Gibson v. Craigslist, 2009 WL 1704355 (SDNY June 15, 2009). The CMLP page. The Justia page.

In my lengthy deconstruction of the Barnes v. Yahoo case, I criticized the Ninth Circuit for concluding that 47 USC 230 was an affirmative defense (and thus could not support a 12b6 motion to dismiss) without proper briefing or analysis. First, this was sloppy work by the court. Second, the elimination of a 12b6 possibility for the defendants creates a real risk that defendants will be exposed to expensive and time-consuming discovery to eliminate plainly meritless cases. Yahoo and a group of amici have asked the Ninth Circuit to reconsider this aspect of the ruling, and I hope they do so.

Meanwhile, today's case does a competent job reviewing whether or not 47 USC 230 can support a 12b6 motion to dismiss. Unlike the Ninth Circuit, it actually cites and discusses the numerous cases in the area although, remarkably, it does not cite or address the Barnes v. Yahoo case! The court reaches the sensible positions that (1) 47 USC 230 does support a 12b6 motion, (2) as a result, the plaintiff was not entitled to discovery, and (3) the case should be dismissed. For more discussion on why 47 USC 230 supports a 12b6, see Paul Levy's excellent brief.

Substantively, today's lawsuit is brought by a shooting victim who claims that the shooter bought the gun via Craigslist. The complaint argues that Craigslist had a duty to prevent the sale of guns to future criminals and therefore Craigslist breached the duty. This argument is similar to the Doe v. MySpace cases (1, 2) in which the plaintiffs argued that MySpace had a duty to police its website "premises" to prevent online communications that lead to offline crimes. The plaintiff's argument here fares no better here than it did in the MySpace cases. 47 USC 230 precludes the imposition of liability for any breach of duty by failing to police its users' communications (putting aside the also-relevant inquiry of whether Craigslist could have any duty that would have prevented this offline tragedy). The plaintiff tries to get around 230 by arguing it's just trying to hold Craigslist accountable as a "business" rather than as a speaker or publisher of third party content, but the court rejects this goofy argument as "unpersuasive."

More on the case from Eugene Volokh.

Tonight I managed to get out for my first decent run since racing in the Cabot Trail Relay a few weeks ago. While out pounding the trails for what felt like forever, I was able to catch up on some of my podcast listening. I highly recommend you check out two of the episodes I listened to, from two of my favourite podcasters.

TVO Search Engine

If you're not a regular listener, you may not know that Jesse Brown's excellent podcast recently moved homes - from CBC (their loss) to TVO (their gain). Michael Geist has done a wonderful job recently of drawing attention to plagiarism and bias in a report by the Conference Board of Canada claiming that Canada is a hot-spot for internet piracy (the report has now been recalled by the organization). In his second Search Engine episode in his new TVO home, Jesse interviews Anne Golden, CEO of the Conference Board. It's awkward, it's uncomfortable, and it's fantastic journalism from someone that doesn't let people get away with a template messaged response to questions. Make sure you check it out.

CBC Spark

Nora Young's Spark podcast has long been a favourite of mine. While it has a similar tech focus to other podcasts to which I subscribe, Spark tends to cover stories I might otherwise overlook. In Spark episode 80, Nora interviews Andrea Reimer from Vancouver City Council about Vancouver's plan to open up municipal data (in the same manner also announced by David Miller for the City of Toronto at this year's Mesh Conference). I found the interview immensely refreshing. Coming from a government background, I know that there's often a fear within government of what people will do with information. This often leads to the minimum information necessary being shared with the public. Reimer's take, in contrast to that:

we shouldn't, as policy makers, fear the public knowing what we know when we're making decisions, and in fact by knowing it perhaps we could inform ourselves better maybe they'll think of new creative or throw in more information that we didn't have

I found myself nodding and smiling throughout the interview. Well worth a listen, for a refreshing take on how governments can go about sharing information with the people who are funding its collection. What other podcast episodes have caught your eye (or ear) recently?

Trademark owners with registrations can register their trademarks with Facebook in order to block potentially infringing URLs from being created. Here is a link to the submission page.

We shall see if this actually becomes an issue similar to cybersquatting in domain names, but due to the shortness of time between now and the 13th I'm posting the information here to help get the word out. Please let me know in the comments below what you think of this process and how Facebook has handled it. Personally, it would have been nice for there to have been more notice.

Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Samsung's Pixon 12: a dozen megapixels of cameraphone nonsense in June After failing to show at the Mobile World Congress event in February, Samsung's rumored 12 megapixel cameraphone has finally arrived. Meet the Pixon 12 and its 3.1-inch AMOLED touchscreen with a Sammy promise of fast shutter speeds and quick browsing.

Sometime next week, the company is going to announce that in its first month of inclusion in comScore's measurement system, it has taken the lead over one-stop shop gaming destinations in traffic by a margin. Combined with the company's claim that the so-called extended network' is growing its delivered impressions by 5 to 10% month-over-month, Mochi Media should be attracting over 100 million visitors on a monthly basis right about now.

Looking at worldwide traffic, comScore pegs the Mochi Media network to have received a little over 91 million unique visitors last April, or roughly 8.2 per cent of the total traffic measured in the Online Gaming' category for that month. These are impressive numbers: the second ranked online gaming destination is Spil Games, and the total amount of traffic that network receives on a global scale per month is close to that of Mochi Media Action, a subset of Mochi's network made up of only one genre (adventure games). Familiar brands you'd expect to rank higher, such as Yahoo! Games, MSN Games, EA Online and Nickelodeon, all obtain less than half Mochi Media's reach worldwide.

It's worth noting, however, that most of this traffic is coming from countries outside the U.S.: from those 91+ million visitors per month worldwide, only about 16 million visitors or roughly 17% originates from the Unites States. The company tells me a lot of visitors come from other English speaking nations like Canada and the U.K. but also from China and a good number of European countries.

I also got some numbers regarding its current network size: Mochi Media currently includes more than 14,000 games played across 30,000 websites, which the company claims translates to 1 billion game plays a month worldwide. A company representative declined to share any details about its revenue - the company provides technology for game developers to integrate advertising units powered and distributed by Mochi Media - but did say sales of pre-roll video advertising units are going particularly well, with CPM rates in the low to mid-teens for the U.S. and the UK.

Mochi Media is backed by $14 million in venture capital from Accel Partners and Shasta Ventures. Its most recent financing round was a $10 million Series B round from both investors back in June 2008. Meanwhile, the startup has convinced both a former MySpace (Carol Werner) as a Yahoo exec (Eric Boyd) to join its ranks and spurred small startups like the recently seed-funded HeyZap to do similar things.

Keep your eyes on this one, folks.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0

Via Fudzilla

A post from the Asus Eee PC blog.

Shuttle's Embedded Slim nettops to come out with VIA's Nano CPU

Get Started

Our Sandbox environment is available now, for you to build and test your application. Find out more about the opportunity and how to get started at http://developer.ebay.com/products/selling-manager-applications/

You can also see the full program guidelines on the developer site, located at the URL below:
http://www.developer.ebay.com/products/selling-manager-applications/program/

Launch with us this Summer!

The public release of Selling Manager Applications to the eBay seller community will be in August 2009. We are continuing to accept applications for our summer release. If you are interested in launching with us this summer, please contact us to initiate your Business Review. We will be locking in our launch partners by mid-June.

