Who wants to pay for paidContent? We’ll find out soon, it seems, because the sales process for the pioneering blog and its parent company ContentNext appears to be wrapping up.

But if you were making a bet, you’d get good odds that the most likely buyer will be GigaOM, another pioneering tech/media business.

People familiar with paidContent believe GigaOM is in the last stages of a deal to purchase the site and its related businesses from Guardian Media Group, which bought the company in 2008 and then put it on the block last fall.

I asked the Guardian about the sale on Friday, and a PR rep told me that “the sale process is ongoing. Beyond that we would not comment.” Last night, I corresponded with GigaOM founder Om Malik, via text message, but he didn’t respond to my question about a potential acquisition.

That’s certainly not the same as a confirmation. But there’s some pleasing logic to a GigaOM/paidContent rollup. Both businesses started as influential one-man blogging operations, then added staff and moved into related operations such as conferences. (Full disclosure: AllThingsD competes with both companies.)

PaidContent founder Rafat Ali left his company a couple years after selling to the Guardian. Malik has sold off chunks of his business to venture capitalists such as True Ventures (where he is now a venture partner) and Reed Elsevier Ventures, who have invested a total of $15 million.

Depending on the price, you could find other strategic buyers that could be interested in paidContent. But I’m told that two of the most logical buyers — WebMediaBrands, which has been stocking up on tech industry publications including Inside Networks, and SAY Media, which recently bought tech blog ReadWriteWeb in December – aren’t in the running.

Other possibles not in the bidding, according to sources: Jim Bankoff’s Vox Media, which owns The Verge tech site; and Dow Jones (which owns this site).

The only other big bidder to consider would be AOL, which owns Engadget and bought TechCrunch in 2010. Sources there said a bid was unlikely, too.

Which is good, because here’s another one: BuzzFeed, the online publishing start-up that’s the toast of people who like to write about online publishing start-ups, is adding a tech section run by Gizmodo star Matt Buchanan.

This follows a now-familiar pattern we’ve seen from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti. Last month, Peretti brought on Politico star Ben Smith to start up the site’s political coverage and to run its overall editorial operations. A couple of weeks ago, he hired Doree Shafrir from Rolling Stone’s Web site to oversee “culture” coverage for the site.

Now Buchanan*, a five-year veteran of Gawker Media’s gadget-obsessed site, will start a new “vertical,” along with John Herrman from Popular Mechanics.

All of this hiring comes as Peretti is flush with cash courtesy of a $15 million funding round, and has reconnected with many of the people he used to work with at Huffington Post, which he co-founded.

Fellow HuffPo cofounder Ken Lerer is also a BuzzFeed co-founder, and former HuffPo ad boss Greg Coleman has come on as an advisor. Everyone who types about the media business likes writing about Peretti, but if you haven’t read any of this yet, I’d suggest starting with this New York Observer profile.

Buchanan and his crew will start publishing in mid-February, says Smith, who says the coverage will be something like what Buchanan did at Gizmodo, and also nothing like it. Think more “tech culture,” and less “stuff about gadgets.”

Well, maybe you should hold off on calling it “tech culture,” too, Smith says. “I guess I hesitate to call it tech culture, because I don’t think there’s a clear line between tech and culture anymore.”

Okay. So what’s next up in the BuzzFeed expansion plan? There’s got to be a bunch of cash left, right? “There will be more. Stay tuned.”

And now, a lightly edited version of a superfast exit interview I conducted via IM with Buchanan, who I gather is headed out for a couple of drinks as I type this.

Peter Kafka: Why’d you leave Gawker Media? I know lots of people have come to you in the past. Why go now?

Matt Buchanan: It’s an opportunity to build something completely new on a really exciting platform, which, even though the hallmark of Gizmodo is the immense freedom we all have, you know, the one thing I can never get here is the chance to do it all from scratch. And to do something that’s different from what a lot other tech sites are doing, I hope. I do love Gawker, and everybody here. I was from the generation that never got screwed over, so I only have good things to say about it.

Kafka: So should we be looking elsewhere for unboxing coverage, liveblogs of Android OS unveilings, and other blow-by-blow standards of tech coverage? Or will you leave all that behind?

Buchanan: Leaving almost all of that behind. I think technology deserves writing and criticism at the same level as any other aspect of culture, like film or music, because the reality of our world now is that it is just as important as those things. It is mainstream culture now. So we want to do tech for humans, as a main thing — but I also want hardcore tech readers to like what they see, too.

Like, we’ll talk about phones and gadgets to the extent that we find it interesting, and that other people might find it interesting, but no, this isn’t another gadget site. I would like to note that it is the first technology site powered entirely by ginger tears, which is what I’m most excited about.

