A Whole Lotta Nothing

Ev's assholishness is greatly exaggerated

There's been a bunch of stories lately about Ev Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter upon the occasion of him leaving Twitter to do his own thing. Some are outright calling him an asshole. This Business Insider story of Noah Glass and Twitter's early days has a whole speculative piece on how Ev might be a calculating evil genius, cut from the same cloth as Monty Burns in the Simpsons, that cut investors out of the Twitter pie as soon as he could apparently by deceiving them about Twitter's potential (and mentions that an investor or two is thinking of legal action against him). That piece references the old NYT piece about Ev being "pushed" out of Twitter and recounts the whole Pyra/Blogger implosion at the start of 2001, which I was a player in.

I read all this stuff, and I have to call bullshit on quite a bit of it.

First off, I worked with Ev for almost a year and I saw him as a really amazing idea man and has the drive you want in an entrepreneur. His dream setup he talked of early on was building Pyra "Labs" where every awesome idea he came up with could be prototyped by a small team and spun off into products by other people or sold to other companies that are more into the execution side of things (Blogger was a spin-off from Pyra, the project management app). If you look at the past ten years, Ev's time after Google is much like that. Odeo was a good idea (I never got the appeal of phone-to-blog-post Audioblogger, Noah Glass' predecessor app) because podcasting was just taking off and I was most interested in the piece that let you record and mix audio using a browser instead of expensive audio software. Odeo went the way of the Dodo because iTunes simply added Podcasting natively and crushed it overnight. Ev went on to form Obvious, which seemed like another take on the Pyra Labs model, and Twitter was a product spun out from there.

Again, Ev is great at ideas, making prototypes and letting ideas blossom into things over time. He doesn't seem like a CEO type to me, and that's not a dig on him -- I'm a CEO myself, even though I'm not a CEO type of guy either. Running a day-to-day corporation with tons of employees is a lot different than being an ideas guy, and it requires different skills.

So Ev leaving Twitter to try something new didn't come off as unexpected when I heard the news from the man himself.

This is my own speculation, but I think the core issue on the Odeo/Twitter thing between Noah and Ev was that their personalities clashed. I remember meeting Noah and him being a pretty intense guy and Ev was a quieter, mellower dude. I remember being surprised when I heard they were rolling Audioblogger into something new together but then I remember they used to be next-door neighbors and I thought maybe I was too quick to judge Noah from seeing him at a couple parties.

One key point that deflates pretty much the whole Business Insider piece on Twitter and Ev buying out his Odeo investors is this: I've spoken with a number of Odeo investors and one mentioned to me that when they were offered the buy back plan, there was an offer to roll your shares into Twitter, though Twitter was so new, no one really knew the potential (seriously, twitter wasn't a killer app at first. I hated it. Merlin hated it.). Ev didn't "slow play" his hand and dupe investors so he could own more of Twitter later on, Ev gave them a pretty amazing offer of continuing their investment and if I remember correctly I heard that everyone but one or two investors took the cash offer out of Odeo and turned down the Twitter shares.

That's an important distinction because it means the investors in the story aren't pissed that they were hoodwinked by Ev, it's because the investors passed on Twitter and combined with today's 20/20 hindsight, it looks like a bad move by almost every investor to take their short term cash back.

Going back to the NYT piece from last Fall, I was a little bit bitter for the immediate few months after i was laid off from Blogger in 2001 because I knew Blogger was a much bigger idea that had so much world-changing potential I didn't want to see die on the vine. By 2002 I buried the hatchet with Ev and admired his drive and hard work at keeping it alive by himself, and eventually growing it into something Google snapped up and improved upon (The NYT story says that unnamed former employees got nothing out of the Google deal. I'm one of the folks they were talking about, and still, there's sincerely no hard feelings).

I look forward to whatever Ev does next because he has tons of great ideas and can build a prototype faster than you think, but one thing he isn't is a calculating evil genius asshole hellbent on screwing over investors.

