Since Tenenbaum had already admitted to infringement, the jury’s instructions from the judge were to choose an amount between $750 and $150,000 per song. The student told Ars Technica: “I’m thankful that it wasn’t much bigger, that it wasn’t millions”. And compared to another recent ruling, he may have gotten away lightly: in June, Jammie Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $80,000 for each of the 24 songs she downloaded, making for a total of $1.92 million.

There’s no doubt that Tenenbaum broke the law, and appears to have continued to infringe copyright for years after receiving warnings and even after being sued. His lawyer’s tactics, including the posting to his blog of audio recordings from the court, are said to have “infuriated the plaintiffs”.

Scathed by the heavy losses they incurred when the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, tech companies moved quickly to cut costs and focus on staying profitable as the current recession hit.

Now, as the doldrums linger, many are taking a hard look at the start-ups they bought during the good times, many of which were never a good fit. Some of those acquisitions could wind up right back on the sales block.

Venture capitalists, who invest in start-ups and recover their money by taking them public or selling them, say the dealmaking has already begun. Many expect more sales and spin-offs in the next few months as companies squeeze their assets for cash and reassess business strategies.

‘In good times, companies acquire, in bad times, they divest,’ said Todd Dagres, a venture capitalist whose firm Spark Capital funded hot microblogging site Twitter.

Mr Dagres and other venture capitalists said companies increasingly are seeking out private investors to gauge their interest in dealmaking. The talks usually centre on small units that don’t carry their own weight, or are no longer considered strategic.

‘What you’re seeing is very active triage,’ said Dan Nova, a venture capitalist at Highland Capital Partners.

‘As Fortune 500 companies focus or refocus their core strategic mission, they’re deciding if those acquisitions are still consistent with that mission,’ Mr Nova said. ‘If they’re not, (they will) try to sell or shut them down.’

In recent months, top Web companies like Yahoo and eBay have begun cleaning out their closets.

As part of a turnaround strategy under its new chief executive, Carol Bartz, Yahoo has begun axing money-losing properties, such as Geocities, which it acquired in 1999.

Online auction giant eBay recently said it would spin off Skype, the popular Web-based phone company it bought for US$2.6 billion in 2005.

EBay also sold back StumbleUpon, a start-up that helps people discover online content, to its founders and venture capitalists, two years after buying it for US$75 million.

Time Warner recently announced the long-awaited spin-off of AOL. Soon to be independent, AOL is putting its start-up buys, including social networking site Bebo, into a separate unit where they will seek venture funding or be folded if they are unable to survive.

Some venture capitalists said they witnessed a similar trend during the last downturn.

‘There were large companies giving away divisions because they didn’t want to sustain the expense anymore,’ Mr Dagres said, adding that the sell-offs slowed down in 2003, once the economy began to recover.

Big guys, bad buysNot everyone agrees that the acquisition strategies of companies are linked to the health of the economy.

Mike Kwatinetz, a venture capitalist at Azure Capital Partners, said Internet companies often make mistakes because they covet a start-up without taking a long, hard look at how well the acquisition would fit into their business.

‘Companies have to have a strategy … (You cannot) buy a company just because it appeals to you,’ said Mr Kwatinetz, whose firm sold online payments company Bill Me Later to eBay for US$945 million last year.

Some analysts have criticised eBay for overpaying for the start-up, but Mr Kwatinetz defended the auction site’s decision. Bill Me Later lets eBay provide a payment service for large merchants that do not use PayPal, thereby creating a complementary fit, he said.

‘I don’t think you will see them do anything with (Bill Me Later) … except integrate it into PayPal,’ Mr Kwatinetz said.

Why do big Internet companies make bad acquisition decisions? Bernstein Research analyst Jeffrey Lindsay reckons it is a combination of factors.

For one thing, he says, Internet companies have gobs of cash on hand and very little debt. Add to that pushy venture capitalists waiting to foist sales of start-ups that don’t yet make money and the hype around brand-name companies like Twitter and Facebook, and the stage is set for some questionable deals.

‘It’s a recipe to tempt, invite disaster,’ Mr Lindsay says. He lists AOL’s acquisitions of ICQ, Netscape and Bebo (which it bought last year for US$850 million), Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr and Google’s acquisition of YouTube as examples of deals that kill value, and could any day be sold or shut down.

Downturns aggravate this trend because companies are forced to confront their poor business decisions when the going is tough, he said. ‘It’s a sad final acceptance and recognition’ that buying a certain start-up was not the best idea.

The experience of StumbleUpon’s co-founder Garett Camp, who bought back his company from eBay along with a team of investors, bears this out.

Mr Camp said both sides eventually realized the start-up was ‘not really core’ to eBay’s business. ‘The synergies would (have) taken a while to develop,’ he said. ‘So I figured it was the right choice for Stumble’s long-term success.’ -

The “bank” was called Prosper (http://www.prosper.com/), and to be fair it was more of a marketplace than a traditional bank. Here’s how it worked:

Say you had a little bit of extra money and you wanted to see a good return on it. You’ve got plenty of alternatives, but none of them – stocks, bonds etc. – allow you to cut out all the middle-men and loan directly to another individual.