Kafka: Curious about your take on your new employer. Seems to me that, while they’re uncomfortable saying this out loud, Jonah and crew are really setting out to build a new version of HuffPo: Build site by aggregating/curating, etc., other people’s content, then use that momentum/money to hire their own folks to build on that. The big obvious difference is that there isn’t a personality driving it from the get-go. And it’s tuned more to social than to search. Thoughts?

Buchanan: Yes! I think it’s too early to tell for some of that — even for me — but what I’m into is the fact that it’ll give John and I the freedom and flexibility to do the kind of tech writing and journalism that we want to do.

*Disclosure: I’ve met Matt a couple times, have chatted with him online a few more times, and I like him. He’s also an excellent resource if you’re planning a trip to Momofuku Ssäm (which you should definitely do, unless you’re a vegetarian) and need help with your ordering strategy.

Wickre said her role at Twitter “will involve a fair amount of wordsmithing as well as nurturing a consistent Twitter voice across our public messages and information pages.” She had been at Google an epic nine years.

Here’s the first official Google blog post (written by a certain relevant fellow named Evan Williams), and a history of Google’s blogs as told by Wickre to Search Engine Land in 2007.

You can call her @kvox now.

Instead, tech bloggers quickly devoured the piece and spat it back up, in chunks, on their own sites. And even if they were inclined to, they couldn’t point their readers to the source material.

What were Fortune’s managers thinking about? Quite a bit.

“This is an entirely new experiment,” says Dan Roth, managing editor of Fortune Digital. “We’re trying to figure out the best way of releasing journalism online.”

The short version: Fortune will eventually make the story available, for free, on the Web. But first it’s going to see if it can use Adam Lashinsky’s piece to generate more than just eyeballs. Perhaps even cash.

In the past, Fortune would have published the Apple story online last Thursday, at the same time the magazine was showing up on newsstands and in mailboxes.

Instead, the magazine teased the piece with a post from Fortune.com Apple blogger Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Saturday, telling print subscribers they could read the full story on Fortune’s iPad app for free. And that everyone else could either sign up for a $20 subscription–which would give them access to the app–or buy an individual iPad edition for $4.99.

Fortune hasn’t been able to pull this off until this week. It’s the first time the magazine has been able to offer its iPad app to print subscribers for free, via a pact that parent company Time Inc. just struck with Apple.

Roth says the main idea behind gating the story on the iPad app is to give print subscribers a bonus for their patronage. Or to make them feel like they weren’t dummies.

“There was this feeling that we’re sort of pissing off our subscribers,” by publishing the magazine’s best stories on the Web, often before paying customers got their hands on them, he says. “The problem was there wasn’t anything we could have offered them before.”

And if Fortune can sell some subscriptions or app downloads, even better. Over the weekend, Fortune tracked 1,400 referral visits to its subscription page from Elmer-DeWitt’s post, and another 1,000 visits to the app’s iTunes preview page. Roth says he hasn’t seen iTunes sales numbers yet.

Starting this morning, a small slice of the Apple piece will show up on Fortune.com, but that will be another teaser promoting the iPad app. If you really want to read the story and don’t want to wait–or shell out for an issue or a subscription–you’ll have another option, too: It’s now available as a $0.99 Kindle “single” on Amazon, too.

But won’t anyone who wants to read the story be able to read it for free via the tech blogs?

Well, yes. Maybe. That’s sort of the test.

Magazine employees have reached out to handful of bloggers who they think have lifted too much of Lashinsky’s story. They’re particularly sensitive about reproductions of a painstakingly created Apple org chart. (Sorry! Fixed!)

But Roth, along with Fortune managing editor Andy Serwer, assumed that parts of the story would get prominent Web play. Their bet is that most of Fortune’s audience will be interested in reading a really good Apple story, but not enough to seek out a summarized version on someone else’s site.

“I think that our readers, for the most part, aren’t necessarily going to Techmeme and reading the tech blogs”, Roth says.”A lot of them are. But not most of them. And this is the kind of thing that people will really want to read all of, and pass it along to friends.”

But then again, they’re not really sure. Hence the experiment. “None of us have any idea what works and what doesn’t work anymore.”

——-

Disclosure: I worked with Dan for a few months way back in the late 1990s, and he interviewed me when he wrote about my last employer a couple years ago. It’s a good read.

How big a toll? That one’s up for debate: Richard Rosenblatt’s company says the changes, which affect the traffic that Demand’s sites get from Google, aren’t significant enough for the company to change its guidance.

Most of Wall Street disagrees, and has been hammering Demand shares for the last couple of weeks. DMD is now trading around $16.70, down from a peak of more than $27 earlier this year.

In a note published today, Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan argues that investors are overreacting (Stifel helped take Demand public in January), and keeps his “buy” rating intact. A worst-case scenario, he says, is that the Google changes will clip Demand revenues by 10 percent and EBITDA by 20 percent–but Wall Street has pummeled Demand much more than that.

