Max Ray Butler, 36, faces up to 60 years in prison for the two felonies under law, but his actual sentence will be influenced by a number of factors, not least a plea agreement with federal prosecutors that was filed under seal Monday.

Wearing an ill-fitting orange jail uniform and round glasses, his hair cut short and neat, the six-foot-plus Butler towered over the burly deputy marshals that brought him into the court room. Once he settled into his seat, he spoke softly and evenly as he answered questions from the judge, frequently drawing admonishments to speak up for the benefit of the court reporter.

I actually did the actions that are relevant in the indictment, and I am guilty, Butler said, at one point.

Butler identified himself in court as Max Vision, the name he gave himself in the 1990s when he became a superstar in the computer security community. At that time Butler was billing himself out as a $100-an-hour computer security consultant, and he earned the respect of his peers for creating and curating an open source library of attack signatures used to detect computer intrusions.

But it turned out Butler was staging recreational hacks on the side, and in 2001 he was sent to federal prison for 18 months for launching a scripted attack that closed security holes on thousands on Pentagon systems, and left backdoors behind for his own use.

While in prison, Butler met more serious criminals, and he was befriended by a professional swindler named Jeffrey Norminton. After his release, Norminton introduced him to an Orange County, California entrepreneur and former bank robber named Chris Aragon.

Butler admitted Monday that he began hacking banks, merchants and other hackers to steal credit card numbers, then sold them to Aragon. Aragon, who's pending trial on related state charges in southern California, turned that stolen data into near-perfect counterfeit cards, complete with holograms, and recruited a crew of shoppers who used the cards to snap up designer merchandise for resale on eBay. Aragon earned at least $1 million in the business, police say.

Butler became a priority to federal law enforcement officials in 2006, when, under the handle Iceman, he staged a brazen takeover of the online carder forums where hackers and fraudsters buy and sell stolen data, fake IDs and specialized underground services.

He hacked into the forums, wiped out their databases, and absorbed their content and membership into his own site, called CardersMarket.

On one of the sites he hacked, called DarkMarket, Butler later discovered that an administrator named Master Splyntr was logging in from an FBI office in Pittsburgh. Butler partnered with a Canadian hacker to try and expose Master Splyntr as a fed, but his claim was largely dismissed in the underground as inter-forum rivalry. DarkMarket went on to become a full-blown undercover FBI operation, and the FBI and Secret Service began an investigation into Iceman.

(I wrote about Butler in the January issue of Wired. I'm now working on a book about him and the carder forums for Crown publishing).

Using informants and some genuine electronic gumshoe work, the feds identified Iceman as Butler about a year later, and arrested him in September 2007 at a corporate apartment he used as a hacking safe house.

When the feds seized Butler's hard drive, they found five terabytes of encrypted data on his harddrive, the government said Monday. They later cracked Butler's crypto, and discovered 1.8 million stolen credit card numbers belonging to 1,000 different banks. The banks tallied the fraudulent charges on the cards at $86.4 million.

But Butler's defense attorney told U.S. District Judge Maurice B. Cohill Jr. Monday that Butler and his associates weren't' responsible for all of the fraudulent charges.

Butler, noted federal public defender, Michael Novara, frequently cracked the computers of other members of the underground, and stole their stuff. Some of the credit card numbers found on Butler's hard drive had been in the hands of cyber thieves before Butler began his hacking spree.

Max is kind of a hacker's hacker, said Novara. There was a lot of stuff on his computer that he was not responsible for, and did not intend to use.

I don't think I ever heard the expression, a hacker's hacker' before, said Judge Cohill, with a smile.

Sources say Butler's plea deal will also wrap up a separate federal case in Virginia, in which Butler is charged with staging the first documented spear phishing attack against employees of a financial institution, gaining access to the corporate network of Capitol One bank.

Butler was calm and attentive at Monday's proceeding, which opened with federal prosecutor Luke Dembosky crossing to the defense table to shake hands with the hacker, who smiled and nodded.

Through his attorney, Butler released a two-paragraph statement following his plea.

Max Vision, known in this case as Max Butler, pled guilty today as a first step toward getting this sad chapter of his life behind him. It is unfortunate that his life circumstances in 2005 led him to participate in this criminal conduct, and he very much regrets doing so, he wrote.

Max has always preferred using his extraordinary computer skills his computer vision for the good of society and the cyber world, and he hopes that he will be given the opportunity in the future to once again don the white hat.

Asked afterward what kind of sentence the government expects for Butler, Dembosky was vague with reporters. Suffice to say, it won't be probation.

See Also:

• Notorious Crime Forum DarkMarket Goes Dark
• Cybercrime Supersite DarkMarket' Was FBI Sting, Documents Confirm
• 56 Arrested in DarkMarket Sting, Says FBI
• One Hacker's Audacious Plan to Rule the Black Market in Stolen Credit Cards
• A White Hat' Goes to Jail

Oh, and I would warn you that there'll be spoilers in this review except that, really, since I still have no idea what actually happened in this movie, I'm not sure how much I can spoil it.

Since the days of Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmmakers have reached beyond meaning. But with this summer's biggest, loudest movie, Michael Bay takes us all the way inside Caligari's cabinet. And once you enter, you can never emerge again. I saw this movie two days ago, and I'm still living inside it. Things are exploding wherever I look, household appliances are trying to kill me, and bizarre racial stereotypes are shouting at me.

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

And the true genius of Transformers: ROTF is that Bay has put all of this excess of imagery and random ideas at the service of the most pandering movie genre there is: the summer movie. ROTF is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane. You. Do. Not. Leave. The Cabinet.

Michael Bay understands that summer movies are about two things: male anxiety, and pure id. That's why he casts Shia LaBoeuf, that supreme avatar of pure male inadequacy, in the lead role. LaBoeuf projects a pathetic, wall-eyed dorkhood, when he's not babbling like a tumor removed from Woody Allen's prostate that somehow achieved sentience. I imagine the DVD of ROTF will include a whole disk of outtakes where they had to stop filming because LaBoeuf was drooling on camera. As it is, the film includes several extreme closeups of LaBoeuf's dazed stare.

Where was I? Oh yes. So LaBoeuf, who's actually a fine actor, is the stand-in for the male viewers' greatest fears about themselves. No matter how great a loser they might be, they can't be as losery a loser as Sam Witwicky. And yet, Sam has awesome giant robots stomping around telling him he's the most important awesome person ever. And he has the hottest girlfriend in the universe, Megan Fox, for whom banality is a huge aphrodisiac. The more pathetic Sam gets, the more Fox's lips pout and her nipples point, like little Irish setters.

To make matters more awesome for the insecure males in the audience, Sam actually tosses aside his giant robot fanclub and his walking-pinup girlfriend, so he can have a normal life. Of course, this only leads to other robots and hawt chicks (who turn out to be robots too) throwing themselves at him and telling him how important he is. In the end, everybody learns to appreciate Sam just a bit more than they already did, and a booming voice tells him he's earned the "matrix of leadership" through his courage and stuff.

And then there's the "id" part, which is the part where stuff blows up real good, and huge machines smash each other up. And every single performance is so ridiculous that it looks down on "over the top" as if from a great height. It's the part of your brain that thinks it would be awesome to see robots with giant dangling testicles, or hot chicks turning into robot tentacle monsters, or "ghetto" robots that talk in inept hip-hop slang and smash each other playfully, or funny Jewish men who talk about their "schmear" and randomly strip to their G-strings. Is that going too far? Then let's go 100 times farther than that and see what happens!

Transformers: ROTF is so long, you'll need to wear adult diapers to it. But the movie's pure celebration of the primal urge, and unfiltered living, will make you rejoice in your adult diapers. You'll relieve yourself in your seat with a savage joy, your barbaric yawp blending in with the crowd's screams of excitement.

And yet and here's the part where I really think ROTF approaches "art movie" status the movie's id overload reaches such crazy levels that the fabric of reality itself starts to break down. Michael Bay has boasted about how every single shot in the movie has so much stuff going on in it, it would take your PC since the dawn of time to render one frame. After a few hours of this assault, you feel the chair melt and the floor of the movie theater becomes an angry mirror into your soul. Nothing is solid, nothing is real, everything Transforms.

The closest thing I can think of to this movie is the Wachowskis' Speed Racer, which had a similar kind of CG image overload, although it was only five hours long as opposed to ROTF's nine.

And around hour six of ROTF, something curious happens: the two components male enhancement and pure id start to clash, badly. Usually, in a summer movie, the two aspects go together like tits and ass: Jason Statham plays someone who faces the same insecurities as regular dudes, but he overcomes them, and in the process he blows up everything in the world. But creating that kind of fusion requires enslaving the id to the male enhancement, and that in turn means only going way over the top instead of crazy, stratospheric over the top. Michael Bay is not willing to settle for going way over the top, like other directors.

So you have a movie that tries to reassure men that they can actually be masters of their reality but then turns around and says that actually, reality is not real. There's no such thing as the "real world," and the only thing that's left for men to dominate is a nebulous domain of blurred shapes, which occasionally blurt nonsensical swear-words and slang from ethnic groups that have never existed. If you're drowning in an Olympic swimming pool full of hot chewing gum fondue, do you still care if Megan Fox likes you?

So yes, ROTF approaches the sublime, and then just keeps rocketing. Next stop: total anarchy. In a sense, it's the first war movie ever to convey a real sense of the fog of war, the confusion that comes with battle. Somewhere around hour nine, you will understand why friendly fire happens in wartime.

So I've gotten almost all the way through this review, and I still haven't summarized the movie's plot. Here goes. It's a couple years after the first movie, and Sam is going off to college, leaving his transforming car and his hot girlfriend, whom he still hasn't told he loves her. And meanwhile, the soldiers from the first movie are running around with a bunch of late-model GM cars and trucks, which turn into robots and fight other robots sometimes. Sam sees weird symbols which make no sense (and they still make no sense at the end of the movie) and they turn out to be the key to the location of a thing that can control another thing, that will enable the bad guys to destroy the sun. Sam has to embrace the heroic destiny he's rejected, so he can save us all from solarcide.

But that bare plot summary doesn't include the twenty or thirty other storylines that could also claim to be the movie's plot. There's the whole thing where someone from Washington D.C. wonders why the U.S. military is running around the globe with a bunch of late-model GM cars from outer space, and tries to put the kibosh on the military-Autobot complex. There's the teenager who's got a conspiracy website, that competes with another conpsiracy website which turns out to be the work of a secret agent who's decided that the best way to keep things secret is to put them on a website. (It works. I post secret stuff on io9 all the time.) Various robots die and then come back to life, and there's a whole strand about whether Decepticons (the bad ones) can become Autobots (the good ones). And there's the Fallen, who's sort of the movie's villain even though he barely shows up. And people from 17,000 BC who had weird teeth and fought robots. And the ancient Egyptians did stuff. And Sam's parents go to France except that they meet a robot and then they're in Egypt.

Really, I could go on and on. This movie starts out with a coherent storyline, for the first half hour or so, and then it just starts to spin faster and faster until the centrifuge of random events slams you into the walls. It doesn't help that there are 500 robots in the movie and they all look kind of the same.

Oh, but that's the other thing about ROTF. It's actually quite funny, a lot of the time. Some of the jokes fall flat, like the "twin" robots with the ghetto speak, and a lot of the stuff with John Turturro. But the movie's relentless silliness is mostly pretty hilarious, in a Saturday morning cartoon kind of way, and almost nothing in the movie seems intended to be taken seriously.

So, to sum up: Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema, if not the greatest. You could easily argue that cinema, as an artform, has all been leading up to this. It will destabilize your limbic system, probably forever, and make you doubt the solidity of your surroundings. Generations of auteurs have struggled, in vain, to create a cinematic experience as overwhelming, and as liberating, as ROTF.

Women as well as men, everyone watching this film will feel the dissolution of all their certainties, all their illusory grasp on the world... but after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once the world is reduced, forever, to a kaleidoscope of whirling shapes, you are totally free. Nothing matters, effect precedes cause, fish spawn in mid-air, and you can do whatever you want. Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you. Feel the music of total excess stir inside your deepest core. It is your Allspark, your cube. And you are a Transformer.

Along those lines, a great documentary to check out is Spike Lee's Kobe Doin' Work (Netflix). Bryant gave the filmmaker unprecedented access to his life for one game. He's mic'd up, 30 cameras follow him, and coach Phil Jackson lets the crew into the locker room before the game, at halftime, and after the game too. Here's a preview:

It's fascinating to watch even though the game was a blowout. Also, there's a great storytelling lesson here too: Tell a story about less. See, the impulse is to go for a grand tale. In this case, it'd be to prove how great Kobe is by profiling his entire career or trailing him for an entire season. Along the way, you'd interview teammates, experts, etc. And you'd come up with a pretty generic piece.

