Jere`s blog

Werc is working

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

This blog is finally in werc! I wrote a script to convert my wordpress archives to markdown, and output by date. I did have to do some manual cleanup on some images and links, but mostly just finally getting the rest of the site in order enough to publish.

I also made some customizations to the blagh app and hoping to make more improvements down the road, but so far so good, clean and fast.

I’m also staring to maintain my personal projects in git and host them publicly with gitosis and gitweb. My repositories will be available at git.jeremdow.com. I’m happy with the custom header and stylesheet for gitweb, actually ties this all together pretty well.

Doing some upgrades

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0900

Doing some upgrades, finally upgraded to PHP 5.3 - so now running Nginx again with PHP-FPM - very fast! (and hopefully stable now)

Back to Wordpress

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0800

There was a lot I liked about werc, but just not enough time to build out properly, so it’s back to Wordpress at least for this blog (for now).

Back to Lighttpd

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0800

This site has been down a lot lately, and about to be down a bit longer.

Why? Well, nginx hasn’t been working out so well - or more specifically spawn-fcgi - it just keeps crashing. Nginx by itself is great - the memory footprint really is smaller and the config file is simple. If you only need to serve static files (like for an image server), you probably can’t beat it - but until there is something stabler for cgi support (for fcgi running PHP 5.3 there is / will be soon) - if I really want to run werc, I need to switch back to lighttpd for now.

And if lighttpd is “suckless” enough for Anselm, it ought to be good enough for me.

Back up with nginx

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Back up with nginx - learning my way around werc - might as well keep this up in the meantime.

Switching to nginx

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Switching from lighttpd/wordpress to nginx/werc – blog will be down for a little while.

All your friend/feed are belong to Facebook

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0800

And FriendFeed goes to Facebook.

Robert Scoble was probably the world’s foremost FriendFeed evangelist - worth reading some of the discussion here: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/b26ae1fd/talk-about-facebook-buying-friendfeed-here-on

Bittersweet news if you loved FriendFeed. It reminds me a bit of my initial reaction to Yahoo acquiring Flickr - nice to see a beloved service make it big, and the simultaneous fear that everything that made it great is suddenly in jeopardy. Yahoo was relatively hands-off and Flickr fared well (sadly to no avail of it’s parent company). Like it or not, it seems unlikely FriendFeed will share this fate, and perhaps rightly so, it’s Facebook enthusiasts who stand to benefit here.

My only hope is that Facebook is able to assimilate more from this than real time status updates and 75 thousand potentially disgruntled users. Whatever FriendFeed team members they can retain belong in key roles both in UI design and overall strategy.

Facebook doesn’t have to be as simple as Twitter, if it could just become half as open and simple as FriendFeed, I would gladly spend more time there.

Twittergate

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The eventual summary on Techcrunch of the hacked Twitter documents released earlier this week is an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at the fastest growing company on the web.

Interestingly, while potential Google and Microsoft relationships are discussed in detail, and granted the protracted Facebook acquisition talks are now behind them, I generally got the sense that the team is side-lining their most immediate opportunity: to outright own the public (search-able) social networking space that Facebook is still lacking.

We know Facebook is working to fill this (now obvious) void as fast as they can, but it will be slow and difficult to implement. Despite this, at least from the available evidence, there’s not much to indicate that the Twitter team is equally focused on building out their own social graph fully enough to really compete in this space. Twitter is a unique service, granted, and Google and much of the media may be right to separate the “micro-blogging” space from traditional social networking, but it’s clear from these documents that all this is still very much up in the air.

Arrington lists “Identity Crisis” among his subheadings, and there’s definitely a strong element of that, perhaps understandably, since none of this information was ever intended for public release.

But I will say this: Twitter is not in any position to compete with Google directly, Google indexes information, Twitter indexes tweets. Any strategy along those lines is deluded. While clearly (in their own vernacular) “trending” right now, they will eventually need to be fully indexed by Google to stand any change of reaching their user and traffic targets. They need to just accept that.

But in terms of Facebook, and even more so, Microsoft - they’re right to be wary of any partnerships and default to full-on competition mode.

As a side note, it will be interesting to see what this rouses out of Google in terms of password recovery and other security issues related to Google Apps and accounts.

Power of the Google Triforce?

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Curiouser and curiouser…

This is definitely one of the stranger Google mysteries to come along in a while.

Edit Chrome 3.0.194.0 Most Visited Blacklist

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The latest Google Chrome build in the Ubuntu repos seems more buggy than the previous versions - but good to see the frequent updates at least.

