Depending on your perspective, this is either interesting news or heartening news: Michael Jackson’s funeral and memorial were indeed a giant Internet event. But they don’t seem to have been as big as Michael Jackson’s death, and they weren’t as big as Barack Obama’s inauguration.

So let’s call them the third-biggest Web event of the year. To date.

That sounds more like what I was thinking this morning: Everyone had to watch Obama’s inauguration or read about Jackson’s death, but not everyone felt compelled to see his burial or memorial.

It also explains why the Akamai people were so uncomfortable with my earlier reading of their traffic stats this afternoon, when I concluded that the events were responsible for the content delivery service recording more visitors per minute than any other time in the last year. Though I’d still love it if someone could explain why that did happen. (Jennifer? Anyone?)

Statistics are tumbling in from different sites and services (if you’d like to share yours with me, I’m all  ears).

Here’s what I’ve got for now:

• Akamai (AKAM) says it delivered 2,185,000 “live and on-demand streams” today. If I’m comparing apples to apples here (Jennifer?), that’s much fewer than the seven million simultaneous streams the content delivery network delivered during Obama’s inauguration. Akamai also compares the number of visitors on its “Net Usage Index for News” and says that number peaked at 3,924,370–that’s nearly double average traffic of 2,000,000, but fewer than the 4,247,971 visitors who were looking for Jackson info when he died on June 25.
• Facebook, which integrated its service with live video feeds from CNN, E! ABC and MTV (why wasn’t Twitter doing this?), says that one million users posted 800,000 status updates during the event, with the overwhelming majority coming through CNN. There were 1.8 million updates with the word “Obama” in them during the inauguration.
• CNN says it served up 781,000 concurrent live streams during the event; during the Inauguration it served up 1.3 million. It served a total of 4.4 million streams during the event, and 10.4 million for the day.
• MSNBC claims three million live streams–which are different from concurrent streams–and says that is its second-highest total, after…well you can guess. More if they roll in.

Nope.

Check out these snapshots of Akamai’s live traffic meters, which I took shortly after 1 pm EDT. They indicate that the Web infrastructure company’s clients are serving up more than 109 million customers per minute–more than they have at any other period this year, including Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Akamai (AKAM) doesn’t represent all of the Web, but since it’s by far the biggest content delivery network service, it’s a pretty darn good proxy. The previous record appears to have been 90.6 million, set last month during the Iranian elections (click to enlarge):

UPDATE: The Akamai folks want me to note that this chart measures overall Web traffic, not just traffic to news sites, etc. Which means that there could be other factors pushing up traffic today — large software downloads, etc. And, for that matter, if you look at Akamai’s peak traffic days over the last year, you’ll note that they’ve increased nearly every month. So while we can say that Akamai’s was serving more Internet traffic at 1pm eastern time than it has at anytime in the last year, we can’t draw a straight line between that fact and the fact that Jackson event was happening at the same time. But I’m going to go ahead and draw a dotted line.

UPDATE 2: Now I see why the Akamai folks were so cautious. New stats indicate that the event was big on the Web, but not as big as the Obama inauguration.

Meanwhile, while I didn’t actually go ahead and write this, my hunch was that any Web traffic we did see today might come from countries outside the U.S. that either didn’t get a TV feed or that cared about Jackson much more than Americans did.

But Akamai’s visualization of traffic to news sites world-wide says I would have been wrong about that, too: Almost all of the traffic is being served up by American news sites, and traffic to sites around the world is down for this time of day.

But here’s the thing I still don’t get: All of this has been happening when there has been nothing to see. Here’s a representative screen grab of ABC’s live feed, which I took around 1:10 pm Eastern Time.

OK. Have at it. I’ll be back later in day with whatever other traffic tidbits I can round up.

I’m betting it is. Jackson was a global icon and his funeral will purportedly be a star-studded affair. But I just don’t think this will compare to the two events that have already tested the Web’s capacity this year alone: Barack Obama’s inauguration and news of Jackson’s death.