That's just melodramatic bullshit.

What? Fortuitous is back?

Everything I've learned about casual podcasting:
An exhaustive how-to guide on getting starting thinking about and recording, editing, and publishing your first podcast.

via fortuito.us

For the last few years, I've regretted letting my long essay/business tips blog Fortuitous go fallow, and I've been thinking of bringing it back many times whenever I feel the urge to write more. The other day I was helping a friend with his new podcast and I realized there wasn't a single resource online that contained everything I'd learned, so I decided to write it myself.

This essay is pretty much everything you need to know to get started podcasting with a Mac. I plan to do more of these, the next one will be on everything I learned after personally printing, selling, and shipping over 500 t-shirts in the past two years.

Maybe in a few weeks I'll return to more business-y topics too.

come break bread with us at the Old Timers Ball

SXSW is coming up and as it has gotten bigger, it has gotten harder to find friends, so Kevin Smokler, Kevin Newsum, and I thought it would be nice to throw an "Old Timers Ball" for ye olde school webloggers to meet, greet, and catch up with each other on the first Friday night. It'll be at the Side Bar in Austin (map below) from 5-8pm. It's a no-host cash bar (you pay for your beers, basically) and we welcome friends new and old to come hang out.

RSVP at Upcoming, if you like, but we look forward to seeing you there.

Details:

Side Bar (602 E 7th)

Friday March 11

5-8 pm

 

(Featuring a UB the DJ set: bring your iPod, iPhone or mp3 player and we'll spin some of your tunes at the party)

 

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Quick thoughts on Pinboard

I've been a Delicious.com user since late 2003, back when it launched. I was happy when it was sold to Yahoo as it meant (what I thought would be) a secure future. Recently, Yahoo revealed that they would like to shutter/sell the site and a rush for alternatives pushed a lot of people towards Pinboard.

I actually signed up for Pinboard about six months ago, intending to use it as a backup archive of my stuff on Delicious, with the hopes of someday using it natively. I recall being impressed that Pinboard could also pull my links out of Twitter, since I often feel guilty throwing interesting links into the wind of Twitter (Twitter is terrible at archiving and finding old tweets so I ask myself why I don't just use delicious instead of Twitter every time I drop a link there). It also pulls stuff I mark at Instapaper and stuff I share at Google Reader. Along with automatic Delicious backups, Pinboard works amazingly as a personal archiving service that lets me find old interesting sites using a variety of tags and search.

Always a but

But the site bills itself as "anti social networking" and "bookmarks for introverts". I understand some of the backlash over weird twitter/screenshots/popularity integration at Delicious, but like Twitter, on Delicious you choose your followers and once you find a couple dozen amazing web surfers marking up interesting out-of-the-way places before anyone else does, you might find like me that the /network/ feature of Delicious is a killer once-a-day visit that often leads to half a dozen interesting finds. It's odd to me that one of the principal features at Pinboard called out on their "Delicious vs. Pinboard" page is NOT being able to identify who is following you even though Pinboard will tell you how many people follow you. I found quite a number of interesting Delicious users from people that were "fans" of mine (I always liked that use of the word at Delicious, better than "follower" or "subscriber"). After the great exodus from Delicious to Pinboard last week, someone built a tool to try and locate people that migrated from one service to another, but it would have been nice if that was native to Pinboard itself.

Like I said, I can understand the reluctance to make Pinboard into yet another social media platform and I made a lot of arbitrary decisions in designing MetaFilter so that it's not gamed by morons but as a user of Delicious for the past 7 years, I've grown accustomed to the subtle network effects for the purposes of discovery and some of the features purposefully lacking in Pinboard rob it of some of that utility.

Two headed beast

So the thing I keep coming back to in thinking about Pinboard is that it's trying to be both a bookmark organizer and archive/storage place for your personal use but also a networked viewer of what your friends are saving (while lacking some functionality). It's a conflicting message to see the homepage of the site say it's anti-social and for introverts but the first few options in the site's navigation are pages of bookmarks from others: network, popular, recent.