Anyway, I accidentally removed a most visited link/thumbnail from the homepage and then realized, that since the interface update is incomplete, there’s no way to restore it through the GUI (you have one chance with the undo link, but that’s it).

If this happens to you, you can directly edit the preferences file in your home folder:

~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Preferences

Find this this entry - and edit as needed:

"most_visited_blacklist": {
},

If you have any “blacklisted” links - there will be lines in here you can delete to restore them to the most visited list on the new tab page.

You’ll also see this at the bottom of the file:

"session": {
    "restore_on_startup": 4,
    "urls_to_restore_on_startup": [ "about:linux-splash" ]
}

But edit or not, unlike the last build, this one seems to be hard-coded to display the dev warning on startup.

One more Chrome OS post

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Now I’m not a great blogger, granted, but I am a long time follower and fan of a preeminent Google watch blog, Google Operating System.

But really, if the name of your blog is Google Operating System - and your stated mission:

An unofficial blog that watches Google’s attempts to move your operating system online.

And then, after more than five years of dutiful reporting, after all the speculation, it’s not April 1st, and Google announces that they are, in fact, actually releasing an operating system…

…and this is the post?

This is level-headed, well-researched, and downright understated - it’s journalism - he even points out, and quite right, that Good OS has been gearing up to release an almost identical product called Cloud (there was some buzz about this quite a while ago, though it seems to have been aptly named, still vaporware for now).

But really, all l I can say is good work, Alex, it’s just srange to watch the rest of the tech media go crazy while someone familiar with Google’s history can so calmly explain the new product.

Am I excited? Of course. I’d bet you are too.

But, is this the end all, come all, end of Microsoft, end of the desktop as we know it?

Not really (or not yet at least).

Google's Microsoft Moment

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Interesting follow up to my last post - http://dashes.com/anil/2009/07/googles-microsoft-moment.html

I think the whole concept is getting a bit overblown in terms of the MS impact - then again, yes we are seeing the transition from desktop to cloud really begin, and Google is in the strongest position to lead that movement.

Google Chrome OS is a bootable browser, the web is the OS

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0800

I hadn’t weighed in on this at all, and not that this will make any difference, but at least I can put some links out.

There seems to be a lot of confusion circulating about Chrome OS being developed as some new Google-polished linux distro - see Wired: No one wants Linux netbooks as one example.

The title of my post basically says what needs saying - but just to clarify: Google Chrome OS is NOT going to be like any other desktop operating system, be it Windows, Mac, or Linux that you might be familiar with.

There will only be one conventional application installed, the browser. In short, the web is the OS.

How does that work? Well, for a complete answer, it might be a good idea to watch this year’s Google I/O keynote - Arrington did, and he’s on board - and reporting on this better than anyone.

Basically, Google’s long term strategy (as it always has been) is to continue to push the limits of the web as a platform, driving adoption of HTML5 and other open standards, until eventually no other (local/proprietary) platform is required for any of the activities you might associate with desktop computing, including games.

If you watched that, now you’re getting the idea - new elements in the HTML5 specification like canvas, video and web workers will give developers the tools to create web applications with pixel level control and resource allocation previously locked up in plugins, or constrained to the desktop.

So what will Chrome OS actually be? Well, at the very least, it could essentially just be a bootable version of the Chrome browser (the kernel boots, the browser launches, and you’re online - that would be it). Now, just for this, Google would have to do a ton of work behind the scenes with hardware makers and the linux community to get enough driver and device support for this to be ready for the mass market.

At most, it could offer some suite of file management, search and other native applications that will run Google-style in the browser ala Google Desktop. The “GDrive”, of course, is expected to make it’s long awaited debut.

The interface for all that is going to be some kind of search. If I had to guess, some new variant of the iGoogle home page - or if we’re lucky, it might be some kind of new search interface that we’ve never seen before.

So can you really completely manage your digital life, work (and hard drive!) with search alone (and maybe some labels)?

Well, we shall see. Having followed all the crazy Google OS rumors over the years, it’s nice to know I’ll finally get the chance to find out.

Simple MySQL Backup Script

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0800

I was looking for a VERY simple script for a quick on-demand backup, like you might want to take before an upgrade or to copy the data to another server.

All of the ones I found were either overly complex (for my purposes) or they just didn’t do exactly what I wanted.

So I wrote this one: Simple MySQL Backup Script

All this does is build one command to do a mysqldump of all of the databases on localhost, and pipe it to a gzip archive. This is all you need to grab a full backup when you need it - but you could schedule it as a cron job just as well (you woudn’t have any archive rotation or anything like that).

