mathewingram.com/work

Lots of commentary on Techmeme today about Google’s new Hot Trends feature, which builds on the search engine’s previous Trends and Zeitgeist features by adding news and blog posts. Many people seem to pay particularly attention to the absurd or stupid things that people search for, including “legless chihuahuas” and “nose bidet.”

Fair enough. Don’t get me wrong. There’s no question that people search for plenty of ridiculous stuff — and yes, the Trends include lots of stuff about World of Warcraft, etc. But still, I think dismissing Google’s Hot Trends as a throwaway toy or a sideshow is missing something. And I think search guru Danny Sullivan made the point in a comment on Duncan Riley’s post at TechCrunch made the point pretty well: “legless chihuahuas,” he pointed out, were in the news; Oprah referred to a “nose bidet” on her show; and one of the other search terms was a radio contest question.

In other words, browsing through the search terms is a pretty good barometer of what people are interested in at a given moment. When I looked at the terms, Justis Richert was a popular term — because the porn actress who was born with that name happened to perform… well, a service for a state trooper while he was on duty (and still wound up getting a ticket, apparently). In other words, it was sparked by another news story.

Anyone who has spent any time running a news-related website knows that there are the stories you wish people were interested in, and then there are the ones that they really are interested in — and they aren’t always the same thing. For better or worse, Google’s Hot Trends and other traffic-measuring tools are a glimpse inside the mind of the people formerly known as the audience (as Jay Rosen called them). Get used to it.

Update:

A commenter here notes that Google’s Hot Trends could pose some competition for Technorati — and it certainly could for Technorati’s WTF (Where’s The Fire) feature.

Okay, CBS didn’t buy Howard Lindzon’s brain — but it is paying a substantial sum (how substantial is still up for debate, since the original report of $5-million has apparently been denied) for what he helped to create with Wallstrip, the daily video-blog on Wall Street and finance hosted by the lovely and talented Lindsay Campbell. And apart from what appears to be some lingering bad blood between Howard and Duncan Riley — who has written about it for TechCrunch and 901am (sorry Thord), as well as his own blog — I think most people are happy to see Howard do well. He took a chance with Wallstrip, and it has paid off. And according to Fred Wilson’s post about the deal, CBS is not acquiring Wallstrip just for Lindsay (as Duncan and others have suggested) but for the expertise in developing and distributing online video, which is something CBS really needs to figure out. In any case, congrats to Howard and the team.

Well, if you were hoping to make it to mesh on May 30th and 31st, I’m afraid you are out of luck — we are officially sold out. We’d love to invite more people, but the fire warden at MaRS Discovery District won’t let us 🙂

We are all looking forward to the great speakers and panels we have lined up, and we’re also pretty excited about the 15 Minutes of Fame entrants we’ve been getting. There are some great startups looking to pitch their ideas to mesh attendees, and it will be fun to see what kind of response they get. We’ll be announcing the winners soon.

If you didn’t manage to get a ticket, don’t despair — you can still come and do some post-conference meshing on the Wednesday night at the Distillery District. We’ve got a deal for anyone who attends the conference: if you head to the Boiler House at the Distillery District, you’ll get a complementary appetizer with any entree, courtesy of your friends at mesh.

And if you’re not a ticket-holder, come on down and have a few drinks with us on Wednesday night anyway. If it’s anything like last year, I’m sure there will be people meshing until the wee hours.

Writing in the New York Times, Mark Helprin says he thinks an injustice is being done to creators of artistic and literary works, because the copyright that protects them doesn’t last forever — unlike the laws that protect, say, ownership of physical property. If the government can’t simply take a person’s house once it is paid for (which it can, of course, but let’s leave that aside for the moment) then why can it take a man’s intellectual property?

As mellifluous as Helprin’s writing may be, his argument on the topic — if one can even call it that — is as clanky and tone-deaf as any I’ve seen. At one point he writes that:

“Were I tomorrow to write the great American novel (again?), 70 years after my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren”

and then asks why

“such a stiff penalty is not applied to the owners of Rockefeller Center or Wal-Mart” and why it is alright for the state to “sieze the property” of authors.

Like many others, Helprin has likely been seduced by the term “intellectual property,” which implies that ideas are (or should be) the same as objects. Once you begin to think of your creations — the words you have strung together in a particular way at a particular time — as property in the same sense that your house and car are , then you are well on your way towards a misunderstanding.

Helprin may believe that investing artistic works with the same qualities as physical property is “natural and becoming,” but saying it doesn’t make it so. Early lawmakers decided to treat them differently for a reason — because they are different. Taking someone’s property removes it from him forever. Copying someone’s artistic creation, or using it to create something artistic in its own right, is something quite different.

