Category Archives: Web 2.0

Associated Content monetizing plagiarized content.

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update:  I’ve rewritten this post after realizing Mashable is not saying AC did anything illegal.

Mashable is falling just short of charging Associated Content, a well-funded content distribution portal, with plagiarism.   Apparently an AC contributor has lifted a lot of Mashable articles verbatim and posted them at AC.     Mashable argues that since AC claims to edit contributions they should have caught this. 

As Mashable notes what makes this scraping and stealing more conspicuous is that AC is a relatively big online publishing player, not a junky run of the mill “made for adsense” site that would soon be delisted from Google and abandoned.

Of course, few sites screen contributors fairly carefully.  In the rush to create profitable social communities, many sites are willing to turn a blind eye to who is posting what and from whom.    Google’s getting better at delisting plagiarized content, but it’s still a big problem.    The solution is fairly simple but so far few are willing to implement better screening of publishers and writers.   Google adsense, for example, is often run on the lowliest of scraped content websites.   Since Google has a record of payments to those publishers  I find it hard to believe they are doing a careful job of deleting them from the system.    I have not even heard Google claim that they do anything much to ban people from the Adsense program.     With adsense as a prime monetizer of online content both legitimate and plagiarized, it would be nice to see Google blacklist abusers and pass this along to other advertising networks.

However based on my experiences as an advertiser Google is probably the best at following up and creating at least a minimal level of accountability for publishers.   I bought cheap traffic from Enhance and the number of junk sites was very conspicuous in the logs.  Conversion was close to zero and I discontinued the campaign.  

Blogger and OpenID

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Reshma Kumar over at Webguild is reporting on Google’s upcoming launch of blogger based blog commenting that will support OpenID.   This is a great development and kudos to Google for again doing the right thing, which is making it easy for people to comment without having to do a separate login.   Also, along with Open Social, this approach is coming closer to the ideal online environment where you log in ONCE, and then interact in a robust way with all online environments and other onliners.   The analogy we should all be using is that of a massive party where everybody has a searchable name tag that contains all the info they care to share including pictures, writings, and resumes.    The complication is obvious here – some people will want to keep some things from some people.    I’m not sure how to manage that part since turning the info “on and off” does not work well in our cached and oft-downloaded online info environments.

Reshma notes:
 Users of OpenID-enabled services such as LiveJournal and WordPress can comment on a blog using their accounts from those sites rather than with a Blogger/Google account.

 This may not sound like much, but it will increase the ease of commenting on other people’s blogs.   I’m concerned by how blog commenting is becoming a dying art.   This is due to part to spam comments and in part to blogger selfishness where they don’t want to add to other’s blogs for a variety of SEO or ego reasons.      Ideally I’d like to see every person with their own blog, and then an auto-trackback feature so the conversations would span multiple blogs and instead of comments you’d just have dozens of interconnected blog posts on a topic.   However many people don’t want to have a blog but do want to participate.   This will help with that.

Berners-Lee: More study of WWW needed

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Tim Berners-Lee, the closest thing we have to an “inventor” of the web as we know it today, is calling for more integrated, broad studies of the internet rather than the mostly piecemeal academic work being done now.     He’s right.   The internet is arguablly the most profound change in human communication in history, and it’s just getting started.    As social networking explodes into the dominant socializing mechanism for humans we are experiencing many new opportunities and many challenges, especially as the online environments create new relationships between people, generations, and cultures.

Universities would be well advised to heed this call from Berners-Lee and offer more “web centric” courses, but more importantly academics should be spending a lot more time studying the complex, changing structure of the web.  The technical aspects of the internet are fairly well studied in commercial circles.   The sociological side is  poorly/rarely studied in academia and the commercial sector is still struggling to understand the implications of the massive shift of human activity online.   

Propeller vs Mixx vs Digg vs?

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Center Networks is reviewing yet another DiggEsque application called, in what has got to be one of the most questionable rebranding efforts of the year:  Propeller  .  Propeller started life as the Netscape ranking site that was very similar to Digg and designed to compete with it.    That effort having failed, it appears Propeller is an attempt to rebrand things such that they can take another shot at Digg.

I’m having a lot of trouble understanding “the point” in what seem like similar approaches to the same challenge, which is getting people to *participate* very actively in story selection and commentary.     Rather than “we’ll build a site and they’ll come to it” approach I want to see dramatic improvements to portable identities.   MyBlogLog is the closest thing to what I think is the clear  “right answer” here.  Basically, what I want is for every online person to have an identity.  I want to see that identity when they visit my websites and I want to see that identity when I am visiting a site they’ve also visited recently (or maybe … visited ever).   One interesting extension that might come out of this would be a superior “vote by your feet” ranking system where pages at which many people spent a lot of time would have more authority, and when this was combined with tags and comments by the visitors you’d have a fairly robust system for ranking sites.

Mixx versus Digg?

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During weekends and holidays my favorite news site, TechMeme, gets wilder than usual because I think there are fewer news outlets posting stories and even the big tech blogs dry up on the weekend.   Even more wild are holidays, which may explain the odd top story today at TechMeme today about MIXX versus DIGG.

Mike over at TechCrunch is reporting that a lot of Digg users are heading over to the new social story tagging site called Mixx.     He notes that Digg users have become increasingly frustrated with the Digg communities and mini-scandals.   A quick Alexa take on Mixx did not really seem to support the idea that MIXX poses much threat right now to DIGG, though since MIXX is still in beta it’s possible MIXX is going to be a contender when it’s known to more people.  Mixx appears to have 150k-250k daily visits (per my rough Alexa extrapolation from approx 35k Alexa rank).     Given the up and down traffic pattern at MIXX though it’s not clear it’s “taking off”, rather than it’s setting in as one of the many DIGG “also rans” that have little chance of even catching the big DIGG.

