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I was going to post some of my notes from the Microsoft/Facebook conference call, and then I decided to search the blogosphere first, and decided that my notes aren’t really going to bring anything to the table. I already knew that Allen Stern of Centernetworks was live-blogging, because I saw his Twitter updates — which he wanted to post to his blog but couldn’t — and then later I came across Mike Arrington’s live notes from the call as well.

On top of that, there are some pretty good notes at the Seattle Times, at PaidContent and by Adam Ostrow at Mashable, and my pal Om Malik did some as well. It seems as though any competitive advantage that listening to conference calls might once have provided is pretty much gone now 🙂 I would echo the points made by Rafat and others: the call contained virtually nothing of any substance, and in fact no direct answers whatsoever. Lots of “win-win-win”-type talk from Kevin Johnson of Microsoft though, who really needs to stop yelling.

Forget about the $15-billion valuation for a moment — which I admit is difficult to do, since it amounts to about 100 times the company’s estimated annual revenue, a bubblicious multiple by almost any definition (Google is currently trading at about 14 times sales). Why wouldn’t Microsoft take a stake in a fast-growing social network?

• 1. It gets to keep Google out, so that’s good.
• 2. It gets to serve ads to those millions of devoted users who check their Facebook every five minutes.
• 3. It has effectively bought a call option on the future of the company.

It’s not like Microsoft has to come up with the $15-billion. All it has to do is structure a deal that is worth $250-million or so, complete with performance clauses and so forth, and it gets a piece of something that could be worth substantially more at some point (nice to see that Jon Fine of BusinessWeek agrees with me). Not to hype the Google comparison, since they are completely different animals, but wouldn’t you have bought a small percentage of Google if you had had the chance, regardless of the implied valuation?

Anyway, the bottom line is that it’s only a 1.6-per-cent stake. And it looks like this face really is worth $15-billion after all. So anyone want to take bets on how long it will be until Mark Zuckerberg decides to buy a jumbo-jet party plane just like the Google boys? I guess it’s a good thing Mark turned down Yahoo’s $1-billion takeover last year.

Further reading:

— Mike Arrington has been live-blogging the conference call.
— Silicon Alley Insider did too, by way of writer Peter Kafka.
— Some analysis from Ashkan Karbasfrooshan at WatchMojo.
— John Paczkowski at All Things D leads with the Ballmer quote about Facebook being, well… no big deal.
— Rafat at PaidContent says there’s still room for others to invest.
— Erick Schonfeld says Facebook took the path of least resistance.
— Rob Enderle tells the NYT “this was almost personal.”

It’s Google’s Web — we’re just living in it. That seems to be the message coming from the latest update to its PageRank algorithm, which has pushed some websites several rungs down the ladder due to the use of paid links. If nothing else, this kind of move reminds people that Google is not some kind of benevolent father figure that exists to make our lives easier — it is a corporation with its own interests at heart, and while PageRank is a tool, in some cases it is a hammer.

Andy Beard says that Google has slapped some of its biggest fans, meaning those who use a variety of tactics to boost their profile in the Google index — but those “fans” also include some marketing types who use what (to Google at least) are shady methods of conferring high PageRank on sites that don’t deserve it, such as the notorious link-farms we all come across now and then. Some self-promoters, like John Chow, have been removed from the Google index completely.

One no-no is the selling of links through things such as Text Link Ads (disclosure: I use Text Link Ads here, as an experiment, and it appears my PageRank has fallen as a result), because Google seems to want to maintain the “purity” of the linking experience, and not get people all confused about what’s an ad and what isn’t. That’s the charitable view. And the uncharitable one? If you want to sell links, Google would much rather that you use AdWords. And as Adam Ostrow notes at Mashable, Google makes a fair bit of money from link-farms itself.

Steve D. at TechVat has more on the PageRank issue, including a list of sites that have seen their rank decrease — and it’s a list that includes some well-known sites, including the Washington Post, Forbes and Engadget. And there’s some commentary at ProBlogger and Digital Inspiration. This is also an issue that Search Engine Land has covered before, including a well-timed piece by Danny Sullivan about the risks of selling links.

It’s a classic small-town newspaper story: the big fire, with all the pumpers and ladder-trucks on the scene, the volunteer firefighters helping out, maybe even a building or two evacuated. Makes for great journalism of the old-fashioned kind (remind me to tell you about the time I spent two hours trying to find the small grass fire in London, Ont. caused by a downed airplane — good times). The California fires are much bigger than that, of course, but essentially the same type of story: Man against Nature.

Now, however, the Web is doing much of the legwork, as Danny notes in his roundup of fire coverage and Allan Stern notes as well. The best thing a news outlet could do in a situation like this one — apart from maybe sending one of its reporters down to command central — is to pull together the threads that are out there: the Google Maps mashups (like the LA Times has put together), the eyewitness photos on Flickr and videos on YouTube.

In addition to that, someone could aggregate all the different fire reports, the details of what is burning and where, the evacuation centres and their locations, photos of the key spots, and facts about the spread of previous fires. Oops — someone is already doing that. It’s a little place called Wikipedia, which is rapidly becoming a key place to go for news about such events.

Update:

My friend Paul Kedrosky wonders if this is the first Web 2.0 disaster — which it might be, but the fact that it occurred so close to the heart of Silicon Valley probably helps — and notes that one paper is using a blog to keep readers updated. And in my comments, Holly points to a post by Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins at Mashable, in which he has lots of links to Twittered news and other sources (and just for the record, I remember Nando and Angelfire too, Mark)

I know this probably makes me naieve (not to mention old) but I just never figured Dylan would be shilling for Cadillac, driving a gigantic, gas-guzzling Escalade. The rest of the video fits — the dusty prairie, the gnarled trees and scrub brush, the rundown buildings. But Dylan driving a giant SUV just doesn’t work for me somehow.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRT7EFoWpZ4&rel=0&border=0&w=425&h=366]

(via The Listenerd)

The outrage continues over Comcast’s jamming of BitTorrent and other traffic on its cable network in the U.S. The company has tried to clarify its position by saying that it doesn’t block BitTorrent traffic, it merely “delays” it (and apparently some other traffic as well). As James Robertson and Cynthia Brumfield have pointed out, part of the problem is that Comcast isn’t being very forthcoming about what it is doing at all — in part because the company says it is afraid that providing too much detail will allow BitTorrent users to find a way around the network “shaping.”

I know that the popular position is to slam Comcast for telling users what to do with their network bandwidth, and I know my instinct is the same whenever my ISP talks about BitTorrent or bandwidth caps. But like most ISPs — and cellular carriers — Comcast has a “terms of service” agreement that allows it to restrict what users do with their accounts, so that whatever they’re doing doesn’t impact on others using the network. That’s a fact of life.

The big issue for ISPs is that p2p apps like Skype, Joost and BitTorrent can consume a huge amount of bandwidth. According to some estimates, 10 BitTorrent users on a network node can double the delays that other users experience — and as much as 60 per cent of the traffic on some networks is BitTorrent-related. That may not be a problem for BitTorrent users, but it could severely impact those using other applications on the same network.

Obviously it would be better if ISPs like Comcast or Rogers built out their networks to provide more bandwidth, and it would also be better if there were more competition in the Internet access business. But it’s hard to blame Comcast or anyone else for trying to make sure all of their customers get the service they deserve. Now if only the company would come out and say so.