Recall that Obama’s first speech as president managed to get most people to stop using Google (GOOG)–voluntarily. And Jackson’s death was a news event that pretty much everyone wanted to hear more about, at least for a couple seconds.

But on the Web at least, Jackson was old news by last week. And my hunch is that anyone who truly wants to watch today’s event will do so on a TV.

But if do you want to watch it on your laptop, try one of these outlets:

TMZ (of course)

CNN.com (partnering with Facebook again, a la the Obama event).

E! Online

ABC News

Fox News

Hulu

MySpace

CBS News

Want to watch in the company of others? Cinedigm will be screening the event, for free, at the theater chain’s screens in 31 states. Details here.

Google also offers up this graph, below (click to enlarge), to give you a sense of the traffic spike it got from Jackson-searchers. It’s impressive, but without metrics it’s sort of hard to gauge what it really means–just like the chart that Google (GOOG) provided about query volume during Barack Obama’s inauguration.

I’ve seen stories touting big traffic spikes at Time Warner’s (TWX) TMZ, which broke the story; Wikipedia, which apparently was flooded with Wikipedians squabbling over the details of Jackson’s demise; and Gawker, which lives for this sort of thing. At some point, the man-bites-dog story will be a site that doesn’t report a huge spike in Jackson traffic.

In any case, here’s the latest one I’ve seen: Yahoo (YHOO) boasting that Jackson’s demise has been its good fortune. Here are the data, per Yahoo PR:

Yahoo! News:
· Yahoo! News set a record in unique visitors with 16.4 million UV’s in a day. Our previous record was on election day when we had 15.1 million visitors.
· Yahoo! News had 4 million visitors come to the site between 3-4 pm, setting an hourly record.
· Yahoo! News recorded 175 million page views yesterday, our 4th highest day after the Inauguration and Hurricane Ike.

Front Page:
· On our front page, the story “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital” was the highest clicking story in our history. It generated a whopping 800,000 clicks within 10 minutes and news of his death saw 560,000 clicks in 10 minutes. Also, the news area on our front page experienced five times the amount of traffic it normally receives.

Yahoo! Music
· Yahoo! Music’s blog post on Michael Jackson has generated 21K comments in under a day.

UPDATE: Here’s some boasting from CBS’s (CBS) Web group. Happy to keep adding to this if anyone else wants to do a little chest-beating.

· Since the news broke, Last.fm saw a huge surge in users streaming music tracks by Jackson. On average, users were streaming 43,000 Jackson tracks per hour. The Michael Jackson artist page has received heavy traffic with more than 30 page impressions per second as fans log on to pay their respects to the pop icon. The traffic for the artist page continues to increase, and the site continues to see more than 45 times the normal traffic.

· TheInsider.com reported record traffic for June 25, with an increase that was close to double compared to the previous week. Prior to yesterday, the record for high traffic was held on May 5 when the site shared revealing photos of former Miss California Carrie Prejean.

· Within 12 hours of the announcement, CBS.com saw 100% aggregate growth over the same day last year as fans turn to CBS.com for breaking news about the tragedy, as well as to link to CBSNews.com and THE EARLY SHOW for their streaming coverage.

· CBSNews.com traffic tripled during the hour in which Jackson’s death was officially announced (3 p.m. PACIFIC/6 p.m. EASTERN) on June 25 as people turned to the site to learn more about the circumstances involving his death.

And yes, this is the third Michael Jackson post I’ve written today. Which gives me an opportunity to embed a third Michael Jackson video. This one is the intro to the “Jackson 5ive” animated series from the 1970s, procured by our eagle-eyed Beth Callaghan. Enjoy.

[Image credit: Library of Congress]

In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” the former vice president said that he owns an Amazon (AMZN) Kindle and used it to read James McPherson’s “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.” He said he also uses a BlackBerry, made by Research In Motion (RIMM), to keep up with the news now that he’s no longer in office.

