Disqus - Latest Comments for Seamus McCauley

Re: Mashups

Seamus McCauley — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:38:22 -0000

"Did she ever read anything about witchcraft or wizardry that got her mind working on what became Harry Potter?"

The first Harry Potter story is widely thought to owe at least a passing debt to a book written in 1984 by Nancy Stouffer called 'The Legend of Rah and the Muggles' which includes, amongst other things, a character called Larry Potter and extensive use of magic. In the event the courts threw out Ms Stouffer's claim for plagiarism, not least because she seemed to have fabricated some of her case, but the similarities between some of the details of both stories are reasonably striking.

Re: Revolution in two years

Seamus McCauley — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 06:21:16 -0000

You might then enjoy this from Michael Bywater's excellent book "Big Babies":

"The old saw 'the innocent have nothing to hide' fails to persuade us because it is a category mistake. Having something to hide is not contingent on guilt but on autonomy."

Enjoyed your debate at the Telegraph on Wednesday BTW, v interesting.

Re: The Internet rewards the charitable and punishes the greedy

Seamus McCauley — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 13:05:03 -0000

Nick's examples may tend to the elitist, but I think he makes a reasonable point. Some things are better for being shared. However, some things are quite legitimately spoiled by being overexposed.

Look at Lonely Planet, and its semi-secret policy of never writing up the best places the writers find in case a mass influx of backpackers destroys them. There are bars I go to that are lovely precisely because they're relatively empty: I don't especially want to deny their benefits to anyone else, but at the same time I recognise that if everyone visited those bars then what I like about them would cease to exist.

Sure, in one sense it's elitist for surfers to try and keep other people away from their beaches but there really does come a point at which there's so many people in the water it's essentially impossible to surf (just as there long ago came a point when it was essentially impossible to drive through any of our cities).

Re: Yahoo opens Google AdSense account

Seamus McCauley — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:53:45 -0000

Your title is the best summary of the Yahoogle deal on the web. Good call!

Re: Mobilty, Facebook, Twitter and Social Cohesion

Seamus McCauley — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:16:49 -0000

But what you're asking for is for people to voluntarily bear the cost (miss out on talking to a friend) of generating a positive externality (be reminded of their ties to humanity in general). People don't usually behave that way do they?

Re: @PPA: Teesside hyperlocal sites getting 5-figure audiences

Seamus McCauley — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:44:21 -0000

Yes, but...do we know how many of those are (so to speak) ex-pats? I regularly look up online news about Otley - the town in Yorkshire where I grew up - but I'd be of almost no interest to advertisers offering a local service there because I visit maybe four times a year and rarely buy anything except a couple of pints of Tetley's as I pass through. My father also follows a local newspaper website from a remote village in Ireland that he's never visited on grounds that "it's funny to read news from a place where bugger-all ever happens". I suppose we'll know for sure that not everyone reading the TS10 site actually lives in TS10 when the site users outnumber the inhabitants.

Re: Dan Phiffer - Rationality vs. Economics

Seamus McCauley — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:35:30 -0000

I think the important distinction here is not between experts and the non-experts but between people acting in circumstances where they have the incentive to behave in an informed and rational manner and people acting in circumstances where they do not. The argument is simply that if you do something that doesn't matter to you, you won't do it especially well. Voting for a national government is a classic example. The chance of my vote mattering is sufficiently close to zero to make no odds, so there's no incentive for me to vote even vaguely sensibly.

Or to take an example from social media - anonymous or pseudonymous message boards generate a terrible noise/signal ratio compared to discussions that require verifiable identities on the part of participants. One (economic) explanation for this is that posting anonymous nonsense to a board has no reputational cost. Posting under your own name does. I'd be reluctant to deliberately troll here (or anywhere) under my own name: but under a momentarily-adopted nom de plume, there's nothing to lose.

In this sense your experiment should confirm Bryan's hypothesis. If you get sensible comments from people writing under their own names or linking back to real, relevant blogs it's because there's a reputational gain for them and/or they're keen to gain the collective benefits of sharing knowledge through debate. If you get nonsense from trolls I'd lay money on that nonsense being attached to made-up names and with no return path.

Re: What is proper etiquette for VCs — fiddle with Blackberry or not?

Seamus McCauley — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 10:37:18 -0000

I've got a phone that I use to take notes on in meetings. Like lots of phones, it has Word and Excel and is usually the most convenient thing for me to put brief notes into, not least because I always have it with me.

