corigin.com

The UK online discount vouchers site MyVoucherCodes, which offers British shoppers access to codes and promotions to save them money when shopping, is enticing bloggers to write reviews or create a video in a competition which could see the winner scoop a holiday or £3,000 (about $1,500)

Mark Pearson, MD of the site, is perfectly open about the free promotion that this contest could generate for his site. “Not only will the prize be the perfect trip to paradise for one lucky winner, but it also means that we continue in our campaign to help shoppers get the best deals and discounts by raising our profile across the UK and in particular search engines”.

Whatever the incentive for writing about a particular site, these are surely the best links — potentially of decent quality and embedded inside a variety of unique blog posts. That is, until such a time as Google has an “altruism meter” and can spot the motivation behind writing about a particular web site!

Those wishing to enter can either write a review of the site, either on their blog or a social networking site, or they can make a video “doing something silly to promote the site”. The competition closes on 12th January 2008.

(Via Computer Active)

There have been several reports over the weekend about Llewellyn Kriel, who is supposedly Africa’s first blogger to lose his job as a direct result of his blogging activities.

South African company Avusa, who publishes The Sowetan Newspaper where Kriel was a sub-editor, fired him because he blogged about confidential internal information at Thought Leader.

At least one person, Victor Ngeny, reporting this story is up in arms about the supposed hypocrisy surrounding this case:

This case brings forth the idea of free expression and free speech. It is saddening to note that the media, which has been at the fore front of clamouring for freedom of expression, are the one now suppressing it. When one reads the memo which landed Kriel in this situation, there is no indication that it is confidential. Kriel uses it to emphasise his case in the dearth of standards at The Sowetan.

There is also the case of intellectual property… who can claim ownership of the writings that a staff writer writes in his personal blog his employer or the writer, himself. To me the ultimate owner of the works is the write[r] as he initiates the thoughts and puts the down. If he happens to do this on company time then a sharing of the derivatives should follow. Compa[n]ies usually share in the limelight as a staff witer or employee builds his personal brand.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this view sits very much in favour of the blogger’s rights, though we have to consider the company as well.

It’s easy to suggest that the company is stifling free speech, and therefore has double standards, but in reality, if an employee blogs about confidential company matters, then I see very little difference between that, and him shouting out secrets on the street, or walking to a rival company and telling the CEO all that he knows.

The likelihood of Avusa not having watertight employment contracts, explicitly outlining whether blogging is acceptable, and on what terms, is high. However, notwithstanding the medium used to communicate, there will be serious penalties for divulging sensitive information in a public space, and likely for using company time for personal gain.

It makes a great “hard done by blogger” story, but the company itself may have every right to let Kriel go.

(Via African Path)

The Blog Council, a professional community of top global brands dedicated to promoting best practices in corporate blogging, officially launched with members from diverse range of business sectors. The companies included: AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, and Wells Fargo.

The Blog Council serves as forum for executives to meet one another in a private, vendor-free environment and share tactics, offer advice based on past experience, and develop standards-based best practices as a model for other corporate blogs.

“Major corporations use blogs differently while abiding by the same rules and etiquette,” said Blog Council CEO Andy Sernovitz. “Individual and small-business bloggers don’t face the same issues. For example, we still need to deliver a responsible and effective corporate message, but we need to do it in the complicated environment of the blogosphere. We have to speak for a corporation, but never sound ‘corporate.’ And we have to learn to do it live, and in real-time.”

Bloggers who enjoy blogging anonymously at the Google-owned Blogger.com might want to hear about a recent legal kerfuffle in Israel.  Specifically, Global Voices Online reports that a local Tel Aviv court had recently ordered Google to hand over the IP of an anonymous blogger who wrote defamatory remarks on his Blogger.com hosted blog (they call the comments slanderous, but really, wouldn’t it be libel instead?)

To no one’s surprise, Google has worked within the boundaries of local laws, and has in fact, given up the IP of the blogger in question.  Further details over at TechCrunch have emerged that confirmed my own suspicions in the matter, in that Google did work through a process, but did give the IP over according to their own Terms of Service.

