The 2012 election cycle is proving a big one for Google NetPAC, the company’s political action committee.

According to a year-end report filed with the Federal Election Commission, Google NetPAC raised $836,305 between July 1, 2011 and Dec. 31, 2011 — the first half of the 2012 election cycle. And so far it has donated $221,250 of it.

That’s more than a 50 percent increase over what Google NetPAC spent at the same point in the 2010 election cycle. Which is significant. Keep in mind, we’re a little over halfway through the current cycle, and the committee still has some $740,960 cash on hand to spend.

Among the donations made: $5,000 to Rep. Lamar Smith, the Texas congressman who concocted the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that Google so vehemently opposes.

An odd disbursement, considering that Google NetPAC’s stated goal is to “support federal officeholders and candidates who share Google’s goal of promoting the Internet as a free and open platform for communication and innovation, to the benefit of our users.”

Hopefully the committee’s contributions to SOPA opponents canceled it out.

Feature image credit: iStockphoto | penfold

Cisco appears to have continued its recovery following a painful restructuring. Sales are up and setting records, earnings beat the consensus of analysts, and Cisco’s outlook for the coming quarter is positive, too. Cisco’s even reached a point where it’s at least close to fitting into its old skinny jeans. What a difference a year makes. Last year it was all about gloom and doom and some irritable investors were calling for Chambers to lose his job.

Since then the company has undergone a painful but necessary restructuring, shed thousands of jobs, shut down marginal business units and refocused on its core businesses, and as yesterday’s quarterly earnings report proved, the results are not only starting to show, but starting to stick.

So is the work done? Definitely not. Yes, Cisco is showing some return to its strengths, but there’s still a long way to go. We talked about that, the troubles Cisco’s competitors are facing, his long-held view that companies like Cisco should get a tax holiday to repatriate their cash held outside the U.S. and many other things.

Also Chambers, remembering that I dedicated “How Ya Like Me Now” to Cisco last quarter as it turned the corner on its troubles, asked me what song I might use to characterize its results this quarter. Taking inspiration from the headline of my first story and from his cautiously optimistic tone, I settled on “It’s Getting Better All The Time,” the Beatles track, performed by Paul McCartney and embedded after the Q&A. Enjoy.

AllThingsD: John, I don’t know if you saw the headline I wrote earlier, but I said you fit into your skinny jeans again. Is that fair?

John Chambers: [Laughs] I think it’s fair. We were up about four or five inches there so I think we have an inch or two to go, but we’re getting close.

So let me ask about the quarter. It looks like a solid quarter where a lot of the troubles were starting to get behind you. In broad brush strokes, where were Cisco’s strengths? I know some of your competitors were having their own troubles, but where were you strong in particular?

The strengths were that we appear to be executing on the market transitions that are going on, and we appear to be reinventing ourselves, not just in terms of how we control our costs, but in terms of the productivity we’re getting out of our employees. So if you look at the major transitions going on in the industry from an economic point of view, to how customers buy, to where the high tech industry is going, which I would argue is all connected to intelligent networks, that all appears to be playing out as we had hoped. The other transitions that you think about, like data centers and the cloud, we saw 90 percent growth in an industry that is growing at best in the teens. Our ability to move in collaboration, where we grew 10 percent though I think we could do better — it remained solid for us. In video with set-top boxes up 23 percent to new video technologies growing well and seeing improvement in the margins. There are things we need to do to reinvent Cisco. I think I said this at your own conference a decade ago [Chambers spoke at D5 in 2007, but that is not where he made this comment. -Ed.] that voice will be free. It’s almost there. You could see the trend, and what it meant is that once voice would become a smaller part of the network load, that would be given away in order to make way for the video and the entertainment. The same trends are taking place all over again at multiple speeds and multiple gears, which if we’re right, they all play together. Everything from mobility to cloud to the intelligent network, to wireless to security, to video being pervasive, all of those are coming together at tremendous speed. And we’re pulling them all together pretty well for our customers. Now, this is just the beginning if we execute right, and we have plenty of hurdles in front of us, but this may be the voice-will-be-free trend times 10 in terms of the impact of the transitions going on. We appear to have managed them well; we did what we said we would do, turned in record earnings and record revenues, and earnings per share were up 48 percent. We’ve realigned ourselves and reinvented the company, which I think you have to do every five years. Sometimes it takes a crisis to reinvent. … It’s a journey and we’re just getting started.

