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Spammers strangling Craigslist?

by on 26 May, 2008 in Web/Tech

From Techdirt:

“Random text is added to each spam message to fool Craigslist’s duplicate message detector. IP proxy sites are used to post from a wide range of IP addresses. E-mail addresses for reply are Gmail accounts conveniently created by Jiffy Gmail Creator (“Who Else Wants to Create Unlimited Gmail Accounts in Seconds Flat Without Breaking a Sweat?”) An OCR system reads the obscured text in the CAPTCHA. Automatic monitoring detects when a posting has been flagged as spam and reposts it.

CL Auto Poster isn’t the only such tool. Other desktop software products are AdBomber and Ad Master. For spammers preferring a service-oriented approach, there’s ItsYourPost.

With these power tools, the defenses of Craigslist have been overrun. Some categories on Craigslist have become over 90% spam.”

And a thousand newspaper classified ads managers say: “D’oh! Wish I’d thought of that five years ago.”

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Where we find the time

by on 3 May, 2008 in Digital revolution, Strategy, Web/Tech

When I tell friends that, chez Tosh, we tend to watch TV while using our laptops as well, they tend to ask – with concerned faces – after the state of the household. So, speaking at Internet World earlier this week, I was relieved to find we’re not that unusual. Panel chair Mike Butcher asked who shared the habit; three-quarters of the room stuck their hands up. Hurrah.

That question, and some of the subsequent discussion, got me thinking about a talk given last week in San Francisco by Clay Shirky. It was, as ever, wildly clever, and re-reading it this week reminded me of some of its wonderful sense. Do go read it all.

Shirky sums up, with great elegance, where people are getting the time to build the web – to read web pages and watch YouTube, create Wikipedia pages, upload those Flickr pictures, issue pokes on Facebook and play games across the ether. It’s all to do with the “cognitive surplus” that has, for decades, been used up or masked by TV (it used to be suppressed by gin). We’ll “spend” some of that TV-viewing surplus doing other things online, thinks Shirky.

“It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?”

A big deal, indeed, and especially if you own a media company which, previously, filled some of that cognitive gap – either with TV, or another product. Huge, unifying cultural events remain important – hence the rise of “watercooler TV” talent shows and the importance of big sporting events to broadcasters. At the other end, narrow niche content that’s very appealing to a small number of people should also thrive.

The pressure, as far as I can see, goes on the squishy middle; generalist entertainment or information that might pass the time but fulfills no specific need, and which hits no heights in terms of quality. Unfortunately, a lot of traditional media content fits that bill, and the web gives us access to the very best examples of it anyway.

This is why the ongoing shift in media consumption presents such challenges. It’s not just YouTube hurting TV. It’s not just Craigslist hurting newspapers. If you’re generalist and, because you’re not a very good generalist, have relied on geographical monopoly to stay alive, then… life’s going to be hard, and Shirky has done a very good job of explaining why.

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Did AOL steal my work? I need your help…

by on 30 April, 2008 in Digital revolution, New Media, Web/Tech, Weblogs

OK – one for all you copyright gurus out there…

In an incident that may make you laugh, given my day job, I reckon a damned MSM company – AOL – has stolen a photograph I took to illustrate a post, as seen above.

The image was nothing special – this snap of Alcatraz I took while in San Francisco a few years ago – but the AOL blog Gadling used it to illustrate a piece (if you click through, that’s not my image on there now). As you can see, they stuck my name on the bottom of the image and linked back to the original Flickr page, but my position is they did that in breach of the Creative Commons license I use on Flickr, which clearly forbids using the image for “commercial purposes”.

Sticking my image on their corporately-owned, advertising strewn page is, in my book, a commercial purpose. They’re using my content as part of their editorial proposition.

