So The Pirate Bay is going to launch a YouTube Killer.

That’s sort of like a company called “Bank Robbers” launching a Bank of America Killer.  “The Pirate Bay” translated into any language means “Please Sue Me, I Dare You, You Pansy.”

I mean, come on.  I think that’s a hilarious name, and part of me is pulling for them just because I bet they like Monty Python too.  But there’s a little more to slaying YouTube than a waiving a funny name and a middle finger at big media.

Ask Yahoo how they did slaying eBay.

The only way anyone is going to put a material dent in YouTube’s stranglehold on the streaming video market is by putting up a bunch of copyrighted stuff and somehow making it stick.  Granted, The Pirate Bay (arrgg, matey) is at the front of that line, having grown out of the Swedish anti-copyright organization.

But as AllOfMP3.com found out, an offshore address is no panacea for legal troubles.

The Pirate Bay has been on the run from the get go, with allegations that U.S. political pressure forced Swedish police to raid them once already.  I certainly don’t think that’s the highest and best use of U.S. foreign relations, and while I’ve never used The Pirate Bay, I can see why people pull for them.

But popularity is one thing.  YouTube, well that’s something else.

Either way, it should be fun to watch.

Arrgg!

I have used and referred to Techmeme as the New York Times of the blogosphere since the day I discovered it.  It is one of my first stops when I go to the net for my news.

But Tom Morris has a good point.  Techmeme has evolved from the New York Times of the blogosphere to the Wall Street Journal of the blogosphere.  I don’t read the Wall Street Journal for one simple reason.  It bores me to tears.  In fact, I think the Wall Street Journal is a lot like the opera.  Many people who go there are more interested in what it says about them than what it does for them.  Like neckties and polo shirts.

Tom thinks, and I agree, that layering a media slant (which in the online world is fancy jargon for “come click on my ads”) on top of the larger business focus makes it even less techy and more something else.  Something less interesting.  Some square thing trying to get stuffed into a round hole.  Stuffed by those who try in the name of a potential dollar to turn a content platform into a product.

Maybe that’s the root of the issue.

Maybe the Techmeme algorithm has deduced that all of this Web 2.0 stuff is really just the media business in some new form.  If you have no product to sell, what are you?  If your primary or only revenue source is the sale of ads, what are you?  You’re not science.  You’re not a seller of goods.  You’re media.  You’re the new TV.  A million pages of user generated content broadcasting your AdSense banner over the new air.

Science, as Tom points out, is the glorious process that leads to the stuff people push on and onto Techmeme.  But it’s a process that’s an extra step away from the illusion of money.  The process gets ignored in favor of the product and the frenzy to monetize it.

Monetize it largely by getting us to click on ads next to the content we have created on the platforms developed by some scientist who doesn’t know Mike Arrington from Mike Brady.  Again, it all looks and acts like media.

Sure, there is science on the internet and in the blogosphere.  But it’s not driving the Techmeme train anymore.  If it ever did.

I still enjoy Techmeme, and I continue to believe it is one of the most brilliant creations of the Web 2.0 era, largely because of its efficiency and simplicity.  But I do wish it was more about tech and less about how to make money off of that tech.  The same tech that Web 2.0 generally mandates be given away for free.

But that’s just not the way it is.  Not on Techmeme, not in the blogosphere and, sadly, not in life.

Thanks to Ric, Blonde 2.0 and Earl for commenting on my last post.

TV Squad is reporting that Fox has canceled Drive, after a whopping 10 days.  The show didn’t blow me (or apparently many others) away by any means, but it was better than most of the mind numbing, generic sitcoms that seem to fill the airways.  Plus it had Nathan Fillion from another great TV show that got canceled too soon.

It seems like the life expectancy of new TV shows is falling to moth-like levels.  Let’s see: Invasion, Surface, Threshold, Skin, Deadwood, BSG (which, while not canceled yet, is obviously on life support) and now Drive.  And those are just the shows I watched.  No telling how many more five and out shows there have been that I didn’t know about.

At this point, new shows are like new software versions- I’m going to let someone else beta test them.  If they stick, I’ll get the season discs via Netflix.

I no longer trust the networks enough to invest my time in a new show that likely won’t be on next week, or the week after.

When a mainstream or even semi-mainstream publication wants to cover something Web 2.0 related, particularly when it is something owned by your crony, take the reporter’s call.  You are not a Rolling Stone and they are not The Rolling Stone. 

You are a blogger for crying out loud.  You are some guy who’s current claim to fame is that you write an online diary and have some other friends who write online diaries too. 

