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After announcing deals recently with everyone from AOL and Microsoft to CNet and Joost — and fresh from its acquisition of Howard Lindzon’s brain with the Wallstrip deal — CBS Interactive continues to roll out its distribution strategy. From MediaPost:

CBS Interactive said its month-old, ad-supported CBS Audience Network, previously known as the CBS Interactive Audience Network, has added 13 partners in the social- and community-network realms.

The agreements are designed to empower the embedding of clips from CBS shows into user profiles, Web sites, blogs, wikis, widgets and community pages.”

New partners include Matt Mullenweg’s WordPress, Clearspring (a widget creation network), Goowy Media, Ning, RockYou, Slide, VideoEgg and others. Smart strategy, I think. Jeff Jarvis has more — and he’s right that CBS probably means “embed” where it says “mash” on the widget.

I have a lot of respect for Doc Searls — he’s been at this whole blogging/social media thing a lot longer than I have, and he is a thoughtful and sincere guy. He also sent me a high-res copy of some of his sunset photos after I saw them on his blog, and for that I am grateful. But I still think his latest post about newspapers and what to do with them (which sprang from a recent WSJ opinion piece by Andy Kessler) is totally wrong.

Okay — maybe not totally wrong. I think he is right that some people will always want to hold a paper in their hands, just as some people want to hold books, or listen to radio plays. But the number of those people is dwindling. As I mentioned on my friend Kent Newsome’s blog, I think Doc would probably like to return to a happier time when newspapers ruled the world. So would I. But that’s not happening. And to say that newspapers should charge people for the news and give away their archives is — sorry Doc — one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. Almost as dumb as the guy Jeff writes about here.

Would it be nice if we could go back to those days? Sure it would — but we can’t. I’m sure the record industry would like to keep overcharging people for CDs full of crap too. That ship has sailed. If you restrict access to your content some people will pay for it, but the vast majority will go away and never come back. That’s not much of a business model.

Update:

Doc has responded to some of his critics (including yours truly) in a post here, and admitted that I… er, we are right 🙂 Please read that and his comment below.

From an opinion piece by Andy Kessler, one-time Wall Street hedge-fund manager and all-around smart guy:

In the meantime, rather than just charge for content, I’d be licensing every type of newfangled software and Web service until I could come up with a tight community of interest around my newspaper, local or national.

Don’t just start the discussion, keep it. This means comments, reviews, personalized newsfeeds, social networks of like-minded readers, whatever. Give advertisers a little “link love” so they don’t stray to generic search engines. Google, Microsoft and others dropped over $10 billion to buy online ad-delivery companies in the last few weeks alone.

The value is there: Newspapers aren’t in the printing business, they’re in the ad business.

A rousing vote of confidence in Sirius Satellite Radio from CEO Mel Karmazin (link via I Want Media):

NEW YORK (AP) — Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. CEO Mel Karmazin sought to allay shareholder concerns at the company’s annual meeting Thursday, saying he was just as disappointed as other investors in Sirius’ lagging stock price. Compared to rival XM, however, he said: “We suck less.”

The Wall Street Journal had a bit of scoop in the “user-generated content” area today, with the news that Lucasfilms is re-launching StarWars.com on Friday, with a massive library of fan films, and some online video-editing tools from Eyespot that will allow fans to mash-up clips (more than 250 in all) from all six of the movies and mix in their own content. For a Star Wars fan and/or aspiring filmmaker, this is a pretty huge deal.

As the WSJ story points out, Lucasfilms isn’t quite opening itself up completely to the fan-film phenomenon — the submissions will be monitored by Eyespot’s software for nudity and other bad things (so forget about the “Leia slave-girl” mashups you’re thinking about, boys) and just to be extra sure, they will all be watched by a team of human filters in Costa Rica (why Costa Rica? Who knows). Fans will also be restricted to using the clips and music that Lucas provides, which some fans are upset by. At the same time, however, it’s easy to understand how a filmmaker like George Lucas — who is notoriously control-oriented — would feel just a tad nervous about allowing his creations to be altered and mashed-up without any restrictions whatsoever. I think he actually deserves some credit for giving it a shot (and as John Murrell at GMSV notes, it’s also enlightened self-interest). It will be interesting to see whether we can find another fan creation that’s as good as Chad Vader: DayShift Manager.

According to Mike over at TechCrunch — confirming a rumour originally reported by Sam Sethi, ex- of TechCrunch UK — Google is close to acquiring Feedburner for $100-million. If true, this is a deal that makes sense to me, as it does to my friend Tony Hung from Deep Jive Interests and to Ash from Watchmojo. Feedburner is a great service with tons of useful features — many of which will no doubt plug in nicely to Google’s Analytics and other website tools — and so it’s no surprise that someone like Google would want them, even at what amounts to a 10-times revenue multiple, according to Ash. Valleywag also had the rumour, and the price tag, in a post last week.