I complained on April 12, when I found they’d been using the image (for around two months) and they removed it quite quickly. It took until yesterday to send me an email, however, saying:

“The picture in question was taken from a public gallery on Flickr and used for an editorial purpose, not a commercial use. Gadling used a thumbnail sized photo which linked back to the original source and which provided you with attribution. The important distinction here is that it is not the user of the photo that must be examined. In this instance, the use of the photo was for an editorial purpose and therefore allowed under the creative commons license you granted.”

Now, to my mind this is close to the old “it’s on the internets so must be free” excuse of old. They’re augmenting that by saying I shouldn’t look at the publisher of the page – big ol’ ugly AOL – but the use, which was editorial. Does that make it free? I doubt it, but I can’t be sure.

So I’m interested in this on two levels. First, are they right? Is this particular level of CC license such that, in fact, a large corporation can use your work on their commercial site without paying up? If that’s the case, I think there are lots of CC users out there who should know. What is the commercial purpose that CC license forbids if it’s not something like this? I’ve no problem with anyone using an image licensed for commercial use… but this? I’ve heard lawyers in the UK snort derisively at the whole CC idea… is it, in fact, pretty much useless?

Second, if AOL are wrong, I’d be surprised if they haven’t used a bunch of images in this way – there may be quite a few people being ripped off. It must be a rich source of free photography for them.

That said, it’s not the money I’m interested in – I’ll happily donate that to charity, if someone with expert knowledge can help me prove the principle. This seems like something that would be interesting to pursue. If anyone can help, or knows someone who can, do let me know in the comments, or by email.

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Fake Steve Jobs on the future of digital media

by on 25 April, 2008 in Digital revolution, New Media, Press & publishing, Web/Tech

Forbes magazine journalist Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, has given an entertaining keynote here on the last day of Web 2.0. I think – although I may have missed someone – that he’s the only big media staffer to be given time on a stage during the event.

What he writes on his blog becomes, of course, great keynote fodder; geek humour, plenty of visual gags to keep the crowd entertained. And, by God, Steve Jobs is rich raw material.

Of interest to me is that Lyons’ story is also a cautionary tale for big (old) media’s digital departments who might be tempted to ignore colleagues in print. I hadn’t known that Forbes Digital knocked him back several times for a job, even just a blog, before he kicked off his site. Even if they’d said yes, it doesn’t sound a lot like they’d have let him adopt the controversial persona he adopted for his Blogger.com site, initially written anonymously.

The games he played before being stripped of that anonymity isn’t a tale that Forbes Digital bosses will enjoy hearing played back. Having been rejected, again, by his magazine’s digital arm, he emailed a boss at Forbes as Fake Steve to ask if he’d be interested in taking him on. The Forbes boss, not knowing he was emailing someone who was already an employee on the old print side, sent back a fawning email saying, in essence, “yes”. In the meantime, Forbes Publisher Richard Karlgaard joined in the chase to unmask Fake Steve, all the while also emailing over storyline ideas for Fake Steve.

Lyons makes them all sound like utter halfwits. He refers to Forbes a couple of times in the keynote while flicking wanker gestures over his shoulder. His corporate paymasters must have a strong sense of humour.

Beyond the gags and clear conversion to the blogging world, Lyons retains a very traditional media perspective. In a slightly half-baked way towards the end of his talk, he offers up that big media is really starting to get the web, and presents as slightly inevitable that – now they’ve grasped what’s going on – they’ll come to dominate it.

Maybe, he offers as consolation to this crowd, some blog publishers will become big media too, by implication suggesting that will be the web world’s contribution to the media landscape.

It’s an odd message to come now, at the end of a conference where big media has been almost entirely absent, where all the energy and thinking about how content evolves is coming from technology companies, not journalists or traditional media. Unless Yahoo counts as traditional media, which has been suggested…

That portion of his keynote is greeted with silence. I don’t think many here really believe him.