Upcoming Changes

• The eBay Managed Billing Platform will be released in late June. Developers should expect disruption to production access in late June and disruption to sandbox access in early July. All developers will need to integrate with the managed billing platform after the release is complete. The key changes include:
• • Setting up billing plans for applications
  • Updates to the OEPI Interface
• In June, documentation will be provided to assist developers with these changes.
• The public release of Selling Manager Applications to the eBay seller community will be in August 2009.

For more information and latest status on the Selling Manager Applications platform, please see the Selling Manager Applications User Guide at:
http://developer.ebay.com/DevZone/selling-manager-applications/Concepts/SellingManagerApps_APIGuide.html

MOBfest is an annual music festival in Chicago that features local bands. Natiiv Arts & Media, my company, focuses on social media coaching for local bands. It only makes sense that MOBfest and Natiiv would come together in the form of a showcase.

On June 18, 2009, at the Fiesta Cantina on Clark, four bands that work with Natiiv will be performing. The line-up is....

Calvin Marty & The Sunken Ship (headlining... you might remember them from this post.)

Cobalt and The Hired Guns (who were in the Metromix contest with I Fight Dragons)

Incredible Shrinking Boy (from The Real World soundrack)

and Matt Ryd (who has been featured on Scrubs and was an RA in college)

For now I'm saying that the door opens at 7PM.. I don't know what the cover is going to be... (I've never actually been in charge of a show like this before, so Rachel from MOBfest is leading the way.) Why don't you hop on over to Facebook and RSVP?

On Twitter? So are these guys. @cmatss @wil_fleming @cobaltandthehgs @cobaltmatt @incboy @mattryd

One more Natiiv band that I know also have a MOBfest show - that's I Fight Dragons and they'll be at the Elbo Room on June 20.

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Many people pointed out the double taxation issue involved with C corporations. C Corporations pay taxes and then when money is removed from the corporation to the investors or founders, another round of taxes is imposed. On the surface, this is a good argument for an LLC but it turns out to not have much of an impact in reality much of the time.

The other issue that people pointed out is that valuable losses can be passed through to the personal taxes of the investors and founders with an LLC. While this is also true under ideal circumstances, it turns out to not be true at all in most common cases.

Victor Fleischer reached out to me by email with a thorough research paper called The Rational Exuberance of Structuring Venture Capital Startups he had written on this very topic in 2003. I found it to be very educational and I think you will too. It's absolutely worth a full read (10 minutes or so) - and it's not as long as it looks because there are many detailed footnotes and supporting references.

Here's the gist of his paper as I read it. Many observers of the venture capital industry believe that VCs ignore LLCs primarily because C corporations are the devil they know, and secondarily because they're focused on gains only and are not typically major participants in losses (since they are investing other peoples money and not their own, primarily). This paper goes a long way towards showing why professional investors prefer C corporations and includes many potential surprises such as:

• Tax losses are often not as valuable as they seem on paper as tax rules prohibit many investors (and entrepreneurs) from capturing the full benefit of the losses.
• Corporations are less complex than partnerships. Friction costs associated with LLCs may make legal costs substantially higher over time for LLCs.
• Gains are taxed more favorably when companies are organized as C corporations from the beginning (vs converting late, if that is even legally possible).
• Employee compensation issues are much more complex with an LLC than a corporation. This can cost more and can devalue options equivalents coming from LLCs.

In short, at least in my mind, much of the argument for LLCs as being more tax efficient ends up being an illusion and only true on paper.

I hope that this starts another big argument. Blogging is for learning, and your comments and participation are really helping me learn. I thank you for that.

Keep in mind the paper is a little old and some tax laws may have changed in the interim. As always, consult your attorney and accountant as I'm no tax lawyer.

Incidentally, Victor is returning to CU as an Associate Professor at the law school this June! I'm glad to welcome him back to Boulder after he spent the last few years at the University of Illinois College of Law. I'm excited that he'll be an asset to the local entrepreneurial community once again.

Related articles

• Why Don't Venture Capitalists Like Investing in LLC's? (dividendsandpreferences.blogspot.com)
• S Corp's vs LLCs (Feld Thoughts)
• Forming an LLC May Be a Wise Choice For Your Small Business (stepbysteptips.com)

The Los Angeles authorities said John Schiefer, 27, was the nation's first defendant to plead guilty to wiretapping charges (.pdf) in connection to using botnets.

Schiefer, who went by the online handle "acidstorm," faced as many as 60 years in prison and acknowledged using a botnet to remotely control computers across the United States. Once in control of the computers, the authorities said, (.pdf) his spybot malware allowed him to intercept computer communications. He mined usernames and passwords on accounts such as PayPal and made purchases totaling thousands of dollars without consent.

The authorities said he worked by day as an information security consultant with 3G Communications. After his guilty plea, Schiefer was hired at Mahalo, the so-called "human powered search engine." Its founder, Jason Calacanis wrote that the company failed to realize that the Los Angeles company had hired a man who had pleaded guilty to being a hacker.

Calacanis point out that Mahalo users' data was not breached by Schiefer.

Note to Mahalo Users: John's work is well-supervised. Mahalo follows strict security policies and we don't store any sensitive data anyway. (Even if one of our employees did go off the deep end, the most they would have access to would be your questions and answers on Mahalo Answersnot much damage can be done there since they're all public anyway).

The defendant was among eight individuals indicted or successfully prosecuted in a crack down on black hat hackers who use armies of zombie computers to commit financial fraud, attack web sites with floods of traffic and send spam. The crimes at issue involved more than $20 million in losses, according to the FBI.

The FBI dubbed the eight cases "Operation Bot Roast II" -- the second round of its investigations against botnets, one of the most dangerous threats online today. The first FBI crackdown on botnets was announced in June, 2007.

See Also:

• Weak Password Brings 'Happiness' to Twitter Hacker
• Miley Cyrus Hacker Raided by FBI
• Pop Superstar Sting Supports Pentagon Hacker, Condemns U.S. ...
• Palin E-Mail Hacker Says It Was Easy
• Israeli Hacker Says He Contemplated Suicide
• Miley Cyrus Hacker Used Celebrity MySpace Accounts for Spamming ...
• Guilty Plea: Blind Hacker Admits Harassment, Eavesdropping, Fraud ...
• Hardware Hacker Charged With Selling Cable Modems That Get Free ...
• Security Report: Most PCs Run Outdated, Hacker-Friendly Software ...
• Hacker Reportedly Kidnaps and Tortures Informant, Posts Picture as ...
• Valve Tried to Trick Half Life 2 Hacker Into Fake Job Interview ...
• Hacker Launches Botnet Attack via P2P Software

Appellee Smith was an operator under two joint operating agreements (JOAs) governing exploration and production on an oil and gas lease known as the Bloomberg lease. Chevron was a non-operating interest owner under the JOAs.

In accordance with the JOAs, in May and June of 2004 Smith notified the non-operating interest owners of its proposal to drill four more wells on the lease. Under the JOAs, the non-operating interest owners then had 30 days to notify Smith whether they wanted to participate in the cost of the proposed operations.

On June 17, 2004, Chevron notified Smith that it didn't want to participate. By then, all the other non-operating interest owners had notified Smith that they wanted to participate. But on June 24, 2004, still less than 30 days after Chevron had received Smith's notice, Chevron attempted to revoke its previous notice. Smith declined to accept Chevron's revocation.

So what was at issue in the litigation was whether the notice period ended once each non-operating interest owner notified Smith of its decision or whether the notice period continued for 30 days, leaving open the possibility of a change of heart on the part of a non-operating interest owner.

