i don’t usually have many bad things to say about the people at download squad, but that’s because they usually don’t act like morons. for example, one of the writers on the site, gordon finlayson, finally got out from under the rock he’s been hiding under for the past decade to realize that there are people that steal content from blogs, paste it to their own, throw some ads around it and try to make money from it.

have a look at this beautifully composed exhibition of idiocy:

But while linking and references may be the lifeblood of blogging, there’s a submerged undercurrent of blogs and Web sites looking to get something for nothing, sailing the high seas of the Blogosphere with a view to plundering hard working Blogs for what they can in order to build up page views and Google page rankings.

yeah i had to read it 5 times to make sense of it too. let me make it easy for you:

note to gordon: when you are linking to sites scraping your content, at least use the nofollow tag. c’mon man!

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apple announced the downloading of the 3 billionth song from itunes today, and i can’t help but wonder who all these rich fools are, that are downloading and paying for songs. i would love to see statistics on how many people make up what percentage of downloads from the itunes music store, and what percentage this figure is of the total itunes install base. here’s what im looking for:

let’s assume there are 100 people in the world. let’s assume 85 of them use itunes. now, let’s assume 20 of them download music from itunes, and 3 of those 20 download 75% of the total music downloaded. according to my made up figures,

85% of the world uses itunes
23.53% of the users download music from the itunes music store
15% of the downloaders (3.5% of the users) account for 75% of the music downloaded

note: i just made up these numbers.

does that sound like a good number of rich fools (3.5% of the total user base)? while i have no doubt that 3 billion songs have been downloaded, i’m having an incredibly hard time believing that this number is spread nicely over all the itunes users. it makes more sense that a small number of deep-pocketed fools are doing most of the paid downloading from the itunes music store, while everyone else uses p2p software to download music and itunes to manage it and sync it with their ipods.

venture beat is reporting today that facebook has removed ‘audio’, a music sharing application, from its platform because the application violates music copyrights as well as facebook’s own developer terms of service. for the uninitiated,

Audio allowed users to upload audio files in the mp3 format, share them with each other and listen to them within Facebook.

while the move is significant for facebook and social networking sites in general (as discussed in the venture beat article), it’s not nearly as significant as it should be for pownce. in case you didn’t see nytimes get down on its knees earlier this week, here’s the kicker:

What struck me most was the site’s potential to be powerfully disruptive. Most file-sharing occurs on public sites, which can be monitored by media companies; if the users violate copyrights, the sites or the users themselves can be threatened into compliance or litigated out of existence (as happened with the original Napster). File-sharing on Pownce would be difficult to police.

the remark, of course, is entirely idiotic. it’s incredibly easy to monitor file-sharing on pownce (as easy as adding all the users as friends and monitoring their activity). if kevin is smart, he will learn from mark and curb this file-sharing activity on pownce now (which is obviously being used to share copyrighted music), rather than face litigation in the future. the problem though, is that without the file-sharing features, pownce becomes just another microblogging tool.

neil cavuto is some chump writing for fox news who was an awful student in school, making C’s at best, and was a habitual liar when talking to his parents. that said, some how he managed to get a job at fox news (perhaps i shouldn’t be so surprised) and has the audacity to give apple marketing advice.

here’s what i have to share with you cavuto:

On October 6, 1997, in response to the question of what he’d do if he was in charge of Apple Comouter, Dell founder and then CEO Michael Dell stood before a crowd of several thousand IT executives and answered flippantly, “What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

A little more than a month later, on November 10, 1997, new Apple iCEO Steve Jobs responded, speaking in front of an image of Michael Dell’s bulls-eye covered face, “We’re coming after you, you’re in our sights.”

Today, after a little more than eight years of hard work, Apple Computer, Inc. passed Dell, Inc. in market value. That’s right, at market close Apple Computer ($72,132,428,843) is now worth more than Dell ($71,970,702,760).

source: mac daily news

i completely agree, the a-list bloggers are slacking off, stealing your ideas and reposting them as their own content, they don’t deserve the attention or the money, blah blah blah blah blah… what the hell are the b-list bloggers doing about it? apart from bitching and moaning about the a-list bloggers i mean.

dare obasanjo makes a half-decent point (so does mike), but whining about it isn’t going to solve anything. unsubscribe from the feeds you think are useless and stop patronizing their blogs. even though i think it’s a bit extreme to say that a-list bloggers are full of it, if you think that’s the case, why don’t i see you writing the content you think is missing rather than just complaining about it? every a-list blogger had to start somewhere; most of them weren’t born with a silver spoon - and if you stop wasting your time with this whining, who knows, this time next year someone might be whining about you not ‘getting it’.

as for the later half of your list of gripes, here’s what i have to say about it ‘pure rubbish’ (well almost pure, you got the part about pownce largely being a twitter knock-off right). and you’re right, techmeme isn’t perfect, for some reason they felt that it would be useful to feature your post.

having previously ‘banned’ the use of the word ‘nigger’, new york is now trying to ‘ban’ the words ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ to discourage their use in music and among young people. of course this ban isn’t legally binding, because of something known as the first amendment. it’s clear that new york hasn’t heard of it so here’s the gist of it: the amendment grants absolute freedom of speech and of press (among others) and places upon the state, the burden to prove that a limitation of any of these freedoms is necessary.

because there is no way the state could make a case to justify limiting the freedom of speech for these words, just like the ban on the word ‘nigger’ the ban on the words ‘ho’ and ‘bitch’ would also be completely symbolic. this is the part that displays the idiocy of new york. because the ban wouldn’t be legally binding, the state won’t be able to enforce the ban and it would be up on individuals to decide whether they respect the symbolic ban.

i just have this feeling that rappers and young people aren’t going to uphold the symbolism and these efforts are just a waste of time for the officials backing it.

i was doing some research for an article earlier today and had to log into mybloglog to check something. this was the first time in over 6 months (maybe more) that i logged into the service that i have come to find well-conceived but poorly implemented.

as if the service’s ongoing battle with spammers wasn’t enough of a headache, mybloglog has decided to pride itself on its stupidity. this is an email i got from them today:

Hi Muhammad!

