The Social

AOL CEO and former Google sales exec Tim Armstrong.

(Credit: Google)

We get it, Tim Armstrong. We know the still relatively new AOL CEO is all about reinventing the once-mighty online access company into a digital publishing powerhouse. But that didn't stop him from really hammering the point home at The Atlantic's First Draft of History conference on Thursday morning.

"What is the future of the company?" Armstrong, who previously served as a high-profile sales executive at Google, said in his talk, which was streamed live online. "If I had to describe it in one word, I think it's content, and I think it's content because there's an opportunity to marry what the content's already done with what the content can do."

One of his goals at AOL, he said, is to evolve and simplify the display advertising industry in a manner inspired by the success of search advertising. "When you have millions of advertisers that can sign up online in 10 minutes and run a global search campaign," he explained, "the same thing needs to be brought to display."

Armstrong has reason to believe in content. AOL acquired a solid portfolio of blogs when it purchased publishing network Weblogs Inc. in 2005, and the titles it's launched since then have largely been well-received--even though Armstrong promptly did away with the "MediaGlow" branding that had been established for the company's content division soon into his reign as CEO.

AOL has reach: 100 million visitors in the U.S., and 275 million globally. It'll soon be wholly independent from parent company Time Warner. Plus, the traditional print publishing industry is so beleaguered that it's about time a digital power stepped up to the plate.

But there are still plenty of issues at stake. Armstrong said that the ultimate answer to one of the biggest controversies in new-media publishing--do you charge for it or not?--will be that the Web will gravitate toward a mix of free, ad-supported content and paid offerings.

"I think consumers are smart. I think that if the content is really good, people will pay for it," he said. "I do think there's cases where I think if you can add enough value to content, people are going to pay for it. I think The Wall Street Journal's a good example of this."

Meanwhile, Armstrong expects the digital advertising industry to continue to mature, despite the fact that revenue has still been dampened by the recession. "When I came from Google to AOL the first meeting that I did was in Baltimore, at our Advertising.com (offices)," he related, referring to the ad network that AOL acquired in 2004. "One of the employees said, 'How many ad campaigns do you think we should be running?' and I said, I don't know, 500,000, and the audience went blank."

He continued, "The number was a few thousand, and for me that was shocking because I came from a place where we went from having a few hundred customers to having a million customers. And why hasn't AOL thought in that direction and that scale?"

Part of achieving that scale, he explained, involves getting pretty deep into local advertising markets, something that AOL sees as an untapped resource for both audiences and ad dollars. At the Atlantic event, he showed off some visuals from Patch, the local-news start-up that he invested in prior to his arrival at AOL; AOL ultimately acquired it. The start-up is currently restricted to about a dozen towns, mostly in New Jersey, but a gradual expansion is on the road map.

"In the town we're covering every single thing that a consumer in that town should be concerned about," Armstrong said of Patch, which employs a professional journalist in each town as well as aggregates local news from other sources. "The thing you don't see from the surface here is (that) we built a massive structured database underneath this. We've digitized the entire town."

Citizen news site NowPublic has been sold to another company in the "hyperlocal" space, Examiner.com, the two companies announced Tuesday.

The two sites will operate independently, but Examiner will integrate NowPublic's technology into its site and will encourage NowPublic's contributors to also write for Examiner--right now, the buyer says it has grown 200 percent since the beginning of the year (it launched in April 2008) and has 15,000 active contributors, hoping to hit 30,000 by year's end.

NowPublic's executives, including CEO Leonard Brody, will join the management team of Clarity Digital Group, parent company of Examiner.

"Every day, we hear discussions about whether hyperlocal content will ever be scalable, sustainable, or profitable as a business entity," Examiner CEO Rick Blair said in a release. "With the acquisition of NowPublic, we have the technology to further engage our community of more than 17 million unique visitors per month, and distribute our stories in new and innovative ways."

Was this a bargain-basement acquisition? The companies did not disclose financial terms. But an insider in the space told CNET News that NowPublic had been shopping itself to some pretty big media companies for some time at a higher price than potential buyers were willing to pay. The company had raised about $12 million in venture funding.

Many media companies have simply been launching their own "citizen journalism" initiatives, like CNN's iReport and blogging experiments from newspapers like the Washington Post, which could make an exit tougher for the smaller players.