What’s the number one hurdle that you want to get over this year, that’s in front of you right now and keeping you up at night?

I want to build deeply into our capabilities, a continued focus on gross margins and effectiveness, from product design to sales all integrated together. You probably know this, but we’re the only company who’s anywhere near this profitable with $45 billion in sales with open standards. It isn’t a mainframe business where everything is proprietary or like in Apple’s situation where it’s a wonderful company but it has an architecture. We do it entirely with open IP, so we can be challenged by a 10-person start-up or a by the biggest giants like Dell or IBM or Hewlett-Packard to come at us. With this type of margin but so low a barrier to entry, we’re doing relatively well. But we still have to reinvent ourselves at a faster pace. We have to do what I call the basic blocking and tackling to participate in the new capitalism that we’re heading into. That’s the attention to gross margins, getting the market transitions right, tying the products together so you can get the price premium on them. But what really keeps me up at night this last year was the realization that this has to be constant reinvention. Average is over. An average high-tech company is headed down. Those above-average companies are going to head down in 3 to 5 years. If as a company you can’t reinvent yourself every 3 to 5 years, you have a problem coming at you.

Does that then imply that Cisco had become complacent or even average? It was and is the biggest networking player, but did Cisco lose its way and try to do too much?

Well, I could give you a long list of things we have to do better. We’re a healthily paranoid company so we always have things we could do better. I do think we were fat. Four to five inches, not just one or two. We’re not back in our skinny jeans yet, as you put it, but we’re within an inch or so of getting there. We missed market transitions at the speed at which they occurred. We should have seen the drop-off in public spending coming at us sooner. Everyone else has still run off the turn, even though they saw what happened to us two to four quarters ago. We should have seen it sooner and reinvented ourselves before it hit us, and made the turn much more effectively, and I’m committed to doing that, and the leadership team is, too. It would have been easy to just cut a billion dollars in expenses, reorganize sales and how customers buy. We realized that gross margins can deteriorate not just because of what competitors do but what we do to ourselves, like what we did on switching. We should have been smarter there.

On the conference call you mentioned the possibility of getting back into the mergers and acquisitions game. Any hints on where you might go or whom you might buy?

I think it’s a fair question. Part of the reason we said that was to explain why we’re building up cash in the U.S. Part of it was for share buybacks because the price was attractive. A lot of people don’t realize that we use M&A deals to gain leadership. We were a routing company, we acquired three switching companies. We were an enterprise and commercial company, we acquired a service provider company in Stratacom. If you look at where it’s going to be, it’s probably in data center, collaboration and video, and combining those with security, bring your own device and mobility. A large part has to do with our government allowing us to bring money back to our country.

That’s always been a big issue of yours. You made some comments about it on the conference call as well. Care to elaborate?

I think that it’s going to happen in the next presidential administration whether the president is re-elected or someone else is. I’ve been disappointed that we haven’t been able to get our message out about this more effectively. Ironically, I was in Europe, the government leaders there look you right in the eye and ask what they need to do to bring jobs to their country and keep the ones they have. They are partnering with business. I think we’re following Europe in the wrong way and following more of what they did to get them in trouble in the first place.

There’s a bit of a disconnect, however, to anyone who sees on one hand a company that wants to bring cash back in a tax-advantageous manner in the name of creating jobs, while the same company just fired so many people in the restructuring. Can you connect those dots for the person who sees the apparent logical disconnect? If it’s about jobs, then why are you firing people in the first place? If you were having lunch with President Obama or any other political leader, they might be confused, so how do you explain it?