Mr. Cheney follows in the footsteps of an increasingly wired crew of politicians. President Barack Obama fought to hang on to his BlackBerry before his inauguration, stoking speculation that he might have received a National Security Agency-approved device. Congressmen might as well declare themselves dinosaurs if they don’t create their own YouTube channels and Twitter constantly.

Read the rest of this post

Rumor has it there are big games going on this weekend–at least one of which involves football players. The rest involve the usual players, though they might appear in different positions–and on different teams–from week to week. These games, most likely, will continue through Monday and beyond. Scores will be kept on an ongoing basis.

BoomTown wrote this week about a new game of tag taking Facebook by storm. Whether or not you’ve written a list of “25 Random Things” about yourself, you’ve likely read a few. BoomTown only gave up five, but they’re good ones. On defense, AOL announced it would lay off 10 percent of its workforce due to the overall ad meltdown; CEO Randy Falco’s memo to his troops is here. And whether or not AOL has buyer’s remorse over last year’s $850 million acquisition of Bebo, the company is not considering putting the social network up for sale.
BoomTown followed the tough love approach of Yahoo’s (YHOO) new CEO Carol Bartz, and liveblogged the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, during which Bartz insisted (without mentioning Microsoft) that she wasn’t brought to Yahoo to sell the company. She also shared some canny-folksy wisdom–in the form of a chicken metaphor–about the value of the company as a whole, but it’s still a little early in the game to call that one. Of course, BoomTown had a few opinions about the unspoken Microsoft (MSFT) scenario.

Over at Digital Daily, there was a lot to be said about smartphones. Apple’s (AAPL) so-called “iPhone patent,” which would cover much of the Palm (PALM) Pre’s multitouch and gesture interface, has the potential to be a huge game changer in that race, if it’s upheld. And as if Palm doesn’t have enough to worry about, Sprint (S)–its exclusive carrier for the Pre–is rumored to be preparing to lay off 14 percent of its workforce in March, when the phone is expected to launch. Elsewhere in that contest, it turns out that Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry Storm, which was largely panned by critics, is actually selling at a decent clip–one million so far in the U.S. No iPhone, but still, it could be worse. As Digital Daily noted, Dell (DELL) is said to be readying two phones to enter the market dominated by the iPhone, BlackBerry, and soon the Pre: one an iPhone-like Windows Mobile device, and the other a Pre-like Android device. Both could launch as soon as February, but greatness is not anticipated. Digital Daily also kept the tech job-cut score, which increased 74.2 percent from 2007 to 2008. Here’s a roundup of some of those affected.

MediaMemo had some interesting numbers to share: While Obama’s Inauguration was indeed a big day for Web video, it wasn’t as huge as some estimated. Exact numbers are impossible to measure, of course, but roughly 13 million people watched the ceremony online, while roughly 38 million watched on television. On an ongoing (and presumably growing) basis, though, numbers suggest that almost 20 percent of Netflix’s (NFLX) subscribers are using the company’s streaming service to watch movies online. That should increasingly morph back into the world of television as the company’s technology makes it simpler to stream directly to a set-linked device. In the world of print, things continue to look grim. Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc., in a standoff with its distributor, which upped its price by seven cents per magazine–has announced it will take its business elsewhere as of Feb. 1. If this is a game of chicken, it’s anybody’s guess who’ll win. And Time Inc.’s Ann Moore received a lifetime achievement award from the magazine industry’s trade group on Thursday. In her acceptance speech, she expressed her belief in the power of magazines and print advertising and her gratitude in the fact that she’s not in the newspaper business.

In Personal Technology this week, Walt Mossberg reviewed iLife ’09–specifically iPhoto, GarageBand and iMovie, with mixed results. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, it was all about Windows 7: Whether it requires new drivers, how it stacks up to XP, and how upgrades from XP and Vista compare with each another. Katherine Boehret reviewed the BlackBerry Curve 8900 in the Mossberg Solution, and liked it.

