Online Media Cultist

Just got the alert via Marc Hustvedt, co-founder of Tubefilter, on Twitter linking to a Search Engine Journal story reporting that Jerry Yang sent an e-mail out to shareholders that Yahoo is willing to sell to Microsoft at the price of $33 per share.

Question #1: After all these months of flirtation and Yahoo condemnation in the media, is this deal finally for reals?

The caveat is that the deal will go down if “Microsoft will negotiate a transaction that delivers certainty of value and certainty of closing.” So that could mean we’re still not at a done deal, but it does seem as though the trigger may be close to getting pulled.

Question #2: If it is for reals, does this affect the day-to-day lives of ordinary online media cultists out there in one way or the other?

Probably not a great deal, at least right away. There will probably be relatively fewer acquisitions of smaller start-ups over the next year or longer as both Yahoo and Microsoft will be consumed with the integration, meshing, and fallout between the two companies. That may have some affect in overall innovation and funding as two titans in the space take a relative timeout for a little while.

But with the economy so wacky right now, there are many other things for startups to worry about.

Back when I used to read print publications on a regular basis (seems like so very long ago now!) I enjoyed reading Newsweek cover-to-cover. A favorite feature of mine – that they still do and offer online – is called Conventional Wisdom, where they run down personalities and stories of the week, giving each an up, down, or sideways arrow indicating who is gaining or falling in influence, good will, or some other factor based on the particulars.

Based on stories I’m following this morning, I thought I’d try something sort of similar.

Rising
* FriendFeed - Continues to be the darling of the tech geek early adopter set. I noted earlier this week that Steve Rubel thinks it could be the next Google. Today, Dembot runs down factors that are contributing to its success.

* MySpace - Readying a major site redesign, set to roll out next week. Webware notes that the UI will see a major upgrade, including “the homepage, navigation tools, profile editor, search features, and the MySpaceTV player.” Maybe Tom and company read my piece, called The rambling shambling social networking funhouse that is MySpace, and took heed?

Falling
* Yahoo - Mike Arrington at TechCrunch absolutely rips apart Yahoo’s search marketing deal with Google. The upshot, Arrington foresees, is the end of any counterbalance to Google in search, strengthening a monopoly and imperiling the health of the Internet economy as a whole.

* Associated Press - The AP has filed DMCA takedown requests against Drudge Report counter-balancer Drudge Retort for… linking to AP stories and using short excerpts in the process. If this case is given any headway at all, the entire nature of how information is shared on the Internet will need to change radically. Best quip award goes to Mathew Ingram: “It’s not only dumb, but ultimately futile.”

The sideways arrow
* Twitter - Still struggling with scaling issues, it has managed to stave off any major bad press this week. It needs to keep doing that, week in and week out, if it wants to keep upstart FriendFeed off its heels.

* Brad Garrett - Garrett, or the really deep-voiced deadpan dude from Everybody Loves Raymond, will star in an online reality show called “Dating Brad Garrett”. Reality shows have long seemed to be the perfect venture to find early success through online-first distribution, so perhaps Garrett’s relative star power will help this show to find an audience. The show will be available on Crackle.com, as well as YouTube, Hulu, and a bunch of other video websites. t

People used to say (and maybe they still do?) that you can stay up-to-date and fairly well informed of the goings on in the world just by reading all of the stories on the front page of The New York Times each day. Well, in webby world, you can do worse than breezing through TechCrunch to get a quick read on all that’s going on in web land.

Which is helpful as I’ve been very very busy of late. Extraordinary things seem to go on when we’re occupied with other things, isn’t it amazing?

In any event, I’m going to quickly breeze through some of the more fascinating things I came across on TechCrunch while quickly catching up today.

AOL Finds An Obvious Use For WOW.com: A World Of Warcraft Social Network
A bunch of sites have tried to crack the code on getting the enormous worldwide community of the massively popular MMO (massive multiplayer online game) under one online social networking hood, but there’s no clear leader as yet. The key is to give these serious gamers the specific communication tools (which server are you on? When’s the next guild meet-up? Etc.) to give them a reason to use the site to their advantage.

Yahoo Search Just Got Smarter
It’s fun to see search getting multimedia-ish… except for those weird and slightly creepy Ask.com commercials. You know that Google is going to come a-knocking on this door sooner or later.

TechMeme Leaderboard In Context + New Verticals On The Way
I think there’s every chance that Techmeme is going to topple Technorati right over with this one. It’s already the go-to place for up-to-the-minute technology stories and conversations, and the new leaderboard is simply appears to be more relevant and credible than Technorati’s strange and somewhat clunky in-bound links list.

Is Favorit a Digg killer?
I keep talking about Digg needing some serious competition… will Favorit be up to the challenge? It kind of seems more like a feed reader with commenting, with voting/ranking being secondary, but I guess we’ll see!

Joost Officially Launches
Long awaited TV-on-the-Internet play finally goes public. I never quite got swept up in the Joost buzz, but these are the guys who founded Skype, so who am I to argue?

FriendFeed To Aggregate Social Network Data Into A Single Feed
I really like the concept behind FriendFeed (aggregating the activity on your various social networking/bookmarking sites, Facebook-like) and think it has the conceptual stuff to beat out a lot of the competition. As an aggregation-junkie, my hat’s off!

