“Part of our strategy here is to let Tumblr be Tumblr,” Mayer said. In fact, Tumblr CEO David Karp wasn’t on the morning’s call: He was at an all-team meeting. (“Instead of calling his all-company meetings ‘all-hands,’ he calls them ‘all-team,’ Mayer noted. “I think in the future we’ll call meetings at Yahoo ‘all-team’ meetings.”)

“When you look at the best and most successful billion-dollar acquisitions in the tech space — eBay and Paypal, Google and YouTube — there’s a meme that emerges,” Mayer said. “The best acquisitions…allow the two brands and the two products and services to evolve somewhat separately.”

Yahoo has “well over” 700 million users, Mayer said, while Tumblr has 300 million — but these audiences overlap so little that the companies can count their combined user base at over a billion.

The difference in user demographics, Mayer acknowledged, means there’s “a type of user that will always prefer Tumblr and may never come to Yahoo” — and that’s fine. Yahoo can “provide search seamlessly in the background,” for Tumblr, but it could be existing and future Yahoo users that benefit most from the Tumblr acquisition: “As we pull Tumblr content into our news feeds and our media experiences, it will cause the core Yahoo properties to become that much more interesting and that much richer,” leading more users to the site even if they are from “very different [demographic] profiles from people coming to Tumblr.”

Tumblr users should get ready for more ads

Tumblr will remain a separate site, but that doesn’t mean its users won’t notice a few changes — particularly on the advertising front. “There’s a number of different places where we think we can monetize in a way that’s meaningful and really additive to the user experience,” Mayer said. Tumblr is already including a few ads in its dashboard, but “we would like to look at that and understand how we can introduce ads — a very light ad load where the impact is really created because the ads fit the user’s expectation and follow the form and function of the dashboard.”

In addition, Mayer said that Yahoo might allow individual Tumblr users to enable ads on their blogs, “but that would always be done with the blogger’s permission.”

So what about Tumblr CEO Karp’s well-known dislike of advertising? “David talks wistfully about the ads that he saw as a child, that would make him want to go see a movie or own a particular type of car,” Mayer said. “He says the current state of internet advertising doesn’t aspire to be as good as the content itself. We think that should change…we’re aligned in those ideals. When you hear us talk about native ads, where the ads are every bit as good as the content, and maybe even make the content better — that’s what we are aiming for. We want the ads themselves to create that aspirational feel that, for example, television ads or movie ads do.”

So, uh, what about Flickr?

In 2005, Yahoo acquired photo-sharing service Flickr. That acquisition, long before Mayer’s time, that acquisition is widely viewed as a big failure — one that ruined the Flickr experience because Yahoo tried to integrate it, then largely abandoned it.

On Monday afternoon, though, Yahoo is expected to announce updates to Flickr. Could we see a resurgence in that platform, as part of Yahoo’s new “don’t-screw-it-up” acquisition philosophy? Mayer was cautious: “In terms of how Tumblr evolves, it really depends on the creators,” she said. But when it comes to Flickr, “I think it is noteworthy that a lot of the posts on Tumblr are graphical. There’s some obvious synergies between Flickr and Tumblr, in that regard,” and it’s “probably something we’ll turn our attention to in the future. Flickr could provide great storage for albums or slideshows, things like that. We’ll see.”

“[T]he launch of the pay model is the most important and most successful business decision made by The New York Times in many years. We have around 700,000 paid digital subscribers across the company’s products so far and a new nine-figure revenue stream that is still growing.”

Thompson added that media pundits predicted that the Times’ subscription model, which is based on a so-called “metered paywall,” would be a disaster when it launched in 2011. Since then, he noted, it’s become a standard for the rest of the newspaper industry. ”In modern media, you could make the case that the best way forward is to listen carefully to what the industry has to say and then do the exact opposite.”

Thompson also equated disruptions in the news business to what’s happening in other industries, like high tech and car rental, and said that risk-taking is the secret of America’s culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Commencement speeches are, by nature, restricted to this sort of soaring stuff. A skeptic, however, might note that the New York Times‘ digital subscription model has already begun to plateau and that the company is still shedding ad dollars and assets. Likewise, Thompson, who arrived from the BBC only months ago, still has to prove he can run an institution that isn’t supported by mandatory contributions from the public.

But the tone of Thompson’s speech is the right one, and it’s welcome to see the New York Times waving its banner not just in the safe halls of Columbia’s journalism school but among the MBA crowd as well. If you want to read more of what he said, here’s a longer excerpt:

The American news business is living through revolutionary times. For The New York Times, which I joined six months ago, it means catapulting the Grey Lady into a world very different from the one in which she spent her first century and a half: multimedia, multi-platform, multi pretty much  everything.

There are some things we’re not going to take risks with. The quality, authority and accuracy of our journalism. Our values, including the time-honoured but still vital tradition of keeping our journalism independent from the commercial interests of the company. In the age of so-called ‘native’ advertising in which the boundary between editorial and commercial content is more and more frequently blurred, that tradition of maintaining a clear line between the journalism and the business of The New York Times is more important than ever.

But we will not secure the future of The Times without the kind of bold innovation – in products and services, in
business-model – which is intrinsically and necessarily risky. Two years ago The Times launched a new digital pay model, essentially asking users of The Times on digital to do what more than a million print users of the newspaper were already doing, which is to pay a regular subscription in return
for extensive access to our journalism.

The consensus among the experts was that it wouldn’t work, was foolhardy in fact and not needed. People just weren’t prepared to pay for high quality content on the internet and, besides, wasn’t digital advertising enough – wouldn’t it grow until, just as with print advertising in the golden age of physical newspapers, it alone was enough to support America’s newsrooms?

In fact the launch of the pay model is the most important and most successful business decision made by The New York Times in many years. We have around 700,000 paid digital subscribers across the company’s products so far and a new nine-figure revenue-stream which is still growing. Much of the rest of the US newspaper industry is now following suit. And developing this pay model, launching a suite of new subscription products to attract additional new subscribers, is central to our plans for the future

What’s interesting, though, was that initial widespread skepticism. It won’t work. It’s mad. They’re barking up the
wrong tree.

