Bob Young was the founder of RedHat, one of the original examples of putting open source software to work in a business model that made sense.  With the money he made from the sale of RedHat, he set off to build Lulu.com, which offers writers a vehicle with which to publish, promote and distribute their work without necessarily using the existing infrastructure of agents, publishers and bookstores.

Evidently, according to this article from today's Globe and Mail, he's about to enter the video clip business, offering producers / creators the ability to create, promote and distribute their work.

The basics of the business model are outlined in this snippet from the article, below:

LULU.TV enters viral video field
Globe and Mail Update


Bob Young, founder of LULU.com, has announced LULU.TV, for video makers to profit from content as they deliver ad-free entertainment and provide a platform which emerging talent can exploit to further their video and movie-making careers.

LULU.TV has engineered a model for paying content providers. Creatives ("shareholders") pay $14.95 a month; 80 per cent of the total payments go into a pool. The pool is split up at the end of the month, with each contributor receiving a share of the pool based on his or her share of the total viewings of the videos on the site.

Tags: RedHat, Lulu.com, Lulu.tv, video sharing, content creation, Web 2.0, business models

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I had originally posted on this upcoming 'event' (number of blogs tracked by Technorati) last week, and had anticipated that the blog-o-meter would cross that line sometime on Friday, July 28, 2006.

Well, as of 14h00 pm PDT Technorati reports 49.9 million blogs, so I am (again) guessing that it will be sometime today ... if not, then certainly tomorrow.

A meaningless marker, for sure, but we all like watching and measuring things .. and it certainly doesn't seem so long ago that there were only 5 or 10 million blogs and blogging was still more often than not being bemusedly dismissed as a fad (hehe .. so cute that Forbes would put a blogging-focused article behind a paywall).

That was before newspapers and major online media properties began trying to incorporate blogging or other elements of interactivity into their online offerings.

It will be interesting to see what the next 12 months brings.

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Lot's of controversy swirling around YouTube lately.  They are serving 100 million videos a day.  People visit to see clips of all kinds, but there is a problem—copyright.  BusinessWeek has a good piece this morning (boy they've had some gems today) on the whole controversy.

These are tough, tough issues.  Does YouTube have the right to claim copyright and distribution of your work just because you use their service?  Are there ways to protect yourself?  Would embedding a CreativeCommons license into the video help?  Would hosting it yourself, but using RedSwoosh to distribute the bandwidth help?

As a company, Qumana believes that you own your content.  That you have the rights to monetize your content.  Your made it so you should reap the benefits.

Seems straightforward to me.

Tags: YouTube, Copyright, CreativeCommons, Qumana

One click on DropPad ... open Qumana

Type in title of blog post

Type body of message ...

Open "Source View".

Paste html snippet where the cursor is flashing ...

Posts that contain Qumana per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Return to WYSIWYG ... check and adjust line spacing if desired ...

Add italics ... check Categories for this post.

Insert Q-Ads text advertising if desired ... place cursor where you want the ad, click on "Insert Ad", type a keyword (use the customizable banner designer to customize ad), then click OK.

Check which blog you're posting to ...

Add Technorati Tags by clicking on "Insert Tags"

Type tags into dialog box, click OK.

Take a last look ...

Click on "Publish Post".

Presto !

Tags: Qumana, offline blog editor, easy blogging, ease of use, usability

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I realize that you need power to run computers. Obviously, after your computer's battery runs out and you can't recharge it, it's hard to keep composing blog posts ...

When there are power outages or other related systems outages that affect the Web but you still have computer power for your individual machine, you can still compose blog posts with Qumana, and save them to be posted later.

Silicon Valley gone dark day #2

George Ou reports that 100-degree weather coupled with widespread power outages have made for a miserable weekend in the Valley. George spent his afternoon assembling a gas generator to power his AC, refrigerator, DSL modem, wireless router and laptop...

Tags: blogging client, offline, advantages, flexibility, versatility

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When will that marker be reached ?

Tonight Technorati states it is tracking 49.4 million blogs, so I assume it will be towards the end of this coming week that the 50 million mark will be passed.  Friday ?  Next weekend ?

Certainly many of them will have been abandoned some time ago, or shortly after being created, and no doubt many are moribund or generally inactive ... but Technorati is still tracking them.

And it's interesting .. and useful for us ... to note that they are still being created at a rapid clip.

It was on September 18th, 2004 that I posted that Technorati had just crossed the 4 million blog mark.

So, there have been at least 46 million new blogs created in just over 22 months by the time the 50 million mark is reached on Technorati. That's a heckuva growth rate.

