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I could have written a post about Google CEO Eric Schmidt joining the Apple board of directors (GooglePod, here we come) or about Universal Music trying out an ad-supported music service (all crapped up with DRM of course), but instead of climbing the Techmeme mountain I wanted to point to an interesting post from PBS columnist Robert X. Cringely about the recent Sony purchase of online video-sharing site Grouper.

Cringely’s view of the reasoning behind the deal is a variation on my theory, which is that Sony is basically desperate. They know that the movie game is changing somehow, and that these changes could possibly make things bad for movie studios, but they don’t really know much apart from that. The New York Times says big stars don’t even help sell movies any more. Should they release movies for download? Should they try fake “viral” campaigns like Snakes on a Plane? Or should they hire a guy to drop Mentos into a Coke?

Cringely’s take is that the Grouper buy represents Sony’s attempt at a kind of market research — a window onto the Internet, to see what gets popular and how, so that they can try to figure out how the heck to rejig their giant Hollywood machine. As the columnist points out, it is becoming increasingly possible for performers such as Frank Caliendo to emerge, become popular and potentially make a decent living without ever having touched the traditional media industry in any normal way. If I were Sony I would be doing a little research too.

Three guesses what the big story in the blogosphere and tech-o-sphere is this morning. Here’s a hint: It starts with the word Google, and ends with the word Office. I’ll say one thing — like my friend Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0, I wish the search company would stop protesting about how it isn’t really competing with Microsoft, and just cut to the chase and say “Game on.”

Despite what the online Office skeptics say (and Kent Newsome has a point about large-scale corporate use of such apps), the future of applications like Word has to include the Web, and so far Microsoft hasn’t exactly been a shining example of how to do that. The battle has been joined, and Google is likely to be a powerful competitor — and its number one strength is that it doesn’t have a gigantic legacy business model to protect. The more Microsoft tries to accommodate users with a free online product, the more it eats into its massive Office profit margins.

The bottom line for me is that competition is good, and new features that encourage collaboration are good (my friend Paul Kedrosky says he is impressed with Google’s app package — so far). Microsoft has dominated the Office market to the point where there has been virtually no competition, and there hasn’t exactly been a lot of innovation either. If Google can help push things forward and engage in a little creative disruption, so much the better.

Update:

It hasn’t gotten quite as much attention as the Office wars, but I think another Google announcement is almost more interesting, and that is the deal with eBay to collaborate on ads and (more importantly) click-to-call features on eBay’s international properties. According to the Yahoo story, this arrangement will involve both Google Talk and Skype. Now that could be interesting.

Okay, I will admit up front that I have way too much time on my hands, and probably shouldn’t be as fascinated as I am with the real story behind some webcam clips by someone calling themselves “lonelygirl15” on YouTube — but at least I’m not the only one. Unbeknownst to me when I wrote my first post on it a little while ago, TV writer Virginia Heffernan at the New York Times was also following the tale of Bree and her boyfriend Daniel (see here and here and here, whose video clips are consistently among the most-viewed on YouTube (Business Week media writer Jon Fine has also been writing about it).

Her latest update delves into one of the popular theories about Bree, who from her videos appears to be the home-schooled daughter of religious — and possibly missionary — parents. The theory is that the clips are “viral” ads for some kind of forthcoming movie or other production, although there are just as many who believe Bree (who has had an email conversation with Ms. Heffernan at the Times) is a real person. The NYT blogger’s latest post refers to one of the proponents of the “Bree is fake” theory, a filmmaker named Brian Flemming who has written extensively about it on his own blog, and raises the possibility of an interesting twist: that he could actually be the one behind what he is debunking (he says he isn’t).

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice in Wonderland said. Is Bree a more elaborate version of a kind of Blair Witch web campaign? Perhaps. Does it really matter if she is real? Probably not. But I find myself fascinated nevertheless. If nothing else, I find it interesting how quickly people — even regular, non-media people — jumped to the conclusion that it was fake.

Update:

In other YouTube mystery-related news, the New York Times has a piece about “FunTwo” — the Asian guitar wizard who plays an incredible version of Pachelbel’s Canon on the electric guitar. Virginia Heffernan revealed his identity on her blog earlier this month.

I don’t want Nick “The Prophet of Doom” Carr to feel bad, but another blogger has usurped his place as my favourite Web 2.0 skeptic: he writes the Dead 2.0 blog, a refreshingly critical and quite often witty look at the bubblicious goings-on at TechCrunch and elsewhere. An anonymous blogger known only as The Skeptic, he runs buzzwords like RSS past his mom to see whether she can make heads or tails of them, and he takes a hard look at new Web 2.0-ish services such as Kaneva and the new VOIP service Hullo.