In many ways, the thing that gets disrupted in a disruptive age is the conventional wisdom. Wherever you end up, in this country or abroad, starting your own business or joining an established company large or small, you’ll bump into conventional wisdom and all the apparently excellent advice that flows from it. But the definition of a disruptive age is one in which the discontinuities outnumber and overwhelm the continuities and in which predictions based on the past or the smooth projection of current trends into the future frequently prove unsound. Conventional wisdom tries valiantly to keep up, to recalibrate in the light of recent developments, but because it cannot foresee transformational breakthroughs or the kind of behavioral and business-model pivots which digital technology makes possible, it never can.

Take my industry. The movies are finished. TV advertising is dead. Exactly what happened to music will happen to TV. Nobody wants news anymore. No one will ever pay for anything on the internet. Not just said, but said widely and widely believed. And – for the most part and within the time horizon which the prophets themselves were suggesting – just plain wrong.

All of the strategically successful things I’ve been involved in – whether a set of new TV channels or developing the BBC’s digital on-demand service, the i-Player – have had this thing in common: that, at the point of launch, pretty much everyone not involved in the project has agreed that it was going to be a total disaster. In modern media, you could make the case that the best way forward is to listen carefully to what the industry has to say and then do the exact opposite.

In the release, the companies noted that “Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business. David Karp will remain CEO. The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators.”

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer also announced the acquisition on her own Tumblr, while Tumblr CEO David Karp wrote about it on Tumblr’s staff blog.

Tumblr has over 300 million monthly unique visitors, according to the release. (comScore had pegged the site’s April traffic at 124 million uniques.) The companies say that half of Tumblr’s users use its mobile app, and reiterated one of the reasons that Yahoo was willing to shell out over a billion dollars for a company whose revenues were less than $15 million last year: “The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo is expected to grow Yahoo’s audience by 50 percent to more than a billion monthly visitors, and to grow traffic by approximately 20 percent.”

“Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission — to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve — certainly isn’t changing,” Tumblr CEO David Karp said in a statement. “But we’re elated to have the support of Yahoo and their team who share our dream to make the internet the ultimate creative canvas. Tumblr gets better faster with more resources to draw from.”

“Tumblr is redefining creative expression online,” Yahoo’s Mayer said. “On many levels, Tumblr and Yahoo couldn’t be more different, but, at the same time, they couldn’t be more complementary. Yahoo is the Internet’s original media network. Tumblr is the Internet’s fastest-growing media frenzy. Both companies are homes for brands — established and emerging. And, fundamentally, Tumblr and Yahoo! are both all about users, design, and finding surprise and inspiration amidst the everyday.”

Yahoo and Tumblr are holding a conference call at 9 AM ET and we will be on the call.

Tumblr founder David Karp, who owns at least 25 percent of the company, has agreed to stay on for at least four years, according to ATD. The WSJ says Tumblr would remain an independent company.

comScore pegged Tumblr’s worldwide traffic at 117 million visitors in April. The site has raised about $125 million in funding, putting its valuation at $800 million. As my colleague Mathew Ingram points out, the company’s revenues were less than $15 million in 2012, though Karp has estimated they will hit $100 million this year.

Yahoo is holding a press event on Monday afternoon in New York, but hasn’t specified what the event will be about. We’ll be there.

Launching on Thursday, Distort combines slow-motion photography — capturing everything from bike tricks to champagne bottles popping open at 400 to 7,500 frames per second — with unique personalities behind the slow-motion, as well as the science behind it. In two episodes made available for preview, San Francisco artist Doctor Popular demonstrates his award-winning yo-yo skills, and Olympic gold medalist Jonny Moseley explains the physics behind his aerial moves.

The emphasis on personality is deliberate, according to Prager via phone, who compared it to “the YouTube formula of authentic personality.”

“Structurally, we want to talk to people who are experts in a field — make it more about them than the slow-motion itself,” Balvanera said. “Slow-mo is the eye candy, but hopefully the core of the episode is the personal story of the people who are on the show.”

That eye candy, however, is a major selling point for the series. Using a variety of cameras including the Phantom Flex, Prager and Balvanera were able to shoot high-resolution video at extremely high frame rates. “At 2,500 frames per second, that’s where the magic of the Phantom Plex really happens,” Balvanera said. “Things that happen in the fraction of a second can stretch out to two minutes — that’s the point where we can really play with time.”

Another fun element of Distort is that thanks to its title, the show is not limited to just slow-motion. “What I like about choosing the name Distort is that we don’t always have to use high-speed cameras. We could zoom in on something you wouldn’t normally be able to see because it’s too small, or show something in time-lapse,” Prager said.

It’s no coincidence that Revision3 will be distributing Distort through its wide array of channels, as both Prager and Balvanera used to work there until recently — Prager, in fact, was a co-founder who worked there for seven years. “I was having a great time at Revision3, but the Discovery sale was good catalyst to take a step back and figure out what I wanted to do next,” he said.

Most Revision3 shows are either produced in-house or by third-party companies, but Distort has a unique relationship with the distributor — while Prager put up the funding for the original pilot, going forward Distort will be a co-production between Rev3/Discovery and Prager and Balvanera. This means that both sides are, in Prager’s words, “incentivized” to make the show the best it can be.

“We could have released this independently, but it made sense to partner with an existing machine. Stepping away from Revision3 means we get to flex our creative muscles and leave the distribution side to them,” Balvanera added.

It’s important to note that Twitter  is a platform, not a news service, and also that regardless, no one outlet can control the internet anyway: That’s the beauty and curse of the beast. So when news breaks it’s about two things: accuracy and distribution.  Right now we’re stuck with a drunk leaf blower in a flour factory. I’ll be the first to champion these tools as platforms for change, opportunity and knowledge sharing, but it has become clear we – and especially the reeling news media – are in need of a system that helps Twitter et al sort through the haze of breaking news and get the facts straight, faster. The current model and tools are not clearing things up – they are adding to the mess.

