New York Times on Microsoft and Mashups … and Mashup Camp 6 is coming!

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You know mashups have hit the mainstream when they hit the NY Times, and this article is a nice introduction to Mashups and why they have become a key component of “Web 2.0”.    

Mashups in music are songs that combine words and/or music from 2 or more songs, and internet mashups are similar – generally they are a combination of the information from 2 or more websites or data sources into one site.   Zillow.com, for example, is an excellent mashup that takes real estate information and “mashes it” with mapping information, so you can navigate homes and prices via maps as well as in other ways.    Also in typical Web 2.0 mashup fashion, Zillow offers “APIs” or “Application Program Interfaces”   which are tools that allow simple integration of Zillow into your own website.

Mashups are not new but as they, and other Web 2.0 sensibilities, become the backbone of the new internet they represent a significant new direction in online life and computing.    Although the internet started out as a fairly open environment, the advent of big money led many websites and services to force users to pay for content and services.   “Paywalls” at sites like the New York Times, Salon, and others meant that you could not get at the stories unless you subscribed.     These paywalls are coming down now in favor of advertising supported revenue models and more open environments where websites tend to share data and even advanced technologies in exchange for the benefit of appearing as a link or an information box within other sites. 

Still confused?    Frankly, I don’t think anybody can even hope to digest the tidal waves of innovation and information that flood over the internet on a daily basis.    But if you want to understand more about mashups there is no better conference than Mashup Camp 6 coming up in in Silicon Valley in March.    David Berlind and Doug Gold started these camps a few years ago and they are a superb way to get up to speed very quickly on how mashups are …. changing everything. 

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.  

YahoOliver Twist to Microsoft “Can I have more please, sir?”

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Ina is reporting over at CNET that Yahoo is going to reject Microsoft’s current offer of about $30 per share and ask Microsoft for $40 per share at the Wednesday meeting.    I’m still in the camp that says Yahoo is not in a good negotiating position to make this demand, though contrary to what better connected folks than I suggest I’m guessing Microsoft will up the offer to seal this deal next week.   I say they’ll offer $34-35 at current MS pricing.   This is more than any reasonable definition of “fair market price”, and Yahoo’s board could only reject this at their huge legal peril. 

 I’m not a fan of class action lawsuits but Yahoo can probably expect a gigantic one if they turn down MS and then Yahoo tanks again.   This would probably  be resolved quickly by a board decision to go ahead and sell. 

I’d love to be a fly on Eric Schmidt’s office wall right now as Google’s role in all this is really intriguing.   They can let the merger go and assume MicroHoo can’t be competitive with Google, they can help Yahoo with monetization in a bold way to prop up Yahoo’s stock but effectively keep their one true competitor alive, or they can just sit and wait for it all to shake out.   Most analysts seem to think Google’s in fine shape competitively regardless of their decision and I’d agree with that.   In fact Yahoo’s stubborn refusal to look for the winning Microsoft combination here may be yet another nail in their corporate coffin.    I can’t help but think this is ego-centric thinking rather than the broad, practical, and innovative thinking that built Yahoo in the first place.    

Given that YHOO was trading well under $20 last week I just can’t see how they can make a strong case to Microsoft (or shareholders) that MS needs to pay a premium of over 100% on this deal.    That said, I do think Yahoo is undervalued in the technological sense – they have much of what Google has and have much of the potential Google has, yet they are capitalized at about 1/4 Google even with the recent Google stock meltdown and Yahoo stock upswing from the MS offer.   Yahoo’s a great company. Unfortunately they have failed dramatically for many years to use this greatness to be profitable and they have failed to make the case to Wall Street.  

What is the right answer in all this?     It’s simple:

1.   Microsoft should counter the $40 request with an offer of $34 per share at Wednesday’s MS stock price.

2.   Microsoft will keep Yahoo intact largely in current form for six months.   Yang and the Yahoo board will be given SIX MONTHS to kick whatever asses need kicking to make Yahoo more profitable.   If Yahoo’s looking healthy in six months they’ll stay on this course, but if they can’t fix in six, send them to the sticks and MS will take over in heavy handed form.

3.  Reorganize the languishing publisher programs at MS and Yahoo to compete more effectively with Google Adsense, which has a virtual monopoly in this space and accounts for over 40% of Google revenue.

Disclosure:  Long on Yahoo

Check out Furrier.org

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John Furrier  has been working in technology and starting technology startups for some time and his blog has a lot of good perspectives from a clever guy.    John was a founder of PodTech, the video startup, and I had a couple of nice talks with him at CES where the PodTech Bloghaus was a huge hit with hundreds of the thousands of bloggers swarming all over Las Vegas.

Yahoo – Game Over Dudes?