A pity too, because this kind of lending can be a gold mine. It’s the kind of lending that started Marcus Goldman’s career in the US. He used to walk around the street markets and offer loans to vendors, collecting IOUs in exchange. His career that became so successful he started his own company. Maybe you’ve heard of it…it’s called Goldman Sachs.

But that was back in the halcyon days of the Industrial Revolution…when America was a much smaller place. And Marcus lived in New York City. So what about the rest of us? The “transactions cost” – things like time, gas for your car, and the opportunity cost of finding borrowers – outweighs the benefits of making those small, P2P feasible loans for most of us.

Well Prosper changed all that. Suddenly, if you had a computer, some spare cash, and a little time, you could make an interest-bearing loan to one of your fellow citizens. Imagine it…

An auto-repair shop in Cleveland needs a few grand to fix one of their repair bays. A few retirees in West Florida, a few techies in San Fernando and a few kids in South Carolina all pitch in and make a loan. The repair bay in Cleveland gets fixed, and all the lenders get paid back with the added revenue made by the fixed repair bay. Plus additional interest payments for their trouble.

As you might imagine, Prosper really took off. From their inception in February of ’06, they made approximately US$175 million in small, peer-to-peer loans before the SEC shut ‘em down in November of last year.

Some of their marketing material even claimed that Prosper’s average returns beat the S&P 500 (and that was before the stock market crash!)

So if they seemed to be doing their job pretty well…filling a gap, and providing a necessary service in an arena where they found little competition…then why did the SEC send them a Cease-and-Desist?

Well Nobody’s Perfect
First I want to start by repeating, nobody’s perfect. And Prosper was no exception.

Since it was first founded in ’06, 18% of all the loans Prosper made went into some form of delinquency or other. And a quick scan of their default rates showed that a Prosper loan could be pretty speculative investment at certain credit ratings.

But hey, who cared? The point was that Prosper was a free and transparent marketplace…and the market was allowed to set the interest rate. So if the market decided Prosper’s debt was pretty speculative – meaning below the safety of investment-grade, which it did – it could charge a higher interest rate to compensate for defaults and discourage frivolous borrowing. Which it did.

And I also can’t help but making the comparison between Prosper and your average Pawn Shop or Payday Loan Hut. Why? Well, that’s the ballpark Prosper played in. Low face-value loans (usually less than a few grand), unregulated collateral and generally free market transactions. Compared to your average Payday lender, Prosper’s lenders were saints, pure and simple.

But then, in rode the SEC. And with long and overly-legal C&D letter, they announced that Prosper’s loans were actually securities and needed to be regulated as such. I’m glad the SEC found the time – between headline cases like Martha Stewart and Mark Cuban – to do something remotely resembling their duty.

I understand that they couldn’t be bothered with trivial things – like keeping ratings agencies in check, sussing out mortgage security fraud or warming up for the Madoff disaster that would blow up in their face in about three short weeks – but the actual timing seems a little…curious to say the least.

They shut down Prosper on November 24th of last year. Curious timing indeed, eh?

That was after Lehman imploded and the Credit Crunch set in. Banks were failing left and right, and the remaining banks were failing to get the job done; thanks to billions in toxic subprime garbage and a fundamentally flawed lending structure. Everyone from former President Bush to PE Obama was talking about “getting the credit flowing again,” and yet here they are, stomping out a revolutionary new channel for credit. What gives?

Maybe they were scared.

Now I’ll steer clear of the conspiracy talk today. But if you’re trying to remember the term, it’s called “rent-seeking.” The Economist defines rent-seeking as “Cutting yourself a bigger slice of the cake rather than making the cake bigger. Trying to make more money without producing more for customers.” If you were wondering who tugs at the SEC’s leash, this whole event might be a good indication.

So Why Are We Talking About This?
I tell you about Prosper partly because a few readers are upset at the negative tone of your daily A-Letter lately. They wanted to hear some good news, to see the sun if just for a moment. And Prosper is – to me – was one of the financial world’s most positive developments in a long time. In my considered opinion, I don’t think you’ve heard the last from Prosper and P2P lending…not by a long shot.

And aside from being a great story – and possibly a great example of economic fascism and rent-seeking at work – Prosper serves as background for the point I really want to make;

I think the government needs to step in when it comes to Pawn Shops and Payday Loan outfits. Prosper was only the first step…the rest of this tiny loan “free market” needs to be regulated, fiddled and messed with. We need to get proactively into the business of evaluating market values on things like old guitars, broken Xboxes, wedding rings and eight-track tape players. That’s the only way we can be sure these pawn shops are properly collateralized. Please! Let’s get somebody like Bahney Fwank in there before any more success breaks out.

From college pranks to Will Ferrell-inspired antics, and even fake news, you’re bound to find a site that caters to your video tastes.

Social Media Break is supported by Cheetos Boredom Busters. Have your own social media boredom buster? Add it to the comments.

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1. CollegeHumor

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If college-style pranks, jokes, and all around juvenile humor is your thing, then CollegeHumor should do the trick. The best stuff typically comes from the site’s original content, but users can upload videos as well. The site has been so successful at tickling our funny bone, that they even have their own MTV series, The CollegeHumor Show.

In typical CollegeHumor fashion, “Prank War 7: The Half Million Dollar Shot” follows poor Amir as he gets conned into thinking he made a blindfolded basket for $500,000.

