I gave my thoughts on the supposed rumours a few days ago, and I’ll stand by them:

If Google wants to own online advertising, then it makes sense to own a platform that almost every single blogger uses.

Sure, you can quibble over how effective it is, or how Google doesn’t always make the best of these acquisitions.  So what?  With this purchase, Google Adwords will be fitting into your RSS feeds somewhere in our future, and not only will it help rope even *more* people into the Adwords program, but it also serves as a strategic piece to blocks out Microsoft.  Heck, with Google’s purchase of DoubleClick, we might even see banner ads being rotated through every once and a while.

With 2007 being the year of acquisitions, one does wonder how far this mania will extend to acquire online advertising firms.

Will it ever get to the point Google,  Microsoft or even Yahoo might gaze their hungry eyes towards PayPerPost or ReviewMe?

Don’t get me wrong: making some strategic moves makes sense if you’re content to be the third fiddle (or fourth, or fifth) to Google’s chief fiddler (or, for the comic book geeks out there, let’s say Firelord, to Google’s Galactus). I think it would be smart to pay Firefox, for example, to make Ask.com its default search. Or, for that matter, starting a price war when it comes to contextual advertising.

Heck, as a blogger and publisher I would *welcome* the latter.

But let’s be honest here.

Google owns one thing that Ask will never have.

Or, something that Yahoo will never reclaim.

Or, that Microsoft will never be able to buy.

And that’s the “mindshare” of Internet users world wide for what “Search” means. Heck, for the minds of some people, Google *IS* the Internet. And let’s not get into its forays into web applications, dark fibre, data centers and the like.

When most people think “Search”, or what to query anything, they think of Google. And now that Google’s been in that position for so many years, it will take more than strategic maneuverings, no matter how slick, subtle, or expensive they might be, to change that.

The kinds of changes that Ask.com is trying to implement are tactical at best, but even the smartest strategic maneuverings would never do more than advertise and bring attention to what Ask.com is — and that is a Search Engine like Google.com

Leapfrogging over Google would take some massive kind of shift in what Search means, something hugely disruptive and innovative. Is *that* what’s going on at Ask.com? Maybe it is, but I haven’t heard anything about it. I mean, sure they’re changing algorithms, apparently.

Whoop-de-frackin’-doo.

Let’s say you could prove that Ask.com is a better search tool than Google, well, what then?

It still wouldn’t be good enough. Business history is littered with examples of poorer technologies that still took and never relinquished the lead even when better products or technologies existed. The Qwerty keyboard. Microsoft.

I could go on.

Do I think Ask.com could topple Google? Of course not. Could it improve its share of the search engine market with aggressive marketing and wiley strategic partnerships? Sure. But how much of the pie are they eventually going to get? And are they going to be happy with that tiny sliver of a slice? Will it be a curve of decreasing marketing returns?

But will investors ever be happy being the runty animal in the search engine family?

My feeling is probably no.

Will Ask.com have the intestinal fortitude to introduce something really game changing rather than settling for throwing marketing cash at a problem that money can’t solve? (Because let’s face it — if money *COULD* solve it, Microsoft would have already done it)

Again — my feeling is probably not.

But you know what? It could. So why doesn’t it?

All elitest snobbery aside, is anyone else wondering if the name “Skype” carries any cachet to the Wal-Mart crowd? I’m thinking, (as you might) probably not.

But, is Skype really so simple that it is now ready for prime time? (because getting distributed through Wal-Mart is nothing else but “prime time”)

I think the answer for this is “sort of“.

I use Skype — but I don’t use it instead of a normal phone service. Why? Well, I live in a condo. I would think about using some kind of VOIP service except that there’s no guarantee that it would mesh with the telephone network that allows me to buzz people into my building.

Which would be fine if you lived a life of solitude, without any hope of visitors — but like most people, I don’t live the life of a hermit.

What I *do* use Skype for is to make Skype-to-Skype calls, and take advantage of the cheap calls to land lines. $20 flat fee for unlimited calls to North American landlines for the rest of the year?

Hell yeah.

