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It’s not really about technology, or business, but it’s still an amazing story: Michael Holmes, a veteran skydiver with more than 7,000 jumps to his credit, had had his chute fail before — but never like this.

After failing to deploy, he couldn’t cut it loose, and then his reserve chute got tangled as well. Unable to control his descent, he plummeted 12,000 feet into the ground at about 80 miles per hour. Somehow, he avoided both the ocean (where he would likely have drowned) and a nearby parking lot, and crashed into a small clump of blackberry bushes. He came away from the impact with just a broken ankle and a collapsed lung.

There’s more info at the Mail on Sunday website, including comments from Michael about the jump. Incredible story.

The Mail on Sunday appears to have gotten YouTube to pull down the video, since it says it has been removed as a result of a copyright complaint from Associated Newspapers (which owns the Mail on Sunday). The newspaper has embedded the video here.

Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch has taken another run at Powerset, which has been hitting the headlines in the blogosphere because the company continues to raise giant sums of money and get all sorts of attention with very little to show for it. Mike figures that the “natural language” search startup could be a “house of cards” and that CEO Barney Pell seems to be staffing the thing with Yahoo engineers, in the hope that the company will eventually be acquired by Yahoo in its eternal quest to beat Google.

That’s all fascinating and everything, but I have to say the most interesting part of his post is the video clip, which features platinum-haired Valley girl Sarah Myers of d7tv.com doing a feature called “PartyCrashers” (Matt Marshall has the video at Venture Beat too). She gets giggly with several staffers and has a brief interview with Barney Pell — in which he says he will probably raise more money this year — but the video really gets good near the end, when she interviews some poor schmuck who has either been hit on the head with a large object, is mesmerized by Sarah’s platinum bob and party dress, or has had way too much to drink (or possibly all three).

His explanation of what Powerset does is so incredibly obtuse that it is hard to believe. At one point, he says: “We have a demo where you can, like, search web pages and, like, get results.” It’s incredible. I don’t know who this guy is, but he is just about the worst advertisement for the company it is possible to imagine. One investor who says he put $100,000 into the company posted a comment on TechCrunch that said he was “very worried about this company.”

Admittedly, an offhand comment at a party by some faceless staffer who has consumed too many free beverages isn’t a fair judgment on an entire company, but still. It’s hilarious and painful at the same time. And a warning for startups: everyone who works for you is part of your sales team.

Lots of chatter about Barack Obama’s new MySpace-style social network, which he just launched in conjunction with the start of his official bid to become the next POTUS. It’s at my.barackobama.com, and it has all the requisite tools of a supposedly Web 2.0 campaign — profiles, blogs, friend requests, and (of course) built-in campaign financing tools so you can help Barack make it to the White House. But does everyone get Barack as a friend, the way all MySpacers get founder Tom Anderson? Inquiring minds want to know.

Fred Wilson has some problems with Barack’s attempts to get all Web 2.0, including the use of Brightcove’s video player, but my problem with the whole thing is a little more philosophical. In part, I’m unconvinced that politicians and political parties — which are inherently even more artificial, controlled and paranoid than companies (and we all know how blogging and social networking gets treated at many of the latter, thanks to Wal-Mart and Edelman) — are really going to walk the walk, as opposed to just talking the talk. John Edwards has passed one test when it comes to defending bloggers associated with his campaign, but there are sure to be others.

And I also wonder whether it makes any sense to try and convince everyone to come and create a blog and invest time in all those other social-networking aspects of their lives exclusively at my.barackobama.com. Why not have a site that acts more like SuperGlu or Squidoo or something like that, one that pulls in blog posts and photos from Flickr and aggregates it all in one place, instead of making people go to Obama’s site to write or post? Of course, that would only increase the risks to the campaign, but that comes with the territory. And presumably Obama’s legion of volunteers could monitor the content.

I think there’s a risk that the social networks Barack and others are trying to build will become little more than Potemkin villages. My friend Rob Hyndman thinks that Obama could have what it takes, and that his site goes a long way towards following through on the promise of Politics 2.0.

It’s more than a little ironic that Craig “Craigslist.org” Newmark — the guy whose classified service is making $50-million or so a year more or less by accident, and eating the lunch of various metropolian newspapers in the process — is a big fan of journalism and of newspapers. I’ve come across many comments by him that express his respect for the craft, and the latest is an account of his talk at the WeMedia conference in Miami that Jemima Kiss (god, I love that name) posted on the Guardian’s Organ Grinder blog.