More next week.

While earlier reports suggested that the Web video audience might have rivaled that of television’s, the Web tracking service says the numbers were more modest. It figures that 13 million people watched video coverage of the inauguration between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Jan. 20. Nielsen numbers indicated that 38 million people watched the event on TV between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Click on table below to enlarge:

Those numbers still aren’t apples to apples, but they’re closer than the earlier numbers we had, which compared TV viewers to video streams–at least 70 million throughout that day. Last week, I theorized that the video stream numbers we’d seen were inflated because many people had to reload their browsers or switch from site to site when they ran into tech trouble. Looks like that may have been the case.

Still, comScore’s numbers show that the event was indeed a big day for Web video, and in particular for the cable networks that streamed coverage on their own sites: 30 percent of online viewers watched the events on a cable news site comScore says. That goosed numbers for Time Warner’s (TWX) CNN.com, News Corp.’s (NWS) Foxnews.com, and MSNBC.com, which is co-owned by GE (GE) and Microsoft (MSFT). (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

For a start, MediaMemo notes that even though estimates for people viewing President Barack Obama’s inauguration speech hit record highs–70 million on the Web and 37.8 million on television–a Web view can’t be equated with a television viewer, so those numbers remain just estimates. One way viewership can be visualized, though, is a graph published by Google (GOOG) that shows a huge dip in searches performed while people were viewing the ceremony live. The Inauguration had a profound effect on YouTube as well. Though it was perhaps the only big Web site that didn’t offer a live stream during the events, its users made up for this by uploading videos afterward at the incredible rate of 3.52 videos per minute. To put that in context, when Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin skits were the hottest thing on the Web, users uploaded videos at the rate of 9.9 per hour. BoomTown notes that even though he might have to give up his beloved BlackBerry, the gadget-loving President did get a completely tricked out new Cadillac limo–nicknamed the “Beast”–for his day-to-day ride.

During his speech, when he was speaking of building a healthy American economy, Obama said “it will not come easy or happen overnight, and it is altogether likely that things may get worse before they get better.” This is basically the theme for the first week of earnings. As BoomTown points out, this crisis started in the financial sector, but it has ended up affecting everything, including seemingly healthy companies in the digital sector. The list gets longer every day. For the first time in 14 years, Sony (SNE) expects to report an annual loss–a staggering $1.65 billion–forcing CEO Sir Howard Stringer to plan for more drastic cutbacks than anticipated. He plans to cut 16,000 jobs and close six plants. And Ericsson? Despite reporting better-than-ever fourth-quarter financials, CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg will cut some 5,000 jobs, just in case, to maintain the company’s competitive edge. Digg plans to cut 10 percent of its workforce, but still says it’ll be profitable in 2009. BoomTown liveblogged Microsoft’s (MSFT) second-quarter earnings call and reported the fallout–for the first time in the company’s 34-year history, Microsoft will lay off a significant number–5,000 workers–the most drastic headcount reduction it’s ever seen. BoomTown also published Steve Ballmer’s full memo to the Microsoft troops about the company’s weak financial results and the layoffs to come.

Maybe the only good news in the tech market this week was about Palm, which has been resurrected by its long-anticipated new hand-held, the Pre. Palm (PALM) shares were up 157 percent this past week–to put that in context, the S&P was down 5.9 percent during the same period.

Good news for Windows PC owners, too–and it’s about time. In Personal Technology, Walt Mossberg previews Windows 7 and said that even in beta it blows Vista out of the water. In its finished form, it might even turn out to be a worthy competitor to Apple’s (AAPL) OSX Leopard. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, he answers a parent’s question about monitoring a teen’s Facebook activity. And in the Mossberg Solution, Katherine Boehret looks at some options for avoiding slow boot-up times on your computer.

More next week, when, hopefully, the atmosphere will be a little bit more upbeat.