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Insufferable Web 2.0 post: day one

by on 22 April, 2008 in Current Affairs, Digital revolution, New Media, Web/Tech

Wired magazine’s guide to building a web 2.0 startup, likely to be getting much reading about these parts this week. Picture by wilbertbaan, used with permission granted by his Creative Commons license

I’m sat in the huge Moscone convention centre in central San Francisco, and they’re playing Robbie Robertson’s Somewhere Down That Lonely River over the PA system. I quite like this song, so I’m rather hoping the speaker doesn’t kick off during this, but I bet he will because he’s slightly late and he describes himself as a “kick-ass public speaker” on his website. The session he’s leading? How to innovate on time.

C’mon. I had to mention it.

It’s glorious to be back in San Francisco for properly webby conference. I’ve been coming here reasonably regularly for various reasons since 2001 – MacExpos, often, but with visits to Google and Blogger and other interesting places squeezed in. Even when stuff didn’t make it into print, it was often the place where I’d learn about trends and finally understand the significance of stuff – tagging and XML spring to mind – that I hadn’t grasped before.

I don’t report much now, but being here is still as fascinating, and the trip is still valuable for the learning. This place is truly the heart of all that’s dot.com – a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem of talent, money and support services that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, and an ecosystem that means nowhere else is likely to overhaul it any time soon.

One thing that’s changed since I was last here; we’re now (really) in the era of the social web. The upshot of every webhead in Christendom (and beyond) having a blog, at least one Twitter account and a life fully exposed and declaimed on Facebook is that you know, to within a hundred yards and a few minutes, when they’re at a party.

You used to travel this far and feel quite alone. Now, there’s the surreal experience of landing at SFO after ten hours and 5371 miles, checking in and – after obligatory stop at Cheesecake Factory for Crispy Shredded Beef – heading to a party a few blocks away to be hailed by by the charming Jackie Danicki before having so much as a drink in my hand.

And then asked about my brother. Ho hum.

[Later: she describes me as a socialist pig on her blog. In a nice way, I'm sure. She's obviously never met a real socialist, although I accept the pig sobriquet with only a nod towards its accuracy.]

There are lots of folk I’m looking forward to meeting. Paul Carr, now ending a mammoth US tour which started when we were both in Las Vegas (we narrowly missed each other) is here, and blogging heavily. Chief Shiny Ashley Norris – a man I’ve met more abroad than in London, I suspect – is nearby and plotting drinks. TechCruncher Mike Butcher is liable to hove into view, I sense, at any moment. Thanks to their mammoth use of social media, I can take a stalker’s interest in their movements from the discomfort of this conference centre seat.

Which is a point. Scott Berkun, the speaker, has started during Robbie Robertson. He is, as it turns out, kick ass – giving us some familiar but well packaged thought on innovation theory and project management, delivered with pizazz. His O’Reilly book may be worth a squint later. But this seminar should, really be called this How to Innovate, and On Time. The comma, and the “and”, are important – this talk only ends with a segment on the “on time” bit.

And it better end on time. I suspect the jet-lag wall is positioned at roughly six o’clock.

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HoopsHype acquired

by on 25 March, 2008 in Digital revolution, New Media, Web/Tech

… barely 24 hours after I noted this about HoopsHype, the site was bought by a fantasy sports “conglomerate”. So it might now be part of big media, but don’t confuse this with old media:  this is sports information now being provided, not just for interest, but for use… in games about games. Parse that.

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Lessons from HoopsHype, the influential NBA site run from… Spain

by on 24 March, 2008 in New Media, Web/Tech

There are interesting lessons (or reminders) falling out this WSJ.com story about HoopsHype, a basketball website that appears to have great influence in one of the US’s major sports.

– It’s unashamedly hardcore; there appears to be no attempt to explain basketball or soften the editorial for a broad audience. It’s content for a narrow niche. As a consequence, a narrow hardcore niche of people – people in the game itself – find it useful, and give it great respect.

– It’s run from Spain, giving it a big advantage over US-based rivals because of the time difference.

– Nobody cares it’s run from Spain, because of the nature of their work – a little original reporting but mainly, it seems, aggregation and community.