Rohan (and many others) are very interested to see what Demand says on its May 5 earnings call:

EHow and Demand Media had a great deal of momentum all the way through the first quarter and into the second quarter. But there is now this new variable with which to contend–it is hard to forecast traffic if there is volatility in index rank. How does that all balance out? To the extent that is possible to broaden the range of possible outcomes for the year, without abandoning the guidance altogether, we believe that would be incrementally positive, at least compared to current levels of fear. Maintaining guidance for full year revenue and EBITDA would be even sweeter, if possible. The “what can be done” part of this is key, in our view–own up to the weaknesses, identify the steps required to address those weaknesses, and correct course. Quickly.

Which sounds great. The problem for Demand (and many other publishers, including the New York Times, which said that its About.com had been beaten up by algorithm changes, too) is that it’s entirely possible that Google isn’t done adjusting its search formulas.

And what if it’s just beginning to overhaul search?

If so, every Google-dependent publisher is going to have a very hard time responding to each and every change the search giant makes. Which means that Demand Media’s fortunes will be in flux for some time. And it will be very hard to make Wall Street feel good about that.

I am surprised, though, at what happens when I click on #royalwedding, Twitter’s official hashtag for the event: I end up on the day’s Promoted Trend, purchased on behalf of something called “Magnum Ice Cream,” and which directs Twitter users to Magnum’s Facebook page.

Turns out this is indeed a real product, from Unilever, and I guess they’re getting their money’s worth, because you’re reading about it now. More important is that near the height of the ceremony Twitter was seeing 13,000 #royalwedding tweets per minute.

I do wonder, though, how the media companies Twitter has been encouraging to use #royalwedding today feel about helping the social network promote the “stylish and luxurious lifestyle inspired by the world’s most pleasurable ice cream.”

Related: In advance of the event, Twitter and ABC News told me they were working closely together on live coverage and plans, with hashtag polls and onscreen meters showing the velocity and total number of wedding tweets, etc.  But this turned out to be pretty restrained: In an hour of viewing this morning, I only saw a single reference to Twitter cross my screen (an ABC rep tells me there have been more).

Also worth noting: If you wanted to, you could watch the wedding itself on Twitter.com, via a livestream that NBC News provided. Pretty sure we’ll see more of this.

In the case of 140 Proof, it seems like they do okay.

About a year ago, Twitter put the kibosh on 140 Proof’s plans to sell ads side by side with Twitter users’ posts. But the start-up has modified its product and says that by the end of 2011, it will be profitable and on a pace to generate more than $10 million a year in sales.

That story has helped the company raise $2.5 million in a Series B round led by BlueRun ventures, which also participated in the company’s first $2 million round. Mark Kingdon, the former CEO of Web ad agency Organic, invested in both rounds, along with other angels.

140 Proof used to be one of several companies that sold or hoped to sell ads within Twitter users’ streams, a practice that Twitter stopped in 2010. It was one of several moves Twitter made in the last year that added restraints to what had been a live-and-let-live approach to third party companies.

140 Proof’s new strategy: It buys real estate on third-party social media software like Echofon and Tweetcaster, and rents that space out to advertisers. Here’s a sample:

The ads, to my eyes, look like Twitter messages, which I thought Twitter was trying to discourage. But they sit at the top of the stream, and 140 Proof says Twitter is okay with them.

I asked Twitter reps to confirm that the company approved. They declined to comment.

140 Proof also points out that it will sell ads against other social media platforms that aren’t Twitter, too. Here’s a blog post excerpt from sales chief Andy Scott, published this week, which boasts that “Twitter’s attempt to ‘spank the ecosystem’ is good for 140 Proof:”

The ecosystem continued to pivot away from a pure-play “same as Twitter.com” level of innovation that is about aggregation of social and real-time from multiple sources — Twitter is just one. Will Twitter own social/real-time updates on the scale of Google and Facebook walled gardens? Doesn’t look like it. Love Twitter, but these horses have left the barn and don’t want to come home. The more Twitter builds up the walls ex post facto — the more entire exploding segments (hello group texting!) bag its unpredictable closed system altogether. Classic platform trade-offs, god love an open world.

And, oddly enough, if you work for a media company that caters to Americans, you might care more about Prince William and Kate Middleton than your counterparts in the U.K.

At least that’s the conclusion we can draw from this surprising Nielsen chart, which tracks online media mentions of Friday’s event.

Note that the chart isn’t measuring raw tonnage of coverage, but share of coverage. And that green line at the top is the U.S. Surprising, right?

Just to be clear, I wanted to make sure I understood what Nielsen was measuring here. Here’s their response: “’traditional media’ includes news sites that are online only (Huffington Post, for example) or web counterparts for print or broadcast outlets (including BBC.co.uk, CNN.com, WSJ.com, CBSNews.com, FT.com, ESPN.com), industry publications (AdAge.com, Adweek.com, academic journals, etc.) and wire services (Reuters, AP). The corpus of data is 45,000 publications/sites around the world; this study reviewed just over 18,000 in the U.S., approximately 6,800 in the U.K. and roughly 1,200 in Australia.”

