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Egon: “There’s something very important I forgot to tell you.”

Egon: “It would be bad.”

According to a leaked video from an internal Google briefing — first reported by a commenter called “fanboy” at Google Blogoscoped and expanded on by Ionut Alex. Chitu at Google Operating System — the company plans to tie together some of the strands of social information it has through Google Reader and other services into what it apparently refers to as “activity streams.”

The idea seems to be that your RSS feeds and your Calendar events and GTalk updates and your blog postings could all be turned into a single stream of information, which others could subscribe to. As more than one person has mentioned, this sounds very much like a Facebook feed, which contains everything from status updates to photos that have been posted.

There aren’t a whole lot of details on these new plans — which go by the code name Maka or Mocha or possibly Makamaka, depending on who you believe — but I think such a feature is a smart move for Google to make.

It’s ironic that Facebook’s unified feed, which caused so much consternation when it was first released, is a huge part of what makes the site so sticky — being able to see what all of your contacts are up to in a single glance is very addictive. Google has a bunch of useful apps like Gmail and Reader and so on, but they aren’t tied together very well. Mocha could change that.

Note: There are also some pretty amazing stats about Google Reader in the video briefing, including the fact that the back-end for the Reader (which apparently serves as the back-end for other Google apps that involve feeds) has 10 terabytes of data and 8 million feeds, and that Google plans to add feed recommendations and other social features soon.

Further reading:

MG Siegler at ParisLemon says Google appears to be moving in the direction he has been hoping it would for some time now, and Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has some thoughts on the various features Google seems to be looking at — including possibly allowing comments on Google Reader shared items, which is a bit of a sticky subject as this TechCrunch post outlines.

Update:

Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped says in a comment here that he has reason to believe the proper name for Google Reader’s new project is “Maka-Maka.” Not sure what the name is supposed to mean — all I could find out from a Google search was that Maka-Maka is the name of a popular “manga” (or adult) comic involving two female friends who become lovers, and that the word “maka” in Hawaiian means “eye.”

The BBC has a story about a survey that says businesses are losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day because employees are wasting time on Facebook and other social networking sites. According to this consulting firm, 233 million hours worth of work time is lost every day — and the firm recommends that more businesses ban or block Facebook, as both the Ontario government and Toronto City Hall have done recently.

I’m sure managers at all sorts of companies are nodding their heads at this kind of report. Those damn lazy workers — clicking around on Facebook wasting time when they could be working! There must be a way to stop them. As Stowe Boyd notes, it wasn’t that long ago that other technologies were the culprit. I can remember (yes, I’m extremely old) the same kind of attitude when PCs and Internet access started to become commonplace in offices. Give someone a PC, let alone Internet access? God forbid — then they’ll just piss the day away playing Minesweeper or Solitaire, or checking their email every ten minutes.

The reality is that employees who don’t like their jobs or aren’t properly motivated will always find ways of avoiding work. If you remove Facebook, or the Internet, or Solitaire, or even their PC they will waste time and avoid work by smoking, or taking long bathroom breaks, or doing a crossword puzzle from the newspaper, or staring out the window for hours at a time.

When it gets right down to it, Facebook is not the problem — Facebook is a symptom. And as Ethan Kaplan points out, if you are in any kind of businesses that deals with the general public and you can’t find a way to leverage those social networks, then you are doing something wrong.

From the European Union — not exactly a bastion of sound decision-making on a whole range of issues — comes the novel idea of banning or blocking searches for dangerous words such as “bomb.” EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini says that he intends to explore with the private sector how to “prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism.”

I think this is a brilliant idea. Why didn’t anyone think of it before? It’s so simple. But I don’t think it goes far enough. Why not ban the actual words themselves instead? That would be much more effective. Then people not only couldn’t search for things like bombs or killing, they wouldn’t be able to write about them either — and eventually, they wouldn’t even be able to think about them, because the concepts themselves wouldn’t exist!

Double-plus good, don’t you think?

Not that long ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt would routinely deny that the company had any intention of using its Gmail, Google Docs and other services to compete directly with Microsoft’s Office suite. “We’re just playing around with some Web stuff,” he seemed to be saying. “Nothing important to see over here.”

We all knew differently, of course, and now we have even further evidence that Google is intent on moving into the corporate space, with the news that it has signed a deal with CapGemini to push Google Docs and other apps at small and medium-sized businessses.

Until now, Microsoft has remained relatively mum about Google, but apparently this latest move was a little too much for the software behemoth to take. As ZDNet reports, the company issued a somewhat defensive-sounding statement about its Office software dominating the market, etc. etc. — and then followed up with some helpful questions for journalists to ask Google, such as:

1. Google touts having enterprise level customers but how many “USERS” of their applications truly exist within the enterprise?

and

2. Google has a history of releasing incomplete products, calling them beta software, and issuing updates on a “known only to Google” schedule – this flies in the face of what enterprises want and need in their technology partners.

