Last week Scoble complained that too few bloggers linked to his Intel video. This week Valleywag reported that Scoble was paid by Intel to create the “professional” video. OMG! Denton explains:

“The hypocrisy of bloggers, so quick to accuse reporters of conflicts of interest and so blind to their own, is nothing new. But it’s truly bizarre that Scoble would, by whining about discrimination against bloggers, draw so much attention to a video feature which could only embarrass him. The moral: fame can go to anyone’s head, even a formerly modest geek’s.”

My hats off to Valleywag for putting this one together! FYI – I am not linking to Scoble on purpose…

Update: turns out Scoble’s company shot two videos, one Intel paid them to shoot and another Scoble posted on his blog.  Scoble was annoyed no one linked to the one he posted on his blog.  Sort of seems like a distinction without a difference, but I am not a journalist so I am sure they have exceptions for the B roll footage…

Jake volunteered to speak at the Community Next event and, through the “Community Choice” (i.e. vote from the people) was given one of the coveted speaking spots. He’ll be speaking alongside Guy Kawasaki, Tara Hunt, Ted Rheingold, and more community brains.

Here’s the skinny on the event:

Community Next – Feb. 10
Stanford University (California)
More info: communitynext.com

Jake will be speaking on the topic of “Community Ecology” – the idea that there is a balance that must be maintained when working with fan groups, and sharing a few techniques about the best way to find and maintain that balance.

If you’re in town, give Jake a shout. He’ll buy the beer (just make sure to let him know after the tab comes).

Have you seen the newest commercials UPS is airing?  I actually liked them.  Check out the campaign here.  The guy’s hair is too long and the background music was familiar.  Turns out the featured song is by a band called “The Postal Service”. I thought this was a little ironic and quickly realized that I was not alone in my observation.  Its not too often that I actually follow up on a commercial I see on TV so UPS must be doing something right…

It is a little depressing when our leaders start looking to Yahoo Answers.  According to Joshua Porter, Senator Clinton posted the following question to Yahoo Answers:

“Based on your own family’s experience, what do you think we should do to improve health care in America?”

Joshua is positive indicating, “Clinton is actually asking the American people what they think, rather than assuming or generalizing from the party she’s a part of.”

Turns out there are over 35,000 answers in just two days with various responses including:

Allen – “We should recall ALL the loans made to foreign countries,and use the money for health care,poverty etc.”

Zero Cool – “The biggest problem we’ve faced is the fact that it’s barely affordable. Cost for healthcare needs to be reduced in some way.”

McGill – “KEEP THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF IT! My state goverment has totally screwed up our automobile insurance. Health insurance in their hands would be a tragedy. I don’t want your “help”.”

Did Hillary’s people have a plan for the responses she would get?  Jumping into the “social media” craze is actually a good idea for politicians, but make sure you have a plan before jumping in.  Interestingly Yahoo notes,

“Yahoo! Answers Staff note: Yahoo! Answers is a forum for people from all over the world to engage with one another and to find information on topics that interest them. This is not an endorsement. We are not siding with any candidate or party — in general or for the 2008 US elections. We’re hopeful that people from all perspectives will realize the great insights that the Answers community can have, and will turn to us for future discussions.”

Last year Alex wrote a post on the Texas Startup Blog announcing that a Texas based startup called eSports Partners (evidently backed by Jerry Jones) raised $5MM (the post is likely removed from here, but Google has a cache here). The text of the post is below:

According to Todd Anders from GuideCap, Coppell based eSports Partners raised a $5,000,000 senior credit facility from Compass Bank (GuideCap arranged the financing). Never heard of eSports? Todd explained, “The company is very low profile and wants to keep it that way.”

Run by CEO Michael McKay, eSports is a merchandise service provider offering solutions for NFL and collegiate markets. The company reported revenues of $31.5MM with 250 employees.

Their solutions include ecommerce (site design, content development and management), retail consulting (store locations, build out, merchandising and management), game day operations (venues to sell team merchandise), catalogs (creation and order fullfullment) and several other related services.

eSports’ clients (gathered from a quick Google search) include the San Diego Chargers, Washington Redskins, University of Arkansas Razorbacks, Miami Doplhins, University of Tennessee, Miami Hurricanes, Denver Broncos, Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, Detroit Lions, Tennessee Titans, Indianpolis Colts, Arizona Cardinals and Texas A&M University.

