Into Tech

You may have heard a lot about Google’s Knol recently, but you have probably never heard of HubPages. This is a pity, because while Knol is based on the same idea - inviting users to create pages on topics they know about - HubPages looks better, reads better, and is better organised.

I am being a little unfair to Knol, of course. The service was only announced in December, and opened to the general public on July 23. It will certainly improve. HubPages, by contrast, is already two years old, and Squidoo - another site based on exactly the same idea - is even older. But by learning from these pioneers, Google could have done a much better job with Knol.

Most of us have compared Knol to Wikipedia: they could have called it Googlepedia. But both Knol and HubPages do two things very differently from Wikipedia. First, they identify their authors, who take full responsibility for their own pages. Second, they provide a way to make money, though I suspect most contributors won’t make much.

Writing knols or hubs is therefore a competitive rather than a collaborative sport. A thousand people can all create pages about the same topic and hope the best one wins.

But there are also differences. Knol has a desperately dull home page with text links to articles about Upper Gastrointestinal Bleeding, Evolving Trends in Laparoscopic Surgery, and so on, and most of the featured articles are very academic. HubPages has a colourful invitation to “Publish your passion”. It features articles about Beatles album cuts, the Top 10 Most Expensive Items On eBay, How to Identify Poisonous House Spiders, and so on. It takes a populist approach.

Hubs are easier to browse than knols. HubPages uses tags to create subject categories such as Love, Health, Finance, Shopping and Business. You can also browse by author, request a hub if you can’t find what you want, and chat with other hubbers in the online forum.

In these respects, HubPages is more of a social networking site. If you like one of Shalini Gupta’s hubs, for example, you can vote for it, leave a comment, browse her other 260 articles, download some of her ebooks, and become a fan - she has more than 600 already. She’s popular partly because one of her subjects is writing hubs for profit.

So far, HubPages has published more than 50,000 hubs and attracts more than 5 million unique visitors per month. It also makes more than 90% of its revenue from Google Adsense advertising, and Google features HubPages as a case study. For a small start-up, this is success. Can that success continue now that Google has invaded its turf?

HubPages gets most of its traffic and almost all its money from Google, but what if Knol’s pages appear consistently higher in search results than those from HubPages, Squidoo and similar sites? Google’s search is closed and proprietary, so we have no way of knowing if it favours Knol unfairly. But we’re watching.

Back in June, we noted that the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a lobbying group representing big store retailers was pushing Congress to start regulating online auction sites, claiming that they were experiencing a huge crimewave from thieves who would resell the goods on sites like eBay. Reader crystalattice points out that some Congressional Reps have put forth just such a piece of legislation, and now the press is parroting the claims that this huge crimewave exists, when the evidence suggests exactly the opposite. Shoplifting is actually decreasing, while insiders (employees) stealing goods is on the rise. The problem is often that stores simply don’t police themselves well.

So, this isn’t at all about stopping this supposed crimewave. It’s a way for offline retailers to try to hurt the competition by adding some ridiculous liability to them — somehow making them liable for the actions of users selling “stolen” goods on their sites. This is a blatant anti-competitive move that is using dubious claims to support the case. Hopefully the press and other politicians won’t fall for it.

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There’s a story making the rounds about a guy who’s apparently going to jail for selling unauthorized copies of software on eBay, and the software industry is trumpeting what a huge victory this is over “counterfeiting,” by claiming: “The Mondello case demonstrates that these pirates won’t simply get a slap on the wrist when caught. They very well may end up doing serious time in federal prison.” Right, but if you read the details, the conviction wasn’t just for copyright infringement, but for identity fraud and mail fraud. That is, as part of his operation, he illegally obtained peoples’ bank account info. That would appear to be a lot worse than copyright infringement, but the press seems to focus only on the “counterfeiting” angle, because that’s the story the software industry association seems to be feeding the press. They want people to think that they’ll go to jail for piracy, when that’s quite unlikely.

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There was a time when the coolest skateboard on the block wasn’t even real, existing only on the silver screen.

The Hoverboard from Back To The Future II was the Holy Grail for all us that wore elbow and knee scrapes like badges of pride. After seeing Marty McFly turn the girl’s toy scooter into a very cool floating board to escape some very badly dressed bullies from the future, the real streets were soon filled with kids on skateboards trying unsuccessfully - and dangerously - to hitch lifts on the back of passing cars.

The original Hoverboard is now on the auction block but, before you plan on living the dream and owning the original board [less the actual hovering ability], you should know that bidding is starting at £15,000 on eBay Live.

Jump for a video of McFly and the board in action and a full description of what you’ll be bidding on.

It appears that the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) is about to learn what DMCA safe harbors mean. The group is apparently upset about the fact that some people sell counterfeit software on eBay. That’s not surprising. But, the SIIA is planning to sue eBay for this activity, rather than going after the counterfeiters themselves. Of course, if anyone from the SIIA had been paying attention, they would know that courts in the US have repeatedly found that eBay and sites like it are protected by various safe harbor provisions. This is for a very good reason: it’s not eBay counterfeiting anything. eBay is merely the platform. If the SIIA wants to go after the actual counterfeiters, that’s their issue. But going after eBay for providing the platform is going to fail miserably. You would think that a trade group that claims they cover the “Information Industry” would know that already.

