First of all, there will always be a place for the big city tabloids out there. They are cheap, easy to read, and sleazy enough to appeal to a wide range of customers.

But what about high-end newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times? The cost of printing a newspaper, while ostensibly low, requires not only resources (ink, paper, etc.) but electricity, labor, and gasoline. Silicon Alley Insider suggests it would be cheaper to send every long-term subscriber an Amazon Kindle than to print and deliver papers.
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Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Barack Obama’s victorious campaign was his unparalleled use of social media and Web 2.0 to raise money, organize, and create buzz. Obama dominated online fundraising and his top YouTube videos were almost universally postive, whereas McCain’s top YouTube videos were often embarrassing.

Knowing that they need to change the game in order to catch up, Republicans are now increasingly using Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace to communicate. In fact, all of the candidates for the head of the RNC are on Twitter, demonstrating the collective view that this is something important for the GOP.
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One thing I will be checking for after Sunday’s Super Bowl is how well the companies that spent millions to advertise will deal with the inevitable online flood that will occur after viewers see their ads.

The one thing about Google Hot Trends that is a fact is that much of it is driven by television, including advertising. With the announcement that Anheuser-Busch has launched a blog, there is some evidence they are moving forward. But optimizing sites for organic search traffic that arises from television hasn’t really caught on as much as it should.
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TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington is probably the best known and most in-demand tech blogger in the world. He has built a site that startups pray to be featured on, and has made a lot of enemies by not pulling any punches. Like him or not, he’s built a juggernaut with TechCrunch and turned it and its events into industry leaders.

But there has been a dark side to his success. Arrington, a former lawyer, has had his family threatened and was recently spat upon in Germany. Due to the most recent incident, he decided that he would take some time off after the Davos Economic Forum in Switzerland.
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Increasingly, pro-Russia hackers are having success in taking down ISPs of countries they feel like need a bit of a rogering. Estonia and Georgia have been victimized in the last couple of years, and now Kyrgyzstan is feeling the heat.

Kyrgyzstan doesn’t get a lot of publicity. It makes Kazakhstan look like a world power. Borat did not come from Kyrgyzstan.
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Friendfeed is finally getting that gigantic jump in users that Twitter experienced in 2008. However, is Friendfeed’s success based on its own merits or are they piggybacking on Twitter’s rise?

While it appears to be true that over 50% of Friendfeed’s total content is arising from Twitter, can that explain its rise in unique visitors? Friendfeed has about 1 million uniques per month compared to 550,000 in September. It is a big possibility that a lot of these unique visitors are finding Friendfeed through search engines that are crawling Twitter’s content. In that case, it would not be particularly impressive.
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TheKnot, which owns such properties as Weddingchannel.com, Lilaguide.com, Babynest.com, and TheBump.com has acquired breastfeeding help site, Breastfeeding.com.

The site has tons of breastfeeding content, including the largest online community of breastfeeding moms on the web. They also have extensive expert input, including from over 4,000 lactation consultants and a medical advisory board that includes some of the world’s foremost breastfeeding experts.
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One of my favorite parts of Google Hot Trends is to see the remarkable synergy between television and search engines. A sporting event, new drama, reality show, or commercial will often cue a TV viewer to search for more info on the web. For example, if a strange illness is discussed on an episode of House, that illness will skyrocket in the number of searches that appear and the term will likely appear as “volcanic” on Google Hot Trends.

So who is watching TV and surfing the web at the same time? I know I do it all the time, partly because my flat screen is perfectly placed in conjunction with my desk to enjoy some telly while I’m surfing. But a new study out from Integrated Media Measurement, Inc. (IMMI) shows that I’m not alone.
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The new report from Hitwise shows that Google now accounts for nearly three-quarters of all search engine queries launched in the United States.

Year-to-year, Google gained about 8% from 2007. Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com all declined in their market share as Google appears headed in the direction of 90% market share and a real monopoly.
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The FriendFeed “Like” feature is something that differentiates itself from the Facebook News Feed. Users can actually say if the like some piece of media (whether it be a Tweet, a YouTube favorite, or a FriendFeed comment) and “likes” show people what is worth clicking on in FriendFeed.

This has not been adopted–or copied–by Facebook. But there is video evidence that they have indeed copied good ol’ FriendFeed.
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