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There are a number of themes going on in the Digg vs. New York Times discussion that has reared its head again. The latest trigger was numbers from Hitwise that tend to deflate the earlier “Digg is as big as the NYT” meme, which I wrote about here. While the Alexa figures from the original TechCrunch post tended to suggest that Digg’s traffic was getting close to that of the Times, the Hitwise numbers are far less impressive.

One of the obvious takeaways is that Alexa numbers are flawed in many respects, in part because they rely on users who have installed a toolbar, and other built-in biases. Rightly or wrongly, many Web watchers either take Alexa numbers with a huge shaker of salt, or dismiss them altogether. Is Hitwise.com better, or ComScore Media Metrix, or Neilsen/Net Ratings? I’m sure they all have their flaws — some because of the technology they use, some because they rely on what people say rather than what they actually do, and some because of the inherent difficulty of getting a handle on something like Web traffic.

One common reaction to the issue has been to scoff at the idea that something like Digg could take the place of the New York Times — and it’s quite reasonable to scoff at this idea, since no one in their right mind (including Kevin Rose and other Digg types, I would wager) would ever make such a ridiculous claim. My friend Rob Hyndman, who like me is a newspaper addict, is quite right that nothing will ever take the place of the New York Times.

But I also agree with my former old-media colleague Om Malik — that is is foolish to dismiss Digg as a toy that has no relevance whatsoever. Replace the NYT? No. Change it, and other traditional media? Already happening.

America Online — what a long, strange trip it’s been. One of the first to make the jump from the old bulletin board days to the new visual Web, back when Netscape was just a toy that Mark Andreesen came up with at university, America Online was like the Google of its time. Sure, it was annoying, and it blanketed the globe in free signup disks, but for many people just getting used to the Internet it was friendly and safe; the “You’ve got mail!” tagline became so famous it became a movie. Then AOL hit the peak — it effectively acquired one of the largest media companies in the world for hundreds of billions of dollars.

Since then, it’s been pretty much downhill all the way. The bubble burst within minutes of the Time Warner deal being signed, the market value of the two companies disappeared like a ghost in the night, and TW has spent the past few years trying desperately to figure out what the hell to do with AOL — as millions of people have deserted the once mighty service. According to the latest figures, more than 15 million people have signed off and never signed on again since 2001 (although AOL still has 18 million left). The company has taken down much of the “walled garden” approach that it became famous for, but it hasn’t helped all that much.

Now there are reports that Time Warner is considering radical surgery: namely, making all (or virtually all) of the service’s content free, with the hope that increased traffic and advertising-related strategies will compensate for the loss of revenue. But will it? That’s a multibillion-dollar question. According to one estimate, TW could be giving up in the range of $2-billion in revenue by going free. Can it make enough deals that bring in new dollars to fill that hole? Maybe the real question is whether the company has any real choice.

The only other option is to spin the thing off and hope someone else wants it (at one point, there was talk that founder Steve Case might), or watch it continue to shrink until someone puts a bullet in its head. More coverage in the Washington Post and Fortune magazine, which notes that there is already a company pursuing the strategy AOL has in mind — it’s called Yahoo.

It appears that the gloves are off in the battle for online-payment supremacy, one which pits Google’s new payment feature Google Checkout against PayPal, owned by auction giant eBay. According to a report on Thursday, eBay has added its competitor’s service to the list of payment networks that eBay sellers are not supposed to use (a list that also includes AnyPay.com, FastCash.com and MoneyGram.com).

According to eBay’s “Accepted Payments Policy” the company “wants to ensure that the marketplace offers buyers an array of safe, appropriate and convenient payment choices for the marketplace. As described in our safe buying guide, eBay strongly encourages sellers to offer payments through PayPal – PayPal is not only convenient to use, but it also offers buyers and sellers industry leading protection against fraud, chargebacks and theft of financial data.”

So is adding Google Checkout to the banned services list an anti-competitive act designed to favour its own in-house solution or is eBay just looking out for its sellers? The company says in its policy that “as new payment services arise, eBay will evaluate them to determine whether they are appropriate for the marketplace. Payment services that are not permitted on eBay may, in fact, be outstanding services for consumers in other contexts. eBay’s evaluation relates only to whether a particular service is appropriate for the eBay marketplace.”

