Top stories for the week of June 30 - July 3

TV has been a way to sell annoying advertising since the dawn of the broadcast networks, so Google's plan to distribute sponsored cartoons via its far-reaching AdSense network is no shocker. A New York Times story reported that GOOG struck a deal with Seth MacFarlane, creator of Fox's Family Guy, to create "Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy." Apparently 50 two-minute webisodes will be created to run in the AdSpace rail on sites targeted at adults who still like cartoons, starting in September, with advertisers paying more than they do for text-only teasers. Metarand says the move leverages Google's existing AdSense infrastructure beautifully. VentureBeat calls it thinking outside the [TV] box. But WatchMojo points out that Google supposedly was going to try the exact same thing with SpongeBob Squarepants two years ago. Digital Destiny complains there are privacy issues in targeting TV at people like this (umm, DD, have you seen the Google ads on GMail that play off personal messages?). Paid Content says the Times story goes "a bit overboard" in calling it “a bold step into the distribution business."  The Times going overboard about Internet business? Now that's a shocker.

The Week in Blog Censorship:  Some bloggers are up in arms that pioneering proto-blog Boing Boing purged itself of any posts by former contributor Violet Blue, who writes about sex or something. Tomorrow Museum captured the spirit of the minor public outrage by saying "This is sexism. It’s also bad journalism. And it goes against the free interactive spirit of blogging." Gawker says it's just uncool. Boing Boing explains: Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility... we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day." You got a problem with that?

It appears Barack Obama supporters have tricked Google's Blogger service into suspending several anti-Obama sites as "spam" sites. Most were pro-Hillary Clinton blogs, several listed on justsaynodeal.com, an anti-Obama site.  "It looks like Google has officially joined the Barack Obama campaign," says the conservative blog NewsBusters. Bloggasm contacted affected bloggers and "every single one was convinced that it was Obama supporters who had flagged the blogs in some kind of concerted effort to silence them. But when I asked for specific evidence of this, most simply pointed out that only anti-Obama blogs were targeted — a fact that is certainly suspicious but not especially conclusive." BlueLyon, one of the suspended bloggers, posted Google/Blogger's apology letter in a WordPress blog. It read: " …we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the “Just Say No Deal” network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam…” Black & Right asks: "What's next, YouTube?"

Friends (and Twits) with Money: Well, it appears that a movie version of Friends is going to happen. Dlisted says Jennifer Aniston had been the holdout because she's too successful and then scoffs on her movie Derailed.

The National Venture Capital Association says the drought for venture-backed startups is in “crisis.” There were no VC-backed IPOs in the 2nd quarter, and TechCrunch notes that the last time there were no VC-backed IPOs in a quarter was 1978. TechDirt and Infections Greed say Sarbanes Oxley regulations, which make paperwork a hassle, are making companies reluctant to go public. Uhh, maybe potential stock buyers have just looked at the market lately.

A post at Innonate (and later on Silicon Alley Insider) insists Twitter could make itself worth $1.5 billion by turning into a PayPal-like online payment system, specifically fro mobile use. Twitter is everywhere, you see, and people could just type "P somebody $5" and that would do it. "Forget, for a moment, that Twitter has had serious scaling problems" Innonate says. OK. Is the moment over yet? Joe Duck seems to recall that "Nobody trusts Twitter to stay up, let alone handle their money." 

Happy 4th!

Get the best of the blog world every week in your inbox with our email newsletter. It's free! Sign up here.

Fascinating read in the August edition of Vanity Fair: They wades into the"Did short sellers kill Bear Stearns" (BSC) debate:

"At Phi Kappa Wall Street, most of the frat boys are instantly recognizable. There’s the big, backslapping Irishman, Merrill Lynch, the humorless grind, Goldman Sachs, and the straitlaced rich kid, Morgan Stanley. And then, off in the corner, wearing its beat-up leather jacket and nursing a cigarette, was the tough-guy loner, scrawny Bear Stearns, who disdained secret handshakes and towel snapping in favor of an extended middle finger toward pretty much everyone. Bear was bridge-and-tunnel and proud of it. Since the days when the Goldmans and Morgans cared mostly about hiring young men from the best families and schools, “the Bear,” as old-timers still call it, cared about one thing and one thing only: making money. Brooklyn, Queens, or Poughkeepsie; City College, Hofstra, or Ohio State; Jew or Gentile—it didn’t matter where you came from; if you could make money on the trading floor, Bear Stearns was the place for you. Its longtime chairman Alan “Ace” Greenberg even coined a name for his motley hires: P.S.D.’s, for poor, smart, and a deep desire to get rich.

