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Now I am really famous: doing a laptop web-cam interview with none other than Loren Feldman of 1938media, who was on our Future of Media panel at mesh (thanks again, Loren). Unlike Rob, I asked Loren to keep his shirt on 🙂 Sorry about the whole table-shaking thing — that’s why I’m in print.

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My friend Tony Hung from Deep Jive Interests — who was a one-man live-blogging machine at our recent mesh conference, as well as being on a panel (about the future of journalism, coincidentally enough) — has a great post about Yahoo’s sudden realization that search isn’t all that important any more. If those comments sound like sour grapes to you, you’re not the only one.

Tony’s point is that Yahoo is talking about how “personalization” is the future, rather than pure search, and to him (and me) that sounds a lot like what social networks such as Facebook do. So does Yahoo wish they had coughed up the $1-billion or whatever it was to buy Facebook when they had the chance? I expect they do. Imagine how thrilled they will be when Google does a deal to drive the search inside Facebook (not that I know anything, but I could see it happening at some point).

Go read Tony’s whole post. Thought-provoking.

I’ve seen a demo of BumpTop — the three-dimensional desktop/file interface developed by Anand Agarawala of Toronto as part of his master’s thesis at the University of Toronto — but watching him demo it at the TED conference adds a certain something. I’m trying to picture this somehow being merged with Jeff Han’s touch interface, or Microsoft’s “Surface” interface. Very cool. In case you’re interested, Anand also apparently does nerd-core rapping.

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Rex Sorgatz, who works for MSNBC and also writes an eclectic and insightful blog at Fimoculous.com, has launched something at the news site that I think is a great effort at harnessing Digg-style voting power in the context of a news event — and in a much more interesting way than the typical user poll or survey. It’s called iPredict (I’m going to forgive Rex the use of the now-ubiquitous “i” prefix), and it creates a real-time graph of user votes on a particular outcome, such as whether Harry Potter dies in the final book. You can see how many people voted and the history of earlier votes. Very cool. Rex has an overview of the thinking behind iPredict (and a great Marshall McLuhan quote) on his blog.

Online music service Lala.com — which until recently was aimed at trading music CDs — has remade itself in a rather dramatic way by launching a free music-streaming service that automatically syncs with your iPod, and by signing a licensing deal with Warner Brothers Records. As Gizmodo describes it, Lala scans all the music you own — whether it’s from ripped CDs or downloaded music in iTunes — and then lets you listen to it anywhere (streaming through your Web browser) for free. In other words, it assumes that you own it. Lala founder Bill Nguyen has a string of startups on his resume, including Onebox.com, which he sold in 2000 for $850-million.

In addition to the free streaming service, Lala has a pay-for-download store, which (at least to begin with) will be selling only albums — for between $6.50 and $13.50 each — rather than individual songs. Lala is clearly hoping that the appeal of free streaming will convince users to adopt the service and then they will be more likely to buy music there as well. As an added feature, Lala has also developed a way of letting you “sideload” music into your iPod through your browser, without having to download it and then import it into iTunes. The service apparently only works with iPods.

It will be interesting to see whether Lala’s streaming service gets slammed by the major record labels (apart from Warner, of course, which seems to be willing to take a leap of faith that it will lead to more downloads). Michael Robertson, the serial entrepreneur behind services such as The Gizmo Project and Linspire — a Linux-based alternative to Windows — tried something similar several years ago with Mp3.com and was effectively shut down by legal threats from the music industry.

His service allowed you to put a CD in your computer, have it scanned and then immediately listen to the music from it without having to rip and upload it all to the company’s servers (Mp3.com ripped CDs and created a library of songs). Lala’s service is slightly different in that someone has to upload the songs — but each song only has to be uploaded once. Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Freedom Foundation, says this may help protect the service from legal attacks.

“This is different from what MP3.com was up to with BeamIt (and for which they were sued) because the *initial* copy is uploaded by the users. MP3.com made the initial copies themselves.