The court held that the notice period ended once each non-operating interest owner had notified Smith of its decision; in a dissenting opinion, one judge disagreed. I'll let you read the opinion and dissent (or this ContractsProf Blog post) if you want the gory details, but for our purposes, suffice to say that the JOAs weren't sufficiently clear one way or the other. Here's the main language at issue:

1. Proposed Operations: Should any party hereto desire to drill any well on the Contract Area other than the [initial well], . . . the party desiring to drill . . . such a well shall give the other parties written notice of the proposed operation, specifying the work to be performed, the location, proposed depth, objective formation and the estimated cost of the operation. The parties receiving such a notice shall have thirty (30) days after receipt of the notice within which to notify the party wishing to do the work whether they elect to participate in the cost of the proposed operation. . . . Failure of a party receiving such notice to reply within the period above fixed shall constitute an election by that party not to participate in the cost of the proposed operation.

The moral of this story for the drafter is that when drafting a set of such procedures, ask yourself what might happen at every step and address all reasonable eventualities. That makes such provisions a drag to draft, but not as much of a drag as a lawsuit that arises because you failed to address a given eventuality.

By the way, the dissent said that the JOA language was ambiguous. That's consistent with the tendency of courts to use the word ambiguous too loosely. That's something I discuss in chapter 6 of MSCD and in this March 2008 blog post. To my mind, the language at issue wasn't ambiguousit was just insufficiently specific.

My thanks to the indefatigable Steven Sholk for letting me know about this case.

The case highlights the legal challenges facing courts and school administrators as they grapple with campus civil order and free expression in an online world.

"We're in the very first generation of this and there's nothing ripe for the U.S. Supreme Court to hear," said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Virginia-based Student Press Law Center.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in a Florida federal court, concerns Katherine Evans, now 19, who was suspended as a senior last year after creating a Facebook group devoted to her English teacher. The group was called "Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I've ever met!," and featured a photograph of the teacher, and an invitation for other students to "express your feelings of hatred."

After people's comments derided Evans for the online stunt, and expressed support for the teacher, she deleted the group. But Pembroke Pines Charter High School, which did not respond for comment, suspended Evans for three days for "disruptive behavior" and for "Bullying / Cyber Bullying Harassment towards a staff member," according to the lawsuit, which is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Evans was removed from her from advanced placement classes "and forced her into the lesser-weighted honors classes." The lawsuit alleges the black mark on Evans' permanent record is "unjustifiably straining her academic reputation and good standing."

The lawsuit(.pdf) is one of about a dozen across the United States that are part of the fallout as schools confront cyberbullying and the explosion of social networking sites. A Texas high school volleyball coach in September went so far as to declare a ban on student Facebook and MySpace profiles, a decision the Northside Independent School District reversed(.pdf). Last month, Tennessee State University blocked the online gossip site JuicyCampus at the school firewall. In June, Missouri enacted a law against "cyberbullying" in the wake of the Megan Meier suicide tragedy, which was triggered by a hoax MySpace account.

Before the internet, student speech cases usually concerned student newspapers and dress codes.

There's no bright-line rule on what constitutes free, student speech in the online world. And as schools start to regulate off-campus student speech on the internet, lawsuits are following.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never addressed the parameters of online student speech, but might soon. So far, lower courts are following a 1969 high court ruling saying student speech is protected unless it is "substantially disruptive," though the road map provided by that decision is leading different judges to varying destinations. In that landmark case, the Supreme Court said students had a First Amendment right to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.

Generally, the courts have allowed the suppression of student speech, online or off, when it threatens bodily harm and advocates illegal activity, "none of which we have in Ms. Evans' case," said one of the teen's attorneys, Matthew D. Bavaro, of Plantation, Florida.

"She has the absolute First Amendment right to do this," Bavaro said. "The question is how far does the school's authority go to punish off-campus speech they don't like? If Katie had praised the teacher, would she have been punished? The school is judging what is appropriate speech."

But with the explosion of the internet and social networking sites, "The courts are figuring out where the boundaries end and start when it comes to off-campus speech," LoMonte said.

On Wednesday, the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, one court level below the Supreme Court, will hear oral arguments in a lawsuit similar to the Florida case filed Monday.

The appeal concerns Justin Layshock, who, as a senior and honors student at a Pennsylvania high school, was suspended for 10 days after creating a mock MySpace profile of his principal.

The profile said the principal took drugs and kept beer at his desk. A federal judge overturned the suspension, ruling last year that the fake profile was not created at school and did not create a "substantial disruption."

"Public schools are vital institutions, but their reach is not unlimited," U.S. District Judge Terrence McVerry of Pennsylvania ruled last year.

Hickory High School appealed.

According to Monday's lawsuit, Evans used no profanities and stated no threats against the teacher. The suspension notice from the public school alleged only that Evans "had posted an inappropriate site regarding her teacher on Facebook." Evans is demanding that the suspension be removed from her record.

The lawsuit, before the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, claims eBay is liable for contributory trademark infringement because it refuses to police its site for infringing materials. Viacom is making the same argument in a pending copyright lawsuit against Google's YouTube.

A New York federal judge in July ruled against Tiffany, the high-end jeweler. The judge said eBay, the world's largest online auction site, was acting within the law because it removed auctions from the jeweler's counterfeited goods when notified by Tiffany. "The law demands more specific knowledge as to which items are infringing and which seller is listing those items before requiring eBay to take action," U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan wrote in July.

Tiffany, which said eBay "facilitates substantial fraud," appealed.

The latest vocal entrant into the legal debate is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and Public Citizen(.pdf). If Tiffany prevails on appeal, online marketplaces would likely come "to a halt," the groups said in a court filing Wednesday. They urged the appellate court "to reject Tiffany's effort to rewrite trademark law to relieve mark-owners of their traditional obligation to police their own marks, online and off."

Amazon and Google, (.pdf) as well as Yahoo(.pdf) and others have sided with eBay. The Council of Fashion Designers of America(.pdf) and the International Anti-counterfeiting Coalition(.pdf) have urged the court to side with Tiffany.

"Although eBay profits handsomely from a system of its own invention that facilitates substantial fraud, the district court believed that the solution to the counterfeiting problem is to put the burden on the victim," Tiffany wrote the appeals court.

Tiffany added that the lower court's ruling "favors the party that has profited from facilitating the fraud and disfavors the two groups of victims that the trademark law is designed to protect - the consumer who purchases counterfeit goods and the trademark owner, here Tiffany, which has carefully nurtured its brand for more than 170 years."

Adding to international confusion, a French court in June ordered eBay to pay $63 million to Louis Vuitton, the luxury good maker that claimed eBay failed to police adequately its auction site for Louis Vuitton knockoffs.

The appeals court has not scheduled oral arguments in the case, Tiffany v. eBay, 08-3947.

See Also:

• Bush Signs Law Creating Copyright Czar
• Judge: Copyright Owners Must Consider 'Fair Use' Before Sending ...
• Stifled by Copyright, McCain Asks YouTube to Consider Fair Use ...
• MPAA Says No Proof Needed in P2P Copyright Infringement Lawsuits ...
• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998
• Lawsuit Claim: Students' Lecture Notes Infringe on Professor's ...
• 'Orphan Works' Copyright Law Dies Quiet Death
• Google Unveils YouTube Copyright Filter to Mixed Reviews
• AT&T To Police Internet For Copyright Infractions
• Music Label's Copyright Argument is Rubbish
• Meet the Latest Copyright Scofflaw -- Meet the GOP
• Study This: Copyright Law Hurts, Helps Economy
• Egypt Conjuring Copyright Pyramid Scheme
• GOP 'Caving' on Trademark Lawsuit Threats
• Judge Doesn't Give Tiffany a Trademark Silver Spoon in eBay Flap ...
• Judge Throws Wrinkle Into Plastic Surgery Trademark Claim
• GOP Threatens CafePress Over Shirts, Stickers and Logos
• Google Profits From Typo Squatting, Report Charges

Blaise Alleyne is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Blaise Alleyne and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

[Note: I'm back from my vacation. For a short recap of my experience, see my FAQs about my trip to the Hulahula River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.]