Bear Stearns was an investment bank, but the traditional banking roles, such as advising on corporate mergers and trading stocks, were always an afterthought there. What the P.S.D.’s at Bear Stearns did best was trade bonds. The firm’s executive history was the story of three bond traders, each with his own outsize personality. From the mid-1930s till the late 1970s, Bear was the province of Salim “Cy” Lewis, the cantankerous Wall Street legend who forged a cutthroat culture run less as a modern corporation than as a series of squabbling fiefdoms, each vying for his approval. Ace Greenberg, an avuncular sort who kept his desk on the trading floor and answered his own phone, took over after Lewis’s death, in 1978, and while his edges were softer, Bear remained a Mametesque pressure cooker where top traders could pull down $10 million a year while runners-up were tossed into the alley."

The Vanity Fair piece blames everyone from shorts to CNBC to Charlie Gasparino and David Faber.

Yet bottom line remains: If your financial condition is so precarious that rumors can bring you down, then its the finances, and not the rumors, that are to blame . . .

>

Hat Tip: Dealbook

>

Source:
Bringing Down Bear Stearns   
BRYAN BURROUGH
August 2008   
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/bear_stearns200808

~~~

Bloggers are an ironic bunch, but their reviews of WALL-E are remarkably snark-free. “A masterpiece . . . a universal film with timeless appeal,” says /Film (which also has an extensive list of Easter eggs in the film); Reel Fanatic ponders whether any recent film has “had more to say about the power of love .” Among the seemingly disparate groups the cute trash robot has brought together: Catholics (“a celebration of what makes life worth living ,” says Catholic Media Review , and Happy Catholic has a list of other glowing reviews from Christian media); nervous parents ( ParentDish calls WALL-E “a neat friend and a positive hero”); Mac lovers (“As soon as he’s fully charged, he emits the Mac’s familiar startup chime ,” notes Apple a Day ); and science fiction geeks ( io9 pays homage to real-life trash robots ).

Of course there are haters, mainly from conservative corners. “ A $170 million art film ,” according to KyleSmithOnline . “Will you go see Wall-E knowing it makes fun of Bush ?” asks The Conservative Mindcleaner . In “ An Open Letter to Conservatives Pissed Off at Wall-E ,” Plog says those right-wingers have a self-image problem and are out of touch—and audiences seem to agree (via Blogging Stocks ) . WALL-E ’s currently rated 97% on Rotten Tomatoes . That’s even higher than Ratatouille ’s 95% —and definitely higher than Bush’s approval ratings.

Get the best of the blog world every week in your inbox with our email newsletter. It's free! Sign up here .

While only one “STOP Hammertime” photo is featured in this selection, I tripped across quite a few in my travels through the flickrverse. You all might want to think about creating your own group. Might suggest “Can’t touch this…”?

Photos from Skyler J., ®ominitä, kirt thirsten, Sarah S.R., Studio 950, somewheregladlybeyon d, magg!e, Richard Moross, and melisdramatic.
More stop signs can be viewed in this cluster.

Lately, I see more sudden eyeballs and what used to be an established trend seems to fall into a more chaotic pattern that is the aggregate of different spike signatures around a smooth curve. This graph is from two consecutive days where we have a beautiful comparison of a relatively uneventful day followed by long-exposure spike (nytimes.com) compounded by a short-exposure spike (digg.com):

The disturbing part is that this occurs even on larger sites now due to the sheer magnitude of eyeballs looking at today's already popular sites. Long story short, this makes planning a real bitch.

[...]What isn't entirely obvious in the above graphs? These spikes happen inside 60 seconds. The idea of provisioning more servers (virtual or not) is unrealistic. Even in a cloud computing system, getting new system images up and integrated in 60 seconds is pushing the envelope and that would assume a zero second response time. This means it is about time to adjust what our systems architecture should support. The old rule of 70% utilization accommodating an unexpected 40% increase in traffic is unraveling. At least eight times in the past month, we've experienced from 100% to 1000% sudden increases in traffic across many of our clients.

[Link]

• Battered by Oil, Dow Touches Bear Territory (New York Times)
• Dow Hits Bear-Market Territory (Wall Street Journal)
• Stocks Near Bear Market Territory (U.S. News & World Report)
• US stocks post sharp weekly losses; bear market nears (MarketWatch)
• This Bear Has Sharp Claws (Barron's)
• Market ends lower, Dow on cusp of bear market (Reuters) 
• Stocks Tumble Toward Bear Market On Rising Economic Concerns (Washington Post)

~~~

The latest commentary I seem to be having a hard time with is this weird obsession with minus 20%. What makes this number, as opposed to 15%, 25%, or even 36.54% special?