Credit NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes for trying to get her arms around the size of the audience that watched Tuesday’s proceeding on the Web. She was able to tally 70 million views, and notes that U.S. TV outlets totaled about 37.8 million viewers.

So was the Web audience watching Obama twice as big as the TV one? Who knows?

That’s because as impressive as those numbers are, it’s unclear what they actually mean. Gannes herself notes that her data are weighed down with several asterisks.

For one thing, she doesn’t have numbers from sources like the New York Times (NYT), which says its Web site served up a record number of views but won’t actually say how many that means. On the flip side, the video numbers she does have come from throughout the day, while TV numbers only cover 11 a.m. through 2 p.m. EST. Etc.

But the biggest issue here is that it’s impossible to equate a Web video view with a television viewer. If you had to reload your Web browser because the video you were watching crashed or stalled, you generated an extra Web video view. Every time you did that. Same thing applies if you switched to a different site to watch its feed.

So given the well-documented troubles most Web sites had serving up video on Tuesday, it’s entirely possible that each Web user generated more than one video view. Say, a couple on Time Warner’s (TWX) CNN.com, and then a few more at GE’s (GE) MSNBC.com.

Which means the real question is: How many video views did the average viewer account for?

The Web sites that have reported traffic numbers could clear this up by explaining how many individual IP addresses they served during the inauguration. But for whatever reason, they’re not.

So we’re back to guesswork when it comes to figuring out the size of Tuesday’s Web audience. Ironic, given that the Web is supposed to offer a precision that old media just can’t match when it comes to this stuff. Maybe one day.

There was only one force powerful enough to dampen the Internet’s hunger for all things Obama yesterday: Barack Obama himself.

Of course.

Check out the chart below, via the “Official Google Blog,” which shows the overall volume of queries at the search engine giant yesterday.

That valley in the middle of the graph? That’s the period when Obama actually spoke during his inauguration ceremony, starting a little after noon Eastern time. That’s one powerful speech.

[Image Credit: Jef Poskanzer]

Besides getting, well, the whole country to run today, President Barack Obama is now taking a geek-tastic new ride down Pennsylvania Avenue to his new home, which should more than satisfy his clearly gadget-loving persona.

Obama, who has an ongoing obsessive relationship with his BlackBerry, much as the rest of us do, just got a spanking new presidential limo (pictured above), which the Secret Service is calling the “Beast.”

The last time General Motors (GM) improved on the car was at outgoing President George W. Bush’s 2005 inauguration, which means the struggling automaker is faster at upgrading than Microsoft (MSFT) is with Windows!

But, let us just say, it’s not very Prius-like, despite Obama’s speech today about focusing on the environment.

Indeed, the Cadillac limo has heavy armor five inches thick, run-flat tires, bullet-proof glass, an interior that seals, in case of a chemical attack, and other stuff that is too top secret to apparently reveal.

BoomTown is thinking, um, working Wi-Fi?

Refrigerated cup holders (and more of them, please!)?

A food machine that makes pizza from thin air like on “Star Trek”?

Or, miracle of miracles, that giant Apple (AAPL) iPod embedded in the steering wheel?

Post your suggestions as to what gadgets should be in the President’s new ride below.

To put that in context, TubeMogul normally tracks uploads by the hour: Last fall, when the “Saturday Night Live” Sarah Palin skits were the hottest thing on the Web, users were sending clips to the site at a rate of 9.5 per hour, says marketing director David Burch.

Yet another testament to Google’s (GOOG) reach, and to the powerful appeal Obama has to the Web generation. And, if we’re going to get technical about it, yet another example of how hard it is for the site to grapple with copyright issues–if copyright holders wanted to, they could probably require the site to take down the majority of these clips for copyright violations, since they’re being lifted from broadcasters’ and other news organizations’ streams. But I’m betting these clips stay up.