The software company is rolling out Rinse, a $39 program that promises to “seamlessly organize and repair your iTunes music library”.

The idea is that most iTunes users’ collections are full of music they didn’t buy from Apple’s digital store, and are very often mislabeled, or not labeled at all. Real says Rinse can fix that, with software that can also “find the matching artwork, remove duplicates and clean things up.”

I’m not clear how this differs dramatically from features iTunes already offers, especially since both iTunes and Rinse rely on the CDDB database owned by Sony’s Gracenote to identify songs.

But I took Rinse for a spin yesterday and found that it could find some songs in my collection that had previously been mislabeled–while it was stumped by some others.

Rinse looks like a product aimed a subset of a subset: iTunes power users who care about the way their collection looks and works–and who have the time to do something about it.

That said, it’s worth noting that if Apple starts moving iTunes to the cloud, identifying exactly what’s on your hard drive may become much more important to you and to Apple.

That will be particularly true if Apple uses a “scan-and-match” technology, which won’t actually make copies of your files, but simply provide a single master copy that many song owners can access remotely.

In any event, Rinse is a good example of Real’s overall strategy shift. As Geekwire, which tracked down Rinse over the weekend, notes: “The program is part of the Seattle technology company’s bid to reinvent itself by providing technologies for managing and distributing digital media–shifting away from being an actual content provider.”

The graphic and the data come from Google, via a research note the search giant published this month. Analyst Rich Greenfield reprinted the report, and if you’ve got time (today could be a very slow work day for many of you), you should register for a free account from Greenfield’s BTIG Research shop so you can check out the whole thing.

A couple notes:

• Google says query volume for “Netflix” peaked in February 2011, but grew more than 90 percent in both 2010 and 2009.
• That growth isn’t simply a result of Netflix adding more subscribers–it’s the result of Netflix subscribers using the Web more frequently. Google says queries per subscriber grew more than 40 percent last year, presumably as people looked to see what they could stream.
• DVD sales finally peaked in 2007, but Google queries kept climbing through 2008. Google’s explanation for this is confusing: “The shift in online behavior driven by the increased ability to buy and research DVDs via the Internet compensated for the decreased desire to own physical DVDs. The result was strong growth in search activity for terms including ‘DVDs,’ ‘new movies on DVD,’ ‘new DVD releases,’ among related other generic DVD terms.”
• Google’s chart also shows “free movie terms” declining after 2009. Does that mean piracy is declining, too? That seems hard to imagine. Here’s Greenfield’s thought: ”We wonder if the key change is that piracy is increasingly being driven by linking sites versus consumers simply searching for torrent links (meaning consumers know to start at a particular site to search for pirated movies versus searching Google to get to the linking page itself). In addition, we suspect social media is increasingly driving piracy as consumers are simply posting links to storage locker locations to stream/download files illegally, mitigating the need to search Google itself.”

Netflix, by the way, reports Q1 earnings on Monday.

Which may sound a lot like what Amazon rolled out last month.

From the music industry’s perspective, however, there’s a big difference: Amazon started its service without getting approval from the big music labels. But Apple is actively seeking licenses for its service, and will pay the labels for the privilege.

And sources tell me that Apple has already procured deals from at least two of the big four labels (Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony and EMI) within the last two months. One source tells me Apple content boss Eddy Cue will be in New York tomorrow to try to finalize remaining deals.

“They’ve been very aggressive and thoughtful about it,” says an industry executive. “It feels like they want to go pretty soon.”

Reuters reported earlier today that Apple has “completed work on an online music storage service,” but said the company had not obtained licenses from any labels so far. I’ve asked all four labels for comment; an Apple rep declined to comment.

The industry executives I’ve talked to haven’t seen Apple’s service themselves, but say they’re aware of the broad strokes. The idea is that Apple will let users store songs they’ve purchased from its iTunes store, as well as others songs stored on their hard drives, and listen to them on multiple devices.

Amazon’s service does the same thing, but label executives have argued that a license would allow Apple (or Google, if it moves forward on similar, but stalled, plans) to create a more “robust service” with better user interfaces, sound quality, and other features.

I’ve never understood how a license would affect things like product design, but there’s at least one practical benefit from Apple’s perspective: The deals it is signing will allow it to store a single master copy of a song on its servers, and share that with multiple users.

Amazon’s service, by comparison, works much more like an external hard drive, where users are required to upload a copy of every song they’ll want to get via remote access.

Amazon offers its user a limited amount of storage for free. I don’t know if Apple intends to charge its users for the service, or will absorb the storage and licensing costs on its own.