They’re related. The first thing you’ve got to do when you hit bumps in the market is find out how much of the damage was self-inflicted and how much was the result of the conditions of the market. It would be a cop-out to say it was all the general market. We had to look at what we were doing internally. Every government leader in the world who’s adding to government payrolls and adding government debt is going in the wrong direction. We have to use technology to deliver services better. You do see most government leaders saying they want to get their own houses in order. The second thing they do is look at ways to generate private sector jobs. I’m a strong Republican, but I think President Clinton got it right with business and knocked the ball out of the park. He partnered with business, he was critical where appropriate, but in six years he generated 22 million jobs, grew GDP on average by 4 percent per year, and he was America’s champion on the Internet. I think that’s a more practical example. He grew private sector employment versus government employment by a ratio of 9 to 1, and created a positive climate for business, and when business got out of line he’d whack ’em. I think it would be a major mistake not to let companies repatriate their cash because whoever is in the Oval Office next year is going to want to get private sector jobs growing again, and there really aren’t very many levers left to pull. We’ve never had this slow a recovery after this deep a recession.
–

Getting Better – Paul McCartney

As of today, Pulse users can subscribe to a curated feed of trending election news, or follow dedicated feeds around specific candidates or political commentators. (So I suppose you don’t really have to leave the comfortable confines of the filter bubble, if you don’t want to.)

Pulse is available for iPad, iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. It adds 1.5 million to two million new users per month, according to CEO Akshay Kothari. He said those users read more than five million stories per day. Kothari declined to comment on plans to add a desktop version.

Via Kothari, here are the new Pulse news sources: Fox News, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos and Reason Magazine; plus dedicated political news from previous sources the Daily Beast, the Atlantic, the Atlantic Wire, Slate, Al Jazeera, the New Yorker, USA Today and the Huffington Post.

Included presidential candidates are Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.

And included political commentators are Rachel Maddow, Hendrik Hertzberg, Erick Erickson, John Cassidy, David Brody, Jared Bernstein and David Horsey.

The news cycle, already pretty fast, has sped up another notch.

“I really think 2012 is going to be the Twitter election,” Costolo said, during his talk at D: Dive Into Media.

In last week’s State of the Union speech, for example, “When Obama made that spilled-milk joke, there was this collective groan that went up,” Costolo said.

More importantly, Republicans took to the service to live-tweet their rebuttals, rather than waiting for the speech to end.

“Tomorrow morning it will be too late to react to what was said the day before,” Costolo said. “Washington is really starting to realize that.”

Politicians, he said, have taken note. Nearly all the Republican candidates have used promoted tweets to amplify their message.

Also, it helps if they can’t steal it.

That’s the takeaway from a new survey from the IFPI, the music industry’s global trade group. It says global digital music sales grew 8 percent last year; that’s the first time that growth rate has increased since 2004, when the IFPI started tracking the statistic.

A good chunk of that increase may have come from subscription music services like Spotify and Deezer. The IFPI says subscription services have 13 million paying users, up from eight million last year.* There are also smaller increases in sales at more conventional outlets like Apple and Amazon, which generate much more revenue for the industry overall.

And while digital music sales still make up a minority of the music industry’s revenue worldwide, they are increasingly important: They now account for 32 percent of sales, up from 29 percent last year. (In the U.S., digital just edged physical last year, for the first time.)

All of which sounds fairly straightforward. But the IFPI is a trade group; it wants to hammer at one of its key points, which is that piracy is a big problem for the industry, which has seen sales cut in half since the Napster era. It figures more than a quarter of all Web users “access unauthorized services on a monthly basis.”

So, if piracy is a problem, why are sales increasing? In part, the trade group argues, because of anti-piracy legislation and industry moves.

The report highlights France’s “three strikes” rule, which allows the government to fine pirates and take away their Internet access. It cites a study arguing that French iTunes sales have increased more than 20 percent because of the policy, and the suggestion is clear: This would be a good idea worldwide.

The IFPI, which has singled out Google for criticism in the past, once again complains that the search engine makes it too easy to find illegal stuff. It also clearly went to the printer before the weekend, because its report refers to SOPA/PIPA as works in progress that are “set to be debated further in early 2012.”

*That number sounds several million high to me, but perhaps my rough estimate is missing a couple of big players.

