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Sometime last week I learned that podcasting startup PodTech was acquired for less than $500,000. This is a rather ignominious exit for a startup that initially entered the public consciousness with its high profile hire of Robert Scoble and the intent to build a technology news media empire using RSS and podcasts instead of radio waves and news print.

When I first heard about PodTech via Robert Scoble's blog, it seemed like a bad business to jump into given the lessons of The Long Tail. The Web creates an overabundance of content and products, which is good for aggregators but bad for creators. Even in 2006 when PodTech was founded you could see this in the success of "Web 2.0" companies that acted as content aggregators like Google, YouTube, Wikipedia and Flickr while content creators like music labels and news papers were beginning to scramble for relevance and revenue. 

Kevin Kelly has a great post about this called Wagging the Long Tail of Love where he writes

So as one crosses the sections -- going from the short head to the long tail -- one should be consistent and view it from the aggregator's point of view or the creator's point of view. I think it is a mistake to conflate the two view points.

I've been wrestling with this for a while and I think the only advantage to the creator that I can see in the long tail is that aggregators can invent or produce a long tail domain that was not present before.  Like Seth's Squidoo does. Before Squidoo or Amazon or Netflix came along there was no market at all for many of the creations they now distribute. The proposition that long tail aggregators can offer to creators is profound, but simple: you have a choice between a itsy bitsy niche audience (with nano profits) or no audience at all. Before the LT was expanded your masterpiece on breeding salt water aquarium fishes from the Red Sea would have no paying fans. Now you have maybe 100.

One hundred readers/watchers/listeners is not economical. There is no business equation that can sustain profits for continual creation from so few buyers. (It can of course support the business of aggregation above the level of creation.) But the long tail niche creation operates perfectly well in the realm of passion, enthusiasm, obsession, curiosity, peerage, love, and the gift economy.  In the exchange of psychic energy, encouragement, meaning of life, and reasons to live, the long now is a boon.

That is not true about profits. Economically, the more the long tail expands, the more stuff there is to compete with our limited attention as an audience, the more difficult it is for a creator to sell profitably. Or, the longer the tail, the worse for sales.

The Web has significantly reduced the costs of producing and distributing content. Anyone with a computer can publish to a potential audience of hundreds of millions of people for as little as the cost of their Internet connection. This is great for content consumers but it has significantly increased the amount of competition among content creators while also reducing their chances of generating profits from their work since the Web/Internet has provided lots of options for getting quality content for free (both legally and illegally). 

All of this is a long way of saying that in the era of "Web 2.0" it was quite unwise for a VC funded startup to jump into the pool of content creators and thus become a victim of The Long Tail instead of becoming a content aggregator and thus benefiting from the Long Tail instead. Of course, even that may not have saved them since the market for podcast aggregators pretty much dried up once Apple entered the fray.

Now Playing: Lil Wayne - I'm Me

A year ago Loren Feldman produced a controversial video called "TechNigga" which seems to still be causing him problems today. Matthew Ingram captures the latest fallout from that controversy in his post Protests over Verizon deal with 1938media where he writes

Several civil-rights groups and media watchdogs are protesting a decision by telecom giant Verizon to add 1938media’s video clips to its mobile Vcast service, saying Loren’s "TechNigga" clip is demeaning to black people. Project Islamic Hope , for example, has issued a statement demanding that Verizon drop its distribution arrangement with 1938media, which was just announced about a week ago , and other groups including the National Action Network and LA Humanity Foundation are also apparently calling for people to email Verizon and protest.

The video that has Islamic Hope and other groups so upset is one called "TechNigga," which Loren put together last August. After wondering aloud why there are no black tech bloggers, Loren reappears with a skullcap and some gawdy jewelry, and claims to be the host of a show called TechNigga. He then swigs from a bottle of booze, does a lot of tongue-kissing and face-licking with his girlfriend Michelle Oshen , and then introduces a new Web app called "Ho-Trackr," which is a mashup with Google Maps that allows prospective johns to locate prostitutes. In a statement, Islamic Hope says that the video "sends a horrible message that Verizon seeks to partner with racists."

