Category Archives: news

Microsoft Fined 1.4 billion by European Union – market yawns

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Despite a record fine of 1.4 billion dollars by the EU for failing to share code, Microsoft’s stock price dropped just a tiny bit today – a drop not even clearly associated with the ruling.     Given that the fine represents only a fraction of a percent of Microsoft’s capitalization and that it removes some uncertainty from the always massive MS legal equation it is probably reasonable to assume the market had pretty much fully incorporated the EU instability into the price of Microsoft.

The BBC Reports

Journablogger Battle Dome 2008

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Blogging people love a heated argument and Mike Arrington always aims to please, so he nailed Fred Wilson for a few inconsistencies in his otherwise very reasonable post suggesting the obvious – that blogs tend to have lower standards of accuracy than mainsteam journal articles.   I don’t think this can be reasonably disputed though I think on balance I’d rather have the fast paced, up to the minute blog coverage that is sometimes inaccurate than the next-day-fact-checked-cold-news that we sometimes see with mainstream technology coverage. 

Of course I hope the Journablogging does not upset Fred too much because I predict things will get *much* worse before they get better.   Monetizing is increasingly dependent on article output, and blogs like TechCrunch are pumping out articles faster than you can click on an RSS feed, and systems like TechMeme encourage mass postings to increase the chance you’ll be seen.    The flood of blogged tech news has only just begun, and accuracy is already one of the first casualties.

Matt explains all this wisely.  He’s pretty smart for a real journalist..

143 Million Pounds of Beef Recalled…from your stomach.

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Could somebody help me understand why the latest beef recall isn’t stupid?   This is terrifying millions of parents despite the fact that there is almost certainly close to zero health risk here according to the FDA.  Oh, also there is the challenge of the fact that most of this beef has already been eaten by you and me.  Excuse me while I barf it up for the FDA?

The FDA notes:
We do not feel this product presents a health risk of any significance

Oh, that clears things up for me.  Rules require the recall of perfectly safe beef- enough to  feed the entire country for days and valued at close to 100 million dollars -because..ummm ….huh?

This is yet another case of absurd bureacracy driven by absurd irrational concerns of absurd people.   Mad Cow?   Still *zero* deaths.   Stop worrying about this crap!   There are millions dying all over the place from *real* hazards like malaria, malnutrition, no seat belts, gun proliferation, and wars.  Those are legitimate concerns.  Bad beef is not. 

Caveat:  The company that this came from appears to be in violation of many rules.  Close them down if that’s wise – I don’t have enough detail to know.   But the recall appears to be rule based spitefulness rather than reason.   My tax dollars, squandered again, costing more people their beef and more future cows their precious cow lives. 

You know, if they recall any french fries I’m moving to Canada.

Wall Street Journal is largely free … online via Google

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Thanks to Danny Sullivan for picking up a clever way to access WSJ articles without a subscription (and perfectly legally as well) by using Google News to find the articles and then clicking through to the stories.    

As TechDirt reported a few weeks ago Dow Jones had decided not to follow the New York Times and drop the WSJ’s paywall.    The revenue considerations are tricky, if not impossible to figure out in these situations.   NYTs has seen an explosion of traffic but I think modest increases in online revenues which were never a big source for them anyway.     The battle between print and online continues to rage and I think now everybody knows the inevitable conclusion – online will win, but won’t necessarily create a lot of profits for the winners.  

Google News goes local

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Google has launched a local news service that scans local news items for context and then lists them according to relevance to your city or zip code query at Google News.   Testing this today on a few Oregon cities I’ve been  impressed with the results as they seem to pull from some obscure but relevant sources and if Google eventually starts using most of the tens of thousands of local newspaper online sites and other sources this could be a superb tool for mashing up news with websites and blogs.

Gas Pumping Robot

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Hey there’s a new robot in town (well, if you live in the Netherlands that is) and it’s pumping your gas:
http://blogs.edmunds.com/Straightline/4236

Here’s a Youtube Video of “TankPitStop” in action:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=7gPqDGrHQoM

The moral of the story is that we will be replaced by robots and computers, and this is all a good thing. 

CES 2008 – The Hollywood Track and Donny Deutsch’s “The Road to CES”.

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Entertainment Technology will be big at CES 2008 in Las Vegas, and there is a website devoted to keeping you posted on that aspect of the show.    The website is HERE – Digital Hollywood.

Another fun CES preSpinoff is Donny Deutsch’s website.  He’s an Advertising guru and host of the excellent TV show “The Big Idea” on MSNBC.    His CES efforts are online here.    Donny’s CES blog is here.

