The Huffington Post is routinely accused of by other media outlets of engaging in what some call “over-aggregation,” by excerpting stories from newspapers and other sources without enough attribution or original content. The latest charge in Miami is that the local HuffPo site is guilt of actual theft, for lifting details from two Miami Herald news stories. But these accusations are nonsense, for a number of reasons — including the fact that the HuffPo stories contains plent of attribution, a link, and additional information that the original stories don’t. But even apart from that, media outlets that complain about “over-aggregation” are missing the point about how news works now.

The site that started waving the “theft” flag — a blog called Random Pixels, run by Miami-based photojournalist and writer Bill Cooke — spends a lot of time castigating The Huffington Post for not paying the bloggers who provide content for the site (another charge that comes up often), and then describes what the writer sees as the modus operandi of the empire that Arianna Huffington created and sold to AOL earlier this year for $ 315 million:

Here’s how it works: A newspaper pays a reporter to write a story. The reporter’s story appears on the paper’s website. Huffington Post then comes along and rewrites the story – adding no original reporting of its own – and posts the story on its site with a link to the original newspaper story.

What does “over-aggregation” consist of?

This is the core of the over-aggregation charge that some — including Boston Globe editor Marty Baron — like to describe as “theft,” or at the very least plagiarism. But is it? In the specific case of the Miami Herald stories, it’s hard to see how. While the Huffington Post versions repeat many of the basic facts that appear in the original articles (including details about the driver of a vehicle who was apparently texting before a fatal accident), even the supposedly incriminating excerpts that Cooke includes in his critical post contain repeated phrases attributing the news to the Herald. For example:

Not only was Cruz-Govin speeding, according to the Herald, he was a habitual texter. On the day of the accident, records show he sent 127 texts, the Herald reports.

Not only do the Huffington Post versions of these stories contain repeated references to the Herald, as well as multiple — and prominent — links to the original story (although it’s impossible to tell whether these were added before or after the critical blog post was published), but the texting-accident story is arguably better than the original. Why? For one thing, it includes dozens of links to more information about texting and driving laws, similar accidents, and other news that might be relevant, which the Herald story doesn’t. The Herald story doesn’t contain a single link of any kind.

Solution: add more value than an aggregator can

There have been plenty of accusations in the past year about the Huffington Post “over-aggregating” stories from other news outlets, including a case involving the Chicago Reader. But one of the problems with those kinds of charges is that no one can agree on what over-aggregation is, or whether it even exists. If an outlet — or even another newspaper — quotes facts and includes attribution and a link, as well as more information on the topic, how is that an offence? The short answer is that there is no offence, except to the pride of the original outlet, and possibly to their view of how the world should work.

As far as accusing the Huffington Post of theft is concerned, the law around this kind of thing is unclear at best: a famous court case in 1918 involving the Associated Press newswire upheld what has become known as the “hot news” doctrine, which makes it an offence to misappropriate breaking news for the purposes of financial gain. But in subsequent decisions, the courts have said that entities which engage in the same kind of aggregation the Huffington Post does — such as the financial-news service TheFlyonthewall — can to some extent escape this charge by including attribution. Whether that would help the Huffington Post remains to be seen.

But apart from the law, which is always several decades behind reality when it comes to technology, the fact remains that aggregation of the kind the Huffington Post does is the way things work now, and complaining about it (or trying to sue over it, as the Hollywood gossip blogger Nikki Finke did earlier this year) is like complaining that since the car was invented it’s gotten really hard to find a good buggy whip. Your content will be aggregated — so the challenge is to add more value than sites like the Huffington Post do. And publishers like the Herald might want to start with links.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Denise Chan and World Economic Forum

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When the major book publishing firms signed an agreement with Apple that allowed them to control the prices for their e-books — unlike the deal they had with Amazon, which gave the online retailer the right to cut prices if it wanted to — they probably thought they had won a major battle. But as a Wall Street Journal story points out, they are still shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to e-book prices, by keeping them artificially high in an attempt to shore up their profit margins and protect their existing print business. In the long run, that pricing model could wind up doing far more damage than the model it replaced.

The Journal piece notes that e-book prices, particularly for some best-selling and popular titles, are in many cases actually higher than prices for the comparable print version. For example, author Ken Follett’s “Fall of Giants” costs $ 18.99 as an e-book and sells on Amazon as a paperback for $ 16.50. One New Yorker says he is buying fewer e-books because of the higher prices publishers are charging for them, telling the Journal:

It’s hard to justify the purchase of e-books that are priced at $ 10 to $ 15 when you can buy the real book on Amazon used for $ 2 or $ 3

Publishers are indulging in wishful thinking

And how do publishers justify doing this? Among other things, they claim that consumers are actually willing to pay more for the e-book version of a novel because of the convenience and other features that they get with an electronic edition — the ability to search, make highlights, and so on. A senior vice-president at Hachette Digital, a unit of one of the world’s largest publishing firms, tells the Journal that she believes “there has been a change in the understanding of the value of a digital book,” and that readers see the added value and are willing to pay extra for it.

