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Technorati CEO Dave Sifry has a new “state of the blogosphere” report out, although the first part of it reads more like a “state of Technorati” report — which my friend and fellow mesh organizer Mark Evans and some others believe is a bit of plumage-fluffing aimed at catching the eye of a potential suitor such as Yahoogle or MicroNews Corp.

Be that as it may, it is still interesting to see how fast Technorati.com has been growing: over 9 million unique visitors in March, up 141 per cent in a single quarter, and double-digit growth every month in page views as well. Not bad. It’s no MySpace, but still pretty good for a blog-search engine. But Dave doesn’t just want to be a blog-search engine — he wants to be a media company. Don’t we all, Dave. But I’m not sure a lot of traffic to Technorati’s tagged media pages really counts as being a media company, unless we are really stretching the definition of the term.

It’s obvious that part of Dave’s post is also designed to cement the impression that Technorati is the leader in blog search, a campaign he has also carried into the comments section of Robert Scoble’s blog, on a post the Scobelizer did about whose search is better. I think Dave should win some kind of award for the number of comments he left on Scobey’s blog, most of which (not surprisingly) are aimed at showing the deficiencies of Google’s search — although to give him full credit, he responds to criticisms from bloggers as well.

So is Technorati the leader? The charts on Dave’s post look pretty good, although neither Hitwise nor Quantcast are infallible when it comes to measuring such things. But as Zoli Erdos points out, Technorati’s lead over Google may not be as large as it seems, and there is clearly still room for improvement — for example, Google’s blog search indexes comments as well as posts. And as I have written about previously, Sphere and Icerocket have their strengths (and weaknesses) as well.

In other words, blog search is still very much a horse race.

Update:

Allan Stern of CenterNetworks says that Technorati shouldn’t be compared to Google’s blog search at all, but to Google proper, which is a fair point. And Jim Kukral wonders in a post on his blog why Mark Cuban has let IceRocket die. Are you going to just sit there and take that, Mark? 🙂

Anyone who has done any looking into the history of the Internet eventually makes their way back to the invention of the mouse and the desktop metaphor at Xerox’s PARC, past that to the old DARPA days, past Ted Nelson’s invention of the term “hypertext” and back to the “Memex” envisioned by Vannevar Bush. But have you ever heard of the Mundaneum? Me neither — until I came across a fascinating article at one of my favourite websites, the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society.

Apparently, the Mundaneum was a kind of card-catalogue version of the Internet, created around the turn of the century by Belgian lawyer Paul Otlet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Henri LaFontaine. Opened in 1910, the idea was to collect all of the world’s knowledge on 3″ x 5″ index cards organized by topic. The project eventually grew to 12 million cards, classified according to the Universal Decimal Classification system developed by Otlet. In many ways, the Mundaneum was a product of the same impulse as Bush’s Memex and the early Internet (and the Library at Alexandria).

Otlet even came up with the idea for a kind of desk, shaped like a giant wheel, which would let users search through, read and even write on millions of 3×5 index cards.

“This new research environment would do more than just let users retrieve documents; it would also let them annotate the relationships between one another, “the connections each [document] has with all other [documents], forming from them what might be called the Universal Book.”

“Otlet imagined a day when users would access the database from great distances by means of an “electric telescope” connected through a telephone line, retrieving a facsimile image to be projected remotely on a flat screen.”

According to the Kircher Society piece, the Mundaneum didn’t really catch on for one reason or another, and it eventually wound up being housed in a refurbished parking garage in Belgium, and closed in 1934.

Topix, the local news aggregator that is owned by several big U.S. newspaper chains (Gannett, The Tribune and McClatchy), is doing what amounts to a relaunch of the site and adding “citizen journalism” or social media to the mix, as well as moving to a dot-com domain (it used to be dot-net). Founder and CEO Rich Skrenta — who describes on his personal blog how this came out of an attempt to “de-suckify” the site — has a blog post at Topix about the changes, and says:

“We’re now inviting members from our hyperlocal communities to take over the controls and help us edit the news.”

