Social Networks Censor Teen Sex [Whooda Thunk?]

The luridly titled Midwest Teen Sex Show is a podcast aimed at young adults with the intent to educate.  While the title may be salacious, the content is more or less tame, or at least as tame as can be expected from a non FCC-regulated sex-education program run by occasionally foul-tongued creators.

According to a report from Tilzy today, though, the show has been on the receiving end of a disproportionate amount of takedowns from the likes of MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook.

The ‘Fetishes‘ episode of MTSS was deleted on 12.28.08 by YouTube. KoldCast emailed YouTube and the company’s only response was a form letter that said the video was in violation of YouTube’s Community Guidelines. YouTube ignored additional inquiry.

Earlier last year, the same Fetishes’ episode was removed from MySpace after being viewed over 33,000 times. MySpace unilaterally deleted the video and provided no explanation as to why. Meanwhile, faux pornographer James Gunn and actual pornographersJenna Haze and Sasha Grey have active profiles.

The episode in question:

The controversial Midwest Teen Sex Show episode of "Fetishes."

Even more puzzling was the removal of the 2,000+ member fan group on Facebook for the show.

On the one hand, the material is hard to monetize (even the show’s official site lists one of their sponsors as “brave”), and it’s understandable that large social networks might be reticent to host the content.

But the show is clearly well-intentioned as well as very clearly segmented in terms of the audience demographics. The deletions expose a fault in maintaining these large social networking destinations – most of the censorship is handled by algorithms, and as such they’re unable to make proper judgments that are obvious to humans, but confusing to machines.

There isn’t an easy answer here on how to solve the problem.  It’s obviously not limited to one particular social network, and it’s doubtful it’s a conspiracy against the show itself.

It is, however, a weakness common to more than one destination social network, and something that ought to have rendered to it some thought on it’s solution.

The Register Spreads FUD Over The Pirate Bay Partner

For some reason, the Register’s Andrew Orlowski has seen fit to attempt to tie a message of racism and Nazi connections into their coverage of The Pirate Bay’s trial this morning. I generally enjoy the unique tone their publication has. It’s pretty difficult to make IT news interesting at all, and they tend to do an excellent job at taking dry topics and putting an attractive, if not generally snarky spin on them.

The headline reads this morning, though: “Pirate Bay's neo-Nazi sugar daddy.” The post goes to great lengths not only to call into question the quality of reporting that Wired is doing on the trial, but the supposed latent anti-Semitism felt by any and all folks who may have used a file sharing network over the course of their lifetime:

One is that anti-copyright activists like to think of themselves as thoroughly decent, forward-thinking progressive people - because the internet is a new democracy, they're reflecting a fairer world. They like to contrast the hygenic efficiency of the technology with the old (and implicitly corrupt) copyright businesses. It's almost a badge of moral superiority.

But like the Futurists a hundred years ago - the original Freetards - they don't mind jumping into bed with neo-Nazis when it suits them. In this case, that's so long as the free music and movies keep flowing.

Look – I’m no stranger to being called a racist for asking simple questions. At this point, I’m generally unfazed by the accusation.

I do feel compelled, however, to simply inquire: “What does being a ‘neo-nazi’ have to do with file sharing?”

Is there some hidden racist agenda behind copyright protest? Does Radiohead have ties to the Klan? Does Captain Jack Sparrow hate Jewish people?

Yes, they’re ridiculous questions, but it’s no more ridiculous than complaining about Wired’s court reporter on The Pirate Bay’s trial not doing an investigative report on one of the company’s founder’s political beliefs, particularly since it isn’t the subject of the trial.

So is the 40% stakeholder in The Pirate Bay a racist?  Yeah, it sorta looks like that from what the Register is saying. Does it affect the outcome of this trial or the functions of the torrent search engine?

Not at all.

To Abandon Twitter, You’d Have to Actually Use It [Presidential Tweets]

Paul Boutin seems to have landed a gig over at the New York Times writing for their blog GadgetWise. I may have known this already, or this might be the first time I’ve learned it (I thought he went to Wired after Valleywag? Guess not!).

At any rate, seeing his byline there is about as surprising as is that someone as plugged in as him is actually asking the question with a straight face: “Mr. president [sic], why have you left us twisting in the wind on Twitter?”

President Obama never used Twitter.  Certainly, his campaign staffers used it.  Not the President, though. 

Similarly, President Obama never wrote a blog post until long after the primaries, and if memory serves only wrote a handful of updates in the period from the primaries to the general election.