Unlike News.me, which will charge $0.99 a week, Trove is free. And while News.me is designed to be consumed on the iPad, Trove is starting out as a Web-based service that also works on Google’s Android and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry. WaPo says iPhone and iPad editions are coming.

The biggest difference: News.me is based entirely on shared Twitter links, but Trove is part personalized search engine–it says it sorts through more than 10,000 sources on the Web–and part traditional publisher, with a four-person team highlighting interesting stories.

Trove also uses Facebook data to set up initial “channels” for users based on their behavior on the social network.

I haven’t played with Trove on the go yet, and my gut is that it’s going to work best in mobile settings, where limited screen real estate makes news curation services more useful. On the Web, though, it seems like a modest evolution from the personalized home pages many of you have already used–interesting, but not crucial.

But take it for a spin yourself, and let me know what you think in comments below. Meanwhile, if you like those cartoons from the Taiwanese Next Media Animation shop, here’s a treat for you.

Now it looks as if News.me is just about ready for public consumption. I’m basing that observation on a new Web site that spells out, in great detail, how the app is supposed to work, and which instructs users to head to iTunes to download the app.

As I’m typing this, News.me still isn’t available in the app store. So it’s possible that the new web page is simply a new web page. Perhaps it’s just an exercise in positive thinking–maybe this will force Apple into approving our app!

[UPDATE: "Our understanding is that News.me is launching tomorrow", says New York Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy; the Times is aware of News.me's plans because it helped develop the project in its early stages (see below). I've asked Bit.ly for comment but haven't heard back yet.]

At a minimum, though, we can learn a lot about what Bit.ly has planned when News.me does launch.

The basics:

• News.me will cost $0.99 a week, or $34.99 a year. It will be available as an iPad app, using Apple’s subscription service, or as an e-mail newsletter.
• News.me will provide users with curated Twitter streams that highlight “the most popular or interesting news stories” that appear in their own Twitter feeds, and from the feeds of other Twitter users they select. The notion is that users can “read over the shoulder” of people they find interesting.
• Bit.ly does the curating, using the data it culls as it shortens billions of shared links on the Web. Since News.me relies on Bit.ly data, it has a natural bias toward publishers that use the service.
• News.me lets users read those stories in a “streamlined reading view,” which will be familiar to anyone who has used apps like Instapaper: easy-to-read black text on a white background–without the ads users see when they read the same stuff on a publisher’s Web page.
• News.me will share some of its revenue with publishers who license their content to the service. But publishers who don’t have News.me deals but do appear on the Web will still see their stuff show up on the service. It just won’t look as nice, and they won’t get paid. And they won’t get the chance to run “additional promotion for publisher products that might be of special interest to News.me users (such as iPad applications).”

You can get a pretty good sense of how the app works by reading TechCrunch’s “exclusive” from February. Or you could just ask many of the people whose work often appears on Techmeme. A whole lot of writers and bloggers–including me–have had a chance to play with News.me for a while.

When News.me finally does go live, potential users will have to debate whether they want to pay a fee to read stuff they can get for free on the Web.

But to me, the most interesting thing about News.me is that it’s an aggregator blessed by some publishers that haven’t always been hospitable to aggregators.

There’s the New York Times, for starters, which handed over the beginnings of the service to Bit.ly in exchange for cash and equity. And the Associated Press, which often butts heads with the Web, has signed on, too.

So have Forbes, and AOL and many of its sub-brands, and a good chunk of the blogosphere–Gawker Media, Business Insider, Gigaom, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc. (I believe–but haven’t confirmed–that neither All Things Digital nor News Corp., which owns the site, have a deal with News.me.)

The Times and the Associated Press also work with Ongo, another aggregation subscription service. But Ongo only uses content from publishers it has deals with.

News.me, though, charges money for a service built using other people’s work–even if those people haven’t signed on.

Which is what the Times has complained about in the past–like last summer, when it forced Apple to pull the Pulse newsreader out of its app store. The AP has engaged in similar fist-shaking aimed at Google and the Internet at large.

Here’s News.me’s defense of its model:

Because News.me generally provides a small subset of a publisher’s content, filtered by user actions and News.me algorithms, it is not a substitute for publishers’ own web sites or iPad applications. And, since it exposes users to content they likely wouldn’t otherwise see, it can broaden the audience and, through related-content links, drive new unique users to publisher web sites.

Which is reasonable enough. Everything on the Web gets shared and sampled; if you’re a publisher trying to build or keep an audience, trying to prevent that is counterproductive.

And News.me’s curated browsing conceit–there’s no search function, and you can’t subscribe to a publication-specific feed–makes it worthless for anyone trying to use it to game publishers. This won’t work as a permanent ad-blocker, or a paywall-jumping aid.

I still won’t be surprised to see some publishers who haven’t signed on rattling their sabers when News.me launches–just like the Times and the AP have in the past. Glad to see they’ve come around.