Yikes MSNBC you *really* need a content optimizer over there!   The URL for this major project is  this!    http://www.cnbc.com/id/22206030/site/14081545/

Lessing’s “curmudgeonly missteps” should be forgiven. Close the book and open the internet.

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Jeff Gomez over at the Print is Dead blog has the best piece I’ve read so far about Nobel prize winner Doris Lessing’s mild attack on the internet.    Lessing’s comments were buried in an otherwise inspiring story about the power of reading, knowledge, and education – a story about how some women in Africa were more concerned about having books to read than food to eat.

Lessing’s suggestion that youth is in the process of abandoning quality book reading in favor of the ‘inaninties” of the internet brought the very predictable blogOspheric response of derision heaped on an old litererary lady who deserves a lot more respect than she’s been getting.

Like Jeff, I can quickly forgive the increasingly irrelevant attacks on the internet.    In fact I agree with Lessing that we’ve lost something as people flock to the internet while abandonining books and newspapers, carrying with them little more than a keyboard and a short attention span.    But we gain something as well.   Something very profound.   The internet is not only far more engaging than books and newspapers, and the internet is not only far more accessible than books and newspapers.   The internet is interactive.  

VERY interactive.   

For the first time in all of human history, people from almost anywhere can communicate night and day, every day, with other people from almost anywhere else.    This tidal wave of human socializing has only just begun and the implications are staggering.   Complaining that books aren’t getting their due respect, while true, is a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.   The ship of knowledge known as the internet sailed long ago and is now a huge fleet carrying billions of people.     

As a Nobel prize winner for literature Doris Lessing will be remembered forever.    And rightly so.   But those memories, and photos, and videos, and copies of what she said will live forever in *digital form*.  They’ll live on the internet, long after all the paper representations have been relegated to a handful of dusty old museum archives and rich book collector’s shelves.

And that, dear Doris, is a very good thing.

Facebook and Politics do mix?

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The New York Times  reports that ABC and Facebook have developed a plan to cover the US Presidential campaign debates that come just before the New Hampshire primaries.    The January 5 event promises to allow Facebookers to participate very actively in the events, most notably interacting directly with reporters covering the candidates.

Despite some skepticism that Facebook users care much about politics, clearly this is another minor milestone in social networking and the effect of the online world …on the offline world.

TechMeme still Rulez!

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[Following is this is a revision of a post I did over at WebGuild.org – the Silicon Valley social networking and tech education group] . 

For bloggers, Gabe Rivera’s TechMeme has become a top technology watering hole, ranking and finding great blog posts and tracking the discussions that form around them.

Fred Wilson, a New York Venture Capitalist and great blogger, is lamenting the good old days when he thinks TechMeme had more of the stuff he wants to read – more of the old guard tech bloggers and fewer popular newspaper articles.

Unlike Fred, I’m happy with what I see as a diversification of the early TechMeme post universe. I’ve never been comfortable with the idea that the “old guard” does all the best blogging, and TechMeme does a great job of unearthing new voices for me.    Frankly, I’d like to see even more new voices.   As I’ve noted here before we need a blogging revolution (hmmm – I guess I’m too lazy to lead it?!   I was supposed to get Scoble a list of “great new voices” and have not done that yet, though it’s on “The List”).     My criticism of TechMeme is more along the lines that by design it will become too focused on the insider rumor mill rather than the most significant technology news stories.    But I appreciate the fact that you want “most significant story” to be defined by objective processes rather than a handful of editors.  TechMeme is doing a great job of that so far.

In general I find I prefer the new fresh voices to the old ones.  Fred wrote that he likes new voices too but appears to be tired of TechMeme’s increasing number of legacy media stories about tech issues.  I agree the old schoolf folks often miss the big picture, but they are driving much of the national debate on these issues so I want their take as well as the insiders angle from well-connected bloggers.    I also appreciate that legacy media folks check their spelling, usage, and their facts – a point that should not be lost on many bloggers including this one.    (But the spell checking takes an extra 30 seconds …. I have no time for THAT inconvenience!)

Thanks to TechMeme I find a lot quickly, and I also have the site doing some of the human filtering for me because I know Gabe won’t run lousy blogs.   Are people writing specifically to TechMeme to get links there, as Fred notes?   Sure they are, but this just creates the challenge we get with all news media – a sort of echo chamber where all the insiders are talking about the same stuff.   That challenge is not really TechMeme’s fault – the solution for that is more good bloggers which will diversify the conversations even more and get people talking about things and linking to things they had not though about before.  

[groaning] after I wrote the post above, TechMeme managed to have one of it’s dumbest top stories in some time – a clear indication of how insulated our silly tech community can become from real world issues.