Dan Mitchell

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Blogs
May 22, 2012
Facebook's Swoon a Symptom of Wall Street's Sickness
Facebook's newly issued shares lost 11 percent of their value on Monday, their first full day of public trading after Friday's snafu-filled IPO. That's a loss of $11.5 billion. Tuesday, the fall continued, taking the stock down another 3 percent. Too many shares were issued at too high a price by an ... More >>
Blogs
May 15, 2012
Drifting Away from Twitter, Toward Reality
I've been known to strongly defend Twitter, which some people have found surprising because of my default digital skepticism. But of course, I was skeptical of it at first (if nothing else, because of the name, which is stupid), until I started using it. It really can be used for quite practical pur ... More >>
Blogs
May 8, 2012
Desperate Newspapers Pin Hopes on Annoyed Readers
News publishers have always treated readers like commodities -- because that's what readers are. The real customers for publishers aren't readers, but advertisers. Readers are the product. It's not quite that simple, of course, and more enlightened publishers treat readers with respect and cover the ... More >>
Blogs
May 1, 2012
Joyless Comic Strip's NYT Parody Falls Flat
There seems to be a wide and growing divide between people who appreciate healthy portions of meaty journalism and those who prefer a media diet of bite-sized snark snacks full of empty calories. In this context, "old media" outlets like The New York Times can never win, no matter what they do. Even ... More >>
Blogs
April 24, 2012
The Internet Kills Babies
This is the most ridiculous thing I have read in the past week. Given that I've been reading a lot about Congress and Mitt Romney, that's really saying something. The argument, by Andrew Keen, basically (and despite Keen's ass-covering caveats) blames the Internet for Anders Behring Breivik's murder ... More >>
News
April 18, 2012
SF Weekly Letters
This is the most ridiculous thing I have read in the past week. Given that I've been reading a lot about Congress and Mitt Romney, that's really saying something. The argument, by Andrew Keen, basically (and despite Keen's ass-covering caveats) blames the Internet for Anders Behring Breivik's murder ... More >>
Blogs
April 17, 2012
Seeking a Path to Riches
Oh, good. More "sharing." The mobile social-app company Path (yes, the one that found itself in the middle a big privacy controversy not long ago) announced on Monday that it had landed another $30 million in venture financing from some top-tier firms, making its total valuation $250 million. Hey, t ... More >>
Blogs
April 10, 2012
Are People Finally Getting Bored with the Tech-Blog Circle Jerk?
At this point, I have to believe that all the people in the Pando Daily-TechCrunch-Uncrunched-whatever micro-universe have consciously incorporated their onanistic little circle jerk into their collective business model. You can almost picture it just that way: Michael Arrington, Sarah Lacy, MG Sieg ... More >>
News
April 4, 2012
SF Weekly Letters
At this point, I have to believe that all the people in the Pando Daily-TechCrunch-Uncrunched-whatever micro-universe have consciously incorporated their onanistic little circle jerk into their collective business model. You can almost picture it just that way: Michael Arrington, Sarah Lacy, MG Sieg ... More >>
Blogs
April 3, 2012
Center for Copyright Information: An Anti-piracy Measure That Makes Sense
About seven years ago, I read something online about a then-recent episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Overcome with the desire to watch the episode for myself, but without a subscription to HBO, I fired up LimeWire, the now-defunct file-sharing software, and quickly found the episode I wanted. An hou ... More >>
Blogs
March 27, 2012
Music Labels Make Life Tough for Spotify
Patrick Carney of the Black Keys is not a fan of Sean Parker, to say the least. Parker is an "asshole," Carney told NME.com on Monday. It's hard to blame Carney, though his rage might seem a bit misdirected -- or maybe just too concentrated on one person. Parker of course was the guy who brought ... More >>
Blogs
March 8, 2012
SOPA, Limbaugh, Komen: This Is What Happens When the Mob is Right
There is far too much cheerleading for the "wisdom of crowds." The undiscerning among us, often motivated by an understandable (if often mindless) disgust with institutions, tend to employ buzzwords like "crowdsourcing" and to preach the idea that "the people" are always right even if "the people ... More >>
Blogs
February 28, 2012
WikiLeaks' Data Dump: Let's Hold Off on Pronouncing It a Dud
If the widespread derision of WikiLeaks' latest document drop is any indication, the struggling organization might be nearing the end of its useful life. Still, the stolen e-mails it started publishing on Sunday night so far seem more interesting in general than the trove of diplomatic cables it ... More >>