Update:

Geek News Central seems to think that we should be afraid of Google owning Feedburner, but fails to make a convincing argument that we should be any more concerned about Google than we are about our ISPs knowing which websites we go to. Ashkan from Watchmojo also seems to think the deal is something we should be worried about, but I don’t see it. Alarm:clock has a look at the synergies for Google.

Lots of commentary on Techmeme today about Google’s new Hot Trends feature, which builds on the search engine’s previous Trends and Zeitgeist features by adding news and blog posts. Many people seem to pay particularly attention to the absurd or stupid things that people search for, including “legless chihuahuas” and “nose bidet.”

Fair enough. Don’t get me wrong. There’s no question that people search for plenty of ridiculous stuff — and yes, the Trends include lots of stuff about World of Warcraft, etc. But still, I think dismissing Google’s Hot Trends as a throwaway toy or a sideshow is missing something. And I think search guru Danny Sullivan made the point in a comment on Duncan Riley’s post at TechCrunch made the point pretty well: “legless chihuahuas,” he pointed out, were in the news; Oprah referred to a “nose bidet” on her show; and one of the other search terms was a radio contest question.

In other words, browsing through the search terms is a pretty good barometer of what people are interested in at a given moment. When I looked at the terms, Justis Richert was a popular term — because the porn actress who was born with that name happened to perform… well, a service for a state trooper while he was on duty (and still wound up getting a ticket, apparently). In other words, it was sparked by another news story.

Anyone who has spent any time running a news-related website knows that there are the stories you wish people were interested in, and then there are the ones that they really are interested in — and they aren’t always the same thing. For better or worse, Google’s Hot Trends and other traffic-measuring tools are a glimpse inside the mind of the people formerly known as the audience (as Jay Rosen called them). Get used to it.

Update:

A commenter here notes that Google’s Hot Trends could pose some competition for Technorati — and it certainly could for Technorati’s WTF (Where’s The Fire) feature.

Okay, CBS didn’t buy Howard Lindzon’s brain — but it is paying a substantial sum (how substantial is still up for debate, since the original report of $5-million has apparently been denied) for what he helped to create with Wallstrip, the daily video-blog on Wall Street and finance hosted by the lovely and talented Lindsay Campbell. And apart from what appears to be some lingering bad blood between Howard and Duncan Riley — who has written about it for TechCrunch and 901am (sorry Thord), as well as his own blog — I think most people are happy to see Howard do well. He took a chance with Wallstrip, and it has paid off. And according to Fred Wilson’s post about the deal, CBS is not acquiring Wallstrip just for Lindsay (as Duncan and others have suggested) but for the expertise in developing and distributing online video, which is something CBS really needs to figure out. In any case, congrats to Howard and the team.

Well, if you were hoping to make it to mesh on May 30th and 31st, I’m afraid you are out of luck — we are officially sold out. We’d love to invite more people, but the fire warden at MaRS Discovery District won’t let us 🙂

We are all looking forward to the great speakers and panels we have lined up, and we’re also pretty excited about the 15 Minutes of Fame entrants we’ve been getting. There are some great startups looking to pitch their ideas to mesh attendees, and it will be fun to see what kind of response they get. We’ll be announcing the winners soon.

If you didn’t manage to get a ticket, don’t despair — you can still come and do some post-conference meshing on the Wednesday night at the Distillery District. We’ve got a deal for anyone who attends the conference: if you head to the Boiler House at the Distillery District, you’ll get a complementary appetizer with any entree, courtesy of your friends at mesh.

And if you’re not a ticket-holder, come on down and have a few drinks with us on Wednesday night anyway. If it’s anything like last year, I’m sure there will be people meshing until the wee hours.

Writing in the New York Times, Mark Helprin says he thinks an injustice is being done to creators of artistic and literary works, because the copyright that protects them doesn’t last forever — unlike the laws that protect, say, ownership of physical property. If the government can’t simply take a person’s house once it is paid for (which it can, of course, but let’s leave that aside for the moment) then why can it take a man’s intellectual property?

As mellifluous as Helprin’s writing may be, his argument on the topic — if one can even call it that — is as clanky and tone-deaf as any I’ve seen. At one point he writes that:

“Were I tomorrow to write the great American novel (again?), 70 years after my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren”

and then asks why

“such a stiff penalty is not applied to the owners of Rockefeller Center or Wal-Mart” and why it is alright for the state to “sieze the property” of authors.

Like many others, Helprin has likely been seduced by the term “intellectual property,” which implies that ideas are (or should be) the same as objects. Once you begin to think of your creations — the words you have strung together in a particular way at a particular time — as property in the same sense that your house and car are , then you are well on your way towards a misunderstanding.

Helprin may believe that investing artistic works with the same qualities as physical property is “natural and becoming,” but saying it doesn’t make it so. Early lawmakers decided to treat them differently for a reason — because they are different. Taking someone’s property removes it from him forever. Copying someone’s artistic creation, or using it to create something artistic in its own right, is something quite different.

I could go on, but as BoingBoing notes, Lawrence Lessig has set up a wiki to craft a response to Helprin here, and there is already more than enough rational argument there to counter the author’s position and then some.