I could go on, but as BoingBoing notes, Lawrence Lessig has set up a wiki to craft a response to Helprin here, and there is already more than enough rational argument there to counter the author’s position and then some.

So Microsoft is buying aQuantive, an online ad company, for $6-billion in its largest acquisition to date — the largest since the $1.4-billion purchase of Great Plains Software in 2001, as far as I can tell. Is aQuantive, which I had never heard of until this morning, worth twice as much as Google paid for Doubleclick not too long ago? Hard to say. Paying twice a company’s market cap is pretty huge. Obviously, the beast from Redmond can afford it, since it probably generates $6-billion in free cash flow every couple of months. But does this remind anyone of the big optical-networking acquisition frenzy of the late 1990s, with Nortel and JDS Uniphase and that whole crew? Just asking.

Update:

ZDNet has some background on aQuantive, in which the only name I recognize is Razorfish, a legendary money-sucking dot-com bubble company that eventually got acquired after the bubble popped. Just for the record, the company’s revenue last year was $442-million, which makes Microsoft’s bid almost 14 times revenue. My friend Paul Kedrosky warns of the dreaded “winner’s curse” that often comes into play in auction-style scenarios. And Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, who knows a thing or two about online advertising, argues that aQuantive is well worth twice what Google paid for Doubleclick.

I know that $4-billion is a big number. And yes, I know that’s how much Apple’s shares fell during the blog scandal known as “Applegate,” in which Ryan Block of Engadget ran an internal Apple memo saying the iPhone and Leopard would be delayed (for which Ryan has apologized). And I know that it may have been an attempt by someone to game the stock, as my friend Paul Kedrosky — who is wise in the ways of the stock-market force — has suggested.

But I still think it’s the proverbial tempest in a stock-pot. Could someone theoretically have lost money if they traded on Ryan’s post? Theoretically — in the same way they would have “lost” money if they had sold Apple two weeks ago or a month ago, and in the same way that they “lost” money if they bought Yahoo stock hoping Microsoft was going to buy it after the New York Post rumour from awhile back. Anyone who sold on the Engadget news is a momentum trader, and/or a nervous Nellie, and therefore deserves whatever they got. The stock was back where it began within an hour of the rumour, and Engadget’s fake memo post only survived uncorrected for a matter of minutes. That’s hardly a capital crime.

The fact is — as Howard Lindzon of Wallstrip (how’s that takeover deal going, Howard?) points out in the comments section over at TechCrunch — stocks go up and down every day, in some cases by large amounts, based on rumours and trader talk and (in some cases) the weather. Day traders can make and lose lots of money on those gyrations, but for the most part it is noise.

The fact that Engadget’s fake memo moved Apple so much is an indication to me of just how volatile the stock is, another sign that expectations are getting overdone. And as Mike Arrington suggested, anyone — blogger or “real” journalist — would have done exactly what Ryan did. The difference is that traditional journalists likely wouldn’t have corrected it so quickly.

I didn’t get a chance to write about this yesterday when it broke, but I think it’s pretty amazing (if true) that ClubPenguin is talking with Sony about getting acquired for somewhere in the neighbourhood of $500-million or so (TechCrunch says $500-million, but PaidContent says that the price is closer to $450-million). Om Malik has some details here. Either way, those are pretty amazing sums of money for a company that has only really been around for a year or so. As my Globe and Mail colleague Barrie McKenna wrote in a story last fall, the company was started by a couple of guys in the relatively sleepy (at least when I was there last) resort town of Kelowna, B.C.

Parents with kids, the founders deliberately chose not to include advertising on the site, and in fact haven’t advertised the site either — growth has been entirely through word-of-mouth. Judging by the speed with which it spread through my family, from eight-year-old daughter to friends and cousins, it is the childhood equivalent of Facebook (as is its cousin Webkinz, also a Canadian success story aimed at kids, which Om says Disney has looked at).

Two big questions remain: Can ClubPenguin keep growing at a rate fast enough that it makes $500-million look like a good deal? And can the company find a partner that has the same philosophy about marketing to kids?

I know this is kind of a stretch, but stay with me while I try to pull a couple of threads together from things that are going on right now: We’ve got the launch of Truemors, the Digg-style rumour site that Guy Kawasaki set up — which seems to have been over-run with spam and the equivalent of graffiti (what Second Lifers call “griefing”), and may be burying critical posts.

Then there’s MySpace News, which some argue is a ghost town, and others say merely needs some work. And there’s Newsvine, which some argue isn’t as successful as it could be (and I would agree). And finally, there is the sad tale of how Derek Powazek and his wife were pushed out of the wonderful photo community/magazine they founded called JPG. What do all of these have in common? Community. I know that’s an overused word, but I think it is the key to the success or failure of virtually every online venture that tries to get “users” involved in some way.