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2. The Onion News Network

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The mock cable news network which claims to offer “hard-hitting” news really provides insightful and funny videos. Shows include “Today Now,” “In The Know,” “O-Span,” and “News Room,” each of which poke fun at traditional cable news shows while offering up entertaining content of their own.

For a taste of the Onion, check out this clip on why entertainment scientists are warning Miley Cyrus will be depleted by 2013.

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3. Funny or Die

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With Will Ferrell, Judd Apatow, Adam McKay, and Chris Henchy behind the scenes, this all movies site features celebrity-inundated Funny or Die exclusives and member uploaded gems like this one - a literal translation of Billy Idol’s White Wedding:

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4. Kontraband

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Kontraband has a vast array of funny videos from the potty humor types we all secretly love to the straight up just plain funny ones. The site also has plenty of pics, games, and jokes all with the potential to make you laugh outrageously.

Here’s a funny video on what we hope was never actually an 80s weight loss fad:

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5. Digg Upcoming

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Digg is a great place to find interesting stories and hot content, but it’s also a hub for priceless and entertaining videos. So what’s the trick for finding hilarious stuff before the rest of your friends? It’s Digg’s beta feature Upcoming.

Upcoming is a recommendation engine that suggests content on its way up the Digg ladder based on your previous digging behavior. All you need to do is click on the Upcoming tab to switch into that mode, then you can select from news, videos, or images to see up and coming content. We’ve found that when it comes to digging up funny videos that have yet to go viral, you can’t beat Digg’s Upcoming videos.

These days, everyone knows that one of the hottest stories any newspaper can cover is that of its own demise. The collapse of print advertising and the downturn in sales, at the news stand and through subscriptions, has led to a frantic search for new ways to monetize content that’s often available online for free.

Social media gives any business an interactive channel to communicate with its current and future customers. For newspapers, that channel can increase the chances of survival in a market where commoditized information has diminished the value of individual brands. Here are ten ways newspapers are using social media to save the industry.

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1. Twitter headline feeds

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With more than 280,000 followers, the New York Times’ main Twitter feed dwarfs the Wall Street Journal (19,000+), the Washington Post (4,800+), and the Chicago Tribune (5,200+). Many metropolitan and small-town dailies have followed suit, creating a Twitter handle as an extension of their brand, but the Times, like other large dailies, has gone one step further, establishing channels for Books, Arts and Entertainment, and other sections. These are sub-channels that support personalized interaction, a point of interest for advertisers.

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2. Acquiring providers of social media services

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In November, 2008, Gannett Co., publisher of 85 daily newspapers, acquired Ripple6, Inc., maker of a social networking platform that links marketers to end users. By investing in a company that has already helped Procter & Gamble with its social media initiatives, Gannett will be better able to collaborate with its advertisers. Look for more acquisitions, or partnerships, as legacy publishers broaden their online portfolios.

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3. Creating more online events to attract readers

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The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) introduced a thematic website last month to promote the translation of The Kindly Ones, a controversial novel that has generated much publicity in Europe, and more recently the U.S. By posting streaming video and a downloadable mp3 of a popular actor reading chapters from the book, and then creating daily discussion forums around related topics, FAZ generated a significant increase in traffic to its Web site, which had seriously lagged those of its competitors.

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4. Promoting and monetizing user-generated content

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In 2007, the Cincinnati Enquirer created CaptureCincinnati.com, a photo-sharing site where over a thousand local photographers uploaded nearly 12,000 images. The best shots were featured in Capture Cincinnati, a coffee table photo book that included a DVD, selling at a retail price of $39.95. Last year, the numbers continued to improve, and the Enquirer expects strong sales of the 2008 edition as well. Marketers might call this bundling products, but whatever you call it, the Enquirer probably won’t argue.

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5. Story-based communities

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The Toronto Globe and Mail uses Cover It Live, a live-blogging/discussion tool that provides interactive coverage of breaking news and live events such as conferences and hearings. Real-time comments, audio and video postings, and polls are among the types of content that can be recorded and then embedded in the story, like this piece on a subway shooting in January.

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6. Collaborative outsourced news services

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While British startup Yoosk bills itself as an “interactive news magazine,” it represents the type of outsourced service many newspapers may wind up using as their own resources dwindle. Yoosk allows its users to put a question to politicians and celebrities, to comment on the publicly viewable answers, and to submit their own ideas for interview features. Its founders hope to collaborate with established news sites, including newspapers willing to outsource parts of their magazine sections.

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7. Customized delivery

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Denver-based MediaNews Group, publisher of such major dailies as the Denver Post and Oakland Tribune, has announced plans to test a “customized news delivery service called ‘I-News’ or ‘Individuated News” this summer with the LA Daily News. This service would allow subscribers to choose from different categories, including news from other parts of the country. Blending the offerings of regional newspapers into a separate platform may help more of them survive.

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8. Branded communities

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The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has launched MySTLtoday, a branded community featuring areas such as user-created groups, user-posted content, and special interest sections like St. Louis’ BestBridal. Excerpts from shared stories are printed each week in the legacy paper. This might seem old-school, but it strengthens a traditional middle American brand, and it promotes more interaction, which helps advertisers pinpoint their targets.