A centralized, collaborative evidence table

Sifting through the mountains of analysis on the bombings alone, I couldn’t help but think of the customized Twitter Nascar hashtag page that was put together in 2011, and how it tied in nicely with the New Yorker digital “evidence table” it describes for Reddit users. So one first step I propose is a one-stop place or system in times of important news or mass emergency. Literally just a single agreed upon place to gather the facts, or a system of checks and balances free from speculation. Like a central hub for help to be channeled and extra information provided – a bit like an active Storify stream.

This feels like a simple fix to a complicated problem at the source. Clearly there are huge questions about who administers it, but one thing is clear: It must be solitary and held to a strict code that is pre-agreed upon, possibly among a cross-collaboration of the major newspapers. For instance, each might host the same page so traffic stays where the trust is with the user.  There is no speculation: Simple fact dissemination and information being released – only after  it is verified – so that the news-consuming public has a go-to source that is consistent.

The ability to deal with errors

Imagine if Twitter or Facebook could lower the relevancy of an incorrect tweet or post in real-time so that bad information was less likely to be seen. Reddit and pals is a more difficult kettle of fish because of their very nature.  We will need to help them help themselves by providing clear information in order for them to do what they do best – engage with it.

The Atlantic wrote recently about the need to undo things on Twitter because it is currently a one-way system that, while capable of self-correcting over time, is pretty flawed when it comes to doing so in the moment. And so we need a system that enables users to revoke or modify what has been said so that it is instantly identifiable. Internet fundamentalists find this idea uncomfortable but many I suspect would cherish the ability to be alerted to incorrect information so the continued dissemination of knowingly false info can be minimized.  A technical nightmare sure, but something to work towards.

A need for innovation and cooperation

Right now big data is not being used or harnessed by news organization beyond visualization or longer-form pieces but I imagine a time (and not too far in the future either) when we see news outlets using Twitter and company in a much smarter fashion than simply looking at volume spikes and “first-grabs.”  So for instance, outlets might soon use data to predict, locate and activate “sleeper-unit” journalists (and trained citizen journalists) who are armed with Facetime technology – or simply volunteer individuals streaming through a phone that a news outlet is able to instantly locate via GPS. It’s interesting to note that Twitter has just appointed its first Data Editor who is charged with “explain[ing] how this phenomenon works.”

We have two options when it comes to “fixing” truly crucial news and real-time mass events: 1) Assume that what we’re doing now works but will need a few tweaks, or;  2) Realize that our current system is no longer tenable and so needs a complete overhaul. Any honest appraisal will quickly come to the brutal truth that the current system is failing, and so needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. In the short term, we will need to move toward something like a system of “Flash tweets:” site-wide notifications, that simultaneously tweet, post, alert, offer a donation system, etc to news sites when major events transpire. I’d like to see a system like this fleshed out by the social juggernauts as they further flex their news muscles.

Paul Armstrong is founder of  Digital Orange Consulting. Contact him via paularmstrong.net, or on Twitter @paul__armstrong or @TheMediaIsDying.

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Photo courtesy Edward Meyer.

Of course, as Om and others have already mentioned, there’s no guarantee this deal will actually be consummated: it could fall apart on valuation, as so many deals do — or Facebook could swoop in with a much higher offer and snatch Tumblr out of Yahoo’s clutches, the same way it did when it stole Instagram away from Twitter last year for close to $1 billion.

Update: According to the Wall Street Journal, the Yahoo board of directors has approved a $1.1-billion all-cash bid to acquire Tumblr.

It makes Yahoo look desperate — because it is

Even if the deal does get done, one of the risks for Mayer and Yahoo is that the company could look desperate by paying more than $1 billion for a site that had revenues of less than $15 million last year (although CEO David Karp has said that figure should hit $100 million this year). That’s an almost bubble-like multiple for a company, and there will likely be plenty of criticism from investors who believe that $1 billion could be better spent elsewhere — in other words, on businesses that would make Yahoo a better return.

But the painful fact is that Yahoo doesn’t just look desperate — in many ways it is desperate. Mayer has made some changes since she took over the ailing former web portal, including the acquisition of Summly and a number of other mobile-focused startups and services, but the company still needs to make some aggressive moves if it is going to jump-start any growth at all. And since Yahoo has about $4 billion in cash on hand, it can arguably afford to make a big bet.

Yahoo buying Tumblr makes sense. Tumblr is only big, cool, newish social platform that Yahoo can afford.—
Henry Blodget (@hblodget) May 17, 2013

For Yahoo, the addition of Tumblr would do a number of things: because of the size and profile of the deal, it would make a major statement about Mayer’s intention to do whatever it takes to revitalize the company, and it would also send a signal to Facebook and Google — and even Apple — that Yahoo is a potential force to be reckoned with when it comes to potential acquisitions. Is doing that worth $1 billion? That’s for Yahoo’s investors and board of directors to decide.

Just as important, it would inject some much-needed life and energy into the somewhat stale lineup of content that the company currently relies on, which caters more to the over-50 set than it does to anyone in the much-desired 18 to 25 demographic. More than any other network, Tumblr is the platform of choice for media-obsessed teens and 20-somethings, who spend massive amounts of time sharing photos and videos and animated GIFs on the site — an engine of potential value that Yahoo desperately needs.

Tumblr gets a massive exit

This doesn’t come without its own risks, of course: As a number of observers have noted, Tumblr’s content contains a large quantity of not only mature or arguably offensive content but outright pornography, which many argue is the source of its massive traffic numbers. How Yahoo (or Facebook for that matter) would deal with this kind of content remains to be seen.