Somehow, though, he gets the credit for being the Web 2.0 president, as Paul put it.

It’s late, and I’m tired, so I’m not going to dig up the article in the Mashable archives that’s springing to mind, but I distinctly remember right after it was official that Obama was the Democratic nominee - saying something like “He used social media as a great fundraising tool, but never to engage.”

I was roasted roundly for my statement, but I still stand by it. Time after time, the President has shown he’s mostly interested in interfacing with sycophantic members of the press, be they New Media or Old. He hasn’t used an online campaign tool or governance tool as of yet to act as anything other than a megaphone. The whole bait and switch maneuver he pulled with announcing Biden so as to get people’s mobile numbers just further supports his interest in technology only as a fundraising tool.

Sure, it’s easy to say that now he’s the president, he’s got more important things to worry about.  But what about that decade long election process (alright, it may not have been a decade, but it felt like it).  Couldn’t he have used the Internet as a communications tool rather than a megaphone?

Only people who bought the hype are now surprised that they’ve been “pumped and dumped.”

Social media pariahs like me have been saying this all along, though.

Wizzard Automates their Ads with Ando

Podcasting News reports today that Wizzard Media has joined forces with Ando Media in an effort automate the placement of advertisements in their audio podcasts.

The audio ads seem to be a mix of remnant ads and brand advertisement. The first advertising campaign is for Cisco’s Webex product, but since the technology already existed as a part of the Libsyn system, I imagine that Ando will assist in helping fill other inventory not already being monetized by existing campaigns.

This will likely give Wizzard a good shot in the arm, one that they probably need.  Wizzard has continued to have growing revenues and has crept ever closer towards operation in the black since they initially went public.  The down market since September has likely hampered their internal sales efforts, and a partnership with a like-minded organization as Ando will definitely help them continue their progressive march.

Worm Alert: ViddyHo [Phishing]

I know most of my readers are smart enough not to get caught in this one, but there’s a worm going around via a number of different IM networks right now by the name of ViddyHo.

The site’s been marked as a phishing site by Google now, so chances are in whatever browser you use won’t let you easily get to the website.

Users are greeted with a sign-in screen for Google Talk (or whatever instant message protocol they received the message from), asking for their username and password to see the video.

Bottom line – don’t do it.  It shouldn’t have to be said, but given that it’s hit the pages of Valleywag today, I guess it does.

Joost Halts Some Remote Embeds; Anime Steps Back Half a Version

In October of 2007, I wrote a pretty well received treatment of the Anime industry and their attitudes towards social media and online video. I meandered and reminisced a bit in the piece, but the thrust of it was the question asked in the title: “Can Anime Reach Version 2.0?”

The Anime community at large was dealing with a backlash from the publishing side directed at the fansubbing community, where they were cracking down on them and lambasting them as a drain on the system.

Setting aside the various problems with that statement, I tried to address the many ways that the Anime publishers could thrive in the new social media ecology, as did Mike Masnick and Anime News Network’s Justin Sevakis.

For a time, it looked like they did.  Not long after the article came out, I was apprised of a number of niche social networks that worked hand in hand with the Anime publishers as well as new distribution routes that were opened up for Japanese animation such as Joost.

It would appear, though, that the Japanese are now having a change of heart.  Viz Media, the producers of the highly popular series Naruto and Bleach, have mandated that Joost no longer allow remote embeds of their online episodes.

Earlier today, we removed the ability to embed shows from VIZ Media - Naruto Shippuden, Naruto, Bleach and Death Note. Many of you may have watched these shows on Anime News Network or NarutoWire, and you'll notice that they're not available on those sites now, either.

We know this may upset you, and we're sorry - we want to offer the best web video experience possible, and we know this falls short. We hope to be able to allow you to embed and watch these shows on other sites again soon. In the meantime, we need to respect the requests of our content partners so that we can continue to offer the variety and quality of programming you've come to expect on Joost.

You can still watch these shows on Joost - like the most recent episode of Naruto Shippuden - and we have no plans to change that. In the meantime, please continue to send your feedback to us at feedback@joost.com.

It’s a very bizarre move, and one that seems to mirror the moves made earlier this week at Hulu, but can’t imaginably be for similar motivations.

As you probably heard, TV.com and Boxee were both forbidden from using content sourced from Hulu in their products and services.  Clearly both of these decisions were made by Hulu’s puppetmasters at the major networks to build up the destination portal of Hulu while cutting off at the knees any potential competition (to either Old Tee Vee or their preferred new version).