Digital-media companies like AOL and InterActiveCorp have also made plays to dominate the local-news market--AOL recently acquired local-focused start-ups Patch and Going, the former of which was already a personal investment on behalf of CEO Tim Armstrong, and the Barry Diller-run IAC has been placing a big emphasis on business directory Citysearch.

It's here, sort of. Several months after the big announcement that content from Disney's ABC Entertainment division would be coming to Hulu, the entertainment conglomerate's shows have started arriving.

The primetime drama "Grey's Anatomy" debuted on the video hub Monday, and more shows will roll out over the next two weeks.

These include, according to Hulu, consistent hits like "Desperate Housewives" and "Scrubs," along with more recent additions to the network such as "I Survived A Japanese Game Show."

Disney joined Hulu in April, giving it a joint stake in the company alongside NBC Universal, News Corp., and investor Providence Equity Partners. Shows from ABC as well as ABC-owned cable channels like SoapNet and ABC Family are on the way, along with movies from Disney (though no titles have been made available yet).

Would-be Hulu rival Joost closed its consumer video service last month after its peer-to-peer technology failed to make up for its tepid content offering.

My big question: When will we see episodes of my favorite ABC show, "Lost," on Hulu? I've e-mailed a company representative to find out.

The Spore Creature Creator.

(Credit: Spore/Electronic Arts)

With all this hysteria about the pig sniffles, you'd think that an announcement about 100 million strange little organisms would be cause for alarm. That's not the case, however, when we're talking about the oddball life forms that players grow and control as part of video game Spore. The game created by industry legend Will Wright announced Monday that 100 million creatures have been created, far outrunning the number of species on Earth.

The game publisher, Electronic Arts, started counting last June. That's when it first released its Spore Creature Creator, several months ahead of the full Spore game itself.

There's more Spore on the way. Electronic Arts' Maxis studio is releasing the Spore Galactic Adventures expansion pack for PC and Mac players, Spore Hero for the Wii, and Spore Hero Arena for the Nintendo DS. The player who created the 100 millionth Spore creature now has a chance to win a copy of Spore Galactic Adventures as well as a souped-up PC graphics card.

Last month, Will Wright announced his departure from Electronic Arts. Wright, who soared to the heights of video game fame with Sim City and The Sims, has said that his new project is an "electronic think tank" that goes by the interesting name of Stupid Fun Club.

Virtual world Second Life has put in effect some new measures to keep adult content away from users who might not want to run into it. Or fly into it, as avatars might do.

Later this year, parent company Linden Lab will create a standalone "continent" for adult content, and members who don't purchase private "land" will be asked to migrate there if they wish to partake in adult-related activities. Second Life is an 18+ environment already, but stricter age verification policies will be put in place. You'll need a "verified" account, either through credit card information or through Linden Labs' filtering system, to get into the adult "continent."

Members will be asked to start flagging content as adults-only as part of a new content rating system, which will start to roll out in an update to the downloadable Second Life client that will be available next week.

"The people that are on our mainland and in our estate, if they are going to engage with adult content, are being asked to do that in the adult content area," said Cyn Skyberg, vice president of customer relations at Linden Lab. "Private land owners will be asked to tag their searches for adult-related listings so that it goes into the adult filter."

So what does this mean for Second Life, which was briefly a marketers' paradise before swifty falling from grace in the Silicon Valley pecking order? Well, it'll help make it a friendlier environment for some of the new "residents" whom Linden Lab hopes to woo. The company is profitable, due largely in part to the sheer volume of virtual goods and transactions made on the platform by loyal users, and Linden Lab sees corporate and academic institutions as an area for future growth. Keeping porn in its place could be good for P.R.

"A portion of this will be perceived as definitely being more corporate- and educator-friendly because you'll have more control over the things you're experiencing," Skyberg said.

There aren't many new companies launching at this year's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, which runs Tuesday through Friday. One of the few that are is Lunch.com, which strives to get a little more juice out of user-generated publishing.

Here's the premise of Lunch: You can review anything you want, from a TV show to a restaurant to a food product to a household appliance. I guess it aims to be, sort of, a Wikipedia for opinions. Founder J.R. Johnson, who started building the site after he sold previous creations VirtualTourist.com and OneTime.com to Expedia, said that Lunch started filling up its private beta by reaching out to frequent Amazon reviewers and received a very positive response.

You're also encouraged to network with other members and filter reviews through its "Similarity Network" function, an algorithm for finding like-minded users and matching them to one another. To ramp up Lunch's assessment of your preferences, you can play "speed-rating" games called Exhilarate, which are structured much like Netflix's recommendation feature.