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9. Publishing APIs for third-party developers

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The New York Times has taken the lead in an area sure to attract other organizations. By publishing application programming interfaces, or APIs, for third-party software developers, the Times Developer Network has encouraged the creation of a new class of social media applications. Developers have already produced mashups that combine Times content with other resources. Advertisers should see new opportunities to embed messages tailored to the end user, and the Times may partner with those developers it deems worthy, avoiding the incremental cost of creating new applications internally.

UK’s The Guardian has announced similar plans to open up its content with Open Platform.

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10. Burning the boat that brought you

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Unfortunately, this isn’t the most agreeable method for many, but social media applied to a smaller, virtual organization might be the way of the future. As reported here last week, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer may move to an online-only version of its daily newspaper. This is the ultimate way to save a paper through social media: make the Web its only channel of distribution, and leverage the history of the brand. Loyalty won’t be hard to track, and the test of that loyalty will be the price point established by subscriptions, for individual sections or the entire publication. The argument “would you save this paper for the price of a latte?” becomes very cogent, especially in Seattle.

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Social journalism

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The word “newspaper” will take on a different meaning, like “record album,” or “TV show.” It won’t go away, and it will continue to describe some of the most hallowed brand names in the world. Social media will play a big part in that transformation. As the dynamics of our society change, as institutions go public or private, or disappear entirely, the need to report these events in a responsible manner will be even more critical. Social journalism is more than a buzzword, it’s the way social media will save the industry.

Woody Lewis is a Social Media Strategist and Web Architect. His experience includes working as technical product manager on a social media project at Stanford, Web solutions architect at Cisco and IBM, and Web strategist at a nonprofit and several startups. He holds a B.A. in music and an M.B.A. in finance from Columbia University, and an M.F.A. in writing and literature from Bennington College. His blog, woodylewis.com, covers social media strategy for newspapers.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, fotosipsak

Facebook’s confirming that, starting today, users will start to see the new homepage, which is designed to make it faster and easier to create multimedia updates and receive instantaneous feed items from your network.

So what’s new for you? Apart from the tweaked look and feel of the page, there are quite a few updates that are going to change the way you interact with your Facebook home page, but most notably is the real-time stream of information and “The Publisher.”

As we’ve noted previously, the news feed stream will now consist of all real-time items being shared by your friends, so you can get instant glimpse of the social activity happening in you and your friends’ worlds. Also, Facebook’s increasingly popular status update box is getting refreshed, so The Publisher will ask users, “What’s on your mind?” and give them the ability to not just update their status but also attach links, photos, and videos to their updates.

The Highlights boxes in the right hand column have also been redesigned to show the most important activity happening over longer period of times, based on Comments, Likes, and other metadata. Think of Highlights as the counterparts to the real-time items flying by.

Facebook has also enhanced stream filters so members can use the filters on the left-hand side of the page to filter the updates for the people and content they want to read the most. The News Feed is the main filter, but users can add new filters based on Friends Lists and applications.

The new home page update is being rolled out to users starting today, so some of you can probably take advantage of the new features already, while others of you can continue to hit F5 and wait to see the change.

We’re excited about the updates to the user home page, but as we’ve mentioned before, Facebook is clearly making its content more digestible in real-time format which pits it directly against sites like Twitter and FriendFeed. With all the instant news items, commenting, and liking features, Facebook’s positioned nicely to keep members active and engaged on their site for the time being.

The service looks a lot like Gmail for voicemail, although you don’t have to be a Gmail user to use it. It lets you retrieve transcripts of your voicemail, archive and search all your sent and received SMS messages, and you can make calls directly from Google Voice’s interface. The calls are free in the US, and cost a small fee internationally.

The automated transcripts are definitely one of the most interesting features; Google has invested a lot in voice-to-text and text-to-voice conversions lately, and this feature will probably be reliable enough for most users. If you like, you can set Google Voice to email or SMS you the transcriptions.

However, Google Voice can also be seen as an aggregator for all various forms of phone communication. It lets you pick one phone number, and reroute voicemail, SMS and phone calls from other to that number, or several numbers. Depending on the adoption rate of Google Voice, it could be a huge threat to a number of other popular services; VoIP clients such as Skype, as well as voicemail transcription services such as Spinvox, come to mind.

If you’d like an invite to Google Voice, try here; for a walkthrough, see the video below.

The answer is: probably not. But people don’t just tune in for the game, but for the commercials as well. Year after year, some of the most memorable commercials of all time appear during the timeouts and halftime breaks.

But it’s not just Bud Light frogs; some incredible technology and Internet companies have put out paradigm-shifting commercials that have yet to fade from our memories. Below are 15 of the most memorable, entertaining, and important commercials from past Super Bowls, in reverse chronological order.

And after enjoying these clips, don’t forget to check out the latest Super Bowl news: Anheuser-Busch Gets a Blog Just in Time for the Super Bowl.

1. 2008 CareerBuilder “Follow Your Heart” Commercial

It’s such a simple but resonating message: follow your heart. Careerbuilder has had some of the best Super Bowl commercials in recent years, and “Follow Your Heart” doesn’t disappoint. Of course their parent company, Tribune Co., recently went bankrupt, so you might not see Careerbuilder blowing a cool $3 million this year…

2 & 3. 2008 E*Trade “Banking Baby” Commercials

These commercials are still airing. They are just that popular. Maybe it’s because that baby has swagger. I just can’t put my finger on it.