The company says that it considers a number of factors when it approves a payment scheme, including whether it offers privacy and anti-fraud systems, whether it has a track record of providing safe and reliable services, and the background of the payment service. For its part, Google said that it has “a long history in billing and payments for AdWords and for premium services, such as Google Video.” And what services does the auction giant approve of, other than PayPal? Well, there’s Bidpay, Certapay, Checkfree and, yes — Canadian Tire money, believe it or not.

As I expected (or feared), the Rocketboom saga continues to deteriorate. First came the tearful farewell video from Amanda Congdon, the vivacious host and sometime swimwear model, saying she had to part company with Andrew Baron, the co-founder of the popular video-blog/online TV show. The implication was that she had been fired, because her partner owned 51 per cent of the company. Then came a response from Andrew — to me, as well as others, and on the Yahoo video-blogging group — that suggested he had been blind-sided by the video farewell, and that Amanda had wanted to move to L.A. to pursue her dreams.

The latest instalment came from Amanda in a lengthy discussion on her blog, in which she posted the contents of an email from Andrew discussing her plans, and interspersed his comments with her rebuttals (never a good sign). Despite the often repeated statements on both sides about how much each cares for the other and respects the other’s various talents, it is clear that there is a substantial amount of bad blood beneath the surface of this ongoing blogosphere drama (which has also been picked up by the Washington Post and Business Week). Amanda also suggests that Andrew is trying to take her 49-per-cent stake from her.

As Stowe Boyd notes, there are a number of useful lessons here — not the least of which is that the 51-49 ownership split is probably a bad idea for a startup, even between friends. My suspicion from Amanda’s lengthy post is that Andrew acted a lot like an owner and perhaps treated Amanda like the hired help, whereas Amanda clearly saw herself as a co-owner. There also appears to be another player, named Mario, who is an unknown quantity, but may have played a sort of Yoko Ono-type role. In the end, as Chartreuse points out, the battle between producer and talent is an age-old one, and it is rarely pretty.

Here’s hoping that Andrew and Amanda can both find a way out of this that allows them to keep their dignity, and to make the most of their respective talents. Rocketboom was a great thing in many ways, and it would be a shame to see it implode. Jason Calacanis, who has offered Amanda a job on her own terms, has some useful advice for talent-related startups.

An update to my previous post about Amanda Congdon, the popular star of the video-blog Rocketboom: As I mentioned, I sent an email to Andrew Baron, co-founder of Rocketboom, after the news broke that Amanda was leaving the show (Andrew was on a panel at our mesh conference in May) and he just sent a response in which he suggested that Amanda’s departure was partly her own doing — and also that he found out about it from the video clip on her blog.

According to Andrew, Amanda wanted to move to Los Angeles, but Andrew and the rest of the Rocketboom team wanted her to wait until they figured out how that would affect the show. “Amanda decided she was not able to stay in NYC any longer and informed me, the Rocketboom business and the rest of the team via her videoblog post this morning that she was moving on,” he said in his email to me.

“We wanted her to get to L.A. to pursue her personal opportunities as soon as possible, but her demand to move this week without waiting any longer, without a justification, and without an adequate proposal for a plan for how the show itself would work, we were unable to uproot Rocketboom from NYC at this time.”

Andrew said that he wishes Amanda well, and that while he is “nervous for the near term because this was an unexpected fork in the road,” he and the team are excited for the future. What that future will hold, Andrew didn’t say, but there seem to be a lot of people who felt Amanda was the main draw for Rocketboom — including Mike Arrington (who says that she *was* Rocketboom and that her leaving is “an unmitigated disaster for the show”) and a lot of commenters on Digg.

Andrew has also posted comments on the Yahoo videoblogging group. And Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc. (now AOL) has offered Amanda a job at Netscape.

Update:

Amanda has posted a lengthy response to Andrew’s version of events, in which she says that the move to L.A. was always in the plan, and that Andrew reneged on their deal and is trying to take her stake in Rocketboom away from her. This one could get worse before it gets better.

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Courtesy of my close friend Dave Winer comes news that Amanda Congdon has left Rocketboom, the massively popular video blog/online TV show that she co-founded with Andrew Baron — who was on a very well-received panel about the future of broadcasting at our mesh conference in May.

According to the video clip she has posted at her site, she was effectively fired by Andrew, who owns 51 per cent of the company. I’ve got an email in to Andrew to try and find out what happened, but it would appear that Rocketboom has lost its rocket (or its boom). What that means for the future of the popular show — and for Amanda, who has gained a wide following in the blogosphere — remains to be seen.

Maybe Andrew might be interested in hiring our very own Web-tech video jockey, Amber MacArthur of G4TechTV’s Call For Help.

