Content and services

Would you pay $15 a month to be able to watch cheesy YouTube videos on your cellphone? Verizon is betting that you will. The company has licensed the rights to a selection of YouTube videos that Verizon subscribers will be able to download and watch on their cellphone. This represents, perhaps, the 457th attempt by a cellular company to get people to pay for content no one cares much about. ESPN recently gave up trying to get people to watch sports on cellphones, after burning through a few hundred million of someone's money.

Microsoft's new search engine, called Live Search, looks pretty good at first glance. It looks almost exactly like Google, which is probably a wise strategy. Many of the other search engines have interfaces that are quite different, and probably put some people off with all the options and choices. I tried a few test queries and compared them to what I get on Google, and Live Search appears to do a very good job of cutting down on non-relevant results.

Microsoft's MSN search and news site is trying to avoid Google's fate in Belgium, where a court told the search company to stop filching newspaper articles from the Web sites owned by the newspapers. Google would show the first few paragraphs of an article, and then provide a link to the rest of the article, claiming fair use. But of course, there were ads on the Google page and so Google was benefiting from someone else's copyrighted content. The Belgian courts told the company to cut it out.

After days of rumors, Google has confirmed that it has paid $1.6 billion for YouTube, a tiny video startup that has never made a cent and that has only 67 employees. What is Google buying? In a word, eyeballs. Google's own video venture has been a huge flop, so the company had just two choices: abandon the lucrative advertising potential of free video, or buy the market, which is basically YouTube.

As an author, I was highly skeptical when Google announced a year ago that it would start scanning books and making them available for search. Along with many other groups and organizations, it seemed like an obvious violation of copyright. The main problem is that Google, of course, places ads on every scanned page that someone sees, and authors get no share of that ad income.

But a new report suggests that the Google "service" might be increasing book sales. That is good news for authors, if it applies across most scanned books.

Just as the cellphone companies are about to start marketing Web sites with the .mobi domain name, ESPN announces that they are dumping their mobile phone service, which came bundled with lots of sports content. It turns out that few people are interested in watching sports on a two inch screen. That's the problem with cellphones; they are phones, not televisions, and just taking content that works with other devices and shrinking the picture does not always work. And it begs the question: What on earth are the cellphone companies thinking with the .mobi domain?

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can create an entry for, now has a cousin: Citizendium. Citizendium (most easily pronounced 'City-zendium') differs from Wikipedia in the way that content will be developed.

AlGore's Current TV, a cable channel with limited distribution, has announced a partnership with Yahoo to create four new broadband channels.

One of the great things about the Internet is that it truly is creating all sorts of new economic and business activity that we never imagined just a few years ago. Amazon is one of those "new economy" businesses, and it is a good example of why the U.S. economy keeps humming along, despite a heavy loss of manufacturing jobs.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds has an article about problems with Amazon's brand new Unbox video download service, which serves as a contrast to Apple's new video service. The Unbox system only works on Windows (iTunes works on Windows and Macs), just for starters. But the gripes are apparently about a "phone home" feature (sometimes called spyware) of Unbox that seems to constantly want to connect to the Internet so that your computer can talk to Amazon's computers.

Apple unveiled its iTunes movie download service yesterday, which is very nicely done from a customer experience perspective. But many people are likely to be frustrated with download speeds. Apple talks about 30 minutes to download a feature length movie, but the company noted that is if you have a 5-6 megabit cable modem connection. About 60% of broadband users have cable modem connections, and many of them are supposed to be three megabits/second or more, but few actually deliver that.

Apple announced a slew of new and upgraded products yesterday that disappointed some Apple fans who had hoped for an iPod phone. Pundits have begun yet another "Apple is becoming obsolete" mantra, but beating up on Apple is nothing new, and for nearly thirty years, the pundits have almost always been wrong about Apple. With cellphones challenging the iPod as a music player and Microsoft's new music player about to be released, it is easy to see why you might think Apple's best music days are behind it.

The owner of 26 Massachusetts and Rhode Island papers is thinking about selling the whole lot and simply publishing on the Web, where he says ad revenues are higher. It's about time somebody in the newspaper business acknowledged that putting gobs of ink on dead trees and tossing the finished product onto people's driveways is not the best way to do things anymore.

YouTube is beginning to change politics, as the rising new Internet service is making it easy for anyone to make video available. Short video clips with political messages are chipping away at another Old Media monopoly, the political ad. Back in the old days, as far back as a year ago, you had to have a big budget to produce and air a political ad. Limited time spots for such ads on broadcast and cable TV made them expensive.

If you have not tried the Snap search engine lately, you should take a look. Snap has added site preview screens, which will be familiar to those of you that use RSS readers, but may not be for others.

One of the most tedious parts of using a search engine is slogging through all the links that are not really what you want. Snap now puts up a preview of the site right in the browser window, so you can quickly see if it looks like what you are looking for. It is one more example of how far behind Google is falling in the search engine wars.

It is official. YouTube has overtaken MySpace as the world's biggest time waster. MySpace is primarily a playground for high school and college kids who place a high value on knowing too much about people they might meet before they actually meet them. YouTube, on the other hand, is an equal opportunity time waster, with something to offer everyone.

If you want a perfect example of what is driving the likes of Verizon and Comcast crazy, take a look at CNet TV, which is currently in beta. CNet has a huge collection of video material that has been available on some cable systems for a long time, and they are now putting all this on the Web.

This article is a great summary of some of the new "Search 2.0" search engines that represent third generation technologies. The first generation of search engines were those that simply indexed the content of Web pages, with the venerable Alta Vista as the best example. Google defined second generation search technology, which looked at links to and from a Web page as a way of determining relevance.

The Mainstream Media (MSM) have consistently turned their backs on bloggers with portrayals as amateurs in "pajamas," among other characterizations. A lot of data on blogging has been self-serving, in one way or another. Sites like Technorati consistently overstate the importance of blog sites, and bloggers themselves often take themselves too seriously. On the other side, the MSM has usually tried to understate the impact of bloggers on the news and on the craft of journalism itself.

Rumors are flying that Apple will announce that the iTunes store will start carrying movies. Apple will hold its annual developers conference in a couple of weeks, and lots of people expect that Steve Jobs will show off the ability to download a movie and watch it at home. Supposedly Apple has struck deals with many of the major movie studios. What is likely is that the movies will have a time stamp that will allow you to watch them all you want for a limited amount of time (like a week or two). This would mirror going down to Blockbuster and renting a movie.