He never took much notice, but evidently the post received a few negative comments and as a result the company requested that Alex remove the negative comments and provide the identities of the people who made negative comments. After talking it over with a couple of lawyers he was assured that he would prevail, but only after $20,000+ in legal costs. Alex contacted the company and their lawyers and suggested that he was willing to remove the post and the comments, but he wasn’t willing to provide the identities unless ordered to by a court. The company demanded that he backup the database and retain it in the event that the company can secure a court order for the release of the identities.

Do you think Alex is doing the right thing? Should he remove the post? What obligation does he have to stand up to companies who receive a few negative comments? We would love your comments (positive or negative). Letter below:

Since we released many of our tools publicly using an open source license lots of folks have set up their own versions.  Most people have integrated the functionality into their own services.  Relying on our free, no warranty, tools for your business is not a great idea due to the fact that it is so easy for mean people to overwhelm (i.e. that was the primary reason we released them for free).

Now we never really considered that some folks would launch our tools and then put them up for sale.  Several folks have slapped on a new name and then posted them on ebay as fully functional businesses.  For example,

[XYZ].com is a URL redirection service that has been operational for over a year.  It generates $3,000 per month in ad sales from various startups.  I need cash and will sell the site for $9,000 right now. You get pay back in six months.  Who knows this thing might even grow faster. Email me right away at scammer@gmail.com.

Of course you don’t need to pay this scammer for the site as you can download the code and run your own version for free.  Additionally, I know they have only been running for a month or so and the likelihood they have advertising revenue is very unlikely.  I suspect that the ads are from shills and will go away once you buy the property.  I thought about linking to these “scammers” here but thought better of it when my inner-lawyer came out.

We have been using wikis in our business as well as promoting the collaboration tool to our clients.  The Dallas Mavericks are experimenting with a public wiki for use by fans.  The Dallas Observer talked to Mark Cuban about the wiki,

But, then, that is the point. Team owner Mark Cuban tells Unfair Park that MavsWiki is intended “a way for fans to have more fun and connect closer to the Mavs” by posting their fond memories of games way past and recently present. Mavs staffers (meaning, interns) will augment the site with old game stories from the Associated Press and other media outlets. Cuban also says, “I think it’s a first of any kind”; certainly, no other pro sports team has a similar site…at the moment. 

Check it out here: Mavswiki.com.  The cost of deployment is very low compared with traditional fan sites, and it gives your brand a great opportunity to let your fans generate content.  It will be interesting to see if dedicated wikis (versus public wikis like Wikipedia) take off.  What do you think?

TechCrunch is reporting that Second Life’s client software is now being released using an open source license. Check out the the SL blog here.  I have used Second Life, but truth be told I am too busy just dealing with my first life to focus too much on my second one.  Mike explains,

I’m a Second Life fan, but sometimes the hype gets to be a little too much. At any given time up to 20,000 or so people are logged in to the service. That’s not enough adoption to justify putting Second Life in the same sentence as Mosaic and Mozilla just yet. Today, it’s the playground for just a few hard core users who can live with an annoying server lag and who, apparently, spend at least some of their time gleefully throwing penises at others. Second Life is a really fancy hosting business, since their main revenue source is renting servers for people who buy islands and other real estate. At current growth trends, though, SL could be a real economic force in a few years. When things really start to hop, SL will look more like it’s own private Internet. Or a privately held virtual nation. At the point that millions of people spend most or all of their waking hours within the SL world, we’ll know this has happened.

For more than a year Big in Japan has been building and hosting social tools for various brands.  Initially we assumed that large corporate clients would want to ‘house’ our tools in their own state-of-the-art data centers, but soon we realized that the opposite was the case.  100% of our clients require that we provide our tools as managed services, instead of simply delivering them executable code.  We realized that as our client base grew our data center needs would grow as well and as a result we acquired an operational data center from McLeod in late 2006.
Our managed environments include:

• multi-homed IP transit (internet access)
• UPS and generator protected AC and DC power
• Cisco PIX & IronPort security systems
• HP Dual Xeon servers (occasionally Dell servers)
• Managed DNS (multi-site and geographic diversity)

Don’t call us for hosting, but if you need social tools built and managed we can provide a turnkey solution ~ no need to call a third-party hosting company.  That said, if your brand is the next Second Life we have great partners such as NeoSpire who can handle huge, million+ user virtual worlds.