Somewhere in the cacophony of the usual stuff on TechmemeCrunchFeed this past week, I missed this interesting nugget of news:

Google News makes money.  Lots of it.  To the tune of $100 million fungolas.

Now, when I heard about this, I did the proverbial triple take (”… wait, wait, wait — WHAT?”).

I’ve been a big fan of Google News.  I’m sorry to see that its commenting feature never really took off, but I attribute that more to Google News not really being as aggressive as it could be in the marketing department; but then again, that’s probably never been their strong suit (in some ways, they’re kind of like Starbucks, relying on their brand strength, and not really any particular message, nor any specific marketing campaign{ing})

But all that aside, one of the biggest issues that we were all yakking about a year ago, was how many traditional publications (read: newspapers) were complaining of how Google News was siphoning off readers.  And that Google Commenting would make that worse.  Some new media watchers (read: me, Mathew ingram, Scott karp, and others) liked the idea, and were pointed in the fact that Google News ought to be viewed as yet another source of traffic, and more importantly, has *NO* ads, and makes no direct money off Google News.

Well, I guess we were wrong about that one.

There are lots of sides to this tidbit of news, but one that hasn’t seemed to have gotten *any* traction is the legal one.

I’m referring to, specifically, the sabre rattling that Sam Zell made about a year ago when he purchased Tribune, and the threats he was making against Google at the time — that Google is liable for lost traffic to newspaper and traditional media sites, as it acts as a aggregator for news.  Lost traffic is lost money, and with this loose slip of the tongue, Google has revealed how much its making “at the expense” of the traditional sites that the are pointing to.

I put “at the expense” in quotes, naturally, because I think this issue is a little more complicated than a zero-sum scenario: Google doesn’t necessarily gain at the expense of other sites via Google News; rather, I suspect that the $100M figure comes from monetizing “left over” traffic who are either a) unsatisified by the news they findin Google News, or b) made more curious by the stuff they *do* find in Google News, as they head over to the “search” button to find more stuff.

It seems like the “death of newspapers” meme has dried up for a while, but with this casual slip of the tongue, one does wonder if it has just given some ammunition — and justification (however ill-defined) — that traditional media may have been looking for a long time.

*image via Quantcast

Almost 8 months into its public launch, Pownce is looking like a bit of a lame duck.

Which is strange (or not).

On paper, Pownce seems like a better Twitter than Twitter, given that you can also share files (up to 100 MB in size), as well as embed photos, videos, or MP3’s.  Plus, it handles sharing links in a sleeker way, more dedicated way.  Oh, the mobile interface is kind of nice as well, and when compared against Twitter’s native mobile interface, it doth rocketh a teensiest harder.

What else does it have going for it?  How about a tight pedigree, with Kevin “I’ll Still Be A Dark Tipper After $200M, I swear!” Rose’s mark behind it.

So, why hasn’t it gotten the traction that Twitter has?  It’s been out of private beta since January, but according to public traffic estimates across the board, things have remained kind of flat.  In fact, even with Twitter’s outages, dropping of Twitter followers, and public cries of “I swear, THIS time, I’m dropping it!”, Pownce — or, other micro-messaging services — really haven’t seemed to make a dent into Twitter.

My best guess(es): a combination of first mover advantage plus network effects.  Business history is littered with the examples of lesser products hauling marketing share over products that seem brilliant and better; in this case, Twitter *defined* what micro-messaging services was, captured the imagination of early adopters, exploded at SXSW 2007, and remained challengerless while those early adopters “figured” out how Twitter was useful (Twitter not as a life-streaming service per se, but more of a stateless hive mind, where you can have one-to-many interactions seemlessly).

And by the time they *did*, it was really too late, because far too many people were on Twitter to begin with.  Changing services would be monumental, and convincing others to use it would be a colossal pain in the ass.

Merely *being* better, as in Pownce’s case, can’t be enough.

And having that built in audience is just as surely saving Twitter’s bacon time, after time, after time.

How could services like Pownce (and Plurk, for that matter), grow their audiences?  Its hard to know.  There’s really only one Web 2.0 company that seems to be thriving, in spite of having features that seem to follow the leader: Mixx.

Mixx will never out-digg Digg, but because of industry connections, they’ve been able to convince mainstream media outlets to put their little “Mixx” it button on their sites, creating the impression, anyway, that they’re on equal footing with Digg (and Propeller, for that matter).

Bottom line?

An upward ticking graph that makes everyone happy.  Sure, you’d think the traffic would go through the roof with inbound traffic from the New York Times, CNN and USA Today, but at least its up.

Unlike Pownce.

Using Dan Farber, however, would be a TERRIBLE example. ;)

Interesting study from Third Age / JWT Boom, which shows how people over the age of 40 (presumably in North America, although there’s no mention that I can find of where they’re from) are engaged with social media on the Internets: the bottom line is that they’ve embraced email (in spite of the cacophony of cries that “email is dead“), but only a minority, about 20% were actively using social networking sites to keep in touch.

While another 20% might be interested, it seems like the vast majority just aren’t interested; furthermore, amongst the 50% who were neither using, nor interested, they gave reasons around privacy, time, and lack of benefit to using such services.

It seems like there was only one more thing that boomers were even LESS interested in and that was actively blogging (i.e. “writing blogging”).

In an interesting finding, boomers were *more* likely than younger users to participate in viral marketing campaigns, and more likely to share information about products or services with friends and family.

The interesting thing to me, actually, is that all of the above behaviours *perfectly* describe older members of my family of my parents generation.  They *still* find value and worth in forwarding email jokes and lists; they pretty much *only* do email; and, they question the worth of something like Facebook, while cautioning me about its privacy issues.  The only thing they “get” even less, of course, is blogging (and *me* blogging).