4. 2006 Sprint “Crime Deterrent” Commercial

Who the hell needs an iPhone when you have crime deterrent? Someone needs to build that iPhone app, quick!

On that subject, who would honestly be surprised if Apple has an iPhone commercial in the Super Bowl?

5. 2005 Rejected “GoDaddy Girl” Commercial

10. 2000 Pets.com Puppet Commercial

Was it a good commercial? No. Is it the epitome of the Dot Com Bubble? Yes. And that’s why the Pets.com commercial is memorable.

11. 2000 E*Trade “Wasted $2 Million” Commercial

At least they knew they were wasting millions. But they’re still standing, and you can only respect that. They also had the famous “Money out of the Wazoo” commercial that year as well.

12. 1999 Apple “HAL 2000″ Commercial

Apple’s spoof of 2001: A Space Odyssey pokes fun at another technological milestone: the Y2K Panic. Do you remember buying canned food just in case the world’s computer system crashed? HAL 2000 and the Macintosh would have had a field day with that.

13. 1999 Monster.com “When I Grow Up” Commercial

Now THIS is how you do a commercial. This commercial is one that aired for years because it struck a sensitive nerve in all of us. Monster had a winner with this commercial, and although Careerbuilder had the better commercials later on, Monster still has the larger market share.

If we learned anything from the dot com bust, it’s this: Super Bowl commercials don’t make you into a dominant company.

14. 1984 Apple Macintosh Commercial

Apple’s “1984″ ad is by leaps and bounds one of the most impactful Superbowl commercials of all time. People harped on that commercial when it was first shown, but it launched the Macintosh brand and brought Apple into fleeting prominence. The commercial is still one of the most viewed commercials of all time.

15. 1976 Xerox Monk Commercial

It may be tough to remember, but the Xerox 9200 was revolutionary for its speed and stability in creating photocopies. You couldn’t print, email, or Twitter out documents in 1976, but you could copy at a rate of two pages per second. This commercial hopefully gives you a sense of how far technology has gone.

Even though this Superbowl is nearly worthless without my beloved Chicago Bears, the commercials rarely disappoint. In many cases, Internet and technology companies purchasing Super Bowl commercials is a horrendous waste of money (i.e. Pets.com). But for the smart companies, it can be the ultimate platform to launch a new product (i.e. Apple).

I think it’s time that the Web giants of the West clean house and toss away what they don’t absolutely need to accomplish goals set by management. Why? Technological focus of the highly productive sort has given way to competitive hubris, and those two terms should remain exclusive from one another often as possible. Each of the Big Four - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL - has displayed terrible redundancies in their own way, and needlessly so.

One of the most outstanding examples, perhaps, comes by way of Google. Google purchased YouTube some years aback, and its acquisition, while still not especially profitable, has come to dominate the field of Web video much the same way the company’s own search-advertising duopoly has grown. Still, Google Video survives. To be sure, they each serve different purposes. But why is that, exactly? Why work an ancillary angle? Wouldn’t it have been better to do away with Google Video by now and attend solely to YouTube?

Also, Google purchased Jaiku, a one-time strong competitor to Twitter that promoted itself heavily for the mobile crowd to great effect, but lost considerable ground in the last year do to the ways of popularity contest. What was the reasoning behind Google’s purchase? To get on the microblog wagon, of course. Yet, if the intention was good, Jaiku nonetheless gained little for its parent. So wouldn’t it be best to just…move on? Jaiku’s homepage signifies its status well at present. The announcement of Jaiku’s move into the Googleplex is still write large. Still.

Now, how about the smallest of the four, AOL. Seems innocent enough, trying to make things happen for itself. But perhaps it’s trying too many things, no? From the looks of it, AOL has only a few really solid efforts underway: its AIM service, its radio (plus Last.fm) projects, and its blogging network. Those are what make AOL sit unique from other giants, it seems, and which should be developed with vigor. Everything else appears ancillary. AOL Mail is still strong as far as users go, but in utility, it’s no market leader. Search? Three words: “Enhanced by Google.” Sure, its search and home news page are very much bread and butter to the entire operation, but again, AOL can’t survive forever on aid. It needs to find its own way. It should think less horizontal and more vertical. How best to make its most attractive properties better, in other words.

Microsoft is at this time a peculiar fellow. It has a reasonable amount of traffic, but its ambition may be too much of a fantasy. Google is very dominant in search, and while Microsoft would do well to remain in the game in order to pull in some coin to fund its Live services, to seek a real challenge with the king of the judge seems somewhat fantastical at the moment. Microsoft was hard after Yahoo, but for $44+ billion dollars, it might be better able to condition its own properties to serve users better. And that suite of full-fledged cloud office applications isn’t going to make itself. My last word about Microsoft for now: The company’s expansion of its original deal with Facebook to supply a search box for users something that I think is worth more to Microsoft’s future than doing anything really massive with Yahoo.