In other words, you need them much, much more than they need you.

They get interviews from people a lot busier, richer and more famous than you all the time.  If you won’t accommodate them, they’ll just move on.  Or maybe embarrass you and then move on.

I learned a long time ago that there are more of me than there are reporters who want to talk to me for background and/or get a quote from me.  The law of supply and demand taught me to welcome the opportunity to be cooperative with the press.

Sure, I’ve been misquoted a time or two.  Once badly.  But I have also built brands and netted a lot of business by being accessible and cooperative with reporters.

The rules of business, marketing, supply and demand and common sense apply to the blogosphere.  To fail to recognize that is just another reason why so much of the real world doesn’t take the blogging culture seriously.

Fred Wilson says Google’s $3.1B purchase of Doubleclick signals the return of banner advertising.

He’s absolutely correct that banner ads have much more branding value than text ads.  The question for website developers is what will advertisers pay for that value.  Billboards along real highways command top dollar- particularly in the growing number of cities that have tried to limit or eradicate them.  I know of people who live very well off of a couple of billboards- the three-sided one at the intersection of the Southwest Freeway and 610 in Houston being perhaps the most valuable billboard in the country.

But advertisers have traditionally wanted to quantify the success of banner ads by tracking not only impressions (the number of “drivers” who pass by the billboard), but also click-throughs (the number of people who “call the number” on the billboard).  This serves to shift the risk of a bad billboard and/or a bad product from the advertiser to the the billboard owner.  Good for them, but bad for us. 

So like real world real estate, it became all about location.

CNN and Yahoo may be the Southwest Freeways and 610s of the internet.  But what about the back roads and side streets?  Will banners get sold and placed there at an acceptable rate?  It all depends on how the advertisers view the traffic that drives those roads.  And whether they agree with Fred that the branding benefits change the mathematical expectations.  My hunch is that like everything else, a small percentage of the sites will make a large percentage of the money.  That’s life, both in the world and on the internet.  So I don’t think the return of the banner ad is going to be the panacea for Web 2.0.

But I do think banner advertising is due for a resurgence, if for no other reason than Google’s war chest and its desire to own the internet and all the data on it.  There are two proven ways to make money on the internet: content and advertising.  Ironically, the one that the hardest to make – the content – is almost universally free.  That leaves advertising.

The internet has become the new CBS, ABC and NBC.  You don’t pay for the content in cash.  You pay by watching the ads.

And on the internet, there’s no TIVO.

Yet.

A beautiful irony is when some self-impressed cat like Steve Gillmor talks about the “stupid blogosphere” in a blog post.

Another beautiful irony is when I am forced to agree with someone whose entire internet persona I find utterly irritating.  But, sadly, Steve is right about TV.  He’s just wrong about the reason.

It is dead.  When shows like Deadwood can’t make it and Deal or No Deal can, TV is dead.  When I have to find out about a show as perfect as Firefly after it has been off the air for almost 4 years, TV is dead.

When I can watch the entire season of Firefly in a week via Netflix, TV is dead.

When there are no network shows that I would allow my kids to watch, TV is dead.

But it’s not about the internet.  No one other than a honking nerd wants to watch TV in a little window on a computer, when a big screen HDTV plasma is sitting 20 feet away.

Podcasts are too hard to make and no one listens to them.  I do a podcast, but it is becoming more chore than pleasure.  If someone can put their favorite songs on an iPod and listen to them on the train, why in the world would they download and listen to the nasal rants of some geek talking about technology that no one cares about?

It would be more productive to have open Skype calls once a week than to do podcast after podcast and toss them into the ether.  But most podcasters are doing it for themselves, not for the audience, so that doesn’t happen.

It’s not about Digg or MySpace either.  Grownups don’t use those sites.  And most of the 20-somethings I know who do still watch plenty of TV content.  Sometimes they TIVO it; sometimes they wait a season and watch the episodes on DVD.  But in no way, shape or form has some butt-ugly MySpace page or the geek-o-river of news at Digg replaced TV.  The fact that some people think they have tells you how completely out of touch with the real world some bloggers are.

It’s not the content of TV that is dead.  It’s TV as a medium for that sort of content that’s dead.  The networks should just release their shows straight to DVD.  It would save them money and us time.

Crappy shows that cater to some imaginary brainless demographic and a better, ad-free alternative in the form of DVDs and TIVO killed TV as anything other than a screen on which to view carefully selected content.

Ed Sullivan and the important half of the Beatles are gone.  I don’t see anyone rushing in to make TV relevant again.