The WSJ covers the recent announcement by lala.com that they will stream music for free via browswers and sell albums only if you want to load songs onto your iPod:

It’s like a subscription music service, but without the monthly subscription fee. Lala is betting that in return for getting all that free access to music at home, listeners will pay to buy the songs they want to take with them on iPods and other music players. The prices will range from $6.50 to $13.50 for an album. (For now, Lala plans to sell music only by the album rather than song by song.)

Entering the online digital music sales fray is not big news. What is big news however, is that unlike all other digital music shops, Lala has reverse engineered some of Apple’s iPod technology and found a way to load their music onto iPods without having to use iTunes!

The risks include enabling Lala customers to circumvent the proprietary iTunes software. That may be viewed by Apple as a provocation. Spokespeople for Apple didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The WSJ analysis is rather rosy but we feel that with Apple’s history of frequent updates to iPod and iTunes software that its only a couple of weeks before they release an ‘update’ that completely disables Lala’s technology. Let the rat race begin!

We love Mark Cuban because he is never afraid to speak his mind, even in front of a congressional panel:

Representatives from YouTube, Sling Media, HDNet and others appeared before a House Energy and Commerce telecom subcommittee to discuss the future of video entertainment. Providers and lawmakers have grappled with a variety of issues that could change the way consumers access online video content, including net neutrality, copyright concerns and bandwidth issues.

[snip...]

“In our current bandwidth constrained environment, the concept of Internet video replacing TV is laughable,” Cuban said. “Replacing high-definition TV [with online content] isn’t even on the radar. There is certainly a market for video content on PCs, but it’s a complimentary market, not a primary market.”

What’s even better is that when the officials raised the topic of net-neutrality, Cuban basically shrugged his shoulders and pointed out that it would not even be an issue if bandwidth was not so constrained. Unfortunately, tech companies and net video providers are in a tough spot. They are typically laissez-faire, pro-net-neutrality advocates but the only way to improve bandwidth is via government intervention which is anathema to them.

While everyone and their brother are tripping over themselves to share in the orgy of User Generated Content (UGC) a couple of striking events in the last couple of days has shown that it can be fraught with danger. The first event was the hilarious "riot" that ensued over at Digg.com when the administrators exercised censorship over the theoretically user-controlled news process.

Nerd anarchy? An e-Rebellion? Or just mob justice… which ever way you look at it social news site, Digg is facing the greatest crisis of its young life. The front page of Digg has been taken over by stories about and related to a hacked HD-DVD key.

To recap, someone has posted a link to a story about the said key getting cracked, and included the key in the title and description of the story. Digg staff took down the story, fearing that it would get sued by MPAA, as outlined in this blog post by CEO Jay Adelson.

This resulted in a proverbial take-to-the-streets riot, and now most of Digg front page stories are either related to the key-story, or are variants of the original deleted story.

In the end, the site’s administrators caved-in to the rioters, virtually guaranteeing that the tactic will now become a regular occurrence on their site. Good going guys! We look forward to the next riot and we think that Kevin Rose should start practicing his “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” speech in preparation for it.

But Digg’s cowardice in the face of adversity pales in comparison to the stupidity of the Barack Obama campaign staff. Back in 2004 a Barack fan named Joe Anthony created a fake Barack Obama myspace account for the senator which became rather popular for obvious reasons and then…

After Obama entered the presidential race, the campaign initially worked with Anthony to suggest improvements and Anthony even shared the site’s password so the campaign could make its own tweaks. When MySpace created a channel featuring profiles of presidential candidates, the Obama campaign chose not to create an official profile but instead suggested Anthony’s page, which already had a large following.

But as the campaign progressed and the network surrounding the page exploded to 160,000 online friends, the Obama campaign decided it should control the content and responses to MySpace users who sent messages.

We’re sure that working a presidential campaign can be stressful and expensive but outsourcing your online strategy to random, unpaid fans is a clear recipe for disaster. We just want to know who thought it was a good idea to NOT create their own official myspace profile. Were they really so lazy as to not want to deal with the most critical medium for reaching young people? You might want to reconsider voting for him if this is a sign of things to come.

Those of you who happen to be in Southern California and want to meet us in person, should come visit us at Barcamp where we will be presenting.