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Kara Swisher over at All Things D  has an excellent post about the Yahoo Microsoft merger where in my view she suggests correctly that the game is pretty much over.    Google won’t do much to get in to this mess (they’d almost certainly be prohibited from aquiring Yahoo due to antitrust rules), and Microsoft is unlikely to up the generous offer which now amounts to about $29-$30 per share depending on Microsoft’s share price at the deal.   Most importantly, the Yahoo board cannot turn this down without the risk of lawsuits from now until the singularity.    If Microsoft had only offered a few dollars above the sagging YHOO share prices last week this story could be different, but I cannot see how the Yahoo board can come up with a plan to keep the stock around $30 per share AND turn down the Microsoft offer.    I suppose Google might sweep in with a good enough partnership that investors would not be spooked, but that now appears less likely and frankly if anybody might have a hint about that it would be Kara Swisher who has significant insider information about Google.

Ergo, MicroHoo appears to be coming soon to an internet near you.

Disclosure:  Long on Yahoo.

Check your hosting plan!

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Some of us – I’m a good example – can be too stubborn about hassling with technology changes because I know that with technology stuff you always can expect the unexpected.   However sometimes this costs me a lot more than the value of the stress it saves me.

I’ve had many hosting plans for many sites over the years and it has been nice to see  the costs come way down from the old days.    

I’m just now switching my Verio shared hosting plan from the $50 monthly to the $13 monthly, and it looks like I’m getting better features at about a quarter of the cost.    Also switching my Godaddy “virtual dedicated” server plan, which I was not all that happy with anyway due to SMTP problems neither they or I could solve.    That plan still allows me to have many domains on the server, but cost is going from about $40 monthly to about $16.   

About five years ago I think I was paying something like $800 per month for a dedicated plan, and over at US History I think we may still be mistaken to run our own servers with all the associated costs for bandwidth and maintenance, but that system would be hard to untangle right now.

The morale of this story is simple:    Regardless of the size of the site you run you should review your hosting plan to make sure you are taking advantage of the new very inexpensive options available from most hosts.   Also, I think it’s a mistake to assume that the “elite” hosts are better than the cheap ones.  Virtualization (running one physical server as several virtual servers), IP sharing, and load balancing, and customer service quirks mean that the cheap plans can be *better* than the more expensive ones, even at the *same host*. 

Verio was very helpful *after* I asked them about options for reducing my costs, though they would have earned much more customer loyalty from me if they’d recommended a switch a few years ago when they changed my server but didn’t let me know I should be switching to the cheap plan.   

TechMeme, Twitter, and Pownce

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For some time my working hypothesis about new niche tech sites is that they appear to have explosive early growth followed by traffic stability or only slight traffic increases as all the early adopter tech enthusiasts sign on, and other people show little interest.     The following Alexa data really supports this hypothesis:

Alexa Graph

TechMeme is one of my very favorite sites and I know this is true for many others.   I’m surprised TechMeme’s growth seemed to have tapered off so early, but in some ways this makes sense because there are only so many people – a small percentage of all onliners – who are heavily absorbed with the latest buzz from the technology world.    Twitter would have broader interest and appears to be growing still, yet I’m skeptical enough people have time to play the Twitter game to make this a mainstream application.   Pownce is a great application but I think people are unlikely to abandon Twitter for Pownce, and thus Pownce will struggle to grow from an entirely new set of social networking non-twitterers.

Rumors of Google and Plaxo and the McCarthy Conspiracy

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Megan McCarthy reports at Wired today that Google may be picking up Plaxo for 200 million.    A few hours later Caroline McCarthy at CNET shoots down the rumor saying it appears unfounded.

Wazzup with all these McCarthys?    Are they rival sisters, trying to outscoop or undermine each other?    Spurned same named journalistas fighting for truth, freedom, and the American way?   Is this all just a coincidence?    Are these women related to the infamous Senator from Wisconsin Joe McCarthy?   Rumor has it that …

Yahoo Live … dies

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Update:  Chad replies in comments below from the Yahoo Live team and I certainly agree that the rumors of the death of of Live were greatly exaggerated.  

Yahoo strikes again with what looked like a neat application – live streaming video for everybody – but woefully inadequate capacity to handle the huge interest in the beta.    The application sounds promising – you plug in your camcorder and start streaming live onto the web via your Yahoo Live account.   Although several other places have these services, Yahoo has the huge population and umm … server capacity …  to make this work for the millions of people who’ll be interested in chatting in this fashion.

Hmm – not sure if I should be warming up to the video socializing idea I viewed skeptically earlier in the year, though as I noted before I’m not at all bullish on the monetization potential of this type of communication, let alone monetization of video clips like those at Youtube – only the best “shows” with clever, engaging, or sexy people will do well in that regard, but I think this is another aspect of globalized social networking that is the new online paradigm. 

Who projects server capacity over there?     Based on the current home page of Yahoo live it appears it is only handling a few thousand streams when the thing went down.     

Matt’s got a play by play of the death of Yahoo live.

Robert Scoble on other streaming video applications.