You'd think that at least one or two million of the bloggers who have kept on blogging would want a simple, elegant, effective and free offline blogging tool ... like Qumana.

If for no other reason (though making blogging easier is a big benefit) than to avoid the frustration they seem to experience when whatever blog platform they are using experiences a service outage (which is at least as frustrating as the dropped call cell-phone experience that is now such a problem that the cell industry's advertising focuses on the issue).

I also wonder how many of the 50 million are from countries such as Spain, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Central American countries, California ;-), France (and Quebec ... technically not a country, but ...), Holland and Germany.  Bloggers who blog in those languages now have access to Qumana operational in their native language (German coming in  a day or two).  Good thing Qumana plays nice with Typepad ... they have a growing base of users in those European countries / languages.

Surely more than a handful will want to try it out.

Tags: Qumana, Qumana Spanish, Qumana French, Qumana Dutch, growth of blogging, Typepad, Typepad Europe

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.. will you use email as much, or do you think you'll use IM and blogs more often to communicate ?

When it comes to the workplace, my guess is that once several major organizations begin to demonstrate the effectiveness of project or research-oriented blogs, there will be a rush to a tipping point. 

Blogs in the workplace will, I think, come to be viewed as centralized bulletin boards for purposeful work, and group dynamics will take care of all but the most extreme cases of inappropriate use .. just as many comment communities on existing blogs have figured out how to deal with the behaviour of trolls.

Here's a peek into the future .. via the Globe and Mail pass-through of an AP story

Text messaging on rise with young people
MARTHA IRVINE
Associated Press


CHICAGO — E-mail is so last millennium. Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder — a parent, teacher or a boss — or to receive an attached file. But increasingly, the former darling of high-tech communication is losing favour to instant and text messaging, and to the chatter generated on blogs and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The shift is starting to creep into workplace communication, too.

"In this world of instant gratification, e-mail has become the new snail mail," says 25-year-old Rachel Quizon from Norwalk, Calif. She became addicted to instant messaging in college, where many students are logged on 24/7.

Much like home postal boxes have become receptacles for junk mail, bills and the occasional greeting card, electronic mailboxes have become cluttered with spam. That makes them a pain to weed through, and the problem is only expected to worsen as some e-mail providers allow on-line marketers to bypass spam filters for a fee.

Beyond that, e-mail has become most associated with school and work.

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.. gives new meaning to the "You" in YouTube.

As in "You" actually means "Our".

Via Blogaholics, here's an interpretation of YouTube's recent announcement.  I suspect that many bloggers will take similar action.

Goodbye YouTube


YouTube has changed their terms and conditions to include the following:

"…you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successor’s) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels…"

Which basically means that they can do whatever they want with the content you upload to their service and they can make money from it. And because it is a tranferable license, they can give your content to anyone else to do whatever they want with it. And if tomorrow some big media company buys YouTube they will have the same rights to your content. You loose all control over how your submissions are used.

I think a lot of people are missing the point when they say that the terms also say "The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the YouTube Website." or that you have to give YouTube the right to distribute your content anyway if people want to see it on their site. The point here is that now YouTube can make money from, and let anyone else they want make money from, your content, without having to ask you first.

I don’t mind sharing my video and my pictures. I don’t mind other people using and remixing what I create. If you look at my Flickr pictures they are all licensed with an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license that permits it. But I do not want other people to make money from it without asking me first.

So I’m deleting everything I have on YouTube.

Other posts on this: here, here, here

Update: Oh, and notice that they don’t exclude your private videos from this.

BTW, a similar move by MySpace led Billy Bragg to remove all his music from MySpace.

I also suspect that means that YouTube is further positioning itself for acquisition by CBS or NBC or CNN .. or something like that.

UPDATE:  Wiggle room ?

Via the Spexious blog

Van Buskirk chooses to overlook two sections of this paragraph in the terms of service that seem awfully pertinent. The first is in boldface:

For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions.

and the second, more important part:

The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the YouTube Website.

Van Buskirk makes this point in the comments to his post that the term “ownership” begins to lose its meaning once you have granted a royalty-free license as broad as the one YouTube claims, and I agree with him on this. But the point about the User’s ability to terminate the license by removing the work from the website here is critical.

Tags: youtube, video, rights, license, terms of service, goodbye

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Many of have been wondering how and when this would first happen.  The eventual decision will have significant ramifications.

YouTube sued over copyright infringement


A journalist and well-known helicopter pilot in Los Angeles has filed suit against video-sharing site YouTube, claiming that it encouraged users to violate copyright law.