In one of his latest posts, The Skeptic looks at the recent trend of venture capitalists investing in blog networks such as Om Malik’s at gigaom. He even does some original reporting, by emailing Om and Paul Kedrosky (also a skeptic on this particular issue), and my blogger/tech writer colleague Mark Evans from the National Post. Strangely, he didn’t reach out to yours truly for my thoughts on the issue; it’s possible he was intimidated by the overpowering intellect displayed in this blog, and felt shy about approaching me 🙂

All jokes aside, The Skeptic’s feed should be part of your daily blogosphere intake, regardless of your thoughts about the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

I don’t usually like to take shots at competing media (okay, that’s not really true — I kind of enjoy it), but the piece of “news analysis” over at CNet speculating about the value of YouTube has kind of gotten under my skin. I know it’s tempting to take the money that Sony paid for Grouper and divide it by the number of users and then multiply by YouTube’s user base, because I and many others in the blogosphere did exactly that when the news first came out earlier this week.

But at least TechCrunch threw in some caveats about the ComScore numbers for Grouper, and several other people — including Cynthia Brumfield at IPDemocracy and Rafat Ali at PaidContent — have mentioned that the Sony purchase had little to do with the number of users and everything to do with the company’s peer-to-peer technology. The CNet article has a somewhat skeptical comment from an analyst about whether YouTube is really worth $1-billion, but says nothing about how the figure was arrived at based on the Grouper deal, or why there would be any problem with doing simple multiplication based on dodgy traffic figures.

To make matters worse, the piece dredges up a piece in Business Week from March that said Facebook was looking to get bought for $2-billion — a piece that was also widely criticized for being based on little more than a rumour, and was subsequently denied by two Facebook founders. That’s not much depth from an article that goes under the heading of “news analysis.” It makes the bubblicious piece in Business Week about Kevin Rose of Digg look like investigative journalism (Business Week has also jumped into the YouTube valuation pool).

Oh, and one more thing (I can’t resist): the dollar values that have been paid for other companies do not “beg the question” of how much YouTube is worth. They raise the question — begging the question means something else entirely.

Amazon doesn’t get a whole lot of love from the “Web 2.0” crowd most of the time — perhaps because it’s kind of a Web 1.0 company that just sells books and other stuff, and happens to use the Web to do it. The giant retailer has added some wiki-type features and other interactivity, but other than that it’s pretty much just a retailer. Bo-ring. Except, of course, for the odd announcement like this one, about Amazon providing what amounts to “grid computing” services — a distributed server network that Web companies can effectively use as their own back-end network.

Nik Cubrilovic, who is a smart guy and runs a Web-based backup company called OmniDrive, has the details at TechCrunch. Apparently (warning: I am not a hardware guy), companies can effectively create a virtual server structured in any way they wish and then upload that image to Amazon’s equipment — that is, its S3 network — and then their service treats that virtual server as though it was just down the hall in a machine room. Users are charged for CPU usage and bandwidth at what appear to be fairly competitive rates (although Nik has some concerns there). We Break Stuff likes it.

This sounds a lot like what Sun Microsystems has been trying to do with its Grid Computing solution, which the struggling server maker — which put the dot in Web 1.0, to paraphrase its famous slogan — launched in 2004, but has apparently had some trouble getting rolling (and getting customers for). By way of a quick comparison, Amazon charges 10 cents per CPU hour for its service, while Sun charges $1 per CPU hour — although I’m sure there are differences of which I am not aware. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote a blog post with some background about Sun’s grid efforts back in March.

Update:

There’s a good look at and discussion of Amazon’s EC2 here, and some good comments about its benefits and/or weaknesses at the Reddit page about the announcement here.

Anyone who followed the development of mesh, the Web 2.0 conference (sorry O’Reilly) that I helped organize back in May, will know that one of my fellow organizers was a guy named Mike McDerment, co-founder and CEO of a company that was then called SecondSite — Mike’s connections within the Web startup and DemoCamp scene in Toronto and elsewhere really helped us get some grassroots support for mesh, which was invaluable. Plus he’s a really nice guy, which always helps 🙂

Around the same time as mesh was taking shape, Mike’s company was re-branding itself as FreshBooks (something he announced at mesh) and adding some new features to what was already a pretty killer product — an Web-based invoicing system for small and medium-sized businesses that is dead simple to use. It’s nice to see that the hard work Mike and his team have put in over the past little while has gotten some recognition from TechCrunch, which profiled the company on Wednesday.

Congrats, Mike.