If you don’t want to bother with the script, you could just grab this command and replace the $variables with your own:

mysqldump --all-databases -v -u$user -p$password \
| gzip > $dest/$archive_file

I’d like to improve this with an option to do a seperate dump for each database, and then create a tar.gz of those - so if I do, I’ll post it here.

Oracle/Sun Analysis

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0800

I’m mostly concerned about MySQL, disappointed the IBM deal fell through, and sorry I didn’t own any JAVA stock this morning.

Nonetheless, Om’s analysis is the one I found the most thoughtful/informative, although not all that reassuring.

Windows 7: I'm impressed

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0900

Jeremy Zawodny says Windows 7 is “snappy” on his T61 - but I wanted to go him one better.

I’m writing this post on a painfully dated IBM T42 (right, that means a pre-Lenovo Thinpad, circa 2004) and Windows 7 actually outperforms Ubuntu 8.10.

Repeat: Windows 7 is faster than Ubuntu 8.10 on 512MB of ram - that’s Vista - with Aero turned on - and it’s faster.

(No, I don’t have any benchmarks on this, but seriously) The boot time is actually obnoxiously faster - but Jaunty should take care of that.

Oddly (or appropriately?), I still tend to prefer a simple gnome desktop - Chrome on Windows 7 is tough to resist though.

Windows 7 Beta Tommorrow

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0900

From the Windows blog -

On January 9th, the Windows 7 Beta will be available for Windows enthusiasts to download via the Windows 7 page on Windows.com. The Windows 7 Beta is going to be available download-only (we’re not sending out physical media) and available for a limited time to the first 2.5 million people who download the beta.

First 2.5 million - and no actual time I can find yet - so keep an eye out and get a jump on it, I guess.

I’m holding out some hope for this Windows - actually quite looking forward to trying it tomorrow.

YouTube Live

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0900

Are you watching it?

It’s fun - not sure what I think - will there be a service?

But, for now it’s fun.

Google SearchWiki - Finally

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0900

This has been a long time coming, but I login today, and low and behold, SearchWiki.

I was following some testing they were doing on this years ago, but honestly this came as a total suprise to me today - and woke up my urge to blog.

Google (still) > Cuil

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Just catching up - with even the Boston Globe taking a retrospective shot at the Cuil launch today, I thought I’d get in mine. If you remember much of the positive press on Cuil focused on their boasts that their new index is far larger than any of the competition:

Cuil is claiming to have the largest index of the web, 120 billion pages indexed (with a total of 186 billion seen by its crawler; spam and duplicate content are among things excluded from what gets indexed). In talking with them, Cuil estimated they were three times the size of Google.

Sounds pretty awesome, right?

Well, I missed this too, but apparently these bold claims were enough to rattle an indirect response out of the Googleplex later in the week, releasing the size of their index for a first time in a long time:

Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days – when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

No disrespect to Cuil, they could still give Google a run for it’s money - they’ve definitely got the arrogance part down, apparently just not so well-endowed in the index department as they thought they were.

Hello world!

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Thanks for the server, Randy - this is lighttpd running wordpress, drupal, and mediawiki.

Randy's Desk

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0800

Desk Originally uploaded by r.ippolito It speaks for itself.

Google vs. google: Stop the insanity!

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0800

Finally, some sense in the madness of all these google as a verb legality stories - thank you Scoble!

Here’s the deal - despite what you may have read “google” as a verb didn’t just show up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary - and neither did all those write-ups in the press about it becoming ubiquitous.

Google’s PR department engineered this - on purpose - and, yes, it’s good for the brand - of course it is.

Also, contrary to most of the stories on this - Kleenex, Jacuzzi, Coke - they all actively worked on the same thing - in fact, as a brand marketer, one of the very best things you can do is to get your brand name to become synonymous with the product you’re selling. That’s one of the basics!

If you’ve been reading the mainstream media’s take on this story, you’ve probably been hearing the opposite of this - but the fact is that all of the companies they cite benefit from super-brand recognition - and all continue to thrive basically for that reason. Whatever market share they may have lost over the years was just plain, fair competition. It’s tough out there, even for super-brands.

Now that we’ve got that straight, why the letters?

Well, Scoble’s right, lawyers have a different set of rules to contend with than do brand marketers and the rest of us.

If Google can’t show that they’ve actively protected their trademarks, there’s a chance they could lose the right to prevent people from actually stealing their name and slapping it on competitive products or crappy unlicensed merchandise - like my Google Spice Rack.

This applies to all intellectual property - the basic idea is to place the responsibility of protection in the hands of the trademark or patent holder, rather than with the government or law enforcement. The laws are also designed to prevent frivolous or gold-digging lawsuits against established companies, or overly selective damage claims.