They read, specifically “Google may investigate any violations to “comply with any applicable law, regulation, legal process or governmental request” ”

I think there are some legitimate reasons for wanting to blog anonymously.  However, if you’re going to do it and you want to avoid persecution for whatever reason, clearly you may want to avoid doing it with a service such as Google.  They will do their best to work through local laws, but have long ago decided to work *within* those local boundaries in almost *all* of its services.

According to a recent press release, renowned actor Jon Voight will be blogging exclusively for the UK Blockbuster web site this month, to mark the UK release of “Transformers” and “Bratz: The Movie”.

More than just an interview, all the articles are written by Voight himself. It’s the first time he’s blogged, and he will share his thoughts and experiences of the films he has appeared in, his career, his favourite films, who he likes to work with, what Christmas means to him, and more.

It seems that he’ll have fairly “open mike”, with the press release stating that “Jon has been known to offer controversial opinions in the past so we will have to see how much he reveals in his blog.”

Unfortunately, though the blog should have been published from yesterday, the provided link doesn’t yet work. Hopefully this will be ironed out over the next couple of days.

Jon Voight blog

Sending your child to a private school can cost tons of money. So, if you are unhappy with your kid’s private school, what do you do? Do you pull him or her out of the school? For one mom, Sonjia McSween, the solution is to create a blog that would warn other parents. The blog’s title: “Say NO to New School of Orlando.”

Because of this, she is now facing a defamation lawsuit from the school. She is being asked to stop from blogging about the school and to pay damages. Ouch!

McSween said that “I did not do it with malice. I created it with disappointment about my experience.”

[Full story]

Movable Type Open Source (MTOS), Six Apart’s open source play, is now out in the open. Licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2, the blogging community then is allowed to freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for anything they want. This is going to be all good for the blogging community with both major blog platforms now openly available to everyone. We can just wonder what the next move of Wordpress will be.

Fliqz today introduced the first video plugin to be available on the Movable Type 4 publishing platform.

Combining the Movable Type 4 platform for building robust blogs and social media sites, with Fliqz’ easy to use unique video plugin makes video uploading a snap. Rather than waste precious time uploading a video from a third party site, only to have to return and embed the code into their blog post; Movable Type 4 users can use the Fliqz video upload tool. After the initial installation, Movable Type 4 users click the “Fliqz Video Browse” button within the “Create Entry” toolbar to select their video, and within a few moments their video is placed directly into the HTML of their post.

A number of journalists working at the UK’s Guardian newspaper, and at Salon, will begin daily vlogging (video blogging) on Current TV, Al Gore’s integrated TV and web platform.

The Guardian is already well advanced in the use of online media and blogging, and Salon is a well-established online media publication, so it seems like a natural progression into video.

“When we were approached by Current TV we knew that their profile and outlook was highly compatible with the Guardian,” said Emily Bell, director of digital content, Guardian News & Media.

The advantage of partnering with Current TV is that the content will be broadcast on UK cable and satellite TV, packaged for the web, and be used on the content owners’ web sites.

“We are very excited about the partnership and think it will bring our journalism to a wider audience and help us showcase our best blogging talent in a video format,” Bell continued.

(Via Journalism.co.uk)

It seems like Corbis, the world’s second largest stock photo service, is trying to catch up with Getty (The largest stock photo service) with the help of bloggers — and is trying to sweeten the deal by making it a bit of a win-win proposition.

Read/Write/Web has the details, but it seems like through a service called PicApps, blogs will be able to post images for their posts from Corbis’s vast stock library without any legal consequence.  The catch is that all of the images that are shown via PicApps this way will have a tiny bit of Javascript embeded in them, which creates a “roll-over” effect with advertising (see R/W/W for an example).

This will allow bloggers to avoid the potential copyright pitfalls with grabbing and posting images they have no rights to, and at the same time, allow them to earn a bit of the action as well.

No details at this time with respect to what the payout will be like, how they plan to roll it out and so on (will there be a limit to the number of pictures per post?), but it certainly looks like one extra way that bloggers can monetize their efforts.

Of course, for the purists who want to avoid the distractions of having a little bit of advertising on their blogs there have always been royalty-free alternatives, providing one knows where to look.

Vodpod, which we featured last year, has announced four new types and styles of widgets available, offering “new and enhanced functionality”.

The single video sized widget can be popped in top left or right of a blog, offering functionality in a small area of space.

Next up in size are updated top and sidebar video widgets, offering views of four or five videos at a time. The sidebar widget comes in three styles: elegant, floating, and boxy.