Consider this somewhat bizarre commentary:

Stocks fell on Friday, pushing the Dow to the brink of a bear market, hounded by concerns that record oil prices and the seemingly endless credit crisis will further damage the economy. Friday's decline built on Thursday's rout in which the Dow fell about 360 points, and rounded out its worst week since February 10.

While the blue-chip Dow average briefly dipped into bear market territory, it managed to close above that level, thus narrowly avoiding the official onset of a bear market, or a 20 percent drop from its all-time high.  (emphasis added)

-Reuters

>

What is the magic about 20%?

What makes this the "official" onset of a bear market? There isn't any NBER-like group that declares an "official" bear market.

Best as I can figure, the 20% number is a not-quite-a-random number -- more than a 10% correction, less than a full blown crash (which for all we know, could be "offically" 30%).

I have no idea who first started bandying about these nice round base ten numbers -- but for whatever reason, they seem to have stuck in the public and the press' imaginations. (Anyone have a better idea where these two figures came from?)

Forget the rather squishy terminology, and consider the following economic, fundamental and technical questions:

• Is the Economy expanding or contracting? Have recent data points been improving or worsening?

• Are corporate earnings getting stronger or weaker? Where are we in the earnings cycle?

• Are stock prices generally rising or falling?

• Are market advances narrow or broad? Is the volume expanding on up days, or on down days?

• Is investor Psychology greedy or fearful?

Rather than focus on terminology, investors should be considering their risk management strategies, what they are doing to preserve capital, and how they are psychologically prepared to deal with what could be an extended downturn.

