SF Chronicle in Trouble?

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 71

I hate to play Valleywag, but I'm hearing rumors that the San Francisco Chronicle is in big trouble. Apparently, Phil Bronstein, the editor-in-chief, told staff in a recent "emergency meeting" that the news business "is broken, and no one knows how to fix it." ("And if any other paper says they do, they're lying.") Reportedly, the paper plans to announce more layoffs before the year is out.

It's clear that the news business as we knew it is in trouble. Bringing it home, Peter Lewis and Phil Elmer Dewitt, both well-known tech journalists, were both part of layoffs at Time Warner in January (they worked for Fortune and Time, respectively), and John Markoff remarked to me recently that "every time I talk to my colleagues in print journalism it feels like a wake."

Meanwhile, Peter Brantley passed on in email the news that "a newspaper newsletter covering that industry publishes its own last copy":

"The most authoritative newsletter covering the newspaper industry issued a gloomy prognosis for the business today and then, tellingly, went out of business.

Many newspapers in the largest markets already "have passed the point of opportunity" to save themselves, says the Morton-Groves Newspaper Newsletter in its farewell edition. "For those who have not made the transition [by now], technology and market factors may be too strong to enable success."

We talk about creative destruction, and celebrate the rise of blogging as citizen journalism and Craigslist as self-service advertising, but there are times when something that seemed great in theory arrives in reality, and you understand the downsides. I have faith both in the future and in free markets as a way to get there, but sometimes the road is hard. If your local newspaper were to go out of business, would you miss it? What kinds of jobs that current newspapers do would go undone?

Cisco's iPhone Trademark Shaky?

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 0

Since iPhone postings seem to generate such a comment storm, it's obviously a topic of some interest to our readers. As a result, I thought I should point to Ed Burnette's argument that Cisco's iPhone trademark may be on shaky ground. Apparently, Cisco may have let the trademark lapse, and faked a photo to show it was in use before they'd revived it -- precisely because they knew Apple wanted it. Speculation, and not from a lawyer, but fun for anyone who is interested in such things. [via]

GPS barcodes on Manhattan?

by Nikolaj Nyholm | comments: 0

Update: It appears that the initiative is not the work of Google tagging New York nor an initiative mandated by government regulation, but something as distant as an accounting standard titled GASB 34 issuing municipalities financial reporting requirements to maintain their credit ratings.
Interesting geodata can emerge from anywhere indeed. As so many times before, we only need inherent openness and creativity to harness the unintended uses.

On the Geowanking mailing list comes rumour from Dodgeball's Dennis Crowley that light posts on Manhattan are being geotagged.

Start looking at all the light posts in the city, about 7-8 feet off the ground. Every single one has a barcode.

Steve Bull clued me in to this on Wednesday night. He said a few weeks ago, he was walking along and ran into a few guys with a huge GPS unit and a 6-foot antenna. They were placing the bar codes and correlating them with their respective geocoords. He didn't know who they were or why there were doing it.

Does anyone know what's going on? Did the Semacode guys get funding, is Google feeling threatened by Gumspots or is this just the latest efficiency project from the NY Dept of Public Works? If the latter, will datasets be open and available?

JBoss on Windows

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 5

In response to an earlier post where I noted that 50% of JBoss deployments are on Windows, a reader wrote in to ask whether that was really true or whether it was simple Microsoft spin. I wrote to Bill Hilf, Microsoft's director of Platform Technology Strategy, who said those were the numbers given by JBoss when Microsoft and JBoss announced their deal to get tighter integration between the JBoss management system and Microsoft Server products. I found the announcement on the JBoss web site and dug out the precise quote: "Microsoft Windows is used, for either development or production use, within almost half of the JBoss user base". The "development or production" might be wiggle words, but I think it's pretty common within the industry. See, for example, this story about database deployments: "In our survey, 90 percent of our developers work with or deployed to Windows platforms". Still more evidence for my contention that Windows is the dark economy of open source use, the hub of activity that is rarely spoken of.

ETel: Yahoo! Building IVR Infrastructure?

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

This story about Yahoo! hiring away the R&D group of Nuance is very interesting. Yahoo! recently released Yahoo! Messenger with Voice (beating Google Talk, incidentally), bought IVR features as well. If Yahoo!'s doing it, you can be sure Microsoft and Google will be at it as well. Life's going to get very interesting in the voice application space, hopefully around the time of ETel (which just opened registration).

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index

by Marc Hedlund | comments: 1

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index:

"Our users want the world to be as simple, clean, and accessible as the Google home page itself," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a press conference held in their corporate offices. "Soon, it will be."

Hilarious.

Oh, yeah, and, The Onion launched a redesign.

Differing Google/MSN News results

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 2

A very interesting debate on Dave Farber's IP list dissects the difference in news headlines about Google's recent hiring of Kai-Fu Lee and Microsoft's subsequent lawsuit. Jason Lee Miller of Webpronews posted a link to an inflammatory story claiming bias:

When the search terms "Dr. Lee court documents Google Microsoft" were entered into Google, the majority of results were emblazoned with the phrase "lawsuit is a charade" in large comforting letters, repeated again again again.
 

That's interesting, I thought. I wonder what MSN returns?

As I suspected, there was one link, in the middle, with the "charade" reference. The rest were to the tune of "Microsoft wins round against Google," and "Ex-Microsoft Exec Barred From Google Job."

Could this be a coincidence? Or is this brilliant PR algorithmic manipulation?

Richard Wiggins debunks the story using a common sense analysis of the different methodology of the two search engines. (I have to say that while Wiggins makes a good case that Google is not manipulating the results, his argument that Microsoft is not doing so boils down to "why ascribe to malice what can more easily be ascribed to ineptitude." I'd love to see someone make a stronger argument for the unbiased nature of Microsoft's results.)

Ads the reason movie theater revenue declining?

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 6

The Big Picture argues that the rise of advertising in movie theaters has so adversely impacted the movie-going experience that it's one hidden source of declining movie ticket receipts. Worth reading.

The Real Video IPod Play?

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 2

On the O'Reilly Editors' mailing list, Danie Steinberg writes:

I've been suggesting that the play isn't to view them on the ipod (although that will be possible) but to use the iPod to show them on a tv. The feature in the photo iPod that allows you to use s video out to show your slide shows on a tv at your mom's house was what leads me to believe that this lets me rent or buy a movie using the internet and use my ipod or a revised version of airport extreme to play it on my tv or other large screen device.

Yes this has been my (still wrong) prediction for 9 months - but Jobs keeps stressing that the new video codec is designed to play video from HD down to mobile devices. This feels like a direct hint at where they are heading.

Good Discussion of Apple/Intel Rumors

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 3

There's some interesting discussion over on Dave Farber's list about the rumored Apple switch to Intel and its implications (scroll to bottom of list on this link). (There are also some intriguing postings on Sun's analogous issues with the "other" non-Intel chip, the Sparc.) I forwarded one of the messages from the thread to the O'Reilly editors list, and got this thoughtful reply from Chuck Toporek:

(continue reading)

Paid Podcasting?

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 1

Daniel Steinberg writes in email to the O'Reilly editors' list: "Just noticed that NPR's programs are no longer available on Audible. If iTunes 4.9 supports podcasting it might also support subscription to paid subscriptions as well. Could be that All Things Considered is coming to iTMS. I love the weekend before a SteveNote!"