Topix (which recently raised $15-million) has been a bit of a wallflower at the social-media dance — perhaps in part because local news isn’t quite as sexy as national or international news — but as Skrenta’s post points out, the service has been growing fairly rapidly, and contributions from readers (in the form of posting in story-related forums) have also been increasing dramatically:

“We went from zero to 1 million users posting in our forums, and now have over 1,000 active local forums (5 posts/day or more). The traffic is growing 10-20% per month — and now accounts for nearly half of our total traffic.”

Skrenta says that Topix is getting about 37,000 posts a day, and the site was looking for a way of featuring the top 1 to 5 per cent of those contributions that actually add something to the story. Now, anyone can submit a story, or facts about a story, or an opinion, or cellphone photos, and they will be handled by what amounts to an editor.

In some cases, editors will be drawn from the pool of active contributors, in the same way that Wikipedia.org does — but in some cases, stories or tips or opinions will be handled by an editor from one of Topix’s member papers. It will be interesting to see how Topix fares with a model that is also being pursued by Newsvine and (to a lesser extent) Daylife.

Greg Sterling has some thoughts on the relaunch at Search Engine Land, and so does Jason Chervokas at the Social Media Club. Ross Mayfield thinks that there could be some old media-new media acquisitions coming as more media entities realize the benefits of the local community model.

P.S. On a completely unrelated note, Rich Skrenta created the first computer virus when he was 15.

At last, EMI has announced what many digital music fans have been hoping for, something that has been the subject of rumours ever since Apple supremo Steve Jobs wrote his Reagan-style “tear down this wall” anti-DRM rant awhile back: for the first time, a major record label will sell music free from DRM. The songs will be $1.99 each, and will be higher quality, or consumers can opt for lower quality with digital rights management. The deal reportedly includes the entire EMI catalogue of more than 5 million songs, and previously purchased songs can be upgraded. There are lots more links at Techmeme, including the official release from EMI — which is here — as well as live-blogging of the keynotes from Jobs and the EMI gang by Crunchgear, more details from CNet and some perspective from Cynthia Brumfield over at IPDemocracy.

This is pretty huge. Maybe even bigger than the Beatles 🙂 The big question, of course, is whether this will start a DRM-free land rush of any kind, or whether EMI will be left to twist in the wind. My hunch is that the other labels will wait and see whether the move pays off, and when they realize that they can sell even more music if it is free of DRM, they will open up as well.

Steve O’Hear of ZDNet doesn’t think EMI’s attempt will get much traction, however, because it means paying more for something you can already get for free. And my friend Paul Kedrosky thinks that EMI — which he describes as an “also-ran” in the music biz — is effectively buying market share.

On a Canadian note, EMI’s new DRM-free songs will be available at iTunes.ca as well (Canada already has a source of DRM-free independent music: a site called Puretracks). Does DRM prevent you from buying more music from official or legitimate sources? Let me know in the comments.

Update:

Gizmodo has some interesting behind-the-scenes details about the EMI and Apple deal, including the fact that EMI came up with the idea rather than Apple, and that the 256kbps format and the pricing were both Apple’s idea.

Tara Hunt of HorsePigCow and Citizen Agency, who joined us at the last mesh conference, has a great post up showing some love for Canuck startups — including the Shopify.com guys, the ConceptShare.com gang (just one minor correction: they’re from Sudbury), the Freshbooks.com team (which includes mesh organizer and Ultimate star Mike McDerment), StumbleUpon.com (now based in the Valley but Calgary-born), Tom Williams’ GiveMeaning.com, and a roster of equally great young companies such as CambrianHouse.com and NowPublic.com. Thanks for the props, Tara.

Has anyone else noticed that all of the headlines in the Techmeme blog swarm about Mike Arrington’s great April Fool’s Day post (which I wrote about — along with some other recent pranks — here) have been edited to insert asterisks in the name FuckedCompany? I didn’t really notice until late yesterday, and then realized that it wasn’t just the main headline with Mike’s post, but every subsequent link as well.

What’s up with that, Gabe? Surely we are all adults, and can tolerate the use of that great old Anglo-Saxon word, no? Unless Techmeme.com has a large readership among the kindergarten set that I don’t know about. After all, it’s not as though everyone doesn’t know what those two asterisks stand for. Or is there some other Google-search related reason — do headlines with expletives get marked differently by the algorithm?