But this one has a twist or two. The media company is Grooveshark, an increasingly popular music service that’s also being sued by all of the major music labels.

And Grooveshark doesn’t want information about alleged lawbreakers. Instead, it wants details about an anonymous user who posted comments on Digital Music News, an industry news site.

Paul Resnikoff, the site’s owner, publisher and primary writer, writes about the subpoenas (and posts them in their entirety) here. And Ben Sisario of the New York Times has a good summary of the story. So I’ll try to do my version very quickly:

• Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest label, is suing Grooveshark over copyright violations, and has cited an Oct. 2011 story that Resnikoff published, along with comments made by one more readers, in its case.
• The story concerned claims by musician Robert Fripp and his team, who argued that though they didn’t want Fripp’s music on Grooveshark, the company wouldn’t take his songs off its site.
• The comments in question came from someone who said they were a Grooveshark employee, and that they had specific instructions to upload music from the big labels to the site, without permission from the labels or artists. “And,” the commenter adds, “to confirm the fears of [Fripp], there is no way in hell you can get your stuff down.”
• Grooveshark is demanding that Resnikoff hand over “any and all correspondence or other communications” between himself and Universal Music over the story. They also want “any and all documents concerning the identity of the First Anonymous Commenter, including, without limitation, that person’s name, address, telephone number and e-mail address, and the IP Address and ISP associated with that person.”

Resnikoff says he won’t comply with the subpoenas. He tells me that even if he wanted to hand over information about his anonymous commenters, he couldn’t. He says that as a matter of policy his site routinely “flushes” any information about anonymous commenters within two days of their posts.

And Resnikoff says that even though the comments in this case contained explosive allegations about Grooveshark, he never tried to verify the commenter’s identity: “What the world sees is what we have.”

In his post, Resnikoff suggests he’ll be protected by whistleblower laws when he fights Grooveshark’s demands. But he tells me that his legal team isn’t sure what laws they’ll cite yet. “We’re just incredibly committed to protecting any informants or sources of information,” he says.

This fight has plenty of interesting gray areas. For instance: What kind of legal responsibility does a news site have for claims that its commenters make? But I’ll let media law experts weigh in on that. For me, the notion that a Web publisher that isn’t directly involved in a legal suit can be forced to cough up names and addresses of contributors makes me shiver.

That scenario also strikes me as similar to some of the worst-case scenarios that SOPA/PIPA opponents have been making in recent weeks — this is a Web site faced with big legal problems over the actions of a single user, right? So I’ll be interested to see if they jump on Grooveshark over this one.

But Grooveshark doesn’t seem to think anyone will get riled up about this. This afternoon, I received an unsolicited email from Edelman, its PR firm. The email contained a copy of the subpoena, and a statement Edelman wants attributed to Grooveshark: “Grooveshark reaffirms its confidence that it will prevail in this litigation and that this filing represents the next step in reaching that end.”

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/photobank.ch)

Consider this: The Republican winner of the Iowa Caucus race won by only eight votes. Mitt Romney received 24.55 percent of the total, while former Senator Rick Santorum took home 24.54 percent — a very narrow victory.

In the New Hampshire primary last week, Mitt Romney also won, this time by a larger margin.

But on Zazzle, where customers get to design customized products and sell them on its marketplace, U.S. voters are voting with their pocketbooks.

For example, interest in Rick Santorum exploded in January. The number of people searching for his apparel and other merchandise is already five times greater than it was during the entire month of December.

Some of his popular apparel includes a “Rick Santorum has a raging clue,” T-shirt, and the more straightforward “Rick Santorum 2012″ coffee mug.

Meanwhile, searches for Mitt Romney’s products are only three times higher over the same time period. A popular button for Romney declares. “Mitt is Legit.”

President Barack Obama has a little more diversity of products on offer, probably because he’s been in the spotlight for longer. There’s the regular assortment of T-shirts and pins, of course, and also mouse pads, iPhone covers, skateboard art and ties.

Not all of the gear is always positive; some items might reflect how much someone dislikes a candidate.

Every year, the Iowa caucus is used to gauge which candidates U.S. voters prefer at the time, even if the outcome does not result in the selection of a national delegate.