Got me. The last time I reported on the Twitter start-up, it was supposed to have been acquired by UberMedia for $30 million.

I’ve asked all the relevant parties and aside from a public non-comment from Twitter, have yet to hear back.

Here’s what I do know:

• In February, after TechCrunch reported that UberMedia had acquired the Twitter client, I asked around and was told that the deal hadn’t been closed but was “pretty far along, with signed term sheets, etc.,” and would be worth $30 million in cash and UberMedia stock.
• Following that report, I heard that some TweetDeck investors were grousing that the company had sold too early, for too little.
• Last week, a person familiar with TweetDeck told me the deal still hadn’t closed because there were “valuation issues.” That explanation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Or more precisely, it sounds more like a polite way of saying “something came up that moved this thing from ‘almost done’ to ‘in limbo.’”
• It’s worth underscoring that the original TweetDeck/Uber deal was going to be paid for primarily with UberMedia stock. If you’re bullish on UberMedia, that’s a good thing, because it could end up being worth much more down the road. On the other hand, it would be no sweat for Twitter to hand over $50 million in its own stock for this deal. And if you’re an investor who’s eager to turn that paper into cash via secondary market sales, it would be easy to do so–much easier than selling UberMedia shares.

So now that we’ve moved from known knowns, let’s move to known unknowns:

What was UberMedia going to do with TweetDeck, anyway?

The two answers you hear most often is that Bill Gross and company were rolling up Twitter-related startups so they could either: Do what Twitter hasn’t done so far, and make real money selling ads against Tweets; or gather up enough users to create a Twitter-like platform that they could run on their own.

But neither of those answers makes much sense to me, either.

Because by all accounts Twitter CEO Dick Costolo seems to have a real problem with Gross, which makes a partnership unlikely. And because splitting off a chunk of Twitter’s users and creating a better/more reliable/whatever service sounds like the kind of thing that appeals to tech pundits. But not real people.

What would Twitter do with TweetDeck, anyway?

This one seems a little easier to figure out: TweetDeck is one of Twitter’s most popular clients, and the service has become increasingly interested in owning its own distribution.

On the other hand! Twitter has been asked about TweetDeck’s role in its ecosystem several times in the last year or so, and each time, the company has responded with the same answer: We love TweetDeck, but it’s not for us–the people who use that thing are hard-core power users, and we’re aiming at a broad audience. (Fun/frustrating game for new users: Boot up TweetDeck and try to find the “search” function.)

Twitter founder/product guru Jack Dorsey is the most recent Twitter official to say something along those lines, in a  Q&A last month. TweetDeck CEO Iain Dodsworth found his statement worth highlighting for his own Twitter followers, though he only called out the first paragraphs of this exchange:

Q: So are you saying there shouldn’t be all of these other clients out there? I love TweetDeck, and I like it better than Twitter.com. Is your job as product director to make Twitter.com as good as TweetDeck?

A: I think the biggest challenge is to build a cohehesive user experience, and at the same time, enable and allow for multiple views on the same thing. TweetDeck is a very interesting client, because it presents a view that no other client in the world presents, which is this multicolumn, massive amounts of information in one pane. And people really, really enjoy that.

But I think that’s maybe five percent of the Twitter population. That five percent of the Twitter population are some of the most high-value publishers that we have, and they’re using the service at extreme velocity. So of course we have to pay attention to that, and I’m not saying we need to rid ourselves of interfaces like that. We have to embrace them.

But, we also need to speak to the 80 percent that will not be using an interface like that, that don’t really understand what Twitter is and that see Twitter as mainly a consumption experience. We spend a lot of time on people tweeting but a lot of the value that one gets out of Twitter is being able to follow their interests, and not necessarily tweet about it. But just consume it. So we need to put a lot more effort into the consumption experience and the consumer experience.

So maybe Twitter changed its mind and decided that it’s worth owning that small slice of power users, after all. Or maybe TweetDeck’s owners ended up looking for more money and less risk (and less upside). Or maybe both, or something else. Positively Rumsfeldian.

Google’s negotiations with the big music labels are “broken,” says a source familiar with the search giant’s thinking: “There’s definitely a problem with the Google music conversations.”  Another industry source says Google’s top executives are reconsidering their music plans altogether. “They’ve gone backwards,” I’m told.

That may be news to some corners of the music industry. Google had representatives in New York last week to talk to the labels, and several label executives I’ve spoken to in recent days told me that they believed their negotiations were progressing smoothly and that they felt confident they would strike deals with Google soon.

But others contended that Google has changed its terms in the past few weeks and that has held up negotiations.

Google officials, who have yet to formally acknowledge their music plans in public, haven’t responded to requests for comment. Wayne Rosso, who once ran the file-sharing service Grokster, wrote a blog post earlier this week asserting that Google was “just about at the end of their rope” with the labels.