The largest new widget is “gallery style”, designed to take up most of a web page, and showing ten video thumbnails and a larger window for the currently playing video.

All of the new widgets make it easy for users to scroll through the video collection.

More information about the new widgets is available on Vodpod’s “New (and beautiful!) widgets for your blog” blog entry.

Renee Hill of eyeReturn started by saying that if you bought advertising executives a PVR or TiVo for their home they would never buy a thirty-second spot again, instead taking that money, and spending it online, and that really made sense to me.

David Carson, Co-CEO of Heavy.com talked about branded entertainment, an area of advertising that doesn’t shill the brand endlessly, rather trying to find ways to get the word out there while still making it fun for its users.

His presentation was amazing, funny, and had some of the best slides from the whole event. They were well designed, and weren’t as text heavy as some other companies. One of the more interesting things David did was to remind us that the Internet is nothing, and if you weighed the data in the internet as a single bubble of electricity, it would only weight two ounces. Saying that someone has actually gone ahead at one point and time to measure it.

David also said that innovations come from big ideas that are put into action. The ideas don’t have to be amazing, as even the most mundaine product or idea can allow room for innovation.

He then brought up the videos featuring the Blentec blender. Most people would think that a blender is a blender, and choose one with the feature they want, or a brand they trust, but Blentec decided to do something different, and showcase their brand by creating online videos that were funny, interesting, and crazy.

David also brought up the Eepybird video with Diet Coke and Mentos. While not being created by either Coke or Mentos, it instantly made both brands “fun” and interesting.

It is all about finding new, and powerful ways to get your brand noticed, and sometimes the best way is to use a form of branded entertainment. I really enjoyed this session, and while not answering the “how” of creating a campaign that would work, it did remind me that if others can do it, I should be able to as well.

Six Apart, home to the blogging platform Moveable Type, has sold off one of its core acquisitions, LiveJournal, to a Russian media company named SUP (pronounced “soup”).  Acquired in 2005, LiveJournal in many ways was a pioneer in the “social media meets blogging” intersection (now also occupied by Vox, also owned by Six Apart), and has prospered under its stewardship, tripling the number of accounts to 13 million in the intervening time frame.

You may be wondering how a blogging company will do a Russian company like SUP at its helm.

Well, earlier this year, I had written about how prolific — and important — blogging had become in Russia, where I had linked to an article which detailed the birth of Russian blogging via the LiveJournal counterpart, called Zhivoi Zhurnal.

In a place where the political and journalistic organs are not as transparent as other places in the world, coupled with a sophisticated and technologically savvy audience, it seemed like blogging had an important role to play both inside and outside politics, as a legitimate “alternative” form of journalism and media.

Whether its to organize rallies, flashmobs, or providing first hand eye-witness accounts of things, it seems like blogging has found a real purpose there, unlike the angst that some bloggers feel about its existence as a medium, here in the west.

With that kind of background, I suspect that LiveJournal is in better hands than most bloggers might be concerned about.  But time will really tell, I suppose.

Update 11/19/07 11:23am: You can now check out / buy the Kindle at Amazon (affiliate). There are 96 reviews and so far the Kindle is netting 2.5 out of 5 starts. Not stellar.

Here comes another attempt to challenge print books. This one from the internet’s (world’s?) largest bookseller.

Newsweek has an article spanning seven pages on Amazon’s new e-Book reader gadget called Kindle. Unless it’s Tuesday 11/20/07 Monday 11/19/2007, don’t expect to find it anywhere on the Amazon website yet, but the article goes into some depth about what Kindle will do. It also manages to stay away from providing some additional, important details.

Rafat Ali of Paid Content seems miffed over honoring a Kindle embargo that Newsweek seemed to have broken (with permission?) and outlines key features.

- price: $399
- weighs 10.3 ounces, about the size of a book with a 6″ screen and doesn’t get hot, according to Bezos
- e-books will cost $2-$10 with 88,000 at launch and the Kindle can hold 200 books
- comes with EVDO-style always-on network functionality (a service called Whispernet) and can function independent of the PC. You can shop directly from the device for new books. Pricing is not mentioned for Whispernet. Is it free?
- provides 30 hours of reading time and two hours to fully charge
- can also subscribe to some newspapers, magazines and “select” blogs at $0.99 - $1.99 a month
- can follow links on blogs, perform Wikipedia and Google searches which suggests there will be some type of handicapped (?) browser built-in (Opera?)

