All Things Digital

If you read this blog, you might think that Kara Swisher isn’t a big fan of fun. Or at least of silly, fun apps like SuperPoke! and what we call “social entertainment.” Call me silly, but I’d take entertainment over utility any time, and you know what? I bet you would too.

Case in point: the week of April 21 and the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary. That Tuesday marked a very important day for our country. A major competition between visible and opposing candidates was decided. It was a vote that is sure to generate publicity and campaigning over the coming months, and it will no doubt continue to occupy center stage of our national attention. Of course, I’m talking about “American Idol.”

That week, the two most popular television broadcasts were “American Idol” and “American Idol” (Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively). The third and fourth were both “Dancing with the Stars.” Check out the table below (from Nielsen Media Research; click on all tables and charts to make them bigger) and perhaps you’ll arrive at the same conclusion I did: When it comes to consumption, we prefer entertaining fare.

Likewise on the Web, Google News’s most popular searches in 2007 are by and large entertainment related (from Google Zeitgeist 2007):

Here’s a graph from Alexa.com of traffic to the three most popular non-search-engine Web sites and the most popular news Web site.

And here’s a graph from a Morgan Stanley “Internet Trends” report from 2008 of two of those same Web sites and the two most popular search-engines:

That last graph made a pretty big splash when it debuted at the Web 2.0 Expo conference; its title was “YouTube + Facebook Views > Yahoo! or Google…” Or to put it another way: today, fun is more powerful than utility.

Consider the value of other companies that deliver entertainment: Disney, Time Warner and Sony have a combined market cap of over $168 billion. Gross revenue for the NFL and MLB last year exceeded $12 billion. Apple made nearly $2 billion through iTunes music sales alone. Social networks benefit from increased activity, advertisers benefit from an exuberant audience, and widget users can, well, share favorite “American Idol” moments, send virtual margaritas or trout slap each other.

So seriously Kara, you have to try throwing a sheep or two. As Dr. Seuss said: “If you never have, you should. These things are fun and fun is good.”

Keith Rabois is vice president of strategy and business development at Slide, which makes widgets and applications such as SuperPoke!

In late 2002, millennia after its inspiration was destroyed by fire, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina opened its doors near the original site of ancient Egypt’s Library of Alexandria. The new institution launched with the heady goal of matching its predecessor’s standing as the ultimate source of knowledge in its time. The project came with controversy, both for its $220-million price tag and relatively modest collection of 500,000 volumes. It’s ironic, then, that Wikipedia, another contender to be the ancient library’s modern-day successor, debuted almost two years earlier, on January 15, 2001, with no controversy and only a paltry 600 articles generated in its first month

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The fans of microblogging service Twitter, led by head cheerleader Robert Scoble, were all aflutter Monday with the sense that in speedily passing along word of this morning’s earthquake in China, they have participated in a news reporting revolution. Seems Scoble started getting and forwarding tweets from China even as the ground was still shaking, an entire minute or two before the USGS posted preliminary data on location and strength, and more minutes before the bulletins started moving on the news wires.

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In Pixar Films’ upcoming animation epic, “Wall-E,” the title character is a cute but clunky robot whose centuries of solitude on an abandoned Earth is broken by the arrival of a svelte, futuristic robot named Eve–who is so white, gleaming and well, pod-like, that she looks like she was born in Apple’s design room. It turns out that she was–sort of: Eve marks the first design collaboration within Steve Jobs’s culture-shaping Apple-Pixar-Disney axis.

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Along the lines of can’t-really-be-answered-but- gosh-they’re-fun-to-ponder questions like, say, “Who’d win in a fight, Batman or Spider-Man?” or “Star Destroyer vs. U.S.S. Enterprise?” here’s one regarding the iPhone: What historical Mac is a current iPhone most analogous to, spec-wise? I.E., complete this sentence: “An iPhone is like having a tiny ____ in your pocket?”

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This week, the television upfronts–in which the broadcast networks present their schedules to advertisers–will open with a mystery. Who stole six million viewers? That’s the number who were watching prime time television last May, a month affectionately known as “sweeps,” but have disappeared this year, according to the overnight Nielsen ratings.

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A funny thing has been happening to Google lately. Have you noticed? It’s going up!

And I’m not talking about the one-day pop it got from those surprisingly good earnings, which shocked just about everyone on Wall Street and sent Google shares soaring.

I’m talking about the day-to-day creep-up, the steady momentum, the renewed interest in a company that never deserved to be on the outs to begin with.

The parallels to Apple are pretty striking.

Yes, the two are in decidedly different industries, but the status they enjoy in their respective industries is pretty striking. They are each the single, exciting brand, doing innovative things, controlling their markets, owning the buzz.