Why isn’t MySpace News taking off? Because as Tony Hung suggests, it either isn’t appealing to the community or it isn’t making it easy for them to use it. Why isn’t Newsvine as successful as it could be? In part because the community isn’t as big a part of the picture as it should be. What is the secret to Digg’s success, and the thing that Truemors needs to find? A community. And what could kill JPG magazine? The loss of a loyal community.

It’s not enough to set up a cool site and say “Hey — look at my cool site! Come on over and form a community!” And it’s not enough to start with a community based around other things, such as MySpace, and then bolt on some other function and expect them to take to it immediately. It doesn’t work that way. And yes, there has to be moderation of some kind, but that path is pretty rocky too, as Digg has found out.

Facebook is (at least so far) a good example of a site that had a community, nurtured that community and may have some success in expanding into other things — but it is not easy. Far from it, as this essay by Cory Doctorow explains. In fact, it just might be the hardest thing of all. And I just came across a great post on how to manage a community by Matt Haughey, who runs one of the best there is: Metafilter (hat tip to Kottke for the link).

I don’t want to be accused of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre or anything, but I thought I should probably warn any of you who might be interested that tickets for the mesh conference are going quickly, and we will likely be sold out soon. The big event is coming up in a little over two weeks — May 30th and 31st at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto.

There’s plenty of info at the mesh website on the speakers we have lined up (people like Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist, Christine Herron of the Omidyar Network, Mike Masnick of Techdirt, Rachel Sklar of The Huffington Post, Austin Hill of Gifter.org and Akoha and others too numerous to mention).

The full schedule is available here. If you want to get a glimpse of just how much fun we all had last year, take a look at this page. And if you want to get a ticket, the ticket window is over here.

So MySpace is launching branded news and entertainment video channels, according to a press release from the social-networking behemoth. The site has signed deals with the New York Times, Reuters and National Geographic to offer news content (National Geographic does news?) as well as with other content owners to offer channels such as The Daily Reel — which compiles links to the best of online video — Kush TV (including the Family Values Tour with alt-punk band Korn) and VBS-TV, from the creators of Vice magazine.

The big question, of course, is whether anyone will actually watch any of this stuff. And something that isn’t mentioned in the release is whether MySpace users will have to go to the MySpace Video page to see the content from these branded channels, or will they and others be able to embed or share the links on their pages and elsewhere? As Quincy Smith of CBS pointed out recently, you have to take the content to where people are, not force them to come to where your content is. That’s why he said that CBS’s Innertube project should have been renamed “CBS.com/NoOneComesHere.”

If MySpace doesn’t want its new video channels to become the same kind of online ghost town that its MySpace News seems to be turning into, it might want to give that kind of thing a little thought.

It’s just a mild breeze, says Gavin O’Reilly of the World Newspaper Association:

“Don’t believe all you’re being told about the death of the press: more people all over the world are reading newspapers. What’s more, they’re still a powerful medium for advertising,” he says in a piece for The Independent. In other words, just ignore the dramatic declines in readership and the stories of newspapers laying off thousands of people or putting themselves up for sale. Just a flesh wound.

“The chorus of disapproval for newspapers has become a global trend. These days it is nearly impossible to find a media analyst who actually reads a newspaper or who can see anything other than doom and gloom for the industry.

I can present a different perspective. Let’s start with circulations, which continue to grow – and not just in India and China. Paid circulation grew globally by 1.9 per cent in 2006, with sales of 510.4 million copies a day.”

Wow — 1.9 per cent growth. Woo-hoo! Time to get out the party hats.

Laurent Haug, a very smart guy and part of the brain trust behind the LIFT conference in Geneva, has written a great post on his blog about finding balance in social media, and how he thinks that we are beginning to do that — in other words, stepping back from the “all users are created equal” view that has driven some of the commentary around sites like Wikipedia and Digg and acknowledging that some people actually might have skills or qualifications that make them more valuable. Not exactly a revelation for some, perhaps (yes, I mean you Seth) but still worth saying. As Laurent puts it at one point:

“Kicking out the experts was not the answer. We do not all contribute the same value. Somebody who has carved violins all his life should have more editing power than me on Wikipedia’s Stradivarius page.”

Laurent goes on to talk about how he sees social media and online communities that generate content being made up of three necessary groups: the users, content creators who are “needed to scale the system to a dimension where it starts to matter;” the drivers, who “build the community framework,” and the experts, who “bring credibility to the whole edifice by sharing their extensive knowledge.” Go read the whole thing.