Nemet Chevrolet Ltd. v. ConsumerAffairs.com, Inc., 1:08CV254 (E.D. Va. June 18, 2008). The CMLP page with links to source documents.

ConsumerAffairs.com is a consumer review site with a twist. It describes itself as:

a private, non-govermental [sic] entity that empowers consumers by providing a forum for their complaints and a means for them to be contacted by lawyers if their complaints have legal merit. Your complaints and comments may be published, shared with the news media and reviewed by attorneys at no cost to you.

A Legal Times article written when this lawsuit was first initiated raises some questions about ConsumerAffairs.com's architecture. First, it suggests that the domain name capitalizes on consumers who might mistakenly assume that the site is affiliated with a governmental consumer affairs office. Second, the article questions the ties between the site and the Horwitz plaintiff's class action law firm, which mines the consumer-submitted complaints looking for potential class action claims and named plaintiffs. But regardless of these attributes, for my purposes ConsumerAffairs.com is a garden-variety consumer review site. Consumers submits their gripes and ConsumerAffairs.com publishes them. As a natural consequence, some vendors will be unhappy with the things consumers are saying about them.

This lawsuit's unhappy vendor is Nemet Chevrolet, a Jamaica, NY auto dealer who has been the target of several consumer-submitted complaints on ConsumerAffairs.com. See, e.g., this page. Nemet sued ConsumerAffairs.com twice but each time voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit for jurisdictional concerns. Finally, satisfied it found jurisdiction over ConsumerAffairs.com, it brought out the big guns--specifically, DC powerhouse law firm Patton Boggs. As the Legal Times article quotes Nemet, "I knew I had to do something, and I got a very, very powerful law firm." Sadly for Nemet, its very, very powerful law firm's complaint still got quickly crunched by a 12b6 motion to dismiss.

Nemet's claims for defamation and tortious interference were preempted by 47 USC 230. This is really a textbook application of 230--the complaint even specifies that the posts were written by third party consumers. Thus, the only issue on the court's mind is whether 230 supports a 12b6 (it correctly determines that it does). Nemet tries to get around 230 by alleging in its briefs and supporting documents that ConsumerAffairs.com created the content at issue and wrote headlines and other supporting materials, but the court refuses to consider these allegations because they weren't in the complaint. Some courts might have entertained a leave to amend the complaint to let these allegations in, but this court clearly wasn't interested.

The court also dismisses the Lanham Act unfair competition and false advertising claims for lack of standing because Nemet and ConsumerAffairs.com aren't competitors. Alternatively, even if there was standing, the court would dismiss both claims:

* the unfair competition claim [this is ambiguous but I think it actually is treating it as a trademark infringement claim, even though the complaint didn't allege infringement] because an auto dealer and a consumer complaint site are so dissimilar that there is no possibility of likelihood of consumer confusion. The court's discussion is rather garbled here, so I'm not exactly sure what the court was doing or saying. However, if the court was thinking of this as a trademark infingement claim, then its ruling is clearly out of sync with other uncited cases (such as the SMJ case), and trademark infringement claims are not really susceptible to dismissal on a 12b6.

* the false advertising claim because consumer complaints aren't advertising as contemplated by the statute.

I have some questions about the rigor of this court's legal analysis, but I also think the court's message is clear and unmistakable: if a vendor has a problem with a consumer review or complaint online, TAKE IT UP WITH THE CONSUMER AND LEAVE THE INTERMEDIARY OUT OF IT.

The Chicago Reader was also at SEED 3 and published this profile: How to Make Money on the Internet: Do what you love, and other tips from the Web cowboys at the Seed Conference. Includes this great quote from Gary V:

Don't quit your job to become the queen of cheese. But if you're doing something that blows and you hate it, go work at 7-Eleven to pay your bills and spend every other hour building your personal plan. If you work 9 AM to 6 PM and get home at 7, whatever you put in between 7 and 3 AM is what you're gonna get in return. You want to watch Lost? Knock yourself out. I don't watch shit. I don't read shit. I'm all about my community and putting out content. I don't consume. I put out.

Related: Mike Rohde's SEED Conference 2007 sketchbook notes [SvN]

It's also worth noting that Josh did a lot of editing work behind the scenes for our feature writers, such as Alex Iskold and Bernard Lunn. So he really has been a fantastic contributer to ReadWriteWeb, as both a writer and editor, and an absolute pleasure to work with.

Note: there is a new writer coming on board, which I will announce in a separate post on Saturday.

10 Classic Josh Posts

Below I've listed 10 of Josh's posts that I've particularly enjoyed over the past 15 months. This is a completely subjective list. I nearly called it 'Top 10 Josh Posts', as a kind of inside joke that I think he would appreciate :-)

• Internet Killed The Television Star: Reviews of Joost, Babelgum, Zattoo, and More -- Josh's first post on RWW, dated 6 June '07. I believe it was after reading this post, which Josh wrote as a guest writer, that I thought: "I need to hire this guy".
• Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One -- Josh's second post! Crowdsourcing has been one of his favorite topics, see also IdeaScale - Crowdsourcing R&D (more links to his crowdsourcing posts inside that).
• Rolling Your Own Online Office
• Web 2.0 Backpack: Web Apps for Students
• Top 10 Facebook Apps: Work; Top 10 Facebook Apps: Play; Top 10 Facebook Apps: Media; Top 10 Facebook Apps: Utility; Top 10 Facebook Apps: Extension -- Josh has written a lot of outstanding posts about Facebook, and this 5-part series on top Facebook Apps is still a must-read.
• Is Facebook Worth the Hype?
• The Web 2.0 Election: Does the Internet Matter in Election Politics? -- online politics has been another strong topic for Josh, as this post demonstrates. I always looked forward to reading his take on how the Web was becoming a part of the political process.
• A Big List of Sites That Teach You How To Do Stuff -- still ranks as one of our most successful posts ever, proving once and for all that the Web loves lists.
• Beacon Saga Comes to an End: Facebook Adds Global Opt-Out, Apologizes -- a great overview of the Beacon saga at Facebook.
• There is No Web 3.0, There is No Web 2.0 - There is Just the Web -- 'nuff said!

All the best Josh in your future endeavours. Stay in touch and we hope to see you regularly in the RWW comments ;-)

New Version Of NewsGators Widget Platform Makes It Even Easier for Brand & Media Companies to Build, Deploy, & Track Widgets

Denver, Colo. June 19, 2008 NewsGator Technologies Inc. today announced the general availability of Editors Desk 2.1, a new version of the companys widget platform that makes it even easier for brand and media companies to build, deploy, and track widgets.

Updates to NewsGators widget platform include a dramatically redesigned user interface, sophisticated new templates, and an easier, more streamlined workflow for widget creation. Editors Desk 2.1 boasts exciting new features including a widget search tool for simple creation of subject-specific content widgets, a duplicating clone capability that allows users to easily create similar widgets, and feed monitoring that provides instant feedback on widget performance and feed errors.