Barcamp Los Angeles-3 is Saturday, March 24, 2007 - Sunday, March 25, 2007

BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.

All attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one. All presentions are scheduled the day they happen. Prepare in advance, but come early to get a slot on the wall.

Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join.

You have all probably already read hundreds of “analyses” of Apple’s new iPhone. But what they all left out is why Apple’s device is so revolutionary.  As Ajit Jaokar so rightly points out, this has nothing to do with the slick technology in the phone itself:

The first supported carrier will be Cingular. Supported carrier? Since when did devices support carriers? Carriers support devices. Not the other way round! Hence, is the tail now wagging the dog?(Not necessarily a bad thing IMHO!)

The always insightful Jeff Jarvis makes a jab at the massive Union-related expenses at TV networks:

We are about to see an implosion of the expensive and outmoded infrastructure of media: the presses and trucks of news, the production priesthood of TV, the money that goes to everything but the information and creativity that really matter. This is good news.

On the way to one of three meetings I happened to have this week with people who are starting new, lightweight networks — because the internet lets them — I walked by a location shoot for a TV show. We see them all the time, we jaded New Yorkers, and so we’re never amazed. But what does not cease to amaze me is all the stuff it takes — or they think it takes — to shoot a show: trucks filled with lights and cables and plugs, handcarts filled just with the director’s chairs with stars names on the back, bins overflowing even with wooden boxes with the Paramount logo on the side, assistant directors running around trying to act more important than the snotty gophers they are, catering trucks with expensive caterers: expense everywhere.

While not explicitly indicting the unions, the comment stream becomes an interesting collection of anti-union sentiment. But is Jeff missing the point here? Big trucks might look intimidating but not everything looks good when shot handheld on a PD-150.

Yet another reason for the TV Network mothership to abandon her whining affiliate children:

CBS Corp. said on Saturday it would broadcast the documentary “9/11” on the Internet as well as the airwaves after several affiliates said they would delay or forgo the award-winning film because it includes profanity.

Isn’t it nice that the FCC cannot regulate the internet? The Christian family groups will still continue to file complaints of “profanity” but those kvetches will fall on deaf ears. Now we can truly return the internet to the cesspool of TV Movies-of-the-Week that it was always meant to be.

Today’s LA Times has a piece on the ensuing Lonelygirl15 controversy, one of Youtube’s best known starlets may in fact be a brilliant viral marketing ploy:

No one has publicly come forward to lay claim to her work, but she is starting to look as connected in Hollywood as any starlet. Three lonelygirl15-obsessed amateur Web sleuths set up a sting using tracking software that appears to show that e-mails sent from a lonelygirl15 account came from inside the offices of the Beverly Hills-based talent agency Creative Artists Agency.

Now that User Generated Content has lowered acceptable standards for entertainment, content can be created for incredibly cheap amounts and distributed for free off the backs of free ‘net video providers like Youtube.

Hope you like Katie Couric:

CBS said on Thursday it will stream its prime-time news program with Katie Couric live on the Internet simultaneously with the newscast, a first for a major TV network that highlights U.S. broadcasters’ rapid expansion on the Web.

A genius move. First, the blogosphere hands Dan Rather his ass when they uncover fake evidence in one of his key stories. Now, as a concession to them, CBS will air his replacement “live on the web” (whatever that means). Set aside the fact that “live TV” has no meaning in the 24-hour, interactive, on-demand internet.

At least CBS knows what side it’s bread is buttered on.

Who needs the FCC when you have Verizon Wireless?

A Verizon Wireless content-guideline document, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, shows that the company has developed a long list of restrictions, including off-limits expletives and curse words, highly specific rules for how much bare skin models can show, and a ban on any derogatory references to Verizon Wireless itself.

Isn’t it funny that while the left hand slaps Google and Yahoo on the wrist for censoring search results in China, the right hand quietly censors us? Is censorship somehow OK when implemented by corporate rather than government overlords? We must have missed the memo on that one.

The walled-garden approach to content that the these wireless carriers are pursuing will completely backfire as people rush to get their uncensored internet content.

Thanks guys, and remember not the let the door hit you on the way out.

