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Being the geekish sort, I noticed with a smile that Slashdot — the venerable tech-focused chat forum/social network that currently plays grouchy old grey-haired guy to young whippersnappers like Digg — broke down yesterday after someone posted the 16,777,216th comment (which in itself should raise an eyebrow or two).

Why? Well, obviously it’s because Slashdot’s MySQL database is structured in such a way that a table can only hold 2^24 data points, which is known as “an unsigned mediumint” (but you probably knew that). While the site changed the way it stores some of the comments — to allow as many as 4.1 billion — it didn’t change all of them and the 16,777,216th pushed the database over and broke it. “We shall flog ourselves appropriately,” said Commander Taco.

But here’s the best part, as pointed out by my friend and uber-geek Paul Kedrosky: the final comment came from a Canadian — a fiddle player, no less, with a band called Siobhan (his comment was something related to the Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. election). His nom de plume is Da Ghostface Fiddlah. Once again, Canadians rule. Pwned.

Just a quick reminder of the mesh meetup we’re having at the Irish Embassy on November 15th in Toronto (that’s a bar, not the real Irish Embassy, for anyone who thinks the bright green country filled with leprechauns might have seceded when they weren’t looking).

Photo from veryweb.it

It’s always nice to get together for a few beers and some great conversation during the cold weather — and it was just such a night that spawned the first mesh conference. Startup types, venture capitalists (please leave the calculators at home), marketing people, geeks and even journalists are welcome.

Want to talk about Google and YouTube? Copyright and the Web? The Wal-Mart/Edelman fiasco? Come on down. Sign up at the Upcoming page if you’re interested, or just show up and get your Web 2.0 on. A map and directions to the Embassy can be found here.

Two things strike me about the deal between Microsoft and Universal Music, which will see the record company get a cut of every Zune player the software giant (theoretically) sells. The first is that such an arrangement is an obvious sign that Microsoft is desperate, and the second is that it’s an obvious sign that the major record labels are not just desperate but creatively bankrupt.

It seems clear that the record labels see Microsoft’s Zune launch as a key chance to make up for the boatloads of cash they’ve missed out on with Apple and iTunes (and their inability to get a government-mandated levy on portable devices). And the fact that Microsoft is willing to go along with their demands for a cut of the sales proceeds is a sign of how desperate the software company is to get some support for Zune, although it’s certainly not getting much support from some music fans.

I’m going to go along with Om Malik’s take on this one, which is that if you look at the amount of money Universal is likely to make from their Microsoft deal, it’s probably about the same as selling a single extra song to all the people who have bought an iPod. As Om puts it: “If the music industry cannot sell one additional song to consumers (and has to blackmail for more money) then, you as a business, have lost grip over your core competency.”

George Scriban at Global Nerdy has some similar thoughts.

Muhammad Saleem over at Mu Life — a great new blogger I’ve recently discovered who focuses on social media — posted something about how Digg and Netscape had the news that Donald Rumsfeld had resigned long before Google News (long in this case being 20 minutes). His post was noticed and linked to by Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion and by Jeremiah Owyang, among others.

As I pointed out to Muhammad and Steve, however, it looks to me like Comedy Central actually broke the news a full 35 minutes before either Digg or Netscape got to it. If anything could reinforce how disrupted the journalism business has become, it’s the fact that a comedy channel can break news — which may not be all that surprising, considering that surveys show many younger people get their news from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show.

Of course, as Matt Sparkes notes on his blog, Digg and Netscape didn’t “break” the Rumsfeld news — they were simply the first to link to the Associated Press story. That’s not really the same thing. So it’s not really fair for Muhammad to title his post “Why Socially Driven News Is Better.” Faster, maybe — but not necessarily better.

That doesn’t mean Digg and Netscape and similar tools aren’t still a threat to newspapers, mind you, since in many cases newspapers just print the Associated Press stories too. And that is becoming harder and harder to justify.

After the amazing Diet Coke-Mentos video from the guys at Eepybird.com exploded onto the scene thanks to YouTube (and later Revver), there was a sharp divide between the reaction from Mentos and Coca-Cola. The Italian company that makes Mentos saw it as free advertising and immediately wanted to do something with the Eepybird team — saying they probably got $10-million worth of free viral advertising from the clip. Coke effectively looked down its nose and sniffed.

A little while ago I wrote that Coke appeared to have finally grabbed a clue, because they were involved in an online contest with the Eepybird guys (also on Revver, as someone from the video site points out in my comments). As it turns out, though, it sounds more like they were dragged kicking and screaming (or whining) into clue-land, according to this story at MediaPost.

John Stichweh, director of global interactive marketing, cast doubt on whether the company thinks engagement is a goal worth pursuing. The measurement that really matters, he said, is sales. “How many more cases of Coke am I selling? I don’t know,” he said at the Ad:Tech conference in New York.