Does this sound at all familiar to any of you?  Or is it merely ageist nonesense?

// via marketing charts

If you're going to send us something, make it worthwhile.

So, if you’ve been blogging for any stretch of time, you might get contacted from time to time by public relations firms on behalf of web entities looking for a mention.  I know I do.  Perhaps I’m not so important that I get included on some lists and not others (in fact, I think that’s precisely the reason), but I can’t help but wonder *why* I get pitched the way I do.

Let me explain.

I rarely, if ever, act on a message by a public relations firm — contrary to what some bloggers say about PR firms ruling the blogging roost, that is.

Most of the time its because of the combination of two things

1. I’m clearly part of a list they like to send unsolicited information to, as its addressed quite generally

2. there is no angle or hook that would otherwise make a news bit newsworthy to me

Now, the first thing, I admit, is pure ego.  I like it if people know who I am when they’re emailing to me.  And it kind of relates to the second. If you have no idea who I am, and what I write about, how can you possibly tailor a pitch to me?

Which is a bit irrelevant because it just doesn’t happen – or rather, it very rarely does.

I mean, its not exactly rocket science getting into the mind of a blogger.  We like free stuff.  We also like access to stuff that no one else does.  We like to get a chance to write about something and be first about it.  And we also like to get noticed and validated for the work (or, should I say “work”) that we do.

You want us to yak about your thing?  Its easy. Give us free stuff to try out.  The more the better.  It can literally be the crappiest swag you have lying around.  Send us that private alpha or beta invitation.  If you don’t have one, make one up (I’m kidding … sort of).  Or — in this case — tell us something interesting and fresh about that thing that we can write about, that’s worthwhile, interesting and uniquely tailored to our audiences.

But for pete’s sake, don’t let *US* figure that out.  Most of us are either a) too lazy b) too busy or c) an ironic combination of the two to connect the ersatz dots, particularly if there’s no *real* picture there anyway (shhh — I won’t tell anyone).

Yes, perhaps I, and a cadre of other bloggers, are not actually that important to spend the time to do any or all of the above.  But if that’s the case, why are you trying to pitch bloggers if you’re probably aware that its not going to work in the first place?

Because, if it is, then really, those kinds of communications are no better than spam, don’t you think?

Joss Whedon and Neil Patrick Harris. Now, that’s funny. :)

Catch all three “blog” episodes at http://www.drhorrible.com

Silly question for you to ponder: even though mistakes happen, and they are inevitable, in the evolving space of cloud computing, is ever acceptable for the structures which host the cloud to be “down”?

I wonder if we’re yet at the dawn of an era where enough businesses are building — and depending on the reliability thereof — their systems through “cloud” servers, where the kind of outage that Amazon’s S3 service, for example, is unacceptable.

Sure, its understandable, but even the pea-brained amongst us (including myself, admittedly) can “get” that dollars … *LOTS* of dollars … are lost when your website can’t do what it needs to do. Sometimes that need is a small thing (i.e. avatars), but sometimes its large. Like SmugMug’s inability to serve photos. As a photosharing web service, I presume such things are important.

On presuming things, I do presume that cloud computing is something that’s here to stay. But are enough businesses building themselves *on* a cloud infrastructure *without* personal redundancies, that this kind of outage is beyond a “whoops”, but unacceptable?

(and that’s beyond the whole topic of what’s in their terms of service, and the legalities and repercussions of violating what’s been promised, and so on, and etcetera, and so forth).

Up here in the hinterlands of Canada, you may have heard about the giant uproar with Rogers, our only provider who can support, and therefore, sell the iPhone — specifically with the bald-faced inequitable profiteering of its data and voice rates in comparison with other countries (i.e. the United States). You may have also heard that it buckled under public pressure, and eventually relented with a marginally improved plan, so long as you sign up before August.

Well, I hope their public relations folk are well rested, because they may need to use their spinning techniques on the tech-loving public once more.

Why, you may ask?

Well, as pointed out by an astute Rogers customer, John Forsythe, Rogers is actively hi-jacking unused domain names, as a “clever” means of scooping up type-in traffic for monetization purposes. Specifically, they’re re-directing unused domain names to their own pages, with Yahoo advertising on the top.

Mr. Forsythe blythely points out that this even extends to subdomains that don’t exist on real domains that do. For example, there’s the ironic example of the non-existant subdomain of Google (example.google.com) which redirects to a page with Yahoo advertising.

Yes — wtf indeed.

Even if this doesn’t raise your ire, if you own a blog or website of any kind, you can see how it might, in fact, cause that rising sensation of bile in your throat, because Rogers (in Canada, anyway) is monetizing subdomain traffic from *YOUR* domain as well.

As John recalls, this isn’t the first time this kind of type-squatting chicanery has ever taken place; VeriSign had tried something like this in 2003, and as a result had a huge bulge in its traffic numbers, with its own site VeriSign.com becoming the 20th most visited (and then reaching the 10 ten) site on the Internets. Yes, the numbers were provided by Alexa, but it still gives some scope of the kind of traffic bumpage these kind of shennanigans can provide.

Eventually VeriSign and ICANN settled things, but it carries on for quite a few cable companies in the States; Rogers, I believe is the first Canadian one to adopt these kinds of practices.

This issue is a hotly contested one, and having exceeded the limits of what I actually know about the topic (extremely minute) in the first paragraph, I’ll kick it back to an interesting discussion at BroadBand Reports.

Post Script: In spite of the unashamedly attention-grabbing headline, unlike the iPhone which has mass commercial appeal, and in spite of the fact there are real issues around the concept of ‘neutrality’, I think its doubtful that this topic will ever raise enough ire to get to the mainstream press.

// via: reddit