3 q's for Yahoo: 1) Can you convert Tumblr users to Yahoo products? 2) Can you monetize Tumblr PVs? 3) What to do w/ all that Tumblr porn?—
Mark Zohar (@markzohar) May 18, 2013

For Tumblr, meanwhile, being acquired would solve a number of problems — the main one being that the company has gone well beyond the “we’re a startup so we don’t really have to make money” stage, and is facing increasing pressure from the investors who have given CEO David Karp more than $125 million in venture financing, an investment that values the company at about $800 million. Accepting a giant check from Yahoo would take care of that problem in one fell swoop, especially if it was all in cash.

With a major company like Yahoo as a partner, Tumblr could connect its massive audience of users to the firehose of ads and other monetization methods the giant web portal has, and potentially generate much more revenue than it could have by itself. The only lingering question at that point is whether Tumblr fans decide that Yahoo is poisoning the well of social content and community on the site, and decide to flee for greener pastures. In other words, does Yahoo make Tumblr into YouTube — a successful standalone network that can grow and prosper on its own — or does it become MySpace?

The only scenario where a Yahoo-Tumblr combo works is if Yahoo keeps Tumblr separate in the same way Google managed YouTube.—
Mark Birch (@marksbirch) May 18, 2013

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / ollyy and Albert Chau

After reporting Thursday that Yahoo was considering a number of options for Tumblr, including partnerships or strategic investments, ATD reported Friday that Mayer had decided to go all in. Om reported Thursday that Yahoo was worried about counteroffers from Facebook, much how Facebook stole Instagram from Twitter after Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s courtship of the photo-sharing site. Now the board plans to meet Sunday to consider giving final approval to the offer.

Tumblr’s backers will likely be pleased with a $1.1 billion price tag, especially if, as reported, it involves cash However, it’s far from certain that such an outlay would do anything to revive Yahoo’s fortunes. Mayer certainly has been trying to bring new blood into the company of late, snapping up a number of smaller mobile startups before focusing on Tumblr over the last month.

Yahoo has scheduled a press event for Monday evening in New York to discuss “something special,” but it wouldn’t hint at anything else. We’ll be there to cover the event, but in the meantime, here’s Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp’s appearance at our paidContent Live conference in April, discussing his company’s fortunes:

In case you missed it, the controversy turns on Toronto’s buffoonish mayor, Rob Ford, who has embarrassed the city numerous times in the past but has now outdone himself: Reporters from Gawker and the Toronto Star claim to have witnessed a clear video tape that shows Hizzoner sucking on a glass crack pipe and calling the leader of Canada’s Liberal party, Justin Trudeau, “a faggot.”

The video in question is now in possession of shadowy figures who want cash for it. The Star, a respected newspaper, turned down an offer to sell it for $40,000 and Gawker, which says the price is now $200,000, has taken to Indiegogo – a site normally used to raise money for artsy people — to ask the public to buy the video. The “Rob Ford Crackstarter” (see pic at right) has 10 days to reach its goal and has already pulled in $26,000 as of Friday afternoon.

Gawker’s gambit raises some very juicy ethical questions. First, while bringing down crack-smoking mayors is clearly in the public interest (see Barry, Marion), it’s less clear whether it’s acceptable to pay people who are likely serious criminals in order to advance the story.

And while check-book journalism has been around for centuries, turning it over to the public could have unforeseen consequences. Until now, publicly funded journalism has been largely been contained to organizations like Pro Publica that launch investigations into things like patient safety and vote buying. Is the world ready for a publicly funded version of TMZ where everyone can pool money to see celebrity’s private lives?

For now, the political dimensions of the scandal are moving too fast to assess the media fallout. We’ll report back next week on what happens to the tape — and the money collected by Gawker.

(Image by Chris Howey via Shutterstock)

It’s been just two and a half weeks weeks since popular soap operas One Life to Live and All My Children were reborn as online-only shows — but production company Prospect Park has already decided to cut back on the number of new episodes released online each week. The change in schedule, the company claims, is due to the fact that viewers are “binge-watching” instead of watching one episode a day, and this makes it too hard for them to keep up.

Starting on April 29, Prospect Park — which licensed the soaps from ABC — ran new, 30-minute episodes of each show every Monday through Thursday, followed by a recap on Friday. The shows are available on Hulu and Hulu Plus, or can be downloaded from iTunes. They’ve received “millions” of views, Prospect Park cofounders Rich Frank and Jeff Kwatinetz wrote in a letter to fans (PDF) this week, and have “consistently been in the top ten shows viewed on Hulu.”

But most viewers aren’t watching these shows the way they traditionally watched soap operas on TV. Instead, as with other TV shows online, “our shows are primarily consumed on different days than when they originally air,” Frank and Kwatinetz wrote:

“Primarily, fans have been binge viewing or watching on demand, and as a result, we feel we have been expecting our audience to dedicate what has turned out to be an excessive amount of time to viewing these shows. (As an example, for the substantial audience only watching on the weekends, we are currently asking them to watch five hours of programming to keep pace with our release schedule).”

In addition, viewers aren’t adhering to traditional soap-watching habits. When the shows were on ABC, “viewers watched only 2-3 episodes on average a week and picked up with whichever day’s episode it was.” By contrast, online viewers “seem to primarily start with the first episode and then continue forward episode by episode…yet starting from the beginning with the amount of episodes we are releasing is asking too much for viewers who need to catch up.”

Prospect Park is also concerned by the fact that, when the shows aired on ABC, viewers often watched both — but online things are different:

“The majority of our viewers are watching one show or the other, not both, and they aren’t viewing the shows when they did before. Part of the reason for choosing between the shows may be that the largest viewing takes place either between 12 PM and 1 PM (when people generally can only fit one episode during lunch time) or between 5 PM and 7 PM (when the vast majority of competing shows are a half hour long). We are finding that asking most people to regularly watch more than a half hour per day online seems to be too much.”

Overall, Frank and Kwatinetz conclude that “When it comes to online viewing, most of us are just trying to find time to watch series comprised of 13 to 22 episodes a season — so asking viewers to assign time for over 100 episodes per show is a daunting task.”