By focusing on just a single game, Lee put a magnifying glass on how Kobe plays. Cameras trail his every move so during every timeout and every play, you get to see and hear how Kobe guides his teammates. It completely changes the way you view both the player and the game. There's no filler or outside input. It's just a laser focus on this one subject during this one day.

Sometimes it's easier to get a big message across if you narrow your scope. It's what we tried to do with our Behind the scenes at 37signals series which presented a look at one week of 37signals' Campfire usage. Not as exciting, perhaps, but the idea was similar: To tell the big story of how integral Campfire is to us, it was best to focus on a short period of time. Sometimes the perfect way to explain a universal truth is through an individual example.

Also, if you watch the documentary, Lee is incredibly loose with how he asks his questions. It means that Kobe is really relaxed and open with his answers too. If you're ever doing interviews, it's something to note: Go in with stiff questions and you'll probably get stiff answers. Go in loose and you're more likely to get your subject to open up and admit things to you they probably wouldn't otherwise.

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?

People often say that Kobe Bryant has no weaknesses to his game, but that's not really true. Before the game, Battier was given his special package of information. He's the only player we give it to, Morey says. We can give him this fire hose of data and let him sift. Most players are like golfers. You don't want them swinging while they're thinking.

If [Kobe] has 40 points on 40 shots, I can live with that, Battier says. My job is not to keep him from scoring points but to make him as inefficient as possible. The court doesn't have little squares all over it to tell him what percentage Bryant is likely to shoot from any given spot, but it might as well.The reason the Rockets insist that Battier guard Bryant is his gift for encouraging him into his zones of lowest efficiency. The effect of doing this is astonishing: Bryant doesn't merely help his team less when Battier guards him than when someone else does. When Bryant is in the game and Battier is on him, the Lakers' offense is worse than if the N.B.A.'s best player had taken the night off. [emphasis mine]

Click the play button below to listen, or click here to subscribe to us on iTunes!

Here are the show notes for this week's episode:

Shownotes for The Singularity Law Podcast: Episode 8 for December 8, 2008

Our Panel for Today:

• Prof. Michael Scott of The Singularity Law Blog
• Josh Kagan of The Josh Kagan Blog

Video Game Law as a Hot New Practice Area: Hype or Reality?

• Wall Street Journal: Video-Game Law: The Niche Legal Practice Du Jour
• LA Times: These Lawyers Got (Video) Game
• Michael Scott's blog: Videogame Law: New Legal Specialty or Marketing Hype?

The Limits of Section 230 Immunity, Part 1: Malware

• 47 U.S.C. 230
• Venkat Balasubramani's SPAM NOTES blog: Could Facebook Be Liable for Spreading the Koobface Virus?
• Green v. AOL

The Limits of Section 230 Immunity, Part 2: Trademarks

• Alleyinsider: Amazon, Google: eBay Shouldn't Have To Hunt For Trademark Infringers
• EFF: Jewelry Company Quest to Expand Trademark Law Could Quash Internet Commerce

Practice Pointer: The Continued Importance of Forum Selection Clauses

• Internet Cases blog: Court enforces forum selection clause in web hosting agreement
• Carnival Cruise Lines, Inc. v. Shute, 499 U.S. 585 (1991)

Turning Piracy Into Profit: The Myspace Experiment and Other DMCA Issues

• Reuters: MySpace, MTV Test Piracy-Profit Plan
• Michael Scott's blog: Priming the Pump - Copyright Style

Final Thoughts: Entrapment by Emoticon

• Wall Street Journal: Emoticons on Trial at the Nebraska Supreme Court

This recording is an informational resource only. It is not designed to offer legal advice.

Update: The Progress and Freedom Foundation is funded by the record labels, including EMI, Sony and a host of content providers.

A conservative think tank lashed out at U.S. District Judge Michael Davis on Monday, calling his mistrial decision (.pdf) in the Jammie Thomas music sharing lawsuit "unreasoned," "unreasonable" and "injudicious."

The new position paper (.pdf) from the Progress and Freedom Foundation says the judge's September ruling is riddled with "profound flaws" that "must be exposed before they mislead other jurists."

Davis' decision overturned a $222,000 Minnesota jury verdict against Thomas, setting the stage for a new trial.

The Washington-based PFF's staff and board are filled with former Reagan administration and other government officials. Monday's publication, "Thomas on the Making-Available Right: An Unreasoned and Unreasonable Decision," comes as the Recording Industry Association of America is demanding Judge Davis allow the record labels to appeal the decision to a higher court before a retrial commences. The trial is currently set for March.

Davis, a President Clinton appointee, tossed the jury's October 2007 verdict after concluding his jury instructions made it too easy for panelists to find Thomas liable for infringing 24 music tracks on the Kazaa file sharing program. Davis had instructed jurors Thomas was liable for infringement solely for having music in an open share folder on a peer-to-peer network, even without evidence that anyone had downloaded the music illegally.

It was an important decision, resting at the heart of what proof is required to ding a file sharer for copyright infringement, with fines totaling up to $150,000 per music track.

The RIAA has issued about 30,000 lawsuits. Most have settled out of court. Rulings on the so-called "making available" argument have been all over the map. The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled in a file sharing case.

Only one federal judge has sided with Davis. But the RIAA eventually won a $40,000 judgment from the judge, before trial, after the court said the defendant had tampered with evidence. But a Texas judge last month sided with the RIAA in a case against a teenager accused of "making available" music on a file sharing network.

In declaring a mistrial in the Thomas case, Davis wrote that "actual" distribution of music files was required. The RIAA countered that infringement was implied (.pdf), and that it was next to impossible to demonstrate somebody else downloaded files that Thomas publicly made available.

Still, the decision, even if ultimately accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court, does not kill RIAA lawsuits. In every case, the RIAA downloads music files from the open share folder. Judge Davis said the 24 downloads allegedly made from Thomas' share folder could be used as evidence of infringement. (A looming issue, however, is that the RIAA's investigators are not licensed, which could become an evidentiary issue but so far has not.)

Thomas Sydnor II, a Progress and Freedom Foundation senior fellow, blasted Davis for failing to follow case law that found pedophiles were guilty of distributing child pornography for solely having kid smut in an open Kazaa share folder. Snydor wrote that Davis "found these on-point analyses of the ordinary meaning of 'distribute' irrelevant."

Sydnor, a former copyright adviser to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the Thomas decision misread or disobeyed precedents, federal treaties, scholarly reviews and the three branches of government.

In his mistrial decision, Davis concluded the RIAA's position "is simply not reasonable."

Sydnor seized on that language.

"And with that, Thomas collapsed its rickety tower of clashing results, unreasoned decisions, and distinguished precedents," Snydor wrote. "This extreme claim was itself unreasonable, and it triggered cascading absurdities."

Illustration: Modernhumorist

See Also:

• Thomas Demands Retrial in RIAA $222000 Verdict
• RIAA Decries Attorney-Blogger as 'Vexatious' Litigator
• Beckerman: RIAA's 'Vexatious' Charge Reeks With 'Falsehood and ...
• Retrial Date Set in RIAA v. Thomas
• RIAA Decries Texas Woman as 'Vexatious' for Demanding File Sharing ...
• Judge Declares Mistrial in RIAA-Jammie Thomas Trial
• MPAA Waffling on Piracy Costs; RIAA Says Illicit CDs Worth $13.74 Each
• File Sharer Settles with RIAA for a Whopping $756 a Song

On October 28, 2008, Google and the AAP announced a settlement of the litigation. The agreement, stretching to 141 pages, provides that Google pay $125 million, plus establish a new licensing system with publishers. The system will allow any copyright owner to opt-out of the project, will require Google to pay 63% of all revenues generated by users' access to the database to a collection society (the Book Rights Registry) for distribution to copyright owners, and will result in the implementation of a DRM/subscription model for full-text access, but not for search which will be limited to short snippets for in-copyright works.

Who won?

While the copyright owners will receive compensation for the use of their works, the settlement (if approved by the court) will definitely work in Google's favor going forward. First, the high settlement amount will discourage others from entering the field giving Google a virtual monopoly on every book, periodical and other copyrighted work coming within the settlement. Second, it will be more difficult for others to claim fair use if they decided to compete with Google. While there was no determination of whether Google's conduct was or is fair use, a judge in a subsequent case may look at this settlement as evidence that massive digitizing of copyrighted works is not a fair use otherwise, why would Google, which claimed fair use all along, have settled for such a large amount? A decision in this case that Google's use of copyrighted material was a fair use would have opened the door for many competitors who could have piggybacked on the court's decision and built competitive databases protected by fair use. So a lack of a ruling on this pivotal issue plays into Google's hands.

The settlement allows Google to charge for access to these millions of digitized works something that previously would have been difficult for Google to do and still claim fair use. So the settlement establishes a legal business model for Google to monetize this huge and growing database of copyrighted materials with the copyright owners' blessing. Google get 37% of all revenues generated, where previously it was getting nothing. (Much more than iTunes gets for their music downloads.)

The settlement agreement is, in essence, a compulsory license for Google to copy virtually any copyrighted work without having to negotiate individually with copyright owners. And it sets the market rate for any negotiations Google will have in the future with copyright owners who are not part of the settlement. While copyright owners are free to opt-out of the system, it would be foolish for most copyright owners to do so. They essentially have three choices go along with the system, opt-out and forego the revenues they would get under the system, or try to set up their own system to monetized digitized version of their works (which hasn't worked in the music industry and is unlikely to work here). A fourth choice do a deal with another database developer is unlikely, since this settlement sets up huge barriers to entry for any competitive service.

So, despite the price tag, I would say that Google is the big winner in this battle, and that the publishing industry may (no, I predict, WILL) live to regret the day they gave Google exclusive control over the online, worldwide distribution of their works.

Let me tell you a story

Lid does a number of things around the Web, and sometimes I even find it hard to keep up. So I have a Google alert on her, so I can see what she is doing and what people are saying about her. That's my excuse anyways.

Last Friday I got an alert from Google with 3 references:

The references are:

1. Lid's ReadWriteWeb post about Social Media and who is doing it well from the Social Media Marketing Summit in San Francisco.
2. A post by Laurena about delicious and tagging which discusses and references Lid's article -just what the Web is intended for.
3. A post by Oggi' which looks remarkable like Lid's - it starts with the same 20 words - and even references her by name.

So who or what is Oggi's blog? Here is a screen shot.

Here is a breakdown of Oggi's blog:

1. 3 separate groups of Google advertising - two text based, and the third image based.
2. The title of the post which is the same as Lid's.
3. The content of the post is the same initial 20 words of Lid's post, then followed by Original post by Lidija Davis with Lid's name linked to her post on ReadWriteWeb.

Now the link on Lid's post is interesting in that it is not a direct link to the post on ReadWriteWeb, but rather an indirect link via Google's FeedBurner service. Here is the link:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/nS1e6RgCjbw/social_media_for_business_who_is_doing_it.php

So what about the other posts on this blog? Surprise, surprise, they all reference other people's posts in exactly the same way. The same title is used, same first 20 words, and a link to the original post via FeedBurner.

Just to prove to myself that Google is still in fact indexing Oggi's blog, I did a site search for Lidija, and found two previous ReadWriteWeb posts.

So what is the point of Oggi's blog?

To hi-hack anyone who is searching for the title of noteworthy posts, so that if they click on the links, they will invoke 3 separate Google blocks of ads, with the user clicking through to the original article.

Now, who wins out of this?

1. Oggi - for the princely sum of a few fractions of a cent.
2. Google - for recording and charging the lucky advertisers for appearing on Oggi's blog - this too would be minimal; however, it is still money on the bottom line.

The individual amount of money changing hands is minimal; however, multiply this by the number of hapless visitors and it could get into the hundreds for Oggi, and multiply this by the number of Oggi clones out there and now you are getting into the thousands for Google. I must state that I have absolutely no clue as to the actual numbers, but I think I have underestimated both sets of numbers here.

So who loses?

1. The users of the Web for being distracted by useless profiteering
2. The advertiser.
3. The Web in general for being littered with content which has absolutely zero value.

So to recap:

1. I was sent an e-mail by Google alerting me to the existence of Oggi's blog, of which I was blissfully ignorant until then.
2. I visit Oggi's blog and find that I am reading a post of zero value to me, has zero content, well actually 29 words copied from elsewhere, and which is surrounded by 3 block's of Google advertisements.
3. The link to the original post is via Google's FeedBurner service.

The only thing which is not Google's is the blogging software, which is WordPress in this case. Otherwise, we would have had a clean sweep. Digressing a bit, we had a bit of fun last April fool's with this post on Google acquiring WordPress (remember this is not serious).

Now what Oggi is doing is cookie cutter stuff, so I can't see how Google cannot detect that the intent is none other than injecting a post in between the user and what they actually want to view and benefiting courtesy of Google ads.

But then the conspiracy person within me has a theory, and we all have one, just the degree varies (checkout ReadWriteWeb's very own post on Chrome)

Why aren't Google proactively purging such sites from their index, and thus alerts?