According to the story, the Coke exec also questioned whether doing interactive or “user-generated” advertising was any cheaper than a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in traditional media, saying that online campaigns are cheaper up front but “there is a cost element in terms of internal labor.”

I guess he’s got a point — if by “internal labor” you mean paying someone to run around at headquarters pulling people’s heads out of the sand and showing them how to click on the “most popular” link at YouTube.

I don’t want to be a gigantic wet blanket or anything, but looking at the top of Techmeme right now makes me despair for the future of the human race. Okay — that might be a bit of an exaggeration. But seriously, do we really need to get that excited about the fact that the latest and greatest upgrade to Microsoft’s 15-year-old operating system has been sent to the place where they burn it onto CDs or whatever?

But of course, saying that isn’t cool enough, so we have to use an acronym and say that it’s “gone RTM” (for Released To Manufacturing”) or “gone gold” or whatever the heck they call it. And for all the bitching and moaning about Google getting love for every Web 2.0 release it does, there seems to be an awful lot of blogger love out in Microsoft-land right now.

“Breaking news!” one site proclaims breathlessly. “VISTA IS GOLDEN!” another one hyperventilates. Not to be outdone, someone pulls out this humdinger: “A new era of desktop computing is upon us.” Sweet Jesus. And a week or two ago there was a similar landslide of links at the top of Techmeme that were all about — yes — the cool new packaging for Vista.

Come on, people. This is embarrassing.

My friend Rob Hyndman, lawyer/advisor to geeks and startups and a fellow organizer of the mesh conference, has decided that organizing one conference just isn’t enough, so he and some like-minded friends — including Stuart MacDonald (another mesh stalwart), camp veteran David Crow and serial entrepreneur Austin Hill — are starting a Toronto version of Startup Camp, to help startups get together and share info about what to do (and hopefully what not to do). More details will likely become available on Rob’s blog.

Okay, someone explain this to me: Intel, a company that makes microprocessors, is backing and selling — but not profiting from — a suite of “Enterprise 2.0” software for companies that includes blogging software (Typepad), a wiki (Socialtext), and RSS feed software (Simplefeed and Newsgator), called Suite Two.

Is the microchip giant hoping that a little Web 2.0 pixie dust will get sprinkled on it, just like Level 3 seems to be? It’s obviously not in it to make any money, since it has already stated that it doesn’t intend to make any from the venture. So it must be hoping that companies will need to upgrade their machines to dual-core monsters to run all that Enterprise 2.0 gee-whizzery, right? Please.

The whole point of these kinds of software is that they are lighter and more versatile — and cheaper — than traditional ways of doing business with employees and customers. So why would Intel want to bundle them up and charge an arm and a leg for them? More to the point, why would anyone go for that deal?

The implication is that big companies are so slow-moving and dim-witted that they need the Intel name to get them comfortable with anything new, and are willing to pay through the nose for it. Unfortunately, that’s probably not far from the truth in a lot of cases. And meanwhile, Intel the plumber gets to look all cool by hanging with the hip Web 2.0 crowd.

Update:

Josh Bancroft, who works at Intel, has a great overview on his blog Tiny Screenfuls.

Steve Rubel over at Micropersuasion has a brief interview he did with Megaphone Mark Cuban, billionaire media mogul and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, in which the two talked about things like the “Long Tail” of the Web (and Mark’s own coinage — the “vert ramp” — and how it affects new media. As is his wont, Mark shot from the hip about what the future holds and where advertisers should be putting their money, saying:

I think most blogs, vlogs , podcasts, broadband TV shows that sneak out of the Long Tail, my blog included, will have a tough time staying out and earning more than minimum wage for their efforts.

He also said that advertisers will inevitably “work with aggregators,” and that therefore “those who host the Long Tailers will get paid, those who create for the Long Tail rarely will.” Kind of a bleak view, but hey — Mark has a billion or two and you don’t. The big risk, he says, is the “inevitable saturation of ad inventory” in new media and the Web.

Steve and Mark went on to talk about high-definition, which Cuban — being the founder and CEO of HDNet.com — not surprisingly sees as the future. He also asks whether anyone thinks that “all those LCDs hanging on walls will be connected to computers anytime soon or show Internet video? They won’t.”

I think he’s probably wrong, especially with Google Video looking at putting YouTube content on mobiles and elsewhere — and with Xbox offering gamers the ability to download video to their TVs — but maybe that’s just me. Could Mark be one of the broadcast types my friend Stuart talks about here?

In other words, the Long Tail is largely crap; those who create it will starve; advertisers should pay attention to HD; and anyone who thinks TVs will show Internet video anytime soon is an idiot. Classic Cuban.

If you’ve never come across Startup Review before, it’s a blog written by Nisan Gabbay, who until recently was an analyst with the venture capital group Sierra Ventures. Instead of short posts or gossip about startups, he does an in-depth case study of a company such as Craigslist every week or two, based on interviews and research. Since many of these companies are pretty well known, there aren’t that many earth-shattering insights, but they are very useful nonetheless.