This sounds like a giant case of wishful thinking, and there is mounting evidence to indicate it is just that. While it’s true that e-book sales continue to increase, that’s more likely due to the mainstream adoption of readers like the Kindle and the iPad than it is any acceptance of higher e-book prices. The WSJ piece also quotes publishing industry sources as saying they are seeing consumer resistance to e-book prices in the $ 10 to $ 15 range, and a company that tracks e-book piracy notes that the rate with which books are being scanned and uploaded to file-sharing sites is also increasing exponentially.

But another publishing industry insider has a warning that is even more important for traditional publishers than piracy: Lorraine Shanley says that high prices for mainstream e-books could easily convince more readers to try self-published novels from authors using Amazon’s Kindle publishing platform — since many of them are priced at $ 5 or cheaper. Self-publishing success stories such as Amanda Hocking and John Locke have shown that sales in some cases can jump by as much as 20 times when the price drops.

Does Amazon need another stick to beat publishers with?

That’s the real threat for publishers with their antiquated pricing models: Amazon is already eating into their market share on a number of fronts — by making the self-publishing of books as easy as possible (and offering self-publishers monetary incentives to sign deals with Amazon) and by signing up authors to its own digital imprints. Do publishers really want to give the company even more power by pushing consumers of their books away with artificially high prices? Do they need to give Amazon another stick to beat them with?

The irony in this approach, as the WSJ story points out, is that the “agency model” that the major publishers signed with Apple actually results in less money from many titles. In the past, Amazon would give publishers a fixed price for both the printed and the electronic version of a book, and then any discounting on the e-book version would come out of Amazon’s pocket. But under the agency model, publishers get 70 percent of the retail price, which for some titles means they wind up with less revenue.

On top of that, the Big Six publishing firms are currently embroiled in a federal antitrust investigation over the agency model, based on allegations that the deal with Apple represented collusion and illegal price-fixing and is therefore anti-competitive. Winning the ability to set prices for e-books instead of letting Amazon do so may have felt like a victory at the time, but it could turn out to be a hollow one.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Mike Licht and Marya

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The San Francisco Police Department now admits to helping Apple security personnel search for a missing iPhone 5 prototype but Apple itself has still not issued an official comment on these reports. Read more…

Neowin.net

Apple’s Final Cut Pro X, released only yesterday, has already received backlash from users who need certain cut features from the last version. In particular, the absence of multicam support has caused a stir in the community, with some users going as far as to dub the new release “iMovie…

Neowin.net

Here’s one feature you won’t find in Apple’s new iCloud service: video syncing. The cloud-based media storage service introduced at Apple’s WWDC conference in San Francisco on Monday offers the ability to sync your personal music library with the cloud without uploading any of the actual files, making it possible to access thousands of songs on any of your devices in a matter of minutes. Apple calls this feature Music Match, and charges users $ 24.99 per year to instantly access their personal music library online.

However, it won’t be able to do the same thing with movies. iCloud can sync videos across devices, but it does so by uploading each and every file to the cloud and then downloading it to other devices. Depending on the file size, this can be a cumbersome and time-consuming process. There were rumors before the event that Apple was in talks with Hollywood to secure similar rights for movie streams, but details about these negotiations were scarce.

A cloud solution for Hollywood fare could have been a great extension to Apple’s existing iTunes video offering, which largely centers around rentals and sales of movies and TV show downloads. Apple does offer streaming of select TV show episodes for $ 0.99 on Apple TV, but it hasn’t made this price point and functionality available to users of the iTunes desktop client, or to other iOS devices like the iPad or iPhone.

That’s a problem, especially in the mobile space where storage is oftentimes limited. Google announced at its developer conference in May that it is going to stream to Android devices through its new Android Movie service, and Amazon has been offering streaming to a variety of platforms. However, both companies don’t extend these services to videos that customers already have on their hard drives either. Google’s recently launched cloud music service doesn’t have any movie streaming functionality, and Amazon’s Cloud Drive only offers basic support for video streaming that requires users to upload each and every video file individually.

Hollywood was also notably absent from other parts of Apple’s WWDC keynote. iPhone software SVP Scott Forstall made a point of saying how many songs (15 billion), apps (14 billion) and books (130 million) have been downloaded through iTunes, and he said that Apple now has 225 million customer accounts with credit cards. However, he didn’t mention how many movies and TV show episodes these customers rented or purchased.