If they did then they loose money since ads are not being triggered.

I certainly hope this is not the case. I would expect that purging 100% of such sites from the index is actually impossible, but I think that low hanging fruit such as Oggi are simple enough for a group of 2-3 Googlers to solve - a few, ok, many, 20% days perhaps.

It maybe a long bow, but the theoretical dilemma is interesting, and no doubt finer minds than mine have discussed this to death.

I googled Google to see if you can report such blogs so this site is removed from the index, but the only thing I could find on the first page of the results, I am not a patient searcher, was a reference to reporting copyright infringements which requires me to mail in a letter (I kid you not).

I was expecting to find a report abuse' link one click away from the Google's home page, in About Google specifically.

With search being an integral part of everyone's online life now, and that given that googled' is now a verb, it plays a critical component of the Web, in that it potentially can control the pages which are viewed by users, thereby controlling the ads which are displayed, thereby controlling the potential revenue received by Google.

Google currently receives a lot of freedom in what they do, which they have rightly earned, but how can we be sure that this is not abused in the future?

How can we, the citizens of the Web, be assured that there is no conflict of interest between the search/index side of the business and the advertising side within Google?

Is there a common theme here? Checkout Michael Gray's view on Google's book search.

</rant>

From the 1976 Olympics, the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics history by Nadia Comaneci on the uneven parallel bars. This more impressive routine also earned a 10, as did this balance beam routine.

Olga Korbut's uneven parallel bars routine from the 1972 Olympics (above). Love that dismount! The skills done on the bars today are so much more athletic but Korbut's routine was a magical flowing performance. At the rate the women today are going, the uneven parallel bars will soon be replaced by the high bar used in the men's competitions...they barely use the bottom bar anymore.

My recollection of the men's 4x100m relay at the 1984 Olympics involves the US team trailing after three legs when Carl Lewis (still my favorite Olympian) seizes the baton from Calvin Smith and thunders down the last 100 meters, singlehandedly winning the race and smashing the world record. The reality was somewhat different. The American team was way ahead when Lewis got the baton but it still is amazing to watch him pull away from the rest of the field like that. Bolt-like, innit?

A similar pulling away occurred in 1996 by Michael Johnson in the 200 meters. No one even came close to threatening his world record for 12 years until the emergence of Usain Bolt.

In 1988, Greg Louganis hit his head on the board on his third-to-last dive in the preliminaries of the men's springboard. He returned to qualify for the next round and eventually won the gold medal in the event.

Bob Beamon smashed the world record in the long jump by almost two feet at the 1968 Olympics. His record stood for almost 23 years until Mike Powell broke it in 1991.

Also at the '68 Games, Dick Fosbury unveiled his unique high jumping technique, the Fosbury Flop, which became the preferred technique in this event. For comparison, here are a couple of videos showing the other techniques that were in use at the time.

Jesse Owens' 100 meter win at the 1936 Games in Berlin.

After his hamstring popped in the semifinals of the 400 meters at the 1992 Olympics, Derek Redmond, aided by his father, finished the race to roars from the crowd. Just thinking about this makes me cry.

Speaking of tear-inducing performances, Kerri Strug hobbled up to the vault runway on a bum ankle and hit a 9.712 on her final vault in the team competition at the 1996 Games, landing more or less perfectly on one foot, clinching a victory for the US team. Or so the story goes. As with all mythology, the truth is present but not entirely adhered to. As it turned out, the US team had enough of a lead on the Russian team that Strug's last vault was unnecessary. But it hardly dimishes the moment for Strug. At the time, she thought she had to do the vault for the medal and she went out there and stuck it.

And finally, Svetlana Khorkina on the uneven parallel bars at the 1996 Games. For reasons I don't fully understand, Khorkina is probably my favorite female Olympian ever.

Update: From the 1964 Games, here's a video of Billy Mills coming from behind in the 10,000 meters. I have no idea how he sprints that fast after running more than six miles. (thx, nivan)

NowPublic announces Silicon Valley "MostPublic Index"
Identifies the Web's 50 most influential people in Silicon Valley

NowPublic, the world's largest participatory news network, today announced its second MostPublic Index, identifying the 50 most influential individuals in Silicon Valley/San Francisco.

The MostPublic Index is a detailed (and transparent) barometer of whose voices are most heard in the digital landscape as new channelsTwitter, Facebook, Flick, YouTube and the liketransform how media is created and spread. Last week, NowPublic identified and announced the 50 MostPublic influencers in New York.

NowPublic's formula gauges influence and publicness across four categories:

• Online Visibility
• Presence on User-Generated Content and Social Networking Sites
• Interactivity and Accessibility
• The R Factor: Presence on Microblogging Platforms (Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.)

NowPublic examined statistics in each of these categories from Alexa, Compete, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Quantcast, Technorati, YouTube and various other blogs and sites, to create a list of Silicon Valley's leading influencers. It then narrowed the list to 50 by analyzing and documenting individuals' presence and popularity in each of these channels, applying a weighted scoring system, determined by the strength of specific traits held in each online community. A detailed account of the scoring system can be viewed here.

Here is NowPublic's list of the MostPublic individuals in Silicon Valley/San Francisco:

1. Robert Scoble
2. Michael Arrington
3. Jack Dorsey
4. Biz Stone
5. Matt Cutts
6. Pete Cashmore
7. Dave Winer
8. Guy Kawasaki
9. Loc Le Meur
10. Kevin Rose
11. Merlin Mann
12. Stowe Boyd
13. Jeff Atwood
14. Jeremiah Owyang
15. Veronica Belmont
16. Kara Swisher
17. Scott Beale
18. Marc Andreessen
19. Ryan Block
20. David Sifry
21. Emily Chang
22. Om Malik
23. Timothy Ferriss
24. Nick Douglas
25. John Battelle
26. David Cohn
27. Louis Gray
28. Tom Foremski
29. Tim O'Reilly
30. Ariel Waldman
31. Matt Mullenweg
32. Dean Takahashi
33. Philip Kaplan
34. JD Lasica
35. Sarah Lacy
36. Brian Solis
37. Charlene Li
38. Rafe Needleman
39. Dan Farber
40. Howard Rheingold
41. David McClure
42. Margaret Mason
43. Jason Goldman
44. Leah Culver
45. Chris Shipley
46. Jackson West
47. Liz Gannes
48. Owen Thomas
49. Adeo Ressi
50. Max Levchin

Color ValleyWag unimpressed.

Lists are fun, of course. But I'm decidedly not one of the 50 most influential people in Silicon Valley. This is more an indication of popularity on social media networks, and even there I'm not so sure.

I've been in Aspen all week so missed this announcement from a couple of days ago:

NowPublic announces Silicon Valley "MostPublic Index"
Identifies the Web's 50 most influential people in Silicon Valley

NowPublic, the world's largest participatory news network, today announced its second MostPublic Index, identifying the 50 most influential individuals in Silicon Valley/San Francisco.

The MostPublic Index is a detailed (and transparent) barometer of whose voices are most heard in the digital landscape as new channels???Twitter, Facebook, Flick, YouTube and the like???transform how media is created and spread. Last week, NowPublic identified and announced the 50 MostPublic influencers in New York.

NowPublic???s formula gauges influence and ???publicness??? across four categories:

• Online Visibility
• Presence on User-Generated Content and Social Networking Sites
• Interactivity and Accessibility
• The ???R??? Factor: Presence on Microblogging Platforms (Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.)

NowPublic examined statistics in each of these categories from Alexa, Compete, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Quantcast, Technorati, YouTube and various other blogs and sites, to create a list of Silicon Valley???s leading influencers. It then narrowed the list to 50 by analyzing and documenting individuals??? presence and popularity in each of these channels, applying a weighted scoring system, determined by the strength of specific traits held in each online community. A detailed account of the scoring system can be viewed here.

Here is NowPublic's list of the MostPublic individuals in Silicon Valley/San Francisco:

1. Robert Scoble
2. Michael Arrington
3. Jack Dorsey
4. Biz Stone
5. Matt Cutts
6. Pete Cashmore
7. Dave Winer
8. Guy Kawasaki
9. Lo??c Le Meur
10. Kevin Rose
11. Merlin Mann
12. Stowe Boyd
13. Jeff Atwood
14. Jeremiah Owyang
15. Veronica Belmont
16. Kara Swisher
17. Scott Beale
18. Marc Andreessen
19. Ryan Block
20. David Sifry
21. Emily Chang
22. Om Malik
23. Timothy Ferriss
24. Nick Douglas
25. John Battelle
26. David Cohn
27. Louis Gray
28. Tom Foremski
29. Tim O'Reilly
30. Ariel Waldman
31. Matt Mullenweg
32. Dean Takahashi
33. Philip Kaplan
34. JD Lasica
35. Sarah Lacy
36. Brian Solis
37. Charlene Li
38. Rafe Needleman
39. Dan Farber
40. Howard Rheingold
41. David McClure
42. Margaret Mason
43. Jason Goldman
44. Leah Culver
45. Chris Shipley
46. Jackson West
47. Liz Gannes
48. Owen Thomas
49. Adeo Ressi
50. Max Levchin

Color ValleyWag unimpressed.

Lists are fun, of course. But I'm decidedly not one of the 50 most influential people in Silicon Valley. This is more an indication of popularity on social media networks, and even there I'm not so sure.

CASE A
A public relations person starts working for a Bed & Breakfast in New England. The person comes up with the idea of inviting high profile A List bloggers up for an all expense paid weekend, flights, room & board, meals the whole shebang including activities are comp'd. In exchange they ask the bloggers if they had a good time please write about it on their blog and post some pictures to flickr. Total cost of the PR event $10K.

CASE B
An SEO starts working for a Bed & Breakfast in New England. The person comes up with the idea of buying some on topic text link advertising on travel related blogs. Total cost for 6 months of link advertising $10K

So I ask you dear readers and specifically you Matt Cutts what's the difference? At the end of the day $10K was converted into links. Why does Case A get rewarded and lauded as a success? Why does everyone involved in Case B get called out for being the scourge of the internet? Why are all of the websites in Case B penalized, filtered, or in some cases completely annihilated from any and all internet visibility, while the sites in Case A bask in their ego stroking navel gazing glory?

Why does Google aggressively go after the SEO's and ignore the PR people? Why do people continue to tolerate Google's double standards and two tiered justice?

The example presented in Case A has been examplified here to protect the innocent but if you don't think things like this are going on every day your kidding yourself. In fact Elisabeth Osmeloski wrote about this earlier this year (see Why All Links Are Paid Links in the Travel Trade). It's not just the travel industry, how many gadgets, cell phones, digital cameras, and even computers are sent high profile bloggers in exchange for visibility and links?

Hey Google Want to prove that you are being fair and shut me up? Get your human editors to review the top A list bloggers in the technorati 100. Look for posts where gifts were exchanged for links. Put your money where your mouth is and start banning or dinging them for the exact same behavior you are attacking sites in the paid link advertising space for. Start banning and blocking the A List attention whore bloggers, cut off their payola and side income. Something tells me they'll stop singing your praises and a few GB of free Gmail storage wont shut them up or solve the problem. How about it Google prove that you are fair and equal and that justice is blind, because from where I sit your rules are selectively enforced and you take an aggressive hard line stance against internet markters, while little Mary A List gets off scott free

This post originally came from Michael Gray on his SEO Blog.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Hey Matt Cutts Be Fair if You Are Going After Paid Links

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That said, I still really like the looks of these. There will be four models of Es. The standard E is their 8.9-inch contender, while as the E Slim is a 12.1-inch MacBook Air challenger, only 0.8-inches thick. Then there's the E Video and E Video+, which offer more RAM, flash storage, webcams and bluetooth in the 8.9-inch chassis. The operating system will be Windows XP, apparently, but with an instant-on Linux-on-a-chip solution for rapidly booting up and checking your email or doing some browsing. And I'm still guessing that Ubuntu's Netbook Remix OS will at least be an option on these, given Canonical's past history with Dell.

The Dell E will be released in August in a variety of colors, starting at $299.

Dell and E Slim revealed [Engadget]

Below the video are some links and notes on what I was speaking about.

• Dataportability explained
  • Techcrunch via the Washington PostI will never get sick of the mainstream media picking up blogs
• Robert Scoble Gets Shut Down For Attempt at Data Exodus
  • This is old, but once again Scoble shows us he is ahead of his time (or out of his mind. I prefer the former)
• Facebook leaves Google Friend Connect
  • I would love to hear more about this (as I mention in the video). Not just, Facebook is evil. I would love to hear some constructive feedback about what you would do if you were Facebook and you had not make money, not just make people happy
• Google Friend Connect
  • Again, this is old news for some (well, a week old) but for those of you who do not pride themselves on knowing everything the second it happens, and may need to know more, feel free to email me, twitter me, seesmic me
• Nicole Ferraro at Internet Evolution
• Michael Arrington's (de)Centralized Me

Tags: seesmic, twitter, friend connect, dataportability, Nicole Ferraro, Robert Scoble, TechCrunch, social, facebook, Google Friend Connect, apps

Userplane, the company behind Webchat and a number of other online communication services, has introduced a new video app dubbed Mediaplayer. The free white-label app will allow web publishers to add hosted video uploads to their sites under an ad-supported model.