The way Jemima describes it, Craig talked about how political philosophers and thinkers Thomas Paine and John Locke were very much like bloggers (except their blogs were written on parchment), and that they caused their own “paradigm shift” in the media. Craig said there is also a place for traditional media skills such as editing and information filtering — something that doesn’t get talked about a lot in these days of “open source” journalism and participatory media. Craig says:

“Everyday I see what some call the wisdom of crowds, but the down side to that is that there can be mob rule, or panic, or low-quality information so what you need on top of that is another layer – the editors.”

Craig went on to say that the blogging model is exciting but it “generally means speaking the truth and checking later,” Jemima says, while professional journalists do the fact-checking first. In many ways, Newmark said, newspapers may have been the precursor to the Internet. Interesting idea, that. The rest of Jemima’s roundup is also worth reading.

Some pretty big developments at Vancouver-based NowPublic, the “citizen journalism” or “participatory media” site, or whatever your preferred term is. One of them is that PaidContent says the company, whose site just underwent a redesign and relaunch, has signed a partnership arrangement with the Associated Press newswire. The two are going to collaborate on news coverage, although there aren’t really a whole lot of details — either in the PaidContent item or in the news release from the wire service.

AP vice-president Jim Kennedy says AP “has a long tradition of pursuing citizen contributions in breaking news events worldwide” and “this relationship will make that connection even stronger and result in more news and images from people who are in the right place at the right time.” Interestingly enough, NowPublic’s “Actual News Guy” Mark Schneider says in a comment on the PaidContent story that the company is looking for a correspondent in Second Life.

The other development came yesterday, and it is that MSNBC founder and former editor-in-chief Merrill Brown has joined NowPublic as chairman of the board. The release says that he “was on the front lines at MSNBC when the Internet transitioned into the number one place to consume news and content,” and that he will “help us to continue building the next-generation wire service.”

Big moves for NowPublic — it will be interesting to see how it develops.

Human beings are funny. If you’re the underdog, the plucky startup going head-to-head with a big player, people will root for you regardless of whether you have a hope in hell of actually succeeding — but as soon as you become the dominant player, they will dump you in a heartbeat and start rooting for the next underdog. Google knows this better than anyone. Not that long ago they were the one getting all the cheers, and now we are all looking at companies like Powerset as the next potential “Google killer.”

For a company that doesn’t even have a real product yet, Powerset continues to get a surprising amount of publicity, including the story in the New York Times and a long feature at VentureBeat about the company’s licensing of natural-language search technology from Xerox’s legendary PARC research centre. Mike Arrington goes so far as to call Matt Marshall of VentureBeat a “cheerleader” for the company, which got $12.5-million in venture financing last year (contingent on the licensing of Xerox’s technology, according to Matt). He also points to a long treatise on natural language search that Danny Sullivan wrote here, which is worth reading.

Is Powerset the next big thing in search? Perhaps. But right now, it seems like a straw man dressed up in hopes and dreams, sent in to battle the now seemingly invincible Google. My friend Paul Kedrosky seems similarly skeptical of Powerset’s chances.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman and publisher of the New York Times and son of the man who preceded him in that job, gave a relatively revealing interview (for a Sulzberger at least) to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz recently, which I found through a link at Journalistopia. Like Danny Sanchez, I was struck by this comment:

Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years? “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” he says.

Sulzberger also says that the Times has doubled its online readership to 1.5 million a day — which is larger than its print subscriber base of 1.1 million. And he admitted that “Once upon a time, people had to read the paper to find out what was going on in theater. Today there are hundreds of forums and sites with that information,” but says

“The paper can integrate material from bloggers and external writers. We need to be part of that community and to have dialogue with the online world … we are curators, curators of news. People don’t click onto the New York Times to read blogs. They want reliable news that they can trust.”

Oh, and if you were thinking that maybe the Times might reconsider its pay wall, and/or offer its new Times Reader software to readers for free? Doesn’t sound like Art Jr. feels that way.

I’d love to be able to write about Yahoo’s new Pipes feature/service/thingamajig — if only so that I could cram in a bunch of puns about the pipes getting full or calling the plumber, etc. like some of the comedians here — but in what has become an all-too familiar event when a new service launches, it has been taken offline due to server overload (and while we’re on the subject, why didn’t they call it Yahoo Tubes? Much better name).