Using the site, I find my /network/ view to be less than 100% useful, thanks to the cool archiving options mentioned earlier. If I follow someone on twitter and also at Pinboard, I'll often see links and tweets reproduced that I've read hours earlier. I've had to unfollow several people that elected to do the Twitter integration because of this, even though I myself set my account to do this (and for useful personal archive reasons). I look at my own Pinboard feed and imagine someone else reading it and there are tons of useless things in there, Twitter @replies to personal friends where I was sharing a link to something that makes no sense outside of me and that one other person on earth. Comparing my own Delicious feed to my own Pinboard feed I see this theme repeated: my Pinboard feed is personally useful, but socially uninteresting.

And there in lies the rub: Pinboard extends the functionality of Delicious to any links you drop in Twitter, sites you choose to read later at Instapaper, and interesting things you share at Google Reader, but like Instapaper, that works best as a personal archiving appliance that you use personally to dig up a story about raising kids you read six months ago at the New York Times. But when you combine extensive personal archiving with a public view mixed into a network of shared links from dozens of friends, you get a mish-mash of bookmarks, jokes from twitter, and wacky sites someone liked in Google Reader. As a personal archive tool, it's pretty impressive, as a shared space to find interesting bookmarks, it's problematic.

In the end, I'll likely continue using Delicious to track bookmarks with Pinboard as a backup/archive tool that I'll gladly continue to pay for. For now I'll continue to hit my Delicious network page to find new things and occasionally check in with the Pinboard network and popular pages to try and find stuff though I find them less useful than Delicious.

Gawk Gawk Gawk

I have to admit that at some point in the last few months Gawker Media turned a corner and is doing consistently strong investigative journalism* across all their blogs, the likes of which the Huffington Post used to do before they went all sensationalistic tabloid entertainment bullshit on us. I used to write Gawker off as tabloid bullshit generator but they don't have too many peers writing about similar insider leaks these days.

* ignoring that ugly "outing the Apple engineer that lost a phone" thing

Popular Culture Through the Lens of the Literary World

 This is my new favorite blog.

Fewest days in the month = least commitment to sparkle motion

I'm going to try making a daily post to this site during the month of February. While Twitter has taught me to be fierce editor, I've spent so much personal time whittling down ideas to their essence that I never post anything more substantial anywhere else. The other day someone mentioned that I might be an expert on cellphones given the few recent posts here and I had to admit it may look that way even though it's such a minor aspect of my daily life, so I went in search of a solution.

To remedy my lack of posting and spending too much time on twitter, I'm going to do something here each day starting next week. I make no promises to how earth shattering the ideas, subject matter, or even length of posts will be, but it'll be something more than nothing, which is what I've been typically posting as of late.

Content sausage factories

This is new to me: seeing a friend's awesome (and creepy) halloween cooking idea (which is kind of shocking and disgusting looking even though it's good food inside) show up in content mills I hadn't previously heard of, like 2leep and odditycentral. The 2leep links show up at the tail end of posts at Inquisitr like this one. 

So it appears that one site pays another to redirect links to a third, which sucks up almost an entire post's writing and photos (with a teeny tiny link to the original, but there's no point in following), and all three sites are coated in advertising.

It seems like someone has taken the old anonymous image aggregator sites (typically no-attribution russian blogs with 200 images in each post) and propped up a business model on it, but at the expense of the original creators of the content. 

Softly relaunching

 

So a long, long time ago I decided to both teach myself to shoot photos better and document my quickly changing life by creating a photo blog back on October 10, 2003 with the grand vision of keeping it going for ten years.

At the time, I was pretty busy with multiple projects, but thanks to moving all my photo management to a new mac and this new fangled application called iPhoto, I got my daily photo posting regimen down to about 10-15 minutes each day (which included download photos, select the best, edit in Photoshop, save to desktop, upload via FTP to site, then build blog post around it). It was a tolerable nightly chore, as long as my life stayed somewhat stable.

