All Things Digital

Valleywag got a hold of a sticker (see below) that Bebo employees are passing around in anticipation of the close of the purchase of the third-ranked social-networking site by AOL for $850 million in cash.

The motto: “I, for one, welcome our new AOL overlords.”

Why shouldn’t they? As BoomTown reported, every Bebo employee has had their previously granted stock options accelerated and fully vested under terms of the deal.

This is typical in acquisitions by the Time Warner (TWX) online subsidiary, since it cannot offer enough of its moribund old media stock.

Unfortunately, those kind of deal terms don’t make for the kind of environment that encourages already jumpy entrepreneurs to stay. In fact, it kind of gives them a free pass to leave.

Still, it is nice to see Bebo minions celebrating their new bosses, including AOL CEO Randy Falco and President Ron Grant, who helmed the Bebo deal.

But to clarify for Bebo staff: Falco and Grant’s nickname at AOL is Smithers and Burns, that lovable pair from “The Simpsons,” and not overlords.

It goes without saying that further errors like this will not be tolerated.

Pretty please, don’t miss this excellent story today in the New York Times by an old colleague of mine, John Schwartz, about amazing images of the human body that were compiled by University of Washington anatomy and dissection expert David L. Bassett and View-Master inventor William B. Gruber six decades ago.

Together, they created the 25-volume “Stereoscopic Atlas of Human Anatomy,” which was published in 1962 and was soon out of print.

Now Stanford University’s School of Medicine is putting the astonishing images online, working with Silicon Valley’s eHuman. Right now, the Times reports, just the head and neck collection is online for $8 a month, but there is more to come.

It seems well worth it. As Schwartz writes:

“Even without the stereoscopic boost, the images are stunning, though perhaps not best examined over breakfast. Blood vessels cluster in a cobwebby tangle along a spinal column, and pelvic bones stand out like butterflies against a stark black field. The back of a man’s head, its layers of flesh and bone sliced away, shows the excavation from the scalp down to the brain as if looking at a stratified canyon wall. The original Kodachrome slides, carefully preserved, still provide images of tremendous clarity.”

He notes that it will eventually be possible for those with special glasses to see the images in 3-D too.

Google (GOOG) has been long tinkering on a version of human-body mapping, dubbed Google Body, a concept much like Google Earth, with many partners including eHuman and Stanford.

But this work–done well before anyone had the sophisticated tech tools we have now–seems just perfect.

Below are some pictures by William B. Gruber from the Bassett Collection:

I usually don’t have a lot of time to get through big, long thumbsuckers in magazines anymore–what can I say? I can hardly keep up with my Twitter feed–but here are two worth a look.

First, a Fast Company piece on the disaster at AOL (this is, for anyone who follows the company, nothing new), called “Dead Man Walking” by David Case.

The phrase, the origins of which is not mentioned in the piece, was applied by pundits to AOL in the early 1990s, when it looked like the Internet was going to make closed online services like AOL obsolete.

It did not turn out that way, of course, as AOL became–for a time, at least–the most powerful player in the digital arena, before imploding right after its disastrous merger with Time Warner (TWX).

After a bit of resurgence under Jon Miller (who was fired for his efforts), AOL is on the ropes again, this article contends–and which BoomTown has been saying for a while now. There are copious examples of this sorry trend in the piece, one more painful than the next.

If you don’t want to slog through it, here’s the money quote:

Eight years removed from the Time Warner merger and more than four years after AOL was expunged from the public company’s official name–an eternity in our evolving Internet age–AOL has been unable to find a way to innovate out of its troubled past. Yes, AOL has been plagued by internecine battles with its corporate parent and by a dial-up subscription-revenue model that could not possibly survive in the modern era. But it has also failed to exploit a wealth of formidable assets, including a ubiquitous brand, millions of regular users, the Web’s dominant instant-messaging service, the iconic MapQuest and Moviefone, the most popular finance site, a top celebrity-gossip site in TMZ, an innovative video search engine in Truveo, and deep television and music offerings… what emerges is a tale of failure on multiple fronts: short-term thinking, bad technology, bungled product development, a dramatic miscalculation of what drives page views on its own site, and a risk-averse culture more prone to imitation than innovation. ‘Pretty much everything we worked on,’ says a former AOL manager, ‘executives pointed to someone else’s product and said, “We want that.” ‘

Second, a piece in the New Yorker by Eric Alterman about the death of newspapers–or, as BoomTown likes to say of this much-trotted out concept: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!

