I reported a few days ago about TechCrush (and has been noticed by a few others) the outfit started up by a couple German entrepreneurs.

Seems like their raison d’etre was to keep an eye on Web2.0 companies profiled by TechCrunch in the days, weeks, months and possibly years afterwards — possibly providing a more balanced opinion after the hype has had a chance to settle.

My own smarmy opinions aside, I think this is a great idea. Follow up will keep everyone a little more honest, and hopefully act as a balance for the exuberance around these emerging technologies.

Back to the story: Its only been up for a few days, and it looks like its already been grounded.

With less than 10 posts underneath their belt, covering Flock, iKarma and Jigsaw, the latest post, titled “The Lion Sleeps Tonight (not)“, dated 9/21/06 says the following.

We put down our pencils here at the Crush-Room for the next days due to possible legal issues. Please stay with us, we will see how things are going to work out.

What legal issues do you think? How about the ones mentioned by Mike “Mr. Web2.0″ Arrington mentioned on this website himself:

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In an event that I think, may have gotten overlooked by the media at large, Warner has kenneled their lawyers on copyright violations at YouTube — when it comes to doing mashups, at least, it seems.

Yes, you can rest at last. That video of your grandma shaking her booty to “My Humps” won’t end up at the end of a lawsuit next year (I hope).

A couple of days ago, YouTube made the announcement:

What’s even better is that Warner is the first record label to embrace and support your creativity by authorizing use of their music content for free, in partnership with your favorite artists! This new architecture will be available by the end of the year. We will have more details to share then.

So, it seems like not only is YouTube allowed to rebroadcast music videos, but will also have the lattitude to use their music (and perhaps the videos) “creatively”, and “for free”.

I’m interpreting “free”, as in “it won’t cost anything”, and “we’re not going to sue your pants off if you don’t pay us a royalty of some kind”.

With the mentioning of an “architecture”, one wonders what sort of technology will be involved; will it be to facilitate mashups? Will they provide actual raw tracks and video clips for users to play with, insert, and otherwise edit?

Or can we look forward to technology that restricts users, or monitors users, as they try and engage this artistry creatively?

Seems like YouTube still has a lot of work to do before they settle the score, even with a corporation that they’ve struck a deal with. In particular, as Mr. Arrington astutely points out, and others have correctly noted: before YouTube even considers getting put out to that cushy profitable pasture in the sky (getting bought out to the tune of about 1.5 billion — its current evaluation), it needs to sort ALL of their copyright issues first.

From crotcheting a kilt, to resuscitating rabbits, I’ve found there are a few things that great how-to lists have in common. Inspired by a contest over at ProBlogger, I’d like to announce my own how-to: How to do “How-to” lists.

Think of them as the six “E’s”. ;)

Meaty: Yes, your how-to should actually contain some redeemable and worthwhile information. It should be as accurate and complete as possible. Resuscitating rabbits? Yes, it IS important to include that part about the defibrillator, but also the part about the intubation tray as well. I mean, how else are you going to control the airway?

Pearly: Iknow that the first part to doing up my pants is to first zip up the the zipper and then button up that top. What I might not know is that most zippers can actually lock down if you press it down all the way (well, if I was a four year old). Pearly has nothing to do with how white and shiny your how-to is. Its that extra bit of knowledge — that extra pearl of wisdom you can provide that’s going to make your how-to stand up and out of the crowd.

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So, for a few weeks I had this problem.

After each post, Wordpress would wait and wait — and sometimes I would get a browser error saying it had timed out.

Sometimes, it would take up to 5 minutes to complete a post!

Have you ever had this problem? The issue was the number of services Wordpress would be pinging after each post; Wordpress if configured to do this in sequence after each post, and needs to wait for each ping after it moves on to the next one.

Well, no wonder.

Turns out there is a plugin that can help with this issue, called “No Ping Wait”.

Through the magic of somehow re-jiggering the pinging process, so that I think that it does it after the posting process, it speeds everything up to a blink of an eye.