Gizmodo has a picture of Kindle which looks like a white, thin version of See and Spell or a wafer-thin fax machine. Some are already calling it ugly, without benefit of holding it in hand, which caused the writer of Newsweek piece, Steven Levy to write that it’s not “beastly.”

Scoble has a post that starts with “I’m held by NDA until tomorrow” and then he goes onto talk about how Bill Gates wanted to do something like this badly with the Tablet PC and then adds:

All I’ll say until tomorrow is you gotta try this device. It’s not perfect, but for long-form reading it is a wonderful device. I am going to buy one of my own.

Rob Bushway wonders if anybody is going to try out the Kindle. I’m somewhat interested in the device, although I don’t like the price point or the fact that it’s yet another eBook DRM scheme. Haven’t they learned from the DRM in music that people don’t like DRM?

I asked the person in our family who reads the most, my wife, what she thought of Kindle? She said she wouldn’t use it. Why not? She likes books that she can hold. Perhaps she’d change her mind once she actually saw one?

Too many unanswered questions.

The 80s version of Guitar Hero [see Hmmcast #147] has a great line-up of songs including “What I Like About You” by the Romantics.

Some of the versions of songs in the game Rock Band and Guitar Hero are extremely good cover versions. The companies pay licensing fees, but it seems that doesn’t stop a lawsuit from happening if the cover is too similar.

Copyright isn’t the issue for the Romantics. The band’s attorneys said Activision properly secured permission to use the song What I Like About You, which allowed it to record a cover version. But by creating an imitation so much like the Romantics’ original, they said, the company has infringed the group’s right to its own image and likeness.

I’ve had this one bookmarked for a day and read the article several times. I still don’t completely understand what the Romantics are so upset about. What is the difference between the license Activision purchased and a Master Use License? Isn’t the whole point of a cover version to sound as close to the original? The Romantics seem to be upset because it’s too close? Huh?

The Harry Fox agency which handles music licensing doesn’t handle Master Use Licenses:

Master use rights are required for previously recorded material that you do not own or control. The Harry Fox Agency does not process licenses for master use rights. They can only be obtained from the owner of the master recording, usually a record company…

Where did Activision buy a license for Guitar Hero II?

With the sales of these games and the replay value I’d think every band would be clamoring to get their music into these games. On the Xbox Live they are selling these songs over $2 each. Surely there is something in there that can be shared with the bands? This seems to be the crux of the issue for the Romantics that they aren’t seeing the revenue directly? The licensing fee got sucked up whom? The RIAA?

The article indicates the Romantics also are seeking an injunction against the game, which means if successful it could have the title removed from store shelves this holiday season. Hint: buy it ASAP.

Maybe you can help me sort out the details on this one below. They bought a license, apparently not the right one. Is this like buying deer tags and shooting an elk instead?

I don’t know if the following PayPal story qualifies as news. I’m putting it in the news category, but reluctantly so. It all sounds very familiar with a slight twist to me. PayPal has been providing one off Mastercard numbers for quite some time, not to mention full fledged plastic cards.

The new software utility, called the PayPal Secure Card, recognizes when a user lands on an e-commerce checkout page and automatically helps the user fill out the payment form in a secure way that also offers stepped-up fraud protections.

From the promo screenshot it looks like this feature will be part of a required toolbar, rather than something that doesn’t eat up more browser space. If that’s the way it works, I don’t like it already. I don’t want to have to install some space hogging toolbar for one feature. If this feature can be shoehorned into the existing StumbleUpon toolbar, great. While on this and since eBay owns Skype let’s have one toolbar that does StumbleUpon, eBay/PayPal and Skype. Save space, don’t try to liberate more browser real estate.

Duncan Riley at TechCrunch writes:

On the security front it also provides an alternative to using your actual credit card online, a secure way of using your credit card (if linked to your Paypal account) without the risk of your real details being disclosed.

Security? Will it be easy and convenient to contest bogus charges? How long will the secure created credit card number live and what consumer protections will be in place?