Most interesting, though, is its look at the growth of Arianna Huffington’s online phenom, the Huffington Post (which we wrote about last week here, in fact), as part of the problem for newspapers. (We borrowed this very funny illustration from the article, which kind of says it all.)

And that is basically: They are dull and Arianna is not.

Here’s the money quote:

Though [the] Huffington [Post] has a news staff (it is tiny, but the hope is to expand in the future), the vast majority of the stories that it features originate elsewhere, whether in print, on television, or on someone’s video camera or cellphone. The editors link to whatever they believe to be the best story on a given topic. Then they repurpose it with a catchy, often liberal-leaning headline and provide a comment section beneath it, where readers can chime in. Surrounding the news articles are the highly opinionated posts of an apparently endless army of both celebrity (Nora Ephron, Larry David) and non-celebrity bloggers–more than eighteen hundred so far. The bloggers are not paid. The overall effect may appear chaotic and confusing, but, [HuffPo Co-Founder Kenny] Lerer argues, ‘this new way of thinking about, and presenting, the news, is transforming news as much as CNN did 30 years ago.’ Arianna Huffington and her partners believe that their model points to where the news business is heading. ‘People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that’s ridiculous,’ she says. ‘Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.’

Since we have been hugging online for a while now, Arianna just made us feel all warm and fuzzy.

The Wall Street Journal gave a big hello to its new owner, Rupert Murdoch, who takes over Dow Jones (owner of this site) today, by publishing this tough piece also today on the disaster of News Corp.’s investment in Gemstar-TV Guide International.

It comes from breakingviews, an online financial commentary Web site that the news organization regularly adds to its print paper and online site. Dow Jones also is a minority investor in the site, which was writing about the recently announced deal for Macrovision to buy Gemstar, in which News Corp. owns a 41% stake.

Money (or, more precisely, non-money) quote:

But in gross terms, Mr. Murdoch looks to have paid $1.6 billion–after selling the magazines in 1991 and receiving cash from Mr. Malone in 2000–for the first half of his Gemstar stake. He paid $6 billion in News Corp. stock for the other half. That is nearly $8 billion for an investment valued at $1 billion today.”

Ouch!

Back in July, BoomTown flagged country song “Online” as a surefire hit.

The video of the song by Brad Paisley from his recent “5th Gear” album had just topped the iTunes chart with its star-studded cast, which included Jason Alexander, William Shatner, Kellie Pickler and the original Marcia Brady, Maureen McCormick. It was a feat no country selection had ever accomplished.

Now the song is the No. 1 hit on Billboard’s hot country songs (and rising to No. 39 on the Hot 100 overall.

Not bad for a geek, y’all.

Here’s the very sweet video again (stick around for the last line about march music):

Or at least the hip-swiveling, guitar-picking country music star understands them.

The video of Paisley’s song, “Online,” from his recent “5th Gear” album, recently topped the chart on iTunes, something no country selection had ever done. It could have been the star-studded cast, which included Jason Alexander, Estelle Harris and Patrick Warburton of “Seinfeld,” as well as William Shatner, Kellie Pickler and the original Marcia Brady, Maureen McCormick.

Why? Well, watch the very funny video below and see the tale of someone who is a little different in real life and on MySpace. As the often clever Paisley writes: “Cause online I’m out in Hollywood/I’m 6 foot 5 and I look damn good … I’m so much cooler online/So much cooler online.”

Aren’t we all?

Finally, oh finally, the day has come when AOL has officially stopped manhandling its customers.

Again! But it actually might be the very last time we have to kiss and make up with the once mighty online service.

Could it be that unicorns will be appearing next?

Yesterday, AOL–about which I know a book or two–settled another case about how it treated customers who wanted to leave the service (well, more precisely, how it did not let them leave at all).

It paid a paltry $3 million to avoid going to court, in the case that involved 48 states and Washington, D.C., and also promised to make it much easier for users to cancel. New York, which got $1.25 million from AOL in 2005 for similar practices, did not participate this time and neither did Florida.

Let me just say from covering AOL for a dog’s age–this kind of behavior has not been known to be uncommon there. But, of course, this time the division of Time Warner did not have to say it did anything wrong either, even though it did.

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