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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.

Although the Web and Web 2.0 gets a lot of attention — and rightly so, in my opinion — one of the other important trends has to do with mobility, and specifically cellphones and PDA-type devices. And while there is lots of evidence of that occurring in North America, it becomes abundantly obvious as soon as you look outside the continent, particularly to developing countries such as China and India. As Don Dodge says, it is the “first screen.”

In those countries, a mobile phone may be the closest that someone ever gets to a computer or the Internet, apart from using one at school, or in a library or town hall — a distinction that North American companies likely have a difficult time remembering. The New York Times has a fascinating story about a company called TenCent that is taking full advantage of the central place that mobiles appear to have in the lives of Chinese youth.

From the sounds of it, TenCent started with a simple instant-messaging tool for phones called QQ, and has evolved into a full-fledged micro-entertainment service with games, social apps, avatars and so on. If you want a picture of what it involves, think of something like HabboHotel.com (with tiny avatars and games) mixed with MySpace and MSN, all powered by a World of Warcraft-style virtual currency called Q coins. The Chinese government even warned recently that Q-coins were becoming a real-life currency, with people trading virtual game points for real-world services.

One QQ user in the NYT story — a 21-year-old university student — says that he is using some QQ service or other for three to five hours a day. That is mind-boggling. According to some estimates, QQ has more than 150 million users, 9 million of whom are online at any one time. And TenCent continues to roll out new features and services. I think Om Malik is right when he says that social networking is a feature that is showing up in many different places.

The intrepid Ionut Alex. Chitu of the blog Google Operating System has apparently stumbled across a new Google app — a PowerPoint-style presentation service called Presently (it’s unclear whether that’s an internal code name or a real product name). As my friend Paul Kedrosky notes, this would effectively complete the Google “anti-Office,” the office-style suite that CEO Eric Schmidt has repeatedly denied building.

Like Paul and others — including my fellow mesh organizer Mark Evans — I find myself using Google’s Docs more and more in order to have documents available to me wherever I am, without having to worry about which version I have, or carrying them around on a thumb drive. And the mesh group got huge mileage out of what used to be called Writely thanks to the online collaboration tools. Speaking of which, could we please go back to the name Writely instead of Google Docs and Spreadsheets?

On a related note, I suppose this means the founders of Thumbstacks.com and other online presentation services should either be looking at adding features to differentiate themselves (online collaboration a la Vyew perhaps). Or they could always sell themselves on eBay like online calendar app Kiko did awhile back, eventually being bought by Toronto-based Tucows.

The Viacom takedown notice — in which the entertainment conglomerate told YouTube to take down more than 100,000 video clips that infringe on the company’s copyrights — has sparked a back-and-forth between the forces of good and evil, or freedom and restraint, or lawlessness and justice, or (fill in your favourite diametrically opposed positions here).

In one corner we have Cory Doctorow, former director with the Electronic Freedom Foundation, who writes on BoingBoing about Viacom terrorizing YouTube by abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, sending letters about any content that has a keyword in common with a piece of Viacom content. And in the other corner is Mark Cuban, billionaire sports team owner, media mogul and blogosphere gadfly, who says that YouTube is deliberately withholding filtering methods it could be using to block copyrighted content.

Mark, of course, has a history as far as YouTube and its, er… liberal definition of copyright infringement is concerned. A few days before Google acquired YouTube, Mark said that “only a moron” would buy it because of copyright concerns. Then YouTube announced agreements with CBS (which used to be part of Viacom), Universal, Sony BMG and others that saw the company agree to pay content owners and put in place copyright filters.

So who is right? Cory, with his complaint that Viacom is using legal means to beat up on YouTube, or Mark, with his argument that YouTube is playing dumb? I would argue both are right (Don Dodge has an answer for Cory’s argument about false positives here). Viacom is hitting YouTube with DMCA notices because it wants a better deal, and as a content owner it has that right. And YouTube is taking advantage of the leeway it has under the law.

Copyright law is a trade-off, as it should be, between the rights of a content creator and/or owner, and the broader interests of society in being able to make use of that content. Just as Napster was before it, YouTube is caught at the intersection of those two opposing forces.

Well, Scoble has gone and done it again, it seems. He agreed to accept a speaking engagement from none other than PayPerPost, everyone’s favourite blogosphere whipping boy. At first, the deal was that they would pay him for appearing, as well as paying for his flight and accommodations, but John Furrier and PodTech apparently decided that wasn’t such a great idea — poor “optics,” as the political types like to say — and so he turned it down.

Duncan Riley says that Scoble “has balls” for doing the speech, but also that he has become “a paid shill” for the company, and that he has every right to “whore his presence.” I think we’re back to where we were just the other day when the latest PayPerPost brouhaha erupted (which I wrote about here). Everyone is being held up against an impossible standard, just because PayPerPost is seen as the blogosphere’s version of a “sidewalk hooker,” — as Scoble’s friend and co-author Shel Israel says in his disapproving comment.

