million in venture funding. The idea is that they'll help corporations understand the social networks within companies, leading to better connections with suppliers and...

Backfence Acquires Bayosphere

Posted by: Heather Green on April 17, Categories: Citizen Media

After failing to gain traction on his own as an entrepreneur with his startup Bayosphere, Dan Gillmor has found a home for the citizen media service. It has been acquired by BackFence, a community media site that got its start last year in neighborhoods around Washington, D.C.

Nike's Online TV

Posted by: Heather Green on April 17, Categories: digital media

I like that Nike was locked out of advertising in the U.S. during the World Cup by Adidas, because it made them come up with an alternative online marketing campaign that's pretty inventive.

Software engineering makes a comeback, despite outsourcing

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 16, Categories: skills

A couple surprises for me in Money Magazine's list of hot jobs. First, despite all the concern about software jobs migrating to India, software engineer ranks as the number-one job....

Microsoft's photo innovation will point to us

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 16, Categories: photos, society

Microsoft's Chinese lab has come up with a search service based on camera-phone pictures. Pondering Primate writes, "The camera on your mobile phone is your "mouse" and every physical object...

New Discovery: Doogtoons Video Podcast

Posted by: Heather Green on April 15, Categories: podcasting

Ok, so new to me. I just discovered Doogtoons, an animated video podcast that really made me laugh. The stumbled across the interview they did with Ninja from the...

Who Gets Social Media Right?

Posted by: Heather Green on April 14, Categories: digital media

Are there newspapers, TV stations, media companies that you think have good strategies or are adopting social tech in a smart way? What impresses you?

Arbitron: Net Radio Up, 11% in U.S. Have Checked Out Podcasts

Posted by: Heather Green on April 13, Categories: digital media

New survey data released by Arbitron finds that about 11% of Americans, or 27 million people, have listened to an audio podcast. Net radio usage is on the rise. Nearly 12% of people in the U.S., or 30 million folks, are weekly Internet radio listeners, up from 8% a year ago.

Why did we get to hear the voices from flight 93?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 13, Categories: legal, society

Did we have a right to hear the voice recordings from flight 93? Or did we just "benefit" from the prosecution's strategy in a criminal trail? Are there other documents...

Blogging at Carnegie Mellon

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 13, Categories:

Yesterday, in the midst of math interviews at Carnegie Mellon, the pr people asked me if I could talk to them about blogs. Blogs? I thought. You mean I can...

Talking about continual government surveillance

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 12, Categories: society

A bold proposal from a French software executive. Every vehicle in France, he says, should ping its location every five seconds. That way, authorities can take down their radar and...

This Week's Podcast with YourHub's Travis Henry

Posted by: Heather Green on April 12, Categories:

This weeks guest on the Cutting Edge podcast is Travis Henry, the managing editor of Colorado’s YourHub service, a community news venture started by The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News that’s already in the black.

The Logical End to the Disney Discussion: Buy YouTube

Posted by: Heather Green on April 12, Categories: digital media

There has been a lot of discussion about whether Disney made a smart move or a dumb one in deciding to start streaming its TV shows over the Net. And Ben Barren suggests that Disney should buy YouTube.

Web 2.0 Companies Making Money?

Posted by: Heather Green on April 12, Categories: digital media

Mark Pincus asks a pertinent question: Are there any Web 2.0 companies making money?

More Ad Auctions: IT Conversations Podcast Jumps In....

Posted by: Heather Green on April 11, Categories: advertising

IT Conversations, a pretty big podcast network, is following in Rocketboom's footsteps and doing an ad auction on eBay. The starting bid they're asking to advertise on a month of...

Video Ad Auctions: Just A Matter of Time

Posted by: Heather Green on April 11, Categories: advertising

Clearly, Rocketboom was ahead of the pack when it auctioned its video ads on eBay earlier this spring. Now Time Warner is talking about doing ad auctions for video on demand.

Pluck's Syndication Moves

Posted by: Heather Green on April 11, Categories: blog business

Tech startup Pluck is rolling out syndicated blog offerings for traditional publications. But is this a service anyone needs?

WiFi leeching blues

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 11, Categories:

I'm sitting our cold porch with the laptop. It's the only place where I can leech my neighbor's WiFi. Mine went dead, for some unknown reason. I tell my wife...

Socializing for Dollars

Posted by: Heather Green on April 10, Categories: advertising

How advertisers are getting it right on social networking sites MySpace and Xanga

How Washington journalism is like the gossip sheets

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 09, Categories: mainstream media

Jeff Jarvis notes the similarities between Washington journalism and the celebrity rags. This is true because both industries, Celebrity Inc. and politics, produce only one product: information. Access means everything...