BusinessWeek reports:

Facebook, the Web site where students around the world socialize and swap information, has put itself on the block, BusinessWeek Online has learned. The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale, senior industry executives familiar with the matter say.

To put this into perspective you have to remember that when “maverick” Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace, he paid $580 Million. 

“Gold Farming” is the pejorative that American gamers use for players in less developed nations who are paid to sit and play games all day:
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Ge Jin, a PhD student from UCSD, is making a video documentary of the gold farming phenomenon (preview here). The documentary preview shows some of his interviews with Chinese workers in various gold farming workshops. In our conversations over email, he has brought up some interesting points based on his observations. He’s also looking for feedback and suggestions for important research questions and different points of view.

This is an interesting phenomenon: In less developed nations, people tend to live cash-poor but time-rich lives. Which they then exchange with people in developed nations who have the opposite situation. There are Americans who are willing to exchange cash for these goldfarmed characters TO SAVE TIME. That is the whacky world we live in.

This is so sad and yet fascinating like watching a car wreck. [via Terra Nova]

Jeff Jarvis (creator of Entertainment Weekly) once again waxes eloquently on the death of journalism:

When I do my scary blogboy dance for old-media companies, I warn them that their real successor - the true media mogul of the age - is not someone they know, not someone named Murdoch, Hearst, or Newhouse. He is Kevin Rose, the scruffy geek behind Digg.com, a site where users edit the news. In him, we see the media industry of the future.

While anyone should be amused by a “blogboy dance” (what is that? hopping around with treo and powerbook precariously balanced on your head?) it is most certainly an attempt to soften the your-business-plan-is-dying blow.

That sound you hear is the brick that network TV is shitting trying to justify ad rates to Madison Ave.:

The “Yes, Dear” episode in April 2005 marked the first commercial use of a patent-pending innovation dubbed Digital Brand Integration, or DBI, developed by New York-based Marathon Ventures, and grew out of an unprecedented marketing deal with CBS.

Since then, CBS has used the technology to plug brands such as StarKist Tuna and Chevrolet on several other shows, including the hit police drama “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and new sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.”

David Brenner, founder and president of Marathon, said his company expects to unveil a new pact soon with the Fox network, a unit of News Corp. Ltd.

Blending brand names and products into television shows, as opposed to traditional ads that run during commercial breaks, has gained greater currency in recent years as the industry faces the rising popularity of TiVo and other devices that let viewers skip commercials.

Product placement and integration (or PPI as it is referred to in the biz) has always been a long shot at best. TV advertising is an amorphous world since there is no exact way to measure just how many people saw your ad. PPI extends this voodo magic even further by causing normal people to somehow believe that they will instantly purchase product X just by seeing it integrated into their favorite character’s hands.

The last gasps of TV are going to be interesting indeed. We are just eagerly awaiting for the day that TV eliminates 30 second spots altogether to return to a live-only variety show format called the “Texaco Star Theater” starring Milton Berle. You’ve come a long way baby, full circle that is.

Jeff Jarvis, the founder of entertainment weekly and seer into the internet media future, posted a slightly different take on the “small internet mice will destroy old media dinosaurs.” The renowned videoblog Rocketboom just auctioned off a single week of advertising on ebay for $40,000:

And here we have in a microcosm the explanation of why media is so horribly out of sync today: The public is valuing new media much more than the old, but the advertisers still value the old. Most every newspaper and in many cases TV networks and magazines have much larger audiences online, but the revenue for their old media properties remains much higher because the advertisers and agencies still value the old and the safe. They want metrics. They want control. They want guarantees. This, in turn, makes big publishers and producers play it safe because they don’t want to mess with the cash cow. And that means that advertisers miss the opportunity to reach a larger, younger, smarter audience in the new medium, which is — supposedly — what they’re dying to do. And that means that big media companies now face competition from a thousand Rocketbooms and a million Gawkers. That allows a TRM to come along and snatch away an opportunity from the big, lumbering giants. That is why small is the new big. Small be nimble, small be quick, small jumped over the conglomerates.

Or let me summarize the problem in one word. Big advertisers and big agencies are chickenshit. They need to grow some balls or else they’ll find new competitors running circles around them. The explosion — the rocketboom — that has already come to newspapers, magazines, TV networks, the music industry is coming next to the ad business.