So Scoble was going to get a fee for speaking at a blogging conference. Big deal. Speakers at conferences get paid all the time, and even if they don’t get an honorarium, they usually get free plane flights and hotel rooms and food. That’s how it works. Is this conference somehow different because PayPerPost is sponsoring it? Like Jason at Webomatica, I think more disclosure is definitely good, but I don’t see why he should be subjected to a public flogging. He’s not speaking at the Aryan Party’s annual meeting, for pete’s sake. Mike says he’s making a mistake.

PayPerPost may not be the model that I would like to see bloggers adopt, but it is one of the alternative for people who don’t get enough traffic to make their blog pay, and it has definitely gotten better since it launched. According to an email I got from CEO Ted Murphy, the company will soon be launching a new feature that would place a disclosure button (with a rollover ad included) at the bottom of any post sponsored by an advertiser, although it will be up to the advertiser to decide whether to use that feature.

Update:

Tony Hung has a long and thoughtful post on the subject of the “impossible standard” bloggers are being held to. And both Duncan Riley at 901am and Jim Kukral of Blogkits (which I use, in the interests of full disclosure) think that Ted Murphy of PayPerPost is a marketing genius.

If YouTube thought that it was out of the woods when it signed those content deals with CBS, Sony BMG and other content owners — on the eve of its acquisition by Google — it looks like it was wrong. Viacom slapped the video-sharing site with a takedown notice on Friday, saying YouTube hosts more than 100,000 videos of copyrighted content, including clips from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and other Comedy Central favourites.

According to a statement from Viacom:

“After months of ongoing discussions with YouTube and Google, it has become clear that YouTube is unwilling to come to a fair market agreement that would make Viacom content available to YouTube users.”

The company said that the recent addition of YouTube videos to the video search function on Google “compounds this issue.”

But wait — haven’t we seen this movie before? Indeed we have. Viacom sent a nastygram to YouTube back in October telling it to do the same thing, and many Jon Stewart clips vanished overnight from the massive video site (although in most cases it was only full-length shows rather than clips). But then it seemed as though the TV networks were starting to see the benefit of exposing their content to millions of fans — CBS said that viewing shows on the web increases viewership, and NBC put dozens of clips from its show Saturday Night Live up on the site.

What seems to have happened is that Viacom has either gotten tired of waiting for YouTube to install the copyright management system it described when it signed the deals with CBS and others, or it wants more money to allow its content to remain on the site. The company’s statement said:

“Filtering tools promised repeatedly by YouTube and Google have not been put in place, and they continue to host and stream vast amounts of unauthorized video. YouTube and Google retain all of the revenue generated from this practice, without extending fair compensation to the people who have expended all of the effort and cost to create it.”

In other words, pay up or take it down.

Digg continues to try and tweak its social-bookmarking service to make it harder to spam and “game” the system. But is it destroying the community at the same time? According to his post at the Digg blog, co-founder Kevin Rose believes that removing the list of top Diggers from the front page will help reduce the incentive for gaming the system — by Digging whatever your friends are Digging, among other things, or paying top Diggers to submit your site.

And yet, as my friend Tony Hung points out at Deep Jive Interests, getting your name on that top Diggers list is a significant incentive for people to submit links in the first place. What happens when that incentive is removed? (Tony thinks the changes are unlikely to cure the gaming problem anyway). Digg has so far resisted the idea of paying top submitters, a policy Jason Calacanis introduced when he Digg-ified Netscape.com.

In his post, Kevin says that Digg plans to introduce ways of helping Diggers find other Diggers with similar interests, and seems to suggest that the top Diggers list has outlived its usefulness, saying it “was created in the early days of Digg when there was a strong focus on encouraging people to submit content.” The implication is that with more than 5,000 submissions a day (and more than 50 million Diggs in two years), Digg doesn’t need to give people that incentive any more. Is that true? Digg is going to find out.

As Scott Karp (who writes about the recent Digg move here) says in a recent post, companies like Digg live by the community and die by the community. Steve O’Hear at ZDNet has some thoughts about the Digg move, and Josh Bokardo thinks Digg may be in for a surprise. Steve Rubel thinks Digg needs to start paying Diggers or it may be doomed. Mark Evans has a take on the recent move too. And there actually seems to be some support for the idea of removing the top Diggers list on the Digg site itself.

Update:

Jason Calacanis says he doesn’t think the latest change will work, and notes that thanks to Digg’s open API, it didn’t take long for someone to create a top Diggers list. And Chris Messina has an interesting post comparing community to the environment, and shifts like Digg’s recent one to changing weather patterns.

Update 2:

Svetlana Gladkova of Profy has an interview with a top Digger from Poland named Chrisek, who says that the changes won’t make much difference to Digg, and that they won’t affect him because he Diggs things for fun. And SEORefugee has some thoughts from another top Digger.

I have a lot of respect for Jeff Jarvis. He’s been pushing the social-media thing longer than just about anyone, and he knows a lot about the media business. And I think Jason Calacanis is a smart guy too, although I know he gets on a lot of peoples’ nerves. But I don’t get why the mere mention of PayPerPost.com seems to drive both of them completely off the deep end (Scott Karp gets into it at The Blog Herald too). There’s a moralistic tone to the whole subject that I find odd.