It seems Mike Arrington has gotten the last laugh on more than a few bloggers — with his announcement that he has bought Fuckedcompany.com. Even Dave Winer got reeled in by the news. I don’t know for sure, but I’m willing to bet that Mike got the idea after reading the Valleywag post about the sale of Fuckedcompany, which suggested Mike should buy it (my friend Steve O’Hear at ZDNet figured out the gag too).

Mike’s post on the “acquisition” was a masterpiece. But there were some clues amidst the press-release-style delivery, including comments like: “the audiences are about equal in size and have very little overlap.” That one set off a warning bell for me — if Fuckedcompany.com has the same size audience as TechCrunch, I thought, then I am Darth Vader. Mike also said that “its clear that we are at the tail end of the current boom (disregard recent statements I’ve made to the contrary).” Ding! He also said “there just isn’t the “wow” factor around new startups like in 2004/2005. That does not bode well for the future – there just isn’t anything left to invent.” Ding!

Near the end of the post, Mike says that “we will likely move new startup coverage, which will be a secondary consideration going forward, to a new blog over time. TechCrunch and FuckedCompany will begin to mirror each other’s content.” Good one, Mike. Happy April Fool’s to you too.

Update:

In other April Fool’s-related news, Ionut. Alex Chitu has word of a new Google offering called Google Writer that will automate blog posting for you, Markus Frind says his dating site Plenty of Fish and eHarmony are merging, Google itself has announced Gmail Paper for sending paper-based mail, as well as Google TiSP, a plumbing-based wireless system for your house. And Google blogger Matt Cutts’ blog has apparently been hacked by the Dark SEO gang. Wikipedia has more here.

Is wireless power about to become a reality? It sure sounds that way, according to a piece in Business 2.0 magazine about a company called Powercast, which says it has developed a way of powering devices (albeit fairly low-voltage ones for now) without power cords or bricks. And electronics giant Philips has signed a deal with Powercast to bring its technology to market.

It may sound incredible — and Ben Metcalfe seems to think it’s an April Fool’s joke come early — but wireless power is not a fantasy. In fact, the eccentric genius Nikolai Tesla, who invented alternating current or AC power, was pretty close to developing wireless power around the turn of the century, but didn’t quite make it — in part because his financial backer, J.P. Morgan, pulled out. It’s possible that his feud with fellow genius Thomas Edison (who favoured direct current power) had something to do with it, but I can’t say for sure.

And there is already what amounts to a wireless-power company, a company called Splashpower.com, which uses adapters that attach to electrical devices, and then charges those devices whenever they are placed on a special mat. But that involves actual contact between the device and the mat — Powercast says it can broadcast power to devices up to six feet away, through relatively small and inexpensive chips the size of a dime.

(in unrelated news, some guy likes to build giant Tesla coils in his garage).

Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post is working on a “citizen media” venture with NewAssignment.net (which I wrote about in an earlier post), has an interesting perspective on the future of newspapers in a recent post. She describes how she and her friends are Web junkies, but still like to read a printed paper — although they print out different versions of papers from around the world, using NewspaperDirect.com.

Then she describes what she sees as the future:

“Those papers that wake up in time will become a journalistic hybrid combining the best aspects of traditional print newspapers with the best of what the Web brings to the table.”

“Chomping down on a story and refusing to let go is what bloggers do best. And while the vast majority of material that ends up being blogged about still originates with a mainstream news source, more and more stories are being broken by online news sources.”

“So stop writing teary-eyed eulogies for newspapers. The only thing dead is the either/or nature of the musty print vs online debate. The hybrid future is kicking down the door. It’s time to let it in and fully embrace it.”

Hat tip to Roy Greenslade of the Guardian for spotting that one — he has his own take on it here. For whatever it’s worth, I think Arianna nails it pretty well.

In other Huffington news, Rachel Sklar of Eat The Press has a great overview of a panel she was on at the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ conference, along with Katherine Graham of the Washington Post and Barry Diller of IAC. Thanks to Rob Hyndman for that link.

As my friend and fellow mesh organizer Mark Evans notes over here, New York’s video-blogging ninja master Loren Feldman of 1938media is coming to mesh — although as Loren mentions on his blog, we had to accede to a rather long list of demands before he would agree to grace us with his presence.