So starting Monday, May 20, the schedules will change. Each soap will now air just two new episodes a week: New episodes of All My Children will air online on Mondays and Wednesdays, and new episodes of One Life to Live will air on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a recap episode on Friday. “Because Hulu agrees with our findings,” the founders wrote, “for the meantime they will keep all of our episodes on Hulu.com for free to give viewers the opportunity to find us and catch up.”

Frank and Kwatinetz acknowledge that “our most dedicated viewers will be upset,” but “we need to devise a model that works for all viewers and follows how they want, and are actually watching, online” in order to ensure that the shows “not meet the fate they experienced previously.” The

Parakweet is a company that’s working to use natural language processing to cull through your tweets and make smart, targeted suggestions based on the data. On Friday, the company plans to announce the launch of two products. One is Bookvi.be, a consumer-oriented book recommendation engine, and TrendFinder For Movies, which is a social media dashboard primarily for entertainment companies to monitor conversations around movies. The latter is a paid product that provides the company with revenue, and the former is free for consumers.

“It’s a very hard problem we’ve tackled, which is accurately identifying sentiments,” CEO Ramesh Haridas said. “With 400 million tweets a day, there are 700,000 a day discussing movies, and if you tried text-matching techniques you’d come back with 40 million results. Many movies and books have very common titles, so you’d just drown in data.”

Both products use natural language processing to figure out how common a title is on Twitter, but also how a consumer is tweeting about a particular product, and they make recommendations based on those tweets. For instance, if I tweeted that a particular book is terrible and no one should ever read it, it would look ridiculous for a book recommendation engine to suggest that book to people. So Bookvi.be is structured to recognize the words I’m using in my tweet and know not to recommend that book. Users can choose to have a weekly email send to them with book suggestions, and they can type in their Twitter username to get book suggestions based on the people they follow.

“The bar on accuracy is very high,” Haridas said. “Especially if it’s sent via email, the precision needs to be intact.”

I’ve looked at a good number of social recommendation tools, and this one definitely stood out. For one, it was incredibly accurate — all the books it suggested were books I would actually read. But most importantly, it didn’t require me to create a new social network, or depend on friends for reviews, so you could get a lot of value from it right away. This is the obvious benefit of using someone else’s social graph, but Twitter seems perfectly suited to making content recommendations for things like books. Because unlike my Facebook friends, the people I follow on Twitter tend to accurately reflect my intellectual interests.

There’s a good deal of money to be made in accurately processing and understanding the words people are tweeting, as evidenced by Twitter’s acquisition of Lucky Sort this week, a similar company that also tries to figure out what people are talking about on social media.  As I’ve written before, as Twitter ramps up its advertising products it’s more important than ever for the company to be able to provide brands with more accurate ad targeting which hinges on the words people are tweeting and searching.

Rachel Chou, the chief marketing officer at Open Road Media, noted that the company only publishes between twelve and fifteen front-list (new) titles per year; everything else is back-list. Most of the titles are available only as ebooks, but Open Road makes some available through print-on-demand (POD), and will do short print runs if a book is really taking off. “There are certain books that really need to be in a [physical] bookstore,” she told moderator Phil Olila, chief content officer at Ingram Content Group. “They deserve that table up front, they have that reader that really wants to hand out a gift.” Open Road starts print runs at 500 copies, and the largest print run they have done is 15,000 copies. “If we’ve done a print run and we find that it’s really taking awhile to get through the inventory,” she said, “we can switch it back” to POD.

Chou also noted that advertising has changed: “I think we’ve done three print ads in three years. The budgets have definitely gone toward digital and online and social advertising.”

Dan Weiss, publisher at large at Macmillan’s St. Martin’s Press, has overseen digital-only series like the Sweet Valley Twins e-singles. He noted that the cheap paperback mass market is shrinking, and said, “We think it’s gradually being replaced by digital-first.”

“We’ve done serials, we’ve done e-first, e-only, we’ve scooped up online writers like [Amanda] Hocking. We’ve done prequels, sequels, interstitials,” Weiss said. The company hasn’t done a print-only deal — like bestselling self-published author Hugh Howey’s print-only deal with Simon and Schuster for Wool — yet. “We feel it’s important as a full-service publisher to have all rights,” Weiss said. “That may change.”

While Weiss said that St. Martin’s doesn’t like to give away content for free, he has occasionally had difficulty convincing others at the company of the need to price digital content cheaply (a challenge that he said is not limited to Macmillan). “As the serial format continues to grow, getting publishers and getting my colleagues to understand that pricing is crucial has been really challenging,” he said. “We have to argue that this is the minor leagues, and we’re trying to build sluggers for the major leagues, that we can take into print.”

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock/Vladimir Melnikov 

The news of the pending deal was first reported by AllThingsD and later Adweek reported rumors of their deal as well. At least a couple of our own sources say that the talks are serious. We have also learned that the deal is being championed by CEO Mayer, who according to Kara Swisher, has met with the team from Tumblr. We have learned that Yahoo’s New York-based corporate development team is leading the process, though like all deals, talks could fall apart. (We have reached out to the respective parties for their comments, but so far we have not heard back from them. We are going to update the post to reflect their responses.)

Tumblr says it has nearly 108 million blogs, over 50 billion posts and it is said to have 117 million visitors a month according to comScore. Forbes.com reports that Tumblr made $13 million in 2012 and is looking to bring in about $100 million, thanks to its new advertising initiatives. The company also recently introduced mobile advertising. For Yahoo this could be a much needed foray into mobile advertising and also into pushing new native ad-formats that help diversify its ad business away from the usual web advertising.

Valley calls Karp

David Karp, one of the co-founders and chief executive of Tumblr, has been seen around in Silicon Valley. Tumblr has been trying to raise a new round of funding, but it’s slower than expected revenue ramp has acted as a dampener for the fundraising efforts. Tumblr has raised a total of $125 million and is rumored to be valued at $800 million. Tumblr investors include Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Sequoia Capital and Greylock Ventures.