Blogs
February 21, 2012
Copyright Owners Continue to Tilt at Windmills
Given the intensity of the debates over digital piracy, you'd almost think that if one side or the other were to "win," the question would be decided: If critics of copyright holders were victorious, piracy would run rampant and the media industry would be brought to its knees; if the copyright o ... More >>
News
February 15, 2012
SF Weekly Letters
Given the intensity of the debates over digital piracy, you'd almost think that if one side or the other were to "win," the question would be decided: If critics of copyright holders were victorious, piracy would run rampant and the media industry would be brought to its knees; if the copyright o ... More >>
Blogs
February 14, 2012
News Sites Can't Rely on Advertising
I'm not about to pretend that I know how to solve the economic dilemma that the news business finds itself in. I've been studying the matter, and writing about it off and on, for 16 years, and, like everyone, I really don't know. Maybe it will be nonprofits. Maybe paywalls. Maybe micropayments wi ... More >>
Blogs
February 7, 2012
Facebook Just Keeps Getting Worse
Over the years, whenever Facebook has made changes, people have inevitably complained -- on Facebook -- about the changes Facebook made to Facebook. "I'm leaving Facebook," those people would declare, on Facebook. Of course, few of them ever actually left Facebook. Until recently, I have ... More >>
Blogs
January 31, 2012
Sorry, Twitter, if You're in the Media Business, You're a Media Company
Given how Silicon Valley moguls flee from the term "media company," you'd almost think it was as bad as "child-porn merchant." But whether they like it or not, companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are media companies. They don't have precisely the same business models as News Corp., Disne ... More >>
Blogs
January 24, 2012
Megaupload Bust Highlights Absurdity of SOPA/PIPA
Last week, just as two ill-conceived anti-piracy bills were disintegrating in Congress in the face of a massive online protest, the FBI, with help from foreign governments, was busting Megaupload, one of the biggest sources of pirated digital goods. The timing was interesting, though the feds s ... More >>
Blogs
January 17, 2012
PandoDaily: Just What We Needed, Another Tech-News Site
Really? Seriously? Another site devoted to technology news? Yep, 'fraid so. This one, PandoDaily, will be written by, among others, some of the people who had previously made TechCrunch so awful: Sarah Lacy (who runs it), Michael Arrington, MG Siegler, and Paul Carr. These are people who believe ... More >>
Blogs
January 10, 2012
MySpace Says It's Bringing TV to the Web -- But It Isn't
Specific Media, now the owners of MySpace, took Justin Timberlake on stage with them Monday night at the Consumer Electronic Show, and with a lot of fanfare, they announced ... essentially nothing. The purported big news is that MySpace is revolutionizing television by bringing it to the Web an ... More >>
Blogs
January 3, 2012
Rupert Murdoch on Twitter: Insipid and Pedestrian
It's sort of hard to believe after all this time, but I still regularly see people making fun of Twitter as if it's just a bunch of morons saying moron things. Okay, it is mostly that when taken as a whole. But I see very little of that kind of thing because I generally don't follow morons. Twitt ... More >>
Blogs
December 27, 2011
GoDaddy's Wall-to-Wall Awfulness
Every time GoDaddy makes the news, as it has over the past week by supporting the widely reviled Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), the question naturally arises: Waitaminute, this is a domain registrar, right? Right. GoDaddy is in perhaps the dullest business this side of term life insurance, and ... More >>
Blogs
December 20, 2011
The RIAA Responds Lamely to Claims of Piracy Advocates
TorrentFreak, a news site that basically supports illicit downloading, last week used a half-assed ISP-lookup service to conclude that employees of both the Recording Industry Association of America and the Department of Homeland Security had downloaded illicit copies of various copyrighted works ... More >>
Blogs
December 20, 2011
The Recording Industry Makes Itself Look Stupid Yet Again While Battling Piracy
Over at Dan Mitchell's Digital Tremors column on our news blog, the Snitch, there's an interesting debate brewing over the recording industry's response to some piracy advocates' claims that its employees downloaded music and other files illegally. Mitchell's take is that while disputing thes ... More >>
Blogs
December 13, 2011
Wikipedia: Should it Go Dark to Protest the Stop Online Privacy Act?