VIZ, on the other hand, has no such stake in Joost, and no vested interest in making it a more highly trafficked entity.

My friend, Sean P. Aune, has a sideline business (aside from being listmaster-in-chief at Mashable) in which he deals in comics and anime products.  As such, I imagined he might have some insight as to the mind of the Japanese on this matter, so I asked him what his theory would be.

“If Viz is answering to Japanese bosses, their minds move in mysterious ways,” said Sean. “Even for all of their technological advances, they still aren't quite sure how to handle Internet ventures.”

It’s a position that seemed sadly consistent with what I learned in 2007: aloof and uneducated in how the social sphere works on the Internet.

Tremor Media Shakes Out $18 Million

Tremor Media, an ad network I’ve been following for quite a while, has raised an astounding $18 million (particularly in this very negative business climate). The round is their Series C, and is from Canaan Partners, Masthead Venture Partners, and European Founders Fund.

Seeking funding overseas was described as a ‘strategic move’ in an interview Beet.tv’s Andy Plesser did with Tremor’s CEO Jason Glickman.

The goal is, apparently, to partner up with savvy partners in the EU to get a better grasp on the market there and build up their presence as well as they have in the US.

Why Use Twine?

It’s been a busy day today.  A busy week, really.  Still, I found time to surf FriendFeed today, and I came across a thread from Chris Pirillo, where he asks the question:

“Okay, after all the DM spam, I finally looked at Twine. Verdict: WTF?! I don't get it - at all.”

Many of the commentors on his thread were similarly confused:

I never got into Twine either. I twittered about that once, & someone at Twine replied, asking me for input. I don't have any input, I just don't get why I'd use it! - joshua m. neff

Twine seems to be a solution looking for a problem.. haven't found out why I'd use it yet - Sean Reiser

It’s a difficult product to pin down for me, and I’ve even had the product demoed to me by Nova Spivak himself.

Of course, Twine is a hard sell for me – not because the product isn’t useful – but because I’m not a huge fan of bookmarking services. I just can’t seem to get them funneled into my daily workflow. I tend to deal more easily with streams of information, and if I think it’s noteworthy, I write about it rather than bookmark it.

To that end, I think that might be the perspective a lot of the FriendFeeders might be coming from, here. It is a bookmarking service in its essence, as well as a way to create and consume streams of information.

It’s particularly useful when you are interested in very niche subjects. You know those PR tools that I talk about occasionally like Filtrbox? They’re great for monitoring a brand or a specific company. When you want to monitor a particular topic or domain of interest, your best bet is to set up some Google alerts. Twine is like that, but for domains of interest.

Because a Twine is maintained not by just a singular individual but a group of folks that are ostensibly passionate about it, you’re not relying on a computer algorithm to make sure it’s actually on topic (Not sure what I’m talking about?  Try doing a Google News search on Joost and “online video”.  The results are pretty hilarious).

There are many other uses for the service, but this particular use is the one that’s most important to me. 

Other Twine fans out there?  How do you use the service?

Laurie Percival Takes Over Lalawag [New Media News]

If you haven’t been reading Lalawag, you should.  It’s a project of someone who’s an ex-Masher like me, Sean Percival.

Or at least it was.  Sean today seems to have turned the site over to his wife, the lovely and talented Laurie.

If you’re not familiar with Lalawag, as the name would indicate, the site rose up during the depreciation of Valleywag. It has a similar tone and scope as the ‘Wag has, but is centered around the Los Angeles area, and employs one of my favorite folks from Valleywag, the ever-acerbic Alaska Miller.

As became quite obvious during my tenure at Mashable, the tech scene rising up in the L.A. area is unique and quite interesting.  Lalawag provides a way to keep a finger on its pulse.

Why Being a “Hit” on The Internet Matters. Now.

Robert Seidman over at TVbyTheNumbers says that being a hit on the Internet doesn’t matter. He cites that the scope of iTunes is completely dwarfed by that of radio and TV:

Does being a hit on iTunes matter when it comes to how TV networks view the show’s performance?  Someday, perhaps, but not right now.  We’ve been running this web site for almost 18 months, and despite increases in downloading and watching TV on the Internet during that time, the needle of how much it matters to the television industry hasn’t really moved any in those 18 months. I doubt that it will move much in the next 18 months either.

With all due respect, though, Robert is wrong.