This Could be Bloody....

Posted by: Heather Green on April 08, Categories: advertising

The online game Project Entropia is letting players create ads for themselves within the game.

Hitwise Shows MySpace Outpacing YouTube

Posted by: Heather Green on April 07, Categories: digital media

Had heard that Myspace's new video service was doing well, but some new data from Hitwise shows that it's outpacing YouTube.

In We Media, Ads That Reflect Personality.....

Posted by: Heather Green on April 07, Categories:

Are there more ads out there like the Rocketboom ad, that is tailored to reflect the personality of the site or service?

Wikis: The Movie (Lucky Number Slevin)

Posted by: Heather Green on April 07, Categories: Wikis

How the producers of Lucky Number Slevin used wikis from JotSpot to help make the movie.

Federated Media's Metablog Play...Very Interesting...

Posted by: Heather Green on April 06, Categories: blog business

In the race to become a meta aggregator, is there a superior way to do it? Will aggregating through community votes (digg), or technology (memeorandum) or persoanl editors (Federated Media) win?

Reality Check for Podcasting

Posted by: Heather Green on April 05, Categories: podcasting

Forrester research provides a reality check for podcasting: Though around a quarter of people express interest in a recent survey, only 1% actually listen to them regularly.

YouTube Raises $8 Million from Sequoia Capital

Posted by: Heather Green on April 05, Categories: digital media

YouTube, the video sharing service, raised $8 million, bringing the total amount it has raised so far to $11.5 million. The backer is Sequoia Capital, the VC that originally financed the startup in November.

This Week's Podcast with Baristanet's Debbie Galant

Posted by: Heather Green on April 05, Categories: podcasting

This week's guest on the BW Cutting Edge podcast is Debbie Galant, the founder of the popular community blog Baristanet.

Heartless U.S. vs. soulless Europe

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 05, Categories: international, politics, society

When I lived in Europe, I often heard that the United States was a heartless society. Now that I'm back here, I'm hearing the equally simplistic line that Western Europe...

MySpace's explosive growth: What does it mean?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 05, Categories: society

Om Malik details the growth at MySpace, which now appears to be the Web's second most trafficked site, trailing only Yahoo. The crowd there has quintupled in the last year....

Blogosphere and the Year of Scrutiny

Posted by: Heather Green on April 04, Categories: business blogging

Why jumping into the meme pool might not be such a good idea when blogging about rumors.

Diggnation Commercial

Posted by: Heather Green on April 04, Categories: advertising

The new online commerical for the online video show, Diggnation, produced by the Digg news folks.

Spies miss BW story about them

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 04, Categories:

You know the National Security Agency, the techno-sleuths who comb the vast world of information for inklings of plots, coups and bombings. I talked to them for the math cover...

My kids play violent video games

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 04, Categories: society

A judge has overturned a Michigan law banning the sale or rent of violent video games to minors. He says the games represent free speech. If I even mention this...

BW story on Green Tags

Posted by: Heather Green on April 03, Categories: BusinessWeek

Here's the BW story I did on a renewable energy product called green tags, which provide a novel way to buy green energy. It's the fastest growing product on the...

NYTimes Describes Next Steps in its Redesign

Posted by: Heather Green on April 03, Categories: mainstream media

A chat with the folks at the NYTimes about the redesign and specifically the how they plan to develop the personalized My Times feature.

Should BW Online match Epicurious.com?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 03, Categories: BusinessWeek, mainstream media

All the talk I've been hearing about online strategies at mainstream pubs involves extending the franchise. And yet I read in today's New York Times about the brilliance of Conde...

YouTube CTO Outlines Copy Protection Tools

Posted by: Heather Green on April 03, Categories: digital media

Steve Chen, the CTO of YouTube, outlines steps the video sharing service is taking to try to provide better copy protection for copyright owners, including education, better tools for copyright owners, and more sophisticated back-end tools.

Living in a bubble, TiVoing the Final Four

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 02, Categories: Weekend Rant

No TV or papers for me this morning. No MyYahoo or blog-surfing. We had guests over for dinner during the Final Four, and I haven't seen the (basketball) games yet....

Help, the aliens are posting... blogs!

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 01, Categories: Definitions

Lots of hand-wringing now that Technorati appears to be indexing the hordes of MySpacers. Aaron Brazell notes that bloggers on MySpace "make the ultimate mistake of calling blog entries "blogs"....

The enormous advantage of writing from the United States

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 01, Categories: society

Here's Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker and Moneyball, on the advantages of being a writer in the U.S.: "The stories we tell about life in America have a...