Mediaplayer users will be able to upload videos as large as 100MB, and there is no limit on the amount of upload or streaming bandwidth they can consume. For the time being, all ad revenue from Mediaplayer will go to Userplane, but Michael Jones, the company's CEO, says that they hope to introduce the revenue sharing model seen on their other apps in the near future. The current version of the app is restricted to video only, but the next release will feature Minichat, allowing users to chat while they watch clips.

Mediaplayer should see a significant boost in initial usage from ex-VideoEgg members. VideoEgg announced last March that it would be leaving the free video hosting space, and has named MediaPlayer as one of its recommended replacements.

Userplane was acquired by AOL in 2006 and, with more than 200,000 publishers, is one of the largest providers of online white-label services. For the time being their product will see competition from other video hosting sites including VSocial and KickApps, but with the eventual introduction of simultaneous chat they will also face off with Meeboand Videophlow, among others.

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

Robert Blum got me to call him an idiot because of this Tweet: FriendFeed only helps if you're dedicating your life to following yet another web site.

Chris Saad took the conversation in a different direction with this Tweet: discussion should occur around the target object - if its a blog then in the comments - not on friendfeed. Which, of course, got this conversation going.

That got Mobile Jones to agree with Chris Saad on this Tweet: Chris is on the right end of this. FF is like is not in the best interests of those who create the content. Which, of course, got this conversation going.

Rob LaGesse wrote a whole blog post about how he thinks FriendFeed is ugly: The service is ugly (to me). It has all kinds of crap I don't care about in my feed. Of course that got this conversation going.

Mark Evans goes even further and says he just can't deal with anything else that'll steal his attention. Of course that started a conversation over on FriendFeed too.

And to put punctuation on this whole story, Corida and others talk about the noise on FriendFeed.

All of these get to the heart of why FriendFeed won't go anywhere other than to early adopter communities who like lots of noise.

I've studied tons of people's reactions to FriendFeed. Here's why it won't go mainstream:

1. Only early adopters care about gluing together various social networks like I do (look at the right side of my blog, for instance, and you'll see travel and schedule and events and photos and videos and more all glued together). Most people aren't on more than one or two services and aren't content creators (of everyone on Upcoming.org, for instance, only a handful of people have more than 5 events and most have none).

2. Normal people (ie, those who aren't on Twitter 18 hours a day) don't like noise. Even on Twitter, what's the number one thing I hear from followers? You're too noisy. FriendFeed brings tons of new noise to normal people, especially if they add a bunch of the friends that FriendFeed recommends (I'm one of them, but the others on that list are among the noisiest people on the Internet). For normal people they can't handle the noise. It's chaotic, confusing, and until they figure out the hide link they will get turned off. Usually when unpassionate or late adopter types get turned off they just hit the back button.

3. There isn't one method of using these services. Some people just want to see their closest friend's baby photos. Other people, like me, want to use these services like a chat room to talk with large numbers of people about today's hottest news. This disconnect pisses both of us off and makes it less likely I'll tell normal users about these services. Of course anyone who reads my blog isn't normal, so I don't mind telling you all about these things incessantly. :-)

4. FriendFeed is frustrating to use even for advanced users. Here, quickly, tell me how you can see only Flickr photos on FriendFeed and block everything else. Hint: there is a way, it's just hard to find. How about, quickly again, tell me how to see all posts that have a comment or a like on them. Sorry, that one isn't possible yet. How about find me all posts from everyone that mentions the word noise in them? Yes, that one is possible, but to do it you gotta get acquainted with FF's advanced search features. At Microsoft we learned no one ever uses those features. Have you figured out how to hide all Twitter messages that don't have a comment on them yet? It's possible too, but you gotta click on the Hide feature and play around. Frustrating, frustrating, frustrating.

5. FriendFeed doesn't work well on mobile phones. Most people around the world use their mobile phones far more often than they use their laptops. So, if you don't have good mobile phone interfaces you can kick your going mainstream dreams in the toilet.

6. Want to find some new friends? The recommended friends feature is pretty cool (albeit frustrating to find) but the problem is you can't figure out why it is presenting the friends it is (hint: it presents the most popular users up front. These are the most noisy users on the service and probably are pretty geeky to boot. People like me, Dave Winer, Louis Gray, Michael Arrington, etc).

7. I can't add new services easily. Qik, for instance, is among my most favorite data type. But how do I get that added? Oh, I gotta add an RSS feed for services that aren't already in the system. But then the videos don't look as nice as, say, YouTube's or Flickr's. That's disappointing.

8. It pisses bloggers off because all their comments are moving onto FriendFeed rather than staying on their blogs. Watch this post, I bet I get more comments over on FriendFeed than here. Now this one does NOT piss me off. I don't really care where you talk about my ideas and I'll go wherever the audience goes (which is why I often commented on other people's blogs). But they do have a point. It'd be nice if bloggers got warned when a conversation was happening about what they wrote and if there were an easy way to join FriendFeed comments and conversations into their own blog commenting systems. When bloggers get pissed off they tend to talk less about new services, which retards their ability to go mainstream.

9. Comments get fragmented, even inside FriendFeed. Why? Well, let's say you write a really great blog post. You'll get shared on tons of people's Google Reader shared feeds. Some comments happen on Louis Gray's FriendFeed. Some happen on mine. Others happen on Thomas Hawk's. Still others happen on other people's feeds. Everyone has their own audience which gets involved and now we have duplicate items all over the place (noise, and not the fun kind) and comment fragmentation.

Well, that's enough. There's more, but these are the biggies, I think. Got any other reasons why FriendFeed won't go mainstream? You know where to leave a comment. I'll be watching for it.

This is part I. In second part I'll explain why FriendFeed will go mainstream.

UPDATE: We're discussing this post over on FriendFeed too.

UPDATE: The Google News example is reproduced here instead. You're reading this in RSS or email a day after I posted it because this post was so large it broke my Feedburner feed. Too much content breaks the web there you have it. Keep reading for my original argument.

If you've made it this far, you may have noticed the absence of blogs from the sources. So this is far from a representative sample of all of the websites that published a version of this news story.

Let's check out Techmeme, again reproduced in its entirety, because seeing is disbelieving:

Yahoo!:

Yahoo! Issues Statement in Response to Microsoft SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 03, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) Roy Bostock, Chairman of Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company issued the following statement today in response to Microsoft Corporation's announcement that it has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo!:

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: TechCrunch, StepForth SEO News Blog, BBC NEWS, Forbes, I4U News, VoIP Blog, Geek News Central, Furrier.org, Tech Trader Daily, LiveSide, Paul Kedrosky's and Geek Speaker

Discussion:

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch: Yahoo Responds: The distraction of Microsoft's unsolicited proposal now behind us

Ross Dunn / StepForth SEO News Blog: Microsoft Backs Down from Yahoo

Darren Waters / BBC NEWS | dot.life: Walking away

Elizabeth Corcoran / Forbes: What Microsoft Will Buy Now Expect to hear more from Steve Ballmer.

Luigi Lugmayr / I4U News: Yahoo's Response to Microsoft's Bid Withdrawal

VoIP Blog: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Proposal

Todd Cochrane / Geek News Central: Yahoo is Toast and Yang needs to be Fired

John Furrier / Furrier.org: Victory for Silicon Valley; The Silicon Valley Poison Pill Worked - As Predicted

Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily: Ballmer Calls Yang's Bluff: Microsoft Walks

Kip Kniskern / LiveSide: Yahoo! responds to withdrawal - issues statement

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Yahoo's Response to Microsoft's Response to Yahoo

Geek Speaker: Why Yahoo is worth more than 50 billion & why Yahoo! For Good

All Related Discussion

Hide All Related Discussion

RELATED:

Microsoft:

Microsoft Withdraws Proposal to Acquire Yahoo! Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc. Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) today announced that it has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO).

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: Search Engine Land, Googling Google, Between the Lines, CNET News.com, Web Worker Daily, TechCrunch, WeBreakStuff, Simon's Blog, I4U News, Microsoft News Tracker, TechBlog, DealBook, Paul Mooney, Pocket PC Thoughts.com, TechSpot, Joe Duck, TechBays, Epicenter, All about Microsoft, Digital Trends, SEO and Tech Daily, Alice Hill's Real Tech News, Mark Evans, Los Angeles Times, WebGuild, Mashable!, Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog, Valleywag, Quick Online Tips, GigaOM, Profy.Com, AppScout, ClickZ News Blog, The Register and Scobleizer

Discussion:

Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land: Leaving Las Yahoo: Microsoft's $5 Billion Mistake?

Garett Rogers / Googling Google: Microsoft withrawls bid for Yahoo, Google wins

Larry Dignan / Between the Lines: Microsoft walks away from Yahoo: Assessing winners, losers and Plan Bs

Stephen Shankland / CNET News.com: Yahoo-Google ad deal could be announced next week

Mike Gunderloy / Web Worker Daily: Microsoft, Yahoo, and Web Workers

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch: Microsoft/Yahoo: Summary Of Today's News & Bonus Gillmor Gang

Fred Oliveira / WeBreakStuff: MSFT and YHOO: It's finally over

Simon Brocklehurst / Simon's Blog: YAHOO! BLOWS IT - HOW LOW WILL THEY GO?

Luigi Lugmayr / I4U News: Microsoft officially withdraws Yahoo Bid

David Hunter / Microsoft News Tracker: Microsoft withdraws offer for Yahoo

Dwight / TechBlog: Microsoft to Yahoo: Never mind

DealBook: Will Microsoft Really Walk?

Paul Mooney: Yahoo Prevails Microsoft Withdraws Proposal to Acquire Yahoo!

Darius Wey / Pocket PC Thoughts.com: Microsoft Walks Away From Yahoo!

Julio Franco / TechSpot: Weekend tech reading (5.04)

Joe Duck: Ballmer has left the Building

Carlo Maglinao / TechBays: Microsoft Yahoo! Deal: the NO votes win

Betsy Schiffman / Epicenter: Microsoft Walks! Says Yahoo Demands Don't Make Sense

Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft: Microsoft takes its ball and leaves Yahoo on the Web 2.0 playground

Geoff Duncan / Digital Trends: Microsoft Abandons Yahoo Takeover

Charlie Anzman / SEO and Tech Daily: Microsoft pulls the plug on Yahoo!

Michael Santo / Alice Hill's Real Tech News: No Microhoo: Microsoft Walks Away from Yahoo! Deal

Mark Evans: Let's Get the (Yahoo-Microsoft Blogging Party) Started

Los Angeles Times: Microsoft drops bid to acquire Yahoo

Joseph Hunkins / WebGuild: Ballmer's Letter to Jerry Yang Withdrawing Microsoft's Offer

Paul Glazowski / Mashable!: Breaking: Microsoft Corporation Rescinds Offer For Yahoo Inc

Todd Bishop / Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog: Ballmer's internal e-mail on Yahoo decision

Owen Thomas / Valleywag: Ballmer to Yang: How stupid are you?

Quick Online Tips: Microsoft Unable to Buy Yahoo!

Om Malik / GigaOM: Microsoft To Yahoo: Take a Hike!

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira / Profy.Com: Steve Stands Jerry Up for the Internet Prom

Brian Heater / AppScout: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo! Bid

Anna Maria Virzi / ClickZ News Blog: Microsoft Withdraws Bid for Yahoo

Drew Cullen / The Register: Microsoft walks away from Yahoo!

Robert Scoble / Scobleizer: The First FriendFeed Event: MSFT and YHOO

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

MicroHoo: The Odd Couple Meetings Led Nowhere After today's events, I guess you could say Yahoo and Microsoft tried, holding a series of meetings about a possible takeover that ended up proving exactly how incompatible the companies were. Kind of like Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, but not funny in any way at all.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: Between the Lines, Valleywag and Paul Kedrosky's

Discussion:

Larry Dignan / Between the Lines: Microsoft walks: Five reasons why it's a good move

Jackson West / Valleywag: YAHOO'S $37 DEMAND TALKS, MICROSOFT'S $33 OFFER WALKS Microsoft

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: First Tick-Tock of Da Deal Gone Dead

Ina Fried / Beyond Binary:

OK, so what's Microsoft's plan B? With Yahoo apparently off the table, it's time to see what Microsoft's back-up plan looks like. Microsoft has said for some time that it has a strategy with or without Yahoo, but it's a strategy clearly in need of a jump-start.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs and About Mobility Weblog

Discussion:

Steve / The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Ballmer now looking for other companies to not buy

Ceo / About Mobility Weblog: Steve Ballmer as The Creature

DealBook:

Guessing Yahoo's Opening Stock Price Well, Yahoo seems to have gotten what it wanted. The company managed to fend off Microsoft's unwanted advances, even after the software giant sweetened its bid by $5 billion an amount Yahoo felt still wasn't enough.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: Silicon Alley Insider and Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog

Discussion:

Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider: Why Yahoo (YHOO) Should Go Ahead With Google Outsourcing Deal (GOOG)

Terry Heaton / Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog: Ack! Microsoft walks away. Winner? Google.