Let me quote something I wrote in October of 2007:

Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr. led the earnings call this morning showcasing the “music-based content company’s” extremely meager profits (profits, by the way, that wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t won a settlement from the old Napster lawsuit). Warner was only able to bring in a profit by a scant $5 million on a total revenue of $869 million. The cause of the gap is obvious: Warner hasn’t adapted well to online music sales.

If my entire record label made the same as or possibly even half as much as a single “pay if you want to” initiative from crazy band out in the UK, I might be a little unsure of my business strategy as well. That’s right, even by the most critical of earnings estimates, Radiohead made between half as much as twice what the entire Warner label made in profit this year.

Get that? One band, completely unrepresented and independent, made half as much money giving away their album as one of the biggest record labels out there made on their entire catalog.

No scale indeed.

Facebook: As Insidious as Dark Helmet

I had no intention of broaching this topic a second time. I thought I had said all I need to say when I pointed out a version of a Terms of Service that was not outrightly stupid and overly opportunistic. Unfortunately, Facebook hasn’t an ounce of good sense in their collective brains, nor do they appear to understand press cycles.  At all.

Before we broach the topic of what’s still wrong with the Facebook Terms of Service, can we just get that little gem out of the way?  Rather than immediately respond, as any nimble modern tech company can and should, Mark Zuckerberg waits until the controversy has almost completely worked its way through the echo chamber before he responds. That, of course, inspires a whole new round of “coulda, woulda, shoulda” from all the pundits.

Then, of course, two days later when the buzz is just starting to die down … again … Mark Zuckerberg “relents” and instead of actually fixing the TOS in a meaningful way, simply reverts it to another, slightly less stupid version.

..And I do mean slightly less stupid.
I almost wrote about this again when @Veronica (Belmont) posted a tweet that was later highlighted by Valleywag.  I say almost because the responsible thing to do, at least I felt at the time, would be to let this meme die off.

Unfortunately, it seems that just about everyone I’ve read about has missed the original point I was driving at the other day. No, I don’t think, as Veronica says, that it’s part of some grand conspiracy by Facebook to take your cat videos and sell them or what-have-you. 

I do think, though, that it’s indicative of a general level of cluelessness and ineptitude pervasive at Facebook.  Yes, I know, Mark’s theoretically a billionaire and I’m not.  Yes, I know the place is chock full of Google people, Ivy Leaguers and folks otherwise considered to be brilliant.

But I also know that many reports suggest they spend most of their time playing video games and slacking off.  I know that they completely botched their major move to make real money with an advertising initiative when they made the groundbreaking announcement and deployment at AdTech last year of … wait for it … web pages and bacn.

This is what I’m talking about.  Facebook continually snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.  Back then, the time was perfect to launch a behavioral ad network (as was the speculation at the time) that could compete with Google’s AdSense program for publisher.  The program would use cookies and behavioral data acquired through user behavior and entered data on Facebook.

Instead, they chose to launch an ad program they saw as completely revolutionary and awesome, whereas even my young sons could have told you were stupid, ill-conceived, and even somewhat offensive.

What Does That Have to Do With the TOS?
It isn’t indicative of anything other than a pervasive attitude of entitlement at the corporation, intense incompetence in the public relations department, and an incomprehensible blindness to where the real opportunities in their business are.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again here and now – this business of social networks and Web 2.0 isn’t rocket science.  It’s intuitive work, particularly for people who’ve ever studied sociology, or even Chris Brogan, or understand intrapersonal relationships in the least.

@ev: You Got That Thing I Sentcha! [Twitter Monetization]

Jason at Techcrunch made note of an unfortunate screw-up at Twitter where applicants for the product manager position (you know, the one that is allegedly tasked with coming up with a way for Twitter to make money) were all made aware of one another via the failure to put all the recipients of a rejection letter in the BCC field.

I don’t have much to say about the actual incident – it happens.  I don’t do it often, but once or twice I’ve forgotten to use the proper field for my carbon copies on an email. Thankfully it hasn’t blown up in my face in a significant way.

What is interesting is the fact that I wasn’t on the recipient list for those rejected.

Which means that they did get that thing I sent ‘em.

Filtrbox Catches $1.4 Million in their Nets

Filtrbox is a service I reviewed an talked about back last summer over at Mashable. Essentially, it’s a tool designed for PR folks and journalists who specialize in beats or are looking to know all they can about a specific set of keywords and topics. I enjoyed testing out the service as well as talking with founder and president Ari Newman.