His latest is on Facebook, which is reportedly looking at acquisition offers from Yahoo and others in the $1-billion range, and has already reportedly turned down an offer in the $750-million range. Nisan gives us a good overview of how Facebook capitalized on a pre-existing, real-world community in order to grow quickly:

Facebook created a high utility online service for enabling pre-existing social behaviors within an offline community. This makes for an interesting lesson learned: it’s easier to piggyback off a pre-existing community with offline behaviors that drive online service usage.

He also notes that Facebook created the conditions for such an online community to grow in a relatively sheltered and secure environment, since the site was restricted to college students and others with a .edu address. The company has since lifted that restriction, which has drawn some criticism from those who thought it should have stuck to its original plan, but has also increased the popularity of the site.

If anyone is going to be around the York University’s Schulich School of Business on Wednesday night, and wants to hear a rousing debate (hopefully) on the future of media and the Web, it just so happens that I’m part of a panel discussion on that very topic.

The panel has been organized by my friend and former Globe colleague Richard Bloom, who is finishing up his MBA at Schulich with a focus on arts and media managment. The donnybrook discussion starts at 5:30 and runs until 7:00 and my co-panelists are former National Post writer Mark Evans (now vice-president of operations with b5media) and Tomer Strolight, who runs Torstar Digital.

So CBS wants to find and buy the next YouTube before it gets big. Gee, I wonder why no one else has thought of that? Way to go, CBS. And so they’ve hired a guy who at the age of 35 is described as a “veteran” of the industry, and of the takeover game. Why — because he helped advise Viacom to buy Neopets? Wow. That’s rocket surgery for sure.

What Quincy Smith seems to have picked up during his time on The Street is the ability to say a whole bunch of really great sounding phrases that actually mean diddly-squat. Here’s a great one that PaidContent highlighted:

The important thing is that we get confidence internally on a set interactive strategy that will immediately change and be organic as we grow. From there we can think about how we can execute on this as a team.

Did you get that? In other words, it’s important to get confident — internally, of course, as opposed to externally — and to set a strategy. Wouldn’t it be better to get confident after deciding on a strategy? Never mind. Because that strategy is going to “immediately change” anyway. And, it’s going to be organic, which as we all know is the best kind of strategy to have.

And then, of course, after getting confident and having the strategy (the organic one that immediately changes) then it’s time to think about how to execute. Not actually execute — which is a fancy word Wall Street types use when they really mean “do” — but just think about it for awhile.

In other words *we don’t have a clue what we’re doing.” Or phrased differently: “I’d better come up with something good, or it’s back to hedge-fund land.”

As with any self-respecting blogger, I hate to say anything positive about Microsoft because they are synonymous with evil (just kidding!), but I must admit that the latest update to Virtual Earth — or whatever we’re supposed to be calling it nowadays, which is probably Windows Live Web Search Satellite Virtual 3-D Planet — is pretty damn cool.

I read about it over at Search Engine Watch and had to download it and check it out, based on the pics that Danny Sullivan put up, with full 3-D rendering — in better than Half-Life 2 detail — of downtown San Francisco and a bunch of other major cities. Microsoft even tipped its Stetson towards the Great White North by putting up a few buildings in Calgary and Vancouver, although apart from three or four major office towers, everything else is 2-D.

Best of all, cyberspace wouldn’t be cyberspace without advertising, right? So there are virtual billboards hovering here and there over office buildings and stadiums and whatnot, large enough that if they were in real life they would block out the sun. Is anyone going to want to advertise inside Virtual Earth? I would bet they are falling over themselves to do so. What if you’re checking out the city you’re moving to? There’s an ad for a real estate broker.

All we need now are those floating billboards with video commercials on them from Blade Runner (video is coming soon, Microsoft says). Oh, and maybe an add-on pack that would let you race cars (but not like this stupid thing Microsoft tried to pull) or hunt virtual bad guys down the streets of your favourite city. I can see it now: Grand Theft Auto — Vancouver.

(cross-posted from my media blog)

CNet has reported that Topix, the local-media network controlled by some of the major U.S. newspaper chains, has raised another $15-million in financing. According to the story, Gannett and Tribune each own 33.7 per cent, and McClatchy (which was bought by Knight Ridder last year) owns 11.9 per cent. Together, the newspaper companies own about 80 per cent of the company.

Topix says that it will use the money to add more staff and put some more cash into marketing, something that it definitely needs to do. Although it has climbed in the rankings, it really needs to get its name more known as the source for local news — and promote some of its unique tools, such as the ability to comment on stories, links to blogs that are mixed in with the news feeds and a great search engine.

Unfortunately, the site is going up against Google News and Yahoo News on the one hand and sites like Digg on the other, and even its new funding might not be enough to turn the tide. As PaidContent points out, the site hasn’t exactly been able to integrate its tools and content with its newspaper owners so far, at least not in any meaningful way, and time is quickly running out.