Wall Street Journal:

Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Offer After Attempt to Bridge Gap in Price Microsoft Corp. said it abandoned its offer for Yahoo Inc., as the two companies failed to bridge a gap between them on price. Microsoft Saturday released a letter from Chief Executive Steve Ballmer

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: Peter O'Kelly's Reality Check and Tech Beat

Discussion:

Peter / Peter O'Kelly's Reality Check: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Offer After Attempt to Bridge Gap in Price - WSJ.com

Rob Hof / Tech Beat: Microsoft Drops Yahoo BidAt Least For Now

Dawn Kawamoto / CNET News.com:

Report: A peek behind the Yahoo-Microsoft meltdown Curious how Microsoft's multi-multi-multi-billion dollar buyout bid for Yahoo sputtered, then crashed? Kara Swisher's BoomTown column in All Things Digital has an interesting account of the missteps, sidesteps

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

Yahoo's Nightmare Scenario: I'm From Google and I'm Here to Help! Here's what a top-notch source at Yahoo joked to me tonight, after Microsoft walked away from its unsolicited takeover bid to acquire the long-troubled Internet giant. Google is now officially our best friend. Oh no.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: Groundswell

Discussion:

Charlene Li / Groundswell: What's next for Microsoft and Yahoo!

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

Yahoo's Tough Week Ahead At around 4:30 California time today news broke that Microsoft has formally withdrawn its offer to acquire Yahoo (see Ballmer's email to Microsoft employees here). Among other things, that ends a three month stock party where the market value of Yahoo jumped

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: Guardian Unlimited, Microsoft Watch, MediaShift and Paul Mooney

Discussion:

Jack Schofield / Guardian Unlimited: Microsoft walks out of Yahoo deal (updated)

Joe Wilcox / Microsoft Watch: The Microsoft-Yahoo Blame Game

Mark Glaser / MediaShift: Yahoo-Microsoft Drama::Takeover Tiff Best Thing to Happen to Yahoo

Paul Mooney: A YAHOO RUN, OR A RUN ON YHOO?

Yi-Wyn Yen / Fortune:

Blame it on Google Microsoft CEO Ballmer said the software giant decided to walk away from a bid because Yahoo would become undesirable' if it formed an alliance with Google. (Fortune) Google proved to be the final straw that broke Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's back.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: MacDailyNews and CNNMoney.com

Discussion:

MacDailyNews: Ballmer's Folly ends: Microsoft abandons Yahoo bid because of Google

Mark M. Meinero / CNNMoney.com: Microsoft withdraws bid for Yahoo

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed:

Analysis of the Microsoft Decision, Plus Yahoo's Hari-Kari Here is my first-cut analysis of what has happened here: On the friendly front, Yahoo drew a hard line at $37 per share, well above the $33 that Microsoft now says it told Yahoo this week it was willing to go

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: broadstuff

Discussion:

Alan Patrick / broadstuff: MICROHOO NO MORE.. So the deal is off - though whether

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

Email From Steve Ballmer To All Microsoft Employees The following email was sent to all Microsoft employees from CEO Steve Ballmer at 5:17 pm PDT (see Breaking: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Bid; Walks Away From Deal): To: Microsoft - All Employees (QBDG)

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

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Discussion: InsideMicrosoft, WebProNews, VentureBeat and Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Discussion:

Nathan Weinberg / InsideMicrosoft: Microsoft Drops Plans To Buy Yahoo

Nathan Weinberg / WebProNews: Microsoft Is Done Pursuing Yahoo!

MG Siegler / VentureBeat: Microsoft now has $50 billion burning a hole in its pocket

David Snyder / Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Steve Ballmer's Email to Microsoft Employees

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Breaking: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Bid; Walks Away From Deal (Updated)

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: BoomTown, Beyond Binary, Reuters, The Next Web, BBC NEWS, Coop's Corner, Voices, LiveSide, Electronista, Valleywag, mathewingram.com/work, Business Technology, SarahLacy.com, Master of 500 Hats, Thomas Hawk's Digital , Search Engine Journal and WinExtra

Discussion:

Kara Swisher / BoomTown: BoomTown Decodes Microsoft's Steve Ballmer's Letter to Yahoo (The Kiss-Off Edition)

Ina Fried / Beyond Binary: Ballmer's e-mail to staff on Yahoo

Reuters: Microsoft says it withdraws offer for Yahoo

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten / The Next Web: Microsoft walks away from Yahoo deal

Rory Cellan-Jones / BBC NEWS | dot.life: Microsoft v Yahoo - post-match analysis

Charles Cooper / Coop's Corner: Post-Microhoo: Winners and losers

Ina Fried / Voices: Microsoft's Move: Is It Just a Feint?

Kip Kniskern / LiveSide: No MSFT-YHOO deal; now what? Microsoft just walked away

Electronista: Microsoft backs out of Yahoo bid

Owen Thomas / Valleywag: Is Ballmer on his way out and if so, who's the next CEO?

Mathew / mathewingram.com/work: YHOO and MSFT: Jerry Yang should be fired

Ben Worthen / Business Technology: The Most Famous Non-Deal in Tech History

Sarah Lacy: Or Maybe I Won't Be Working for the Evil Empire

Dave McClure / Master of 500 Hats: MicroHooFreude! (Memo to Jerry: Prepare to be Sued)

Thomas Hawk / Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection: Remember When Thomas Hawk Said If He Were Microsoft He'd Lower His Bid for Yahoo?

Arnold Zafra / Search Engine Journal: Microsoft Cancels the Yahoo Acquisition Deal, Finally!

Steven Hodson / WinExtra: Please tell me it's so

New York Times:
Microsoft Withdraws Its Bid for Yahoo

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: CNET News.com, The Big Picture, deal architect, Slashdot, HipMojo.com and Digg

Discussion:

Stephen Shankland / CNET News.com: Yahoo: Microsoft's price just wasn't right

Ritholtz / The Big Picture: Ballmer, Yang Agree to See Other People

deal architect: Back to customer focus So the Microsoft/Yahoo! deal appears finally off.

Timothy / Slashdot: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Takeover Offer

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan / HipMojo.com: Should Investors Sue or Back Yang?

Digg: Microsoft Withdraws Its Bid for Yahoo

Ina Fried / Beyond Binary:
Microsoft pulls its Yahoo offer

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: DSLreports, Forbes, CNET News.com, Business Week, Smalltalk Tidbits , Scobleizer, Techlog, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, InformationWeek, HipMojo.com, Search Engine Watch Blog, paidContent.org, CenterNetworks, Search Engine Land, John Battelle's Searchblog, WebGuild, MacRumors, Engadget, VentureBeat and Digital Daily

Discussion:

KathrynV / DSLreports: Microsoft Rescinds Yahoo Offer - No agreement could be reached in talks yesterday

Elizabeth Corcoran / Forbes: Forget It, Ballmer Says To Yahoo!

Stephen Shankland / CNET News.com: Is Google ad deal really Yahoo's best option?

Robert Hof / Business Week: Microsoft Drops Bid for Yahoo

James A. Robertson / Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants: Reality 1, Scoble 0

Robert Scoble / Scobleizer: How will Yahoo heal after Microsoft walked away?

Harry McCracken / Techlog: No MicroHoo? Hallelujah!

David Snyder / Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Microsoft Retreats or Withdrawls, Depends on Your View

Alexander Wolfe / InformationWeek: Microsoft Yanks Yahoo Bid

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan / HipMojo.com: Latest Chess Move: MSFT Withdraws Offer

Kevin Heisler / Search Engine Watch Blog: Breaking: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Offer; Yahoo Responds

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent.org: Microsoft-Yahoo: Yang's Response: With Distraction Behind Us

Allen Stern / CenterNetworks: What's Next for Yahoo? Merging With AOL Still My Pick

Greg Sterling / Search Engine Land: Microsoft Yanks Its Offer For Yahoo

John Battelle / John Battelle's Searchblog: MICROSOFT BAILS, YAHOO'S GOOGLE THREAT APPEARS TO HAVE WORKED

Joseph Hunkins / WebGuild: Microsoft Walks Away From Yahoo

Arn / MacRumors: Microsoft Walking Away from Yahoo Acquisition

Ryan Block / Engadget: Microsoft pulls bid for Yahoo!, Microhoo will never be

MG Siegler / VentureBeat: Yahoo breaks the wrist, Microsoft walks away

John Paczkowski / Digital Daily: Ballmer to Yang: Dear Jerry, Drop Dead

Ina Fried / Beyond Binary:
Microsoft says proxy battle not worth it

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: BloggingStocks

Discussion:

Peter Cohan / BloggingStocks: It's off. Microsoft withdraws its offer for Yahoo for now

BBC:
Microsoft walks away from Yahoo

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

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Discussion: Gizmodo and TECH.BLORGE.com

Discussion:

Jesus Diaz / Gizmodo: Microsoft Retires Yahoo Offer, Won't Try Hostile Takeover

Erna Mahyuni / TECH.BLORGE.com: No Microhoo - Microsoft terminates bid on Yahoo

Kara Swisher / BoomTo

Tags: microsoft yahoo news google discussion ]]>Microsoft withdrawing its offer to buy Yahoo is a sufficiently large story to demonstrate the problem of redundant news content on the web. Google News is currently tracking about 2,000 versions of this story. To get a better sense of why it's a problem to have 2,000 stories about the SAME THING, I've reproduced about ten percent of them below just the headlines and ledes. If you have the stomach to scroll through them all to see what else I have to say about it, check out the sources as you scroll:

UPDATE: The Google News example is reproduced here instead. You're reading this in RSS or email a day after I posted it because this post was so large it broke my Feedburner feed. Too much content breaks the web there you have it. Keep reading for my original argument.

If you've made it this far, you may have noticed the absence of blogs from the sources. So this is far from a representative sample of all of the websites that published a version of this news story.

Let's check out Techmeme, again reproduced in its entirety, because seeing is disbelieving:

Yahoo!:

Yahoo! Issues Statement in Response to Microsoft SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 03, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) Roy Bostock, Chairman of Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company issued the following statement today in response to Microsoft Corporation's announcement that it has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo!:

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

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Discussion: TechCrunch, StepForth SEO News Blog, BBC NEWS, Forbes, I4U News, VoIP Blog, Geek News Central, Furrier.org, Tech Trader Daily, LiveSide, Paul Kedrosky's and Geek Speaker

Discussion:

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch: Yahoo Responds: The distraction of Microsoft's unsolicited proposal now behind us

Ross Dunn / StepForth SEO News Blog: Microsoft Backs Down from Yahoo

Darren Waters / BBC NEWS | dot.life: Walking away

Elizabeth Corcoran / Forbes: What Microsoft Will Buy Now Expect to hear more from Steve Ballmer.

Luigi Lugmayr / I4U News: Yahoo's Response to Microsoft's Bid Withdrawal

VoIP Blog: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Proposal

Todd Cochrane / Geek News Central: Yahoo is Toast and Yang needs to be Fired

John Furrier / Furrier.org: Victory for Silicon Valley; The Silicon Valley Poison Pill Worked - As Predicted

Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily: Ballmer Calls Yang's Bluff: Microsoft Walks

Kip Kniskern / LiveSide: Yahoo! responds to withdrawal - issues statement

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Yahoo's Response to Microsoft's Response to Yahoo

Geek Speaker: Why Yahoo is worth more than 50 billion & why Yahoo! For Good

All Related Discussion

Hide All Related Discussion

RELATED:

Microsoft:

Microsoft Withdraws Proposal to Acquire Yahoo! Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc. Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) today announced that it has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO).

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

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Discussion: Search Engine Land, Googling Google, Between the Lines, CNET News.com, Web Worker Daily, TechCrunch, WeBreakStuff, Simon's Blog, I4U News, Microsoft News Tracker, TechBlog, DealBook, Paul Mooney, Pocket PC Thoughts.com, TechSpot, Joe Duck, TechBays, Epicenter, All about Microsoft, Digital Trends, SEO and Tech Daily, Alice Hill's Real Tech News, Mark Evans, Los Angeles Times, WebGuild, Mashable!, Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog, Valleywag, Quick Online Tips, GigaOM, Profy.Com, AppScout, ClickZ News Blog, The Register and Scobleizer

Discussion:

Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land: Leaving Las Yahoo: Microsoft's $5 Billion Mistake?

