Quick background: In April, Google sent a 50-page white paper to the US Department of Justice asserting that Microsoft was violating its 2002 antitrust settlement by not allowing outside desktop search engines (such as Google's own Desktop Search application) to be installed in Windows Vista. Microsoft initially denied the claims, saying that users could indeed use Google's application instead of their own, if not very easily, and assistant attorney general Thomas O. Barnett sided with the Redmond camp, writing a letter to state attorneys asking them to drop their investigations.
Then last week Microsoft agreed to make changes to the search application in Vista that would make it easier for consumers to install an outside default desktop search program. Google, however, wasn't impressed. Monday, the search giant appealed directly to a federal judge saying that Microsoft had not done enough to mitigate their concerns.
I know you don't want to read another blog post about the People Ready controversy, which
was ignited by Valleywag on Friday US and turned into an all-in brawl over the weekend.
But I feel obligated to sum up my position on it, as one of the 6-7 bloggers at the
center of the storm. I
initially wrote a post about it Saturday night my time (Friday night US). I defended
the ads, but I asked what R/WW readers thought of the situation - and boy did I certainly
find that out! Many of the comments on that blog post thought the People Ready ad was
wrong; and some people made very convincing arguments. A few people unfortunately
distorted the facts, but even those comments I read with interest and tried to respond. I
am grateful to all the readers who engaged me in conversation on this issue - some people
even followed up with emails. Although my basic position is unchanged and I will continue
to run the ads, I did learn some things along the way and I wouldn't do it
exactly the same next time.
As with the reader feedback, I've also been following the feedback of the other bloggers involved. Om Malik and Paul Kedrosky both wrote mea culpa posts and pulled the ads. Fred Wilson defended the ads, as did Mike Arrington. Mike is never one to pull punches, in fact he has been throwing plenty on this issue. And I support him on this (even though he might think he is in this battle alone). Both of us are self-made publishers and blogging is our business - and in that respect we are different from Fred and Paul, whose blogs are more personal.
In protest of a recent rate hike of 0.012 cents per song, per listener, from the current 0.007 cents rate (that's about 270% for you math gurus) by the US Copyright Royalty Board, the SaveNetRadio Coalition is staging a "day of silence" tomorrow. These rates are retroactive from January 1, 2006, meaning that net radio stations will owe back royalties for almost 17 months) and extend until December 31, 2010.
SaveNetRadio is calling July 15th "The Day the Music Dies," and while that may be a bit melodramatic, the rate hikes will undoubtedly knock many independent Internet radio stations down for the count.
The other day I tracked down another early alpha-testing startup
called Fairtilizer, which is an online music
community aspiring to define a new generation of music media. The premise behind this
startup is that user generated music media is a threshold where online recommendations,
distribution, artists and labels will pass the traditional TV, radio and print vehicles.
In a not-so-new venue Fairtilizer, early on, has the key element for a successful music
startup – some killer artists. The climate is harsh for entries into this arena but
Fairtilizer is just getting off the ground.
Even with consolidation going on left and right, the galaxy of sites that make up what we call "web 2.0" is expanding at a frantic rate (or perhaps that elusive goal of being snapped up by a bigger fish is helping to drive it). So how do you keep up with this ever growing array of web 2.0 sites? That is, other than reading Read/WriteWeb. The answer: via the ever growing array of web 2.0 lists.
A little over a year ago, Richard MacManus posted his List of Web 2.0 Lists. Just 13 months later a lot of those links are dead, or no longer being updated, and there is a whole crop of new sites that we can now add to our arsenal. Below I will endeavor to update Richard's list with new sites and those that are still in business.
Dan Farber talked to LinkedIn founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman on Friday at the Supernova 2007 conference, and was told that over the next 9 months LinkedIn will deliver APIs for developers. It seems that LinkedIn has been hurried onto this open track due to the hype surrounding Facebook's new open platform. Dan also reports that LinkedIn wants to "create a way for users who spend more time socially in Facebook to get LinkedIn notifications." Nick O'Neill has a post discussing the ramifications.
Of course I agree that opening its platform to developers is the best (the only?) way for LinkedIn to take its service to the next level. Interestingly Alex Iskold wrote about this back in January, and his post then is well worth re-visiting now.
On Thursday at the Supernova conference, Udi Manber Google's VP of
Engineering talked about what
a difficult problem search is. This was followed up by Sheryl Sandberg, Google's Global
VP of Sales and Operations, giving a presentation entitled What's next for
advertising?.
Sheryl started by providing a little history on Google's approach to search advertising. She said that "before Google advertising was focused on the advertiser," but when Google was developing their advertising model they started by "focusing on providing useful information to users." In other words, they "wanted the ads to be just as useful as the search results."
I'm bemused by the latest blogging 'controversy' to dominate Techmeme. Normally I don't blog about these things, but this one has me as a central character - although I wasn't mentioned in the Valleywag piece that started it all. The Silicon Valley gossip blog has a headline reading 'Microsoft pays star writers to recite slogan', referring to this FM campaign.
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the weekly wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email:
Earlier today, Richard took a look at the state of e-learning 2.0, which got me to thinking about how school might be different if I were in college today because of the influx of new Web 2.0 apps aimed and students. I went to a school that utilized a Virtual Learning Environment called WebCT (since absorbed by the Blackboard company), and it really wasn't very fun to use. Note taking meant writing on paper, study groups meant face-to-face meetings, and if you were struggling through Shakespeare, your best bet was to turn to the library, not the Internet.
When I was in college most of the tools in this round up didn't exist. It was truly the dark ages of education! Well, okay, it was a just a few years ago, but just in this decade, and especially in the last few years, a handful of tools to make school life easier have appeared. What follows is the set of web tools I would put in my backpack were I headed back to school tomorrow.