After a couple of meetings in which people clearly thought I was (rudely) emailing while they talked, I took to explaining that I was making notes before getting my phone out.

By next year, I expect people will have got into the habit of claiming they are "just taking notes" when they are really emailing. So it goes.

Re: Mayfield’s Palihapitiya: “White male circle of insiders”

Seamus McCauley — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 11:14:00 -0000

If it's true that valley VC is institutionally racist, it follows that valley VC money is being allocated inefficiently because the supposed meritocracy of the market has failed. That's a huge opportunity for someone with VC experience and contacts with minority entrepreneurs. What's not clear, therefore, is why Palihapitiya is appearing in videos telling the world about this gap in the market rather than quietly getting on with the job of making money from it. If I see an exploitable market inefficiency my first thought is usually not to make a video warning my competitors that it's there.

Re: How About a Web 2.0 Newspaper

Seamus McCauley — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 12:40:48 -0000

One newspaper - Chile's Las Ultimas Noticias - has tried this for a number of years now. It runs stories on its website and the ones that prove most popular online are prioritised in the next day's print edition.

What, possibly, is missing from this model is that in embracing a web2.0 approach the tone of the newspaper has deteriorated massively, from a relatively serious news publication to a celebrity tabloid. Now, one might argue that if that's what people want that's what they should get. Fair enough, but it's not necessarily what the advertisers want. One of the distinctive benefits of a newspaper is that it can offer advertisers serious content against which to promote their brands, quite distinctively from e.g. MySpace etc. This is one of the reasons, I would argue, newspapers continue to enjoy a share of the ad market disproportionate to their reach and it would not be a trivial decision to give that USP up so as to encourage a more user-edited approach.

Re: How About a Web 2.0 Newspaper

Seamus McCauley — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 07:02:31 -0000

Thanks. I've got a summary of what happens when you turn the choice of content over to readers at http://qurl.com/wsk51 and there's another at the American Journalism Review here http://qurl.com/hdlp8. Nick Carr occasionally touches on this issue too with particular reference to Wikipedia, see e.g. http://qurl.com/nppmw. Generally, the conclusion I tend to is that the lowest common denominator is awfully low...

Re: Virgin Media anti-piracy: who’s the crook now, eh?!

Seamus McCauley — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 13:05:29 -0000

If Virgin is really going to war with file sharers I can't make any business sense of the move at all.

Virgin can't compete with Sky for content. It already tried and, famously, Lost. What remains on Virgin's VOD service is a shadow of the packages Sky offers.

What it *can* compete on is unmoderated bandwidth. Sky (and BT, who run their own VOD service in the form of Vision) have plausible business reasons for kicking file sharers off their networks - they'll do it so they can sell them the content instead. So if Virgin can just give up trying to sell their weak content package they can compete by selling unmoderated bandwidth to file sharers.

I don't see "freeing up bandwidth" as a plausible motive. Bandwidth utilisation follows the standard power laws. If they want to kick the very heaviest users off to free up bandwidth the standard trick is a "fair use" clause. They don't need to threaten most of their users to achieve that. But if they ban everyone from even moderate file-sharing the demand for anything but the smallest pipe seems likely to dry up - who's going to pay for a 10meg pipe just to check email?

So it must be fear of a court case or a change in the laws. That sucks - that a business decision to sell your customers the thing they want is made impossible by a barely-plausible legislative / litigious threat. Yet alas that seems to be where we are.

Re: More bloggers for the UK journalist’s reading list

Seamus McCauley — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 05:05:15 -0000

A UK media version of the Corante network which relevant bloggers could cross-post their best/most pertinent articles to, perhaps? Sounds like a sensible move - it puts everything in one place, and introduces an element of peer-review validation to what is otherwise a bunch of people saying whatever we like. The perfect model for me in that regard is the US stockmarket site SeekingAlpha which lets anyone submit an article, but then has it go through an editorial review process before it gets onto the site.

Re: More bloggers for the UK journalist’s reading list

Seamus McCauley — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 05:07:38 -0000

Whoops, messed up the HTML tags in that comment and can't see any way of editing it - perhaps you could fix it Martin?

Re: @OPA: The other blog is back

Seamus McCauley — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 04:49:42 -0000

Excellent news. When I added it to my blogroll it came up under the title "Press Gazette ? Fleet Street 2.0" though, I think you've got an error in the Wordpress title field.