I remember encountering the video last year and thinking it was incredibly unfunny. It wasn’t a clever juxtaposition of hip hop culture and tech geekery. It wasn’t satire since that involves lampooning someone or something you disapprove off in a humorous way (see The Colbert Report).  Of course, I thought the responses to the video were even dumber; like Robert Scoble responding to the video with the comment “Dare Obasanjo is black”.

Since posting the video Loren Feldman has lost a bunch of video distribution deals with the current Verizon deal being the latest. I’ve been amused to read all of the comments on TechCrunch about how this violates Loren’s freedom of speech.

People often confuse the fact that it is not a crime to speak your mind in America with the belief that you should be able to speak your mind without consequence. The two things are not the same. If I call you an idiot, I may not go to jail but I shouldn’t expect you to be nice to me afterwards. The things you say can come back and bite you on butt is something everyone should have learned growing up. So it is always surprising for me to see people petulantly complain that “this violates my freedom of speech” when they have to deal with the consequences of their actions.

BONUS VIDEO: A juxtaposition of hip hop culture and Web geekery by a black tech blogger.

Now Playing: NWA – N*ggaz 4 Life

THEN: The PayPerPost Virus Spreads

Two new services that are similar to the controversial PayPerPost have announced their launch in the last few days: ReviewMe and CreamAid. PayPerPost, a marketplace for advertisers to pay bloggers to write about products (with our without disclosure), recently gained additional attention when they announced a $3 million round of venture financing.

The PayPerPost model brings up memories of payola in the music industry, something the FCC and state attorney generals are still trying to eliminate or control. Given the distributed and unlicensed nature of the blogosphere, controlling payoffs to bloggers will be exponentially more difficult.

Our position on these pay-to-shill services is clear: they are a natural result of the growth in size and influence of the blogosphere, but they undermine the credibility of the entire ecosystem and mislead readers.

NOW: I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

The title, which is a quote from the movie casablanca, is what came to mind tonight when I read the complete train wreck occuring on TechMeme over advertisements that contain a written message from the publisher. The whole thing was started by Valleywag of course.

The ads in question are a staple of FM Publishing - a standard ad unit contains a quote by the publisher saying something about something. It isn’t a direct endorsement. Rather, it’s usually an answer to some lame slogan created by the adveriser. It makes the ad more personal and has a higher click through rate, or so we’ve been told. In the case of the Microsoft ad, we were quoted how we had become “people ready,” whatever that means. See our answer and some of the others here (I think it will be hard to find this text controversial, or anything other then extremely boring). We do these all the time…generally FM suggests some language and we approve or tweak it to make it less lame. The ads go up, we get paid. This has been going on for months and months - at least since the summer of 2006. It’s nothing new. It’s text in an ad box. I think people are pretty aware of what that means…which is nothing.

Any questions?

During my morning workout I was watching stories on Iran on both Good Morning America and CNN. GMA had an exclusive interview with the President of Iran and interviewed some of the citizens in a move which made it seem like "the Iranian people" love America and it is their leaders that hate the United States. My favorite quote was one of the burkha clad ladies being quoted as saying "I'd like to go Las Vegas" [sic]. CNN on the other hand was all about the recent "news" that Iraqi insurgents are being armed and trained by elite Iranian troops. I'm now going through a serious case of déjà vu, it's like 2003 all over again.

Dave Winer does a good job of calling bullshit on this snow job in his post Iranian weapons? BFD where he writes

The NY Times ran this story on Saturday, today there's a mysterious US press briefing announcing that they had discovered that weapons imported from Iran to Iraq are killing American soldiers. So what exactly are we supposed to conclude from this? They don't say.

On the Sunday talk shows, the politicos don't say what's obvious to this voter.