Robert Tur says video he shot of the beating of trucker Reginald Denny during the 1992 Los Angeles riots was posted at YouTube without his permission and viewed more than 1,000 times. Tur says in his lawsuit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court, that YouTube is profiting from his work while hurting his ability to license his video.

"Mr. Tur's lawsuit is without merit," YouTube said in a statement. "YouTube is a service provider that complies with all the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and therefore is entitled to the full protections of the safe harbor provisions of the Act."

Passed in 1998 to protect copyright holders from technology that facilitated piracy, the DMCA also offered protection to Web service providers by limiting their liability in cases where their customers were found guilty of copyright violation.

Tags: YouTube, copyright, copyright infringment, DMCA

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via Doc Searls weblog:

Short Distance

Don Thorson has a new gig with Jajah, which has a new way to do VoIP over what we used to call "long distance":

         ...   enter your number and the number you're calling on the Jajah website, and click on a button.

Don: After you hit "call" , your phone will ring, your friends phone will ring - you both answer and you talk.

You've basically instructed our server to make two local calls - which is one of the reasons it's so cheap.

Tags: VoIP, free long distance calling

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YouTube hits an official high - the Internet's fasting growing web property (doubling in June over May) now serves 100 million videos a day (CNet), which accounts for 60% of all videos watched per day. It is, without a doubt, the all-round leader in online video and holds an astounding 29% of the U.S. multimedia entertainment market (Hitwise).

To summarize, YouTube has now:

• 100 million videos watched per day
• serves 60% of the videos watched online
• 29% of the US multimedia entertainment market
• 2.5 billion videos watched in June
• 65,000 new videos uploaded per day
• 20 million unique users per month (up from 12.6 in May)
• 30 employees (some say 52)
• one of the top 50 web properties

YouTube has the market, and now its next challenge is to monetize that market without alienation. I have a feeling they'll have no trouble if they start slowly and with good design. Right now their efforts are weak, at best, but I am sure the advertisiers are knocking on their door... and I hope they are creating their own ad distribution system to capture the revenue.

And, of course, the next challenge after monetization.... legal battles.

Via business2blog

Via the BoingBoing blog.

In a misguided attempt to supposedly curtail terrorists communicating on blogs, BoingBoing reports the following:

India's Department of Telecommunications (DoT) passed an order to ISPs Friday to block several websites. The list is confidential. Indian ISPs have been slowly coming into compliance. SpectraNet, MTNL, Reliance, and as of Monday afternoon, Airtel. State-backed BSNL and VSNL have not started yet but likely will soon. The known list of blocked domains is *.blogspot.com, *.typepad.com and geocities.com/*.

Yes folks, the Indian government has decided to censor blogs and refused to explain why. This morning Shivam Vij managed to talk to Dr Gulshan Rai, director of CERT-IN, the only body authorised to issue directives to ISPs. His response: "Somebody must have asked for some sites to be blocked. What is your problem?"

The full story is here on BoingBoing.  BoingBoing notes:

"The block is still spreading through Indian ISPs. This recalls Pakistan's Blogspot ban during the Danish cartoon controversy and India's Yahoo Groups ban in '03 to shut down a separatist forum."

lSnip ...]

"We're treading with a little caution before we go whole-hog at the government. There is a possibility that it is a mistake - where a directive from the government on a few blogs might have been misrepresented by ISP's here - who have blocked the entire sites."

Update (from BoingBoing), 11AM PT:

An Indian political blog is reporting that the ban was initiated by the Indian intelligence service to stop terrorism: Link. According to their source, the terrorists are using blogs to communicate.

Not only is this useless (because the terrorists can simply use proxies), it's akin to shutting off the country's telephone service because terrorists talk to each other through phones.

Tags: blogging, terrorism, regulatory control Web 2.0, lack of understanding

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I suspect that it is just as straightforward as with YouTube and Kaneva.

Let's find out ...  update: it is, yay! 

With a minor squiggle - you don't see the frame for the Google Video clip in the WYSIWYG window of Qumana.  We'll have to work on that .. but don't worry, the clip's html is there and does get published, so that the clip itself is published.

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The next wave of publishing to the Web continues to grow.  The Globe and Mail's feed from AP provides an article outlining the spectacular growth of the video clip publishing web site YouTube.

The report is from an invitation-only Sun Valley conference and points out that YouTube has emerged into the limelight.

There is a big wave of video coming on-line and these [media] guys want to work with us to stay relevant in this changing marketplace," Hurley said during an interview. "This trend in the Internet isn't changing, so we are working with them to find solutions on how they can embrace what we are doing and really leverage that to help their business.