This sort of thing actually comes up all the time in software - when smaller companies will attempt (often successfully) to sue Microsoft or Apple for infringement damages, long after the product in question has been on the market. As the plaintiff, the longer you can wait, the higher the damages will be, since they will be based on the total revenue from infringing product sold. To curb this kind of extortion, the law insists that you make proper warnings in a timely fashion, and not allow companies to unknowingly infringe without contest. If you fail to do this, your case can be thrown out.

But remember, it was Google PR that stirred up this “google as a verb” thing in the first place - they want to keep that going. So, like Scoble says, in this case, Google just needs the appearance of active protection - the letters are just letters…

So, by all means, continue to google - go ahead and google google in the dictionary right now - google it from Yahoo! if you want.

Google Video Bumps Froogle

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0800

Wow - Google finally re-worked the main search page to highlight Video!

I guess the MTV deal must have put it over the edge…

But, what about poor Froogle, who lost their link?

Not to worry - they also equipped the more link with a slick little in-line ajax window linking to Froogle, Groups, and the all new (law suits pending) Book Search!

Way to go, Google! Now pimp that Google Talk so that I have someone else to chat with…

It's been a while...

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0800

Wow, June 6th… That was a while back… (2 months, exactly) Man… Google Spreadsheets turned out to be a big disappointment too… (although I still use it - very useful for storing important info online - sort of a GDrive Lite if you will…) Anyhoo, if you have missed my posts as of late, I do apologize, I tentatively plan to get back on schedule next week. -Oh yeah, and if anyone actually DID miss Jere’s Blog (besides me) leave me some comments - I could use the encouragement.

Google Spreadsheets - Surprise!

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0800

That’s right, while we were all waiting to see what Google would do with Writely, it turns out they whipped up their own spreadsheet app first.

Google will begin extending invitations for the beta tomorrow - sign up here - and of course if I am fortunate enough to gain one, I’ll be sure to pass along my impressions.

As with past launches, Spreadsheets will likely cause quite a stir in Redmond - and so in a muted attempt to soften the blow (or just add insult to injury) - in providing a link to the old Labs FAQ, Google makes sure to remind us all that taking on the world’s largest software company is just another way some engineers choose to while away their Friday afternoons.

Richard MacManus predicts Microsoft will react quickly - as if they couldn’t have seen this coming already…

And, as for “quickly” - I’ll believe that when I see it.

I’ve been using the beta of Office 2007 along with Office Live since they opened it to the public, and from what I can see Microsoft is either completely blind to this threat, or has given up on the average consumer entirely - in favor of deeper pockets in the business segment.

Of course, it’s equally possible they know something we don’t, or have something else up their sleeves entirely… only time will tell.

Speaking of time, the Writley blog says the plan is to open the service back up to the public in July - so I would say it’s safe to assume Google’s Web Office will quasi-launch sometime over the summer - well ahead of Vista and Office Live in January.

And don’t forget Yahoo’s new page design officially debuting this summer as well - with MSN Live Search hot on its heels…

With all that pressure mounting, is it any wonder Google finally seems to be rolling up their sleeves and pulling out the big guns - whether or not they admit to it?

Jere's Blog poses for a picture...

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Mon, 29 May 2006 00:00:00 -0800

This is a graph of my blog created by “Websites as graphs” - another project by the same guy who is selling the “1,000 paintings” of the numbers 1 - 1,000. That project’s a little avant garde for my tastes… I love the website graphs though.

Advideo?

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Fri, 26 May 2006 00:00:00 -0800

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Google will soon be offering contextually relevant video ad placement on its Adsense network presenting a new opportunity for advertisers and complementing the text-only Adwords service on which the company was built.

Offering greater flexibility with it’s well known auction-based pricing and introducing TV advertisers to the web’s unprecedented level of targeting, the new service certainly shows strong potential.

In other news - it seems Google’s Video Search has fallen to fifth (read: last) place behind YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo, and MSN.

Hmmm… there’s something else… it’s… thinly veiled…

…Wait! - I see it now:

What if there was a way to blanket the web with links to Google Video search - maybe cool “Powered by Google Video” links - using some kind of massive advertising network?

Wow - that would really pump some life into GV - what could be better than that???

Getting other people to pay you for doing it.

Ah, Google…

Google Envy? You Bet.

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Fri, 19 May 2006 00:00:00 -0800

Phill Wainewright’s post on ZDNet about Microsoft going after Google’s ad business definately makes some interesting points.

I just happen to disagree with all of them.