But in my opinion the thing that is the killer application for Skype is the very thing that makes it more like a phone, and less like some fancy schmancy VOIP device — and that’s a cordless USB phone.

The model that I have allows me to access the phone line OR Skype, which is great. I can use the handset like a phone whenever I want, and then with a flick of a button, make long distance calls through Skype without any problems.

Moreover, because its cordless, I don’t need to be tethered in front of a PC when I’m making my phone calls.

Just like an ordinary phone! :)

Om Malik makes some great points about the need for Skype to increase revenues to justify its purchase price. They make sense insofar that I don’t really understand the telephony industry at all, anyway. I still can’t figure out why eBay purchased Skype in the first place — or rather, how they justified its huge price, and their projections on ROI.

Nevertheless, is Skype ready for prime time? I’m thinking that the answer may really hinge on the hardware, more than anything else — in as much that its able to overcome the perception that its something that requires, or is tethered, to an actual PC.

But perhaps that’s just an elitest geek-centric way of thinking.

For example, is this new new world governed by total egalitarianism? Are we really living in a wonderful utopia where all voice are given equal thought as they ought to be as determined by their merit? Are markets really conversations, immune to, and laughing at businesses?

Well, it’d be nice if it was, but the answer to all of these questions is “not really”. While personal publishing tools allow anyone to start writing and publishing their thoughts, as evidenced by a recent blogging dust up, there is still a natural heirarchy in the currency of attention. Its partially dominated by early adopters of the medium, but it exists as naturally as fact as the sun rises in the east. Are blogs, wikis and podcasts conversations? Sure. Are they outside, immune to, or laughing at businesses? The answer to this is a resounding “no”, and can be summarized in one word: “PayPerPost”.

We don’t all use it, we’re definitely not all fans of it, but this company seems to encapsulate the zeitgeist that there are bloggers who are willing to sell their opinions for a price. You can rant all you like about how that’s not actually how it works; however, when you are paid for your opinion, good or bad, there cannot but be some kind of influence. And in this new media world we live in, bloggers are proud of their closer connections to industry; on one hand it allows them to get the scoop earlier and faster than traditional outlets. On the other hand, with appropriate disclosure, it seems like all kinds of conflicts of interest are acceptable.

Is there truth to the flipside? Is this just a cacophony of the unwashed, the uneducated, and the uncultured? Is mob mentality the rule of the day? Isn’t this just just an attempt at getting inward looking narcissistic drivel — and attitudes — to flourish? Again, the answer is “not really”.

The value in blogging, wikis, or podcasting is relative. Stuff that many people would label as self-important drivel may be correct; on the other hand, the authors of that self-important drivel don’t care — and more to the point, haven’t written or published it for the purposes of real public consumption. The ecosystem of new media is self regulating in many ways, as it ignores things that are without use to it, and promotes the things that are. For example, self-important drivel isn’t all that easy to find via search engines, but stuff that is often genuinely useful (to greater or lesser degrees) often is thanks to the other lingua franca of new media: links.

And this very blog has been the kind recipient of a whole ‘lot of links over the past ten months.

The nature of this new world of self-publishing, however, is that while there *is* a natural “attention” hierarchy that is naturally reinforcing, it is virtually frictionless to get started, as barriers around cost and ease of use are virtually nil. Poeple who have something genuinely interesting to say, or genuinely new or worthwhile to report in all of its relativistic wonder *can* get heard. Whether its the whistleblower who has to go on YouTube to make his point about Navy spending indiscretions, or podcasters getting “scouted” into mainstream media thanks to their self-directed efforts, or musicians eschewing traditional channels of distribution, yet still succeeding and selling records, successful examples of the relatively egalitarian nature of new media abound.

The truth and reality of new media is somewhere in between the Utopian ideals of the Cluetrain Manifesto and the anti-anti-Establishment rantings of Andrew Keen. We have tools to exist in a virtual ecosystem which is a meritocracy of opinion, although this has its limits and boundaries. Its an ecosystem which is prone to mob mentality and flash condemnation — but its also self-regulating environment, where all facts and opinions are naturally checked and checked again.