Speaking of Yahoo, it is one player that is so unfortunately confused about its plans for the future that it hasn’t yet managed to make an outright killing with its top properties. From far and wide, cries over the unrealized potential of Flickr have droned on and on and on again. Yahoo Mail, besides being visually refreshed, has remained largely unchanged. Yahoo Buzz, something which many consider to have a clear advantage over Digg, if only for its potential audience, is not displayed with any prominence on the Yahoo homepage. The user must select “More Yahoo Services” in order to gain access. For something which can make Yahoo seem more current and appear more content-rich from the get-go, it’s strangely second-tier. For goodness sake, Yahoo still features a link for GeoCities at its topmost domain. Poor prioritization for sure.

Here’s the thing. The roles of Internet giants are understandably difficult to manage. The carnal objective of enormous financial growth, mandated by the companies as well as the starseekers of Wall Street, is a massively tough nut to crack in and of itself, quarter after quarter. Brilliance is hard to repeat, after all, and sometimes there is only so much you can eek out of a particular business. The risk of having a decision deemed stupid and ineffectual by users and subsequently investors as well, is just added pressure that can only be conducive to cautiousness, and not meaningful progress.

Of course, being a giant also has its outstanding benefits. It means that you carry with your name a sizable amount of money, either in assets or in cold hard cash. Which you can experiment with very liberally, particularly in the startup market. But having the option to do so doesn’t necessarily mean you take it.

For a long time I’ve watched the Big Four mozy about and stretch themselves unnecessarily. I’ve seen things boom, bust, and languish to various degrees of boring. Sites and services launched afresh or have been purchased, and something or other has subsequently stagnated as a result. Yet all too often have those burdens been kept afloat. Why that is is a mystery. There’s no reason for it. They’re dead weight, and the sooner one is done with them the better. You have lower amount of vital statistics to watch over, giving you more opportunity to zero in on what really matters to their brands.

The fact is that excess fat is on everyone’s plate, and the more able one becomes at mimimizing one’s weaknesses, the more pronounced one’s strengths may grow. Really, sometimes it is that simple.

Perhaps the answer lies partly in the numerical growth trend on Craigslist as seen over the last 12 months.

As Craigslist users have no doubt witnessed over the last several years, the site is taking on larger and larger numbers of advertisements for local sales of odds and ends, big and small (cars to handheld gadgets). Chris Albrecht of GigaOM, with figures reportedly gleaned direct from the source, has shown as much in a post published late last week.

The number of for-sale postings nearly doubled in the space of 12 months on the classifieds site. What was slightly under 9,000,000 for the month of June 2007, grew to 18 million plus in May 2008, subsequently dropping to about 17.8 million in June 2008.

Naturally, the same cannot be said for eBay. It’s a very different beast. Still, if eBay’s historic strength in second-hand sales is anything to go by, and consumers are pushed to sell off belongings, the auctioneer is presumably the choice outlet to distribute things unnecessary and unwanted. (So to speak.) Thus, I suspect the company may well manage to pull through the coming seasons on fairly sound footing, despite the relative gloom of the retail sector.
According to recent announcements, revenue at eBay grew to $2.20 billion in the second quarter, from $2.19bn in the first, so is it by no means speeding along uphill. And one must also take into account the need for consumers to increase spending on eBay to match any presumed influx of product listings. Which is far from guaranteed. It goes without saying that while that national taxpayer rebate in the US from late spring may have helped things along for the summer, its effectiveness is expected to peter out in the coming months.

Regardless, I ask you: What do you think is in eBay’s future for late-2008, early-2009? Is it in a convenient position for the times? Or is the company in for bitter figures? Is the company’s internal affairs and issues with the powerseller crowd too big an elephant to allow eBay to continue growing - albeit quite slowly?

Instead of just throwing away your electronics, you can resell them and earn some cash, in turn recycling by allowing someone else to reuse your items. Gazelle actually buys your items, and acts something like a pawn shop for your electronic gadgets. The service includes an online calculator which will estimate the value of your products based on the information you provide. For those items that no longer have market value, they can merely be recycled instead of resold.

Part of Second Rotation Inc., Gazelle features a few new upgrades that will hopefully make the overall process of selling and recycling electronic items simpler. New navigation capabilities have been layered into the Gazelle site so users can easily find the items they’d like to sell and begin the process from there. The estimate calculator has also been improved, displaying the value of items over time. Now you’ll be able to better determine when an optimal time to sell your used products will be. The Gazelle upgrades also feature more Web 2.0 aspects, which merely introduce more transparency into the selling process, giving users more control by offering more insight to the data it collects for the purpose of determining things like product value, etc.
Whether you’d like to become more active in the reuse and recycle process, or you’d just like to offload your stuff for a fixed price, Web-based consignment service, Gazelle is hoping to lure you in one way or another. Through its partnerships with other companies and electronic goods stores, Gazelle turns a profit from the gadgets and items you sold for cash, but its upgrades really seek to better utilize its existing Web presence for the purpose of gaining a broader user base through simplified mechanisms.

If you used the SecondRotation site in the past year or so, you’ll recall that its bare bones appearance did little to steal market share from alternative sites on looks alone, though the service itself has proven to be quite useful. The new look and improved process will certainly make Gazelle more attractive to the average consumer and will allow Second Rotation Inc. to further its reach.