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The UK is flooded with hundreds of thousands - possibly millions - of potentially dangerous console chargers according to the latest warning and product recall from Trading Standards.

The government agency has issued a recall for certain non-branded chargers - see photo on the left - which were made in China and most likely sold on online sites like eBay, and others.

The chargers are mainly sold as accessories for the Nintendo DS and DS Lite handhelds, but can also be used to charge Gameboys. The agency lists electrocution and overheating issues with these chargers. In a statement, Trading Standards said:

Thanks to the whole slew of folks who sent this in: TechCrunch has the details on Channel Intelligence, a company that owns a ridiculously broad and obvious patent on creating a list from a database and is now suing a whole bunch of small websites that offer things like wishlists. Read through the claims of the patent and see if you can explain how a single one is possibly new or non-obvious to those in the space. As TechCrunch notes, the lawsuits are all targeted against smaller websites, rather than the big players like eBay or Amazon. There are a variety of reasons why this might be. Channel Intelligence may have approached those companies and actually received a token payout (cheaper than a lawsuit for those companies). Or, perhaps more likely, it’s using these smaller lawsuits to bring in some additional cash and to establish the myth that this patent is valid. That was common a few years back, before people started suing everyone at once for patent infringement. Patent holders would mostly target a few small companies, who wouldn’t be able to launch a strong legal defense — use those “victories” to build up a warchest while also claiming that it showed how the patents are “valid.”

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Every time we’ve mentioned eBay lately, we’ve received a long list of complaints in the comments about how awful eBay is. It’s become quite clear that there’s plenty of dissatisfaction with the company — and a big part of the problem seems to be figuring out who eBay is really representing: buyers or sellers. In theory, as an impartial marketplace, eBay should be able to serve both sides. After all, you need both sides to be happy to make the marketplace truly effective. However, with growing concerns of fraud on eBay, it seems that the company has recognized that it’s more important to focus on improving the experience for buyers — and less so for sellers, especially the smaller sellers. Witness eBay’s recent change to ban sellers from offering feedback on buyers. Apparently too many sellers were using that feature to “retaliate” against any buyer that left negative feedback, and that was distorting seller ratings, often upsetting buyers.

An even bigger indication may be recent deals that eBay has done with big-time sellers, such as Buy.com, who has apparently worked out a special deal with eBay to list various products at fixed prices, with no listing fee. This has plenty of sellers seriously pissed off, as they can’t compete with Buy.com in those product areas, but it probably provides a better user experience for buyers — many of whom just want a cheap price from a trusted seller, and are getting sick of long, drawn out auctions. Of course, for you dot com history buffs, it’s a bit ironic to remember that before eBay came along, the “leader” in the online auction space was OnSale — who did very similar deals with big companies to sell off their inventory. Then eBay came along and its person-to-person sales model pretty much doomed OnSale. Either way, this makes you wonder if this trend will continue, and how it will impact eBay overall. The big sellers may fill in some of the gaps, but it changes the nature of what eBay’s platform really provides.

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Unlike last month’s awful ruling in a French court, costing eBay millions, a US court has correctly recognized that eBay should not be found responsible for auctions of counterfeit goods. This case involved Tiffany Co., who wanted eBay to be held liable for others selling fake Tiffany goods on eBay auctions. The court sided with eBay on every single charge, and smacked down Tiffany over and over again in the ruling. It noted that eBay is not responsible for the actions of its users, and Tiffany is wrong to suggest that eBay has the responsibility to monitor the auction site for infringing auctions. eBay does take down such counterfeit auctions when made aware of them, and that is all that the company is required to do. The court specifically points out that the Supreme Court had already rejected the idea of a “reasonable anticipation” standard that would have made eBay liable, even though Tiffany tries to suggest otherwise. The court also notes that eBay didn’t infringe on Tiffany trademarks in mentioning Tiffany in advertisements for the site. This is an excellent overall ruling, and nearly the complete opposite of the terrible French ruling.

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Remember all those lawsuits against Google by people who didn’t like how Google listed them (i.e., they felt that Google had them too far down the rankings)? Well, it appears that some similar lawsuits are being filed against eBay. One jewelry sales company, Windsor Auctions, felt that it should have been making more money via eBay and sued the company after realizing that a competitor was using tools eBay provided it to get better listings. Windsor mostly relied on a depression-era law that tried to stop big companies from engaging in predatory sales practices (using its marketing muscle to force suppliers to give it better deals). As Eric Goldman points out in the link above, the law makes almost no sense today (and it’s questionable if it ever did). It certainly doesn’t seem to apply to this case — and the court has agreed, tossing out those charges, though leaving some others dealing with a implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. It’s difficult to see how eBay can be at fault here for offering up tools that will help sellers, but as we’ve seen with all those Google cases, companies always look for someone to blame when someone beats them in the market — and the company with the big pockets is always an easy target.

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