Oh, blessed relief!

Caution: Works with Wp 1.5 and greater. Upload, install in the usual fashion and away you go!

Download: http://somethingunpredictable.com/wp-no-ping-wait/ –> Yikes! it seems the site is down as of the writing of this post. If its not up in the next few days, I’ll just upload my version for you.

As a followup to yesterday’s doom-and-gloom post about that soft “popping” sound over at Yahoo, Om Malik over at GigaOm has done some digging with respect to Yahoo’s third quarter results.

Its a good read, but as a summary:

1. Pundits think that its a sign of an upcoming wider malaise
2. Mr. Malik feels that its probably a combination of: endemic problems AT Yahoo, a wider economic trend, AND a climate of deepening competition
3. When the financial sector goes soft, Yahoo follows (graph provided)
4. Ford’s tough times will probably mean more results-oriented marketing (i.e. away from CPM banner ads) for Ford — and likely the rest of the automobile industry
5. Yahoo has had problems with its next-generation ad serving system (lateness), which may be an indication of difficulties at Yahoo itself

Bottom line:  While Yahoo may have its own issues, there seems to be accumulating evidence that a system-level issue may be at place.  Advertising-dependent models will be hit first.
I suspected that they might be better this time around to weather the storm …

… but its still gonna hurt.

• Wisdom of Crowds? Or Genius of Few?
  PicksPlay has been running internal numbers — No surprise, it seems like there are elite sports play pickers. And it might just be the edge some betters are willing to pay for.
  (tags: cool. betting sports web2.0 genius crowds wisdom)
• Hot or Holy? Religion Sites Embrace Web 2.0
  MySpace meets its match with a crop of Web2.0 sites which focuses on holiness, rather than hotness. Sacrilicious! Thanks to Red Herring.
  (tags: redherring religion web2.0)
• Genius Made, Not Born
  Courtesy of Scientific American: A wonderful article on the whole matter of nature vs. nuture, regarding genius as told through an analysis of chess champions. Brilliant.
  (tags: scientificamerican nurture nature genius expert)
• Projectors Shrinking At Prodigious Pace
  Projector the size of sugar cube, story courtesy of the BBC. “The width of projector measures less than 16mm; its height and depth is 9mm.” The difference? A single mirror. Cool.
  (tags: movies TV television projector shrinking BBC)
• Cool Thing Of The Day: Moo Cards
  For the 2.5 of you who don’t read Boing Boing: You can get business cards for kids! Bright colors, simple designs, coupled with pictures from Flickr with a laminate finish. Designer-licious!
  (tags: colorful children kids flickr boingboing cards business cool)
• Howstuffworks “How Digg Works”
  Digg gets the “How Stuff Works” once over. Flip over to page 2, where they go into an in depth of some of the behind the scenes stuff. Page 3: the controversy. Interesting perspectives.
  (tags: howstuffworks howto digg)
• Over 10,000 fonts for free! (As in Beer!)
  Another free font archive throws their hat into the free-font ring. Courtesy of BetterFonts.com. The interface is clean and remarkably free of ads (although there are a few). Slick.
  (tags: archive foundry fonts fontography free)

Yes, the first sign of the apocalypse may be heralded by a popping sound. Yahoo announced today that its third quarter results dropped lower than expectations because of lower ad spending in two segments: cars and financial advertising.

Have advertisers started realizing that ad impressions and page views are a worthless metric?

After all, there is a reason why advertising evolved out of banner ads and into a pay-per-click model with the rise of Overture.

Well, its difficult to know the reasons behind the softer ad spending, but it can’t be but bad tidings for the blogosphere.

While some larger blogs and social networks have diversified (”Hiltonized?”) their revenues, far, far, far too many still rely on advertising revenues.

Much like the first bubble, internet businesses can be remarkably sensitive to shifts in ad spending if that’s all their revenues are based on.

However, UNLIKE the first bubble — I expect that many businesses will probably be in a better shape to weather it.

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