Soon after having a child a couple years later I started slacking a bit, then a bit more, until I didn't have 15 minutes a day to spare towards a little hobby site. I'd say the whole thing died sometime in late 2005 when I just gave up on daily posts. I streamlined the process further but the uploads and blog posting was too much of a hassle. I kept posting plenty to flickr, thanks to its ease of use with various photo uploading tools. In 2005, I started wishing for a way to make a photoblog powered by flickr entirely, which wasn't an option when I started.

Last year I stumbled upon Flogr, and I'd been wanting to try it out ever since. I finally got around to it today, and so it lives at www.tenyearsofmylife.com.

I'll start by saying I threw this together in about an hour, I tweaked the default template but know it has a bunch of annoying quirks (several I noted in Flickr's new App Garden thread linked earlier). The oldest photo seems to be dying and I haven't imported any of the 2003-2007 content that was previously on the site (I'll eventually do it). Also the feed sucks so I'm replacing it with a tag feed from Flickr. I'm not happy with the URL structure or even the idea of having an external URL for something that actually lives at flickr, but what I am happy about is the ease of use.

It's pretty much just a stream of my favorite recent photos posted to flickr and it really cuts down on the workflow to the point where a photo can go from my camera to iPhoto to the web and to this site in about four clicks within the span of a couple minutes. I'm no longer aiming for daily new photos or trying to make myself shoot one new one per day, I'd rather just keep it to as often as an interesting photo comes along that I feel like sharing which will likely be on the order of 3-4 per week.

Now that expectations are appropriately lowered, enjoy.

Julie and Julia

I caught Julie and Julia today in a theater with all of three people (including me) while everyone else in town was at the first showing of Gamer. I wanted to see this because I was intrigued how one even goes about making a movie about a blog.

It did a pretty good job showing how the Julie character decides to do a blog and what it's like to write daily about yourself and how that can sometimes hinder your offline relationships. The concurrent storyline of Julia Child seemed truthful and sincere and overall I enjoyed it and left the theater feeling uplifted and inspired to cook.

But there was this one scene. Julie is in her cube and she's ecstatic that a post got 53 comments and she high fives her coworker, and moments later her husband calls and says he just noticed she's #3 on the most popular Salon blogs list and her arms shoot up out of her cube in victory and I began to cry tears of joy.

I sat in the theater thinking about my little blog and how it became a community large and a business small. I remembered walking into a coworker's office in December 1999, arms in the air, as I exclaimed "100!!! One hundred people hit my web server today! 100!!!" I remembered being so stoked that three thousand people hit the site in January 2000, when I won a web site of the day award. I remembered the first time a newspaper reporter called and wanted to talk to me of all people.

The tears kept rolling through the next scene and stopped after 5 minutes or so and I thought to myself how weird that I was brought to tears by mundane shots about blogging serving as mere story continuity to others in the theater.

Sure, it's just another romantic comedy that most people could say is forgettable date movie. But it's the first movie about blogging and the first movie that resonated in a way no other movie ever has with my own experiences. This will probably make sense to about a few dozen people with experiences similar to mine but my god did that film move me.

My new blog about cycling and stuff

I've started and abandoned a metric ton of blogs in my time, but my latest is one I'll be sticking to at least for the entire year of 2009 and likely beyond. My new blog is called Stronger, Fitter, Faster and it's about how I'm devoting a lot more time and energy into getting in shape, losing weight, and racing bikes.

Over the past year, half of this blog has turned to cycling related stuff but I felt like taking the next major step of having a cycling coach would mean I'd have a lot more to talk about and a lot more stuff that'd likely be boring to any non-cyclist, so I'm going to toss those kinds of things on the new blog.

This also means my internal flow chart for how an idea in my head ends up as a post on the web is even more complicated, with some stuff going to twitter, metafilter, this blog, the new cycling blog, or anything else I can post to. I should really draw up a visualization of this.