– It’s run by only three people.

– The site is (relatively) small – it’s got barely 3% of NBA.com’s traffic, according to Compare.com. But it’s growing fast, while NBA.com is showing signs of stagnation, year on year.

– It’s profitable.

It’s a story that sums up what many of us have been talking about for years; as the barriers of geography and technical knowledge are brought down by broadband and easy-to-use content management systems, the battle moves to content.

Pick a niche, super-serve it, and the Google will find you, and the users will come. Google, and the users, don’t care who or where you are – just that what you’re offering is what they’re looking for.

And, as it always has, that raises profound and worrying questions for established news and content brands, who are so used to trading on who – and where – they are.

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Applauding Shirky’s light touch

by on 19 March, 2008 in Books, Digital revolution, London, Uncategorized, Web/Tech

Clay Shirky rolled into town yesterday, giving a lunchtime lecture to a packed house down at the RSA on his new book Here Comes Everybody.

It’s about how online crowds form and act, but the title could have adequately described the packed auditorium; the gang was all there, as many techie, socialie, liberal-artsie types as you could shake a stick at. It was particularly fun to see a vast number of friendly faces from my years working on the Guardian’s tech section. “Shouts out”, as I think the youngsters like to say these days, to Vic Keegan, Sean Dodson, Jim McLellan, and Pat Kane. There were I’m sure, others.

Given the sheer heft of blogging power in the room, I’ll leave reporting what Shirky actually said to others.

But I will note how Shirky said what he said. It is a rare talent, I think, to wear your learning lightly, especially around that intersection of the social sciences and new media. Maybe it’s because this is such a new area, and we’re still evolving the language to discuss it. Maybe it’s because some of the early practitioners feel they’ve got to baffle their audiences to earn their respect (or paper over the cracks).

Either way, it’s not unusual to hear people speaking (or writing) about this area struggling to make themselves clear or, even worse, not really trying. Even some of the questions asked after Shirky’s initial talk rather lost themselves – and they were only a few sentences long.

Shirky, however, was superb, illuminating his theories with three sharp stories, a measure of wit, and an absence of conceit. His thought is, I’m sure, complex and brilliant and the result of years’ experience and mulling. It’s just he left us to work that brilliance out, rather than rubbing our noses in it, screaming “admire the elegance of my societal observations, you fools!” It made for a far more enjoyable lunchtime, and I’m sure his book will be all the better for it too.

His slick, easy way is quite a talent – but what is it born of? Practice, I’m sure, but maybe also coming from the US? Our American cousins seem, certainly, to do this better, at least in this area. Maybe it’s just that country has such a lead in this specialism. Maybe there’s something in the water. Maybe they set greater stock in expressing themselves in a clear way (or recognise the rewards of doing so).

Either way, it’s quite a talent to talk about complex stuff like that for an hour and hold the attention of a packed room. I hope it inspires others to try out his style.

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The Asus Eee PC, and why small could be big

by on 17 March, 2008 in Web/Tech

Ginny's new laptop

– A cheesy picture of my cat, with Asus Eeepc, for scale.

“If,” said the worried Sony executive, “the Asus starts to do well, we are all in trouble. That’s just a race to the bottom.”

Ah. Don’t you just love the sound of.. er… paradigms being shifted in the morning? [Note to subs: find something more poetic for this line. Subs. Subs? Where d'yall... ah].

The executive in question was talking to CNet recently about the lovely Asus Eee PC – a tiny laptop with a 7-inch display, Wifi and no drives (hard or optical). The price tag matches its dimensions; the machines start at just £200.

You can understand his concern; the weee machine is very bad news indeed if you’re trying to sell slightly bigger laptops for roughly ten times that pricetag.

I got an Asus last month, a generous birthday prezzie from Mrs Tosh. And, four weeks or so in, I love my little laptop. I wouldn’t swap for a Sony. Even the gorgeous MacBook Air, by dint of its exorbitant pricetag, is no match.