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We often cover semiconductors that require less energy, but we rarely talk to the companies behind those chips to find out what else they might be doing to reduce their power consumption. However, Norm Fjeldheim, chief information officer for Qualcomm, recently shared a few tidbits about what the cellphone chip maker is doing to keep corporate consumption down–and it all starts with information technology (not everyone is jumping ship to build “cleantech” firms).

While it was some 20 years that the Qualcomm IT department instigated a recycling effort that’s still in effect on the Qualcomm campus today, it is within the last five years that Qualcomm has made its biggest strides. In 2004 it began construction on a new corporate building and attached a data center to the corporate offices.

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Large tech companies turn their annual conferences into lavish affairs featuring high-quality gifts for attendees and concerts by big-name rock stars. But lately an unplanned giveaway has stolen some headlines: the flu.

The San Francisco Department of Public Heath this week warned of an outbreak of the Norovirus at the Moscone Center, where Sun Microsystems is currently hosting the JavaOne conference. The Norovirus is a highly contagious flu-like virus that causes nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and some stomach cramping. A spokesman for the city tells the Business Technology Blog that the warning came after the public-health department received several complaints from attendees at Sun’s conference.

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Social network Facebook announced Friday the debut of Facebook Connect, a new technology for members to connect their profile data and authentication credentials to external Web sites. It makes the company the latest major Web site to embrace the concept of data portability.

The formal announcement was made through a post on Facebook’s developer blog by senior platform manager Dave Morin, who has been one of the company’s most visible evangelists in the developer community over the past year. Facebook Connect will launch within the next few weeks.

Through Facebook Connect, members will be able to use their Facebook identities across the Web–profile photos, names, photos, friends, groups, events and other information. Facebook profile content, for example, could appear on other social sites, and Facebook event listings could theoretically connect with external event and invitation services.

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In the rapidly shifting era of blogger and media relations, we can expect one thing to occur as we forge ahead: mistakes. It happens to the best and the worst of us.

This isn’t a generic post on how not to make mistakes, or if you do, how to apologize, per se. This is an example of true transparency and public soul-searching that will hopefully help and inspire PR practitioners, journalists and bloggers to learn from the mistakes of others–and hopefully work together when unintentional or harmless mistakes are made.

Let’s talk about transparency for a moment. You hear that word a lot across the social mediasphere–almost to the point where it may be losing its original value and intent.

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If there’s one thing to be learned from social media tools, it’s that these services were not made to interact with one another. Complaints are rolling in and heated discussions are taking place about the noise levels within social media platforms. Here’s a look at why–and why filtering should be the next step.

With so many different platforms to aggregate, noise levels are surging. An underlying issue in the level of noise is that some of these services were not made to interact with one another. Users of social-aggregation tools should understand that what you may consider noise is actually a side-effect of using a social-aggregation platform. Users should also note when you may be confusing aggregation with importation.

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Reports, rumors and innuendos are bouncing around the Web that Google may not want to cut an advertising deal with Yahoo after all. This before there is actually substantiation that Google and Yahoo are crafting an advertising deal, which was something of a rumor and innuendo in the first place, allegedly planted to let Microsoft know that Yahoo had options.

Google is allegedly worried about ticking off Washington officials who might think that if Google is playing ball with Yahoo, Google has become an antitrust violator that must be terminated. As if Google isn’t already close to monopoly power in search. It gets 67% of all searches, and that share keeps growing. Google worrying that a Yahoo deal will push it over the brink in antitrust is like Kim Jong-il worrying that if he puts on a party hat he’ll be considered crazy.

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With all the commotion over the rise of social networking sites, parental groups and government bodies have been asking for someone to think of the children. In response to rising concerns that Facebook and MySpace have become beacons for sexual predators and bullies, these two leading sites have agreed to add over 40 new safeguards aimed at protecting young users.

Announced today by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, the agreement “marks another watershed step toward social networking safety, protecting kids from online predators and inappropriate content.” Officials from Washington, D.C. and 49 states have signed on to the agreement, which took months of negotiations.

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The cool thing about eBay’s support system is it will always answer your question; unfortunately, that answer will always be a form letter on how to reset your password, as Timothy discovered when he tried to figure out how to sell his laptop to someone who wasn’t a Nigerian scammer. Timothy has discovered the awful truth behind today’s eBay–something many readers here already know–which is that it’s become virtually impossible to sell any sort of medium- to high-end electronics there anymore.

Timothy’s email went on for about two weeks, so we’ve tried to edit it for length.

“eBay seems now to be essentially broken. What used to be a ‘virtual yard sale’ where one could hunt for–and potentially find–a good deal on a broad variety of eclectic items has now turned (in my opinion at least) into a hybrid mass of scammers and shady garage-retailers, clumped together with a straggling, dying breed of people who used to be excited about eBay, but who are now wishing it would return to what it used to be.”

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