Global Nerdy

A couple of recent articles — Mike Arrington’s Print Media Demise, Cont. and Susan Mernit’s recent blog post, The pile on to declare print (newspapers) dead, reminded me of a story I recently heard from my friend Chandra, who teaches what you might call an “English for business” course at a community college in Toronto.

She posed this question to her class: “Suppose your company was facing some negative publicity in the papers. What would you do?”

Here students that there’d be nothing to worry about. The general gist was that nobody gets their news from newspapers anymore.

She then changed her question slightly. “Okay then,” she said, “what if the bad publicity came from blogs?”

The response this time was different. Bad press in the blogosphere? Okay, now you’ve given us something to worry about.

Over at the Tucows Blog, there’s a new article by Tucows CEO Elliot Noss titled Questions to Ask Before You Pick Your Domain Name Registrar. Here are the questions, each of which Elliot goes into further detail:

1. What is the registrar’s primary business model?
2. Does the registrar make transfers as easy as the rules allow?
3. Do you allow for easy locking and unlocking of domain names?
4. Does the registrar make it easy to opt-out of auto-renewals?
5. Do the registrar tie domains to its services?
6. Does the registrar offer Whois privacy? What are its privacy policies in general?
7. What are the registrar’s policies on compliance issues like litigation, ownership disputes and WDRP?
8. How easy is it to contact the registrar?
9. What happens when my domain expires?
10. Are the people selling you your domain name a registrar or a reseller?

If you’re thinking about registering a domain name anytime soon, this article is a worthwhile read.

Some of the terms and concepts covered in the article might be unfamiliar to you, but worry not: this week, I plan to write some articles explaining some of them. I hope that this will clear up some of the confusion about domain name registration.

One more thing: in the interest of full disclosure, I work for Tucows, a company that is a domain name registrar and for which Elliot Noss is the CEO.

Hey, other tech news sites.

We understand the internet ecosystem — borrow a little from this site, grab an image from that site, quote and link to a couple of blog articles — and we think it’s all good.

We notice that in the rush to write articles about “Clown Co.” — you know, the partnership between News Corporation and NBC Universal to create a “YouTube killer” — that while references to Google’s coining the name for the partnership abound, there is a paucity of actual clown images being used in the stories, even in tech news sites known for their snark and smart-assery (Valleywag, we’re lookin’ right atcha).

Because we at Global Nerdy live to serve, we hereby provide this image for you to use in your articles. It features Insane Clown Posse, a ridiculous hip-hop band with a follwoing among “the kids”. There are some similarities between ICP (as the band is often called) and Clown Co.: it’s a partnership of two, both ventures are kind of hard to explain, and hey, we felt like poking fun at them. Here’s the pic:

Feel free to use it wherever you like — just credit Global Nerdy, okay?

Don’t say we never did nuthin’ for ya.

As George mentioned in his earlier posting, “Clown Co.” is Google’s internal nickname for the joint venture by News Corporation and NBC Universal to create a competitor to YouTube. The name’s catching on; Michael Arrington uses it in his latest TechCrunch piece titled Dear Clown Co.: Name This Thing Fast Before Its Too Late. I have a hunch that it’s already too late, a fact that will annoy both NewsCorp/NBCU partners (and possibly the company whose actual name is Clown Co).

In his article, Arrington lists a number of red flags that came up during Clown Co.’s media/analyst call featuring NewsCorp CEO Peter Chernin and NBCU CEO Jeff Zucker:

Isn’t that just like a clown: bringing a TV to an internet fight. The two key messages being pushed by Clown Chernin and Clown Zucker were “respecting copyright” and “creating the largest advertising platform on earth”. Arrington nails it with his comment: “That may be good messaging to stockholders, but it isn’t what the public cares about.”

Why would I want to watch TV when I can watch it smaller and blurrier? I wish that line was mine, but it’s from last night’s Daily Show segment on YouTube and Viacom. It may have been a joke for John Stewart, but it actually sounds like Clown Co.’s strategy. They made almost no mention of user experience, save for “we are shocked at the willingness of the consumer to sit through the whole show with ads on NBC.com”, which suggests that they have no idea why YouTube is so popular.