1. If you don't want Americans blown up by Iranian weapons, get them out of Iraq.

2. It's a big surprise? We're calling them names, threatening them, moving our aircraft carriers into their ports, and we're supposed to be shocked that they're helping people who are fighting with us in Iraq? I would be surprised if it were otherwise, if they weren't helping them.

3. Who's providing more weapons to our enemies, Iran or the U.S.? I don't have the slightest doubt that the American taxpayer is the largest single source of support for people killing Americans in Iraq. We're pumping billions of dollars into Iraq every month, a lot of that must be in the form of weapons. Our supposed allies in Iraq are actually Sunni or Shi'ite militia. There are virtually no non-partisans in Iraq, everyone is on some side, and aside from the Americans and British, they're all trying to blow our guys up.

4. We'll leave behind a power vacuum in Iraq if we leave now? Seems doubtful to me. The place is already in chaos. We have 150,000 troops in Iraq (or thereabouts) in a country of 27 million people.

I agree with a lot of what Dave Winer has to say although I disagree that pulling out is the right course of action since the country is likely to devolve further into a state of civil war which the United States is directly responsible for. Unfortunately, it seems that while the congress is endlessly debating whether to issue the equivalent of a press release that expresses mild indignation at the president's troop surge in Iraq, he has already moved on and is planning how he'll expand his invasion and occupation of the Middle East into Iran.

The phrase to hell in a handbasket never seemed so accurate.

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has a blog post entitled Complicated Decisions where he writes

There is also genuine concern for the fate of the Iraqis if we leave.  Yet, according to this opinion poll, 7 out of 10 Iraqis want us to pull out.

http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/sep06/Iraq_Sep06_rpt.pdf

And so the decision about leaving Iraq can be boiled down to this:

1. American troops are dying.
2. It’s impossible to know if national security is best served by staying or leaving.
3. 7 out of 10 Iraqis want us to leave.
4. We have accomplished all that we KNOW we can accomplish. Anything else is guessing.
5. Iraq diverts resources from our higher priorities.

It’s impossible to know the RIGHT answer about Iraq. But it has become simple to know the RATIONAL path. Unlike a financial investment, where you might be willing to invest in a high risk/reward situation, you can’t diversify war. If the payoff isn’t obvious and predictable, the rational thing to do is pull out and minimize troop casualties. Any other path is just guessing.

Your disagreement is invited.

Back in 2003, I wrote a couple of blog posts where I disagreed with the plan to invade Irag because it set a bad precedent. The current state of affairs with almost 3,000 dead and over 20,000 injured U.S. troops along with the claim of over half a million Iraqis dead is worse than anything I imagined. Now that the invasion has happened I find myself unable to agree with either of the major sides in the U.S. debate on what the next steps should be.

On the one hand, there are the Cut and Run arguments such as what Scott Adams has made above which I mostly agree with. Except that it is quite likely that the situation in Iraq will likely devolve into a civil war and wholesale ethnic genocide if U.S. troops leave. Given that the U.S. invasion is the catalyst for the current state if affairs, I strongly believe that the U.S. has a responsibility to fix the country it has turned into a frightful warzone. On the other hand, the Stay the Course arguments have failed to sway me because it is quite clear that the situation in Iraq is more complex than the sound bites on Fox News would have one believe. Sometimes it seems there are five or six different sides battling it out; U.S. troops, Al Qaeda operatives, Sunni militia, Shi'ite militia, Iraqi government troops and foreign troops from neighboring countries. It is unclear to me exactly how the Stay the Course folks quantify victory in such a situation. Today I walked past a TV and saw some pundit on MSNBC asking which side the U.S. should fight alongside in the Iraqi civil war as if picking what outfit to wear to the prom. 

I've begun to lean more towards Scott Adams's position although I have difficulty with the U.S. initiating this bloodshed then just walking away from the results of its actions. What are your opinions on the next course of action the U.S. should take?