Part of what makes MyBlogLog so special is our ability to automatically add you to communities in which you have shown a repeated interest. We have just added you to the following communities:

1) MyBlogLog
http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/mybloglog/

Bonus — The “Hot in My Communities” box on your My Home page will keep getting better and better with each community you join.

Note: If you decide one or more of these communities is not for you, simply visit that community’s page on MyBlogLog and click the “Leave Community” button.

Rock on,
MyBlogLog

now wait a minute! part of what makes you special is that you can go into my account and without my knowledge or permission add me to communities that you think i’m interested in? you’ve got to be kidding me. it’s been so long since the last time i logged into the service that i don’t even remember. and you are telling me that i have showed a repeated interesting in a community and therefore you are going to make the decision on my behalf and add me to that community?

and as for the “if you decide one or more of these communities is not for you…” part, how about not making the decision for me to begin with and letting me add myself to the communities that i want? that way i won’t have to go remove myself from every community you arbitrarily add me to.

tony has been pondering a stupid question: when will having a business plan matter? he’s talking, of course, about new web startups that are getting funding without a business plan. actually the question isn’t a stupid one at all, rather it’s one that investors are simply not concerned with. should they be? most definitely. why aren’t they then? too much money, too much faith, too much optimism, take your pick.

the guilty parties include not only venture capital firms funding the projects (like Union Square Ventures that funded twitter) but also include companies like google (youtube) and yahoo (del.icio.us) that ultimately acquire these projects.

The question everyone asks is “What is the business model?” To be completely and totally honest, we don’t yet know.

the venture capital firms that invest in the companies do so without having any idea of how the services will be monetized but hope that at some point in the future a corporate giant will swallow the service up and dish a handsome payout to the venture firm, making monetization its own worry. union square, for example, is investing in twitter and hoping to get lucky the way they did with their investment in del.icio.us when it was bought out by yahoo.

the company that ends up acquiring the startup ultimately does so thinking that they will buy it while its hot and help it grow and deal with monetizing it later. it is more a purchase of internet users’ attention (time and page views) than anything else. from google’s point of view it probably made sense to purchase the attention of 64% of the online video-watching audience and worry about squeezing them for money at a later date.

it doesn’t necessarily make sense, and i don’t see it as the best way to go about investments and acquisitions but when you have that kind of money, you’re probably not thinking like me. for now, both the venture capital firms and the companies making the purchases are just blowing bubbles. we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

josh bernoff’s wrote some rather juvenile commentary a couple days ago on why he is sick of the term “users” and i think its only appropriate that i take a stand for all you users out there. he argues that since everyone is a user we should stop calling them users and ‘backs up’ the argument with the following ironclad logic:

Nobody talks about users of dishwashers, or users of retail stores, or users of telephones. So why are we talking about “users” of computers, browsers, and software?

it only makes sense that i use bernoffian logic to make my counterargument. how about this: since we call people who drive cars, drivers and people who prepare food, cooks, and people who write software, programmers, we should call people who use a particular service or application, users of that service or application.

for some communities there are specific terms, such as digger (for digg), twit (for twitter), but for many others the generic term “user” is used as a synonym for “community member”. you can be a facebooker, a member of the facebook community, or a facebook user. they’re all the same except for the fact that,

1. facebooker - makes you sound like a moron.
2. facebook community member - is unnecessarily cumbersome.
3. facebook user - is familiar and immediately understandable

i’m a user, you’re a user, duncan is definitely a user, and so are millions of others. don’t try to take that away from us.

it’s just one more appalling display of mainstream media’s dismally poor understanding of the tech world. the nytimes has an incredibly fanboyishly written article on pownce, kevin rose’s new startup. take one look and it becomes clear that it is more a plea for traffic from digg than anything else.

jason’s description of pownce as “the hottest startup in Silicon Valley — minutely examined by bloggers, panted after by investors…” couldn’t be far from the truth. yes, there are some that like the service, but many find it to be a twitter-clone with added functionality that e-mail or other services can perform much better, and ultimately the service fails to live up to the hype. as for the investors, the only reason they want to invest is because they don’t want to miss the boat on adventure number 3 (after digg and revision3) and are willing to gamble. i.e. the investors panting is indicative of nothing more than the fact that they have too much money and are willing to throw it away (do i hear bubble?).

he goes on to talk about a purported mystique that was injected into pownce because it is invite only. sure, i can’t disagree much here (i wanted an invite asap too), but come on, most startups nowadays launch in private alpha/beta, and not for the sake of mystique but to fix what’s broken before the site is opened to the masses.

after the initial few paragraphs, the article starts to make more sense as the author concedes that most of the site’s functionality is available elsewhere, but this doesn’t last for long. soon after, the article goes into pownce’s “potential to be powerfully distruptive” because apparently file-sharing on pownce would be hard to police. at this point i started to look hard for any signs of sarcasms or hints at humor because no one in their right mind (or with even the faintest idea of how social networking sites work) would make such an absolutely idiotic remark.

all in all the article is shameful. you really have to start worrying when valleywag is more accurate than a site like nytimes. now i don’t claim to have all the answers but how about this: let mainstream media cover mainstream news, and we will handle the niches?