Garett Rogers / Googling Google: Microsoft withrawls bid for Yahoo, Google wins

Larry Dignan / Between the Lines: Microsoft walks away from Yahoo: Assessing winners, losers and Plan Bs

Stephen Shankland / CNET News.com: Yahoo-Google ad deal could be announced next week

Mike Gunderloy / Web Worker Daily: Microsoft, Yahoo, and Web Workers

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch: Microsoft/Yahoo: Summary Of Today's News & Bonus Gillmor Gang

Fred Oliveira / WeBreakStuff: MSFT and YHOO: It's finally over

Simon Brocklehurst / Simon's Blog: YAHOO! BLOWS IT - HOW LOW WILL THEY GO?

Luigi Lugmayr / I4U News: Microsoft officially withdraws Yahoo Bid

David Hunter / Microsoft News Tracker: Microsoft withdraws offer for Yahoo

Dwight / TechBlog: Microsoft to Yahoo: Never mind

DealBook: Will Microsoft Really Walk?

Paul Mooney: Yahoo Prevails Microsoft Withdraws Proposal to Acquire Yahoo!

Darius Wey / Pocket PC Thoughts.com: Microsoft Walks Away From Yahoo!

Julio Franco / TechSpot: Weekend tech reading (5.04)

Joe Duck: Ballmer has left the Building

Carlo Maglinao / TechBays: Microsoft Yahoo! Deal: the NO votes win

Betsy Schiffman / Epicenter: Microsoft Walks! Says Yahoo Demands Don't Make Sense

Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft: Microsoft takes its ball and leaves Yahoo on the Web 2.0 playground

Geoff Duncan / Digital Trends: Microsoft Abandons Yahoo Takeover

Charlie Anzman / SEO and Tech Daily: Microsoft pulls the plug on Yahoo!

Michael Santo / Alice Hill's Real Tech News: No Microhoo: Microsoft Walks Away from Yahoo! Deal

Mark Evans: Let's Get the (Yahoo-Microsoft Blogging Party) Started

Los Angeles Times: Microsoft drops bid to acquire Yahoo

Joseph Hunkins / WebGuild: Ballmer's Letter to Jerry Yang Withdrawing Microsoft's Offer

Paul Glazowski / Mashable!: Breaking: Microsoft Corporation Rescinds Offer For Yahoo Inc

Todd Bishop / Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog: Ballmer's internal e-mail on Yahoo decision

Owen Thomas / Valleywag: Ballmer to Yang: How stupid are you?

Quick Online Tips: Microsoft Unable to Buy Yahoo!

Om Malik / GigaOM: Microsoft To Yahoo: Take a Hike!

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira / Profy.Com: Steve Stands Jerry Up for the Internet Prom

Brian Heater / AppScout: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo! Bid

Anna Maria Virzi / ClickZ News Blog: Microsoft Withdraws Bid for Yahoo

Drew Cullen / The Register: Microsoft walks away from Yahoo!

Robert Scoble / Scobleizer: The First FriendFeed Event: MSFT and YHOO

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

MicroHoo: The Odd Couple Meetings Led Nowhere After today's events, I guess you could say Yahoo and Microsoft tried, holding a series of meetings about a possible takeover that ended up proving exactly how incompatible the companies were. Kind of like Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, but not funny in any way at all.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: Between the Lines, Valleywag and Paul Kedrosky's

Discussion:

Larry Dignan / Between the Lines: Microsoft walks: Five reasons why it's a good move

Jackson West / Valleywag: YAHOO'S $37 DEMAND TALKS, MICROSOFT'S $33 OFFER WALKS Microsoft

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: First Tick-Tock of Da Deal Gone Dead

Ina Fried / Beyond Binary:

OK, so what's Microsoft's plan B? With Yahoo apparently off the table, it's time to see what Microsoft's back-up plan looks like. Microsoft has said for some time that it has a strategy with or without Yahoo, but it's a strategy clearly in need of a jump-start.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs and About Mobility Weblog

Discussion:

Steve / The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Ballmer now looking for other companies to not buy

Ceo / About Mobility Weblog: Steve Ballmer as The Creature

DealBook:

Guessing Yahoo's Opening Stock Price Well, Yahoo seems to have gotten what it wanted. The company managed to fend off Microsoft's unwanted advances, even after the software giant sweetened its bid by $5 billion an amount Yahoo felt still wasn't enough.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: Silicon Alley Insider and Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog

Discussion:

Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider: Why Yahoo (YHOO) Should Go Ahead With Google Outsourcing Deal (GOOG)

Terry Heaton / Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog: Ack! Microsoft walks away. Winner? Google.

Wall Street Journal:

Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Offer After Attempt to Bridge Gap in Price Microsoft Corp. said it abandoned its offer for Yahoo Inc., as the two companies failed to bridge a gap between them on price. Microsoft Saturday released a letter from Chief Executive Steve Ballmer

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: Peter O'Kelly's Reality Check and Tech Beat

Discussion:

Peter / Peter O'Kelly's Reality Check: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Offer After Attempt to Bridge Gap in Price - WSJ.com

Rob Hof / Tech Beat: Microsoft Drops Yahoo BidAt Least For Now

Dawn Kawamoto / CNET News.com:

Report: A peek behind the Yahoo-Microsoft meltdown Curious how Microsoft's multi-multi-multi-billion dollar buyout bid for Yahoo sputtered, then crashed? Kara Swisher's BoomTown column in All Things Digital has an interesting account of the missteps, sidesteps

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

Yahoo's Nightmare Scenario: I'm From Google and I'm Here to Help! Here's what a top-notch source at Yahoo joked to me tonight, after Microsoft walked away from its unsolicited takeover bid to acquire the long-troubled Internet giant. Google is now officially our best friend. Oh no.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

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Discussion: Groundswell

Discussion:

Charlene Li / Groundswell: What's next for Microsoft and Yahoo!

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

Yahoo's Tough Week Ahead At around 4:30 California time today news broke that Microsoft has formally withdrawn its offer to acquire Yahoo (see Ballmer's email to Microsoft employees here). Among other things, that ends a three month stock party where the market value of Yahoo jumped

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

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Discussion: Guardian Unlimited, Microsoft Watch, MediaShift and Paul Mooney

Discussion:

Jack Schofield / Guardian Unlimited: Microsoft walks out of Yahoo deal (updated)

Joe Wilcox / Microsoft Watch: The Microsoft-Yahoo Blame Game

Mark Glaser / MediaShift: Yahoo-Microsoft Drama::Takeover Tiff Best Thing to Happen to Yahoo

Paul Mooney: A YAHOO RUN, OR A RUN ON YHOO?

Yi-Wyn Yen / Fortune:

Blame it on Google Microsoft CEO Ballmer said the software giant decided to walk away from a bid because Yahoo would become undesirable' if it formed an alliance with Google. (Fortune) Google proved to be the final straw that broke Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's back.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: MacDailyNews and CNNMoney.com

Discussion:

MacDailyNews: Ballmer's Folly ends: Microsoft abandons Yahoo bid because of Google

Mark M. Meinero / CNNMoney.com: Microsoft withdraws bid for Yahoo

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed:

Analysis of the Microsoft Decision, Plus Yahoo's Hari-Kari Here is my first-cut analysis of what has happened here: On the friendly front, Yahoo drew a hard line at $37 per share, well above the $33 that Microsoft now says it told Yahoo this week it was willing to go

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: broadstuff

Discussion:

Alan Patrick / broadstuff: MICROHOO NO MORE.. So the deal is off - though whether

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

Email From Steve Ballmer To All Microsoft Employees The following email was sent to all Microsoft employees from CEO Steve Ballmer at 5:17 pm PDT (see Breaking: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Bid; Walks Away From Deal): To: Microsoft - All Employees (QBDG)

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: InsideMicrosoft, WebProNews, VentureBeat and Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Discussion:

Nathan Weinberg / InsideMicrosoft: Microsoft Drops Plans To Buy Yahoo

Nathan Weinberg / WebProNews: Microsoft Is Done Pursuing Yahoo!

MG Siegler / VentureBeat: Microsoft now has $50 billion burning a hole in its pocket

David Snyder / Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Steve Ballmer's Email to Microsoft Employees

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Breaking: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Bid; Walks Away From Deal (Updated)

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: BoomTown, Beyond Binary, Reuters, The Next Web, BBC NEWS, Coop's Corner, Voices, LiveSide, Electronista, Valleywag, mathewingram.com/work, Business Technology, SarahLacy.com, Master of 500 Hats, Thomas Hawk's Digital , Search Engine Journal and WinExtra

Discussion:

Kara Swisher / BoomTown: BoomTown Decodes Microsoft's Steve Ballmer's Letter to Yahoo (The Kiss-Off Edition)

Ina Fried / Beyond Binary: Ballmer's e-mail to staff on Yahoo

Reuters: Microsoft says it withdraws offer for Yahoo

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten / The Next Web: Microsoft walks away from Yahoo deal

Rory Cellan-Jones / BBC NEWS | dot.life: Microsoft v Yahoo - post-match analysis

Charles Cooper / Coop's Corner: Post-Microhoo: Winners and losers

Ina Fried / Voices: Microsoft's Move: Is It Just a Feint?

Kip Kniskern / LiveSide: No MSFT-YHOO deal; now what? Microsoft just walked away

Electronista: Microsoft backs out of Yahoo bid

Owen Thomas / Valleywag: Is Ballmer on his way out and if so, who's the next CEO?

Mathew / mathewingram.com/work: YHOO and MSFT: Jerry Yang should be fired

Ben Worthen / Business Technology: The Most Famous Non-Deal in Tech History

Sarah Lacy: Or Maybe I Won't Be Working for the Evil Empire

Dave McClure / Master of 500 Hats: MicroHooFreude! (Memo to Jerry: Prepare to be Sued)

Thomas Hawk / Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection: Remember When Thomas Hawk Said If He Were Microsoft He'd Lower His Bid for Yahoo?

Arnold Zafra / Search Engine Journal: Microsoft Cancels the Yahoo Acquisition Deal, Finally!

Steven Hodson / WinExtra: Please tell me it's so

New York Times:
Microsoft Withdraws Its Bid for Yahoo

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: CNET News.com, The Big Picture, deal architect, Slashdot, HipMojo.com and Digg

Discussion:

Stephen Shankland / CNET News.com: Yahoo: Microsoft's price just wasn't right

Ritholtz / The Big Picture: Ballmer, Yang Agree to See Other People

deal architect: Back to customer focus So the Microsoft/Yahoo! deal appears finally off.

Timothy / Slashdot: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Takeover Offer

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan / HipMojo.com: Should Investors Sue or Back Yang?

Digg: Microsoft Withdraws Its Bid for Yahoo

Ina Fried / Beyond Binary:
Microsoft pulls its Yahoo offer

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: DSLreports, Forbes, CNET News.com, Business Week, Smalltalk Tidbits , Scobleizer, Techlog, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, InformationWeek, HipMojo.com, Search Engine Watch Blog, paidContent.org, CenterNetworks, Search Engine Land, John Battelle's Searchblog, WebGuild, MacRumors, Engadget, VentureBeat and Digital Daily

Discussion:

KathrynV / DSLreports: Microsoft Rescinds Yahoo Offer - No agreement could be reached in talks yesterday

Elizabeth Corcoran / Forbes: Forget It, Ballmer Says To Yahoo!

Stephen Shankland / CNET News.com: Is Google ad deal really Yahoo's best option?

Robert Hof / Business Week: Microsoft Drops Bid for Yahoo

James A. Robertson / Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants: Reality 1, Scoble 0

Robert Scoble / Scobleizer: How will Yahoo heal after Microsoft walked away?

Harry McCracken / Techlog: No MicroHoo? Hallelujah!

David Snyder / Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Microsoft Retreats or Withdrawls, Depends on Your View

Alexander Wolfe / InformationWeek: Microsoft Yanks Yahoo Bid

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan / HipMojo.com: Latest Chess Move: MSFT Withdraws Offer

Kevin Heisler / Search Engine Watch Blog: Breaking: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Offer; Yahoo Responds

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent.org: Microsoft-Yahoo: Yang's Response: With Distraction Behind Us

Allen Stern / CenterNetworks: What's Next for Yahoo? Merging With AOL Still My Pick

Greg Sterling / Search Engine Land: Microsoft Yanks Its Offer For Yahoo

John Battelle / John Battelle's Searchblog: MICROSOFT BAILS, YAHOO'S GOOGLE THREAT APPEARS TO HAVE WORKED

Joseph Hunkins / WebGuild: Microsoft Walks Away From Yahoo

Arn / MacRumors: Microsoft Walking Away from Yahoo Acquisition

Ryan Block / Engadget: Microsoft pulls bid for Yahoo!, Microhoo will never be

MG Siegler / VentureBeat: Yahoo breaks the wrist, Microsoft walks away

John Paczkowski / Digital Daily: Ballmer to Yang: Dear Jerry, Drop Dead

Ina Fried / Beyond Binary:
Microsoft says proxy battle not worth it

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: BloggingStocks

Discussion:

Peter Cohan / BloggingStocks: It's off. Microsoft withdraws its offer for Yahoo for now

BBC:
Microsoft walks away from Yahoo

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

+

Discussion: Gizmodo and TECH.BLORGE.com

Discussion:

Jesus Diaz / Gizmodo: Microsoft Retires Yahoo Offer, Won't Try Hostile Takeover

Erna Mahyuni / TECH.BLORGE.com: No Microhoo - Microsoft terminates bid on Yahoo

Kara Swisher / BoomTo

Tags: microsoft yahoo news google discussion ]]> Mon, 05 May 2008 04:21:15 -0500 tag:croncast.com,3967 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Tinyscreenfuls/~3/284387551/ Shared item Warning: this is going to be a rambling, self-referential post with lots of whining and talk about feelings. If you don't want to read it, just move along

Today was a rough day for me, emotionally. I guess it all has to do with how much of my life I choose to put on the web - a lot. There's very little that I don't share with the people I'm connected with on the web, via this blog, Twitter, or whatever. But it came back to bite me today, and I'm smarting. I guess it's just an unpleasant result of putting my life online.