That matters a whole lot more than whether something is called a bull or bear market...

~~~

Granted, June 2008 isn't in the top 30 bad months of all time, so let's keep our heads on, but if it feels like it's been a nasty, nasty month, that's because it has been.

This oil thing sure has legs. Even if we aren't in a "peak oil" situation (and even the Saudis can't agree about that), we've gotten to a price point where consumer behavior is going to change significantly over the next few years. Over the long term, that's a good thing. The world economy is addicted to oil, largely because it's been so cheap for so long. But it's not cheap anymore and given the pace at which the rest of the world is developing these days, it's not going to be cheap ever again. Unless we find another source of energy that is a lot cheaper than oil and I am not aware of any developments that will get us there soon.

This has bigtime ramifications for slowing growth and rising prices (inflation). And these impacts will not be limited to the US economy. They will be felt worldwide. The hypergrowth economies of China, India, Brazil, Russia, and other developing economies may not be impacted as much as the more mature economies like Japan, Europe, and most of all the US. Russia, in particular, stands to benefit greatly from the spike in oil prices.

Slower growth and rising prices (inflation) cannot be good for equities. Rising rates, which is what will have to come, will not be good for any kind of financial assets.

Which, of course, leads me to venture capital. The value of your equity in a startup company is a financial asset. It may not be publicly traded but like all other financial assets it is ultimately worth the present value of future cash flows discounted at an interest rate that takes into account market rates of interest plus a risk premium.

We've been operating in a world where real interest rates have been hovering around zero (at least in the US). And that has propped up the value of equities and venture capital assets have been part of that prop-up.

All we have to do is look at the 70s to see the effect of low growth and high inflation (stagflation). Here is a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average during the 1970s.

Yes, that's right, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended the 1970s right about where it started.

I wasn't in the venture capital business in the 1970s. I was a teenager that decade. I remember Vietnam, Watergate, the oil shocks, the gas lines, Gerald Ford, whip inflation now, Jimmy Carter, the Iran hostage crisis, and Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan.

The first venture capital firm I worked for, Euclid Partners, was formed in 1971. The two founding partners, Milton and Bliss, raised about $4.5mm in 1971. They didn't raise another fund until 1983. They strugggled mightily during the 1970s with their portfolio and ultimately made it work when the technology market took off in the early 80s. I heard a bunch of stories from them about that time and it was not an easy time to be an entrepreneur or a VC.

Surely the next 10 years won't be identical to the 1970s. A lot has changed, particularly the global economic environment. But it's also clear that the economy we are in (and maybe have been in for the past 18 months) is going to be tougher for owners of financial assets than the past 20 years have been. And I don't think the startup economy and venture capital is immune to this new reality.

So what should we do about it? Well first, we need to be careful with valuations. If financial assets are going to be subject to downward pressure then inflated valuations will not be sustainable. We need to be careful with the amount of money we invest and burn. Companies that are capital efficient and cash flow positive will fare better in this environment. And we need to be prepared to wait a long time for liquidity.

It's ironic that the title of the CIBC report is "Heading For The Exit Lane" because I think the exit lane will take longer to find and possibly be less rewarding in the coming years.

A Final Thought: This may mostly be good news for cleantech investors. As oil gets more expensive, cleantech and alt energy technologies can become commercially viable more quickly. But it takes a lot of money, biotech-like capital investments, to get most cleantech investments to profitability. So if the capital markets are going to be more difficult, it's not all good news for cleantech. And the web clearly has a role to play in all of this too. More on that later.

Anita Elberse, a Harvard Business School associate professor, has a really interesting article in the new Harvard Business Review that analyzes some Long Tail data and challenges some of the theory's predictions. Based on Rhapsody music data and DVD rental data from an Australian Netflix clone called Quickflix, she concludes that the blockbusters are not losing share to the long tail of niche products in those markets; indeed, they're gaining it. She writes:

Although no one disputes the lengthening of the tail (clearly more obscure products are being made available for purchase every day), the tail is likely to be extremely flat and populated by titles that are mostly a diversion for consumers whose appetite for true blockbusters continues to grow.

That's surprising (not least to me), and now that I've had a chance to give the paper a quick read, let me jot down some quick thoughts on why Elberse (who I collaborated with on some of my research and respect highly) would come to such different conclusions than I do.

Let me start by saying that the paper looks rock solid and I'm sure her analysis is accurate. But there is a subtle difference in the way we define the Long Tail, especially in the definitions of "head" and "tail", that leads to very different results.

The best example of this is in what she describes as a growing "concentration" of sales around a relatively small number of blockbuster titles. In the Rhapsody data, she finds, the top 10% of titles (out of more than a million in that data sample) accounted for 78% of all plays, and the top 1% account for 32% of all plays. That sounds pretty concentrated around the head, until you reflect, as she notes, that "one percent of a million is still 10,000--[...]equal to the entire music inventory of a typical Wal-Mart store."