Well, it finally happened. If you’ve upgraded to the latest version of iTunes, aka 7.7, you can check out the mythical iPhone App Store, and although you can’t buy anything yet, you’ll at least be able to choose the apps you’ll be spending your precious denaros on. *Update: ok, now you can start spending cash, if you’re so inclined.

As Steve Jobs promised earlier today, there are about 500 applications to choose from at this moment.

The categories for the apps are Business, Education, Entertainment, Finance, Games, Health & Fitness, Lifestyle, Music, Navigation, News, Photography, Productivity, Reference, Social Networking, Sports, Travel, Utilities, and Weather.

At first glance, I’m seeing a lot of games, plus some familiar names, like Twitterific, AIM client, Facebook, MySpace Mobile, Pownce, and Typepad. Most of the applications fall into the 0.99-9.99 dollar category, but some, like PhotoDial, cost as high as 14.99 dollars. The most expensive application I’ve found so far is LionClock Lite, a time tracker that costs a whopping 29.99 dollars. Well, strike that: Netter’s Anatomy Flash Cards and Netter’s Neuroscience Flash Cards - those cool medical apps that were shown when iPhone 3G was unveiled - are 39.99 each. Ouch. Simple applications such as Light, as well as many utilities, are free.

One disappointing category is definitely Navigation, which only contains 11 applications, one of which is Flashlight. Sure, it does help you see where you’re going, but I wouldn’t exactly call it navigation. I sure hope for more applications that will take advantage of iPhone’s shiny new GPS in the (near) future.

The best populated category, by far, is Entertainment, a good portion of which are simple ebooks. There’s also a lot of utilities, but not many fall into the must-have category.

All in all, the app store is populated well, but there’s nothing groundbreaking here; after a couple of days the ratings on the apps will make more sense, so it’ll be easier to choose the really good applications. And, of course, hopefully the developers will swarm to create new stuff so we’ll have a much wider choice soon.

Several more screenshots await after the jump.

Company Name: Cameesa

20 word description: Cameesa is crowdfunded fashion. We are a clothing company run by those who wear it.

CEO’s 100 word description: The idea with Cameesa is to get more people involved in the clothing creation process. We use crowdfunding to let the community decide what we make. The people who find and fund designs (called Supporters) then share in the profits along with the artist. There is no voting or competitions; the community truly has control over what gets made.

Launched in mid-June, Cameesa is a new clothing company hailing from Chicago, where it faces some steep competition from another dominant home team–Threadless. The Cameesa t-shirt company doesn’t necessarily promote designs through a contest, but still requires support for a given design before it can be sold through its online store. The support Cameesa artists gain is instead in the form of micro-investments from individuals.

Give about $20 for each design you support and you’re putting up the money for their Cameesa-approved design to make it to the storefront. It’s a model that’s very similar in theory to Sellaband, which accepts micro-investments from several people and uses the capital towards production costs. The benefit is that these supporters get ongoing revenue from sales and the artist gets to grow their presence (and income).
Some could argue that such a model for fronting money isn’t necessarily worth the rewards, unless sales become scalable on a large scale. As a design needs 50 supporters in order to become an inventory item on Cameesa’s site, each supporter gets 1/50 of the investment amount. The artist himself retains 20% of the profits–after 250 shirts are sold.

The question remains whether or not it’s worth it to artists and supporters in the long run. Part of that answer could be boiled down to promotional options provided by Cameesa, and the drive of both artists and supporters. Some widgets, badges and third-party applications on social media sites could begin to help out towards this end.

Some are clearly promotional blogs, but many seem quite genuine. What celebrity blog would you like to see published?

Actors

Alec Baldwin - Part of The Huffington Post site, the 30 Rock star posts his thoughts on the current political landscape.

Valerie Bertinelli - Currently blogging through the Jenny Craig website about her weight loss.

Zach Braff - The star of Scrubs doesn’t update frequently, but he does post occasional news.

Jackie Chan - The long-time action star updates frequently with photos and thoughts from his travels.

Jenna Fischer - An actress best known for her role as Pam Beesley on The Office blogs on her MySpace page about her life and gives acting tips.

Mariska Hargitay - The Law & Order: Special Victims Unit actress posts occasionally and sometimes has guest bloggers write as well.

Allison Mack - Best known for the role of Chloe on Smallville, Mack uses her blog to keep her fans up-to-date and share her passions in life with them.

Alyssa Milano - Milano, former star of Charmed, has a blog about baseball (linked by her name), and another one on her personal site, Alyssa.com.

David Nykl - The actor who plays Zelenka on Stargate: Atlantis posts frequently about life on the set with lots of behind-the-scenes photos.

William Shatner - The star of Star Trek and Boston Legal posts every few months.

Jodie Sweetin - The former star of Full House blogs for OK! Magazine about her life and losing weight after having her baby.

Athletes

Gilbert Arenas - Posts frequently to his blog on the NBA website.

David Beckham - The LA Galaxy player updates his blog roughly once a week about games he’s played and what he’s up to.

Curtis Granderson - The center fielder for the Detroit Tigers blogs over on ESPN about baseball, life and even the occasional movie review.

Anna Kournikova - The tennis player better known for her looks than her skill, has a blog that mostly promotes her personal appearances and upcoming events.