Earlier today, I was in a meeting where some people from the marketing group were presenting on what they're doing in the world of social media. Anyone who knows me knows that this is a sensitive topic, because I believe very strongly that there's a right and a wrong way to use social tools for marketing. There were lots of buzzwords flying around in the meeting, and of course, I couldn't resist making some snarky comments on Twitter. Some of the other people in the meeting are on Twitter, too, and we started a little bit of backchannel banter on the topic.

The conversation then moved into the comments of a post on Michael Brito's blog (Michael works in the marketing department at Intel), and continued in a pretty heated fashion for the rest of the day (Michel turned off comments on that post a few minutes ago). You can go read the thread yourself, to see what was said.

Now, i can't speak to how anyone else in the thread was feeling, or what they were thinking, so the rest of this post is going to be about my thoughts and feelings. I don't want to put words into anyone else's mouth.

I started out frustrated, and finding it hard to make sense of what I was trying to say. I had a very strong feeling and idea I was trying to communicate (about the right vs. wrong way of marketing, having a human voice, and other crap you can go read about). I felt strongly so I spoke strongly, and at first, it didn't work at all. It seemed that everything I said only make people defensive, raised hackles, and provoked retaliation - comments about how I should look in a mirror, etc.

But, as is usually the case during a debate on a complex and emotionally charged topic, after a while, through thinking about it and talking it out, I felt like I settled on a way to clearly and calmly communicate the point I was trying to make the whole time:

I'm giving you feedback and criticism. I'm not trying to attack you personally, but I'm trying to make a point. I can understand you feeling defensive. I'm saying things that make you uncomfortable. But the reason I'm saying them is not to attack you. I promise.

I've been doing this social media stuff since before it was even called that. Years and years. I know how to connect with people and build community. I know how to use those skills in marketing - to build an audience, share information, etc. I know what I'm doing. One of the reasons I'm getting so frustrated is that I wish I'd get a little respect for the things that I know and have done. I'm not the new kid on the block here.

I just noticed something - your voice became human in these comments. You're talking like yourself. You're letting your feelings show through. We're having a conversation.

I know it's hard to preserve that human voice when you go to write a blog post. I struggle with that, too. I always ask myself how can I write this so that it doesn't sound like a press release, or something written by the marketing committee. I don't always succeed. I probably succeed less often than I think I do.

But I try, because I really, truly, fundamentally believe that I should sound like a human when I write. Because I know that if I don't, it's a lot less likely that people are going to want to have a conversation with me. And the reason I write, on my blog, on Twitter, for ISN, or wherever else, is to have those real conversations. To make those real connections with other people. It's what I live for. I believe it's the RIGHT way to market to people - connecting with them with respect, humility, and in my very own human voice.

Another reason I get so frustrated with how Intel and other companies are using/abusing/exploiting social media is that they use the same old command and control techniques, and treat it just like it's another channel or medium for them to deliver their message into my brain.

It's an antagonistic view. The terminology is military, brutal, warlike. Tactics, strategy, campaigns. I am NOT a target. I resent being targeted. I am a human being. Connect with me. Converse with me. I'm telling you how you (collectively) can do that. And I get pissed off when I'm ignored, and still treated like a target or just another set of eyeballs.

Conversations matter because they build relationships. Links between people. And as you build more and more of those links, you start getting something really, really cool and powerful and worthwhile - community. To me, that's the golden ring.

But it's possible to do things that hurt those connections, and thus hurt the community. Talk down to people. Target them. Treat them like nothing more than recipients for the message you want them to get. Don't listen to them.

And on a more subtle level, you can do things that don't necessarily hurt the connections and the community, but don't do anything to build them, either. Things like being boring or uninteresting. Not providing any human surface area for people to connect to.

In my opinion, that middle ground is the most dangerous place to be. It's where we (and I'm definitely including myself) get complacent, lazy, and (yes, I'm going to say it), arrogant.

I'm sorry this whole thing spiraled into whatever it was. It's not fair of me to judge you as a person based solely on what you write on your blog, and I apologize for any offense that was given.

I'd like to get to know you better - to connect with you in a meaningful way. But I'm frustrated because I can't find much human surface area to attach to. It's all business and marketing. So I guess what I've been trying to say, and ask for, is for you to provide me (and others) a little more of your human voice, so we can build a better connection.

Does any of that make sense? Or am I really just crazy, and talking nonsense? I feel that way sometimes

I felt calmer after posting that. I felt like I had gotten to the bottom of the argument I was trying to make, and had found a way to say it that hopefully wouldn't be too prickly and raise too many hackles. I was, honestly, feeling like I had accomplished something in the midst of the arguing and debate.

I really felt like I was exposing myself, emotionally, when I wrote that. I was sharing my true feelings, without varnish, without buffer. I've found in the past that putting myself out there like that was scary, but worth it, because if I didn't, I'd be a hypocrite, telling other people to be human and share their real, human voice if I wasn't willing to do it myself. And people are usually respectful, and tend to open up themselves after I've done so.

But this time, it backfired on me, and I got hurt.

In the comments that followed, a coworker that I consider a friend, someone who gets it (and who I don't even want to name here, for fear of appearing like I'm trying to lash back at her or something, which I'm not) had this to say:

Josh, have you ever considered the reason you lack respect is your voice? You come across as condescending when you discuss how you inventedI meandiscovered social media before anyone else. Yes, there must always be a pioneer. And thank you for your efforts in that arena. But noone will take you seriously when you continue to tout your position as social media guru (even if you don't use the words) and talk (or throw around labels like arrogant) at people instead of with people. That's what makes this dialogue so ironic. You're doing exactly what you claim to abhor.

(Here comes the mushy part where I talk about my feelings - you've been warned!)

It really hurt to read that. I felt almost like I had been physically smacked upside the head. I felt that way partly because it was unexpected - coming from someone I consider a friend, and partly because it made me start thinking maybe she's right - maybe I'm arrogant and condescending and no one has ever bothered to tell me before. No one had ever said something like this to me before. No one had ever stated or implied that I act like I invented social media at Intel. The thought never occurred to me, and I've never tried to be like that. But what if she was right?

I posted a response, talking about Intel's dog eat dog Focal review culture, and how if I didn't take credit for things I had done, no one else was going to give me that credit. But that's not what I was really thinking about

Now, I mentioned earlier that there are very few personal details of my life that I don't share on the web. My life is pretty much an open book. But one thing I've never really talked about online is how I've always struggled with my sense of self worth. Or rather, than I have a very persistent, severe tendency to get down on myself, to start thinking that I'm not doing anything right, and feeling like I'm not worth anything. Yes, I've sought professional help. I feel like I generally keep these feelings under control, but they're always there, under the surface, and I don't know what it was about today - the passionate nature of the people involved, or my own strong feelings on the topic, but once I read those words, I couldn't think of anything else.

Usually, when I get like this, I just withdraw from my online life - I stop blogging, leave Twitter alone, and find something to do to get through the rough spot. It would be easier if I drank, or had some other mind altering vice (Ben and Jerry's doesn't count, does it?). I've been embarrassed to talk about my feelings. I figured there's got to be SOMETHING I keep to myself, and don't share with the world. And yet, here I am, writing this blog post. Consider it Self Therapy by Blogging.

So I need to ask you a question. Besides all of my own self-loathing issues, I need to be sure of something. I need to know if there's something I can do better, to make some real change come out of all this. So I need you to tell me if you think I'm arrogant, condescending, take credit for things I didn't do, or otherwise behave like a jerk.

I want to know so I can stop doing it, and correct any wrongs that I've done. Not because I'm feeling sorry for myself, and I want you all to pile on. And not because I'm feeling sorry for myself, and I'm fishing for complements and pats-on-the-back to make myself feel better.

I honestly want to know, so I can become a better person. You are my friends, and I value you what you think. if I had spinach in my teeth, I'd want you to tell me. Same thing here.

Leave a comment, or drop me an email (jabancroft@gmail.com) if you'd rather talk in private. Thanks for listening to me talk about my feelings!

Tags: human myself feelings trying felt ]]>Warning: this is going to be a rambling, self-referential post with lots of whining and talk about feelings. If you don't want to read it, just move along

Today was a rough day for me, emotionally. I guess it all has to do with how much of my life I choose to put on the web - a lot. There's very little that I don't share with the people I'm connected with on the web, via this blog, Twitter, or whatever. But it came back to bite me today, and I'm smarting. I guess it's just an unpleasant result of putting my life online.

Earlier today, I was in a meeting where some people from the marketing group were presenting on what they're doing in the world of social media. Anyone who knows me knows that this is a sensitive topic, because I believe very strongly that there's a right and a wrong way to use social tools for marketing. There were lots of buzzwords flying around in the meeting, and of course, I couldn't resist making some snarky comments on Twitter. Some of the other people in the meeting are on Twitter, too, and we started a little bit of backchannel banter on the topic.

The conversation then moved into the comments of a post on Michael Brito's blog (Michael works in the marketing department at Intel), and continued in a pretty heated fashion for the rest of the day (Michel turned off comments on that post a few minutes ago). You can go read the thread yourself, to see what was said.

Now, i can't speak to how anyone else in the thread was feeling, or what they were thinking, so the rest of this post is going to be about my thoughts and feelings. I don't want to put words into anyone else's mouth.

I started out frustrated, and finding it hard to make sense of what I was trying to say. I had a very strong feeling and idea I was trying to communicate (about the right vs. wrong way of marketing, having a human voice, and other crap you can go read about). I felt strongly so I spoke strongly, and at first, it didn't work at all. It seemed that everything I said only make people defensive, raised hackles, and provoked retaliation - comments about how I should look in a mirror, etc.

But, as is usually the case during a debate on a complex and emotionally charged topic, after a while, through thinking about it and talking it out, I felt like I settled on a way to clearly and calmly communicate the point I was trying to make the whole time:

I'm giving you feedback and criticism. I'm not trying to attack you personally, but I'm trying to make a point. I can understand you feeling defensive. I'm saying things that make you uncomfortable. But the reason I'm saying them is not to attack you. I promise.

I've been doing this social media stuff since before it was even called that. Years and years. I know how to connect with people and build community. I know how to use those skills in marketing - to build an audience, share information, etc. I know what I'm doing. One of the reasons I'm getting so frustrated is that I wish I'd get a little respect for the things that I know and have done. I'm not the new kid on the block here.

I just noticed something - your voice became human in these comments. You're talking like yourself. You're letting your feelings show through. We're having a conversation.

I know it's hard to preserve that human voice when you go to write a blog post. I struggle with that, too. I always ask myself how can I write this so that it doesn't sound like a press release, or something written by the marketing committee. I don't always succeed. I probably succeed less often than I think I do.

But I try, because I really, truly, fundamentally believe that I should sound like a human when I write. Because I know that if I don't, it's a lot less likely that people are going to want to have a conversation with me. And the reason I write, on my blog, on Twitter, for ISN, or wherever else, is to have those real conversations. To make those real connections with other people. It's what I live for. I believe it's the RIGHT way to market to people - connecting with them with respect, humility, and in my very own human voice.

Another reason I get so frustrated with how Intel and other companies are using/abusing/exploiting social media is that they use the same old command and control techniques, and treat it just like it's another channel or medium for them to deliver their message into my brain.

It's an antagonistic view. The terminology is military, brutal, warlike. Tactics, strategy, campaigns. I am NOT a target. I resent being targeted. I am a human being. Connect with me. Converse with me. I'm telling you how you (collectively) can do that. And I get pissed off when I'm ignored, and still treated like a target or just another set of eyeballs.

Conversations matter because they build relationships. Links between people. And as you build more and more of those links, you start getting something really, really cool and powerful and worthwhile - community. To me, that's the golden ring.