It’s small enough to fit in the little satchel I carry around, and light enough for me not to care it’s there. With no moving parts, it’s robust enough to cope with being constantly on the move. And all that makes it very handy – whenever I need a computer to work on, it’s there. It’s dinky enough even to be usable when I’m jammed in the back of a Virgin 747 which, at the moment, looks like a Good Thing indeed.

So, all told, a lovely wee machine – a great choice if you’re in the market for something small and useful. I heartily recommend it.

And, using it, you do wonder: is it significant in an industry-wise sense? Is the little Asus the first of a new class of computer?

As Glyn Moody pointed out in the Guardian the other week, the machine is running the Linux operating system, and its huge success makes it a significant breakthrough for that OS. Finally, goes the theory, a machine that proves you don’t need a Phd to use Linux.

I’m delighted it’s a Linux machine, and I might explore the system’s innards sometime, but the interesting thing for me so far has simply been that the operating system isn’t an issue, either way. It could be running an OS by Tonka, for all I care.

Certainly, it lacks the pleasing eye-candy of OSX, or the transition-y joy of Keynote – my presentation app of choice these days. It’s not part of my carefully synched, interconnected cluster of Macs and iPhone, where documents, bookmarks and contacts flit from desktop to palmtop to (big) laptop with no supervision from me. The interface isn’t what you’d ever term beautiful.

But none of that really matters. What’s most important is that it’s got Firefox for web browsing, and that Firefox has Flash, and all the other bits and pieces you expect from a proper web browser; thus, the web works properly. And, thus, Google applications, which gives me email and documents, runs just fine.

Elsewhere, pre-loaded, there’s Skype to use with the little camera and microphone built in to the lid, and OpenOffice for when I can’t get an internet connection to Google apps. A video out jack lets me do presentations – it happily steps up its resolution to fill a projector’s display. And I can upload to Flickr, picture transfer made particuarly easy by the little flash card reader built in the side.

That, really, is all I need. The differences between this and my next laptop of lust – the Air – aren’t really worth £1000 to me.

So the OS wars angle passes me by. It’s not as if the Asus, lovely as it is, will have me forgoe my desktop Mac, where iTunes and iPhoto (and soon, I suspect, Aperture) are the most-used apps.

But, away from all the advantages Apple’s vertical integration gives it, things are different, I suspect. Specifically, if I was a Windows laptop manufacturer, I’d be more worried. Just as Windows is getting absurdly greedy for computing resources, here’s a little laptop that cuts things right down.

The executive I quoted at the top makes this shift in the laptop business sound like a bad thing. He makes it sound as if the Eee PC isn’t, yet, doing well – that this might be a genie that can somehow be kept in the bottle. I can understand his denial; working in an industry also challenged by upstart, low-cost competition, I recognise the emotions he’s facing.

Truth is, I suspect he and I are swimming in the same choppy water. The waves have been kicked up by the opening up of once-expensive, complex tools to whole new markets – a line of innovation that’s already brought desktop (print) publishing, easy digital publishing (blogging) and cheap digital audio and video to mass markets.

It’s about time the same forces started shaping the devices which faciliate all that creativity – especially laptops, where price points haven’t changed much in years.

For those of us with laptop habits, all this is great news. The bad news for our Sony executive is the race to the bottom may already have started – it’s already time to adapt, too late to forewarn.

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The Last Post:* Lacy, Zuckerberg and how being slightly rubbish is more dangerous than ever

by on 11 March, 2008 in Current Affairs, New Media, Web/Tech, Weblogs

* This is first in a new occasional series, called The Last Post, where – thanks to the inconvenience of having a day job, and being somewhat lazy – yours truly arrives at the arse end of a raging internet meme to offer up some half-baked and ultimately unenlightening musing on stuff you’ve been reading about elsewhere for days. Stay tuned!