So yeah, cycling stuff will likely go over there from here on out, but I'll try to post more here in 2009 and not let twitter take every idea for a blog post away from me. No more of this "one post per month" crap.

Three more for the old reading list

Three blogs I have recently found, devoured, subscribed to, and squeal with glee when they update: FiveThirtyEight (awesome election stats and coverage), Lovely Package (it's to product design what longtime favorite Brand New is to logos), and Be Sportier (like Uncrate, but just stylish sports stuff, with large photos and consistently otherwise impossible to find goods)

Almost there...

If you're visiting this site in a browser, you've likely figured out I've moved to Typepad and there are a few bugs in commenting, in my archives, and in my feed (feed still points to my old blog and permalinks). Things should be working as intended soonish.

update: yay, everything seems to be working now. Comments are out of order on my old imported posts, and I don't currently have URL redirection for old WP urls yet, but everything basically works again and I'll likely be posting much more because heck, Typepad is kind of fun and easy.

Testing out iPhone posting

Throwing in the towel (or the death of blog CMSes)

This blog is approaching 8 years old and after two years on a custom system I wrote myself, followed by four years on Movable Type, followed by two years on Wordpress, I've given up completely on hosted blog software and moved this blog to Typepad. I really like Typepad and though I'm giving up things like custom .htaccess redirects for old posts and my old permalink URLs, I'm gaining things like the easiest to use posting UI available and most importantly, I'll never need to update any software by hand ever again.

It's been a long, frustrating week with several days spent trying to move off Wordpress (I was tired of my weblog app chiding me for upgrades every two weeks) followed by several days trying to get MT to work followed by brief experiments with Textpattern followed by giving up and finishing here. There are so many things wrong with each and every blog app that I feel like developers really should revisit my anti-blog CMS screed from early this year.

Becoming an old (blogging) man

Today I realized that I'm part of the "old guard" of blogging because I remember a time when blogging was so new that very few sites had comments (it seems like MetaFilter was one of the first few?) and after a few years when they started to become commonplace, people were generally decent to each other because it was very literally turning a blog into a face-to-face conversation.

But I think the root of the problem (described in various media outlets over the past year or so) of snarky, or mean-spirited, or generally unhelpful comments becoming the norm has to do with the distance we've achieved from those original link-and-essay heavy blogs.

I have a feeling that if you've only seen blogs in the past five years (which is probably 95+% of people reading blogs today) you consider comments to be de rigueur and they are entirely divorced from the original concept of a conversation between the reader and the author of the original post. It's not an intimate conversation, it's just another content management feature available to you on the web.

This has a de-humanizing effect that I'm seeing play out more and more often in the weirdest places. People will post about their idle curiosities on their personal blog ("Why does x happen when I do y?") and instead of seeing friendly answers I would expect many years ago, I'll often see someone early on read into the question and assume all sorts of accusations ("well, maybe it's because you are a, b, and c, and everyone knows it!") and watch most followup comments start from there and go into darker directions.

It's tough because I love blogs and I love comments in blogs, but I'm starting to think there's this "new generation" that has grown up online only knowing blogs as having snarky comment areas and never realizing it used to be a personal, intimate space where you'd never say anything in a comment that you wouldn't say to a friend's face. Also, know that I mean "new generation" in a way where age of person in it is irrelevant. You could be 50 years old and started reading blogs last summer and I'd put you in that group.

Of course, I could just be talking out of my ass, old people tend to do that...

Satisfaction - People-Powered Customer Service

Satisfaction has launched (more on their blog). Disclaimer: officially I'm a "member" of their "advisory board" (airquotes because it sounds more important than it seems -- unofficially, I talked to Lane every so often over the past few months and they patterned some design/interaction decisions similar to the ways I run MetaFilter and Ask MetaFilter).

