I’ve Said Too Much

I’ve installed the Reuters video player (which I wrote about here). It’s in a pop-up which you can click on here. It is unbelievably easy to implement, and there are some limited configuration tools (background colour and such). The email from Brightcove (who are providing the service for Reuters) was pretty clear and friendly too.

My only real gripe with is it the size: it’s 540×360, take it or leave it. That’s quite a hefty chunk of real estate for any site to give away (which is why I’ve put it in a pop-up). A smart move might be a second, much smaller version, which people could embed in margins or even within blog posts. Which leads to another idea: if it was possible to embed a smaller player AND select the video it was playing, people could extract video within blog posts in just the same way they extract text today. Which would be pretty amazing, the more I think about it. There is an option to configure the starting video - which I haven’t played with - but what I’m talking about is the ability to play only one video, and then refer to it in the surrounding blog post.

Smart and interesting. Reuters has announced that it’s going to make video clips available to affiliate websites. Basically, anyone can sign an affiliate deal with Reuters and in return get a web-based player to embed in their site:

The video player, compatible with Windows and Macintosh-based systems, will be embedded in an affiliate’s Web page and will not require a viewer to install software.

During the pilot period the video player will be offered free of charge to any participating Web site, but it may contain ads, Smyth said. Once the service is launched commercially sometime in the first part of 2006, affiliate sites may have the option of showing ads or paying a license fee, he said.

Videos on Reuters’ main Web site contain 15-second ads that precede the video.

The technology uses Flash to stream the video, and they’re using salesforce.com to handle the CRM for registering to use the service. I’ve signed up and will try implementing it soon - assuming I’m allowed to use the beta.

Wow. Wow wow wow. Will we all remember where we were when the BBC opened up its news archive for downloaders? This is incredibly exciting. Haven’t played with it much yet, but just wanted to say that.

There’s a fascinating post on copyright law in the blogosphere by Washington law professor Daniel Solove. Solove’s contention is that bloggers - with their tendency to run large extracts from news articles and the like, and even their use of copyrighted photography copied onto their own servers - are playing a very dangerous game of chicken with the concept of fair use. Solove reckons this may lead mainstream media to start clamping down.

Will this inevitably happen? Will bloggers have to start studying the complexities of the fair use doctrine? Will mainstream media entities adopt an RIAA-style approach? One strategy could involve bringing suits and then offering to settle for a substantial sum, but much less than the cost of fighting the suit. Even if the fair use issue were debatable, it might make sense for the blogger just to settle rather than risk a loss in the case (and much greater damages) and go through the expense of litigating (let alone the extensive time and emotional toll that such litigation might take). A more vigorous copyright enforcement will certainly not kill the blogosphere, but it could change the way people blog. With blogging getting bigger and more profitable every day, will copyright suits become the wave of the future?

I think there will inevitably be some of this going forward, but I’d make some points:

• Mainstream media (at least, mainstream media like the Guardian) are getting increasingly sophisticated in their understanding of what the blogosphere does for them in terms of inbound links, new audience and overall search engine juice. For every person inside an online newspaper shouting about copyright violations, there’s probably someone else pushing for more inbound links, not fewer.
• Solove uses the example of stock photography companies cracking down as an indication that we might be in for some copyfights. But pictures are different from text, profoundly so. As a blogger, I can’t show a fragment of a picture, and I can only rarely link to a more complete picture. With text, this isn’t so.
• Solove says that bloggers tend to run quite long extracts of content from mainstream media because, to date, many MSM sites have taken content down after a period of time, either to remove it completely or to put it behind some kind of paywall. Again, I’d point out that mainstream media’s getting a bit smarter about this. We’re getting the value of permanence.

None of which is to say that there won’t be copyfights in future, particularly from premium brands with subscription models (like WSJ and the Economist). As for the rest of us, we’re going to be chasing audience and eyeballs and ad inventory for quite some time. So link (and extract) away. Within reason, of course….

I just installed the rather lovely Google Blogger Web Comments extension into Firefox. What the extension does is tell me if there are blog posts about any particularly web page I am visiting, using Google’s Blog Search utility. A little icon appears in the bottom right of the browse status bar when there are Blogger posts about the page I’m viewing.

In the process of installing this nifty little tool, I also had to tell Firefox to allow pop-ups from Google, in order for the install to complete.

What’s interesting about this process is that by installing this extension I have actually helped Google do two profoundly evil things. Firstly I had to change my pop-up preferences to allow pop-ups from google.com. Secondly I installed a piece of software that tells Google exactly what pages I am visiting. Potentially, Google will know more about my web use than my system administrator does.