But Yahoo may not be alone in courting Tumblr. In November 2012, my colleague Mathew Ingram argued that Facebook and Tumblr should poke each other. Surprise surprise, it is something that is nagging Yahoo bigwigs.

Facebook in the mix?

We have heard that Yahoo is worried that Facebook could swoop in at the last minute and beat it to the buzzer. If the Instagram acquisition was any indication, then we shouldn’t doubt Zuckerberg’s salesmanship. Karp is said to have a close relationship with Facebook and was recently spotted at the Facebook Home launch. Facebook could use the much needed younger 18-to-24 year old demographic, something it (successfully) tried to acquire with Instagram. A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.

One question is why wouldn’t Google want Tumblr? After all, it would mean young people on a social network that could feed into Google+ — sort of like how Blogger fed pages into Google. I am guessing given its ownership of Google+ and Blogger, Google might meet some resistance from the Department of Justice. Still, as our sources pointed out, Yahoo knows the challenges in the competitive landscape and is trying to move very fast. The speed would perhaps mean that the company could short circuit the due-diligence process and overlook Tumblr’s challenges with content of questionable provenance.

Money Talks

The good news for Tumblr and its backers: Mayer will soon be super flush with cash. According to a recent Yahoo 10-Q filing, the value of Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba has gone up substantially as Alibaba’s continues to grow its revenues at a healthy clip. Yahoo owns about 23 percent of Alibaba and the Chinese eCommerce company is likely to go public and could worth as much as $100 billion in its post-IPO avatar. Yahoo is expected to sell about half its stake in the Chinese company in the likely 2014 IPO. Wall Street currently values Alibaba at around $70 billion.

In the end the question that remains: is Tumblr the fountain of youth that Yahoo badly needs or will this be a case of a pathetic middle aged guy hanging with youngsters, trying to be hip. Either way, Tumblr founders and backers could laugh all the way to the bank.

PS: Read this teenager’s response to a question on Quora, “How do teenagers waste hours upon hours consuming Tumblr?”

How can Google stand out from the crowd, and convince millions of consumers who haven’t warmed up to access models that they don’t need to own music to enjoy it? To find out, I’ve both tested the service since its launch Wednesday and met up with Paul Joyce, Lead Product Manager for Google Play Music on the sidelines of the Google I/O developers conference where the service was launched. Joyce politely declined to answer some of my questions, but the conversation gave me a good idea of what’s in store for the music service with the confusingly long name.

Right now, it’s more or less like all the others

Google’s premise for Play Music All Access is simple, and you’ve heard it before: Play millions of songs, on your desktop and on the go, for one low monthly fee. That’s what Spotify and all of its competitors have been offering for some time now, and Google doesn’t mess with the basic recipe. All Access costs $9.99 ($7.99 if you sign up before the end of June), and it offers streaming access to songs from all three majors and most significant indie labels.

However, there’s one big difference: Google’s subscription music catalog seamlessly integrates with the company’s music locker, with which users can store up to 20,000 songs for free. That’s an interesting combination, and it hasn’t been offered by any of the other major subscription players before. It makes it possible to have Google generate smart radio stations based on your own music collection, or mix subscription tracks and CDs you ripped in custom playlists, and then access these on the go without having to worry that some of the tracks won’t be available.

Joyce told me that the locker is especially good for tracks that aren’t available through the subscription offering, or even as MP3 sales – mashups, imports and other kinds of rarities.

In the future, All Access will be a lot more social

But All Access isn’t just about filling the gaps left by other services. It also wants to be better at engaging you – which has been one of the problems of existing services. “People sign up, and then they don’t know what to do afterwards,” Joyce said. Having millions of songs at your disposal doesn’t exactly make choice easy, and there is some evidence that a good chunk of users simply tune out.

How does Google want to address this issue? Joyce gave me one hint: “There is more we can do to innovate in social,” he said.

Play Music doesn’t offer much of a social integration today – but that could change soon.

And we are not talking here’s a list of the unfortunate music choices of all the people you didn’t really care about in high school social, which has been Spotify’s original model of social discovery. “If you treat all your recommendations of all your friends the same, then that is a problem,” Joyce argued. However, he wasn’t convinced that the Rdio model – which is very much like Twitter in that it offers you to follow tastemakers – is the right approach either. It’s simply too much work to find the people who can give you good recommendations, he argued.

So how is Google Music’s approach to social going to look? Joyce didn’t go into details, only telling me that the goal was to give you “the right music from the right people at the right time.” However, one has to assume that it would be powered by Google+, which gives us some idea of how it could work: You could get music recommendations from circles and communities, with the ability to share circles of influencers with others. Instead of just curating albums, Google Music’s editors could curate circles of influencers, and users could simply follow the 50 most influential indie rock bloggers with one click.

What else does Google have up its sleeve?

There have been ongoing reports that Google is going to launch a separate music subscription service on YouTube, which makes about as much sense as having four separate messaging apps from the same company (but that didn’t really stop Google, either). Joyce didn’t want to go into any specifics. “YouTube is a great asset for Google,” he told me, and then added: “We will find exciting things to do together.” Maybe it won’t be two separate services, after all?

Google also plans to bring Play Music All Access to other countries “soon,” said Joyce. Countries that already have Google’s music cloud locker will be first on the list for an international expansion, and currently include the UK, France, Germany and Spain.

And finally, there is iOS. Joyce’s lips were sealed when I asked him about the potential of bringing the service to the competing mobile platform, but it would make a lot of sense, and follow Google’s overall theme of unification across mobile and desktop platforms. Of course, this would be the first time that any Play service was available on iOS – but I predict that Google will have to take that step if it wants to seriously compete with Spotify and Co.

Columbia University plans to explore these issues, Emily Bell, director of the Columbia J-School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, said at Betaworks Betaday on Thursday. To that end, the Tow Center will run a weekend workshop on sensor journalism in June and will fund a few projects. And next year, Bell said, the Tow Center plans to run a “sensor newsroom classroom” in partnership with the architecture school.