Today, the company announced it’s closure of a $1.4 million Series A funding round and the launch of an upgrade called Flitrbox G2. The funding round was led by Flywheel Ventures and True Ventures at the end of last year.

The service is free to use, with premium account upgrades available at $10/month, something from my testing shows was well worth the cost.

iPhoto versus Picasa II [Facebook’s TOS]

Remember that response I penned to Mashable’s Jennifer van Grove last month? She had written a review of the new iPhoto release that ranked it higher than the new Picasa – and it hinged on the fact that the new iPhoto had the capability to upload to Facebook (and this justified the $29 pricetag).

Today, the Consumerist shows us why Picasa is still a much more superior option. The subject matter is the Facebook Terms of Service, which has been slightly modified to grant them use of all content you upload to the system… in perpetuity… regardless of whether you close the account or not.

Here are the salient bits:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

That’s the same as the old TOS, but this bit was removed from the end:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

This is the pertinent part of the Picasa TOS:

9.4 Other than the limited license set forth in Section 11, Google acknowledges and agrees that it obtains no right, title or interest from you (or your licensors) under these Terms in or to any Content that you submit, post, transmit or display on, or through, the Services, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in that Content (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist). Unless you have agreed otherwise in writing with Google, you agree that you are responsible for protecting and enforcing those rights and that Google has no obligation to do so on your behalf.

UPDATE: Amanda French did a comparative analysis of Facebook’s TOS to MySpace, Yahoo, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google/Picasa. Look here.

Virginia GOP Leader Tweets; Dems Retain Seats

I don’t follow a lot of Virginia politics, but this particular story is making the rounds on a lot of political and technology blogs.

The GOP chairman from Virginia has recently joined Twitter, and amidst a major struggle for control of the state Senate, he Tweeted the following:

Needless to say, the Democrats, who at the time were leading the Senate control by 21-19 were able to block the vie for a tie, convince the turncoat to stay on the side of the left.

I really don’t know what to say … it’s hard to imagine what, aside from common sense, could have prevented this.

25 Things Isn’t News, But It Isn’t Surprising [St00p1d N3wB5]

Adam Singer, just like the rest of us, can’t resist falling into our old habits of joining in on the echo chamber.

He’s, essentially, flabbergasted.

Flabbergasted that newbies are being newbies. He’s talking about the Internet newbs at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

They both wrote up stories about the 25 things meme that’s going around on Friendfeed and Facebook. If you’re somehow unaware of what I’m talking about, it’s a meme where you and your friends are encouraged to make a post detailing 25 random facts about yourself that might not otherwise be common knowledge (I fell prey to this meme here).

Here’s what Adam says:

Hate to be the one to say this, but the 25 things meme is not news.  It is simply what the social web does.  If national media (yes, national media - NYT, USA Today, even TIME) are going to write up note-tagging on Facebook and that is the best web culture reporting they can come up with - that’s just sad.

[…]

Really?  This is so mysterious?  Wow, I could have sworn people have been doing this since we could email each other.

I may be in the minority, but do you find this mundane coverage by national outlets trying to report on the absolute least interesting things in the social web uncomfortable to read?

He talks about it as if this is something unpredictable – this ‘news’ coverage of what we who’ve been on the Internet for 15 years have seen for a long time.

But as the social web goes truly mainstream, people are going to be exposed to this stuff for the first time. And some of these folks in the mainstream are going to be journalists for mainstream publications.  And as NBC used to say about their re-runs, “if you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you!”

How are these newbs getting stuck on the Internet beat, anyway?  Well, it’s a matter of perspective and complexity.  Most of the Internet is about social interaction these days – and as anyone who’s ever taken a sociology course can tell you, this stuff ain’t rocket science.

It doesn’t take much of an intellectual to be an “expert” in social media, particularly when you have such well known experts like Robert Scoble, Seth Godin and Chris Brogan paving the way with all you need to know in layman’s terms. To analyze the stuff takes an astute mind, but it doesn’t take an experienced one.

Thus these newbs are given a beat at a mainstream publication, these journals of record, to talk about what’s going on here like it’s sliced bread.

And the rest of us get to laugh at them.

The “Don’t Click!” Twitter Hack Explained

I noticed that Frederic Lardinois caught wind of the “Don’t Click!” Twitter social virus today over at ReadWriteWeb today. I actually lightly blogged this vulnerability February 4th on my LinkBlog (which if you’re not subscribed to, well, now you know the kind of great stuff you’re missing).