Should Wikipedia shut itself down to protest the bizarrely clueless anti-piracy measures Congress is considering? As with many things about Wikipedia (such as whether an encyclopedia that anybody can edit is a good idea), it's not an easy question to answer. Would it even be effective? It's har ... More >>
Blogs
December 6, 2011
India Wants Facebook to Prescreen User Content
Sometimes it's hard to refrain from going libertarian. Okay, not really, but whenever governments try to pass or enforce absolutely clueless, sledgehammer-blunt laws governing the Internet, it's a challenge not to simply give up hope that enough politicians will ever understand the basic concepts ... More >>
Blogs
November 29, 2011
Facebook's Cheesy Ads: Do They Make it Worth $100 Billion?
A couple of weeks ago, Business Insider, the puerile gossip 'n' lies site run by disgraced, bubble-era Internet-stock analyst Henry Blodget, informed us that a "source close to Facebook employees" said in an e-mail to the site that the company would go public within weeks. The article's author, N ... More >>
Blogs
November 22, 2011
Facebook Fumbles Its Way Toward a Phone
Facebook is building a phone, the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital is reporting this week in a series of posts. Facebook basically has to do it if it wants to stay in competition with Apple and Google as the go-to online destination -- or platform, or "ecosystem." Lots of people make Fa ... More >>
Blogs
November 1, 2011
Copyright Fight the Subject of Juvenile Flamewars
To the uninitiated, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce might sound like a larger version of local chambers of commerce: something like the Elks or the Rotary Club, where dull businesspeople get together for dull meetings to eat rubber chicken and to "network." But the U.S. Chamber is the largest lobb ... More >>
Blogs
October 25, 2011
Groupon's Big Bowl of Problems
Groupon, it appears, means to get rich or die tryin'. On Friday, it updated a regulatory filing indicating that it is scaling back its IPO plans. Less than five months ago, when it first filed, the company said it planned to raise about $750 million. Now that's been reduced to $540 million. The e ... More >>
Blogs
October 18, 2011
What Exactly Is a Tech Company?
Fast Company has published what might be the best, clearest look at the how the contours of the tech landscape are shaping themselves, and how that landscape has come to be dominated by four companies. I was alerted to the article via a tweet by Chronicle tech reporter Casey Newton who characte ... More >>
Blogs
October 11, 2011
Sonic.net: The Li'l ISP that Stood up to the Feds
I way overpay for my monthly Internet service. There are a bunch of reasons: Sonic.net, my ISP, has great customer service. It almost never goes down. The website is simple and user-friendly. It updates it quickly with service info. When you call them, they talk to you like you're a fellow human, ... More >>
Blogs
October 6, 2011
R.I.P. Steve Jobs, an Insanely Great Capitalist
As I write this, many of my Facebook friends are expressing their profound sadness, and actually issuing "thanks" to Steve Jobs, who died on Wednesday. I'm feeling the same way. It is astonishing that such sentiments can be felt, at this moment in history, about the CEO of any American corporat ... More >>
Blogs
September 27, 2011
Facebook's Newest Blight: The Ticker
Recently, to check to see whether my keyboard was working, I randomly slapped some keys. I happened to have Facebook open at the time and I ended up entering what I typed -- "jmjyttyj"-- into its people search. I got three hits. There is no member named jmjyttyj, but Facebook helpfully pointed me ... More >>
Blogs
August 16, 2011
Google Thumbs Nose at Antitrust Regulators
You can't say Google doesn't have balls. Despite increasingly heavy antitrust scrutiny by the federal government, the Internet behemoth is charging ahead with a deal that brings all kinds of potential for cornering a market. It will pay $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility, a leading maker of hand ... More >>
Blogs
August 9, 2011
How Google Ended the 'Browser Wars'
Today is the 16th anniversary of Netscape's initial public offering. It occurs to me that many of you might be only vaguely aware of Netscape, and of what it meant to us in the mid-'90s. That's because many of you were toddlers, or perhaps not even born yet. That's depressing and mindblowing ... More >>
Blogs
August 2, 2011
Judge Halts Weird Online Movie Service Zediva
In March, Zediva, a really weird online movie-rental service, told Wired that "it doesn't expect legal trouble over its service," which allows users to watch actual DVDs, played on actual DVD players, via the Internet. A couple of weeks later, the Motion Picture Association of America sued Zediv ... More >>
Blogs
July 27, 2011
Netflix Saga: Fight for Your Right to Cheap Video Rentals
Americans have collectively developed a keen sense of entitlement. That's why so many of us think we have a "right" to undeserved pay raises, undeserved good grades in school, free software, free music, low-priced gasoline; that we have a "right" to act like jackasses in traffic or in Internet co ... More >>
Blogs
July 19, 2011
Why Are Tech Journos Suddenly Interested in News Corp. Scandal?