In March a comment here by Nelson Hochberg pointed out how difficult and convoluted it was to contest charges for these virtual cards with PayPal (emphasis mine):

The Paypal literature states that a unique credit card number is generated for each transaction implying that the and is good for only one transaction. However each generated credit and is good for three months allowing unlimited transactions up to the total amount in all of the credit cards, debit cards and bank accounts listed with your Paypal account. I had two vendors charge my Paypal Virtual Debit Card for more than the one charge I authorized.

It took me one and one half hours on the phone with Paypal to find out I have to download a hard to find form, print it, fill it out and mail it to Paypal to contest a charge. All of my credit cards allow me to contest a charge over the phone. I am still waiting to find out if Paypal will refund the unauthorized transactions. (At the end of this post are the Paypal instructions for downloading and using the form to contest transactions)

It took me another hour on the phone to find out that I can cancel a virtual debit card through a supervisor. You have to call Paypal and request a supervisor to do this.

Hopefully PayPal has refined this process for the PayPal Secure Card because if vendors can charge more than authorized and it’s too unwieldy a process reversing these charges, customers will revolt. I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with my virtual PayPal Mastercard to date and I’ve used it a bunch. I don’t have any problem using the card at various websites, have not been victimized or scammed yet, and I earn 1% cashback (pictured) every time I use it. Will using this new PayPal Secure Card pay me 1% cash back? What are the benefits to me using the PayPal Secure Card instead?

Just as with the Amazon Kindle e-Reader in the last post, I have more questions than answers. Guess we’ll both learn more in the coming days.

After previously launching the YouTube ads within the US, Google has decided to allow users from other nations to test drive the ads upon their own web pages.

AdSense lovers from the United Kingdom, Canada and Ireland will be able to embed these video units so long as they follow Google’s guidelines–as well as “speak” English.
(more…)

WordPress Bloggers Go Social with KickApps

KickApps, an on-demand social media platform, today released the Single Sign-On (SSO) plugin that enables a seamless member login experience between WordPress blogs and KickApps hosted social media sites. WordPress bloggers can now easily integrate social media experiences, such as social networking, user-generated content, programmable video players and Widgets for content syndication, to their blogs to fuel audience growth and engagement.

When publishers enable the KickApps SSO plugin between their WordPress and KickApps powered social media sites, registered members of the WordPress powered site will be auto-registered into the site’s KickApps powered community during sign in, requiring no initial user import by the publisher. Once logged in and clicked through to the community site, the member is brought over to his or her profile page, where they can start uploading video, photos and audio, and manage their media.

Well, it almost looks like it, as it seems like the numbers are uniformly down, just like 5-6 days ago, when Feedburner’s subscribers had fallen by half.  The reason that was given at the time was that subscribers stats from Google’s Feedfetcher were off line.

Has the same thing happened again?   Many commenters on the same post at Feedburner are wondering the same thing as the numbers seem to be down around 50% again.  More importantly, with these kind of reliability issues the second time in as many days, it does one reflexively wonder what is going on at Feedburner/Google HQ, whether it be security issues, upgrades, or hardware failures or what have you.

Consumer electronics company LG, who have recently started making great mobile phones, are currently running a competition in five European countries, trying to find the ten best mobloggers to capture images of people which best shows off the style of that particular country.

Mobile phone users in Germany, Spain, the UK, France, and the Netherlands, have been taking pictures and posting them, with a subject, to the City Clickers web site.

The ten people (two from each country) who snap the best photos will win a new LG Viewty phone, plus their bill paid for two months, and training on how best to use the phone.

It’s been running for a couple of weeks now, and closes at midnight CET on Sunday 25th November 2007. So you Europeans still have time to get out there this weekend and snap some stylish shots.

(Via Tech Digest)

In light of the Google PageRank correction to what is thought to be paid postings — and in the recent past, paid links — its ironic that Google might be selling links of their own.

That’s right — although Google has created the perception that it is actively punishing those blogs which are doing things to pollute organic listings, Google itself may also be an unwitting participant in said “pollution” by selling links … at almost $2k a pop.

How is this?

(more…)

Apologies to my US friends peeking over from above a turkey-laden table, but here’s some more indulgence for us Brits.

Shiny Media has launched a second competition in association with LG, this time offering two lucky people a six-month video blogging internship.