Why does this matter? Because of the DMCA safe harbor that applies to hosting material on behalf of users. Pretty clever lawyering — wish I’d thought of that back in 1999.”

A more recent service Robertson launched called AnywhereCD lets you buy a CD and immediately download the tracks as non-DRM-protected mp3 files (the CD is delivered by regular mail). Although the service had a licensing arrangement with Warner Brothers, the record label forced AnywhereCD to remove its music by filing a lawsuit against the company (AnywhereCD has counter-sued). AnywhereCD also allows you to “sideload” songs into your iTunes, into a locker at another Robertson-owned music service called Mp3tunes.com or onto a mobile device.

Lala’s bet is definitely a risky one — and an expensive one: the company, which has raised $14-million from several venture capital groups including Bain Capital, says it expects to pay more than $140-million to the record industry over the next couple of years, and admits it will likely lose about $40-million in the period. Sounds like a great business model, doesn’t it?

In the end, Lala faces the same challenges as any other music service (apart from the dumb name, of course): will it be able to offer enough variety and selection to appeal to enough users to make it worthwhile? To me, one of the big issues is the album-only part — I think people have gotten a little too used to buying individual songs for that to fly (I know I have). It also remains to be seen whether Apple will get upset that the sideloading feature effectively bypasses its iTunes software (Susan Kevorkian of IDC says Apple may be just fine with it).

Would free streaming and the sideloading feature make you likely to try Lala? Jupiter Research analyst David Card has some thoughts here, and Liz Gannes at GigaOm says Lala should be congratulated for taking a risk.

In contrast to the usual whining and moaning about how Google News and other similar aggregators are killing journalism and ruining the newspaper business, the World Association of Newspapers heard from someone who believes that Google and Yahoo can help to save newspapers, and perhaps even get teenagers to start reading them:

“After a five-minute delay Mike Smith, executive director of the Media Management Centre, part of America’s Northwestern University, took to the stage with some good news.

And it was radical news. Rather than website news aggregation services such as Yahoo News killing newspapers, they can actually save newspapers’ networks of foreign bureaux. Not only that, they can actually achieve the near impossible and prompt teens to start reading newspapers.”

Smith went on to talk about how the joint venture between Yahoo and a dozen large newspaper companies, including McClatchy (which now owns Knight Ridder) has helped papers cut costs and has saved more than a few foreign bureaus.

I don’t want to be mean, but I just can’t help myself. I know Guy Kawasaki is a legend for his marketing work with Apple, and a lot of people find his blog to be very useful — despite what appears to be an addiction to the age-old cliche of the “Top 10 Reasons Why…” style of blog post. Whatever. It takes all kinds. But his latest post about the creation of his Digg-style rumour site Truemors just stuck in my craw for a whole bunch of reasons.

It’s not just the sort of self-satisfied tone of the whole post, as though Guy had somehow invented the wheel, or cured cancer. And it’s not just the rampant over-use of Web jargon like “Long Tail” and “Social Media.” Those are bad enough, mind you. But what really bugs me is that I’m not sure Guy has created anything at all — at least not anything of value — and therefore the entire thrust of his post is completely undermined. What he should really be saying is “How I Wasted $12,107 On a Site That Serves No Purpose.” Seriously — Truemors makes Digg look like a collaborative effort to reproduce the works of Shakespeare.

Setting up a site like Truemors is hardly rocket science. I built one based on the open-source Digg clone Pligg, and it took me about four hours to configure on my server — and it definitely cost me a lot less than $12,107. Did it have any value? No. The only thing that could possibly give Guy’s site some value is if it spontaneously developed a thriving community the way Digg and Slashdot and Metafilter have.

Is Guy’s name and a couple of nasty blog posts at TechCrunch enough to do that? I doubt it. If he had paid me $12,000 in consulting fees, I could have told him that. The only upside is that pre-Web 2.0, Guy would have blown at least $30-million or so building a crap website that no one would ever go to.