I'm happy to see the site going public, I think they've got some great ideas and a great design, and it'll be interesting to watch them grow. At the moment, they're a great way to get tech support help from regular folks instead of the large companies that typically have bad tech support and I'm sure a lot of smaller companies might just use them for all their support needs (why reinvent the trouble ticket wheel for the 1000th time?). If enough small companies get on board, it'll be interesting to see how larger corporations interact with the service. I think the challenge out of the gate will be to keep things helpful and on a positive note, without descending completely into a consumer rant/spew/rage kind of thing that sites like Consumerist sometimes veer into.

Check it out -- there's not much there now but I think it'll turn into something really useful and novel in a short period of time.

Boing Boing redo

I gotta say that I'm enjoying the Boing Boing redesign so much that I'm actually breaking down and making a real blog entry about it (as opposed to a witty twitter quip, or simple delicious link, or a lowly screenshot posted on flickr).

I thought the old design was showing its age and the ad layouts were very distracting (the jokes about it looking like NASCAR weren't too far off). I even sent a mockup of a cleaner layout to Xeni and Cory a couple years ago, but I never thought it would change and assumed it would putter on for several more years in its previous state. I don't know what prompted the change, but the new look is a great improvement. It's way cleaner, easier to read, and the ads are no longer distracting. I disagree with Nelson on the change (though I agreed with his previous assessment). At this point in the lifespan of Boing Boing (one million dollars!), I no longer compare them to other blogs and instead to major media outlets, so I'm cutting them slack on three ad zones. Look at any page at even nicely designed media sites like the New York Times and you'll see 3-5x more advertisements. So among top-shelf media sites, their advertising is barely noticeable.

I'm also happy to see a new gadget blog that's unlike all the other million gadget blogs out there. It helps that it's authored by my all time favorite gadget blogger, a man that deserves a medal for getting hired to write a regular column on Gizmodo, only to get fired after Gawker editors and readers took his first essay way too personally and seriously. It's clear from day one of this new Boing Boing blog that this won't be another shopping or wishlist gadget blog. Free from all the pointless gadget lust that powers other sites, this looks like it'll be more along the lines of "interesting crap someone built that looks cool/works in a cool way."

Bottom line, it was a great surprise to see Boing Boing's new layout and direction today and I think it's a huge positive change (and adding comments was nice too).

Ads good! No ads better!

If you've followed this site for a few years, you probably saw my old essays introducing Google's Adsense to the blogging public and that time I said ads in RSS were a no-no. Today I wrote an extensive update on the same subject over on my new blog: How ads really work (superfans and noobs). I basically lay out everything I've learned from hosting ads for the past five years including some data from my own sites and those of several friends.

My new site: fortuitous

When I came back from Austin, I mentioned that I wanted to do a new site focused on business type advice. After a month or so of the idea gelling in my head, I wrote down about 30 ideas for essays I'd like to write, I banged out a mockup, and I looked up a bunch of goofy domains. A couple more weeks passed and thanks to the CSS coding of Ryan Gantz, editing skills of Anil Dash, and the nice fellow that sold me the domain cheap, I give you: fortuitous.

It's a new essay every Monday about some aspect of business that I've learned while running the MetaFilter/PVRblog/etc empire. Nothing too earth shattering, but it's a fun outlet and I think it'll help a lot of people in a similar situation out. Subscribe to the feed and follow along.

(btw, the design of the bottom frame CSS hack thing is totally cribbed from NorthTemple and it does display funny if you scroll your mousewheel like mad. It was also the first thing I've ever built using Coda as the IDE and it was fantastic, with a little more polish/features it'll replace Textmate as my editor of choice)

What the hell, old school bloggers?

On some random blog, I found a link to this book "Founders at Work", a book interviewing the founders of tech companies. The person mentioned Caterina talks about Flickr in it, among big famous 70s and 80s software geniuses so I ordered it thinking it'd be a history book about a bunch of classic Silicon Valley companies with maybe a recent one like Flickr thrown in there.