Please take this, advertisers, as a friendly kick in the pants.

Calling people “chickenshit” is a great way to get their attention but not necessarily get you to change their minds. Instead we would point out that the media dinosaurs obsessed with control should realize quite quickly that if they want “metrics,” “guarantees,” and “controls” then the internet is lightyears ahead of other media in that department.

Many of you are probably already familiar with Chris Anderson’s theory known as ”the long tail”:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

And while his theory is well researched and has some excellent evidence to back it up, a new study just released seems to shed new light:

The researchers used the Internet to create an artificial market for singles, all recorded by bands not on the current Top 40 hit parade in the United States.

They then persuaded more than 14,000 young Internet users to log onto the site and choose their favorites.

...

While people do genuinely seem to like some songs better than others, their preferences change once they know what other people like, Watts and colleagues found.

“The popular things become more popular and the less-popular things get less popular,” Watts said.

People, it seems, do not entirely trust their own taste when it comes to music. The same may hold true for books and movies and may explain why the top sellers vastly outsell the rest, the researchers concluded in their report, published in the journal Science.

In Anderson’s theory the reason that we see such a large gap between hits and less successful fare has to do with marketing budgets. It appears however that he is only partly right. Instead it is a more complicated scenario: people buy what their peers tell them is “cool.” So while a marketing budget can help spread the word, the Internet will not eliminate hits, just change the way hits are marketed.

We can’t wait to see what happens with this new research…

Many in Los Angeles celebrated the announcement that city attorney Rocky Delgadillo slapped the makers of “Grand Theft Auto” with a lawsuit. But finally, in a hilarious op-ed piece in the same newspaper, the voice of reason comes out:

The city believes that parents who simply wanted to buy their boys a wholesome cop-shooting, hooker-killing, car-stealing game were unfairly duped. Because if the ratings board had known about the scene, the game probably would have been bumped up to an “Adults Only” rating (restricting it to those 18 and over) instead of “Mature” (which keeps it away from anyone under 17).

That means that all across Los Angeles, innocent 17-year-old boys with advanced computer skills were being exposed to moderately rendered, computer-animated soft-core pornography. And City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo wants to make sure someone pays for doing this to our kids. Because if these teen computer geniuses are given the opportunity to unlock a video-game sex scene, then they’ll be just one step away from breaking the code that allows them to type dirty words into Google.

Although I wish a teenage boy’s world were as full of innocence and wonder as Delgadillo does, I wondered if consensual animated sex was really the kind of thing that would offend a 17-year-old male who grew up in Los Angeles. So I tracked one down and asked him if this was the kind of thing that would warp his impressionable mind.

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, left, shakes hands with Santa Claus at the Transportation Department in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2005 where they signed an open skies aviation agreeement between the U.S. and the government of the North Pole to give Santa and his team greater access to rooftops across the country.

A fat guy, wearing a costume and fake beard to disguise his features, demands to force his materialistic wishes onto all of us. We, the drones greasing the unfeeling gears of capitalism, don’t need to buckle under pressure from this red velvet menace.

But seriously folks, why the fuck does the U.S. dept. of Transportation have to negotiate with Santa-Fucking-Claus? We are the most powerful nation on earth (even if our undocumented workers cost more than his slave-labor elves)!

So much for the war on Xmas.

Nothing major was announced (although we are impressed that Hollywood bureaucrats actually trekked all the way to the AFI campus). The main gist of the conference was:

Cohen said BitTorrent.com will remove links that direct users to pirated content owned by MPAA companies from its search engine.

Yes, that’s all it was. They are going to remove illegal links from their search engine. You can all go home now, no revolutionary new technology is being released. Nothing to see here.

The rest of the press release is available after the jump.

IWantMedia’s summary is about as good as it gets:

This year Google will sell more advertising than any newspaper chain, magazine publisher or television network. By next year Google is expected to have ad revenue of $9.5 billion, placing it fourth among U.S. media companies in ad sales—ahead of Time Warner and NBC Universal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/business/yourmoney/30google.html

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113071868808083821-lHYE_q4_9IruWTJLYMwtu5MWiUs_20061031.html

That sound you just heard was the sound of Madison Avenue shitting bricks.