I got pretty excited by Chad Hurley’s announcement at the annual Rich International Assholes Hot Air Fest at Davos that YouTube would soon start paying users for content until my fellow Social Media Collective member Jeff Nolan reminded me that it still isn’t clear if YouTube itself is making money.  Pretty hard to share what you don’t have although you can […]

Live by free software, die by free software.  That’s the message IBM and Yahoo just delivered to Google with a new free, entry-level, enterprise search application that undercuts one of the few things for which Google actually charges money. The Google Mini, an appliance loaded with Google search software starts at $1,995 for 50,000 documents and […]

The big news this morning is that Google has entered the wiki/collaboration space by acquiring JotSpot, the do-it-yourself wiki company founded by Excite.com co-founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer.  How much Google paid is confidential (we’ll see for how long) but you can bet it was several orders of magnitude more than the $100,000 it cost Kraus and Spencer to launch the […]

Show me a good corporate environmental citizen and I’ll show you a company that is more concerned about cutting costs or saving money by eliminating waste from its processes than it is about melting Arctic ice floes.  This is not a criticism.  As a motivator of human behavior, short-term payback trumps long-range fear any day of the week.  We all […]

Google has just added its re-designed (or shall we say, “un-designed”) Writely word processor to its online spreadsheet offering and renamed  the package Google Docs & Speadsheets.  Is this the end of Microsoft Office?  Not a chance.  Will it be a threat to Microsoft someday?  You bet your ass. 
As is its style, Google has stripped away […]

Why Google Wants YouTube
TRAFFIC DATA
Select Online Video Sites 
August 2006
Source: comScore Media Metrix 
Total Unique Visitors (000)
Select Sites Aug-06
Yahoo! Video                   21,141
MySpace Videos               19,406
YouTube                         19,089
MSN Video                      15,414
Google Video Search        11,891 
STREAMING VIDEO DATA
Select Video Properties
Unique Streamers (000), Streams Initiated (MM), Share of Streams (%)
July 2006
Source: comScore Video Metrix
Select Unique U.S.                             Streams Initiated
Properties Streamers (000)                 by U.S. Users (MM)
Total Internet (U.S.) […]

Google founders Sergey Binn and Larry Page may behave like tree-hanging simians when the subject is decking out the company superjet but their approach to charity strikes me as incredibly sensible and mature.  As a front page article in today’s New York Times points out, the Google founders have taken an approach to charity that differs wildly from […]

You know a company is having dark thoughts about its own mortality when it starts sticking the word “Live” in front of all its new products.  Such has to be the case with Microsoft which released its Live Search from beta today and launched Live.com in 47 markets worldwide.  The company also launched Live Local Search in the U.K. and […]

Okay, here’s my fantasy.  It’s 1950 and I’m a seven-year-old kid living on a backwoods farm in West Virginia and I have acquired an invisible (to everyone but me) and unloseable Treo 700p connected to today’s web.  Any piece of future information on the web up to today is available to me, including the results of horse races, […]

The New York Times has a page one story by John Markoff this morning about Google CEO and chief babysitter Eric Schmidt joining the board of Apple and what this might portend in terms of building an alternative to the Evil Empire in Redmond. 
Schmidt, who will always be remembered (by me, at least) as the guy […]