Furthermore, stuff that is truly important does float to the top – and does so quickly — because it doesn’t have to penetrate layers of entrenched self-reinforcing institutionalized bureaucracy, no matter what its form. Self-important drivel exists as well, but since its only written for a tiny audience anyway, its largely irrelevant to any real discourse on the issue. Anonymous instigators of abusive, puerile and hateful commentary exist as they always have. But like the pre-Mosaic era, they’re largely ignored.

The ecosystem of blogs, wikis, social networks, and podcasts is not a perfect system. But its a damn sight better than what existed before. There now exists a means for individuals that want to be heard and who have something worthwhile to say, to actually have a better chance of having it heard than ever before. On the other hand, its not a zero-sum game either. People and institutions who feel threatened by these changes need to take heart its greatest advantages, and realize that while we are still all trying to figure out what It All Means, there is more benefit to taking part than it is to deny its existence, or worse yet, take cheap shots from the sidelines.

But, as Mike Arrington reports, some big, big news brewing out of MySpace today. Turns out they’ve suddenly switched off their user’s profile’s access to Photobucket, one of the largest (if not *the* largest) free photo and video storage services on the net. According to an email that was published through Mike, and is echoed on the Photobucket blog, Photobucket gets in the order of 50,000 video uploads *per day*.

Is this a surprise?

Well, it shouldn’t be. Way back when YouTube was purchased by Google, a senior executive with Fox (it may have even been Murdoch himself) was heard to say something to the effect that there was no reason why MySpace couldn’t start competing in the online video arena, because of its huge installed base of users. Or, even other online services.

There’s no official reason why Photobucket has been cut off. There might be a legitimate one, or not. But I think it just goes to show that Rupert Murdoch means Business when it comes to MySpace, and furthermore, isn’t afraid to show that MySpace doesn’t need any external widgets polluting its pool of users with “choices” and the like.

Photobucket’s CEO is asking that its users vote with their feet, or perhaps their keyboards. Ultimately, I think that the next move is really MySpace’s. Once people start acruing the benefits of network effects in a social network, its a double eged sword which has the effect of locking them into the same network. It only makes sense to move if *everyone* moves.

If MySpace has an alternate video storage and management product cooking — which only has to be *just* has good — it will have no problem locking in its users. They’d have to deal with a whole lot of them being cheesed off because all the time that was spent uploading their videos to another service had been lost; but I’m sure there’s lots they could do to sweeten the pot in the meantime.

And if MySpace *does* have an alternate to Photobucket, the next logical question is “what else do they have cooking?” There’s been a spate of news around widgets which cross blogs and social networks. But if MySpace (and other networks) starts developing their own in-house widgets, it might signal a larger trend towards creating truly closed-in systems; ultimately, this would benefit MySpace in a huge way — not only preventing people from leaving MySpace (because it continues to add functionality to itself) — but also increasing the height of those metaphorical walls which separate its users from marketers who are salivating at the chance to get at this demographic. Higher walls (to flog the metaphor) can only mean steeper tolls to get access to MySpace’s users.

Which in turn means a more profitable bottom line for Fox.

The ball’s in Rupert’s corner with this one. Will it turn into a public relations disaster, or a shrewd tactical maneuver that makes social widgets virtually obselete? Time will tell … and do so very, very soon.

Own up to it.

Either Mr. Calacanis isn’t in the habit of doing this, or, perhaps he’s merely too busy with his other projects to comment in person (although not too busy to answer challenges, declare bets, or make public claims, in the first place, of course).

But some time ago Mr. Calacanis decided to paint the SEO industry in a negative light, in some fairly broad strokes. Something to the effect that (I’m paraphrasing here) most SEOs were charlatans, and that all a blogger (or site owner) needed to do was concentrate on good content, and the rest would take care of itself.

Any six year old, however, can tell you how false that is.

But, Neil Patel of ProNet Advertising decided to issue a challenge of his own some weeks ago, stating in effect that he could increase Mr. Calacanis’s own blog’s traffic with SEO methods *alone* … and without any shady tactics, naturally.

Well, the results are in, and sure enough, Neil’s results speak for themselves. Traffic has indeed risen more than 20% with only 10% of the changes that they intended to make. No funny blackhat chicannery here.