The original story was on DarkReading on February 3rd, entitled: “Twitter Clickjacking Hack Released.” In the piece, Kelly Jackson Higgins not only described the attack type in great detail, but had (for a time) a link to where the hack itself could be downloaded and tested.

Padolsey's Twitter clickjacking attack (click here to experience it if you're a Twitter user) basically positions an iFrame over a button that's linked to Twitter's "Status" function. While logged in to Twitter, the victim clicks the button on the demo page and, voila, his Twitter status gets changed by the attack to a harmless update the user, himself, had no control over: "Yes, I did click the button!!! (WHAT!!??)"

"This is a pretty harmless example, but I can imagine it being used for more sinister endeavours," Padolsey blogged. "Clickjacking is a dangerous, malicious technique -- take it seriously."

Essentially it’s just a CSS layer placed over a button, which opens an iFrame and uses your cookie that you have set that leaves you logged into Twitter. It bypasses the API altogether.

There really isn’t any defense around this – except for a problem with the hack that Steven Hodson and I found.  If you dig around, you can find the source code for the hack still in Google’s cache, as I did (almost all of the working hacks mentioned in the security articles have been taken offline now).

Steven and I both tried utilizing the cached and live versions of the hack in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer, and both browsers seemed to be patched against the exploit (hence why I only talked about it on the linkblog, instead of a more in-depth article like this). In essence, the hack didn’t work.

So, essentially, it’s not that big of a deal (even though @ev says there’s a fix going out now).

Brightkite Adds Facebook Connect

Yet another app falls to the identity juggernaut of Facebook Connect today – Brightkite has now implemented the ability to log in to the service using your Facebook account.

Aside from the added convenience, the benefit really goes to Brightkite here, with the ability to get the viral spreading common to Facebook apps.  Soon after logging on with FC on Brightkite, you are asked to “Discover Friends,” which allows you to bring in your friends from Facebook, GMail, Twitter and Yahoo Mail.

If you want to connect with me on Brightkite, here’s my profile.

Southwest Airlines Gets Connected

Southwest Airlines, the regional carrier based here out of Dallas, has finally implemented in-flight wireless Internet service, but not the Aircell service that has made the rounds over the last year or so.  This time around, the service is provided by Row 44, which is a satellite based service (whereas Aircell uses specially designed technology that functions on the principals of mobile phones).

Yahoo’s blog, Yodel Anecdotal, couldn’t help from trumpeting the news as well. Yahoo was chosen to be the default homepage provider for the inflight service.

Yahoo provided a bit more information in their release:

They’ve equipped one aircraft with Internet connectivity (via Row 44) and plan to add three more before the end of March. Yahoo! has teamed up with Southwest to build the free inflight homepage (here’s a larger screenshot), where passengers can find a host of things to either help them wile away the hours or bone up on their destination city.

Pretty cool stuff.  There’s no word on the cost for the in-flight service I’ve seen anywhere.  I enjoy the concept of being able to turn on Internet as soon as I get on the plane (and by most accounts, it works relatively flawlessly).  It was an option on the last American Airlines flight I was on, but I couldn’t justify popping $15 for using the web for only 45 minutes of being in the air.

Memetracker OneSpot Aggregates $4.5 Million [video]

Everyone in the blogosphere is fascinated with memetrackers.  It’s one of the many ways we bloggers and online journalists use to quantify our worth and success in what we do.

Of course, the most successful memetrackers have tended to be closed sites like Blogrunner and Techmeme, and all the sister sites associated with that. It’s this that makes such an intriguing company to watch, and something that most bloggers would absolutely love to either try out or take a run at implementing it into their workflow.

That’s why it’s not surprising that OneSpot has taken a $4.2 million series A from Silver Creek Ventures (as well as Mike Maples and Pat Horner).

Subscribe to the Video feed here.
Download the MP4 directly.

The money is going to further develop the product and give them a runway towards profitability and growth, but the event served as a great launchpad for discussion last week when Matt Cohen was gracious enough to sit down and talk with me about link journalism, memetracking and the ideas of content creation versus content curation.

Matt and I had some great conversational threads in the interview (so much so, that we put off the actual discussion of the cash infusion until the end of the show). I could go through and catalog the discussion, but I’d rather you watch it with the thought in mind that Matt’s discussion on the aim of what he calls a “Pandora for content” has caused me to reconsider the long term plans for this site, with less of an emphasis on more writers and an additional emphasis on using his aggregation service to augment my own content creation.