Kudos to my M-list buddy Kent Newsome for posting pretty much what I intended to write (if I had been around a computer at the time) after I read Stephen Baker’s recent piece at BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting. Baker’s post came in response to a comment by Steven Streight — aka Vaspers the Grate — on a previous Blogspotting post. In complaining about the number of blogs filled with drivel, Streight said that “as the blogosphere fills up with more and more worthless blogs, the overall quality and reliability of the blogosphere as a whole declines.”

In his post, Baker notes — correctly — that “the blogosphere by itself has no credibility. Individual bloggers build their own credibility.” The fact that there are thousands of inane, asinine, flaccid or insipid blogs out there doesn’t diminish the quality of those that are good. If anything, it enhances the good blogs by making them seem even more rare. And Kent makes the same point: “Saying that the blogosphere is losing credibility is like saying the spoken or written word is losing credibility. It’s not the medium that matters – it’s the person at the other end of it.”

For what it’s worth, Vaspers clarifies his argument here.

It’s been awhile since we heard anything substantive from Nick Carr, the grim reaper of Web 2.0, the Doctor Doom of interactivity, the Keeper of Souls for anything related to Wikipedia, etc. But the launch of Netscape as an interactive news site similar to Digg seems to have gotten him fired up — albeit several weeks after the event itself.

Nick says that since Netscape served as midwife for the original Web, in what he calls “a lovely ironic twist,” the company may be “the undertaker at the burial of the Web 2.0 hype.” Mr. Carr seems to like declaring things to be dead, or at least on their deathbed, since he has done that at least a couple of times already with Wikipedia. His regular calls of doom remind me of Sir Lancelot in Monty Python and The Holy Grail, who was so eager to declare people dead so that he could ride off to avenge them.

Nick says that Netscape’s new format looks like “a junk drawer” because people have voted all kinds of oddball stories to the top, such as one about the discovery of Noah’s Ark. This is similar to the slagging of Digg.com that takes place regularly, which involves picking some of the top stories in order to prove what morons most people are. Then he says that “normal people” (whoever they are) dislike the revamp, as proven by items such as this one.

None of that proves anything close to what Nick is arguing for, however, which is the death of interactivity in news media. All it shows is that some people react badly to change, and some wish to have others decide what’s important for them. On the former point, I would agree with Dare Obasanjo that Jason Calacanis probably handled the transition badly, and could have done a better job preparing people for the move.

Courtesy of Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion — who seems to catch things before just about anyone (including me) — I came across a piece in the New York Times about Nick Denton selling off some of his Gawker Media blogs and reassigning various bloggers from other properties. According to the story, he has put Sploid — a tabloid-style blog — on the block, along with Screenhead, which was devoted to online video and other new media, and has reassigned bloggers at Gawker itself as well as Wonkette and Gizmodo.

The always refreshingly — even brutally — honest Denton says that events such as PaidContent.org’s wildly popular recent blog mixer make him nervous. “It made me want to move to Budapest, batten down the hatches and wait for the zombies to run out of food,” he told the Times. Nick has regularly made comments about how the blog explosion is overrated, and some of that is no doubt intended to keep as many competitors away from the field as possible (Jeff Jarvis says Nick practices “reverse hypology”). But he is also quite right that blog networks such as Gawker, just like regular media, have to be ruthlessly managed.

In many ways, Denton’s Gawker.com stable — much like Jason Calacanis’s very similar Weblogs Inc., now owned by AOL — are more like traditional magazines than they are like blogs. They have short items posted regularly, just like blogs, and they often have personality and a point of view just like blogs, but many of them don’t accept comments (Valleywag makes you apply to be a member who can comment) and don’t really have a sense of community about them.

I’m not saying any of that is bad — I’m just saying they are very much like magazines, and magazines need to be ruthlessly managed and pruned. And as Nick points out, online magazines are even more vulnerable than the print kind. “The barrier to entry in Internet media is low,” he said. “The barrier to success is high.” The Huffington Post’s Eat The Press site has more on the personnel changes at Gawker, including internal memos and a preview of a post from Nick, in which he says (among other things) “Better to sober up now, before the end of the party.”

Wise advice.

It’s getting so the virtual world isn’t any fun any more. Isn’t the whole point of an imaginary universe that you can toy with the laws of nature, by doing things like flying? Apparently some laws aren’t meant to be broken, however — such as the law that says teenagers can’t play Second Life. Or at least not the adult version anyway. Former Microsoft PR blogger Robert Scoble seems to have run afoul (again) of the lawmakers in the virtual world of SL, by allowing his 12-year-old son to play the adult version of the game.