Microsoft goes on to take thinly-veiled and not-so-thinly veiled shots at the fact that Google apps depend on Internet access, that they don’t let you create headers and footers, and other earth-shattering revelations (the company’s statement also flicks at the issue of corporate security, which others have mentioned as well).

Of course, the overwhelming impression created by the note is that Google is starting to get under the software titan’s skin. Larry and Sergey are probably chuckling to themselves even now.

(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

Given the success that some YouTube “stars” have had — with Dutch singer Esmee Denters signed to a boutique label run by Justin Timberlake, and Ysabella Brave also signed to a recording contract — it’s not surprising that some record labels would try to do an end-run around the process and create a YouTube “sensation” out of whole cloth.

That appears to be what happened with Marie Digby, a young singer who was recently signed to a recording contract with Disney’s Hollywood Records. According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, the 24-year-old singer was already working with the record company before posting any of her cover versions of popular songs to the video-sharing site.

Her appearances on TV shows and radio shows, for example — which apparently occurred after they saw her YouTube videos — were booked through a record company executive, and the story says that the record label was also involved in choosing the songs she posted to YouTube.

Crass? Yes. Surprising? Hardly. As Wall Street Journal blogger Kara Swisher put it: “Hollywood lies again; also just in — birds fly, fish swim.”

For many YouTube watchers a big part of the appeal of finding someone like Ms. Digby is that they are outside the traditional star-making machinery, and are therefore more authentic and natural. To find out that this isn’t the case often ruins the magic (although Lonelygirl15 continued to be popular once it was revealed to be fake).

Ms. Digby isn’t even the first to be involved in such a scheme: last year, a Scottish singer named Sandi Thom appeared on the scene, playing songs with her band from her apartment and streaming them over the Internet, and after attracting as many as 100,000 viewers (allegedly) she was signed to a recording contract — except, of course, that she had already been signed to a contract before the performances began.

In a post on her MySpace blog, Ms. Digby maintains that the Wall Street Journal story was blown out of proportion (although she doesn’t deny that she was working with a record company before posting her material to YouTube). She says:

“Here’s Lesson 1 for me in Media – The writer will use whatever quote he wants of yours to make it fit his ‘angle’. This loser was desperate for a good story… he knew what he wanted to write before he ever even talked to me.

The guy’s angle is this : that I am a complete phony and fake and a pawn of my record label in some brilliant marketing scheme. IS this guy completely insane. You think it’s that easy? That you get signed and suddenly everything’s taken care of for you!!!??”

Ms. Digby goes on to say that:

“What hurts the most is that this loser took every genuine thing i said and made it sound like I am acting, that this whole thing is scripted. The dude is desperate to be onto the next ‘ lonely girl’ or whatever.. i’ve actually never seeen that but its obvious that’s what he wanted me to be.”

Although some commenters on MySpace and YouTube have denounced her as a fraud, a number of fans have posted comments of support.

Is Ms. Digby a fake? That’s difficult to say. Her version of events seems to be that she developed the YouTube campaign in an attempt to keep the record company’s interest, while the WSJ tries to make the case that the whole thing was orchestrated by the label. The bottom line is that we may never know the “real” story, now that YouTube has become a subsidiary of the Hollywood department of smoke and mirrors.

Jonathan Coulton — who refers to himself as an “authentic Internet superstar” — has some perspective on Ms. Digby on his blog, in which he describes her as being “clotheslined by the thin line between grassroots and astroturf.” Nice line.

Although we had some advance warning that this might be happening — courtesy of a post from Mike Arrington at TechCrunch that was denied by Netscape at the time — it’s still kind of sad that AOL is pulling the plug on its social-news experiment at Netscape.com.

The note at the Netscape site says that the Digg-style interface is merely moving to another location (Mike said he heard reports that it would be wow.com, another AOL-owned site). But it seems obvious that interest in the idea is waning, and the focus has shifted back to making Netscape into the news portal it used to be, primarily for the ad dollars. According to the site:

“We received some feedback that people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled. In fact, we specifically heard that our users do have a desire for a social news experience, but simply didn’t expect to find it on Netscape.com.”

I know there will be a lot of gloating over this move — particularly from those who don’t like Jason Calacanis — but I think it’s unfortunate. Even if it was in essence a “Digg-clone,” I still think (as I have said from the beginning) that Netscape introduced some useful features to the social media model, including the use of editors to promote and add to stories, and the somewhat controversial decision to pay top submitters.

For whatever reason, Netscape just never seemed to be able to get much traction, so we will never know if any of those features makes sense for a social news site — and that’s a shame.

Update:

Muhammad Saleem, a Netscape “scout,” says in his post on the announcement that he’s shocked at how some blogs have mis-reported the news as the closure of Netscape — and he has a point. But I think even if the site remains at a different location, it seems obvious that its star has dimmed somewhat in the AOL universe, as HMTKSteve notes in his comment at Muhammad’s blog.