More Tumblr Stuff [Acquisition Rumors]

ValleyWag has a rumor making the rounds at the moment putting Tumblr once again in the spotlight of the /socnets blog today. AllThingsD is running a refutation of VWag’s rumor that Tumblr is looking at an acquisition offer by Yahoo.

While the rumor doesn’t seem to be holding much water at the moment, I have to say that I have much the same reaction that most folks seem to have – it’s a bad idea.

On the one hand, it seems to fit into the general spirit of other tools at Yahoo like Flickr and Delicious. On the other, Yahoo already has a number of lifestreaming products that aren’t doing a whole lot, like the ill-fated Yahoo 360 and floundering profiles system.

I’m not sure, at this point, what Yahoo can do to rehabilitate it’s own community.  The most successful thing it has going at ths point is it’s email and the partnership with AT&T that sets folks homepages to My.Yahoo.com. To try to turn that into a community would require integrating other services in their arsenal (like, say, Flickr and Delicious) into that fold.  Bringing another lifestreaming service with no discernable business model doesn’t bring them any closer to displacing Twitter, the theory that Duncan Riley and Owen Thomas seem to be advancing.

It’s difficult to imagine that driving user engagement being the path to community is something that Yahoo doesn’t understand, having been in this game this long.  Furthermore, it’s not something you can buy and plug into a larger userbase – it’s something you need to organically cultivate.

Podango Opens Up Bidding to the Public

I was just pinged by former CEO of Podango, Lee Gibbons, regarding the sale of the company.

If you recall, we talked about the demise of the company a few weeks ago, with where and how it’ll eventually end up. The word at the time was that they expected to relaunch at some point during January:

Just last week we found out that a planned investment was delayed putting us in a financial situation where we will need to restructure through various strategic opportunities that are evolving. We expect at some point within the next month or so to relaunch under a different structure and possibly with a new owner.

Obviously, that didn’t exactly happen, although they haven’t been sitting on their laurels this whole time making no progress towards that goal.

Lee told me in December that a number of things were in the works to try to revive the company under different banners:

Lee also gave me some clues as to the eventual future for Podango.  Doug Smith is currently heading up the acquisition plans, but given the variety of asset types the company has in it’s arsenal, it’s very likely that they’ll be parted out to a number of different new organizations.

An update from Doug Smith via Lee Gibbons today sheds more light on how that’s going:

After seeking funding from both traditional and nontraditional sources for over a year, the founders of Podango have elected to sell. We have a handful of suiters, but we don't want to sell quietly with people later saying, as they did with Odeo and Podtech, "gee, if I had known I would have..."

We are going to close the bidding pool on the 10th and move quickly to bidding, then closing.

As I outlined in December, there are still a number of very valuable assets that sit underneath the banner of Podango, despite their current bout of insolvency, definitely meriting attention.

If you’re one of those “gee, I wish I could get in on that” types, you should contact Doug Smith (doug@Podango.com).

Tumblr’s David Karp Discusses Going Pro [video]

Tumblr has always been one of my favorite microblogging services. They’ve got a unique culture, and from the very beginning have been very useful for a wide number of applications.  Most people either tend to use it as a linkblogging service or as a sort of Internet scratchpad to copy and paste cool videos, quotes, chat logs and such, but my earliest use was as a shownotes system for my daily podcast.

David Karp explains Tumblr's revenue plans.

The ability to automatically post articles from an RSS list allowed me to hook a tag from Google Reader into my tumblog, and then simply refer to a subdomain in my podcast to find the shownotes for that particular episode.

As more and more folks get into using Tumblr for their unique purposes, CEO David Karp explains how they’ll plan on making money over the next indeterminate amount of time.

The idea is, not surprisingly, a freemium model.  You can tell by his responses that the Mullenweg method plays pretty highly in his expectations for the service, but before that they plan on rolling out future features and asking the users to pay between $5 a month to $10 a year.

Will it work?  If it were any other platform, I’d probably say no.  Tumblr users are a special breed, and particularly dedicated to the content management system (in a way, like WordPress users are).

It should be interesting to watch unfold.

Walmart Discontinues Blog Advertising [Dear John Letters]

It’s not uncommon at all to hear that companies are cutting back on advertising, in this current economic climate at least.  I’ve had three conversations today with different business partners and clients that centered primarily around the difficulty in getting major corporations to loosen their purse-strings for sponsorship and advertising.