Some of the challenges are technical: How can journalists and newsrooms build their own low-cost sensing techniques? WNYC’s John Keefe, for instance, built a cicada tracker to figure out exactly when the expected cicada plague will hit New York City this summer. Can other organizations do the same thing?

“How do you get the really efficient things from sense networks in a way that helps you do human reporting?” Bell said. The techniques also create ethical questions: “We are moving into this world where the line between transparency and privacy is constantly in tension. When you can survey everything, what do you report?”

“Practically, we’re very close to being able to survey most of what people do most of the time,” Bell told Betaworks’ Andrew McLaughlin. “I come from Europe, where everything is solved by regulation, In America, the momentum is very much with business rather than the individual. [Google CEO] Eric Schmidt said at the journalism school the other day that privacy is all about making good judgment calls about what you put online. That’s just not true. You can’t make adequate judgment calls to control your own data. That’s only going to get worse.”

Let’s be positive

Every story I read about Google is us versus some other company or some stupid thing. Being negative is not how we make progress. The most important things are not zero sum.

Except Microsoft is not playing ball

The Web is not advancing as fast as it should be. Certainly, we struggle with companies like Microsoft. We would like to see more open standards and more people involved in those ecosystems. I wouldn’t grade the industry well with where we have gotten to.

And that other Larry is just greedy

We’ve had a difficult relationship with Oracle, including having to appear in court. Money is obviously more important to them than any collaboration.”

Google has been fighting with Microsoft for a while and well, Oracle is a tough adversary, especially when it comes to Java.

While I am complete agreement with Page’s general sentiment about opportunities and the importance of being positive, I think Larry (and all other technology industry leaders) should actually practice what they preach if they want others to follow.

Not that Edelstein would exactly describe Haunting Melissa  — the story of a teenage girl who believes her dead mother is haunting her, and then suddenly disappears — as a movie. “I didn’t want to take a movie and stuff it in an app,” he told me. Rather, the goal was to use technology “to push a story out to people in bits and pieces.”

Edelstein’s production company, Hooked Digital Media — which includes investor Kevin Washington as cofounder and MySpace cofounder Aber Whitcomb as advisor — built an iOS platform that pushes content out to viewers over time. Haunting Melissa doesn’t have a predetermined length: Edelstein shot thousands of hours of video, and it will be pushed out to viewers in “chapters,” or segments, on a timeline that can be tweaked on the back end. For example, if a user hasn’t entered the app for a while, he or she might receive a push notification that a new chapter is available.

In addition, the actual video content can be adjusted through the app’s content management system, so new content can be inserted into a chapter after a user has already watched it. The idea is to keep users coming back to the app, checking for new content and seeing what has changed.

The Haunting Melissa iOS app, available in the iTunes Store today, is free, as is the first chapter. If a user shares that chapter on Facebook, he or she gets the second chapter for free. Users can buy a “season pass” for $6.99 (standard definition or $14.99 (HD); if purchased individually, chapters are $0.99 for standard definition and $1.99 for HD.

“We are gambling on the notion that this is going to fit in the diet of people who watch and consume a lot of stuff,” Edelstein said. “This isn’t sitting down to watch X hours of House of Cards. It’s one piece of what you’re going to consume over the course of time.” He imagines that users will dip in and out of the app as new content becomes available — but he isn’t sure, because Hooked Digital Media hasn’t tested how viewers use the app. “We just have to go for it and see how people watch and react,” Edelstein said. “My experience in testing movies is that it’s a total clusterf*ck. Unless you have a sample size that’s over thousands of people, you can’t get an accurate measure of content consumption.”

So the company is waiting to see what viewers do and how they share Haunting Melissa on social media. Edelstein describes the creation of Haunting Melissa as “low-budget independent film making.” He tapped industry connections who wanted to work on a different kind of project and got to test new skills — like iPad color correction — for Haunting Melissa. “Because of that excitement level,” Edelstein said, “I was able to work with people I’d worked with before.” He is now working on a sequel.

• Crackle Network at Sony Pictures Television: Account Executive (San Francisco)
• Law360: Digital Marketing Manager (New York)
• Fox Group: Counsel, Legal Affairs EST and VOD Licensing, Home Entertainment (Los Angeles)
• Target: Mgr Digital Category Planning (Minneapolis)
• M80: Director, Paid Social (New York)

We also have listing from companies like IGM Creative Group, Akamai Technologies, IOMEDIA and more. Click here to see what else is on our jobs board.

According to a court filing released on Tuesday, CEOs of the same publishing houses that once rejected the price-fixing theory will now offer evidence to suggest they colluded with Apple in order to increase ebook prices. The case involves allegations that Apple and its late CEO Steve Jobs organized a conspiracy with the Big Six publishers to introduce a commission-style pricing system in order to wrest pricing power from Amazon.

The new filing, posted below, says that the CEOs of Macmillan, Hachette, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster and Random House will testify about various aspects of Apple’s role in the alleged conspiracy. All of these companies with the exception of Random House were also named in the antitrust lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice and agreed to settle the case last year.

The government’s new filing says Macmillan CEO John Sargent is expected to testify that:

“[T]he deal that 5 of us did with Apple meant someone was gonna have to do it. Just luck of the draw that it was me. . . . The optics make it look like I stood alone, but in the end I had no doubt that the others would eventually follow.”

Such evidence could prove damaging to Apple, which is also expected to confront testimony from Amazon executives. Apple will also be forced explain a growing list of possibly incriminating comments and emails. One of these, cited by the government to show Apple played an active role in the price changes, describes SVP of internet software and services Eddy Cue telling Jobs:

“In the end, they want us and see the opportunity we give them but they’re scared to commit! It [has] less to do with the terms and more about the dramatic business change for them. . . . They just have to get some balls.”

The new filing also includes the views of other prominent executives, including News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch. According to Harper Collins CEO Brian Murray, Murdoch was “pissed at Amazon” and wanted to “screw Amazon.”