Similarly, Redwood City, Calif.-based Zazzle believes it has a big enough forum to conduct a meaningful poll of its own. Tomorrow, the company will kick off a poll that will analyze design and purchasing behavior up until the day before Super Tuesday, which falls on March 6 this election year.

In the past, Zazzle has often been used by Americans to cast their vote. On the site, more than 2.5 million custom political designs, and one million political clothing items have been sold to date.

“Whereas Twitter and Facebook reflect consumer opinions through text, sites like Zazzle are where the physical manifestation of ideas and opinions take place. This has been an accurate form of pre-determining political stories since the 2008 election,” said Josh Neuman, Zazzle’s head of political merchandising and analyses, in a statement.

For instance, the year before Barack Obama took office in 2008, 21,099 items Obama-related items were created on Zazzle, 73 percent percent of which were positive.

The final poll won’t be unveiled until March, but in the meantime, here are some other recent trends Zazzle has witnessed:

• Interest in Santorum has exploded. The number of people searching for Santorum merchandise in January is already five times greater than during the whole month of December.
• Romney is seeing three times as much traffic.
• In January, there’s been a dramatic surge in merchandise sales for Ron Paul, who currently outsells Obama by nearly three times.
• Obama merchandise continues to be a top seller, but 60 percent of the items are anti-Obama themed.
• People are still buying merchandise for dropped-out candidates, including Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann. The sales for either of these candidates are higher than those for Gary Johnson, who is still in the race.

But here’s the upshot: The cable guys, who had been noodling with the idea of getting into the wireless business, are going to let Verizon handle it instead. And Verizon, which has already committed a ton of money to get into the cable TV and broadband business, won’t spend any more.

Call it a virtual merger, or detente, or whatever you like — it’s both sides agreeing to work together by staying out of each other’s way. [UPDATE: Comcast doesn't love with my characterization of the deal. See below]

None of the players involved wants to come out and say that, perhaps with antitrust regulators in mind. And the agreements won’t explicitly prevent any of the companies from competing with each other.

Verizon’s FiOS, for instance, is already available to about 15 percent of Comcast’s TV/broadband subscribers, and Verizon won’t stop selling it there. But Verizon stopped expanding its FiOS footprint last year, after spending $23 billion. And while Verizon hasn’t said it won’t start up again, this tie-up makes it very unlikely.

Comcast, meanwhile, is sort of in the wireless business now. But only a handful of its subscribers — perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 — use its Xfinity Internet2go service. So it’s easy to stop marketing that immediately, and transition that group to Verizon’s services in the near-term.

Meanwhile the companies all agree to co-market each other’s services. And the cable guys have essentially given themselves an option to get back into the wireless business four years from now, where they could rent out Verizon’s spectrum and become “mobile virtual network operators.” But that seems more like an escape hatch/leverage, not a road map.

The deal seems like it has obvious upsides for both companies, but we’re very likely to hear consumer watchdogs tell us that the tie-up stifles competition for crucial communication services. Which is why Comcast is making sure to argue that the deal will “provide more choice, great new innovative products, and better experiences to consumers and small and medium-sized businesses.” It will be interesting to see what Washington thinks of this, especially in light of its AT&T/T-Mobile stance.

UPDATE: Comcast wants to get some of its points across. Fair enough. The following comes from PR rep Jen Khoury:

·SpectrumCo is selling, and Verizon Wireless is buying, 122 spectrum licenses. This helps Verizon Wireless by putting them ahead of the curve on meeting their future spectrum needs as they roll out 4G LTE

·The sales agreements are customary in the wireless industry – similar to DirecTV and AT&T’s agreement to market and sell each other’s services, and they don’t require regulatory approval.

·We’ll be like each other’s Best Buy – each selling the other’s products and services, essentially for a commission.

·Neither Comcast nor Verizon Wireless is acquiring an ownership interest in the other company, and the operations of the two companies will remain independent, and no customers are being transferred.

(Image credit: Shutterstock/Viroel Sima)

Industry sources expect the Department of Justice, who had been reviewing the $400 million transaction for antitrust violations, to approve the deal in the next couple weeks, perhaps as early as this Friday.