In a lottery-like windfall settlement that likely has the champagne flowing at Creative Labs’ headquarters, the compay has just gotten a cheque from Apple for $100-million (U.S.), thanks to a patent on the navigation system used in the Creative Zen players and — as it turns out — the ridiculously successful Apple iPod (and just about every other MP3 music player out there, including my second-hand Dell DJ). As usual, Steve Jobs summed it up best, by saying: “Creative is very fortunate to have been granted this early patent.” I’ll say. Staci over at PaidContent quite rightly calls this comment a candidate for understatement of the year.

It is kind of ironic — as I think one commenter at the unofficial Apple weblog mentioned — that a company whose name is Creative has resorted to suing its much more successful competitor rather than trying to outperform Apple on features, but the patent system is the patent system (broken or not), and Creative beat Apple to the punch by several months in filing the Zen patent. At one point, Apple asked the company for help with what would become the iPod, but they couldn’t agree on terms. Would it have been better for Creative to have been partners rather than adversaries? Who can say. At any rate, $100-million makes up for a lot of mistakes.

I must admit I was somewhat interested when I saw a mention of Dave Winer’s new (or not so new, depending on whom you read) mobile “river of news” thingamajig — if only because I have used a BlackBerry and a Treo and a UTStarcom Windows device to read RSS feeds, and have yet to find anything that I really like. Google’s mobile version of its Reader comes close, but it has its flaws too. So I checked out the mobile feed that Dave set up for the New York Times, and for the BBC, and it looked OK. But it still was kind of klunky in a way that is difficult to describe, as far as navigation is concerned.

There were a couple of other things that rubbed me the wrong way too, and others have put them into words for me: Paul Kedrosky, for example, was one of the ones who noted that this type of feed is hardly new — as did Rogers Cadenhead, who admittedly has a somewhat fractious past involving Mr. Winer and some lawyers and so forth, and Josh Bancroft (although Josh seems to have modified his thoughts somewhat since).

As usual when Dave is involved, one of the irritants was just the way he puts things — not just grandstanding, as he does about how much money he makes, but also the cryptic comments that make it obvious he’s trying to get back at someone. My buddy Kent Newsome does a good job of describing this Winer M.O., although he is much kinder that I usually am.

As for the idea that Dave’s rivers of news will be easier for people to read than existing solutions, how easy is it to have to bookmark a new URL for every new mobile feed? I get the fact that he’s working on something like mobile Bloglines, which Josh said changed his mind about the whole thing — I just don’t see why he has to pretend that it’s some kind of revolution. Ian Betteridge wonders too, and as usual, Shelley has her own caustic and hilarious take on it.

So Sony Pictures has gone and bought Grouper, the online video site, for $65-million (U.S.). Okay — hands up, anyone who has heard of and/or used Grouper, apart from reading about it at TechCrunch or Mashable or some other Web 2.0 site. Pretty much what I figured. Although it is a half-decent looking service from what I can tell, it is one of half a dozen video-sharing solutions out there, and is unremarkable other than the fact that it requires you to download a standalone Windows app (a negative in my view) and it has a peer-to-peer aspect to it (Note: In the comments below, Sean says the download is only required if you want to share videos privately).

According to the math that TechCrunch came up with on a per-user basis, using ComScore data, Sony appears to be paying $70 to $120 per unique visitor (and that’s visitor, not user), compared with other recent deals for iFilm and Atom/Shockwave at about $15 to $20 a unique visitor. The one caveat, of course — as with anything that involves traffic metrics — is that ComScore’s half a million uniques is dramatically lower than the company’s own estimate of 8 million. If you use Grouper’s figure, the per-unique is about $8.

Doing some quick math, TechCrunch comes up with a figure of $2-billion for YouTube, which will make co-founder Chad Hurley happy, since the highest we’ve seen so far is $1-billion, a figure that more or less came out of thin air (using ComScore’s traffic from June and the multiple of $15 to $20 per unique, YouTube would be worth about $300-million). Does that make any sense? Maybe to a desperate movie studio or entertainment conglomerate it would (which Om points out Sony most certainly is), but that remains to be seen.

As for what Sony has in mind for Grouper, the talk is about pay-for-downloads and so on, which in typical Sony fashion will no doubt be low-quality and all crapped up with DRM. Davis Freeberg congratulates Grouper for pulling one over on Sony, while Duncan Riley says it’s just a matter of time before Sony render Grouper “so unworkable, unusable and undesirable that it will die an inglorious death.”

Rafat at PaidContent says the site has a solid management team, and maybe Sony deserves some credit for realizing when they need help, while Cynthia at IPDemocracy says it’s about speed to market. Rafat and Cynthia are very kind 🙂