Quite honestly, I have a hard time seeing people turn to a general reviews site when there are already well-established sites for reviews of businesses, books, movies, and the lot--not to mention a plethora of "social shopping" sites for consumer products. I feel like Lunch could've gained a lot more traction if it had made its debut two or three years ago, when user-generated content was a lot more noteworthy. But maybe that's just me.

Auditude, a video advertising company best known for technology that can identify clients' video content and run ads against it, has raised a $10.5 million Series B funding round from Redpoint Ventures and existing investor Greylock Partners. This brings the company's total funding to $23 million.

Last time we checked in with Auditude, the company had inked a deal with News Corp.'s MySpace and Viacom's MTV Networks to detect both official and user-uploaded MTV content on the social network's MySpaceTV platform. It was seen by many as a savvy antipiracy measure. Since then, Auditude has started powering a broader variety of video ads on MySpace and its MySpace Music product, as well as partnered with Warner Bros. Entertainment. More content deals are on the way, CEO Adam Cahan told CNET News.

"From our perspective, we are looking to work with everybody," Cahan said. "We are trying to tackle what I think is one of the biggest opportunities and challenges on the Internet right now, which is (that) tons of people are watching video, 80 percent of folks out there, and yet very few people are really making a business of this yet."

Redpoint partner Chris Moore will join Auditude's board of directors, which also includes former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta. A member of the short list for the top post at MySpace Music, Van Natta instead took the CEO role at rival streaming service Project Playlist.

On an otherwise placid holiday weekend, one blog's commentary on a change to Facebook's terms of service created a firestorm of banter on the Web: does the social network claim ownership to any user content on the site, even if the user deletes it?

Facebook reorganized its terms of service last Wednesday. In a blog post, company legal representative Suzie White provided an explanation. "We used to have several different documents that outlined what people could and could not do on Facebook, but now we're consolidating all this information to one central place," White wrote. "We've also simplified and clarified a lot of information that applies to you, including some things you shouldn't do when using the site."

The blog post sounded benign. But the brouhaha arose on Sunday over a revision in the wording of Facebook's policy over what happens to profile content--shared items, blog post-like "notes," photos--when members delete their accounts.

Consumer advocacy blog The Consumerist phrased Facebook's fresh policy as "We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever," pointing out that Facebook's ToS spruce-up removed several sentences in which the company said its licenses on user content expired upon account deletion. And that's where the hysteria began.

"Facebook should now be called The Information Blackhole," one Consumerist commenter proclaimed. "What goes in never comes out. Be careful what you huck in there."

Truth be told, most Facebook users won't give a hoot, the same way that the flurry over the Beacon advertising program in late 2007 was fueled by a few vocal privacy advocates while the general population didn't seem to care about it one way or the other. But for advocates of copyright reform and privacy, not to mention photographers and writers who may want the photos they upload or "notes" they write on Facebook to eventually lead to some kind of profit, the news was alarming.

Some prominent Twitterers and bloggers, like New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, announced that they were deleting their Facebook accounts or pulling all uploaded content.

So Facebook issued somewhat of a clarification on Monday to explain what the change really meant.

"We are not claiming and have never claimed ownership of material that users upload," a statement from Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt read. And indeed, Facebook's terms of service do say that "User Content and Applications/Connect Sites" are exempt from its claims on content ownership.

"The new Terms were clarified to be more consistent with the behavior of the site," Schnitt's statement continued. "That is, if you send a message to another user (or post to their wall, etc...), that content might not be removed by Facebook if you delete your account (but can be deleted by your friend)."

We've all heard it by now. Live streams of Barack Obama's presidential inauguration broke records for the Web, with about 7.7 million streams flowing concurrently at its peak. Which, of course, makes us wonder: what will set a new record?

With broadband penetration, not to mention Web usage in general, still growing, it's conceivable that some event of historic importance will surpass the inauguration in due time. Chances are, it'll be some prescheduled event that people know to tune into, rather than a sudden occurrence--but you never know.

We picked a few possibilities: World Cup football (soccer), for example, has been a big draw for Web traffic in the past, and with the 2010 tournament taking place in South Africa, the geographic distance from Europe and the U.S. may mean that some football fans are tuning in remotely rather than on location. Or, hypothetically, what if a major TV show chooses to broadcast its finale online? (Yeah, yeah, we know, the networks would never let it happen.)

Choose your prediction, or leave a comment with your own theory.