But it's possible to do things that hurt those connections, and thus hurt the community. Talk down to people. Target them. Treat them like nothing more than recipients for the message you want them to get. Don't listen to them.

And on a more subtle level, you can do things that don't necessarily hurt the connections and the community, but don't do anything to build them, either. Things like being boring or uninteresting. Not providing any human surface area for people to connect to.

In my opinion, that middle ground is the most dangerous place to be. It's where we (and I'm definitely including myself) get complacent, lazy, and (yes, I'm going to say it), arrogant.

I'm sorry this whole thing spiraled into whatever it was. It's not fair of me to judge you as a person based solely on what you write on your blog, and I apologize for any offense that was given.

I'd like to get to know you better - to connect with you in a meaningful way. But I'm frustrated because I can't find much human surface area to attach to. It's all business and marketing. So I guess what I've been trying to say, and ask for, is for you to provide me (and others) a little more of your human voice, so we can build a better connection.

Does any of that make sense? Or am I really just crazy, and talking nonsense? I feel that way sometimes

I felt calmer after posting that. I felt like I had gotten to the bottom of the argument I was trying to make, and had found a way to say it that hopefully wouldn't be too prickly and raise too many hackles. I was, honestly, feeling like I had accomplished something in the midst of the arguing and debate.

I really felt like I was exposing myself, emotionally, when I wrote that. I was sharing my true feelings, without varnish, without buffer. I've found in the past that putting myself out there like that was scary, but worth it, because if I didn't, I'd be a hypocrite, telling other people to be human and share their real, human voice if I wasn't willing to do it myself. And people are usually respectful, and tend to open up themselves after I've done so.

But this time, it backfired on me, and I got hurt.

In the comments that followed, a coworker that I consider a friend, someone who gets it (and who I don't even want to name here, for fear of appearing like I'm trying to lash back at her or something, which I'm not) had this to say:

Josh, have you ever considered the reason you lack respect is your voice? You come across as condescending when you discuss how you inventedI meandiscovered social media before anyone else. Yes, there must always be a pioneer. And thank you for your efforts in that arena. But noone will take you seriously when you continue to tout your position as social media guru (even if you don't use the words) and talk (or throw around labels like arrogant) at people instead of with people. That's what makes this dialogue so ironic. You're doing exactly what you claim to abhor.

(Here comes the mushy part where I talk about my feelings - you've been warned!)

It really hurt to read that. I felt almost like I had been physically smacked upside the head. I felt that way partly because it was unexpected - coming from someone I consider a friend, and partly because it made me start thinking maybe she's right - maybe I'm arrogant and condescending and no one has ever bothered to tell me before. No one had ever said something like this to me before. No one had ever stated or implied that I act like I invented social media at Intel. The thought never occurred to me, and I've never tried to be like that. But what if she was right?

I posted a response, talking about Intel's dog eat dog Focal review culture, and how if I didn't take credit for things I had done, no one else was going to give me that credit. But that's not what I was really thinking about

Now, I mentioned earlier that there are very few personal details of my life that I don't share on the web. My life is pretty much an open book. But one thing I've never really talked about online is how I've always struggled with my sense of self worth. Or rather, than I have a very persistent, severe tendency to get down on myself, to start thinking that I'm not doing anything right, and feeling like I'm not worth anything. Yes, I've sought professional help. I feel like I generally keep these feelings under control, but they're always there, under the surface, and I don't know what it was about today - the passionate nature of the people involved, or my own strong feelings on the topic, but once I read those words, I couldn't think of anything else.

Usually, when I get like this, I just withdraw from my online life - I stop blogging, leave Twitter alone, and find something to do to get through the rough spot. It would be easier if I drank, or had some other mind altering vice (Ben and Jerry's doesn't count, does it?). I've been embarrassed to talk about my feelings. I figured there's got to be SOMETHING I keep to myself, and don't share with the world. And yet, here I am, writing this blog post. Consider it Self Therapy by Blogging.

So I need to ask you a question. Besides all of my own self-loathing issues, I need to be sure of something. I need to know if there's something I can do better, to make some real change come out of all this. So I need you to tell me if you think I'm arrogant, condescending, take credit for things I didn't do, or otherwise behave like a jerk.

I want to know so I can stop doing it, and correct any wrongs that I've done. Not because I'm feeling sorry for myself, and I want you all to pile on. And not because I'm feeling sorry for myself, and I'm fishing for complements and pats-on-the-back to make myself feel better.

I honestly want to know, so I can become a better person. You are my friends, and I value you what you think. if I had spinach in my teeth, I'd want you to tell me. Same thing here.

Leave a comment, or drop me an email (jabancroft@gmail.com) if you'd rather talk in private. Thanks for listening to me talk about my feelings!

Tags: human myself feelings trying felt ]]> Tue, 06 May 2008 04:38:52 -0500 tag:croncast.com,3962 http://feeds.tuaw.com/~r/weblogsinc/tuaw/~3/282127781/ Shared item Filed under: Apple Corporate, Apple Financial

There's no love lost between Steve Jobs and Dell founder Michael Dell. Back in 1997, when Michael was CEO of Dell, he famously told a group of IT big wigs, ""What would I do [if I were in charge of Apple]? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

Oh, Michael. That's the kind of statement that waits in a corner for years, thinking, "I'm going to bite him in the backside ... hard."

The time has come. Earlier today, Apple rose $6.05 (3.48%) in NASDAQ trading, closing at $180.00. Compared to Dell's standing, Apple's market value of $158.66 billion is now four times Dell's $38.97 billion.

Only a year ago, we were excited that Apple had doubled Dell's value. Here's to the next twelve months.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Tags: apple dell michael value back ]]>Filed under: Apple Corporate, Apple Financial

There's no love lost between Steve Jobs and Dell founder Michael Dell. Back in 1997, when Michael was CEO of Dell, he famously told a group of IT big wigs, ""What would I do [if I were in charge of Apple]? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

Oh, Michael. That's the kind of statement that waits in a corner for years, thinking, "I'm going to bite him in the backside ... hard."

The time has come. Earlier today, Apple rose $6.05 (3.48%) in NASDAQ trading, closing at $180.00. Compared to Dell's standing, Apple's market value of $158.66 billion is now four times Dell's $38.97 billion.

Only a year ago, we were excited that Apple had doubled Dell's value. Here's to the next twelve months.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Tags: apple dell michael value back ]]> Fri, 02 May 2008 15:00:00 -0500 tag:croncast.com,3954 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/281469838/ Shared item Time magazine has come out with its annual list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. You've got your Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. All the usual suspects. Digg CEO Jay Adelson squeezes onto the list, as does our own Michael Arrington as the token blogger. (See full list here).

The way the list is put together is that Time tries to get one famous person to write about another. So you have Craig Newmark on Zuckerberg, Guy Kawasaki on Steve Ballmer, and Arianna Huffington on Arrington (how apropos).

Congratulations to one and all. Can you find Michael on the cover at right? (Click to enlarge). Neither could I at first, but he's there. Hint: Look for the profile in silhouette. At least, I think that's him.

CrunchBase Information

Mark Zuckerberg

Jay Adelson

Michael Arrington

Information provided by CrunchBase

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

Tags: list arrington zuckerberg michael mark ]]>Time magazine has come out with its annual list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. You've got your Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. All the usual suspects. Digg CEO Jay Adelson squeezes onto the list, as does our own Michael Arrington as the token blogger. (See full list here).

The way the list is put together is that Time tries to get one famous person to write about another. So you have Craig Newmark on Zuckerberg, Guy Kawasaki on Steve Ballmer, and Arianna Huffington on Arrington (how apropos).

Congratulations to one and all. Can you find Michael on the cover at right? (Click to enlarge). Neither could I at first, but he's there. Hint: Look for the profile in silhouette. At least, I think that's him.

CrunchBase Information

Mark Zuckerberg

Jay Adelson

Michael Arrington

Information provided by CrunchBase

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

Tags: list arrington zuckerberg michael mark ]]> Thu, 01 May 2008 14:21:03 -0500 tag:croncast.com,3931 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/infolaw/2008/04/23/what-are-the-bestworst-remixes-of-public-domain-works/ Shared item My new project involves examining legal protections for the public domain under United States copyright law. There's a doctrinal component to that what does the law say? as well as a normative component why should we care? It's that latter question that I've been noodling around lately.

Anyone who looks for indications that copyright policymakers in the United States (including both Congress and the federal bench) share the belief, held by many legal academics, that a robust public domain is necessary to foster future creative production, is bound to be a little surprised: the evidence is actually fairly equivocal that Congress and the courts actually hold any such view. Even the language Congress and the courts employ seems, if anything, to be skeptical of the value of the public domain: it's routine to speak of works falling into the public domain, which conjures to mind somebody clutching the ledge of a tall building, hanging on for dear life: quick, that work is about to fall! Won't somebody save it?

The broadest judicial recognition of the value of the public domain that I'm aware of comes from Judge Kozinski's memorable dissenting opinion in White v. Samsung Electronics, 989 F.2d 1512 (9th Cir. 1993), which wasn't even a copyright case:

Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture.

Id. at 1513. Later, Judge Kozinski continued:

To paraphrase only slightly Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), it may seem unfair that much of the fruit of a creator's labor may be used by others without compensation. But this is not some unforeseen byproduct of our intellectual property system; it is the system's very essence. Intellectual property law assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely on the ideas that underlie it. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate: It is the means by which intellectual property law advances the progress of science and art. We give authors certain exclusive rights, but in exchange we get a richer public domain. The majority ignores this wise teaching, and all of us are the poorer for it.

Id. at 1517.

I'd like to be able to illustrate Judge Kozinski's point for skeptical colleagues and friends by citing specific examples of particularly noteworthy works of art that are based on public domain source materials in simplest terms, I'm interested in contemporary remixes of public domain works. (I appreciate that this is a narrower conception of the influence of the public domain on later creators than Judge Kozinski is actually talking about, but it makes for relatively comprehensible examples.) So, for example, we might say that West Side Story is thought to be a pretty effective transformation of Romeo and Juliet: it takes Shakespeare's public domain play and makes of it something new, different, and by some measures at least, better.

The problem, of course, is that many remixes don't remotely improve on the artistic value of the original. I've yet to meet anyone competently acquainted with both The Iliad and Troy who sees much worth in the latter. (Which is not to say that a dynamite modern retelling of The Iliad couldn't be written; one of my old English profs, among others, has done so.) I was a kid during the disco era, during which it seemed like A Fifth of Beethoven was playing constantly; but that work, too, has not exactly held its own against the better-known public domain original. And you can probably think of others.

What are your nominees for the best/worst remixes of public domain works?

Tags: domain public works property law ]]>My new project involves examining legal protections for the public domain under United States copyright law. There's a doctrinal component to that what does the law say? as well as a normative component why should we care? It's that latter question that I've been noodling around lately.

Anyone who looks for indications that copyright policymakers in the United States (including both Congress and the federal bench) share the belief, held by many legal academics, that a robust public domain is necessary to foster future creative production, is bound to be a little surprised: the evidence is actually fairly equivocal that Congress and the courts actually hold any such view. Even the language Congress and the courts employ seems, if anything, to be skeptical of the value of the public domain: it's routine to speak of works falling into the public domain, which conjures to mind somebody clutching the ledge of a tall building, hanging on for dear life: quick, that work is about to fall! Won't somebody save it?

The broadest judicial recognition of the value of the public domain that I'm aware of comes from Judge Kozinski's memorable dissenting opinion in White v. Samsung Electronics, 989 F.2d 1512 (9th Cir. 1993), which wasn't even a copyright case:

Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture.

Id. at 1513. Later, Judge Kozinski continued:

To paraphrase only slightly Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), it may seem unfair that much of the fruit of a creator's labor may be used by others without compensation. But this is not some unforeseen byproduct of our intellectual property system; it is the system's very essence. Intellectual property law assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely on the ideas that underlie it. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate: It is the means by which intellectual property law advances the progress of science and art. We give authors certain exclusive rights, but in exchange we get a richer public domain. The majority ignores this wise teaching, and all of us are the poorer for it.

Id. at 1517.

I'd like to be able to illustrate Judge Kozinski's point for skeptical colleagues and friends by citing specific examples of particularly noteworthy works of art that are based on public domain source materials in simplest terms, I'm interested in contemporary remixes of public domain works. (I appreciate that this is a narrower conception of the influence of the public domain on later creators than Judge Kozinski is actually talking about, but it makes for relatively comprehensible examples.) So, for example, we might say that West Side Story is thought to be a pretty effective transformation of Romeo and Juliet: it takes Shakespeare's public domain play and makes of it something new, different, and by some measures at least, better.

The problem, of course, is that many remixes don't remotely improve on the artistic value of the original. I've yet to meet anyone competently acquainted with both The Iliad and Troy who sees much worth in the latter. (Which is not to say that a dynamite modern retelling of The Iliad couldn't be written; one of my old English profs, among others, has