Media and brand companies are embracing widget strategies at a breakneck pace because syndicating content with widgets works, said Jeff Nolan, vice president, NewsGator Software-as-a-Service. By simplifying the creation, deployment, and management of widgets, Editors Desk 2.1 enables companies to quickly and easily realize positive business results from extended brand reach to increased website monetization.

NewsGators widget platform is part of NewsGator Software-as-a-Service, which encompasses the companys syndication and data services offerings and helps media companies, content publishers and advertisers engage audiences through the use of social media and Web 2.0 technologies. NewsGator's Web 2.0 syndication products, including personalized RSS readers, Widget Framework, Community Publisher and Widget Ads, give companies the tools they need to enable their audiences to create, subscribe and interact with the most relevant content while staying within the company's brand. NewsGators widget and data services are in use by some of the world's largest media companies and brands, including CNN, Media General, National Geographic, Newsweek, CBS News, Reuters, USA Today and Discovery Communications. For more information, visit www.NewsGatorWidgets.com.

About NewsGator Technologies, Inc.
NewsGator Technologies helps enterprises and media companies leverage social computing solutions to deliver real business value. The companys enterprise social networking and widget services are in use by hundreds of the worlds most recognized brands, including Bank of America, Biogen Idec, CBS, CNN, Discovery, National Geographic, Procter & Gamble and USA Today. NewsGator Social Sites and Enterprise Server give enterprises better ways to collaborate, share content, expand employee knowledge and improve productivity. NewsGator Widget Services enable media and brand companies to better engage their audiences and extend the value of their brands through viral syndication of content. NewsGator also offers free, award-winning RSS aggregators for the Web, desktop, mobile devices and e-mail clients. For more information, visit www.newsgator.com

Contact Information
Laura Farrelly
NewsGator
303-552-2046
lauraf(at)newsgator(dot)com

Jennifer Gazin or Zoe Vandeveer
LaunchSquad
415.625.8555
newsgator(at)launchsquad(dot)com

So I choose to ignore and be an optimist. Eddie is an optimist as well , but has been linking to some great stuff the last week so go check it out.

I rarely get negative on this blog for the opportunity train is just too vast. That said, there have been fewer and fewer new ideas since late January, when I took many trend lumps and went light on stocks.

Now we are in June and there are even fewer exciting trend ideas than January and the market mood is getting angrier, more agitated and restless.

I am not smart enough to describe all the events that are creating what Todd thinks is a meltdown possibility , but once in a while it's good to remind yourself that

Since Tiger is not golfing anymore this year, I am in as negative a mood as I have been in a while, so deal with it.

It's a good read too. Todd is a great writer.

Here is one of our first Wallstrip interviews and it's with Toddo':

In today's episode, Mark Frauenfelder brings his own espresso machine to US Barista Champion, Kyle Glanville, to learn how to make the perfect espresso. Kyle also gives a hands-on demonstration of the "ultimate nerd's way to make coffee."

This weekend, Kyle will be competing against the best baristas from around the globe in the 2008 World Barista Championship. The final round and awards ceremony are on Sunday, June 22nd, and streaming video of the competition can be seen now and through the weekend at worldbaristachampionship.com.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video and links to previous episodes featuring Kyle Glanville and Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea.

There are some mighty good bands on this, certainly a few that we recommend skipping a corporate lunch or two to check out. Hell, bring your CEO along. I'm sure he'll enjoy it.

June 16th--Bird Names, presented by Bottom Lounge
June 23rd--Gary Higgins, presented by the Abbey Pub
June 30th--Killer Whales, presented by mP Productions
July 7th--Le Loup, presented by Schubas
July 14th--Bill Callahan, presented by JAM Productions
August 4th--Tortoise, presented by The Hideout
August 11th--TBA
August 18th--The Ex with Getatchew Mekuria, presented by the Empty Bottle
August 25th--Habib Koite & Bamada, presented by Martyrs'

In an interview with the Guardian, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth just came out and admitted that a version of the OS specifically aimed at Asus Eee devices was, indeed, in development:

TG: Will you be coming out with a tailored version of Ubuntu for the ultraportable sector?

MS: We're announcing it in the first week of June. It's called the Netbook Remix. We're working with Intel, which produces chips custom-made for this sector

Fantastic news. You can slap Ubuntu on a subnotebook as it is, of course, but I've read there's a certain degree of general wonkiness on getting it to run perfectly on the hardware. I think this is a real smart move: the desktop space is pretty much owned by Vista and OS X, both of which are simply too beefy for Eee-class devices. Ubuntu could own this space if they tried... an excellent way to introduce their OS to more consumers.

interview: Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu [Guardian]

Image: Lloyd Humphreys

View Poll

Pheedo announced that Gawker Media, publisher of several of the web's most popular media properties including Gizmodo and Lifehacker, experienced more than 300 percent growth in RSS advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2008.

Gawker Media has always made full content feeds available from the beginning, believing that the RSS channel was a valuable and under-levered distribution channel for marketing our content, Christopher P. Batty, Vice President of Sales of Gawker Media, said.

According to a recent study from Universal McCann, RSS use is exploding, growing faster than all other key social media platforms, including social networking and video sharing. According to the study, the number of RSS users jumped 153% between June 2007 and March 2008.

MSI have just released pricing details for the Wind, and it's looking very good. Americans will get the 10" Wind on the 3rd of June, featuring a 1024x600 LCD, an 80GB HDD, a 1.3 megapixel webcam and a six-cell battery specced for 5.5 hours of life, along with Intel's new Atom processor. If you want the Linux version with 512MB of RAM, the price will only be $399. You'll pay an astonishing $150 premium for XP and an extra half-gig of RAM though for the Windows flavor, which costs $549. Just slap Ubuntu on the damn thing and save yourself a couple bills.

Despite its gauche white plastic shell, the MSI Wind subnotebook may have just ripped the lashing, fluid-spurting spine out of the Asus Eee's market share and become the subnotebook to beat. $399 for a subnotebook that costs less than $400 and has six hours of battery life? Sold.

MSI unveils pricing, launch date for Wind laptop [Tech Report]

Image: Crunchgear

Google AdWords has just made a major announcement: they are launching Google TV Ads, an all-digital system that lets you place your ads into TV program. The service has been available as a trial program for over a year now, and now Google has opened it up for everyone.

Using TV Ads is almost as easy as using Google AdWords: you do it all from a web interface in a couple of simple steps. First, you choose your target audience; then, you choose the networks, dayparts, and specific programs you want your ad to run on. Finally, you choose the cost-per-thousand impressions you're willing to pay; and you actually pay after your ad airs on TV.

Of course, to place an ad on TV; you first need to have a TV ad; however, Google's Ad Creation Marketplace provides you with the tools to connect with pros who will provide scripting, copywriting, editing, production and voiceovers for your ad.

There's a sweet deal thrown into the mix, too; for a limited time, Google will cover the cost of creating your TV ad through the marketplace up to $2000. Read the fine print, though; there's no free lunch. Here's an excerpt:

Promotional credit valid only for Google TV Ads customers with active AdWords accounts who have created and successfully run a Google TV Ads campaign. Ad must air on TV through Google TV Ads by June 30, 2008. Advertisers will be charged for TV advertising and receive the promotional credit for the amount of the cost of creative - up to $2,000 - after the campaign has been active for at least 4 weeks with a minimum average budget of $2,000 per week.