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After weeks of discussion in the blogosphere over whether what happened in Tunisia was a “Twitter revolution,” and whether social media also helped trigger the current anti-government uprising in Egypt, author Malcolm Gladwell — who wrote a widely-read New Yorker article about how inconsequential social media is when it comes to “real” social activism — has finally weighed in with his thoughts. But he continues to miss the real point about the use of Twitter and Facebook, which is somewhat surprising for the author of the best-seller The Tipping Point.

Although the topic of social media’s role in events in Tunisia and Egypt has been the focus of much commentary from observers such as Ethan Zuckerman and Jillian York of Global Voices Online, and also from Foreign Policy magazine columnist and author Evgeny Morozov, the response from Gladwell was all of about 200 words long. In a somewhat defensive tone, he suggested that if Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong had made his famous statement about how “power grows from the barrel of a gun” today, everyone would obsess over whether he made it on Twitter or Facebook or his Tumblr blog. Gladwell concluded that while there is a lot that can be said about the protests in Egypt:

Surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along.

In other words, as far as the New Yorker writer is concerned, the use of any specific communications tools — whether that happens to be cellphones or SMS or Twitter or Facebook — may be occurring, and may even be helping revolutionaries in countries like Egypt in some poorly-defined way, but it’s just not that interesting. This seems like an odd comment coming from someone who wrote a book all about how a series of small changes in the way people think about an issue can suddenly reach a “tipping point” and gain widespread appeal, since that’s exactly what social media does so well.

Gladwell is not the only doubter

Gladwell isn’t the only one who has taken a skeptical stance when it comes to the use of social media in such situations. Foreign Policy writer Morozov is also the author of a book called “Net Delusion,” in which he argues that the views of some “cyber-utopians” are in danger of distorting political discourse to the point where some politicians think that all people require in order to overthrow governments is Internet access and some Twitter followers. This view was echoed in a recent piece in BusinessWeek entitled “The Fallacy of Facebook Diplomacy,” which argued that “the idea that America can use the Internet to influence global events is more dream than reality.”

But as sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci argues in a blog post responding to Gladwell — and as we argued in a recent post here — the point is not that social media tools like Twitter and Facebook cause revolutions in any real sense. What they are very good at doing, however, is connecting people in very simple ways, and making those connections in a very fast and widely-distributed manner. This is the power of a networked society and of cheap, real-time communication networks.

Weak ties can also connect to and become strong ties

As Tufekci notes, what happens in social networks is the creation of what sociologist Mark Granovetter called “weak ties” in a seminal piece of research in the 1970s (PDF link) — that is, the kinds of ties you have to your broader network of friends and acquaintances, as opposed to the strong ties that you have to your family or your church. But while Gladwell more or less dismissed the value of those ties in his original New Yorker piece, Tufekci argues that these weak ties can become connected to our stronger relationships, and that’s when real change — potentially large-scale global change — can occur.

New movements that can bring about global social change will still require people who interact with each other regularly, and trust and depend on each other in somewhat dense networks. Or only hope is if those networks span the globe in a tightly-knit, broad web of activity, interaction, personalization. Real change will come only if we can make friends we care about everywhere and we make bridge ties that cover the world in a web of common humanity.

That’s not to say that the question of who is using which social-media tool is inherently more interesting than the actual human acts of bravery and risks that people in Tunisia and Egypt have taken, or are taking. But those tools and that activity can bring things to a tipping point that might otherwise not have occurred, or spur others (possibly even in other countries) to do something similar. Why else would governments like Mubarak’s be so quick to shut down the Internet and cellphone networks? And that is interesting — or should be — regardless of what Malcolm Gladwell might think.

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Post and thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user Rosauro Ochoa

GigaOMTech

Just a quick update on the great missing email/folders caper over at Hotmail, a number of Facebook fans of the “Hotmail…wth” page are leaving comments that their emails and folders are back…except for emails from last 3 days.  We noticed last night that Windows Live Corporate Vice President Chris Jones had joined the Facebook page, and he was quoted as saying a fix was on the way:

From Chris Jones of Microsoft:

We have identified the source of the issue and are working to restore email access to those who have been affected. We expect the process to take several hours and will post an update as soon as it is complete. We sincerely apologize and thank you for your… continued patience.

Good news for those affected, and hopefully Hotmail will be able to restore those “last mile” emails, too.  Let us know if you spot any announcements from Hotmail on the subject.

LiveSide.net

Here’s an interesting quote from Ted Power, the former lead designer for Google’s mobile web apps:

“Chrome OS could potentially mark a profound leap forward. For the first time, all the layers between the network and the computer have been removed. The device itself is of little consequence; you can ‘feel right at home’ from any networked device. Chrome OS isn’t so much about what has been added, but what has been stripped out; no more complicated file systems, software updates, etc.”

