Category: General

Sorry, but after swatting down at least a dozen online-poker spams every day, and now a wave of trackback spams from “tigerspice.com” I have to ask:

WTF is it with poker?

My teen-aged son is obsessed with watching it on television — louche men wearing bug sunglasses — and it seems to have encroached into nearly every channel with celebrity poker, world series of poker, dogs playing poker.

I have a dark fantasy of inventing the email equivalent of a neutron bomb and replying to the online poker spammers with some sort of digital missile missive that will cause faces to rot off.

Forbes.com: Stopping The Presses
Good commentary by Paul Maidment, editor at Forbes.com, on the state of affairs in the newspaper industry. Thanks to Mark Cahill at Atex for the pointer.

MP3s for pennies? Russian cops say no | CNET News.com

In the “Oops, blogged too soon department …” In my daily dump below, I promised to dig a little deeper into allofmp3.com’s copyright status. Looks like the Russian music seller is in the deep doo-doo with the IP cops. From CNET:

“A Russian digital-music site offering high-quality song downloads for just pennies apiece is the target of a criminal copyright investigation by the local police, recording industry groups said Tuesday.

“AllofMP3.com has been operating for several years, asking consumers to pay just 2 cents per megabyte of downloads–usually between 4 cents and 10 cents per song. Alongside the catalogue available at traditional stores like Apple Computer’s iTunes, the site offered access to songs from the Beatles and other groups that haven’t yet authorized digital distribution.”

I see French People

“I’m color-blind … I don’t see French people. I just see smart people who are creating value and innovation.”

What has the global economy come to? Full page ads in the NYT (c-20) touting the benefits of doing business in France? I thought the era of despising the French as a pack of concessionary socialists went out with “freedom-fries” and the vitriol of the barking heads at Fox News. But no. Now Ed Zander, CEO of Motorola, is proclaiming he’s color-blind to the Frenchness of the French. So what if its employment-for-life in the United States of Europe? As Ed tells us: “Great food, great wine!”

WordPress 1.5
This is like a newspaper publisher telling the readers that he’s just bought a new press. Big whoop. How about a writer upgrade? The power of upgrades compells me to disprove the famous “WordPress 5-minute install” and trash my blog later today in the interests of being current. I get twitchy if I’m not running in the beta-zone. Time to roll out mysqladmin.php and get gnarly with the CSS templates.

Time to Retire “Twisted”
A piece in the Times looks at Aspen and its richification over the years despite Hunter Thompson’s efforts to beat back the greed-heads with the Freak Power Party. The piece ends with a very good suggestion by an Aspen writer who says he checks himself everytime he types the word “twisted” and remembers that’s a Dr. Thompson word and should be retired into the rafters like Bobby Orr’s Number 4. Here. Here. Time to create the HST Archive of Language and relegate “Fear and Loathing”, “Greedhead”, “Twisted” etc. to the ceiling.

A Blog Post I Wish I had Time to Report
Tip of the hat to B. Lipman who introduced me to allofmp3.com, a Russian paid-music service that lets you PayPal in balance and then download CD quality music (the usual western music, not Cossack dance tunes) for pennies per song. With iTunes and others essentially pricing a song at a buck, what’s with allofmp3.com getting away with full CDs for $2.00 and songs for $0.14? Ah, it seems Russian copyright law is a very interesting thing. I shall explore and expiate. Love to see the RIAA go gunning to shutdown a Russian music service and find itself in the court system of one of the world’s greatest kleptocracies.

Highbeam vs. Factiva …
I emailed a detailed description of my online research habits to customer service at Factiva last week but haven’t received a reply. They claim I’m unfairly comparing Highbeam’s all-you-can search model with their “Individual”-$2.95 per article rate. I’ll give them another few days then post my pricing and feature analysis before declaring this tempest dead.

I knew the second his picture flashed on CNN "American Morning" that he was gone. I knew the only way that bubbly chucklehead Soledad O’Brien was going to put Hunter Thompson on CNN was if he was dead. The NYT didn’t have the news, so I suffered through a half-hour of banter between the cheery morning hosts because my cable modem was null and void for some reason. Finally the crawl confirmed the news.

 

 

I met Hunter Stockton Thompson in the Tosca — my favorite San Francisco bar — during the Democratic Convention in 1984. He was drinking heavily with Warren Hinckle, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, stacking little brandy snifters into a pyramid, keeping score and warning the bartender to leave them alone. I was in my 20s, covering the convention for a New England newspaper. I was too shy to introduce myself and Hinkle was doing a good job warning autograph seekers away, so I plugged some quarters into the juke and selected some opera arias — the only jukebox in America that I know to be filled with arias — and returned to my table. While taking a piss I found myself standing next to the man. "Hey," I said. "Boring convention?"

Mondale was a lock, the most boring man on the planet, and the only excitement was the nomination of Geraldine Ferraro.

"Don’t talk to strangers taking a piss. The vice squad will bust you."

I took his advice and continued to empty my bladder. I was wearing my press pass. A big impressive thing with a holographic on it. He noticed it and asked: "Who you write for?" I told him. He said, "Cow town?"

I’ve never asked anyone in my life for an autograph, but this was my chance. Both Fear and Loathings had scarred me as a teenager, I had to do it.

