Serving Up A Google Hurricane

Looks like Google is never out of the news. After the celebrated marriage with YouTube, the Mountain View kingpin is believed to be cooking up something big again.

The rumour mill is getting the adrenalin flowing. So, what's cooking?

According to WebProNews, there's gonna be a hurricane (Not Katrina, again) swirling right up by Monday. They got wind of this from DM News associate editor Giselle Abramovich.

According to her, Google is set for a corporate restructuring and are about to launch an Adsense for Audio service.

For those who envisage the coming of the online video age, this has got to be huge. And that's the main reason for the sensational Google/YouTube marriage.

Think of this as a recipe that includes podcasts, streaming media like YouTube, MP3 player, radio and TV plus a few other new media technologies...and throw in Adsense for Audio for good measure, what do you get?

Voila, a Google Goodie Dish, of course!

To read more...

> WebProNews: Google to restructure

> Blog.dmnews.com: Rumour has it...

Bubbling Dotcom Bubbles

Your snoopy wiredhound was caught napping while Google Inc. was gobbling up YouTube Inc. for a cool USD1.65 billion.

This is the most expensive acquisition in Google's eight-year history and it really shook up the dotcom landscape.

After Monday's coup by the Internet's leading search engine company, some are rubbing their eyes and wondering whether this is the beginning or the end of the dotcom craze.

Certainly it brings back memories of the dotcom boom in the late 1990s. So has the dotcom boom come back with a vengeance?

If we take Google CEO Eric Schmidt's word for it when he told investors that YouTube would be "one of many investments" the company plans to make in the video field, then be prepared for more splashy news in the near future.

Last year, Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace - a hot social networking site popular with teenagers - for USD580 million and got tongues wagging about the acquisition.

The way things are moving, online video seems to be the next big thing 'cause there's a huge market out there for the taking.

As YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen had proven, their video site turned out to be a cultural phenomenon. It appeals to the young.

Born August last year in Hurley's garage, YouTube captured about 2.8 million users a month but today its audience had shot up to 72 million users, according to a BBC news report.

Is this the theoretical "Long Tail" effect that Chris Anderson wrote about in his book whereby the future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream?

Here's a quote from YouTube's CEO Hurley reported in the San Francisco Chronicle:

"We're in the middle of a shift in digital media entertainment. Users are now in control of what they want to watch and when they want to watch it. They decide what rises to the top, what's entertaining."

Here's a hypothetical USD1.65 billion question to Yahoo and MicroSoft: What're you gonna do about this Google-gobbling? You ain't gonna take this lying down?

Thumbs Up to the Crew

When the going gets tough, the tough gets going. Thanks to the crew at Blogger Beta. They did a fine job getting things to start rolling again quite fast after the initial glitches. I've managed to re-instate most of my stuff here. I must say I'm very pleased with the results.

Is The Grass Greener This Side of Blogger?

Sometimes we wondered whether the grass is greener on the other side. Same thing here when one contemplates on switching camp. . .and I did just that today by packing up and moving from the old Blogger to Blogger Beta. That explains why this blogsite looks so unfamiliar if you had been to my previous abode.

Now, here's the bad news...the grass isn't that greener this side of blog heaven!

To my horror, most of my input - Google Adsense, RSS/Atom feed buttons, Amazon ads, and other paraphernalia that most visitors don't care two hoots about (they don't click 'em!) - seem to have vanished into thin air.

Just think how much efforts were put in to set up the blog, and now it's zilch. Kaboom! It's all gone to that big blog in the sky.

Would I go back to the old blog? No, I'm gonna stick this one out and see whether the Blogger folks sweat it out to bring stability and order to their realm.

Being the nosy kind of bloghound, I went to the forum for Bloggers to snoop around. Yada, yada, the confusion, frustration and constipation building up there was mind-boggling.

People were getting lost in the new environment. Fonts and colors were not responding. Add and arrange page elements by clicking and dragging but nothing seems to move. One poor soul was asking for direction to go to "layout." And yada, yada!

I needed some fresh air. I took a break and went shopping, making a point to grab some Panadols.

[Several hours later]

P/S. I'm back at my trusty PC...signed in to my blog...and voila, good news! It seems Blogger Beta has got its mojo working. I'm delighted but it's getting late and I need some rest. I'll be back tomorrow and see how much damage control I can achieve. Ta.