This is a good moment to remind everyone of the normal definition of "head" and "tail" in entertainment markets such as music. "Head" is the selection available in the largest bricks-and-mortar retailer in the market (that would be Wal-Mart in this case). "Tail" is everything else, most of which is only available online, where there is unlimited shelf space.

So in the data she cites, the head of the online music market represents 32% of the all plays, and the tail represents 68%.  That's certainly no challenge to the Long Tail theory; indeed, it's even more tail-heavy than the data I cited in my book (probably because I used a more generous estimate of 50,000 tracks for Wal-Mart's inventory).

She then looks at Quickflix data. Here the top 10% of DVDs accounts for 48% of all rentals, and the top 1% accounts for 18%. "The concentration [of sales around the blockbusters] is not as strong as Rhapsody, but it's still substantial," she writes.

But here, too, the use of percentages misleads. Quickflix had 18,000 titles at the time of the research, compared to the average Blockbuster's 3,000 titles--there's only a factor of six between their inventories, as opposed to a factor of 100 in the Wal-Mart/Rhapsody comparison. If you look at her chart, you'll see that the top 3,000 titles (ie, the amount equal to Blockbuster's inventory, or the "head") accounts for 70% of rentals and the "tail" accounts for just 30%, making it more concentrated on the head than Rhapsody, not less. (BTW, I calculated almost exactly the same split for Netflix in the book.)

My point is not to suggest that Elberse is wrong and that I'm right, it's only to point out that different definitions of what the Long Tail is, from "head" to "tail", will generate wildly different results.

Anyway, it's getting late and I just wanted to highlight a few other interesting data points and conclusions from her article:

• Much of the paper is about consumer satisfaction in the head vs tail. In the Quickflix data, she says, "customers give lower ratings to obscure titles...it is a myth that obscure books, films and songs are treasured. What consumers buy in Internet channels is much the same as what they have always bought." That may be true for the specific example of the Australian DVD data, but it is not clear from the paper why she feels able to extrapolate that to all Internet commerce.
• The heaviest DVD renters were the most likely to venture into the tail; light consumers largely concentrated on the hits.
• In music, of the 2.4 million digital tracks sold in 2007 in the US (most of them through iTunes) 24% sold only one copy and 91% sold fewer than 100 copies.

And there are pages and pages of other nuggets like this. It's an excellent article, and although I don't agree with all the conclusions, I'm delighted to see research of this rigor on the topic. Recommended.

Top Stories for the Week of June 23 - 27, 2008

It's the end of an era. Bill Gates has retired and will stop punching his time card at Microsoft. Let's just hope he stashed away some savings. In stunned reverence, Gizmodo has uber-tagged its finest Gates-related posts into a Bill Gates Retirement Party compilation. Our fave is a video of the greatest billg parodies, a mashup of clips from The Simpsons, Celebrity Death Match, South Park, 2DTV, Freakazoid and Pirates of Silicon Valley. Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog can think of no finer way to honor Gates than by starting its series on his departure by printing internal memo Gates wrote, documenting his own frustration trying to use Microsoft products. "The lack of attention to usability...blows my mind," Gates wrote to colleagues after trying unsuccessfully to download Microsoft software. A Seattle radio guy read the memo on the air. Michael Krisman at IT Project Failures reproduces the best bits of the memo.  To Mashable, Gates' rant shows big companies have "lost all reasoning about what’s usable and what’s unusable..." All these guys will miss Gates the way political comedians will miss George Bush.  He's provided so much material over the years.

PaidContent.org picked up on a New York Times article about Google News, which compiles breaking stories from other Web sources using algorithms instead of editors. The site hasn't been taking over the world as feared. Google hasn't monetized the service with ads, and PaidContent says "It can’t, without getting into too much trouble with the news media companies." Indeed: the AP is still using cool text-fingerprinting software to hunt down blogs using its content without paying, and Signal to Noise asks: "When is old media going to realize that the world of charging $$ for proprietary content isn’t the only model that works any more?"

Lawyers for a guy on trial in Florida for running a porno Web site have used Google to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie.” That's a great use of marketing intelligence, says Buzzmachine.  Adds TalkLeft: "Technology makes the concept of contemporary community standards meaningless."  Meanwhile a class-action lawsuit over a hidden sex scene in videogame Grant Theft Auto: San Andreas was joined by only 0.022% of the game's buyers, says Joystiq.   Words of the Weasel Sort says the mere existence of the suit shows the nation is messed up: "You'll allow your 11-year-old to play a video game named after a felony, but once you hear that it gets a little naughty, THEN you start to think that maybe he shouldn't be playing it."

All this obscenity is a fitting segue into the passing of profane/profound comedian George Carlin who bloggers mourned on Monday - and all week. Kuro5hin commits some kind of sin by editing the eulogy for Pope John Paul II into one for Carlin. Searchengineland uses Google to show that a lot of people were searching for Carlin material this week. The Unofficial Apple Weblog points to Carlin performances available on iTunes (including his infamous "seven dirty words" bit) and there are many compilations of YouTube clips of his act (like here and here). The Beat, in a epic look at Carlin's material and politics, points out that a transcript of the dirty words routine ended up in court documents. So there. Says the Beat: "George Carlin was, like the radicals of an earlier age, an idealist – and a patriot -- of a deeper sort than is encountered very often these days."