It's another signal about the continuing blurring of the lines between mainstream media and the "new media" environment represented by blogging, podcasting, vlogging, music sharing and so on.  For example, one of the key ways YouTube videos get into circulation is by being published to a blog and and distributed throughout link-driven social networks.

That's a key reason why we have made it a breeze to publish YouTube (and Kaneva, etc.) clips to your blogs by copying and pasting the embed code into the blog post.  We know some of the blog platforms enable this pretty easily too ... but our next version will make it even easier, through the use of a Publish Multimedia icon and a simple dialog box.

The following excerpt from the article sets out more clearly how big traditional media are looking at these services and the spaces represented by social networks more and more closely.  YouTube and CBS ?

Hurley proved he is quickly making powerful new friends Thursday when he hooked up with CBS Corp. CEO Leslie Moonves for a 45-minute sit-down held in a small room outside the closed-door meetings where all the other conference participants had gathered.

During a wide-ranging conversation that could be heard by several reporters working in the room, Moonves seemed to become increasingly intrigued as he learned more about YouTube's rapid evolution.

Moonves marveled when Hurley informed him that YouTube's steadily expanding audience is now watching about 100-million videos per day. He asked how YouTube might be able to direct more traffic to websites owned by CBS. The meeting ended with Moonves concluding that CBS should start posting daily snippets of its programming on YouTube.

If CBS forges a formal agreement with YouTube, it would mark the website's second endorsement from a major television network in less than three weeks. In late June, NBC announced it would share some of its programming on YouTube as well as buy some advertising on the website.

"That was a big, key moment in our history," Hurley said of NBC's stamp of approval.

Now Hurley may face his biggest challenge — proving that YouTube can attract enough advertising to become profitable. The 52-employee company has so far been subsisting on $11.5-million (U.S.) in venture capital.

So, CBS and NBC will be publishing some of its content to YouTube.  So can you, of course.

And, using Qumana you can take a clip from YouTube and post it to your blog, add an advertisement (Q-Ads), and publish it.  see, that wasn't so hard .. you're a media publisher.  Do you think the lines are blurring ?

Adding an advertisement ?  Hmm .. we of course let you insert ads into a blog post.  I wonder if YouTube is going to be following the same path as Google Video, and creating ways to have advertising work its way into Google video clips ?

Google Testing Ad Supported Premium Video

Google is running a test offering about 2,000 premium videos available for free streaming viewing, inserting a persistent banner-type ad at the top of the screen and showing an additional post-roll video ad once the premium content has finished streaming.

The test is expected to last about a week, according to Peter Chane, group business product manager, Google Video.

Tags: publishing videos, YouTube, Kaneva, Google Video, Video clip advertising

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The YouTube phenomenon now has stats to prove it. This video-sharing service has not only grown quickly, it has become the clear leader in the video space and is carving a niche as a new community service.

According to comScore, YouTube had 12.6 million unique visitors in May, almost double what it had the previous month and catapulting it in front of Yahoo Video as the most popular video service on the web. Additionally, YouTube is just outside being one of the top 50 web properties - in a very short span of time.

Below is a chart showing the growth trends for YouTube plotted with Yahoo Video and Google Video:

The web is definitely not a static market and explosive growth is taking place in the realm of community services such as YouTube. I expect that we've only just begun a major shift in the online landscape.

"There seems to be no end in sight when it comes to the popularity of social networking sites. Myspace.com surpassed the 50 million unique visitor-mark in May, an increase of seven percent since April. In addition, Youtube nearly doubled its traffic in May, reaching 12.6 million visitors, while Classmates.com reached 14.7 million visitors, and Facebook.com captured just over 14 million visitors."

I am an active YouTube community member. I post videos, search videos, embed them, and subscribe to many YouTube feeds. I have witnessed the popularity of YouTube as it hit with the right demographic, with the right services. YouTube is not just a place to share videos, it's an online community seeing the same devotion as one would expect to MTV or MySpace. People congregate there to share and talk, and blog posts containing YouTube videos are incredibly powerful tools for community building, and traffic generation, on blogs. I have been witness to this on my own websites.

The next shift I expect is the integration of video into other community services. Right now things are very disparate: writing, photos, video, music, podcasting, etc. Attempts have been made to combine these into community spaces, but the model has yet to hit off. I am very interested to see how this plays out in the next few months.

Via Read/Write ; Tags: youtube, social networking, community, video services, yahoo video, media, web properties