One issue that could have complicated Google’s discussions with the labels is Amazon’s launch of its own music service last month. The online retailer, which already sells digital music it licenses from the big labels, launched a cloud-based storage service without getting approval from any music owners.

That service is fairly limited, and Google had envisioned a more robust offering with the labels’ participation. But it’s possible to imagine a scenario in which Google launches something similar without label buy-in, too.

In that scenario, Google wouldn’t be able to sell music, but it would at least be able to offer online storage that users could access from their PCs or phones. Lack of a decent music service has been a notable weakness for Google’s Android platform, and Android head Andy Rubin has been the driving force in Google’s music efforts.

Here’s a pitch that combines both models in one service: Cloud media startup mSpot is offering a “Movies Club,” which lets members rent multiple–but not unlimited–movies per month, at a discount from what they’d cost a la carte.

MSpots’s movies, which are already available as one-off rentals, work on a variety of platforms, including Apple iOS devices and Google’s Android.

Which sounds interesting, but mSpot is going to have a difficult time explaining it to their customers. There are multiple subscription tiers, starting at $4.99 a month, but it’s impossible for a subscriber to know in advance how many movies that entitles them to, since that will vary depending on the titles they rent.

And the savings over conventional rentals are never going to be mammoth. Apple’s iTunes, for instance, rents “The Social Network” for $3.99, and mSpot club members can get it for $3.00. That’s nice, but it may not be enough for someone to make a monthly commitment.

Meanwhile, Hollywood itself hasn’t completely embraced the idea. MSpot has a catalog of about 1,200 movies for its conventional rental service, from most of the big studios with the exception of News Corp.’s Fox (News Corp. also owns this Web site).

But only half of those titles are available for club discounts. Disney and Viacom’s Paramount are the only big studios signed on so far.

VideoSurf, which has raised a total of $28 million, is one of several search engines/guides dedicated to helping users sort through the explosion of Web video. VideoSurf’s specific pitch is that its software can identify images within the video it scans, instead of relying on metadata.

It has plenty of competition, from Blinkx–which just acquired Burst Media for $30 million–to AOL’s Truveo to Clicker, which CBS just acquired for something less than $100 million (educated guess: $80 million).

And, of course, there’s Google’s YouTube, which racks up enough queries to make it the world’s second-largest search engine.

VideoSurf says it attracts 20 million unique visitors a month, with 12 million of those coming directly to its site. That’s up quite sharply from the 1.5 million it claimed in 2009.

Now Verizon says it is “taking its ads in a different direction,” says the Atlantic, which makes it a good time to read up on Marcarelli’s life story.

It’s a great piece, and you should definitely read the whole thing yourself, but here are a couple highlights:

• Verizon’s official name for Marcarelli’s character is “Test Man.”
• Marcarelli’s contract with Verizon required him to work “a couple hundred days a year” for the company.
• The role is a very hard one to shake: “A few months ago, he attended his grandmother’s funeral. As her body was being lowered into the ground, he heard the hushed voice of a family friend: ‘Can you hear me now?’”

I’ve always been fascinated by people who become identified–publicly or not–with commercial characters. I even wrote about it years ago–remember the Taco Bell chihuahua?

Which reminds me: Still love to chat with Dan Bakkedahl, who continues to play “AT&T” in those anti-AT&T ads that T-Mobile is still (!) running. Dan, drop me a line when T-Mobile gives you the go-ahead!

Tasini figures the volunteer copy Huffington ran for the past five years ended up generating a third of its sale value, or $105 million. But he doesn’t explain how he got to that number.

More important, his complaint, filed in New York’s Southern District court this morning, doesn’t explain why the site should be expected to pay for work people gave it for free.

Instead, Tasini’s argument is in large part directed at the state of Internet content-making today, where users and contributors are frequently asked to help build a Web site without getting any financial compensation. A sample:

TheHuffingtonPost.com’s continued assertion that it, alone, should be enriched by the valuable content provided by Plaintiff and the Classes has the broad detrimental effect of setting an artificially low price for the valuable digital content created by Plaintiff and the Classes, depressing the market for such content and, over the long term, having a serious depressing effect on the value of intellectual content being created by Plaintiff and the Classes and on the ability of Plaintiff and the Classes to support themselves as creators of high quality, engaging, digital content.

As someone who makes digital content myself (I’ll let you guys judge its quality and engagement levels) I’m sympathetic to this kind of thinking. But only in a tears-in-beers kind of way, not a file-a-suit-in-federal-court kind of way.

Because I don’t understand where any of this is illegal. Just (arguably) unpleasant.

Just as important, Huffington Post’s main argument against not paying its bloggers–or the many Web sites whose stuff it aggregated quite aggressively–is that it compensates them with exposure.

And while you can argue over the value of that exposure, you can’t argue over the basic premise. And if you did, you should have stopped handing in columns a long time ago.