It’s unclear whether the DOJ will impose any restrictions on the deal. But Web ad players, reading tea leaves and DOJ body language, are betting the sale goes through unhindered. No comment from Google; I’ve yet to hear back from a Department of Justice rep. UPDATE: “Our investigation is ongoing,” a DOJ spokeswoman emails.

Admeld helps publishers sell their ads by negotiating bids from multiple buyers, and is a big player in the complicated and fractured display advertising business. Google, which has long been dominant in search advertising, has been steadily increasing its presence in display ads via acquisitions like DoubleClick and Invite Media.

So it was easy to see why regulators might give another big deal some scrutiny. In fact, at this point, every big deal Google makes will get a hard look from Washington, which is already pursuing a broad antitrust investigation. But so far regulators have yet to stop a deal, including Google’s $750 million acquisition of AdMob and its more recent deal for ITA. Next up: The $12.5 billion Googorola deal.

The DOJ first began looking at Google-Admeld six months ago, and in late July extended their review. At the time, Google published a blog post explaining why the company couldn’t dominate display ads, even while its executives told Wall Street it had big ambitions in display.

More recently, Google has gotten help making its case from competitors. Facebook, for instance, is already ahead of Google in the display ad market, at least by the estimation of some analysts.

And Yahoo, which still competes fiercely with Google for display ad dollars, has put together a battle plan designed specifically to take on Google: It has lined up a coalition of big Web players with AOL and Microsoft, and it has begun pulling back its inventory from third-party ad buyers, including Google’s Invite Media.

(Image credit: iStockphoto/alexsl)

One of Yahoo’s biggest problems — brain drain — has turned out to be an asset for private equity firms and other players interested in figuring out their best moves related to the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

A plethora of ex-Yahoos, including many former top execs, are getting buttonholed by those who want to know more about the inner workings of the company that might not be obvious from its copious financial data available publicly.

That includes former Americas head Hilary Schneider, who has a longer-term consulting gig with TPG Capital, one of the several PE firms that has recently signed a non-disclosure agreement with Yahoo; former COO and President Sue Decker, who has had a longtime informal relationship with Blackstone, which has not signed the NDA and has been in talks with Yahoo’s Asian partners, China’s Alibaba Group and Japan’s SoftBank; and even former CEO Carol Bartz, who sources say has also been contacted to get her insights.

She is one of many in that regard, in a large pool of former Yahoos, such as: LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who had run Yahoo’s media efforts; Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig, former Yahoo COO; SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg, who ran swathes of Yahoo’s entertainment properties; Criteo CEO Greg Coleman, former Yahoo sales head; former CEO Terry Semel, who is now an investor; former communications exec Brad Garlinghouse, who is now at AOL; and Demand Media Chief Revenue Officer Joanne Bradford, who also was a top Yahoo advertising exec.

Not all are cooperating with the requests for a chitchat about Yahoo, but there is much incoming interest in ex-Yahoos and what they might know.

There’s lots more where that came from, from all parts and all levels of Yahoo, given the breadth of the exes now doing very well — thank you very much — throughout the tech and media industries.

Thus, calls from PE firms, from Silver Lake to Bain Capital to Providence Equity Partners, as well as interest from major and majorly irritated shareholders, such as activist hedge fund investor Dan Loeb.

It’s a smart idea to tap this rich vein of information, as all contemplate possible multi-billion-dollar investments.

While some of these execs have not worked at Yahoo in many years, all have significant knowledge about the challenges and also the culture that cannot be gleaned from spreadsheets.

They also know a lot about the internal politics and personalities of the existing inside players, too. More importantly, several were involved in similar previous major business decisions at Yahoo.

Decker, for example, was a key exec in the Yahoo takeover attempt by Microsoft several years ago; Schneider and Bartz were deeply involved in striking the advertising and search partnership with Microsoft.

“Between everyone, it’s a good way to figure out where all the bodies are buried,” said one person close to the situation. “And there are a lot of bodies.”