Re: HabboHotel To Hit $77M in Sales This Year

Seamus McCauley — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 12:56:42 -0000

"On the other hand, you could argue that these worlds are exploitative, and exist to separate kids from their pocket money."

Where "these worlds" includes both virtual worlds and the corporeal world we live in day-to-day? I'd be hard pressed to defend an argument that the Habbo Hotel marketing strategy is markedly less child-exploitative than that of McDonalds or Disney.

Re: 2006/08/23/dovetail-youtube-for-independent-films/

Seamus McCauley — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 07:36:27 -0000

It looks like Channel101 (http://www.channel101.com) but without the benefit of the monthly festival...

Re: 2007/04/25/blinkx/

Seamus McCauley — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 09:36:29 -0000

Plain English? Ok...on the basis of having read the release:

(1) Autonomy developed some technology that was useful to Blinkx. It leant Blinkx that technology, plus a bunch of money, on condition it could buy Blink cheaply later.

(2) Blinkx agreed, and built a website using the Autonomy technology.

(3) Autonomy bought Blinkx cheaply per the above arrangement.

(4) Autonomy combined the technology it leant to Blinkx with the website Blinkx built using that technology. By combining the two things Autonomy created a more valuable new company, rather unhelpfully also called Blinkx.

(5) Autonomy now plans to sell that new company by floating it on the stock market.

Re: 2009/01/07/apple-charging-drm-removal/

Seamus McCauley — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 09:35:29 -0000

Whose mistake? You bought the thing!

Re: MySpace is YOUR Space, Not THEIR Space

Seamus McCauley — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 05:16:26 -0000

Oh, and itÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s worth noting that a reference in the New York Times doesnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t drive nearly as much traffic as a top spot on Techmeme.

I found that a reference on TechCrunch beat a spot on Techmeme by a considerable margin. The New York Times might be sobered to learn therefore that (anecdotally) the referrals heirarchy seems to go (1) TechCrunch (content written by Mike Arrington); TechMeme (an algorithm written by Gabe Riviera); (3) New York Times (350 full time reporters and 40 photographers, says Wikipedia, and that includes some of the most expensive columnists in the business).

Re: Netscape Could Beat Digg By Focusing on Average People

Seamus McCauley — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 08:45:48 -0000

Maybe it will turn out that people like (or need) a little trampoline news with their Israel/Hezbollah news

No "maybe" about it Scott - enough news sources publish an occasional list of their most popular stories to make it obvious what sort of news people read when given a completely free choice.

See here the Seattle Times admitting that "articles on horse sex are the most widely read material this paper has published in its 109-year history", or here Slate pointing out that "during 2005, Slate covered the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the future of the Supreme Court, but our most popular stories were, for the most part, about dogs, beer, celebrities, and naked ladies. Below you'll find a list of the 10 pieces that attracted the most readers this year".

See here for a summary by the American Journalism Review of the tabloidisation-by-democracy of American news sources, or here for my own.

What news is "better" or "important" isn't really the issue. That's the question newspaper readers were paying editors and journalists to address for them in the pre-digital media1.0 world. News providers are becoming increasingly adept at delivering consumers the news they actually want rather than the news editors think they should have - this is one of the consequences of Jay Rosen's concept of "the people formerly known as the audience".

It seems a lot of the people who used to be the audience want their trampoline news instead of their Israel/Hezbollah news. Now, we might join Douglas C Clifton, editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, for deploring that situation. He said of people's ability to pick and choose the news they want that "I think that's a terrible thing. It's not good for a democratic, pluralistic society. It's not good for the business." But it's not a genie that's going back in the bottle any time soon.

Re: Google’s Vertical Search Problem and the Law of Average Users

Seamus McCauley — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 13:00:58 -0000

I think it might go deeper than what average people do.

People are mentally ill-equipped to accept probabilistic results. The fact that what a search engine does makes it probably right sits uncomfortably in the mind - we are set up to deal with greater levels of certainity than this. The great success of Google as a brand, I believe, is that it is has set itself up in the popular imagination up as authority above and beyond the practicailities of how its probabilistic search results are actually generated. People "ask Google" or "Google" for results (that disputed but commonly-accepted verb again!) as if there is some anthropomorphic entity called Google that can "know" things, because that's easier for our minds to accomodate on a day-to-day basis than the reality that we are interrogating an algorithm that's only probably - in the technical sense - accurate.

