The Bee Blog

GigaOM and Personal Bee

What a busy week it has been!  Early this past week, Om Malik launched a sidebar link, "Around the Web" on his web site, GigaOM. The response has been phenomenal - traffic to the Bee has increased by 5 times, dozens of new Beehives have been created, and our flourishing community has been expanded by the addition of Om's readers.

One of the things about a social news site is that it becomes more and more interesting as more and more people decide to join in to the fun.  In some of our Beehives we have definitely reached that critical mass!

What Happend to the News?

One of the interesting things that happens when you are a news aggregator is that you sometimes see how people - even mainstream media - try to edit themselves after a story has been released.  This morning's example -- an obituary in the NY Times for Jeane Kirkpatrick.  The original story lead read:

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick's staunch neoconservativism helped chart the course of U.S. military and diplomatic actions from 1981 to 1985.

But somewhere after it slipped into the RSS stream and before it hit the paper it was changed to read:

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick was a strong beacon of neoconservative thought, helping to chart foreign policy from 1981 to 1985.

The headline was changed also, removing the fact that Kirkpatrick died at the age of 80 though this fact is still in the lead paragraph.

What do we learn by pulling back the covers at the top newsroom in America?  Here is my take -- the writer is a bit biased to the left and the editor is trying to remove that political drift and keep the paper in the middle...  "strong beacon" is almost a positive statement as opposed to "staunch" which could be read as extremist.  And the notion of "military actions" is watered down to "foreign policy."

And what were the military ambitions of the Reagen presidency during her term?  Again the Times updated version:

Ms. Kirkpatrick weighed the risks and rewards of clandestine warfare in Central America, covert operations against Libya, the disastrous deployment of American marines in Lebanon, the invasion of Grenada and support for rebel forces in Afghanistan.

I wonder if the now missing version mentions that "rebel forces in Afghanistan" includes the folks we now battle today in George W.'s "War on Terror." 

What do you think, is this watering down the news? Or serving a public interest by remaining non-partisan?

How will we support reporting?

I don't always agree with Jeff Jarvis, but I always admire him both for how smart he is and how well he expresses himself.  And in this case, I also think he is right on target:

But what of the business of journalism? The New York Times itself has said the newspaper industry is in free fall. So how will we support reporting? Not the way we did before, with monopolies that made us arrogant and complacent. Start here: Journalism in America is wasteful. We squander far too much of our resource on commodity news everyone already knows, on the ego of bylines and prizes, on habits and traditions that go unchallenged, on fear. Does every paper in this country need its own movie critic, its own golf columnist, its tangle of middle managers, its own copy editors editing already-edited AP stories? Must we continue throwing money into stock tables, TV listings, and other features we carry still only because we are afraid of losing one more reader?

Read more on his Buzzmachine blog -- "Edit Me"

2 pass left...

If you are interested in one of the Personal Bee sponsored scholarships to the Web 2 point 2 conference -- write soon!  Only two left -- send email to me at tshelton (a) personalbee.com

Around the web (Venturebeat launches Beehive)

A great week for The Personal Bee!  Matt Marshall's Venturebeat has launched a Beehive! Scroll a little down the page and look for "Around the web" in column 3...

Music Beehive - Rich Media RSS

Announcing echoAtom -- the first music beehive, using our Rich Media RSS Reader technology!  Tracking 833 blogs about music, echoAtom shows off the great features of The Personal Bee, plus one new one... we pull all of the mp3 links out of the posts and use them to build a play list, in an embedded Flash music player.  You can play all of the music in this beehive, or just music from a particular blog post as you are reading...  Take a look!

Web 2.2

The Personal Bee is proud to be a sponsor of Web 2.2 and the great work that Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells are doing to create the real cutting edge Web conference! The conference is getting lots of good publicity so you'd better sign up fast! On Friday Dave Winer wrote about it... As a sponsor I have 10 passes in case anyone would like to come as a guest of The Personal Bee - let me know!