The Social Graph

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ReadWriteWeb has an excellent summary of the idea that online relationships between people can be described in terms of a “Social Graph” that defines and to some extent dictates those relationships.

I guess I’m OK with a lot of the faux complexity that Social GraphOlogy is going to bring the table, though it would sure be nice if Tech folks and academics could just talk about things in the simple terms they deserve.   All this stuff, and most of the internet, is about the intersection of information with *human relationships*.  We are talking about basic sociology here, and I’m not sure it’s going to be  helpful to redifine things with new terminology when it’s not really needed.   The Social Graph recognizes and defines online human relationships.   Couldn’t we just talk about this in the same way we talk about other things and preface everything with “online”?     Probably not, because that won’t socially graph well enough.

OK it’s official – you can say “Graph” for Social Networking and still be cool

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Tim Berners-lee has referred to the “Global Graph” in a recent blog post over at TBL.   There have recently been several blog posts suggesting that the word ‘Graph’ is too confusing or inappropriate as a way to describe concepts surrounding social networking, but now the the big Tim BL is on board, now it’s all about the graph baby!

Seybold on wireless = early senility?

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Update:  Andrew Seybold’s reply:  http://www.andrewseybold.com/blog.asp?ID=132

Tonight PBS covered the smart phone market, and asked for input from Andrew Seybold.   He should have been a great choice and clearly has an insider view, so how could he say something this transparently absurd? 

ANDREW SEYBOLD: As much as I respect Google, the wireless industry can’t be an extension of the Internet because wireless bandwidth is finite. It’s a fixed resource, and it is shared bandwidth. The more people who use it in a given area, the less data speed they have.

Andrew, with all due respect – and considerable respect is due, I think you’ve missed something profound here.    Sure, wireless capacity must increase to accommodate all the data, and it certainly will.    There are already technologies like WIMAX and EVDO that will scale up to meet demand, and it’s likely that improvements and new technologies will emerge very fast in response to this cash rich, market.   In any case, it is now *crystal clear* that all players in this space are moving to converge the phone experience with the internet experience.    It is not clear exactly how that will shake out and eventually become seamless, but you are suggesting this is not even the *direction* in which things are moving.  

ERIC SCHMIDT: I completely disagree with the characterization that somehow the wireless network is going to be any different than the wired network, because there’s enormous spectrum becoming available through licensing programs, better radio design, faster computers, and so forth.

Thank you Eric, you are absolutely right.  In fact I expect you already have several plans in place to make the higher speed and broader bands available to prospective gPhones and Google Phones and Android equipped phones.  

Kindle as “Future of Reading”? More like Present … of stupidity.

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I don’t usually pan products here but the Kindle coming out from Amazon tomorrow is *really* a bad idea.   Not because it wouldn’t be neat to have a great reading device to replace books, but because of the demographics involved here.   Amazon is going to be lucky to sell enough Kindles to keep this project going through Christmas.     Part of the challenge for the Kindle is that it’s ugly.   Butt ugly based on the picture, though some are saying the Kindle picture does not do it justice.

Newsweek Reports with a title that is now in first place for journalistic hyperbole gone mad. 

But even if the Kindle was an AppleEsque stylish, techological beauty, who do they think will buy these things?

The early adopters of techology – folks like me who have a lot of computers, a laptop, and a fancy phone *already have* devices where we can read blogs and websites and books.   Oh yes, most of that reading is free on my laptop, where the Kindle is going to charge you – even for blogs if early reports are correct.  Sure it would be nice to have a portable reader for the coffee shop when I don’t have a real book to bring there.     But I *do* have a real book around somewhere that I do bring to the coffee shop if I’m not bringing my …. laptop … which gives me more than just reading capabilities.    Can I blog from the Kindle?    I’m not going to carry a Kindle AND my Laptop around with me.

OK, so what about those folks who are not attached to their technologies pretty much every waking hour?   The folks who may not even have a laptop to carry around.    They are going to budget $399 for a .. ummm …. ugly Kindle?  Huh?  The folks who don’t particularly like computers or gadgets and don’t think it’s fun to have a laptop at the coffee shop are going to jump right out and buy an ugly, new, unusual ….. uber gadget?     No.    What will the marketing say “Luddites of the world wake up and get out your wallets, because the Kindle is the high technology for YOU!”

As Matt Ingram notes, what in the world is Jeff Bezos smoking over there?.    The Kindle is yet another gadget designed by the folks who have everything for the folks who have everything, and therefore brings to the marketplace pretty much … nothing.  

OK, I’ve been mean and harsh because I think the Kindle is going to fail pretty dramatically.   I also feel bad because I understand Jeff Bezos is a cool, nice guy.    Yikes, I’ll never get a job selling Kindles door to door now, but the ugly Kindle truth is more important than that.   However, I would have to say that *some day* we may see lots of this type of device in libraries and coffee shops as a great way to bring people fresh and hugely diverse content without subscriptions to hundreds of magazines and papers and blogs and websites.   That is the neat part of this idea, but unfortunately for it to work the Kindle would need to kindle a lot of interest in the device as much as the idea, and this won’t do that.

Email as the new Social Network

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The New York Times is summarizing some interesting plans from Google and Yahoo to turn their email systems into forms of social networking.    This idea could have a lot of potential, as the Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse points out in the article that Yahoo has a lot of information about an individual’s social relationships – for example who they email regularly – and this info is simply begging to be mined to help users navigate their increasingly complex online worlds.