Maybe they’re scared of clowns. Only two networks signed up, and Viacom didn’t join in.

These clowns don’t know what they’re getting into. YouTube, now with added Google, have the experience and infrastructure to run web apps that are simple enough to get out of the user’s way and powerful enough to be useful and compelling.

These clowns have history working against them. Valleywag brought up the case of MusicNet, the BMG/EMI/Sony alliance that was formed to take on Napster and eventually became a flop that was named by PC World as one of the worst tech products of all time.

Even vaporware has names! By not giving even an interim codename to their already vague and amorphous project, they made their project hard to talk about and left the door open for anyone to stick it with a moniker that they’ll be stuck with. Letting their Google/YouTube competitors do that was even worse. To borrow a line from the Bart Gets an Elephant episode of the NewsCorp property The Simpsons, “How about those clowns at Clown Co.? what a bunch of clowns.”

This San Jose Mercury News piece makes me wonder if they’re looking for a tech evangelist…

When it comes to vacation, Netflix has a simple policy: take as much as you’d like. Just make sure your work is done.

Employees at the online movie retailer often leave for three, four, even five weeks at a time and never clock in or out. Vacation limits and face-time requirements, says Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings, are “a relic of the industrial age.”

“The worst thing is for a manager to come in and tell me: `Let’s give Susie a huge raise because she’s always in the office.’ What do I care? I want managers to come to me and say: `Let’s give a really big raise to Sally because she’s getting a lot done’ – not because she’s chained to her desk.”

[via my cousin Rafy]

Don’t bother, they’re here:

News Corp. and NBC Universal said today that they were creating an online video site stocked with TV shows and movies, plus clips that users can modify and share with friends.

The two companies enlisted help from some of Google’s biggest Internet rivals. The News Corp.-NBC Universal partnership has deals with Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., Time Warner Inc.’s AOL and News Corp.’s MySpace to place videos in front of their collective audience of hundreds of millions.

It’s telling that these guys aren’t suing a la Viacom. My guess is that even if Google could offer iron-clad assurances that users couldn’t upload their content, NBCU and News Corp still wouldn’t do a deal with them. As far as they’re concerned, a deal with Google leaves money on the table: why should they accept 70 cents of every advertising dollar for their content? The logical response is to build their own destination site and sell the advertising themselves. Selling advertising is, after all, what they do. How could they sit back and let some internet upstart supplant their whole business model?

I’m one of those people who sees much more than “pirated” content as having been the key to YouTube’s success. And while YouTube might not be the right partner for large media companies, they’re certainly a good partner for smaller players who couldn’t otherwise afford distribution on this scale. YouTube, in other words, has nothing to worry about. They’ll still be the dominant distribution channel for “amateur” video (the kind that creates web-scale flash floods of traffic), as well as the partner of choice for professional, independent producers looking to end-run the gatekeepers of Big Content (NBCU, News Corp, Viacom/CBS, Disney, Sony).

On the flip side, the new partnership has a great base of brand-name content; they have a built-in audience in the millions. If the service provides value to users beyond what they get from their DVRs, or Apple TV/iTunes Store, there could absolutely be some incremental value here to Big Content.

*Google’s name for NBCU/News tie-up? “Clown Co.”

Technorati Tags: Google, NBC Universal, News Corp, YouTube, Big Content

If you’re like me and Twitter only from a computer, you’re probably annoyed with the slow load time of the Twitter site. Using IM was an option, but as of this writing, the IM system is still down.

If you’re running a Mac or Linux and have curl installed (I believe it’s installed by default on Mac OS X), you can send “tweets” — that’s what they call Twitter messages — using the command line. Open up a terminal application and enter the following, all on the same line, substituting your username, password and message where appropriate:

curl -u your-twitter-username-here:your-twitter-password-here -d status="Your message here" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml