Based on the number of requests I've decided to transcribe the CalacanisCast Beta 7.... you can read the transcript below. I'm thinking about having folks (i.e. the audience) insert links in the content at the wiki. This would take some responsibility... but would be helpful. So, the idea would be to put a link on Dave's name to his blog (or wikipedia page), a link to a product mentioned on the show, etc.

I've got a great person helping me with the transcription.. he might be able to start us off with somegreat links.

best j

Jason Calacanis: Welcome to CalacanisCast beta 7:
I am here with Dave Winer the founder of RSS, OPMS...

Dave Winer: How many times are we going to do this...

Jason: I gotta do it because there are people who listen to the podcast who don't know what any of this is – so I try to be a little magnanimous about it. So...

Dave: Why don't we try this version of the CalcanisCast that we are all real jerks. No that that wouldn't come real hard to any of us, right? Based on what I've heard about all of us...
Well, not you Peter, Peter is...

Jason: Not Peter, actually. Peter is known as...

Peter Rojas: Well, I keep a low profile...

Did a quick podcast last night to talk about how I'm feeling. I've got a bad cold, so excuse my coughing/hacking.

CalacanisCast Beta Four... MP3 file.

If you want to subscribe go into iTunes and hit "Advanced -- Subscribe to Podcast" add this feed:

http://podcast.calacanis.com/rss.xml

Fred calls me and Mark to task for being YouTube haters, and says that YouTube is the "single best thing that has happened to the Net in the past several years." I wouldn't argue with that *single* best comment, but in fairness it is right up there with voip, blogging, podcasting, Google Adsense, social software, social news, and broadband.

Who wouldn't want a free Tivo of the best video moments in the history of filmed media?! That's not the point.

Fred's second incorrect statement is that YouTube created the Flash Media player--dead wrong. They didn't make it Fred, but they did make it a hit.

[ Update: Fred say's that when he mentioned the embedded flash player he was talking about the syndicated video feature... fair enough. ]

What Fred misses completely (and he doesn't miss much) is that YouTube's real invention was *syndicated* video. Up until YouTube folks would block other domain names from using their video because of the bandwidth bills. YouTube bravely (or foolishly if their company had/does run out of money due to bandwidth bills) did was *encourage* users to syndicate their videos and used that syndication as a promotion and a link back. That was brilliant--straight up brillaint.

That concept worked, and that syndicated concept is--I believe--their innovation. Does anyone else know of anyone who did syndicated video before YouTube? I don't off the top of my head.

Now, my point all along about the YouTube service is that it is Napster on the web with very little else. Rewarding someone with a huge valuation or a huge exit for being a "pirate bay" is a joke, and that's why the big media companies shut down Napster. They did it on principle, not based on logic. Logic would have told the media companies to buy the company and make it legit slowly. If the music companies they would own iTunes, not Steve Jobs.

Now, the technology behind the site is *easy* to build. Trust me on that one because our team at Netscape built it in a month, and our technology is MUCH better than YouTube's. The reason is that the technology behind YouTube is Macromedia's not YouTube's. YouTube should get very little to no credit for their technology beyond the scalling of the service--which is not that easy (but not that hard either).

In fact, the technology piece is sooooooooo easy that Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, and countless startups have all built their own versions. Why would you pay a $1-2B to YouTube for Technology that costs < $50,000 to make/customize?! That is why companies with scale (aka traffic) like Yahoo, MySpace, Viacomm, and AOL have all created their own services. Only an idiot would pay someone $1b for technology that is a commodity and traffic that is based on their IP!

YouTube does have a great community in a very similar way that Napster and Bittorrent had and have great communities. However, if I had a bar that gave out free (stolen) beer every day I could build a great community as well.... but I digress.

What I will give YouTube a lot of credit for is leveraging mountains and mountains of illegal content to make a huge legal business, and for getting away with this plan for so long. They did show copyright holders of the world the value of their content online, and it's created great companies like Revver which are coming up with models to pay origional content owners.

So, all credit to YouTube for:

a) syndicated video
b) staying in business this long without getting sued
c) showing video holders the value of their content
d) scaling the service

If YouTube can make the shift from back-alley pirate bay to legit content distributor it will be one of the great bait-and-swith, hit-and-run acts of of all time. Napster couldn't thread that needle, and I frankly don't think YouTube will.

If they do I'll buy those dudes a bunch of beers and congradulating them on being the greatest hustlers of all time (and I mean hustler in Jay-Z sense of the word--respek!).

The goal of the new Netscape is to create a social news site where the audience builds the front page, and our "anchors" do metajournalism on the stories they vote up. We've learned that it takes a lot of time to just manage one of these sites with all the spam, gaming, duplicate stories, and images. As a results of this we are adding a dedicated image editor and we're empowering our Navigators to do much of the policing (they are experts on policing since they live on the site).

The result is our anchors can spend more time on meta-journalism, or metaj as we referrer to it internally. This is a new style of journalism as we've all discussed here before, and it is based on things like followup interviews and adding context.

When you see the anchor icon ( ) next to a headline that means you should click on the headline to see what the Anchors have added to the story. The goal here is follow up on, and expand, the coverage in the story. We're not trying to control anything, but rather act as servants to the users. They voted the story up, and because they voted it to the homepage we know they would like more information about the story--who wouldn't want more details?

Here are some examples of note:

• CK Sample Karina gave a bunch of history to a video clip from the film Outfoxed, incorporate five followup links, and he syndicated the video from YouTube to Netscape to save people from having to leave the page. The links and data points he gives in his commentary would take a user 15-20 minutes of research to find. So, people were interested enough in this clip to vote it up, and now we are giving them additional information that the original poster did not share. The result? A more educated public in less time--that's big.
• Fabienne gave some educational feedback, and added "Op-ed" to the title of this negative story about President Bush. She explains to people that Netscape, as a social news site, is not right or left. Anyone can vote a story up, and if the right folks don't like this story they should post their own story and vote it up. Educating our user base on how social news works is a HUGE part of what we're doing right now. Folks in the web 2.0 world have been using delicious, digg, and slashdot for years so they instantly understand the dynamics around voting and submitting. However, the mass audience is very confused by this concept and it takes three or four "touches" for the average person to get their head around the dynamics. Over the past 60 days we've gotten 50,000 folks to register for the site, and they are getting it in a big way.
• Dakota--who is a meta-J machine, did excellent follow up to this "megadeath angry at the United Nations" story. What Dakota does better than anyone is pick up the phone! It's amazing what you can get done if you call people on the phone and ask for their feedback. Dakota's metaj is in many cases *more* interesting then the original story. I can't say enough about what a great job she is doing finding people to comment on stories.
• Karina is the master of giving context, and is really breaking out as a star anchor at Netscape. Here she gives context on the whole Tom Cruise gets dumped story. She's also been working with our very talented preditor (video producer/editor), Alexia, on Netscape At The Movies series of videos.
• Speaking of Alexia, she's also great at PICKING UP THE PHONE (I love when people pick up the phone :-), like in this example.
• Ryan has been doing great Op-Eds, like this one on who SHOULD leave SNL. This is a great riff on the whole "who's leaving SNL" thread that spread. I like the way he turns around the meme and takes it to another place. Although, I'm finding that Op-Eds don't see to be that big of a bang for our metaj buck. We've got a large audience with opinions, and they post them in the comments, so I'm thinking that if Anchors take the time to followup on a story they should focus on data, interviews, context, and other hard points. It sort of feels unfair that we get to put our opinion above the users below, while us putting data/research/interviews up top doesn't seem unfair. Does that make sense?
• Eliot, an Anchor who got his start on HackADay and Engadget, is a machine at going to events. This type of first person coverage--complete with videos and photos, is just invaluable. Here is another example.

What do you guys think of metaj?

What are we doing well, what can we do better?

Are there any example in MSM that you think we could follow to enhance what we're doing (I always refer to the update segment on 60 Minutes--perhaps we should do "#1 story last month followup")?

Clearly we're on to something with this concept because Netscape members are loving it, I'm just trying to figure out what the "best practices" will be. I guess in some ways we're definning that since there really aren't many examples of metaj out there. What do you think Jeff? Fred? Om? Rafat? Jim? Mark? Nick? Steve? Scoble? Dave? Mike?

My VC pal Fred Wilson is trying to figure out what Om and Rafat are raising venture capital since the whole discussion over the past couple of years has been that media companies don't need a lot of capital.

Important to note that these are all < $1M (and $1m) investments. These are seed deals done by VCs (which Fred is doing a lot of I understand).

Fred mentions that Nick Denton didn't need seed, but that's because Nick was a millionare already and he seeded Gawker himself. Om and Rafat (who worked for me at Silicon Alley Reorter) don't have the capital to do what Nick did. Mark Cuban (and I) seeded Weblogs Inc, so that's not a good comparision either(although, it's important to note that we never spent the Cuban investment--not a nickle of it since we quickly became profitable).

Rafat and Om want to scale their businesses and that takes capital.

They already "make a living" blogging.

Here is the new model:

1. Start a blog with adsense and make spare change.
2. Scale a blog to 250k to 1M pages a month and become big enough for Federated Media, AdBrite, and Blogads to care about you (i.e. sell your inventory)--now you're making a living.
3. Scale over 1M pages a month and become big enough that you can afford your own sales group and fire Federated Media for taking 40% of your money because your cost of sales will be 15-20% as a stand alone business.

This is exactly what happened at the start of the Internet. DoubleClick used to do ad sales just like Battelle is doing at Federated Media. They got out of that business because the reward for helping a client to phase three was that they fired you--it sucks as a business (I still can't understand why John got into it... I think he actually wants to help authors, which is noble, but I think as a business it doesn't scale).

You see, Battelle's model is predicated on Rafat and Om deciding to stay in phase two or keep their relationship with Federated in phase three--which they are obviously not willing to do. That's why we canned the Federated Media /BlogAds model when we started Weblogs, Inc. We started out with the reveune share/repping model and Brian and I quickly decided that owning the IP/brands was a much better play.

Another problem for Battlelle is that Google is quickly moving into the repping business and selling display ads. So, Federated Media is stuck between Google coming into their business and their best clients leaving to hire their own sales force--horrible place to be. The margin pressure and cost of signing up clients is gonna be insurmountable I think. Batelle will wind up owning his own portal pages/distribution I think.

The bottom line is that "real" businesses--as opposed to "lifestyle" businesses--own the relationship with their clients (in this case advertisers). No real business is going to give their client relationship to AdBrite, BlogAds, or Federated Media. Maybe for the bottom 20% of their inventory they will keep people around, but that is the .50 to $1.50 crummy inventory business and it really sucks to be in--it's the Classmates and LowerMyBills market (no offense to those companies, it's just a bad businesses for publishers to go after).

You have three stages of media companies, and these two guys are now in the third phase, and that is where it gets very interesting. Phases one anyone can do. Phase two is also pretty easy--half the people can do it. Only 1% of people make it to phase three and only 10% of those scale to a $10M a year business. Rafat and Om are the one out of a hundred, and it's gonna be amazing to see if they can be the 1 out of 1,000.

Bottom line: There is a huge difference between making a living and making a business. Om and Rafat are making businesses, not a living.

Did a podcast with Josh Harris and the Wilsons last weekend in New York City. Fun stuff. GothamGal's take.

Fred says that the Flash player and slick syndication stuff on YouTube is why they won. That certainly helped, however Fred's 100% wrong when he dismisses the impact of stolen content and I can prove it to you in one link:

http://www.google.com/search?q=lazy+sunday

The real reason why YouTube won is because they matched great SEO with stolen content that was not available anywhere else.

Mainstream media has been creating a huge vacuum on the Internet for over a decade. When stolen content becomes available--years ago on Napster, today on YouTube--it races off the charts. In YouTube's case it also races to #1 on Google.

SNL didn't put their videos online and the price they paid is that they lost the #1 Google ranking for their content to YouTube.

Do a search for SNL Video and YouTube is #1 and SNL is #2--how on earth is that fair? How on earth can VCs back--or in Fred's case praise--a company that is involved in massive piracy for personal gain? Now don't go giving me that "if NBC doesn't put their stuff on the Internet users will/information wants to be free" line of BS. YouTube did this so they could get rich quick--it's a business not the wikipedia or OurMedia. This is a site with advertising on it back by VCs.

If YouTube makes $250M from a sale their founders and VCs should give $225M of it back to the content owners like NBC and Loren Michaels who they stole it from!

Here is what the YouTube story is going to look like:

1. Create extremely simple technology in a couple of weeks.
2. Blow $1m in hosting costs a month.
3. Enable the stealing of people's content for a year, while turning a blind eye to piracy.
4. Claim they never, ever looked at their logs or their own sites top 20 list to see that it was filled with stolen content.
5. Sell the company and let someone else deal wth the IP headache.

If they sellout this will be the Internet industry's hit and run, and I'm gonna write the book.

If someone buys YouTube they will not be rewarding entrepreneurship, they will be rewarding piracy and they should be ashamed of themselves. Everyone else in the video space played by the rules, YouTube gave content holders the finger while shrugging their shoulders pretending they didn't know. Please.... really.

YouTube stole their way to the top while other folks behaved themselves.

Sinister but brilliant... but we as an industry shouldn't reward such behavior.