There is new news in this regard, and I’m seeing some very creative sales strategies emerge that are working, but once in a while amidst all the closure, layoff and cut-back announcements, you see one that makes you scratch your head.

My buddy Sean P. Aune sent over a terse notice he got from Walmart a few minutes ago announcing the closure of their blog partnership program:

Dear Affiliate,

Walmart.com has made a business decision to discontinue partnering with blog sites at this time. Commissions will be paid on all sales referred prior to the discontinuation date of February 5, 2009. We at Walmart.com would like to thank you for your partnership and wish you success in all business endeavors.
Regards,

The Walmart.com Affiliate Team

What makes this particularly odd is the fact that this isn’t a system that’s presumably costing Walmart any money to speak of.  An affiliate system generally can run itself with very little oversight, and there are no paid minimums to content with for the advertiser.

In fact, Walmart only pays out whenever a sale is made, and then only once a certain dollar amount threshold is reached.

In this sort of economy, this is the last type of advertising cutback I’d expect to see.

It’s Not Too Late to Start a Web Series [Star Trek Meets The Office]

1Tim Street profiled a new bit of sci-fi entering the web video space under the auspices of wondering aloud whether or not it’s too late to launch a web series given the very serious economic climate.

I don’t mind, since the series looks pretty cool and very original.  As the title indicates, it’s a sort of cross between The Office and Star Trek, called The Crew.

As to the question Tim asks, I think the answer is clear, particularly in light of a couple bits of news that have popped across the wire today.

Firstly, taking a look at some stats today released by most online portfolio companies and online publishers show an incredible increase in online revenues. Techcrunch has the profile and the telling bar graphs to go along with it.

More interestingly, though, are the stats that Elisabeth Lewin discussed yesterday over at Podcasting News. December set a record for video viewership (as most months do). Comscore recorded increases from Google, Fox, Yahoo, Viacom and Hulu.

From the post:

• 78.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours.
• 98.9 million viewers watched 5.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (59.2 videos per viewer).
• 48.7 million viewers watched 367 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes.
• The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 10.1 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.

In terms of viewership, now is the time to be launching a new series.  The media landscape continues to expand in terms of well traveled destination sites and channels for distribution. Many of those sites are looking to license content for their site, and certainly the online world is seeing a bounce-back in terms of the return of their sponsors (something I’ve verified with a number of large-volume publishers including the recently repositioned Federated Media).

I don’t want to go so far as to say we’ve hit the bottom and started to return upward because my narrow field of vision doesn’t necessarily reflect the economy at large.  Within my narrow field of vision, though, a lot of indicators are starting to show signs of rebound for content producers.

Introducing the Latest Twitter Service, TweetSandwich

@rstevens is the man. Read more here.

FriendFeed Updates Their Search Functionality

FriendFeed has done some work that rolled out today on their search functionality. Prior to the work they’ve done, FriendFeed’s search functionality has already proven to be a useful service for me, almost as powerful as Google’s search, but able to really dig into what conversations and news items that are capturing attention at the moment.

With the new search functions, you’re able to get a bit closer to Google like functionality with search queries like:

• Search for words only in entry titles or in comments
  [intitle:superbowl] - entries that mention "Superbowl" in the title
• Search for only entries that were liked or commented on by specific friends
  [like:bret football] - entries about football that Bret has liked
• Search for entries with a minimum number of likes or comments
  [comments:5 friendfeed] - entries that mention FriendFeed with at least 5 comments
• Exclude terms from your search
  [jobs -steve] - entries about the job market, not the CEO of Apple

Despite the fact that I think it’s a cool idea, we all know Scoble’s just about settled back in from his Davos trip, so we can expect the gushing about the power of the live-web in 3 … 2 … 1.

Update: Too late, apparently.

PajamasMedia: WTF, Over?

If you watched the tech news over the weekend, you probably read a bit about the death of the PajamasMedia blog advertising network.

I’m simply baffled by the inability to monetize blogs in the political blogosphere, and the sad state of affairs is that lib-bloggers are able to do it better than the conservative networks like PajamasMedia (though not by a whole lot – HuffPo just got into the black not long ago, and not by much).

My buddy Art sat down with me Monday to talk about this whole thing as we pointed out some of the inconsistencies in the rhetoric coming from Pajamas, and what we think their hurdles will be moving forward.

Look for more podcasts from me soon by subscribing here.