Pat Neshek - Pitcher for the Minnesota Twins that talks about baseball in general, what it’s like to be recruited, and his love of trading sports trading cards.

Curt Schilling - The pitcher for the Boston Red Sox posts several times a week on average.

Comedians

Roseanne Barr - The comic, actress and writer is a frequent blogger with multiple updates per day sometimes.

Dave Barry - A long time humor columnist, Dave Barry is also an active blogger.

Michael Ian Black - Co-creator of the comedy trio Stella and Wet Hot American Summer actor, Michael Ian Black updates his blog regularly. This one is definitely worth checking out.

Margaret Cho - Cho is best known for her comedy tours, but she is also a copious blogger.

Tom Green - Comic Tom Green, who spoke with us back in June, not only broadcasts video from his house, but he also blogs it.

Rosie O’Donnell - Rosie O’Donnell has been a well-known, and sometimes controversial, blogger for quite a while now.

Miscellaneous

David Byrne - The Talking Heads founding member is also an artist and writer, amongst other things. He updates his blog a few times a month about projects he’s working on, his life, and ideas on current events.

Mark Cuban - Billionaire, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and Dancing With the Stars contestant, Mark Cuban is not shy about sharing his opinions on his blog.

Adam Curry - The former MTV VJ and huge podcasting advocate blogs daily on his site.

Paris Hilton - The actress/singer/model blogs on her MySpace account from time to time, mostly to clear up rumors about herself.

James Lipton - The writer, executive producer and host of Bravo TV’s “Inside The Actor’s Studio” posts about his work on the show and the entertainment industry.

Joseph Mallozzi - Works on Stargate:Atlantis, but finds time to post extremely long posts from the set almost daily.

Ronald D. Moore - One of the men behind the current Battlestar Galactica, he blogs about all sorts of things.

Jamie Oliver - The television chef blogs frequently as well as occasionally moblogging.

RuPaul - The well-known drag queen/singer/actor and more has been blogging regularly since 2001.

Martha Stewart - The Domestic Diva talks about her personal life, what’s going on behind-the-scenes, and more.

Donald Trump - Focused on his Trump University brand, this blog features a mixture of posts from Trump as well as his staff.

Musicians

Lily Allen - One of the favorite subjects of many gossip blogs, Ms. Allen uses her MySpace blog to dispel rumors about herself, talk about her new music and whatever is going on in her life.

Barenaked Ladies - The entire band posts to their blog.

Thomas Dolby - While it would be easy to make a “he blinded us with blogging!” joke, we’ll try to avoid it as we tell you the well known musician is a frequent blogger.

MC Hammer - It seems MC Hammer is everywhere all over the web, and on his blog he’s tackling just about every subject you can think of.

John Mayer - John Mayer talks about everything from recording his latest music to what his current favorite gadgets are.

Moby - Well known musician Moby has been running his blog since 2000.

Gene Simmons - Known as much for his reality show as his band, KISS, Gene Simmons blog is frequently updated.

Nikki Sixx - The Motley Crue and Sixx:A.M. bassist updates his fans via his blog every so often.

Kanye West - the popular hip hop artist and producer updates his blog regularly, mostly with pictures and videos that have to do with music, fashion and design.

News

Daryn Kagan - A former correspondent for CNN who now does daily blogging about positive news stories.

Meredith Viera - Host of Today and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is blogging through iVillage.

Brian Williams - Posts on a fairly regular basis to the NBC blog, The Daily Nightly.

Writers

Peter David - Comic book writer and novelist, Peter David has been blogging since 2002 on a very regular basis.

Neil Gaiman - Mr. Gaiman is a comic book writer/novelist/television creator who has been blogging for quite some time.

William Gibson - The well-known author of Neuromancer has been blogging on his site since 2003.

Danny Rubin - The writer of the film Groundhog Day still hears about it so much that he started a blog to answer questions and discuss the philosophy of the movie.

Kevin Smith - Writer and director of such movies as Clerks and Chasing Amy only started seriously blogging in 2005, but has been prolific ever since.

ROCKETON is a new, downloadable avatar service that lets you use the entire Web as your virtual world. If you like Weblin, then you’ll like ROCKETON — the underlying concepts are very similar. You create an avatar, and let it journey with you as you surf the Web. Currently ROCKETON is in private alpha, but I got early access to the site in order to check it out. Below is my journey as a ROCKETON avatar:

Hour 1

Downloaded the ROCKETON application. Easy, quick. I found myself on the ROCKETON launch pad, where all the newbies come to play. Here, you customize your avatar, and finish registering your account. The custom options were pretty basic in terms of the type of outfit I could choose, or the hairstyle I wanted, and that’s when I realized why most of the avatars on the launchpad were wearing the same thing. Details like color, however, can be changed.

Even though it was quick and easy to set up, my first impression of ROCKETON was reminiscent of my first experience with Second Life, when you’re left in a virtual environment full of users that are as clueless as you are. That soon changed.

After getting my avatar customized, I noticed a sleek menu at the bottom left corner of my browser. This had just about everything I needed to play with ROCKETON. Here, you can “hide” your avatar and the ROCKETON menu, see the top sites where avatars are visiting, view all of your info (profile, rank, points, preferences, etc.), change your avatar, access your store, buy points, trade items, view friends and play games with other users.