When I was a staff editor at the tech-news site CNET News.com in the late '90s, one of the top editors there used to insist that we "localize" big news events by writing about how they were being covered and discussed on the Internet. So, for example, the death of Princess Di and the impeachment ... More >>
Blogs
June 28, 2011
Lindsay Lohan Shills for Pump-and-Dump Stocks on Twitter
To get an idea of just how classy those "sponsored" celebrity tweets can be, take a look at what Lindsay Lohan tweeted last night. "Have you guys seen food and gas prices lately?" she asked. Yes, we have, Lindsay. Have you? Then her tweet took a weird turn, into economic analysis: "U.S. $ will so ... More >>
Blogs
June 15, 2011
Pandora Goes Public for $3 Billion. Happy Face?
Ninety million users, zero profits.First, a word of congratulations to Pandora, the Oakland-based Internet radio service whose initial public stock offering today resulted in a nearly $235 million windfall to its investors. The company is now valued at $3 billion. You can buy its stock on the New ... More >>
News
June 1, 2011
SF Weekly Letters
Ninety million users, zero profits.First, a word of congratulations to Pandora, the Oakland-based Internet radio service whose initial public stock offering today resulted in a nearly $235 million windfall to its investors. The company is now valued at $3 billion. You can buy its stock on the New ... More >>
Blogs
May 24, 2011
Foursquare: The Silliest Thing Ever Invented
Before I started using Twitter a couple of years ago, I, like many people then and now, assumed it must be the silliest thing ever invented. The stupid name didn't (and doesn't) help. Mainly, I thought people used it for telling the world what they had for lunch, but I then looked into the matter ... More >>
Blogs
May 10, 2011
Facebook Paying People to Watch Ads Won't Work
Caitlinator/FlickrI'm frankly amazed that in all the coverage of Facebook's plan to pay users to watch ads, nobody -- as far as I can tell -- has mentioned the several companies that tried to do something similar during the (original) dot-com boom, and failed spectacularly. The most famous of th ... More >>
Blogs
May 3, 2011
No, Twitter Hasn't Replaced CNN
It's become perfectly predictable: Every time there's a major news event, people spend several days talking about how Twitter and Facebook are replacing traditional news organizations -- the (sigh) "MSM." Even if the word "replacing" isn't used, that's often the implicationIn the present case -- ... More >>
News
January 26, 2011
Premium pay nets city workers millions in bonuses for just doing their jobs
It's become perfectly predictable: Every time there's a major news event, people spend several days talking about how Twitter and Facebook are replacing traditional news organizations -- the (sigh) "MSM." Even if the word "replacing" isn't used, that's often the implicationIn the present case -- ... More >>
Blogs
April 16, 2010
Does Large-Scale Urban Fish Farming Make Sense Here?
Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago TribuneA student at the Chicago High School of Agricultural Science checks on an experimental tank of tilapia.Our favorite morsel from the blogs. Mission fishin': While the idea of urban farming continues to crackle through the zeitgeist, for most of us it's still more ... More >>
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