Get the best of the blog world every week in your inbox with our email newsletter. It's free! Sign up here.

“If you need us to tell you that it’s pretty much all NSFW, then you have a lot to learn, kid,” says Best Week Ever. Today bloggers are commemorating comedy legend George Carlin, who died of heart failure on Sunday at the age of 71, with video clips galore. Going beyond “Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television,” which is everywhere (and here’s the transcript from the FCC case that followed), The Big Picture compiled some of Carlin’s political clips and a list of one-liners, while Jesus’ General is running 8.5 hours of his material in a loop all day. Blogger reaction ranged from lukewarm (The American Mind’s Obama-on-Hillary-esque “Carlin was entertaining enough”) to poetic (“Like Lear’s Fool or Hamlet’s gravediggers, he did not polish or varnish the brutality of life” via Bark Bark Woof Woof) to near-manic (“Oh, God…no,” cries Brilliant at Breakfast). “A true hipster of the old-school variety,” says A Deeper Shade of Soul, while Happy Furry Puppy Story Time with Norbizness compares Carlin to “a foul-mouthed Wittgenstein” and rounds up his best jokes on religion. “Carlin would have had a field day with the coverage,” says No-Name247, and indeed, the c omedian was a blog reader himself: Last year, he told HuffPo’s Rachel Sklar in a long exclusive interview: “Every time you read someone’s blog or someone’s column on the Net, they’ve got a series of links for you of other bloggers and columnists. So I just go down the hole . . . I just get like six or seven steps removed from the one I was reading originally by following links. And then I wonder where the fuck I was, you know?”

Get the best of the blog world every week in your inbox with our email newsletter. It's free! Sign up here.

Their latest survey makes it clear that oil isn't to blame for the latest raft of customer service woes.

The study finds that satisfaction with “people” factors—including knowledge, courtesy and helpfulness of reservation and gate agents, check-in staff and flight crew—has declined dramatically since 2007, and is the leading contributing factor to the overall decline in customer satisfaction with airlines in 2008. The decrease in satisfaction with people factors is more than twice as large as the decline in satisfaction with price factors.

“Across the airline experience, from check-in, to the flight, to deplaning, passengers are being affected by the ramifications of carriers making staff cutbacks and have expressed that performance and attitudes of airline staff are suffering,” said Sam Thanawalla, director of the global hospitality and travel practice at J.D. Power and Associates. “In this unstable industry environment, it is critical that airlines invest in their employees as a means to enhance the customer experience, as there is a strong connection between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Those airlines that focus on keeping their employees informed and motivated will be better able to change negative consumer sentiment and truly differentiate themselves.”

Not all airlines hate their customers. Yet again, surprising nobody, J.D. Power declared that JetBlue and Continental reigned supreme. If only other airlines would follow their lead.

Overall Satisfaction in the Airline Industry Declines to a Three-Year Low [J.D. Power and Associates]
PREVIOUSLY: Continental and JetBlue Win Overall Satisfaction Awards From J.D. Power
(Photo: balmes)

A sidebar to the piece describes the reunion of The Microsoft Eleven, the employees pictured in the famous photo shot in Albuquerque in late 1978, before the company moved to Seattle.  (Photos btw, are from Microsoft.)    I had the chance to hang out at the reshooting of that picture and also to run a brief roundtable discussion, and it was great to hear those memories.  As you can see from the new picture, I think everyone looked pretty spiffy as well: check out, for instance that big grin on Paul Allen’s face.  One sad note was the absence of Bob Wallace, who died in 1992. (He’s the one in the top row center in the original picture.)  He was a terrific guy.   I met him in 1984 at the original Hacker Conference and then soon afterwards in Seattle, where he talked about his pioneering efforts in shareware, a term he coined.

Personally, I can’t think of a better journalist to take the helm. Brokaw takes over on June 29th. Press release follows below…

PRESS RELEASE — Beginning on Sunday, June 29, NBC News’ Tom Brokaw will serve as moderator of “Meet the Press” through the 2008 presidential election. The broadcast will continue to originate from the NBC News Bureau in Washington D.C. The announcement was made today by NBC News President Steve Capus.

“A lot has been said in recent days about what ‘Meet the Press’ means to NBC News and to the nation,” said Capus. “To have someone of Tom’s stature step up and dedicate himself to ensuring its ongoing success is not only a testament to his loyalty to Tim, but his enduring commitment to NBC News and our viewers.”

“Some of my best memories from covering the last several presidential elections have included working closely with Tom, so I know just how lucky we are to have him step in as moderator for ‘Meet the Press,’” said executive producer Betsy Fischer. “His intellect, focus and calming presence is exactly what we need to move forward smartly and remain the No. 1 public affairs show on television as we head into one of the most pivotal elections in our nation’s history.”