To understand how huge this is, try and set up a TV ad campaign through any other means. Yup, it's way more complicated than what I've just described. Google now provides anyone with a credit card and an internet connection with the ability to create a television commercial and monitor the success of their campaign using a simple online tool. Touche!

As far as the effectiveness of Google TV Ads compared to other ways of setting up TV commercials, I guess it will be a lot like Google AdSense; there are better options out there, but it's available to everyone and therein lies its appeal.

Check out a demo for Google TV Ads here. Screenshots below.

---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Google Desktop Gadgets for Your Startpage
Google AdSense on Your Mobile Websites
Google Talk Turns Into a Chat Widget
Google Voluntarily Taking Your Analytics Data
Google Maps Street View
Zoho Writer Goes Offline with Google Gears
Google Maps Gets Business Reviews

About ScrnShots

At first glance, ScrnShots appears to be a takeoff on sites like FFFFOUND! or We Heart It (our coverage). Those sites let you "favorite" pictures from the web as inspiring, interesting, artistic, and so on. ScrnShots takes it a step further, encouraging you to take a screenshot of the image and then upload it to their service.

Once uploaded, you can tag the screenshot, add a description, and notate the URL from which it came. The screenshot is then available for others to find and use on their own site via an embed code. For example, here's a screenshot I took of a Twitter review site, microrevie.ws:

A Sample Embedded Screenshot

For that screenshot, I used the thumbnail-sized embed code, but there was also an embed code for the full-screen version as well as a medium-sized version, which is the one that displays by default when you go to view a particular screenshot's page.

Grabbing the embed code was as simple as copy-and-paste, but I initially thought that the embed code feature wasn't working yet because, when looking at the embed code on the page, it showed only a truncated portion of the embed code's URL. (See below). However, after copying-and-pasting, through some sort of technological magic, the entire embed code appeared.

The Embed Codes

There is also a blog widget available from ScrnShots which allows you to paste a widgetized version of a screenshot or screenshots onto your own site or social network profile. The widget comes in small or medium size and can be configured to display anywhere from one to ten of your most recent screenshots. Feeds for each user's recent screenshots and favorite screenshots are available as well.

The ScrnShots web site is well-designed and easy to use. However, the one thing it lacks is some sort of upload tool. As it is right now, screenshots have to be uploaded one-by-one, a tedious process that simply takes to long for anyone to become a heavy user of the service. That could be by design though, since they are still in private beta and may not be ready for massive uploads of photos just yet.

When it comes to their business model, ScrnShots is taking a page from flickr's book. At launch the site will be free with unlimited uploads, and, on June 6th, the PRO service will begin. With a PRO account, you can continue to upload unlimited screenshots and mark them as private, where they can only be shared with specific people you designate. Basic account owners can continue to use the service for free, but will have a monthly cap on uploads.

ScrnShots vs Flickr

ScrnShots will certainly appeal to the design community, who may want to use it to share images with each other, but it seems odd to focus on just that niche when there is an untapped potential to become the main site where bloggers can share and store screenshots with each other. As a blogger myself, I know that I have a whole folder of screenshots taking up space on my computer. They aren't worthy of of the gig of storage they consume and they aren't important enough for me to bother uploading to flickr, yet I haven't deleted any of them just in case I need to reuse one at some point. Having a site where I could offload them would be incredibly handy.

Inspirational Designs of Shots of Web Sites?

In addition, flickr, being the big sharing site for photographers, is filled with photos with varying levels of copyright. Some you can use, some you can't, some you can if you link to a URL and give the photographers name, etc. On flickr, there are some people don't care if you use their image, but there are many others who think that it's worthy of link to their web site if you do so.

Personally (and I think many bloggers would agree with me on this), I don't think taking a screenshot of a web site or logo represents any special effort on my part, so I would have no problem uploading all my screenshots to a service like ScrnShots for others to use. And as a blogger, having a site filled with publicly available screenshots for use, worry-free, would be a great resource.

Interestingly, the source claims that you won't be able to get this deal from an Apple store, but only from AT&T directly. Also, it'll be locked so you can't take it to another carrier... or will be for about five minutes before the Internet figures out the newest way to hack it.

All the other usual rumors are confirmed by the source: early June, 3G and GPS. They will still apparently come in only 8GB and 16GB flavors, although that seems a bit hard to believe to me, given the iPod Touch comes with up to 32GB. Finally, in keeping with Apple's design philosophy, if you can't figure out a way to improve its looks, make it thinner: the 3G iPhone will allegedly be 2.5 mm thinner than the original.

Take with the usual grain of salt, but it all parses.

AT&T to cut the price of Apple's New iPhone [Techland]

The message was clear: go to hell, bargain seekers. Sony will not be pandering to the nascent low-cost UMPC market. The very term is an oxymoron, Sony snorts. UMPCs should be sleek, slim and paralyzed with crapware. They should be marketed to individuals with smooth, cylindrical drainage shunts installed in their brainpans to match every digit of their post-six-figure income. They should cost more per ounce than heroin filtered through the limbic system of Tom Cruise.

Luckily, not every laptop maker is following suit. In fact, most aren't. They see money in paperback-sized laptops that are cheap enough to sell to anyone. Hot on the heels of HP's Mini-Note 2133 comes Dell, announcing their intent to release their own low cost, ultraportable notebook to the masses as early as June, lining up nicely with the release of Intel's Atom processor. The price should fall in line with the rest of the Eee-clones.

Time to stay ahead of the pack, Asus. Where's the Fff?

Compal Electronics Official: Dell To Launch Low-Cost Laptops [CNN Money]

Apple held one of their flashy dog-and-pony shows (er, press conferences) this morning to bring us all up to date on the latest developments for the iPhone. As expected, the announcements were split between discussing enterprise support and showing off the coming iPhone SDK. The beta releases of these things are going out to developers today, but if you're an iPhone user, don't get too excited: customers will see the new features as part of a software update in June (which, based on Apple's track record, probably means June 30).

On the enterprise side, the news was as much about Microsoft as about Apple. Though they had a laundry list of features their enterprise customers were demanding (push email, Cisco VPN compatibility, enforced security policies, remote data wipe, and more), it's been clear to outside observers that the Blackberry has had a huge advantage over the iPhone in corporate settings simply due to Microsoft Exchange support. Well, no more. In addition to implementing all the other enterprise wishlist features, the next version of the iPhone software will include ActiveSync technology so it can talk directly to an Exchange server.

Of course, Apple wasn't shy about pointing out the superiority of this direct communication to the old-fashioned method of using a proxy server to grab mail from Exchange and shove it out to the device. If there was anyone who doubted that Apple is gunning directly for RIM's business, this part of the presentation (with its dig at reduced reliability of systems with more moving parts) should convince them.

On the software development front, Apple is delivering a version of XCode that's iPhone-aware (the same tools they use to build iPhone software in house). That includes getting the right APIs into XCode, offering remote debugging and a simulator, and putting together specialized instruments for debugging and performance-tuning iPhone applications. While this may look revolutionary to some Apple-centric developers, to be fair Windows Mobile developers have had all of that for their platform for years. What they don't have, of course, is a way to target the iPhone.

As you'd expect, this development environment is productive, even for folks who don't already know XCode development. Demo'd code - all written in two weeks or less - included image processing, a couple of games (including a version of EA's unreleased Spore), a client for Salesforce, AIM for the iPhone (can native Twitter be far behind?), and a version of Epocrates (a medical software package that's currently available for Windows Mobile, Palm, and Blackberry).