My friend Paul Kedrosky — who unfortunately wasn’t able to make it to mesh last week, and therefore wasn’t able to share any of his wisdom in person — is right to point us towards a great post from Marc Andreesen about the non-bubblishness of the current tech bubble.

The Netscape co-founder has a long and very worthwhile analysis of why we so often see bubbles. which are actually extremely rare (this NYT story has some thoughts on that as well), and also notes several things about the current tech “bubble” that make it different from the first one — and he is ideally placed to have some perspective on that. Among other things, he notes that there are far fewer tech IPOs now (and therefore less hype and potential for financial disaster) and also that:

— It is far cheaper to start an Internet business today than it was in the late 90’s.

— The market for Internet businesses today is much larger than it was in the late 90’s.

— Business models for Internet businesses today are much more solid than they were in the late 90’s.

This is a logical consequence of time passing, technology getting more broadly adopted, and the Internet going mainstream as a consumer phenomenon.

Andreesen says that he believes it is “about 10 times cheaper to start an Internet business today than it was in the late 90’s, due to commodity hardware, open source software, modern programming technologies, cheap bandwidth, the rise of third-party ad networks, and other infrastructure factors. And the market size for a new Internet business is about 10 times bigger than it was in the late 90’s.”

Great post by Ryan Sholin — whose blog Invisible Inkling has become one of the top media-related blogs I surf through every day — giving a top 10 list of things you should know about newspapers and the Internet, many of which are phrased in such a way as to be a response to popular misconceptions, such as the idea that the industry’s problems are all Google’s fault, or craigslist’s fault, and so on.

As a journalist, I particularly like number 10. Go read the whole post.

I don’t want to get all mushy or anything, but I would just like to echo what my fellow mesh 2007 organizer Stuart MacDonald said in one of his speeches to the crowd — either at the end of the second day or after the speakers’ dinner on Wednesday, I can’t remember which: We could not have done this without you. And that’s not just a nice thing to say — it’s true.

And by “you,” I mean all the attendees, all the speakers, all the people who asked questions and made great comments, and all the people who have since said so many great things about the conference (Tony Hung has some links here, and there are more on the mesh blog) that it’s hard to keep up with them all. As Stuart said, we just created the structure that made it possible for something wonderful to happen — you are the ones who ensured that it did happen.

I have so many personal highlights from mesh that it’s difficult to list them all. Doing the keynote interview with Mike Arrington (and hanging out with him after the keynote and at the after-party) was obviously a big highlight, and the keynote that Mark Evans did with craigslist CEO was also hugely entertaining — as I mentioned in a post below. But there were tons of other moments too, like chatting with Mike Masnick of Techdirt (I am a huge fan) at the speakers’ dinner, as well as Lionel Menchaca, Dell’s head blogger, who is a great guy and has done some amazing things at that company with social media.

Talking about crowdsourcing and newspapers with Jeff Howe of Wired magazine was also a highlight, since it’s an area I am keenly interested in, and so was talking with the lovely and talented Christine Herron, ex of the Omidyar Network. And Toronto-born Rachel Sklar of Huffington Post’s Eat The Press is about as fantastic as a person can get — she lit up both the panel she was on as well as the speakers’ dinner and after-party, and pretty much any room she was in or table she was at throughout the conference.

Loren Feldman of 1938media is not only hilarious — and clearly a workaholic, since he had already done two videos before even arriving at the pre-mesh cocktail party, one from the hotel bathtub — but also a stand-up guy. And so is Ethan Kaplan, the head of technology at Warner Brothers Records, who is so smart that at times he made my head hurt.