Visible Measures says it has attracted more than 1 million views since last night. I can tell you with almost clinical precision that his debate gaffe occurred around 10:18 pm Eastern time, because it was all over Twitter as soon as it left — or didn’t leave — his mouth.

Still, it’s not Perry’s biggest Web video hit (yet). Visible Measures reminds us that his first big campaign ad racked up more than 2 million views earlier this fall.

Meanwhile, for ad/tech/biz types: Note that the moment occurred on CNN’s broadcast, but YouTube attributes the bulk of the views to Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti’s BuzzFeed, which got the clip up with alacrity. [Ugh. As Ethan Mandel notes, this was actually CNBC's broadcast -- easy enough to spot had I been paying attention -- and now CNBC has removed this particular version. Still easy enough to find on YouTube, though.]

At least if you’re me, and your pals never, ever post Republican primary candidates’ TV spots on Facebook.

So no surprise to learn that the weird/funny/puzzling Herman Cain “smoking” ad is the 2012 campaign’s most popular Web video to date. So says Visible Measures, which tracks this kind of stuff.

The ad has racked up 2.1 million views on YouTube and other sites. Tellingly, only 1.3 million views come from the original video — the rest are reposts, “replies”, spoofs, etc.

And if you haven’t seen it yet, of course, you really should.

More interesting to me is that this ad, from Cain rival Rick Perry, is the second-biggest hit on the Web. And it’s a photo finish. This one, which first appeared in September, has just under 2.1 million votes. If this were a real race, we’d have a recount.

So. Two ads, almost-equal view counts, very different zeitgeist rankings.

Lesson here? Simple: It’s easy, if you’re me, to define “viral” as “thing I’ve heard about.” And often, you/I will be correct.

But very often the chattering/typing classes — or anyone, for that matter — mistakenly assume that our view of the world looks like the one everyone else sees. And the great/terrifying/humbling thing about the Web is that every so often it reminds us that there are 7 billion people out there. Which means “popular” is often going to mean “never heard of it.”

Okay. Sermon’s over! Back to me and my pals on Facebook. Look at this old “Headbangers Ball” video my friend Todd just posted!

Obama’s Tumblr launched today with a couple of casual posts that are clearly not written by the president himself. An anonymous staffer writes that the Obama reelection campaign plans to use Tumblr as “a huge collaborative storytelling effort.” That will be done using Tumblr’s popular reblogging feature to pull in content from other Tumblrs, as well as direct user submissions.

The best part is a meek plea for decency, so rarely found in political discussions online.

There will be trolls among you: this we know. We ask only that you remember that we’re people — fairly nice ones — and that your mother would want you to be polite.

The site could be well-timed in the lead-up to the 2012 U.S. presidential election, and it has created a special section to help users compare their own viewpoints with those of the leading candidates.

TwoSides is also an open platform for any sort of conversation in which members can express distinct viewpoints and vote for them. Users get credit for convincing other people to adopt their views.

The site has a lot going on visually, and it’s hard to know where to get a foothold. Still, its three-panel display and infographics have a nice visual heft as compared to blogs, Q&A sites and other unstructured discussions.

TwoSides has a young three-man team and has raised $25,000 from early Google employee David Jeske.

The spike in suits, which now total 65, comes as claimants faced a recent deadline by which they needed to file if they wanted to be connected to a group of cases that are scheduled to be heard starting in January. The alleged victims — who include celebrities, politicians, victims of crime and others — generally claim that the company’s now-closed News of the World weekly tabloid newspaper breached their privacy by intercepting their voice-mail messages.

The latest tally of suits was detailed during a hearing in a London court Friday related to the phone-hacking claims. The company also has agreed to settle more cases, with five of those 65 suits now having been settled or otherwise resolved.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

After his unusually enthusiastic declaration at a Silicon Valley event last week that “we are very, very interested” in buying the “whole” of Yahoo, you might imagine Alibaba Group co-founder and CEO Jack Ma running out of the speech looking for a giant pile of cash to pay for it immediately.

Instead, according to sources close to the situation, what the Chinese entrepreneur got was a cold dose of CFIUS — or Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the federal interagency review process for foreign investment deals.