I’ll try to work some of the above into standalone stories over the next few days… if only I can grab some time, and the angry Internet Lordz provide me some connectivity at home!

The Internet may still very nearly spin around the axis (matrix?) of Google search, but people like Yahoo’s content and services at least a little bit better, according to a new study from the University of Michigan American Consumer Satisfaction Index.

The relaunch of Yahoo’s portal is cited as a reason why Yahoo’s customer satisfaction is on the rise, as well as its e-mail, “social networks and other features.” Meanwhile, Google’s applications and services are not as visible to the average user.

In my view, GMail is superior to Yahoo e-mail, though I’ve heard that people like improvements that have been made to the latter. In terms of social networks, I can’t believe that either Yahoo 360 or Orkut could have made much of a difference in peoples’ responses. I can definitely see the difference if Yahoo’s “web 2.0″ acquisitions such as del.icio.us, Flickr, and MyBlogLog were cited. That’s a pretty great trio of efficient, elegant, and popular web services right there.

I wonder if Google cares very much about this study. As long as it continues to own search and make zillions through its Adsense and Adwords services, they will continue to laugh all the way to the e-bank. Internet Marketing Monitor rightly notes that, “The article suggests that Google’s relatively unchanged interface and dismal marketing of its non-search services give users the impression that little has changed at the site. Those of us who look beyond the interface realize that this is not the case. But most users don’t go much deeper than the outside.”

That said, Yahoo has smartly improved in areas that it needed to – recognizing Google’s dominance in search – and it’s paying off. Another four-year study, produced by Nielsen/NetRatings, proves the old Internet axiom that content is still king.

According to the study, people are consuming online content like never before, watching videos and reading news and entertainment content, “surpassing activities such as sending e-mails, shopping or searching for information.”

While at first glance, these seem to be fairly obvious “revelations,” they are pretty stunning when looking at the short history of the web. E-mail, for instance, is one of the first “killer apps” of the online world. It’s something that grandparents do everyday as part of their lives. People who can barely turn on a computer know how to “Google” search terms to find relevant information.

But the increase in broadband penetration, coupled with the serious and massive effort to increase the quality and quantity of online media and entertainment offerings, has fundamentally shifted the way in which people consume content overall.

People spend more time online today than they do watching television. As recently as four or five years ago, this would have seemed like a farfetched notion.

In other words, the Internet is not just a place to write to friends and family and find relevant information. It’s a place where people can immerse themselves in deep social networks, create and share media, and watch (and interact with!) videos and other forms of entertainment.

So, both surveys show that Yahoo is looking at the long run and improving in areas that reflect where people are spending increasing amounts of time.

Lots of pushing chess pieces round the board by the Interwebs Overlords this morning.

First and foremost: Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo for $50 billion, Mashable and a bunch of other people are reporting.

I get the feeling that the other major players on the board realize that they have to come together to take on the overwhelming power that is Google. It also does on the surface seem to make a lot of sense because of Yahoo’s core competencies in search and online media and Microsoft’s software and operating system strengths. There’s also a lot of chatter about how this move is happening now due to Google’s recent strategic maneuver in gobbling up Internet advertising firm DoubleClick.

Meanwhile, in a separate development that could be as far reaching in terms of influence and effect as the potential Microsoft-Yahoo deal, YouTube is going to go into the business of revenue sharing with some of its most popular video creators, such as the (in)famous Lonelygirl15.

While Om Malik asks, “what took them so long?” I’m rather surprised at this move. Adding pre-roll or post-roll or something-roll ads in videos makes perfect sense – something YouTube is now experimenting with – but the ad revenue-sharing with people uploading “user generated content” has not yet proven to be a viable business model. Perhaps YouTube is hoping to experiment with its biggest grassroots stars with the thought that they can pull the plug if it does not prove viable.

The best ideas are almost always the simple ones, and usually the hardest to come up with and execute effectively! MyBlogLog, a barebones social network with huge appeal and upside for bloggers, clearly did both and was rewarded with a $10 million acquisition by Yahoo!

In relation to the inflated valuations we’ve seen recently, I think this is a pretty smart if not risk-free acquisition. I’m a big fan of MyBlogLog because it’s a simple and clean tool that appeals to bloggers’ self interest (getting read, making connections, yakking about areas of expertise) in much the same way the most popular social networks appeal to teens’ desire to express themselves and connect.

The killer app is a MyBlogLog widget that bloggers install on their side nav. When MyBlogLog members visit a blog, their profile picture shows up in the widget. This is a powerful and visual way to let bloggers know they’re being read by actual humans (something Matt McAlister calls distributed identity). Clicking a profile picture takes you to a MyBlogLog profile, where you can add contacts, join communities, and send private or publicly viewable messages. Quite simply, there’s nothing cooler for publishers than spending time crafting a piece and then seeing the thumbnail profile picture of those who are checking out your story.

And that’s basically it. The features that the MyBlogLog site offers will undoubtedly get buffed out by team Yahoo!, but I hope they don’t go too crazy with the bells and whistles. MyBlogLog could become the “MySpace for bloggers” in all the best ways that can be meant, namely huge potential users and traffic figures.

Until recently, bloggers came to the Internet able to easily publish, engage and interact with readers in the comments area of each post, and distribute wares easily via RSS. Now a new front in stimulating communication and networking comes in the form of MyBlogLog-style widgets (and the simple social network that backs it) and may represent a new key element for online communities.