In its own filings, Apple maintains its long-held position that it is not a “ringmaster” of a conspiracy, as the government alleges, but that it simply offered the same pricing system, which is based on a 30 percent commission, that it offers to any company that sells through its iTunes store. Apple also maintains that it helped to create competition at a time when Amazon dominated the ebook market.

The next important step of the proceedings will take place on May 23, when the parties meet before U.S. District Judge Denise Cote for a pre-trial conference.

Here’s the filing (all 156 pages of it!) with some of the key points underlined:

DOJ Motion of Facts and Law

To submit documents, users must download the Tor Project software. They can then access Strongbox and submit information under a randomly generated code name. The New Yorker explains, “If a writer or editor at The New Yorker wants to contact you about the information you have submitted, he or she will leave a message for you in Strongbox. These messages are the only way we will be able to reach you, and this message can only be accessed using your code name.”

In a New Yorker blog post, Poulsen writes that he and Swartz began developing Strongbox, which was nicknamed DeadDrop, in 2011. He says:

“By December, 2012, Aaron’s code was stable, and a squishy launch date had been set. Then, on January 11th, he killed himself. In the immediate aftermath, it was hard to think of anything but the loss and pain of his death. A launch, like so many things, was secondary. His suicide also raised new questions: Who owned the code now? (Answer: he willed all his intellectual property to Sean Palmer, who gives the project his blessing.) Would his closest friends and his family approve of the launch proceeding? (His friend and executor, Alec Resnick, reports that they do.) The New Yorker, which has a long history of strong investigative work, emerged as the right first home for the system. The New Yorker’sversion is called Strongbox; it went online this morning.”

Tech Cocktail was cofounded in 2006 by former blogger and AOL product strategist Frank Gruber and former Feedburner employee Eric Olson. The site, which has its headquarters in downtown Las Vegas, said it will use the funding to hire more employees, including VegasTech organize Gabriel Shephard and DC Tech organizer Justin Thorp.

Take a look back at our live coverage of Google’s flagship conference, which started at 9am PT Wednesday. We’re not expecting as major a news event as we have in past years, but there will be no shortage of updates to the company’s plans for Android, Chrome, YouTube, and its cloud-computing services. We’ll have a full contingent of GigaOM reporters at the show bringing you updates both here and throughout the course of the day, so stay tuned.

So far, Google has announced:

• 900 million Android activations
• Three new Google Maps location APIs
• Synced Google Cloud Messaging accounts, which will let you sync notifications across devices.
• New Google Play Game Services features that can do multiplayer gaming through Google+
• Android Studio, a new development environment for Android app developers.
• A new design for the Google Play app store that highlights tablet apps.
• Google Play Music All Access, a subscription music service.
• A new educational initiative involving Android tablets and apps for education.
• Sweeping updates to Google+, including a new stream design.
• Conversational search within Chrome.
• Big changes to Google Maps.

Some other findings from the report, whose topline figures were released Wednesday:

• Adult fiction is the largest driver of ebook growth, but adult nonfiction and children’s/young adult titles also grew over 2011:

• Sales of hardcovers and trade paperbacks remained steady in 2012, but the mass market paperback continued its decline. This format is particularly affected by competition from ebooks, BookStats says, because ebooks are released at the same time as hardcovers while mass market paperbacks are released later.
• Online retail continues to grow as a sales channel, though BookStats cautions that, because its statistics reflect publishers’ net revenues from sales channels and not retailers’ revenue from consumers, these figures can’t serve as a completely accurate picture of the retail market.

• The total U.S. book market — including educational and professional/scholarly publishing — was $27.12 billion in 2012, BookStats estimates, down 0.9 percent from 2011.

Notes: BookStats is published jointly by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group. (In the past, the groups conducted separate annual surveys.) The report incorporates net sales revenue and unit data reported by nearly 2,000 U.S. publishers. It also estimates the size of the entire industry.

The charts illustrating this post were created by me, not by BookStats.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Borys Shevchuk

Google has been negotiating to launch a music service for some time, and apparently struck licensing agreements with all three major labels just in time for its developer conference, which will be held in San Francisco this week. That means the company beat Apple to the punch; Apple has reportedly been in negotiations to launch a Pandora-like radio service.

Google will have to compete with a growing number of subscription music services, which include market leader Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody, Muve Music and the yet-to-be-launched Beats music subscription service. However, Google would be the first company to combine a music locker for cloud-hosted personal music collections with a subscription offering.

Check out all the details of the announcement, as well as everything else Google is going to unveil, by following our Google I/O coverage, including a live blog of the keynote starting at 9am PT Wednesday.

While it might not feature anything as crazy as last year’s Google Glass-streamed skydive over downtown San Francisco, if you love (or love to hate) Google’s world, here’s what you can expect this week. We’ll update this post as new stories are posted.

Day 1:

• Live blog: Google I/O 2013 showcases Android, Chrome, YouTube and more
• Google I/O statshot: 900 million Android devices activated
• Google Apps set for a communication upgrade with deeper Google+ integration
• Google officially launches its music subscription service at Google I/O
• Google turns up location data usage on Android apps
• What Google was thinking when redesigning the new Google+
• Prepaid gives Google a huge Android boost (and Apple has noticed)
• Eight years later, Google reinvents its Maps for a data rich web
• Coming to a school near you: Google launches Android app store for education
• How Google is setting the new search standard with voice and knowledge graph
• Google TV will receive Android 4.2.2 update as well as latest version of Chrome
• And, bam! Here’s Google Compute Engine
• Google’s growing cloud just got a NoSQL database
• Here’s the real theme of Google I/O: Service unification between Chrome and Android
• Why the snap of a photo changed my mind about Google Glass

Pre-show expectations:

• Why the time has come for Android @Home to finally make a splash
• Google I/O: Arming for the battle of the public cloud stars
• What to expect for Chrome and Android at Google I/O 2013
• Where to watch Google I/O 2013 live online
• Reports: Google will launch music subscription service at I/O