Where is Microsoft spending its $100 million in marketing for its new Bing search service?
Here’s a photo that was forwarded to me showing an advertisement on top of a taxi in Manhattan of a goodbye message from Bing, as well as NBC, to the late pop legend, Michael Jackson.
Huffington Post co-founder and blogging diva Arianna Huffington was in Berkeley this past weekend keynoting at the Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp 2009.
So, BoomTown took the opportunity to motor over the Bay Bridge to catch Huffington on video between sessions about all the big changes at the news Web site of late, including a new CEO and local New York site.
As many already know, John Malone has been a cable legend since he first ran Tele-Communications Inc. back in the early 1970s. His influence put most cable channels on the map and his forceful business skills willed cable into becoming a key consumer medium for entertainment and news.
Malone talked about that experience onstage at the seventh D: All Thing Digital conference and how it mirrors what is going on now as more content is being distributed on the Internet. You should listen, because Malone is a genuine media pioneer who could teach Web players a thing or two.
In what is quite possibly the most spot-on comment about Twitter that BoomTown has heard thus far, Harvard University Professor Jonathan Zittrain said about its use by Iranians protesting the election results there:
“It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”
In other words, Twitter is so simplistic and silly that it is a perfect digital tool to overthrow a government–which kind of makes the trendy microblogging service the Forrest Gump of international relations.
Apparently, if you want to think about the growth of the Huffington Post as a culinary dish, perhaps today’s replacement of CEO Betsy Morgan with longtime online media powerhouse Eric Hippeau might appear under the Emeril Lagasse cooking cliché: Let’s kick it up a notch!
Both co-founders of the online media site, Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, said as much in interviews I did with them–as well as Hippeau–this afternoon.
“The deal is that we simply have been growing so fast that we needed more firepower to accelerate in expanding the site and monetizing it,” said Huffington, who is also editor-in-chief of the news site.
Adding the final leg of its new strategy to reinvigorate AOL, the Time Warner online unit said it was buying two small local start-ups, Patch Media and Going.
Each acquisition–which focus on hyperlocal community news (Patch) and events (Going)–is small, about $10 million.
Ironically, local has previously been a big arena for AOL, which launched its Digital City unit with great fanfare more than a decade ago. AOL still runs Digital City, as well as its CityGuide listing offering.
But, in a move that will surely be scrutinized, Patch is a company whose principal investor has been AOL’s new CEO Tim Armstrong. AOL declined to say how much he had invested in the company, but sources said it was less than $5 million.
Last week, Walt Mossberg and I interviewed entrepreneur, high-definition television fanboy, dancing fool and reliable gadfly Mark Cuban at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference.
After our onstage interview, BoomTown also got him to be more specific about his thoughts on a variety of things he discussed, including Google’s underwriting of its YouTube video subsidiary, the problems with broadband and the Internet as a “utility.”
Yahoo’s SVP of Northern American Audience, Jeff Dossett, is leaving the company.
Reasons for the departure are personal, said sources, who said that Dossett is most likely to do a start-up.
Dossett did not return emails asking for comment, but Yahoo confirmed his resignation to BoomTown.
BoomTown will be driving the minivan–packed with my assistant Ed, my mom, two mannequins (don’t ask), a coffee machine and lots of coffee and some very nice outfits–down to the seventh D: All Things Digital conference today, so don’t expect much in the way of posts from me.
Thus, I hope Twitter doesn’t sell to [fill in the blank], Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer don’t agree to agree (until they are on the D stage next week) and Facebook’s valuation doesn’t ricochet up and down the blog-hyped scale once again.
But the rest of the well-oiled All Things Digital machine will be in full force covering tech and media news, even as we gear up for the big event next week, which will feature pretty much all the major players in the digital space.
That would be Walt Mossberg and his well-known Personal Technology and Mossberg Mailbox columns–as well as BoomTown, John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily, Peter Kafka’s MediaMemo, Katherine Boehret’s Mossberg Solution and video and pictures from our famous D: All Things Digital conferences.
Today, All Things Digital is introducing its very own app for Apple’s iPhone and the iPod touch, offering all the posts and columns you get on this Web site–including news, product reviews, analysis and video–from our crack team.
Just smaller and cuter.
So download us and take us along everywhere you go–ATD really enjoys long walks on the beach.
While the current meme is that traditional journalism is getting the stuffing knocked out of it by the digital onslaught, it neglects to notice that a lot of really sharp news reporters are actually getting some real traction by finally starting to be serious about creating online sites that are designed to compete.
As case in point, BoomTown recently visited the offices of TheWrap.com, a Web blog aimed at dominating breaking news about the business of Hollywood and the entertainment industry.
While in Los Angeles today at the AlwaysOn OnHollywood conference, BoomTown ran smack into blogging empress Arianna Huffington.
She was there to give a speech called “Video Killed the Radio Star…But Can the Web Actually Save Journalism?”
Her answer was a decided yes, especially with great journalists working online, such as the new managing editor of the Huffington Post the mega-blog has just hired.
That would be former CNET Networks Editor-in-Chief Jai Singh, who quit the company last year after a dozen-year run.
Actor Ashton Kutcher crossed the million-follower-on-Twitter line at 11:12 p.m. PDT, beating CNN.
Kutcher simply tweeted: “Victory is ours!!!!!!!!
The CNN cable news channel passed the million mark soon after, but was still second.
The race was getting close as midnight neared on the West Coast.
Not a real race, but a race of the Twits.
Kutcher vs. CNN was a race to get one million “followers,” those who sign up to receive a person’s or organization’s tweets on the hot microblogging service.
Now, I am worried about what Kutcher–whose Twitter handle is aplusk–will do with his one million minions. Order us all to play idiotic practical jokes on people? Rent Demi Moore movies, even the unwatchable ones (”G.I. Jane” anyone?), over and over? Get 1970s mullets?
BoomTown read a ton of the various columns reacting to the Associated Press’s announcement of a new initiative to–as near as I can tell–stop the Internet from being the Internet.
I tease, as it is a lot more complicated than that. But AP board Chairman and MediaNews group CEO Dean Singleton seemed very exercised about his mission to “protect news content from misappropriation.”
It’s going to surely be an interesting debate, kicked off by a very curious quote Singleton gave to paidContent.org: “Print is still the meat. Online’s the salt and pepper.”
A tasty debate!
Neeraj Khemlani, Yahoo’s general manager and executive editor of news, is set to leave his job–right in the midst of a major restructuring of its media unit–to work at Hearst Corp.
Khemlani’s departure could be announced to his staff at Yahoo as early as today.
While Khemlani was in line to head one of the three main prongs of the new content organization, running a possible network programming arm, sources inside and outside Yahoo said he instead has opted to take a job as VP and Special Assistant to the CEO for Digital Media at Hearst.
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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