For any of you not familiar with Loren, his video blogging usually involves a stark, in-your-face, blunt assessment of someone’s shortcomings, something the British refer to as “taking the piss” and New Yorkers refer to as “talking.” A prime recent example was the clip below about Jeff Jarvis, which is right on that fine line between cruel and hilarious — territory that Loren pretty much owns.

http://www.podtech.net/player/podtech-player.swf?bc=05cc9e6e-c151-441a-bc77-878aebedf010

Although he is part of Podtech now, like Robert Scoble, that hasn’t stopped Loren from taking shots at the Scobleizer, or at Jason Calacanis, or pretty much anyone else for that matter. If you know Ze Frank at all, just think of Loren as the anti-Ze — or like Ze with a five-day growth of beard (and occasionally without a shirt) and a really bad hangover.

Another great mesh meetup last night at the Charlotte Room, complete with plenty of beverages, snacks, pool tables and great conversation. Thanks to all who came — and especially to podcaster extraordinaire Leesa Barnes, who brought her podcasting bag of tricks and hopefully caught some great ideas being born amid all the meshing.

Hopefully some photos will be making their way into various places — I know Rannie Turingan was taking some because I saw them on his Facebook group (it’s here if you are a Facebook user), and I saw Will Pate snapping some pics as well.

If you have some photos and they’re at Flickr or Photobucket or whatever, just send me an email at [email protected] and I’ll link to them here — and over at the mesh blog as well — and if you have a blog post about it, feel free to do the same. Mark has some more details at Maple Leaf 2.0.

Jay Rosen, the online journalism veteran behind NewAssigment.net — an experiment in “crowdsourcing” journalism, or “citizen reporting” or whatever you want to call it — announced earlier this week that NewAssignment and the Huffington Post are collaborating on a new journalism venture aimed at covering the upcoming U.S. elections.

Jay posted about it on his own blog, but has also written about it in a guest-post on Marc Glaser’s blog at PBS. As he describes it:

“Our idea is not complicated: it’s campaign reporting by a great many more people than would ever fit on the bus that the boys (and girls) of the press have famously gotten on and off every four years, as they try to cover the race for president.”

In other words, instead of just one or two reporters trailing John Edwards or Rudy Giuliani or whoever, the idea is to have dozens of people tracking different parts of each campaign, filing to blogs and stories and other formats, and then aggregating all of that and editing it and posting the best of it somewhere like Huffington Post.

Arianna Huffington’s post on the new venture is here. As she describes it:

“We are recruiting large groups of citizen journalists from around the country to cover the major presidential candidates. Each of these volunteer reporter/bloggers will contribute to a candidate-specific group blog — offering written updates, campaign tidbits, on-the-scene observations, photos, or original video.”

Ms. Huffington says that this is “the wisdom of crowds hits the campaign trail,” and that hopefully such a venture will avoid the kind of group-think reporting that the mainstream media can become guilty of at times, adding that “Exhibit A is, and will always be, the press’ shameful lack of questioning during the run-up to the war in Iraq.”

At the mesh meetup we had at the Charlotte Room tonight, I ran into Jim Courtney of Skype Journal and he said he had just finished posting something interesting about the new Skype beta — and he was right. It seems that not only is the client being improved, but eBay is finally starting to achieve some of the synergies that many observers were hoping for when it bought the VoIP service for $4-billion or so way back when.

According to knowledgeable people like Jim and Iotum co-founder Alec Saunders, who posted on it here, among the things that Skype has improved is the sound quality of the application. Now, the sound is apparently just as good with the regular mike and speakers you get with a PC as it is with a dedicated headset or other equipment, which will be a big boon for regular users.

Jim says he suspects that Skype is making use of new codec technology they acquired awhile ago. They’ve also made it possible to take a snapshot with your video cam to use as a profile picture, and you can import contacts from more mail clients than before.

But for me, the biggest move with this beta is the fact that you can now click and send money to contacts via PayPal — which was one of the no-brainer synergies that I expected would have happened a long time ago. Maybe there was some technical issue holding it up, I don’t know. But finally it’s possible.