The software tools are coupled with the App Store, a new software distribution platform that will put a catalog of installable applications directly in front of every iPhone user, complete with things like featured applications and popularity rankings. This will be the exclusive way to distribute applications, and as a developer you'll pay Apple 30% of your sales price off the top to be included. On the other hand, for that 30% they run the store and handle credit card processing. The 30% cut holds even if your price is free - that is, there's no charge to distribute free applications via the App Store. Apple will also exercise some editorial control: no porn, nothing malicious, and bandwidth hogs - a codeword for no VOIP over the ell networks.

Developers can download the SDK for free, but to get into the distribution program, or to run applications on a real device instead of a simulator, you need to pay $99. But there's a potential way to recoup that money: venture firm KPCB is putting together a $100 million iFund for firms building iPhone software.

So, what's in this for web workers? If you get your email via Exchange, the iPhone will become a much more attractive device in about four months. For everyone else, it's up to the horde of developers to take that SDK and build compelling applications. (And there's definitely a horde: KPCB's web site crashed moments after the iFund was revealed). Even developers who don't want to chase the VC money will find the cost of entry to the iPhone platform extraordinarily low, compared to programming for other devices in the same class.The most important long-term effect of today's announcements is likely to be the establishment of the iPhone as a credible platform for open development.

Share/Send

Y Combinator startup Heroku, which has been in private beta since October, is coming out today with more details about how it's out to ease the development and deployment of Ruby on Rails (RoR) applications.

There are two sides to Heroku's offering. The first is a completely in-browser development environment where RoR programmers can build their apps instead of doing so with software on their own computers. Relative to other programming languages, Ruby and the Rails framework can be particularly onerous just to install and configure. Heroku wants both amateur and advanced programmers to get coding right away by making RoR development possible with any browser-equipped computer.

The second aspect to Heroku's offering, which it is promoting with new materials on its website today, will allow RoR developers to not only build their apps with Heroku but to host and scale them there as well. Heroku is using Amazon Web Services to provide automatic scaling of its hosted apps and plans, like a utility, to charge premium users for the amount of processing power they consume. Even if you don't want to build your app within Heroku, you can import it to (and later export it from) the hosting service to enjoy its automatic scaling capabilities.

For the time being, those who are interested in developing and/or deploying their RoR apps with Heroku can submit their names to a waiting list. Co-founder James Lindenbaum says that they are actually letting people into the site pretty quickly and are using the waiting list mostly as just a way to prevent an onslaught of new users.

A free version of Heroku's hosting will be available to beta testers, with a premium version coming later that will remove Heroku branding, allow for custom domains, lift bandwidth and processor caps, and provide a set of advanced developer tools such as performance metrics and code optimization.

Heroku, while part of this winter's batch of Y Combinator startups, has been in development since last June and has already attracted 2,500 users who have built about 2,000 apps. The three founders have backgrounds in enterprise software development and came up with the idea for Heroku when they witnessed the rising popularity of RoR for the enterprise but also saw the difficulties that many faced with the deployment of RoR apps.

For another company working to provide better RoR hosting, check out Engine Yard (discussed here) which provides a more hands-on approach.

Engine Yard

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Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Nick started at TechCrunch in June 2006 and has worked along side of me, day and night, since then. For many months in early 2007 he was the only person other than me writing for the site. He was a perfect business partner, always steady emotionally as my temper flared at regular hosting outages, missed stories and pissed off readers. In addition to writing and general analysis, Nick also kept the site running and wrote any new code we needed. Basically, I worked him to death.

At some point late last year he simply burned out, telling me (jokingly?) I just can't write about another fucking startup. I think we both knew at that point that it was time for Nick to move on to the next step in his career.

He soon had offers from a bunch of startups and venture capitalists, and I think he made an excellent choice with Social Media. I suspect he'll give his reasons for joining, as well as some juicy gossip about TechCrunch, on his personal blog in the near future. For now, you can read his bio on our About page.

Nick joins ex-TechCrunchers Marshall Kirkpatrick (now at ReadWriteWeb), Natali Del Conte (now at CNET TV) and Ben Meyer (now at Facebook) who've abandoned us over the years. I miss working with all of them, and all are still very good friends.

You'll be missed, Nick. Come by any time to write a post or two, for old time's sake. And good luck at Social Media. They are very lucky to have you.

Social Media

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Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

I have been slacking a little over the last month on the updates, so time to play catch up.

First of all some big news, Blogcatalog has now surpassed MyBlogLog in traffic levels, if you believe Alexa data. They are in exactly the same niche, and share plenty of users, so whilst I don't trust Alexa data extensively, this is a significant achievement considering it wasn't long ago when people had trouble differentiating the two services.

If you switch to a 7 day view, you will see that Blogcatalog overtook MyBlogLog 24th January.

The observant will also note when looking at a 3 year chart that MyBlogLog had much more explosive growth over a short 3 month period, were purchased by Yahoo, and since that time has been a little bit in decline which is a shame because I still love MyBlogLog, and if I have a choice between MyBlogLog and Google Analytics for stats checking, I am more likely to have a glance in MyBlogLog than Google Analytics.

BlogCatalog has had a much more gradual growth, working to differentiate themselves by introducing lively discussion forums and member groups, and bringing bloggers together to support good causes with Bloggers Unite.
The growth has been viral, "grass roots" growth, with from memory one mention on Mashable, one mention on Marketing Pilgrim, and very little if any coverage on large technology blogs. Blogcatalog would be a great example of what Guy Kawasaki was talking about yesterday.

Forget A-list bloggers. Lousy reviews by them cannot tank your product. Great reviews cannot make it successful. Focus on big numbersany Technorati 1,000,000 blogger can be a channel to reach people. If enough people like your product, the A-list bloggers will have to write about you.

Some key recent enhancements (click through to see working examples on some of these widgets)

Blogcatalog Discussions & Groups

Discussion Forums and Groups

There are frequent enhancements to the features in the various discussion areas, the latest one being a new widget for the discussion groups you have joined - other features include practical enhancements to the discussion features, in many cases making them more useful than Facebook, where it is very hard to track discussion in the groups you join.

BlogRank Buttons (just released)

This was announced just a few hours ago

BlogCatalog ratings are based upon various metrics including votes using a widget on your site, voting on the site, visits from Blogcatalog to your blog, and overall Blogcatalog activity in various forms.

Communities Widget

This is a way to display your profile on other social media sites introduced in December. Quite simple, and useful if you don't want to give juice to the sites for reputation management.

On this one I am not sure who got there first, as MyBlogLog also launched a similar widget in December

There actually seems to be some bugs in the code generated, or maybe it is just my laggy connection, but I couldn't seem to get a version that displayed both the names of a service, and icons next to them.

BlogCatalog API

I am not that great a programmer but I have managed to play around with the Blogcatalog API and create some simple applications (still to be released) by combining data from Blogcatalog with data from other APIs. Blogcatalog has had their API available for some time.

MyBlogLog should have had their API launched months ago by my reckoning, and it finally entered beta a week ago. It seems like it might have more features than the current Blogcatalog API, but once you have opened up, opening up a little more isn't too difficult.
With wider adoption (the tech bloggers have been wooed by MBL in the past) the new MBL API is being greeted as the possible saviour of Yahoo.
Sure, it is possible MyBlogLog have more data stored, I am not sure what data Blogcatalog collect, have a wider audience, and MyBlogLog have the "social starfish" available via API, but it isn't much more work for Blogcatalog to allow access to that data.
MyBlogLog have however been working on infrastructure heavily for the last 12 months - I would hope their API is now ready for some heavy usage.