The Scobleizer says that he got his son to build some objects in Second Life while he was moderating a panel at the Gnomedex conference. Unfortunately for Scoble, a Linden Labs employee (Linden runs Second Life) was in the audience and put two and two together, then confronted Scoble junior (in the game) and after the panel spoke to Scoble as well. She said Scoble’s account would be banned, and that he was not entitled to a refund of the $100 worth of Second Life objects he had purchased, including a virtual Mac computer. The uber-blogger must have known it was coming, however, since he has been down this road before.

It’s obvious that Scoble has an issue with the age restrictions on Second Life. He has written before about how he thinks it should be up to the individual parent whether they let their child play the game, and where they let them go. From Second Life’s point of view, however, it is an invitation to a lawsuit, much like the $30-million one that MySpace is now fighting because a teen was molested by someone she allegedly met through the social network. I tend to agree with Scoble though, who said in one post: “This is a virtual world. Why do we need to live with first-world rules?” My M-lister pal Kent Newsome disagrees though.

Is it true that there’s no such thing as bad publicity? I’ve always wondered about that — I’ll bet whoever owned Tylenol didn’t think so after it poisoned a bunch of people way back when (now I’m dating myself). In any case, Ted Murphy and PayPerPost.com have certainly been testing that motto today. It all started with an article in BusinessWeek by media writer Jon Fine about Ted’s new venture, which involves bloggers getting paid to make positive posts about companies.

Then Marshall Kirkpatrick posted about it on TechCrunch, saying it entices bloggers to “sell their soul,” and all hell broke loose. My pal Scott Karp got his knickers in a royal twist over the idea, saying that the whole concept of blogging has “now been starkly divided into the pre-PayPerPost era and the post-PayPerPost era” and that blogging has “been irrevocably tainted” (Scott has since followed up with a more thoughtful post).

Pete Cashmore of Mashable says that PayPerPost is “a terrible, terrible idea and totally unethical,” and Shel Israel says on Naked Conversations that he hopes this “nasty, cynical, ugly idea crashes and burns quickly.” Should be a fun time at the blogger dinner that Ted Murphy is co-hosting with Jeremiah Owyang and Shel in a couple of weeks, since Shel effectively calls him the devil.

And I thought some of the stuff that has been written about Jason Calacanis was bad. Ted Murphy must be wondering what he did to deserve all this, and to his credit he appears to have responded on several blogs in an attempt to do some damage control. Is PayPerPost the end of blogging as we know it, or a disaster that ruins the credibility of every blogger? Hardly.

Yes, it is kind of dumb, especially since there is no requirement for the blogger to mention that he is being compensated for his posts. But I think the comparison to the mainstream press is a good one — everyone knows there are publications that get paid for their content, and people take them less seriously. Credibility is won a post at a time. PayPerPost doesn’t change that — it just makes it more obvious.

And for what it’s worth, I think slamming Ted Murphy is kind of an immature response. Don’t like his company or his idea? Fine. But suggesting that he’s the devil is taking things a wee bit too far for my liking. Rob Hyndman and Mark Evans also have some thoughtful responses to the whole brouhaha.

I’m tempted to declare that blogging — once the domain only of Web geeks and teenaged girls — has officially jumped the shark, with the news (via Bloggers Blog) that a reference to blogging appeared in a Family Circus comic on Wednesday. In Dilbert, sure. In Archie, even. But Family Circus? That most boring and suburban of comics, renowned for recycling those same “Billy tries to get somewhere but gets distracted” comics every month?

Yes indeed — Billy’s sister is running a lemonade stand and tells the customers that Billy is her advertising manager, and he’s inside blogging about the business. I kid you not. So that’s it, folks. Time to wrap it up and move on to something else. Oh yes, and speaking of “jumping the shark,” that phrase has also officially jumped the shark, since the site that popularized it has been bought by TV Guide magazine. Is nothing sacred anymore?

I’ve been meaning to blog about something for a few days now, but various events in my personal life (including a move to a new house and a sick family member) have kept me from doing so. The something I wanted to blog about was a post by LeeAnn Prescott of the Web-tracking firm Hitwise, which looked at the traffic stats for various photo sites, including Flickr and Shutterfly (which is controlled by former Netscape CEO Jim Clark and has filed to go public).