And that has made all the difference

Is YouTube the greatest swindle of all time?  Or a brilliant "thread-the-needle" approach to copyright law?  In one corner we have Mark Cuban who famously said that "only a moron would buy youtube" prior to Google being a moron buying the thing.  In the other corner we now have Tim Wu, writing for Slate who provides an interesting analysis of copyright law and an explanation of why Google got YouTube cheap was willing to take on the risk of buying YouTube. Wu writes:

But what about Mark Cuban's copyright argument? Why isn't YouTube is trouble in the same way Napster and Grokster were? The first difference, as indicated, is that Napster simply wasn't covered by the §512 safe-harbor law, and YouTube is. Napster wasn't "hosting" information at the direction of its users, but rather providing a tool for users to find and download predominantly infringing content. It may sound odd that Napster gets in more trouble for helping you find illegal stuff than YouTube does for actually hosting it. But that's the law and why YouTube should really, really thank its friends at Bell.

The sometimes vitriolic dispute (I mean "moron?" come on  Mark!) hinges on the question of whether  there is a difference between what Napster and what YouTube have done to build their businesses.  Arguably, the two models are very similar -- both companies have provided consumers with access to copyrighted material, without a license, and financially benefited from this activity.  Tim Wu argues that the difference is that YouTube benefits from the notion of "Safe Harbor" which we have, he points out, because of the Bell operating companies lobbies to Congress... Wu writes:

Thanks to the Bells, all these companies (ed. "Information Residing on Systems or Networks At Direction of Users.") are now protected by a "notice and take down" system when they host user content. That means that if Jon Stewart notices an infringing copy of The Daily Show on YouTube, Comedy Central can write a letter to YouTube and demand it be taken down. Then, so long as YouTube acts "expeditiously" and so long as YouTube wasn't already aware that the material was there, YouTube is in the clear. In legal jargon, YouTube is in a "safe harbor." Earlier this week, when YouTube took down 30,000 files after requests from a Japanese authors' group, that was §512(c) in action.

This is in contrast to Napster in two fundamental ways -- First, Napster was a network which was wholly about copyrighted content and not about "user generated content."  Secondly, Napster had a pretty good idea of what people were doing with their system.

As Robert Frost wrote in his poem The Road Not Taken:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Google Enters Another Market (Custom Search)

Everyone on the Internet fears the day that Google will enter their market. Today the fear was tangible for Rollyo and Swicki.  The Financial Times reported that Google will launch tomorrow (Tuesday) "...a customisable search engine that users can carry on their own blogs and other websites..." and compares the new service to Rollyo.  Matthew Ingram carries the photo of a shark on his post about this development.  Ingram points out that when Google entered the calendar market, competitor Kiko gave up and sold themselves.  He asks whether or not this was the right decision -- pointing to Paul Graham's post at the time "Google Does Not Render Resistance Futile."  I find myself agreeing with Paul and Rex Hammock puts his finger on it when he writes:

There’s a social networking aspect of Rollyo that probably won’t be a part of the Google product, however the Google product will likely offer publishers, including bloggers, an instant way to monetize narrow search in the Adsense program they’re already participating in.

For all of the things that Google has done right in technology, they have done very little well in the category of social.  It isn't too late for them to learn but if history is any guide, they will miss the importance of the social network in search as well. And frankly having a strong competitor forces you to do the two things which you most need to do in any case when you are a small business -- innovate constantly and be 500% better than your larger competition.  Then Google can educate the market about why the market needs your product and then you can deliver on the market's expectations.  That is what YouTube did.

UPDATE: The Service is called Google Co Op and John Battelle has a screenshot on his SearchBlog.  Michael Arrington also piles on with a screenshot.  Both of them mention the similarity to Rollyo and others. But neither of them talk about the really interesting question -- can Google get the social network part right?

Shake Rattle And Roll!

We spent the second quarter of 2006 testing the original "beta" concept site for the Personal Bee.  We spent the summer implementing everything we had learned.  Now we are ready and have released the Bee to the world. 

http://www.personalbee.com

You Can Be A Media Mogul

The idea is simple. Anyone one the world can create their own news site.  You choose the topic.  You choose the content sources.  You brand your site.  You decide which stories are important and which to remove... You are the master of your topic domain and can build a base of subscribers into a media empire.

Enjoy the Bee.  Send your comments and suggestions! 

Ted Shelton, CEO
The Personal Bee, Inc.
tshelton @ personalbee.com