If presenting is your thing, then simply shoot some footage of you at your best. If you prefer video editing, no problem. Take some of the supplied raw footage and turn it into a masterpiece.

You’ve got about three weeks or so to submit something, with the competition closing on 14th December.

The two lucky winners will receive training by top talent in video blogging, the opportunity to contribute to videos that are watched by a daily audience of thousands, an all expenses paid trip to Barcelona to cover the 3GSM World Congress next year, a blog on which you can share your experiences, and a new LG Viewty phone.

Unfortunately, it’s only open to those in the UK (you’ll be working at Shiny HQ in London). For much more information about the competition, visit the official competition web site: LG Video Media Talent Award, or visit the YouTube channel to view the videos and vote.

Disclosure: Andy writes for several of Shiny Media’s blogs

You have may heard that Facebook has opened itself to advertising and marketing over the past month through several initiatives, one of them being the feature of creating pages for businesses (Microsoft) and/or personalities (Kevin Rose). If you’ve felt tempted to create a page for your own blog, that may have merits on its own as a means to create a community of fans *on* Facebook. But if you did it expressly for link credit, because Facebook pages are visible to Google, you may want to hold your horses, ‘pardner.

(more…)

This is a pretty cool story out of Washington State. As part of the campus housing TV services, students will have the opportunity to buy a dual tuner 80hr Series 2 TiVo plus a full year of service for only $125. That’s almost half the cost of the same box and service contract directly from tivo.com.

It’s a bit of an extravagance for college, but back when I was in college I remember everyone would rush home for Simpsons and Seinfeld and having something like a TiVo would have been incredibly convenient for watching on my own free time (it’d also be a great way to procrastinate before a test).

Over on the Snapstream blog, they announced Beyond TV 4.7 Beta. If you’re a PC user with an iPhone or iPod, this sounds like a pretty nice way to automatically pull down your recorded shows to your handheld device each night.

iPhone owners with a Mac can continue to use EyeTV to pull down analog cable or OTA TV, and automate moving new shows to your device.

If I still had a 90 minute daily train commute, I would be all over these devices. Catching up on the previous night’s shows each day would almost make going to work fun.

Nice preview of DivX’s set top box, which really could be an AppleTV killer (720p output, plays DivX, streams video from networked PCs) especially if they can bring the price down to a reported $99. They’ve also announced an open plugin/API for the device.

Good news: the reported TiVo OS upgrade capability to add external storage is now a reality.

TiVo began selling the Western Digital 500Gb external drives for TiVo HD and Series 3 TiVo DVRs. [via uncrate]

The official TiVo.com.au site is now up, with a scheduled rollout next summer, just in time for the 2008 Olympics.

It seems it will be based on the TiVo HD platform and for some reason, the 30 second skip hack will not function on the Australian TiVos. Hopefully that’s a feature that never goes away, as I’ve grown completely dependent on it in the last couple years. [thanks, Matthew!]

Getting video off a TiVo onto my mac has been a long time coming. It was promised as long as three years ago and when the Series 3 TiVo was released last year, transfers were disabled by default — but all that changed today.

Yesterday I signed up for a priority download spot for the 9.2 OS and today I got the update. It adds external storage, multi-room viewing, and (finally) TiVoToGo downloading.

(screenshots and my first transfer details after the jump)

I immediately tried it out with Toast 8 ($99 download) on my mac and downloaded the
smallest file I could (a ~500Mb 30 minute cartoon). It transfered in
about ten minutes and played ok in the special video player. After
fumbling around in Toast, I eventually figured out how to initiate an
export and conversion to an iPod/iPhone friendly format, but the
program died. Roxio’s support forums are filled with similar tales. An unfortunate beginning but all was not lost.

(screenshots of Roxio’s transfer and video playback)

Thankfully, the open source TiVoDecode Manager (free!) is still around and works just fine with the Series3 TiVo video format. I was able to connect and transfer the same video in about the same time, with the resulting file being a standard mpeg file.

It’s nice that the transfered video was completely stripped of DRM, since it meant I could move the video to any other device I wanted. Also, it exports at the native size, whereas TiVo’s official Roxio export limits video to a low quality maximum of 320×240. It’ll take another conversion using something like VisualHub to get it on my iPhone, but it’s nice to know there’s a free option available (that produces higher quality output, to boot).