And the really interesting thing is how undeliberate this is. I’m pretty sure no-one at Google sat down and said “OK, chaps, here’s your challenge - write a tool that forces people to accept our pop-ups and indexes every web page they visit.” Because I’m sure someone would have said “nooooo, that would be evil.” Because web innovation is now reaching so far down into the innards of people’s browers and even their computers (and it started with cookies, remember - I mean, how evil are they?) that everyone ends up doing something evil at some point.

And the really really interesting thing is how ready I am to give Google all this stuff for the benefit of one little piece of mildly interesting functionality. Just think what I’d give them if they offered me something really useful - like a single sign-on? Or VOIP that works? Or municipal Wi-Fi? Or….

Oh.

Wow. New American Dictionary have selected “podcast” as their word of the year:

NEW YORK, Dec. 5 /PRNewswire/ — Only a year ago, podcasting was an arcane activity, the domain of a few techies and self-admitted “geeks.” Now you can hear everything from NASCAR coverage to NPR’s All Things Considered in downloadable audio files called “podcasts”. Thousands of podcasts are available at the iTunes Music Store, and websites such as iPodder.com and Podcast.net track thousands more. That’s why the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary have selected “podcast” as the Word of the Year for 2005. Podcast, defined as “a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player,” will be added to the next online update of the New Oxford American Dictionary, due in early 2006.

And, as far as I know, the word was coined by a Brit, Ben Hammersley, in the pages of the Guardian. The original article was here (it’s on the MediaGuardian site, which means you’ll need to register). And I found it using our whizzy new search engine, which is pleasing.

Well done, Ben. We’ll be keeping an eye out for all the usual suspects trying to claim authorship of the term (claiming to be the creator of podcasting will now be known as “going out for a Curry”).

And while we’re on the subject, our Ricky Gervais podcast went to number 1 on iTunes with a bullet. Delightful.

Our Ricky Gervais podcast went live this morning, and the early signs are that people are lapping it up. The whole thing’s funny (of course), but the last five minutes or so are absolute surreal genius. Check it out.

As I continue to seek out real-world implementations of e-paper, I was flabbergasted to come across this on digg.com: Seiko’s e-paper watch:

The Japanese company Seiko will release a limited edition of 500 units of their Spectrum SVRD001, the first watch in the world that uses flexible e-paper or Electrophoretic Display (EPD). The design of the watch is similar to a bracelet and the body is made of stainless steel and a black & white e-paper. The price of one of these 500 units is an extremely affordable 1900 EUR. It will weigh 134g and will be 37mm thick. It will be available worldwide in January 2006.

Well, 1900 euros for a watch might not count as “real world”. But it’s the nearest e-paper has got to being “in stores”. Or has someone seen something different?

Finally, someone’s attempted to put some numbers behind the mashup “economy”. In this case, Matt McAlister posits that the traffic you lose on your main site has the potential to be made up by revenues from “mashup partners” which are sharing their ad revenue with you.

I’m not going to argue with Matt’s numbers (though if people are getting $30 CPM in the US, I’m in the wrong country). What I’m going to softly question is the assumption behind that business model: that people will easily make deals with “mashup partners” which will release revenue.

My gripe with this isn’t technical - it’s surely going to be possible to come up with a system whereby API keys for mashups are only awarded to people you have deals with. But there’s a philosophical problem here - mashups to date have only really worked because the likes of Google and Amazon and Yahoo! have made their APIs available to all and sundry with very low bars for entry (indeed, lots of the commentary around these APIs has been explicit in recommending that these bars are set really, really low). This has unlocked a torrent of creativity. But if you were to stick a business contract which stated that revenues on any mashup product need to be shared, I’d wager that the takeup of these API keys would collapse. After all, most of the people making these mashups are militantly anti-registration and even anti-commercialisation.

And then there’s the administrative issue. Someone has to look after all these contracts with mashup partners. Someone has to account for them, manage them, renew them and police them. I’m sure Google and Yahoo! have got very sophisticated data munging techniques for checking who’s got their API keys and how they’re using them, but I bet the minute you put a paper trail behind that it starts getting really difficult. In other words, it won’t scale.

Personally, I think the only business case behind mashups, if you’re a content owner or an ecommerce player, is simply this: does it drive traffic to my main, revenue-generating site? How much stuff do I have to “give away” to make that happen? Of course, this doesn’t apply to Google and Yahoo!, because at the end of the day they’ll make money as long as AdSense of YPN ads appear on the mashup. But for everyone else - it’s still going to be about page views or item purchases. IMHO.

PS: Someone emailed me last week to say “oh, so you’re down on APIs now, right?” Absolutely not so. APIs play a key role for content publishers, as long as they’re done in such a way that doesn’t put business value at risk. The balance between unlocking the creativity of the network and suddenly finding that you’ve ripped value out of your business is very fine, I reckon. Unless, like I say, you’re a portal with an ad network to foster. But let’s not mistake one business model for another…