"May I have your autograph?" "Let me wash my hands first." He toweled off. I handed him a pen, and he signed the pass. I thanked him, he returned to the bar, I returned to my table, and that was that.

The next day Dennis McNally, the publicist for the Grateful Dead, asked me if he could borrow my press pass so he could sneak Jerry Garcia into the Moscone Center. I was worried the Secret Service would confiscate it and screw me out of my ticket, something I didn’t want to explain to my clueless editors back in Massachusetts, but in exchange Dennis offered me backstage passes for the Dead shows at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. That was a great trade and Jerry was very honored to get into the convention wearing a pass that had Hunter’s signature scrawled on it.

I am very sad today. As sad as I was that August day when Jerry took the dirt nap.

 

Patrick Spain, the founder of Highbeam, emailed:

Probably the last thing you wanted was another HighBeam person weighing in, but I thought I would anyway and you can ignore it, if its not helpful to you.

Most of the differences in the business models of Factiva and HighBeam are apparent from looking at the sites. I leave you to say what you like about them. Their individual model is an annual fee and then payment on a per article basis. Ours is monthly or annual subscription that provides unlimited access to our resources. I am the first to admit that Factiva has more and deeper sources than HighBeam, though I would question whether most people need or will pay for “perfect” answers rather than just “excellent” ones.

The real difference is that Factiva, at least on its site for individuals, is still selling content. We aren’t. We think the time for selling content online is past. We are selling access to a research environment that has tools, content, and an easy to use interface. If we do it right, you get an excellent answer quickly and easily. Howard Schultz at Starbucks would call this selling the “experience” rather than just the coffee.

Furthermore, we give a lot of the tools and some of the content on HighBeam away for free and support it with advertising. The user base of the free part of our site is many, many times the size of the paying user base. We make money from both.

Another more fundamental difference is that our only focus is to serve the research needs of individuals in a variety of business environments. Factiva sells primarily at the enterprise level. There is a pronounced, yet underreported, shift toward employees purchasing the goods and services that they consume directly from the vendor, rather than through a central corporate purchasing entity. This trend, made possible by the Internet, is most evident in the purchase of travel services, which has almost entirely devolved to individual employees. But it can also be seen in in the information business and the software business. Salesforce.com will sell a single employee a seat at $50 a month.

We think that individuals within companies purchasing exactly what they need, when they need it, is the future. The old model of selling large ticket goods and services to central purchasing entities (many of which are now outsourced or gone altogether) with an expensive direct sales force is increasingly broken. Within this fundamental and irreversible shift lies immense business opportunity.

Patrick

Patrick Spain
Chairman & CEO
HighBeam Research, Inc.

As part of the ongoing discussion between Highbeam and Factiva on the relative strengths of each service, I received some feedback from Highbeam on my earlier recommendation that they integrate into Office 2003’s “research” function so I can search from within Microsoft OneNote.

Highbeam points out that they are integrated, but under an old name, “E-Library”.

I tested a search via Highbeam into the Forbes archives to pull out an old story I wrote in the early 90s about the impact of Internet-based search tools such as WAIS and GOPHER on the professional search market. The search failed, pointing me to an InformationToday article. So I needed to go directly into Highbeam, declare I only wanted to search Forbes, and voila, I hit the piece.

Highbeam gives me an option to link to the article. So, this is a test of that function to see if I can direct readers deep into their archive.

We’ll see if it works.

1. Hmm, it seems to have befuckticated my WordPress style sheet.
2. Removing the link cleared up the problem — a strikethrough of all text on the blog.
3. Let’s see what happens when the link code is restored. Nope it’s messing me up. The link works, but it trashes the CSS template.
4. Okay, time to email Highbeam and ask what’s up.

Here’s the problem

Here’s the code that’s killing me:

Good-bye, Dewey decimals. (Internet and Wide Area Information Servers)

Hmm. Now it works. Ghost in the code of something. The problem probably lies in WordPress then. It’s been flaky recently. Maybe time to upgrade.

Anyway, interested in whether a user other than myself can deep link into Highbeam’s archive and see the fulltext or if they get a come-on. I’ll test from a different, uncookied PC

Platt in Pumps – Computerworld
Don Tennant, EIC at Computerworld, has a pretty funny fly-on-the-wall perspective of the board meeting in Chicago when Carly got the axe.

The New York Times Company Investor Relations

Tip of the hat to Rafat — I found this news at paidcontent.org.

Whoa. Active M&A season in the world o’content. First Dow pays a big price for Marketwatch, now the Times snatches up About (nee’ The Mining Company).

I’m not, and never have been, a big fan of About.com. (the guides don’t add that much value and the click-throughs are irritatingly framed) But there’s no fighting the reality that guides have always been a big draw for the masses. They made Scott Kurnit wealthy, and About.com was Tom Rogers big Hail Mary acquisition when he was helming Primedia. How this integrates with the NYT.com and Boston.com hasn’t penetrated my thick skull yet. In any case, it is a big step up to the plate for NYT Digital and signals aspirations far beyond making a buck off of their morgue and ad impressions.

It’s all beginning to feel very 1996 all over again. The interesting thing, Google IPO fever aside, is the action is in the acquisitions, not the offerings. With About.com done, what’s next on the M&A radar?