For his part, Brokaw said, “I’ve been appearing on ‘Meet the Press’ since the days of Watergate when it was moderated by Lawrence E. Spivak right through the distinguished tenure of my great friend, Tim Russert, so I feel right at home. Tim made ‘Meet the Press’ the center of the universe for informative and lively discussions of public affairs, particularly the exciting 2008 campaign for president, and I intend to continue that commitment to our viewers.”

Betsy Fischer is the executive producer and Michelle Jaconi and Rebecca Samuels are the producers of “Meet the Press,” which is seen on the NBC Television Network from 9-10 a.m. ET in most markets. In Washington D.C. and New York City, the broadcast is seen from 10:30-11:30 a.m. ET. Please check local listings or the “Meet the Press” website (www.mtp.msnbc.com) for television and radio broadcast times in your area.

Google Trends for Popular Websites

Google Trends for Websites is yet another traffic tracker for sites. It's in a field already dominated by Compete, Quantcast (for US traffic), and Alexa. So what could it possibly offer to users that we don't already have? This is Google we're talking about and Google has a significant amount of data about a ton of websites. For example, in our recent poll of Instant Messengers that ReadWriteWeb readers use here's how the websites IM clients Digsby, Trillian, Pidgin, Miranda IM, and Adium stack up against one another using Google Trends for Websites:

You'll receive a graph of traffic stats along with stats on the region of most visitors, related sites that visitors visited, and even other search terms if there are any. In contrast, Google Trends for keywords will show related searches, how popular the keyword is, peak time, news articles and blog posts mentioning the keyword.

The Little Guys Are Left In The Dust Again

If your blog or website doesn't receive a lot of traffic, you're better off sticking to trackers such as the Google Analytics service. Google Trends for Websites won't have any data for such sites, which is a shame considering the smaller bloggers may be the biggest users of the product. Personally, I don't see the use for Google Trends for Websites compared to other tools that are out there that offer the same information and more. Blogs already receive the information that Google is giving via their own statistics software with a lot more flexibility and options to choose from. In the end, Google Trends for Websites seems like a bit of a dud and the name should be changed to Google Trends for Popular Websites.

Sorry I Missed Your Party is a hilarious blog featuring photos of other people’s parties.

photo via Sorry I Missed Your Party

ShareThis

But it’s not the candidates themselves doing the Twittering, but rather their selected representatives — neither of whom appear to have used Twitter until very recently. Republican National Committee communications director Liz Mair will be representing Republican candidate John McCain. Georgetown professor and former Clinton White house tech policy advisor Mike Nelson will be representing Democratic candidate Barack Obama. They’ll each respond to each tweet, with Cox presumably grilling them with follow-up tweets when they deliver weak-sauce responses.

Candidates will be allowed post multiple tweets — hence the “debate” part. They’ll also be allowed to link to web sites via tweets, a common practice for Twitter users. Linking seems like a potential loophole, though, as it could allow the debaters to link to press releases and other boring material instead of answering the question on Twitter. Let’s hope Cox holds their feet to the fire.

You’ll be able track the debate by following each person on their personal accounts. Cox is @anamariecox, Mair is @lizmair and Nelson is @mikenelson. Representatives will be using the hash tag option, tagging each of their responses with #pdfdebate, which will allow you to track the entire debate on Twitter Hashtags site. You can also use Twitter conversation-tracking service Summize.

The debate is an initiative of the Personal Democracy Forum (PdF), which is organizing a conference next week on the intersection of technology and politics. See more on the organization’s TechPresident blog.

The debate isn’t slated to end until, as with all Twitter conversations, the people doing the tweeting feel like stopping.

Oh yeah, and you can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers MG Siegler, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha and Chris Morrison. We have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

Top Stories for the Week of June 16 - 20, 2008

Mozilla wanted to set a record for most downloads of a software program in a 24-hour period when it released Firefox 3 on Wednesday, and since no one else has ever bothered to really count, they did it! 8.3 million served! Users partied, and Microsoft sent a cake (with a DLL file baked inside). Arcanology, which speaks from inside the Mozilla-torium, says "the new cake is much nicer (and much less brown) than the old one." John's Blog, also an inside job, reports at the peak there were 283 downloads per second. BWTorrents says the Moz became a victim of its own PR stunt as its servers crashed amid the swarm. All the fuss was about the new Firefox browser, which won't change the world or even the Web but has cooler bookmark management, a larger "back button," and other magic as detailed by Lifehacker.

Speaking of crashing, the UK blog Register Hardware says bored youths this summer are using Google Earth satellite images to find houses with swimming pools, then using Facebook to organize pool-crashings.  Wonder if they could use Google Earth to find a job? Elsewhere in technology use and abuse, YouTube said it will now accept longer videos from certain partners. The max file size is now 1 GB, which Silicon Alley Insider says is nearly enough for a full movie in standard definition (for example, "Semi-Pro" runs an hour and 38 minutes and consumes 1.1GB.)  Blog Maverick (aka Mark Cuban) says it's about countering Hulu, with long-form content that YouTube can sells ads against. YouTube is "under the gun to start monetizing those 82 million viewers a month," says NewTeeVee.