One of the interesting things about the numbers LeeAnn provided, which drew a lot of commentary on techmeme.com, was that Flickr — despite being by far the most widely talked about photo site, at least from a Web 2.0 perspective — came in fairly far down on the list of top 10 photo sites. Number one by a landslide was a site hardly anyone talks about: Photobucket, which (unless I’m mistaken) gets the vast majority of its traffic from MySpace and other social networking sites, by providing an easy photo hosting service for blogs.

LeeAnn’s Hitwise item sparked a fairly extensive response from Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, who tried to post a comment on TechCrunch but apparently had difficulty getting it past the spam filter. I wound up seeing his comment a day or two later on Paul Kedrosky’s blog. Paul liked Stewart’s comment so much that he later elevated it to post status.

Stewart’s comment/post is worth reading, if only to see the (in some cases) large discrepancies between Hitwise traffic numbers and those from Comscore Media Metrix and Nielsen/NetRatings. But it also brings up the issue of whether Photobucket and Flickr really compete or not. One is a community — Web 2.0 if you will — and one is just a hosting service, which is more Web 1.0. And yet Photobucket is the plumbing behind a very Web 2.0 service such as MySpace, and it has 48 per cent market share and is still growing.

It’s not the PayPal-killer that everyone was hoping it might be, but Google has launched a payment system — known as Google Checkout — that could still wind up disrupting the existing online payment game, if only because the search engine has the cash hoard to finance a prolonged battle for market share with advertisers. The service is tightly integrated with Google’s AdWords program, and will give advertisers who use it a break on their charges for the keyword advertising system.

This is a smart move, and arguably a lot smarter than launching a direct head-to-head attack on PayPal, which has a substantial market share with eBay sellers (which is what compelled the auction service to buy it in the first place). For one thing, as Forrester analyst Charlene Li notes on her blog, integrating Google Checkout and AdWords could make the advertising service that much more attractive to companies and even individuals — provided Google can show that shoppers will “convert” to being buyers at the same rate they do with existing checkout schemes.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the company’s intention is to make the process of buying something as fast and as painless and possible, and to a certain extent that’s what PayPal tries to do as well — it just does it mostly for auctions on eBay. But if Google can get sufficient traction from the retailers in its AdWords program, it would be relatively simple to roll the Checkout service out to just about anyone, including individual website and store operators. And the fact that Google’s fees are lower than either PayPal or Visa/MasterCard will make it that much attractive as well (more details here).

It’s not out of the realm of possibility that Google Checkout could become the fast and easy micro-payment system that many Web-heads have been anticipating for so many years. What if a website or blog network or micro-publication of some kind could sell access to stories or other merchandise, and get a deal on their ads to boot? That could be a powerful tool. Whether Google wants to go down that road — and whether consumers are willing to have Google be their online bank — is the big question.

Marshall Kirkpatrick over at TechCrunch is disappointed that it’s not a stored-value system, and wonders what’s in it for him, and Om Malik makes the point that Google’s main interest in launching Checkout isn’t to bash PayPal or even Amazon for that matter, but to enhance its advertising model by moving towards a “pay-per-action” rather than a “pay-per-click” model. Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 (who should maybe change the name of his blog to Advertising 2.0) says Checkout is a very 1.0 shopping engine.

Not that long ago, NBC was beating up on YouTube.com for hosting copyright violations like the brilliant “Lazy Sunday” video clip from Saturday Night Live. This struck me as completely asinine, as I mentioned at the time, because the viral quality of the clip — which was downloaded more than 5 million times in a couple of weeks (and that during the Christmas holidays) — gave NBC and the normally lame SNL show millions of dollars worth of free publicity. Not only that, but telling YouTube to take it down made them look heavy-handed and uncool.

It seems that someone at NBC finally woke up and got a clue about the marketing impact of an event like that, and the potential that a site like YouTube offers, because the two have now struck a deal whereby the video site will promote clips of NBC’s new shows and host a contest as well. YouTube CEO Chad Hurley said that the deal is clear proof “that we’re building a viable, long-term business, and it’s showing there’s common ground between traditional and new media.”

This comes at the same time as Warner Brothers has struck a deal with a video site called Guba to sell and/or rent full-length movies and TV shows. Warner has also signed a partnership with Bram Cohen’s BitTorrent to use the peer-to-peer technology to distribute content. Of course, said content will be all crapped up with Microsoft’s DRM (digital rights management) restrictions, but it’s a start.