In the latest installment of the saga, Jeff and some other smart people at the AlwaysOn conference slammed the company and its compensation model for bloggers, and then Ted Murphy — CEO of the company — stood up and took issue with some of what Jeff and the panel said. The company requires that bloggers disclose that they are being paid, he pointed out (although Jeff rightly noted that this came only after pressure from the blogosphere).

Then Jeff makes fun of the fact that Murphy has a TV crew following him, and compares him to the ill-fated Bubble 1.0 company that was the subject of the movie Startup, something that is echoed by Valleywag. And Jason Calacanis says the PayPerPost “scam” and “train wreck” is coming off the rails and that the “most hated company” on the Web is doomed.

I thought PayPerPost was bad too (although I didn’t call it a “cancer” like some people), because it didn’t require bloggers to disclose that they were being compensated. But now it does, even if that disclosure comes in the form of an overall policy, rather than something that is declared on a per-post basis. And there are plenty of other ways for bloggers to be compensated and become conflicted. What makes Ted Murphy into Satan all of a sudden?

Jeff’s post in particular has a real lecturing tone to it that I find irritating. He holds PayPerPost up to public ridicule, accuses them of giving parents the tools to exploit their children (like parents haven’t been doing that for centuries anyway — and check the comment on Jeff’s blog from the mother he mentions in his post), and then makes fun of the CEO for promoting his company.

Is the startup reality show idea stupid? No doubt. But no stupider than lots of other things. For more on this topic, check out WinExtra’s blog and ZDNet’s Larry Dignan’s balanced take, as well as a nicely-written rant from Jeneane Sessum at Allied, and another over at The Last Podcast.

It’s been like watching a pot bubble over on the stove today, watching the pissed-off Flickr fans — including prominent blogger and Zooomr CEO Thomas Hawk — venting about having to switch to a Yahoo login. A simple enough thing, right? Stop using the Flickr login and start using a Yahoo one. I did it months ago, and it really wasn’t a big deal. I had a Yahoo login from way back when I used to use My Yahoo as a home page, and so it was a slam-dunk.

Many of the people on the forums at Flickr have said the same thing — big deal, get over it you big babies, Flickr is owned by Yahoo now, they’ve been saying for months that this would happen, etc., etc. And all of that is true. But it also doesn’t help the die-hard Flickr fans from the “Old Skool” who have been there since it was a startup (started in Vancouver, incidentally) and feel like they are getting the short end of the stick from big, bad Yahoo.

This has obviously created an opportunity for some other photo sites, one of which is offering Flickr “refugees” a discount to move their accounts over, but more than anything the 10 pages of comments on the Flickr forum about the move is a sign of how big a mountain users can make out of what Yahoo and Flickr no doubt see as a programming molehill. To them, no doubt, it is a simple data management shift, but to users, it is an emotional train-wreck.

My friend Scott Karp has a very insightful post on the whole mess. As he puts it, if you live by the community, you will die by the community. If your service relies on the “user-generated content” of millions of people, then every move you make will be watched by some sizeable proportion of those users, and the success or failure of those moves — and, theoretically, of your entire company — is dependent on how you handle them. Fair warning.

P.S. At this point, nothing whatsoever about the 10 pages or the blog uproar on the Flickr blog. And there’s some back-and-forth between Anil Dash of SixApart and Thomas Hawk over the Flickr changes on Anil’s blog. Factory Joe (Chris Messina) has some thoughts as well, including the fact that he thinks this shows the need for an OpenID standard, and Tara says community isn’t just a big love-in all the time, and that’s just the way it is.

So I saw Steve Rubel’s post about Technorati launching a new buzz-tracking, Digg-like thing and the first thing I thought was “WTF?” I know that’s the name of it — or was, since it’s apparently been yanked now — but I meant it in the original blogosphere/instant messaging sense of “what the f**?” Among other things, why would Technorati bother trying to reproduce something like Digg this late in the game?

Unlike some people, I’m totally okay with the name (which apparently stands for “Where’s The Fire?”). It plays off the other meaning of WTF, which could add to the buzz, and I think it’s kind of funny. But why? And not just why launch something that appears to duplicate Digg — like dozens of other copycat sites, many of which use the Pligg open-source Digg platform — but why launch something that seems to have taken its servers down with it?

After all, it’s not as though Technorati has been sailing along as smooth as glass. There continue to be regular system issues, unexplained and sudden down-time, complaints about technorati’s blog-ranking numbers and so on. As someone commented at Darren Rowse’s Problogger: “How about they fix everything else that’s broken on their site before launching a new service?” A fair point.

Update:

The site seems to have re-launched, with an explanation from Dave Sifry about how it works. If I understand it correctly, it seems that Technorati is asking users to write an explanation of why a particular search topic or subject is important, and then other users can vote that explanation up or down.