Where’s Mr. Calacanis now?

No comments in the blog post to acknowledge Neil’s work.

Nothing in his own blog in spite of a spate of anti-SEO rants.

Is this surprising?

Not really, because its happened before.

Twice.

1. The Digg “Sushi” Bet: After all, Mr. Calacanis made a public “bet” in the fall of last year claiming that Digg would start paying its top users, just like Netscape did, by the end of the year. Digg hasn’t, and sure enough, Mr. Calacanis didn’t offer any follow up in this regard (in fact it was a Sushi bet for folks living in LA/ NYC — my feeling is that no one has taken him up on the bet).

2. The Alexa Challenge: How about the time Mr. Calacanis wanted to “game” Alexa to show how crappy it was (it still is, but that’s besides the point). He asked his users to install Alexa and cause an artificial spike in traffic. Sure enough, nothing really happened — I went to the trouble of breaking things down, actually — and, sure enough, nothing on Mr. Calacanis’s end either.

I’m not going to chalk this up to a-list anything. That conversation’s long past (and quite frankly was already past when Mr. Calacanis decided to pick it up almost two months after I started it … but that’s neither here nor there) its expiry date.

But, jeez man.

You’re happy to stand on the tallest mountain and beat your chest when you think you’re right.

How about when you’re wrong?

Jason Calacanis decided to weigh in on a post I did a few months ago, wherein I took exception to the shrill tone of the anti-PPP rhetoric. I also ranted a little about how A-list bloggers didn’t “get” blue-collar blogging types [which got picked up by Lorelle] I make it a habit of replying back on my blog whenever possible, and comments on my blog or no exception.

This was Jason’s reply:

What a joke… a couple of years ago Scoble, Jarvis, and I were the blue collar bloggers! We were hustling trying to get our vocies heard and a couple of years later–after blogging daily/hourly–the supposed “A List” got some traction and attention.

Here is a tip: THEY EARNED IT!!! They busted their butts for years blogging in an intelligent way. They were not given their seats at the table–they took them!

There is no “A List” — it’s a myth.

There are people who blog every day, have something intelligent to say, and who get linked to more than the folks that are some combination of a) new, b) have little to say, and c)are not hustling.

If you want to be part of the A List you can do it in [the message truncates here]

And this is my opinion:

You know what’s a joke? Being so far removed from ordinary bloggers that you don’t think there is an “A-list”.

Listen, I’m not disparaging the fact that you, Scoble, Jarvis (and a host of others) are not hardworking. Far from it.

But there are intangibles that you all bring to the table that most people don’t have; and I think it speaks to the fact that even though you guys do have the credentials (Jarvis), the connections (Scoble), or the publicity/notoriety (you — from Weblogs) that you *still* have to work so hard says something.

Blogging is damn hard work, and harder still when you have kids to feed and are working lousy hours at work — and you don’t have the connections, notoriety or credentials to fuel your blogs success.

And let’s not discount it. When you have the ability to meet people most people don’t; when you have the inside track before most people do; and when you are actually *creating* news as most of us *can’t*, that’s what really separates “A-listers” from the rest of us.

I’ve come a long way in blogging, but I’m not blind to the fact that the vast majority of bloggers — even those who bring something new, refreshing, and regular to the table — may find barriers to blogging success in spite of hard work or their talent. I’d like to believe in the democracy of blogging, but the fact is that there are certain advantages that some bloggers have that others don’t. Not having them doesn’t mean you can’t be an A-lister, but I have yet to find one that didn’t have any.

The “A-list” exists, and it exists naturally. Do I think some of them “call it in”? Sure. But some of them also continue to blog just as hard as they do when they first started. But to think that a natural stratification doesn’t exist — or if it does, is easy to penetrate if you “are good and work hard” — is quite frankly, blind and a little arrogant.

[Yes, I am referring to your “how-to be an A-list recipe” with regards to Techmeme].

[And yes, I’m also referring to 2007, not 1997, or even 2002 when there were a tenth (hundredth? thousandth?) as many blogs competing]