It just showed up and I can't believe how many recent companies are in it (del.icio.us, Blogger, Six Apart, 37Signals, etc) but I didn't hear about this book from any of the long-term bloggers that are part of it. C'mon Ev, Mena, Jason, and others! I read your blogs daily, and would have ordered this book weeks ago if I knew it existed.

You've come a long way, baby

January 2007: Macworld Highlights includes a "Microsoft Bloggers Lounge"

January 2000: Camworld Blogger Meetup at Macworld. My photos of the event.

Vox is a Go!

Vox launched today and I can't say enough good things about it. Just try it out and see (it helps if you get a few friends and family roped in as well).

Dad, if you're reading this, this is that invite I sent you a few weeks back that you never used. Sign up and email me your Vox blog URL when you're done.

Thanks Mena, Ben, and the rest of the Six Apart crew for building this app. It is going to literally make many people's lives better.

Rambling about blogging and TV

I've long wondered when the act of blogging TV would take place. I don't mean writing blog posts about the last episode of Lost, I mean actually snipping segments from TV and posting them for all to see. Basically doing with TV what bloggers were doing in 1999 with the web -- snipping bits here and there to make a full picture of some topic through the use of quotes and links.

YouTube (and to a lesser extent Google Video) have finally reached a tipping point of blogging TV. With 1999 blogs, I knew that anything happening online that was interesting would get picked up by those few dozen blogs and eventually I stopped following primary sources like CNN and the NYT and just followed blogs. With TV, there's no way I can keep up, but I know if something interesting pops up, it'll be all over YouTube the next day.

I'd argue that YouTube is the king of this movement because they have such loose and lax legal guidelines. Of course, everyone that uploads claims they own the copyright and got release forms from everyone involved and cleared anything seen on camera, blah, blah, blah, but in reality, it is totally lawless and people are basically uploading random interesting TV bits they dump right off their computer. It reminds me of Napster in 1999, totally interesting, and totally illegal in the eyes of IP lawyers.

Like Napster, there are positive sides to this kind of loose fair use/infringement. It's only because things are so lax that everyone and their brother saw the Chronicles of Narnia SNL spoof video, and SNL ratings definitely saw a spike in the shows that followed (and I noticed SNL tried to capitalize on this by putting Andy Samberg in more skits and letting cast members do funny little videos for the two following episodes).

I'm really surprised that TVeyes didn't become the tool of choice for this type of activity. If you've never seen their service, it's really incredible. The thing with TVeyes is they already record pretty much all the major networks including cable outlets. Then they digitize it all, index the closed captioning, and provide search tools for the text and automatically crunch out video segments that meet your search criteria. So for instance, if like me you watched the SNL show on your DVR the night it aired, you could say "damn, that was good, I need to get a copy to my friends" you just pop onto TVeyes, do a search on NBC for "narnia" and it would find the segment and prepare a little 3 minute video capture of the show. It's like TiVo for all TV, with searching and quoting features built it, which is exactly what YouTube is doing, but they require that someone, somewhere recorded and digitized it.

TVeyes has been around since at least 2000, back when they'd email you whenever a word popped up anywhere on TV. Unfortunately, TVeyes seemed to focus on the enterprise, acting like a video clip service to corporate giants, but I guarantee if they kept this stuff open to all, everyone could flock to it and share the videos. Overnight, you'd have thousands of people mining the very best bits of TV and revolutionizing that industry.

In a way, I'm already starting to see the effects of YouTube and its many clones. Goofy clips are starting to pop up on more comedy shows like The Colbert Report -- stuff they never did before, but suddenly they have these small chunks of random comedy (click on the charlene video) that seem ripe for viral spread through YouTube, almost like they were trying for it.

Maybe stuff like clips on YouTube vs. regular format TV is kind of like how blogging was first viewed critically in 1999-2000. Everyone was afraid people wouldn't read 3,000 word essays if blogs took over -- that it was shortening our attention span as everything had to become small, easily read chunks with links to more information. It was the death of the long format and it was going to ruin us all. But it didn't, and I don't think sharing TV clips is going to ruin TV anytime soon.