I was going to ask Tasini about this on his conference call this morning, but I bailed out as soon as I heard him announce that bloggers were “modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington’s plantation.”  No point in sticking around for that kind of tortured metaphor.

But, hyperbole aside, as I noted two months ago, this isn’t the first time AOL has been involved in a lawsuit over unpaid labor. And that last one, filed in 1999, did indeed result in a win for the plaintiffs–in 2010. As I wrote earlier:

Still, you never know! And I’m sure there’s at least one attorney, somewhere, who’s ready to try it out. Let’s check back in a decade and see how it panned out.

In a letter sent to the big labels, Amazon says it has been selling more MP3s since it launched the service. In other words: Stop whining about licensing deals and start thanking us for making you more money.

It’s easy enough to imagine sales jumping in the last two weeks, as lots of people dropped by to try the service out. And Amazon gave users a real incentive to buy more songs while they were there by offering increased storage to anyone who bought an album at the online store.

But Billboard’s Ed Christman, who’s seen the letter, says Amazon doesn’t have anything else to say about its recent sales spike–like, say, numbers.

Instead, the letter is dedicated to:

• Reminding the labels that Amazon has no interest in seeking licenses for the service it has already launched “as no licenses are required.”
• Letting the labels know that, actually, it does plan to come to them for other licensing deals soon, as it contemplates “potential enhancements” to the service.

Why does Amazon feel that it didn’t need licenses for its initial launch but will need them down the road?

Part of the answer is a technical one that deals with the way the cloud service works, and whether users are actually uploading a copy of their own property to the service or if Amazon is keeping a single master file for multiple user’s songs.

But the real world answer is that this is a clever/ballsy strategy on Amazon’s part: It’s signaling to the labels that they’re going to get at least some of what they want–eventually. It’s just that Amazon is in a hurry and didn’t want to start negotiations from scratch–not when Google and Apple are looking at similar ideas.

So far it seems to have worked. Not only have the labels stayed mum, more or less, about their displeasure with the service, they haven’t done anything more forceful either–like taking their songs out of Amazon’s store or suing the company.

And if Amazon’s right, the labels may have no real choice but to keep their mouths shut and cash some checks.

We can call this the “cord shaving” argument, and if I could remember where I first saw the term, I’d be happy to give them credit. (My hunch is that it was BTIG Research’s Rich Greenfield. Or maybe digital-media-executive-turned-aggregator Jason Hirschhorn. Or maybe Video Nuze, etc.).

This one has a nice ring of logic to it: You’d have to be a very committed non-cable watcher to dump your entire service and make do with the Web stuff. But depending on your viewing habits, it might be quite easy to substitute, say, Netflix for HBO.

It would be cheaper, too–you’d just have to wait a while to see “Boardwalk Empire” or “Game of Thrones.” (Though I’d still pay a premium to see Kenny Powers.)*

And that may be what we’re starting to see now.

Here, for instance, is a new study from Accenture that draws a connection between Web video watchers and a drop in premium cable: It figures the Internet is responsible for an eight percent drop in subscriptions.

Alas, just as with the cord-cutting debate, we may be stuck, for a while, with competing sets of data.

Market researcher SNL Kagan, for instance, says that in the last quarter of 2010, subscriptions shot up for CBS’ Showtime and Liberty’s Starz, while Time Warner’s HBO stayed steady.

These are apples and oranges data points: The Accenture numbers are taken worldwide, while the Kagan numbers are U.S.-only. And they cover different time periods, too. Etc.

Still, there’s a reason why Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has been so forceful about bashing Netflix publicly. Investors, at least, are concerned that the Web service (and perhaps Web video in general) will indeed cut into HBO’s business. So this won’t be the last we hear about this one.

And here’s one of the least unsafe-for-work Kenny Powers clips I could find. But it is still not going to be safe for some workplaces. It is awesome, though:

* For the concerned reader who inquired: No, you can’t get anything HBO shows via Netflix’ streaming service. But if you’re patient enough, and you subscribe to the DVD tier of the service, you’ll be able to get the shows and movies that way.

Stuff you need to know:

• The pricing makes sense: $2.99 for a four-issue digital subscription, versus $4.99 at newsstands–and, just as important, close to the $0.77 an issue price for an introductory print subscription. Also sensible: Print subscribers get the digital version free.
• Unlike other magazine apps, Bloomberg isn’t straining hard to add multimedia bells and whistles: There’s an introductory video with editor Josh Tyrangiel, and an audio interview featuring Charlie Rose, but the rest of the design is as utilitarian as the print version–no 3-D animation here.
• That stripped-down design means the app will only run a modest 30 megabytes per issue.
• Unlike other publishers, Bloomberg isn’t making a point of reaching out to Apple’s competitors: It’s not promising to launch on Google’s Android or any other platform soon. Instead, it notes that 17 percent of the print magazine’s subscribers already own iPads.