In old media, TV newsman Tim Russert will be missed, but the relentless TV coverage of his passing (Wolf Blitzer again?) seemed excessively insidery to many normal people (and also bloggers). Balloon Juice wrote that the marathon coverage "is indicative of the problem...[TV newspeople] think they are the story. It is creepy and sick and the reason politicians get away with all the crap they get away with these days..." Added Below the Beltway, "It’s gone from remembering a good guy to a bunch of NBC hacks sitting around talking about him for no apparent reason other than filling up air time." Asked Jack Shafer at Slate's Press Box: "What has possessed NBC News to televise a never-ending video wake?" Thank goodness one brave media critic, Pop Culture: Adam Graham stepped up and wrote there were excessive stories complaining about excessive Russert coverage.

And in sports, Tiger Woods announced he's having surgery to fix a torn ACL that will end his participation in pro golf for the year, and Deadspin says that means the PGA will "lose a large portion of its fanbase not ingesting daily doses of Centrum Silver vitamins" (that's a joke about older folks!). There's no guarantee Tiger will return in top form, and The Golf Blog frets injuries might jeopardize the Tigerquest to break the world record for most downloads in one day (or some such thing). The Boston Celtics won the NBA Championship, and few commentators have done a better job than Most Valuable Network of describing the turnaround in Boston's sports psyche, which used to be about "expecting the worst and bracing for heartbreak." Boston fans are so happy now they even sent Microsoft a cake.

Get the best of the blog world every week in your inbox with our email newsletter. It's free! Sign up here.

[via Forbes]

In a brilliant piece of linkbait , the Vanity Fair VF Daily Blog produced an A-List map of the blogosphere that ranks top blogs from Scurrilous to Earnest ( Jossip to Think Progress ) on one axis to News and Opinion (think Consumerist to The Daily Dish ) on the other. Do NOT hit the link unless you have hours to wander around , writes The Whited Sepulcre . Blatant New York Magazine theft says emptyage and VF clearly didn’t bother to read 60% of the sites they describe . Valleywag is trying to grasp how it ended up on the Earnest end of the scale (frankly, so are we). Surprises on the list? Just one: Calacanis at bottom right as the most Earnest (ahem) and Opinionated. The predictable “ we made the list ” blog posts ensued. Mission accomplished!

Get the best of the blog world every week in your inbox with our email newsletter. It's free! Sign up here .

[BusinessWeek]

Mozilla’s failure is actually worse than most in a couple regards. First, it is trying to set the world record for downloads of a piece of software in a day. A failure to launch cannot be good for such a goal. And second, to help achieve this record, it decided to make it so that everyone in the world download the software at the exactly same time.

Mozilla had to know its servers would get slammed around 10 AM PST (the start time), hell, it begged for it to happen. In the blogosphere, we have a word for this: FAIL.

Mozilla put a lofty 5 million number out there as a goal for downloads today. Right now it’d be happy with one.

update: The direct download links are now working. Of course, this really won’t help achieving the record as most people will have no idea how to download the software without a Mozilla webpage directing them to the link. We’ll do our part and put the links here.

You’re welcome, Mozilla.

Warning: These will start auto-downloading Firefox 3:

Mac OS X

Linux

Windows

update 2: The main Firefox download page now appears to be working — after some truly weird redirects.

The Spreadfirefox world record download page is still down.

You’ll also notice that in the picture on the right, even thought the graphic is for Firefox 3, the version number is still 2. (Thanks Zach Landes)

update 3: It looks like Mozilla hasn’t started the counters yet for the downloads as it is overwhelmed. As soon as the site goes live is when the counting will begin. In the old days we called that “cheating.”

The numbers below make this clear:

In March, Americans watched 9.8 billion videos, down from a high of 10.1 billion in December of 2007. (coverage)  Google’s properties, YouTube and Google Video (almost entirely YouTube), accounted for approximately 3.63 billion, or 34.3%, of those views, with Fox Interactive Media (led by MySpace) far behind in second place, with around 584 million, or 6%.

In April, video intake regained its momentum. Americans watched 11 billion online videos and Google had 37.9% of them. Fox dropped to 557 million, or 5.1%. Yahoo! and Microsoft were next on the list, with around 352 million (3.2%) and 268 million (2.4%) respectively.

Overall, almost 3/4ths of Americans with Internet access are now consuming online video, spending an average of 228 minutes doing so per month. One small but fascinating statistic is that the average duration of an individual online video was 2.8 minutes, suggesting that attention span shrinkage is not at all limited to the written word.

In the Scottish pre-wedding tradition of "Blackening the Bride," The bride is taken by surprise and covered with foul substances, such as eggs, various sauces, feathers, and well you name it...

The bride to be, officially blackened, is the then paraded around town, and of course a few pubs, for all to see.

Watch this bride get "blackened":

Another strange wedding ritual involves kidnapping the bride:

In many small villages throughout Germany, friends of the bride and groom will kidnap the bride and hide her somewhere.The groom then has to search to find her.

Of course the search always begins in the local pub, for obvious reasons, where the groom will invite everyone to join him in the search, after buying them all a drink.

Check out this "kidnapped" bride.

Read more of the world's most bizarre wedding rituals.

Al Gore says he is backing Barack Obama and will do whatever he can to help him get to the White House.

In a letter to be e-mailed to Obama supporters, Gore says Obama has united a movement over the past year and a half.

The