In other words, just an incomparable couple of days — right off the charts. And all because of you (and of course my partners Rob and Mike and Stuart and Mark). If you have any links, or pictures, or a blog post, or even just thoughts, please send or post them and tell us where they are. I’ve included some below. (photo by Pema Hagen)

mesh links:

— Flickr photos here
— Technorati tag: mesh07
— mDialogue video (thanks a lot to Greg and his team)
— Tony Hung live-blogged a whole pile of sessions
— Mark Dowds
— Mike Arrington and his underwear (courtesy of Loren Feldman)
— Cynthia Brumfield on the underwear (I’m sensing a theme here)
— PayPerPost CEO Ted Murphy’s thoughts
— some thoughts from panelist Christine Herron on Mike Arrington’s media keynote
— Tom Williams (whose keynote with Austin Hill was mentioned by many as a highlight)
— Rachel’s post at Eat The Press (I have expressed my apologies for what is referred to later on in the post)
— the Arrington/Ted Murphy “most evil man in the room” comment makes Wired’s blog
— Dell head blogger Lionel Menchaca.
— podcaster and workshopper extraordinaire, Leesa Barnes
— Richard Edelman, keynote and an extremely nice guy
— ProductWiki
— Global Nerdy
— Technosailor (thanks, Aaron — and I think you are right)
— Webslinger
— Digital Word (good point, Kristina)
— Adam MacIsaac, a panelist and my dinner partner
— a couple of posts from volunteer Kyra Aylesworth of PrGirlz
— Chris Clarke of ThornleyFallis
— Julie Rusciolelli
— notes from Joi

And so another rumour comes true — with Google officially acquiring Feedburner — and another startup gets acquired by a giant. In journalism, that officially makes it a trend, since we can now add that deal to CBS buying Last.fm and eBay acquiring StumbleUpon. I confess that the Googleburner deal makes a whole lot more sense than either CBS.fm (which I think makes a little sense) and the eBayUpon deal (which makes very little). I wrote about the Googleburner rumours awhile back, after Sam Sethi at Vecosys broke the news. I know that this deal is only going to feed the “Google is too big and possibly evil” theorists, but I think that’s over-reacting just a tad. My friend Scott Karp has some thoughts at Publishing 2.0

I’m still trying to recover from the incredible two days that was the mesh conference, and will be posting updates and links to video, blogs, photos and reviews as I come across them, but in the meantime here’s a cross-post from my Globe and Mail blog in which I try to catch up with two of the many tech deals that occurred while I was en-meshed:

It’s been a busy week in tech-land, as media and Internet giants have been snapping up Web startups like kids in a candy store. CBS, which only just finished buying the financial video-blogging show known as Wallstrip (created in part by Toronto venture capitalist and hedge fund manager Howard Lindzon) is paying $280-million (U.S.) to acquire Last.fm, one of the most popular online music tools around today. And as has been rumoured here and other places, eBay — which paid $2.4-billion or so for Skype not too long ago — is buying StumbleUpon, a Canadian creation that was based in Calgary before moving to the Valley.

StumbleUpon is what you might call a “serendipity engine,” in the sense that it randomizes the Internet by serving up web-pages from a vast catalogue of user submissions, either sending you to a completely random page or choosing a random one from a category of your choosing. Users — of which there are about 2.3 million now — can then vote on whether they like the site or not. I have to confess that I still don’t see how it’s going to fit into eBay’s traditional auction business, but someone at Seeking Alpha has done their best to put together a convincing argument here.

Last.fm, which is similar to another site called Pandora, allows users to set up a profile with their favourite music (including their iTunes playlists) and then share that with others. The site then recommends new music based on similarities between their selections and those of people with similar tastes. By contrast, Pandora uses advanced algorithms to determine similarities between songs, and then recommend new ones based on those attributes (there’s a good discussion of the differences between the two here).

Scott Karp has some thoughts on the Last.fm deal as a sort of Hail Mary play by CBS because of its radio assets, and there’s a post from one of the Last.fm founders here. In case you are keeping score at home, according to the Times of London (Last.fm was created in London), the three founders will get approximately $38-million each from the deal.