Overall, I’m happy I can finally get shows off my Series 3 TiVo and I can’t wait to load up my laptop and iPhone with video the next time I take a long flight somewhere. The official Roxio route still seems to have some bumps but the free TiVoDecode Manager works just fine if you want to use the feature immediately. TiVoDecode also lets you save $99, which is an added plus (just burn DVDs on a mac using iDVD and the raw mpeg files).

Jay Rosen has an interesting post on the failure of AssignmentZero, an effort to build a publicly funded crowdsourced news organization.

Among the many lessons, he keeps coming back to motivation and incentive.

“A well managed project correctly estimates what motivates people to join in, what the various rewards are for participants, and where the practical limits of their involvement lie.

…amateur production will never replace the system of paid correspondents. It only springs to life when people are motivated enough to self-assign and follow through.”

The idea wasn’t fundamentally broken, in my mind. Crowdsourced news is very powerful. As Derek Powazek said,

“At its best, crowdsourcing is about expanding the walls of the newsroom to the internet, giving an opportunity to people with real experience to share their expertise. This is a point that’s often lost on people who are just looking to make a quick buck on Web 2.0.”

More than anything else, I suspect that AssignmentZero failed because there weren’t any readers. Motivation wouldn’t have been a problem with a NYTimes-sized audience.

To date, I’ve never seen a better explanation of the motivations in collaborative online experiences than Yochai Benkler’s paper called Coase’s Penguin. One of my favorite excerpts from that is where he warns against paying for contributions from the community:

“An act of love drastically changes meaning when one person offers the other money at its end, and a dinner party guest who will take out a checkbook at the end of dinner instead of bringing flowers or a bottle of wine at the beginning will likely never be invited again.”

There are as many motivations as there are contributors in a shared media project. What holds them together is more art than science. Some of that art includes good timing and luck. But it also requires a unique kind of commitment and salesmanship from the leaders of the project.

I’ve begun to wonder if the tipping point happens when the confluence of the community size, the ROI to the contributors and the depth of the trust relationship with the company or the brand creates more value than the sum of the parts. Maybe the science of collaboration services can be found by quantifying the meaning of the relationships between those elements: size, cost, benefit and trust.

Or it could also be that the secret sauce inside the Craig Newmarks, Stewart Butterfields and Jimmy Waleses of the world is much more complicated and nuanced than anyone realizes.

Filed under: Handhelds

OQO has been sending out invitations to a London press conference which will include a pre-launch unveiling of an unspecified product. They’re also announcing what jkOnTheRun calls an Anytime / Anywhere Computing Environment, which is so vague that it could mean almost anything. The CEO of the company will be at the event too, so we know this probably isn’t going anything as insignificant as a point update to existing models.

[Via Boy Genius Report]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

A number of sites are speculating that the reports that The New York Times may be ending its TimesSelect premium service — and rumors that Murdoch may make WSJ.com free…

Nike has taken a stand, bowed to public opinion, and canned indicted football star and dog-fighting mogul Michael Vick.

The company said today that it is suspending him without pay from its roster of endorsers and pulling all Vick-related items from its retail stores. The products have also been removed from Nike’s website.

Reebok, which doesn’t count Vick as an endorser but is the leading manufacturer of NFL jerseys, also said it would suspend sales of Vick-related items. They said in a statement today:

“While we respect the legal process we find the allegations against Mr. Vick too disturbing to ignore, therefore, we have decided to immediately suspend selling Vick NFL product, both at retail and online through the Reebok website.”

Vick apparel continues to sell on eBay.

A little advanced notice that the third annual BlogDay is coming up at the end of this month.

The idea is that bloggers should dedicate one day to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and other areas of interest, by recommending five new blogs that they find interesting, and notifying those bloggers that they’re being recommended.

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The Financial Times says it’s partly due to good timing: Externalities are clearly much more powerful in the internet age. Potter websites, online chat rooms and video games offer fans…

Discovery Communications announced the acquisition of the green blog TreeHugger.com. The site will become part of Planet Green, which includes the first 24/7 eco-lifestyle TV network launching in 50 million homes in early 2008.

Treehugger.com has 1.4 million unique monthly visitors and has served over 50 million pages. It also has an archive of 13,500 posts.

Financial details were not disclosed though sources of PaidContent is placing it at $15 million.