In any case, I can’t imagine there’s anyone out there who didn’t see the event live. So here’s a different take from a YouTube uploader, Achangein09, who contributed this clip a few minutes ago:

Most notably, citizen journalism meets photo technology in a partnership between Microsoft and CNN called The Moment. Using in Microsoft’s (MSFT) Photosynth technology, attendees of Obama’s swearing in are asked to shoot photographs of the moment he takes oath and send them to CNN, where they will all be compiled along with CNN’s professional images to create a 3D photographic reconstruction of the very second Obama becomes President. Owners of digital cameras are urged to take three photos of the event–one wide angle shot, one mid-zoom shot, and one full-zoom shot–and the CNN site reads, “We’ll capture the most detailed experience of a single moment ever.”

Read the rest of this post

Based on the Internet behavior of 10 million Internet users captured by online research firm Hitwise, the most common category of searches containing the word “inauguration,” accounting for more than 22 percent of queries, are terms seeking general information about the upcoming ceremony. The most common question on searcher’s minds surrounds the date and time of President–elect Obama’s swearing in. With this weekend’s concert and upcoming ceremony, parades and inaugural balls, Internet searches reveal some confusion as to which event is the most historically significant.

Outperforming historical (“George Washington’s Inauguration”) and educational (“Inauguration lesson plans”) search missions, Internet data reveal that Obama’s swearing in will not escape controversy.

Read the rest of this post

Live streaming site Ustream has rolled out its iPhone app, which promises to provide live coverage of the event to anyone using Wi-Fi. Not really sure why you’d want to do this–there will be wall-to-wall coverage of the event on every television station, and as I noted yesterday, you won’t be able to boot up your Web browser without finding a live stream. Still, live video on your iPhone is cool–and will be genuinely useful in other settings.

Can’t wait for today’s events to start? Try to sate your appetite with this live shot of the Capitol, which is coming to you from a camera set up at the Museum of the American Indian. The Ustream folks promise that  the camera will zoom in on the podium during the inauguration ceremony, and that “we will attempt an audio feed as well.”

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

This week I tested two free tools that attempt to make your Web searches more relevant by learning from users’ reactions to search results: Google’s SearchWiki and Surf Canyon Inc.’s namesake tool for Web browsers. These two don’t necessarily compete against each other; in fact, they can be used in tandem. But after initially entering a search query, SearchWiki requires additional work on the part of the user that many people may not want to do. Surf Canyon works automatically as you go, sorting results according to real-time user behavior.

SearchWiki depends on people to rank their own search results by promoting favored URLs to the top of a screen and knocking others to the bottom. It is available to most people who are logged into a Google account, and these user preferences are remembered if the same searches are performed at other times.

This sorting is done using elegant animation; preferred URLs float to the top of the screen when selected and unwanted results disappear in a magic-trick-like poof when removed. Comments about a link can be typed into a word bubble beside the URL and all comments are available to the public, labeled as posted by “Searcher” unless you create another nickname for yourself. People can also add preferred URLs to a search-results page if, for example, they know a better link about something than those that show up.

Google’s SearchWiki

But who wants to do all this work? Google (GOOG) says your votes don’t influence the way other Google users see search results, nor do they affect your search results if you aren’t logged into Google. You can see the number of votes a URL got from fellow voters, as well as comments made about the URL — but only after you select a link at the bottom of the search-results page. If you promote a URL, you’ll automatically see what other people think about this link.

For your efforts, you’ll create a small collection of results that are saved in your account, sorted by date and time should you ever want to revisit them. This could come in handy in some circumstances, such as if you were researching a topic and you forgot to save Web pages as you went. Google confusingly calls these “SearchWiki notes,” though they really include all of the links you voted on, as well as typed-in notes about links.

SearchWiki is a tough sell because most of us are already trained to surf the Web quickly, skipping ahead and back through links without taking the time to rank those results or comment on them. And it only works with Google searches.