I’ve been watching with wonderment as All The Big Bloggers soil themselves in fury over BusinessWeek journalist Sarah Lacy’s splendidly misguided attempt to interview Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at the South by Southwest digital festival in Austin, Texas. [See it all on video, or just the worst bit]

I watched from the discomfort of my desk here in London, and was going to try and thread my miscellaneous thoughts into some grand meta-theme, But, frankly, having popped my back carrying my MacBook to Manchester and back yesterday, I’m hardly in the mood.

Instead, some bullet points, arranged through the painkiller haze in roughly in the order they occurred to me. We all prefer lists, don’t we? It’s just like real PowerPoint, after all.

• First, some sympathy for Lacy. Indeed, my first idea for this post was to complain that the audience simply blithely turned up without doing any background research on Lacy at all. I mean: have they read BusinessWeek lately? If they were looking for insight or revelation, they’d have done better heading for the bar. They shouldn’t have been surprised at the soft-sudding Zuckerberg got, or the BusinessWeek hack’s clear belief she was a big part of the show (as so wonderfully caricatured by Paul Carr). But then I thought nobody would get the gag – sarcasm doesn’t work on the page, does it?

• Then, I came to think of it, I’d seen Lacy in action before – she “interviewed” Kevin Rose at LeWeb in Paris in December. I’d rated her session pretty pointless and anodyne then, but hardly worthy of a blog post, let alone a salvo of abuse.

• The person who suggested that Robert Scoble should have stepped on stage and done the interview instead proves only one of two things: (i) that satire is alive and well and spending some time in Austin, Texas OR (ii) that crack abuse is still worryingly prevalent in the interactive industries. And proves my next point, which is…

• Lacy does get more abuse, I’m convinced, because she’s a woman, and good looking. Were she a grey-haired, paunchy old man from BusinessWeek, she’d have been written-off, I’m sure, as a bit lame, but the scandal wouldn’t have erupted so.

• Lacy doesn’t help herself by using flirting as an interview technique, or by making clear in a video interview after The Event that she’s so big-time and Big Business Writerly that she hardly needs to pay attention to the geek audience which only wants to know about APIs and shit. Jeff Jarvis makes some good points about what went wrong with her interview. I’d offer that she seemed more concerned about how she came across – through a lens irrelevant to the setting she was actually in – than how her interviewee came across, or the utility of the whole exercise to the audience.

• Once she made that mistake, it quickly became clear how really, really dangerous it is to be slightly rubbish in front of the wrong audience. Once, it was possible to make mistakes at a geek gathering and recover. I’ve seen far worse than Lacy’s performance pass unnoticed. Conference hosts and speakers who were patently unprepared and/or drunk. Genuinely shocking presentations (one, memorably, invoking the memory of Ghandi to sell rubbish mobile phones – buy me a drink and I’ll tell you about it sometime) and the accidental spilling of company secrets which would – had they left the room – got people fired. Now, all the audience is always on – Twittering away, with a blog to fire off on at length later, interconnected to the nth degree with everyone else in the room, and everyone who gives a damn in the rest of the world, shielded by – if not anonymity – enough distance not to be actually, physically, banjoed by the person they’re insulting. Thusly, and uninhibited, vast waves of geek ire roll out across the ether at the speed of light.

• Finally, a little self-loathing: we conference-guzzling, globetrotting massively digitally connected geek blogextroverts are cocks. I mean – really. We’re writing long essays all over the webs about a BusinessWeek hack of limited renown interviewing – poorly, but not criminally badly – a techie of massive potential wealth but non-scaling personality (or, by the sounds of things, insight. This happens – genius people manage to crank out one brilliant thing but don’t have much more to say or, in the end, do). We could focus our efforts on stuff that matters, and leave the poor Sarah to slowly realise her sucky stage skills are neither Alpha, nor Omega, nor even really yesterday’s news. Is this – really and truly – the most significant thing to come out of SXSW? If it is, no business should send anyone to this gathering again.

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