That might be understandable if we were talking about a couple of guys working out of their college dorm room, or someone’s basement in SoHo, with a few old roped-together SparcStations and a leased line from Verizon or something like that. But why wouldn’t Yahoo — which no doubt has half a dozen football-field sized server farms stationed around the continent, with hundreds of thousands of PCs humming away inside — put a few more servers online for their new toy? Going down right out of the gate just looks so bush league.

As for the service itself, I know that people like Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web like this idea of remixing RSS feeds and other things, and Jeremy at Yahoo does a good job of describing the thinking behind it — a guy I like to call Radar O’Reilly (old M.A.S.H. reference) calls it a “milestone in the history of the Internet” — but I just don’t get it.

This looks like pretty hardcore geekology, it seems to me. Not that it isn’t of value, but definitely something that would appeal mostly to people building other things, rather than as a consumer-facing service. If I ever get a chance to actually look at it, maybe I will think differently.

David Jones from Fleishman-Hillard, who blogs at PR Works, has an interesting post up about the “Bridezilla” video clip, the one that popped up on YouTube and became a viral hit, leading to stories in major newspapers across North America, appearances by the actresses involved on talk shows, and so on. As it turned out, of course, the video wasn’t put together by some struggling actors as a lark, or a resume-enhancer — it was created by Sunsilk, a hair-care subsidiary of consumer products giant Unilever.

Great PR, right? Everyone’s talking about it, Unilever gets its name in the paper and on TV, everybody goes home happy. Except that I kind of feel a little like David seems to (in addition to his post, he commented on a post at Capital C’s blog, since the Toronto shop was involved in creating the ad). Not taken advantage of necessarily — nothing quite so dramatic. This is no Edelman/Wal-Mart situation, at least not as far as I’m concerned. But I still feel that the whole thing was kind of sneaky. In fact, I would have been much happier with the video, oddly enough, if it had come right out at the end and said it was sponsored by Sunsilk, or by Unilever.

At least that would have been authentic, in an inauthentic kind of way (if you follow me). Instead, I was sucked in by the video, then watched as actresses took credit for it — and thought “way to go, that’s the spirit” — until all of a sudden Unilever turned up in stories, and then Sunsilk, and then the real story finally dribbled out. It sounds like there was some confusion as to who was going to claim credit for it, Sunsilk may or may not have tried to distance itself from the video. In any case, by that time I was kind of sick of the whole thing.

Is that a great “word of mouth” or viral marketing experience? I wouldn’t say so. What do you think? Comments are open.

Came across a post from Alec Saunders about Monday night’s DemoCamp (number 12), and it reminded me that I meant to write about it too. It was at No Regrets in Liberty Village, just down the street from Tucows — where I went to DemoCamp #3 (I think it was) about a year ago on another frigid February night. The place was packed to the rafters, and despite a balky sound system and some cranky Wi-Fi it was a great show.

Alec calls it slam poetry for geeks, and he has a point. He juggled his five BlackBerrys or whatever it was to demo Iotum’s TalkNow, and did a fine job (as befits one of last year’s DEMO gods), and Albert Lai told everyone a bit about how Bubbleshare.com got to where it was and why it decided to be acquired by Toronto’s Kaboose network (and then dropped his laptop on the floor). Will Pate did a demo of Flock, and remained cool as a cucumber even when David Crow’s Mac froze and had to be rebooted, and even when someone asked why Flock didn’t just make Firefox extensions instead of creating a whole new browser.

Dave Humphrey talked about how his students have been helping develop the Mozilla open-source browser code, and we had some updates too — from Scott Brooks and his partner at Conceptshare.com, who risked their lives to drive down from Sudbury, and from my pal Mike McDerment’s Freshbooks.com (which is hiring), as well as from Brent Ashley, who said that he more or less gave up on his Ajax blog-chat app because he realized that “no one really gives a shit about being able to chat on a blog.”

Sacha wandered around taking pictures of everybody so that they could be collected for a DemoCamp index (and because Sacha is terrible with names and faces), Jay told everyone to introduce themselves to someone new, Joey made some bad jokes about David’s heart attack last year and handed out dried mango slices all the way from the Phillipines, and a great time was had by all.

Commentary about Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ clarion call for non-DRM’ed music already fills more than two pages of Techmeme, but naturally that’s not going to stop me from chiming in (it never has before :-)). And there’s no question that Jobs’ statement is a landmark event. I’ll leave it to others to decide how much of it is a heartfelt statement of belief and how much is marketing spin (Tony Hung has some thoughts on that over at Deep Jive Interests), but it’s clear that Steve-O is trying very hard to lay the blame for DRM at the foot of the music labels.