Paul Buchheit, the ex-Googler who created Gmail, thinks that the ideal design of a computer that acts like a local node of a global super-computer matches the design target of Chrome OS. “It should be relatively cheap and reliable, secure (no viruses or anything), zero-administration (I don’t want to be a sys-admin), easy to use, and fast.” Paul says that Chrome OS is unnecessary because iOS and Android devices meet the same ideal and there are already millions of devices that run these operating systems.

There are already millions of people who use Chrome and some of them would like to buy a computer that’s as fast as their browser. Mobile phones are not yet powerful enough to handle complex web apps, but that will change and, at some point, web apps will be indistinguishable from native apps. You’ll be able to use your favorite web apps from almost any device, but why not use a device that removes everything that’s unnecessary and slows you down?

Google Operating System

Facebook, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social network, has no plans to go public until at least 2012, Bloomberg reports after talking to unnamed sources close to the company. The company apparently wants another year of growth before going public. Initially, Facebook was rumored to be going public in 2010, and then in 2011. The draconian procedures and bureaucratic migraines that come with going public notwithstanding, one big question comes to mind: Is Mark Zuckerberg missing an opportunity by not going public now?

“If they have other sources of capital, the company would probably be better off deferring an IPO until Zuckerberg had more experience under his belt,” said Ray Valdes, a San Jose, California-based analyst at Gartner Inc.

Poppycock! I don’t buy these nonsensical arguments that Mark needs more experience — he is the only 26-year-old I know of who’s put a company worth $ 158 billion on the defensive.

Logically speaking, it makes perfect sense for the company to wait it out. Facebook has revenues that are growing at a massive clip — rumored to be around $ 1.4 billion in 2010, and that can only go higher. A few more years of that kind of growth and  you are looking at a company that may make a bigger splash in the public markets.

On the flip side, things can go wrong. In the fast-changing world of social networks and fickle online consumers, the tide shifts more rapidly than you think. In  the last ten years, we’ve seen seemingly unshakeable major Internet brands — eBay and Yahoo — stumble and struggle. The future of a search monopolist (Google if you want to know) is being questioned in business media. Hey remember — five years ago there was nobody better than MySpace. Who knows what lurks around the proverbial corner. What if the seemingly unstoppable growth flattens out in late 2011? Can the company go public then?

More importantly, the stock market is like a Mexican telenovela on speed — responding to sentiment and not so much to logic. At the moment, it seems Wall Street will pay top dollar for Facebook.

“Who is advising Facebook to wait for another [year] of growth? Wall Street wants to fund that growth and get in!” Jim Cramer, founder of TheStreet.com, host of truly crazy Mad Money and a reformed hedge fund manager tweeted when I asked him what he thought about Facebook’s IPO (or lack there off.) “Market craves growth,” he added. With few growth options, he felt that it was time for Facebook to strike and use public money to fund its growth. “I believe that this market is so desperate for growth that it might have paid $ 70-80 billion for Facebook.” At present, Facebook is valued at close to $ 25 billion on SharesPost, a private exchange which allows company insiders to sell their holdings to investors in private transactions.

An IPO like that could have other repercussions — it could lift the slumbering fortunes of Silicon Valley, which is waiting for the initial public offering market to party like it’s 1999. There are a lot of significantly large companies that are stuck in neutral because public markets, for now, are waiting for a powerful signal — like a Facebook IPO.

What do you guys think? Is Facebook smart to wait it out, or do you agree with Cramer — strike when the iron is hot?

Related Post from the Archives: By the Numbers: Facebook’s Road to an IPO

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

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For those of you lucky enough to have Hotmail Wave 4, apparently one of the new features – Conversation View, has been at least temporarily disabled.  MVP Vasudev tweeted about it:

‘Conversation View’ in the Windows Live Hotmail Wave 4 Beta has been temporarily disabled. #WinLive

We’re able to confirm through our own Hotmail Wave 4 account (we were admitted on to a press “dogfood”, which has since been converted to a regular account, but still with Wave 4) that Conversation View is currently gone.  Instructions on Windows Live Help to enable Conversation Threading say to go to Customize your Mail>Conversation Settings, which simply isn’t there at the moment:

Update Whew, that didn’t take long .  As you can see, Conversation settings is back in the list:

and as Guillaume B points out in the comments, you can get to Conversation View through the dropdown box just below the Search Box:

The “Conversation” setting wasn’t there when we checked earlier, either.

Perhaps coincidentally, Windows Live is also experiencing some issues this morning (PDT).  Windows Live Help has a message up:

There is currently an issue reported that may impact your ability to use our products and services. >

Windows Live SkyDrive is currently experiencing login issues. You may receive errors when attempting to  login to your SkyDrive account. You may also receive errors while publishing content with Windows Live Photo Gallery in an online album.

Hopefully these issues are just a few “to be expected” glitches in the system as Hotmail rolls out and the Wave 4 beta continues.  Are you having problems?  Let us know in the comments.

LiveSide.net