Stretch that brand any further and the mind rebels. No longer simply asking the all-knowing Google sage, one is suddenly asking Google Images or Google News for answers. It's sufficiently not the same that the convenient congitive dissonance trick that we've played on ourselves fails.

Re: How Will Twitter Affect Search?

Seamus McCauley — Fri, 11 May 2007 11:15:42 -0000

I wonder why people are using Tinyurl rather than Qurl? Sure, it's just three letters they'd be saving but when you've only got 140 characters and the point of the exercise is to optimise them it all counts!

Re: To Beat Google, Yahoo Needs To Change The Game

Seamus McCauley — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 11:13:33 -0000

Is Google really that weak at the human side of things? PageRank is always spoken of as an algorithm, an automated process - but all that automation really does is distribute the decision-making around all the people who create hyperlinks. AdWords is an automated ad-booking system in the sense that you don't talk to any salesmen, but the market is made by all the buyers interacting with one another. Google's human intelligence and human relationships are external, invisible and distributed: I'm not sure that means they're weaker than Yahoo!'s visible, internal ones.

Re: All Blogs Are Publications And All Bloggers Are Publishers

Seamus McCauley — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 07:07:03 -0000

He has a responsibility to his advertisers to act within some guideline — he can make up the rules, certainly, but advertisers are entitled to know what they are. Otherwise, how can they make an informed decision about whether to run ads?

Well, if advertisers are genuinely concerned about whether the sites they advertise on have a published policy the price they are willing to pay for ads on sites that don't have such a policy will fall to reflect the risk they associate with its absence. Much as publishers without ABC-audited circulation figures traditionally command lower advertising rates than those with audited circulations because advertisers discount for the risk that those publishers' figures are made up.

If Fred starts feeling a pinch as advertisers desert his site for lack of a stated policy or cut the rate they're willing to pay perhaps he'll rethink. Making commitments to future action can be very valuable for the person making the commitment. But until then, you're asking for a type of consumer protection that the market, through prices, already provides. Advertisers can show the value they place on a commitment by advertising, or not advertising, or by advertising for more or less money, and even stating their reasons when they buy.

Re: The Underground Web Economy

Seamus McCauley — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:02:19 -0000

Which is why it's advisable to type URLs not into the address field but into an installed search bar, since a mistyped URL in the address field might take you to a malware-laden spam site but a mistyped URL in a search box will come up with "did you mean?" and the site you wanted just a click away.

Re: The Underground Web Economy

Seamus McCauley — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:55:08 -0000

Odd, it works for me - “techrcunch.com” in Google takes me to a second page of search results, the first of which is "did you mean techcrunch.com" and a link to Mr Arrington's lovely site. Did you click the "did you mean?" suggestion or the first link below it?

Re: Publish2 In Private Beta

Seamus McCauley — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:34:30 -0000

Hi Scott

Would love to give it a whirl in beta - promise to respect confidentiality.

Re: It's Official: Yahoo HotJobs-Seven Newspaper Publishers Join Forces; Deal Includes Local News

Seamus McCauley — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 14:59:11 -0000

Also unanswered - so far as I can tell - what Journal Register Co, one of the newspaper publishers involved, is planning to do with the JobsintheUS site it acquired in Dec2005 for an undisclosed sum but with $3m pa revenues. Agreeing not to buy or develop competing services when you bought a competing service less than a year ago and have presumably been developing it is interesting.

Re: Google's UK Revenue Up 57 Percent, Slowed Over Christmas

Seamus McCauley — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:35:07 -0000

Not sure how you're calculating the $/£ exchange for 2006, but getting from $1.6 bn to £814m requires a 2006 rate of about $0.51. I believe the rate over the whole of 2006 averaged $0.54, which might not sound like a big deal but takes Google's UK revenues in 2006 to £872m and means that the (sterling) rise from 06-07 would be only about 45%.

Re: LiveJournal Cleans Up Premium Accounts Mess By Appointing Users To Board

Seamus McCauley — Tue, 06 May 2008 08:13:20 -0000

Since one of the main complaints during the last LJ user protest was that SUP had failed to even consult its advisory board, I'm sceptical that padding out that board will do much good in isolation.

Re: Naspers Acquires Hungarian Auction Site Vatera.hu

Seamus McCauley — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 08:32:44 -0000

Pretty sure Naspers still only holds the 30% share of Mail.ru it acquired in 2007, with Digital Sky Technologies the majority shareholder since it bought out Tiger Global a couple of months ago.