If you like the idea of more personalized Web searches but would like to use other search engines or don’t want to do extra work, you might like Surf Canyon. Once downloaded, this tool displays bull’s-eyes beside certain results to show that Surf Canyon has found additional related hits. Clicking on this bull’s-eye reveals those suggested links, pulled from deeper down in the search results, and these links might have bull’s-eyes of their own. This cascade of data goes on and on as an algorithm studies which of the returned results you do or don’t choose.

You might be deterred from using Surf Canyon because it must be downloaded before it works on Internet Explorer or Firefox. (A version of Surf Canyon for Apple’s (AAPL) Safari browser is due out within a month.) This tool works with Google, Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft Live Search (MSFT) and Craigslist, and just started working with LexisNexis’s LexisWeb.com legal-search engine.

Surf Canyon might not seem to be doing much at first, but it changes and reflects your preferences as you make them. For example, a search for “Obama dog” originally returned results about how the President-elect and his family are narrowing their search for a puppy. But as I opened more links related specifically to Mr. Obama’s daughters, more results appeared on screen about Sasha and Malia. Each time I hit the browser’s Back button to return to the original search page, Surf Canyon offered a new set of relevant URLs.

I tried looking at Craigslist.com for last-minute inauguration tickets, and one hit listed an inauguration-appropriate dress that someone was giving away free. The Surf Canyon bull’s-eye appeared beside this result, and when I selected it, three more dress listings appeared.

Surf Canyon recently released an option for users who want long-term personalization, found at my.surfcanyon.com. It lets people select sources from which they prefer to receive news, shopping, research, or sports and entertainment results. Individual sites not listed on this page can also be added to a list of sources to use; likewise, sites can be added to a blacklist so results never come from them.

Unlike Google, Surf Canyon doesn’t save your history or usage profile. And if you haven’t created personalized preferences using the link above, it responds solely using your as-they-happen signals, like when you choose one link over another.

Google’s SearchWiki is asking users to do extra work, which may not be practical for many users. But if you do use it, this tool’s personalized, saved results could be a real boon. Surf Canyon worked well for me with multiple search engines, retrieving data from result pages I likely wouldn’t have opened. Either way, your days of futile Web searching are numbered.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090113/web-searches-that-really-bear-fruit/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090113/go-to-the-inauguration-online-with-live-earth/ http://allthingsd.com/20090113/go-to-the-inauguration-online-with-live-earth/#comments Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:42:37 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=8427

Live Earth–famous for its huge global entertainment concerts in 2007–will open its 2009 Green Inaugural Ball to the online community by taking video submissions, some of which will be shown at the event taking place in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 19.

Partnering with Magnify.net as part of a larger deal with the online video company, Live Earth is creating a global video channel for the inauguration.

Anyone can submit a new or existing short film or video to the Live Earth video site, which launches this morning, “expressing ideas as to how President Barack Obama and his administration can use clean energy and green technology to change the country, save the economy, and solve the climate crisis.”

That’s right, my friends, welcome to the Internet-astic, BlackBerry-loving, You-Tubing, Twittering Obama administration. Luddites need not apply.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090113/go-to-the-inauguration-online-with-live-earth/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090105/yes-we-can-um-cant-we/ http://allthingsd.com/20090105/yes-we-can-um-cant-we/#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:32:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=8065

President-Elect Barack Obama arrived in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, which was the first step in what is likely to be one of the most historic inaugural events in American history.

The official inauguration takes place Tuesday, January 20, the exact date stipulated by the Twentieth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Obamas arrived Saturday and took up residence at the Hay-Adams Hotel, right across Lafayette Park from the White House, which was caught better than any news footage I saw by a tourist with a video camera and posted quickly online.

So begins the YouTube Presidency.

Well, one thing is certain from looking at it: Yes, President-Elect Obama can do massive motorcades!

Here is that video, along with the popular celeb-packed video “Yes We Can,” which was done early in 2008 by Will.i.am.

Curiously, it feels a bit out-of-touch now that what needs to be tackled by the new administration is quite a bit more serious than we all thought back then.

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