Translation: If you are from China and want to buy our U.S. companies, we are going to have to give you a major look-see and it is not going to be pretty.

Perhaps that’s fair, but the prospect that even a purchase such as Yahoo, a consumer business that seems to have little in the way of national security concerns, might enter the buzzsaw of U.S. politics apparently surprised Ma.

Thus, sources said, that while it remains very interested, Alibaba is now at least a little concerned about the feasibility of the deal and that Ma is “perplexed” about why the U.S. has such restrictive rules against foreign ownership of a consumer business.

That said, he has been in touch with Yahoo co-founder and board member Jerry Yang and is likely to make a more official visit soon with others involved in Yahoo’s strategic review.

In addition, sources said, rumors of an imminent Yahoo bid hook-up with DST Global and Silver Lake — which recently invested in Alibaba — are overblown. While Ma did say last week at his much-noticed speech at Stanford University that he was talking to a lot of buyers, Alibaba is not closely aligned with anyone as yet.

Of course, given that Yahoo owns a 40 percent stake in Alibaba, Ma will be a big player in any deal done.

That’s because of a 2005 agreement that stipulates that if there is a change of control, Yahoo must give Alibaba a 15-day chance to buy back its stake.

Still, after his effusive I-want-Yahoo-now speech that caught the Internet giant and its bidders off guard, dialing back the rhetoric a bit is probably no surprise given the delicate dancing now going on.

In other words, a case of wanna-be-buyer’s remorse.

What’s on their minds? The economy, obviously.

Except not quite that obviously. In the fine print, YouTube notes that the chart above “excludes the “Other” category, which has received 26% of all questions, ranging from education to State’s rights.”

Disclosure: News Corp., which owns Fox News, also owns this Web site.

Prior to today, I kept hearing chatter, none of it stronger than word-of-mouth gossip, that Google really did want to make a run at the video site. That struck me as a stretch, given that Google was already facing a wide-ranging federal antitrust probe, and that adding the video site that dominated the market for “professional” content would be a giant red flag for regulators.

Now it seems like a really, really long stretch.

Google could easily afford to shell out a couple billion for the site, owned by a consortium that includes Disney, Comcast and News Corp. (News Corp. also owns this Web site).

At the end of June, Google had $39 billion lying around, and it makes a couple billion more in profits each quarter. And Google biz dev boss David Drummond made a point of telling investors this morning that the $12.5 billion Google wants to spend on Motorola won’t slow it from making other deals.

But Motorola makes Hulu that much more unlikely for two big reasons:

• Google could certainly argue that it wouldn’t break antitrust rules with a Hulu deal for a lot of reasons. They could note, for instance, that Hulu doesn’t have truly exclusive rights to its programming, but shares the licenses with content owners who show the stuff on their own sites (i.e. Fox.com, NBC.com, etc.). But TV is different from mobile advertising or flight search software — people have an emotional attachment to it, and regulators respond accordingly. Note that Comcast had to abdicate any control of NBC Universal’s Hulu stake as a condition to getting its merger done. It’s that much harder to imagine Washington giving Google the go-ahead to control the online output of three of the four broadcast networks at the same time it is asking for control of a giant handset-maker.
• Even if Google thought it could get the deal done, it would have to convince Hulu’s owners, too. Google says it thinks it can get Motorola approved by Washington by the end of the year, but that seems crazily optimistic — as Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney notes, both ITA and DoubleClick took 9 to 11 months for sign-off. If you’re Disney/News Corp./et al and you decide you do want to sell, you want to find a buyer who can actually make it happen.

Then again, perhaps Google could offer a 63 percent premium and a gazillion-dollar break-up fee as insurance, just like it did with Motorola today, and Hulu’s owners would be willing to take the non-risk. Goohulu may have a very, very low chance of survival, but I can’t call it DOA just yet.

Our only comment is that if the government would like to talk about this we’d be happy to listen.

Twitter PR exec Rachel Bremer, responding to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s trial balloon to limit access to Twitter, Facebook and communication technologies like BlackBerry Messenger in the aftermath of his country’s riots.