This doesn’t have anything to do with the Web, really — or with Cadbury chocolate, which is the product that is allegedly being advertised — but it still made me laugh for some reason. The original version is here.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbLr2NEV_7o&w=425&h=350]

(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

The cover of the New York Times Magazine last weekend looked like it was selling a feature story about a religious guru, with a photo of a large, bearded man sitting crosslegged in a field, wrapped in a white blanket. And there’s no question that Rick Rubin — the music producer who was the subject of the cover story — is seen as a guru by many in the industry.

Rubin’s abilities have helped to create acts such as The Beastie Boys, and rescued fading stars such as The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond from oblivion. But can he save the entire industry? That’s the subject of the NYT piece, which goes into some detail about how iTunes and file-sharing have eviscerated the business, and how young music lovers pay little or no attention to the radio or buying CDs any more.

In fact, hiring a guy like Rubin — who refuses to attend meetings or have an office at Sony’s Columbia Records despite now being co-chief executive, and who wears cargo pants and a T-shirt instead of a suit — should be evidence enough that executives in the industry are scared out of their wits. And it’s clear that one of the things Rubin wants to focus on is the music, which would be a refreshing change.

As media mogul David Geffen puts it in the story:

“The music business, as a whole, has lost its faith in content… only 10 years ago, companies wanted to make records, presumably good records, and see if they sold. But panic has set in, and now it’s no longer about making music, it’s all about how to sell music.”

A couple of the other prescriptions for success that Rubin throws out in the piece, however, raise some fairly major question marks, and the first of those is the idea that the online music business has to adopt a subscription model in order to have any hope of staying alive.

The only problem with that idea is that no one has had any real success with the subscription approach, despite repeated attempts. Services such as Rhapsody, the new Napster and Yahoo Radio are still around and have users, but they are hardly growing. The bulk of music listeners simply don’t seem to be interested in subscribing to a kind of virtual radio station online, although some continue to support the idea.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs — who knows a thing or two about music online — has repeatedly said that he has no interest in offering a subscription service. “Never say never, but customers don’t seem to be interested in it,” Jobs told Reuters in an interview after Apple reported blow-out quarterly results. “The subscription model has failed so far.”

And Jobs is far from the only person who is skeptical of the subscription approach.

It’s true that part of the reason a subscription model hasn’t worked is that the record companies and other players — rights holders such as publishing companies and performance rights groups — haven’t been able to get their act together, and have spent most of their time coming up with new ways to screw people through DRM.

Unfortunately, there’s no sign that any of that is going to change anytime soon, with or without Rick Rubin.

Finally. Google has decided to add search functions to my favourite RSS reader, Google Reader. Until now, the inability to search through my 400 or so feeds was a gaping hole in the usability of Google’s RSS reader — but not enough of a hole to get me to switch.

It made me wonder when Google added features such as the ability to see your RSS reading trends (whose feeds you read most, share most, star most, etc.) but didn’t add a search function. Didn’t Google use to be a search company? But I still liked Google Reader enough that I have kept using it, even though I used to be a die-hard Netvibes.com fan.

As Ionut Alex. Chitu mentions, there are some quibbles with the search function in Reader, but it is still definitely a must-have. And before you mention it, yes I have tried Bloglines.com, and used to use it regularly but moved on — I like the redesign, but I think it’s too little too late.

This has nothing really to do with Web 2.0, or social media — other than it’s a YouTube clip, I suppose. I just came across it somewhere in my feed reader and thought it was fascinating, since I am a big fan of blues guitar played the old-fashioned way. And this is about as old-fashioned as it gets.

It’s a video clip of someone named Seasick Steve, who (according to his Wikipedia page) is a Mississippi-born former hobo and railroad-hopper who plays a three-stringed guitar called the Three-Stringed Trance Wonder and accompanies himself on the Mississippi Drum Machine — a wooden box with a piece of carpet on top. Enjoy.

If you’re reading this via RSS, you can click here. YouTube also has some clips of Steve playing the one-string Diddley Bow.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9MOalhXaiI&w=425&h=350]

He does it in a nice way, of course — and, more than that, a thoughtful and erudite way — but David Weinberger’s summary of Andrew “the Internet is killing culture” Keen’s arguments (such as they are) nevertheless dismantles and mulches the prominent pundit’s points perfectly.

To his credit, Weinberger — author of Everything Is Miscellaneous — doesn’t just bash Keen and his idiotic meanderings outright. Instead, he carefully lays out what he believes is the best possible interpretation of Keen’s arguments, and then painstakingly dismantles that. In one of the best parts, he says:

“I think that’s one reason so many of us find Keen’s book frustrating. It’s like reading an argument against democracy that keeps pointing at how many people there are and how much they disagree with one another.

That’s not an argument against democracy. That’s the problem democracy was invented to solve. Likewise, the Web was invented to solve the problem of scale.”

It’s a long post, but worth the read. For some additional points, check out the full text of a “Reply All” debate between Keen and Weinberger that ran in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year. As some of you long-time blog readers may know, I am not exactly a fan of Mr. Keen’s. And it seems that Tom “plasticbag” Coates has some issues with him as well, as he articulates in this recent post.