According to Wainewright, while Microsoft seems to be chasing Google in the ad space, both companies have been ignoring better opportunities to go up against Amazon and Ebay which operate in much larger trading markets. He goes on to cite many sources predicting that the estimated 500 billion dollar online advertising market may begin to shrink as it matures - some putting it as low as 150 billion.

Well, let’s examine that first - so as internet traffic increases, ads become more targeted, and therefore ROI on these ads increases - the total market is going to decrease? Why?

That’s completely backwards thinking - if a corporation sees a larger ROI on its ad budget - they’ll be willing to spend more on advertising, not less - show me the evidence to refute that.

He’s also completely ignoring new markets like mobile, location-driven ads, TV on the web (and internet enabled TV) and those implications. These aren’t part of a 1:1 transfer from old media - these are totally new markets. Not to mention that the only explanation for the size of Google’s revenues without an equal decline in old media advertising is the the long tail - and it’s long enough to make the online ad space far larger than old media ever was.

That said, his other basic notion is sound, I guess - the online trading/retail market is huge. Sure, (corporate identity, focus, and strategy aside) there’s no reason Microsoft couldn’t launch a service to rival Ebay - anybody could. Google even flirted with the idea of taking on Amazon with Book Search for awhile (and wisely decided against it), but all of that is missing the point.

The reason MS is chasing Google like crazy in search and advertising, is because they have to. They realize that software-as-a-product is out and ad-supported software-as-a-service is in. They need to build an ad network to rival Google’s, before Google builds a free browser, office suite, and maybe even an OS to rival Windows.

Still think they’re wasting their time?

Perri-air anyone?

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Thu, 18 May 2006 00:00:00 -0800

Sales of canned oxygen to create fresh market for Seven-Eleven Japan - RapidNewsWire.com

It had to happen sooner or later…

Google faces lawsuits over Book Search

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Thu, 18 May 2006 00:00:00 -0800

Old news really - but the fact that Google is forging ahead with it’s full text scans at several major university libraries despite the suits filed against it - has added fuel to the fire on both sides.

Read more about this in the Washington Post.

Basically, no one can really deny, even publishers, that making the full text of ink and paper books available and searchable online would benefit readers - what is in debate is how publishers, authors, and online providers such a Google, Amazon, and others should share in the profits and what this eventually spells for the future of the entire publishing industry.

The answer, at least at first glance, seems obvious: As predicted ever since the dawn of the net - tree huggers everywhere will rejoice, and books will finally come to inherit their pre-destined home on the world wide web. (Drinks all around, amen to that.)

What could prevent this (and certainly stall it for awhile) is another example of the often mind-boggling behavior of established industries when they feel their core business is somehow being threatened on the web.

While I feel like I sort of understand it - it still doesn’t totally add up for me. How can McGraw-Hill and Simon & Schuster (a long time software publisher, no less!) balk at the potential to sell “e-books” online and share in Google’s ad revenues when their contents are searched? Why aren’t they shipping forests of volumes to the Googleplex right now for scanning and hassling Google to get this out of beta and start the money flowing faster?

Well, why did the music industry spend millions to shut down Napster, and then a year later gladly distribute their records online over similar services - even resurrecting Napster itself?!

What was it about TV networks that made it take so long for their executives to figure out that making shows available on the web is just another form of broadcasting? I mean, seriously, since the 1950’s they broadcast - For Free - INTO THE AIR - and they were afraid of the internet???

Well, surprise, I blame Google - and every other web company.

You don’t just start scanning other peoples books - and figure out the profit sharing later. You can’t violate every copywrite law in the world and start giving Metalica’s songs away without so much as a phone call - and you can’t expect NBC to just turn over the keys to the kingdom just because you started up a video search.

Many of these traditional media executives really are scared - some of them justifiably so. The future really is uncertain - and they don’t see opportunity - they see upheaval, even disaster - this puts them on the phone with their lawyers.

It’s up to Yahoo, Google, Amazon and others - companies that live and breathe the web and understand it’s full potential - to explain, educate, and forge partnerships with their old media allies.

Online distribution will benefit all media companies - if anything the market can only grow, boosting revenues and bringing even more players to the table - not ousting established giants.

Media and the web were made for each other - it’s a win-win - but before audiences can benefit, online companies need to learn to play by the rules.

Google Updates Video

jeremdow@noreply.cat-v.org (jeremdow) — Thu, 18 May 2006 00:00:00 -0800

Google Video this week added a long awaited uploader - both a web and downloadable application version to make it easier for users to upload their own videos to its service.

Google remains in third place, however, lagging behind both MSN and YouTube - and still lacks key partnerships needed to draw users with premium content.