I would love to have seen some cool apps made with the Blogcatalog API by now

Support For Wordpress.com, Myspace, or Yahoo! 360 Blog?

This is something that MyBlogLog have had for some time, Blogcatalog announced support for Wordpress.com, Myspace and Yahoo! 360 yesterday.

Who knows, maybe you can even see my recent visitors in a feed reader, in fact that would be an interesting addition.

Tagging & Reading

Quite a few months ago I wrote about Blogcatalog parsing tags from your feed itmes and then listing your content on varous tag pages, just like Technorati. At the time they only offered support for a few blogs, using a specific format for tags and categories. I noticed a couple of months ago that they now have my blog being picked up and fed into tag feeds

In addition on your profile pages it is now possible to read the feeds of the blogs you have added to your neighborhood

Ok now for the big one

Blogcatalog SezWho Partnership

Blogcatalog today have just announced a partnership with SezWho, who provide special plugins to integrate with Plugin Systems on various blogging and discussion forums.
The good things from my perspective:-

• SezWho doesn't require any form of browser plugin
• This doesn't replace the existing comment system, thus a blog owner retains the content on their site, and if they choose, can remain dofollow. That isn't true of other replacement comment systems with similar features.
• No browser plugin is required - I often had problems using various browser based comment tracking with incompatibilities, and I also had problems with their plugins, though I must admit I haven't retried with cocomment recently, maybe that situation has improved. Comment tracking that required me to click a button was always awkward, and subscribing to RSS feeds for comments on individual posts just became a chore - we will see how this works in the long run
• Comment ratings - this could be likened to the thumbs up / thumbs down on SEOmoz where you gain points, but this is a distributed rating system that means you gain in reputation for leaving high quality comments across multiple blogs - I am not sure whether this gets gamed heavily, but Ihope that it will encourage better commenting, especially on dofollow blogs.

Warning:- I may be more inclined to just delete a URL from a spam comment rather than deleting them totally, so that other readers can also vote your comment down
yes, sometimes there is a little evil in me

Negative points?

• Only support for Wordpress self-hosted and Moveable Type - in many ways I would look on this as a plus, as it might encourage more people onto their own hosting, though I hope they can come up with a solution for my many blogging friends on Typepad.
• Installation is a little complicated for a novice, though there is a WordPress widget (regular readers know I don't like Wordpress Widgets though for SEO reasons)

I should also point out that as I am writing this I haven't tested the integration on this blog with the threaded comments, but I don't expect there to a problem, and by the time many people read this I will have everything up and running.

Setting Up SezWho

Log into Blogcatalog, go to your account and manage your blog

You will see just after the feed management section a big button to create an account on SezWho. |Click it, wait a moment or 2, and you will be issued an API key, and you will be given a link to click to download special versions of the SezWho plugins.

Goodbye MyAvatars

I have been using the Wordpress plugin MyAvatars for over a year now, but it is time for it to be retired.

MyAvatars uses images from MyBlogLog, and unfortunately on popular content it is starting to cause me problems on page loading times. This isn't something that was a major problem for me before, because I had a very fast connection, but it has started to cause me real problems, maybe because MyBlogLog switched over to the Yahoo image platform, or maybe it is a problem that always existed.

This doesn't prevent people viewing my content quickly, because avatars and widgets are generally loaded in parallel, but on a slow connection it can start to hurt a little.
When your total page sizes can reach over 1MB, and most of that is avatars on comments, it is time to reconsider.

One caveat, I am not sure if the SEZWho Blogcatalog plugin will add avatars to trackbacks, I will have to take a look.

Benefits

Big immediate benefit for Blogcatalog is press coverage, as SezWho are in California. I think it is a good match as both are heavily aimed at promoting discussion between bloggers, both on blogs and off them.

I am also not a fan of applications that try to do too much - SezWho seems to do just enough to be worthwhile whilst leaving me in control of content left on my blog, and commenter ratings will certainly help in making the decision on whether a commenter is generally well behaved. I don't mind short jokey comments or great post Andy if it is from someone legitimate, it is when someone comes in as a first time commenter, you rarely know if they are genuine.

About Blogcatalog & SezWho

My blog has in the last 9 months grown into quite an in depth resource on all things "Blogcatalog". I first started writing about them when they relaunched around April 2007 with an initial investment of $40000 to purchase the existing property.
Full coverage of Blogcatalog can be found by browsing my Blogcatalog tag.

Primary competitor for Blogcatalog is Mybloglog

SezWho when they received $1M investment from KPG Ventures back in October 2007 were given quite a luke warm reception on Techcrunch.

Competitors to SezWho include Disqus, Intense Debate and coComment

Specific Disclosure - I do some consulting with Blogcatalog on a very much low key, part time basis, though I also give coverage to their competitors and try to remain impartial - I have given MyBlogLog extensive coverage as well, most recently in a joint interview with Ian Kennedy on Collective Thoughts

Further coverage no doubt on the Blogcatalog blog though the press release isn't posted yet.

Related posts

• Wordpress 2.1 Launch date set (1)
• Traffic Or Topical Community - What Comes First? (28)
• Supporting Your Most Valued Communities Without WIIFM (24)
• MyBlogLog vs Blogcatalog - Differentiation (41)
• MyBlogLog Spam Hack Update & Widget Performance | Linkbait Idea (2)
• MyBlogLog API - How Far Forward Are You Thinking (3)
• I Bet You Missed Some of These (March 07) (4)
• Exclusive: Blogcatalog vs Technorati? - Sharing The Love & Tagging (nofollow removed) (20)
• Blogcatalog
  Blogger Social Networking Hub (9)
• Blogcatalog Slam Dunks MyBlogLog? (29)

-Deadspin editor and author Will Leitch telling Radar about his boss, Gawker Media sultan Nick Denton.

"Emerging companies get one opportunity to launch," said Mario Jobbe, co-founder of semantic search startup Circos, which is launching at this year's Demo conference. "We know that by going to Demo we are giving our company every opportunity to succeed."

The long list of Demo veterans that have gone on to great success entices many companies to pony up the $18,000 fee it costs for a slot at Demo. TiVo launched here. The Palm Pilot debuted here. Sun introduced Java at the 1995 conference. In February 2000, Half.com launched at Demo, and by June of that year, it had been bought by eBay for more than $300 million.

Entrepreneurs are drawn in by the ability to target such a high-quality audience with few distractions. Each startup gets just six minutes to present their new product to the waiting audience, and the time between presentation sessions is devoted to intense networking in the hallways and exhibit areas.

For VCs and other investors, Demo gives a first glimpse at new products in action. To qualify for Demo, companies must promise that the products or services they're showing are brand-new and haven't yet made the conference circuit.

Stewart Alsop, now a venture capitalist, founded Demo in 1991; it's now run by veteran journalist Chris Shipley. Although Silicon Valley companies dominated the show in its early years, this year's show has a decidedly more global focus: Half of the companies attending Demo hail from outside California, basing their headquarters in places like Georgia, Connecticut, Finland and Taiwan.

According to Shipley, the exhibiting companies "represent a whole range of technologies and applications and market sectors."

Shipley says that security and maintenance services will figure large in this year's product lineup: products to help solve infrastructure issues and simplify distribution networks. The exhibitors will also include services to facilitate video conversations and even products that promise to help children learn to read.

"We're starting to see some of the building blocks for the next generation applications which will be both delivered by enterprise software providers and individuals who are empowered to create some of their own applications," Shipley said.