But will this Martin Luther-style nailing of principles to Apple’s digital front door have any effect on the record labels’ love of digital rights management? I’m not holding my breath. There’s no question that Jobs is right when he says that

“If the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none.”

But that doesn’t mean they’re going to stop. If acting rationally and in their long-term best interests had any bearing on what the RIAA actually does, it wouldn’t have spent so much time and money suing some of its most devoted customers, creating what has to be the worst public relations environment for an industry since the Catholic Church burned people at the stake.

I think (as my friend Rob and Nick Carr do) that the real point of Steve’s letter comes near the end, when he mentions that Europe should step in and lean on the record labels, since two and a half of them are based in Europe (Vivendi owns Universal, EMI is British and Sony BMG is half German). Apple has been coming under fire for restricting iTunes to a proprietary song format, and Steve is clearly trying to shift the blame to the record companies.

Is he right? Absolutely. That’s what makes it vintage Jobs — as Webomatica notes, he comes out smelling like a rose no matter how you look at it.

Update:

Responses have been coming in from the major labels, and — surprise, surprise — they aren’t crazy about the idea. Edgar Bronfman Jr. at Warner Music basically suggested that Jobs was insane if he thought the labels would roll back DRM just because CDs don’t have it. But EMI is reportedly thinking about doing so, according to several reports. And the Economist has a nice piece about the whole subject here.

After reading the long piece in the New York Times Sunday magazine about Budweiser’s creation of BudTV, followed by Steve Safran’s two-thumbs-down review of said service at the Lost Remote blog, I had to check it out for myself — and I have to say Steve is right on the money. BudTV sucks big time. It’s not just cringe-inducing in the usual way that Bud commercials are, either. It’s bad through and through — as in not funny.

Apparently, Anheuser-Busch is spending $30-million in this thing, and all kinds of comic and movie celebrities like Chris Parnell (ex of Saturday Night Live) and Kevin Spacey are involved — which just makes it even more obvious that money doesn’t buy humour. Not even close. Chris Parnell’s Future Show, with Chris Farley’s brother, is right off the lame-o-meter, and another show called Arrogant Fake British Rich Guy is just stupid. Not even groan funny — just stupid. So is Billy Lama. I think I chuckled once, but only once. By that standard, the typical Bud Light commercial is Monty Python squared.

Lost Remote and PaidContent also point out that for BudTV, “sharing” consists of cutting and pasting a URL into an email to a friend. Wow. How 1996. And the registration process is onerous and confusing (not to mention likely useless as far as age verification is concerned). NewTeeVee didn’t think much of it either. This is the future of TV? I hope not.

In what shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been watching the video download race heat up, retailing behemoth Wal-Mart is announcing a download service today that will feature both movies and TV shows from all six major studios: Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox and Universal. Movies will be $10 to $20 and TV shows will be $2.

Obviously, having all six studios taking part will help Wal-Mart by broadening the amount of content it can offer (theoretically at least). One of the biggest issues with other ventures such as the virtual ghost towns known as CinemaNow and MovieLink — which were put together by the studios themselves — is a lack of compelling content, much like the Video On Demand channels that cable providers like Rogers have in Canada, where you get the dregs from the theatres.

As Mike Arrington at TechCrunch points out, there are plenty of players in this particular game, including the aforementioned MovieLink and CinemaNow, as well as Amazon’s Unbox.com (A note to Canadians: none of these are available to Canucks, just as we are banned from watching the TV shows that NBC and other networks are streaming from their websites, and just as we can’t get movies and TV shows on iTunes for that matter — don’t get me started).

Rafat Ali at PaidContent and others have noted that Wal-Mart’s foray into movie rentals a la Netflix was kiboshed after a brief run, and an analyst says in the the New York Times story that the results of this latest venture will likely never be more than “a freckle” on the giant company’s earnings. He’s undoubtedly right about that — Wal-Mart’s revenue last year was $340-billion, and it made a profit of almost $12-billion.

In case you’re wondering, that makes Wal-Mart about 10 times the size of Walt Disney Co. in terms of sales, and about four times as large in terms of profit. In fact, it’s probably larger than all of the six movie studios put together. Which makes me wonder: why doesn’t Wal-Mart offer movies for free? Time-limit the downloads so you only get them for a day, and use them as a loss leader. Of course, the studios would never go for that kind of deal.